Better grasp of symbols can be achieved by teaching anthropology at school
TWOrecent events in separate parts of the world are significantly linked. They are the protests and demands at UCT for the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue that has long occupied centre stage at its campus, and the ill-informed axing, by the UK’s Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, of its new-born A-level anthropology curriculum and examination – an act that reduces anthropology in the UK to a subject that, as in South Africa, is taught almost only at university level.
As so many have now explained, and as anthropology students have long been taught, arguments about artefacts such as the Rhodes statue hinge around the immense power of symbols, especially in a society such as contemporary South Africa which has so long been divided by the effects of a series of invasive interventions propelled by “global north” interests and agencies. All these agencies have actively sought, as anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff have phrased it, to “colonise the consciousness” of the region’s population.
Simultaneously, they have worked to split the population, doing that symbolically, then also physically, by separating those whom they regarded as “normal” from those whom they said were abnormal, even deviant and “other”.
Again, as anthropology students have long learnt, the use of symbols is central to such discrimination. Apart from the obvious ones of racial and sexual characteristics, such symbols include artefacts like the Rhodes statue and the architecture and naming of buildings and other spaces (the Rhodes Memorial nearby included). They also include far subtler, yet even more pernicious uses of symbols for establishing cultural and socio-political dominance.
At UCT, those include, among others, inadequately thought-through choices about institutional language (including non-verbal forms of communication), illconsidered decisions about what and who should be commemorated or celebrated and how, and unthinking commitment to particular (dominant) ways of explaining the world (epistemologies) alongside sometimes outright dismissal and explicitly denigratory rejection of other explanatory approaches – what UCT anthropologist Francis Nyamnjoh calls epistemicide.
UCT’s protesting students and their supporters have rightly denounced these kinds of symbols. They have done that because those symbols reproduce the practices of splitting the population socio- culturally, practices that were central to South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past.
They do it because the continued presence of those symbols reinforces the “othering” processes set in motion, throughout the country’s (and continent’s) recorded history, by those who have dominated the exercise of political-economic power. They do it because those “othering” processes have effectively belittled the socio-cultural practices and beliefs of most of the region’s inhabitants and have defamed their symbolic practices by making those out to be abnormal and, in some instances, criminalising them.
How does all this relate to the UK’s counter-productive axing of its A-level anthropology curriculum and examination, and the consequent elimination of opportunities for high school students to learn anthropology and the perspectives it provides?
Anthropology’s strength is to understand and teach about the social meanings, uses and power of symbols, among them the kinds of symbols about which so many of UCT’s students and staff have been protesting, as well as the symbols they have used in their protest action. Despite its early participation in the colonial “civilising mission” and in furthering an imperialist agenda, anthropology as a discipline has, since the 1970s when it came to reflect on that participation and consequently to recognise its historical role and social position, turned its focus to understanding how the imperialising process has worked.
It has examined and explained how material and emotionally felt and intellectually understood symbols, including knowledge and modes of knowing, are intertwined in practices of social domination, as also in practices of resistance to such domination.
Given anthropology’s ability to help make sense of those highly complex processes, particularly as they play out in contemporary South Africa, we urgently need our high school curricula to incorporate anthropological perspectives. Had even a portion of those involved in the intensely antagonistic interactions around the Rhodes statue and the idea of transformation known enough to be able to apply such a perspective, the recent events might well have reached easier resolution so that real transformation can be achieved.
Indeed, both “sides” in the conflict would readily have seen why UCT management’s demand for “rational debate” was itself perceived as a symbol of the same imperialist discourse of dominance that the Rhodes statue represents. The same might be said of the logic of the National Heritage Resources Act.
Since vast numbers of South Africans still live with memories of intense experiences of social separation, of being belittled and “othered”, and since those in turn create deep mistrust and anger, such gulfs in perception appear repeatedly in South Africans’ struggles to overcome the legacy of “othering” processes and practices. And we need to find all means to bridge them. Anthropology provides one such means by enabling young people to become wellinformed and tolerant citizens who understand and can address divisive social processes in the face of national efforts to build society-wide solidarity.
Offering young people the tools for understanding where that divisiveness comes from, how it plays out and how to think beyond it is crucial; and inserting anthropology content into high school curricula is one way to do that.
It may be too late now for all the protagonists in the Rhodes statue crisis to benefit from applying perspectives they might have learnt, had they been able to study anthropology at high school. It is not too late, however, to introduce anthropology into high schools nor to demonstrate the short-sightedness of the UK’s axing of its anthropology A-level curriculum in a society that is itself increasingly riven in ways that reflect South Africa’s socio-cultural divides. Offering anthropology in South African high school curricula will provide future generations with perspectives that will inform their struggles both to overcome and to refrain from using subtly pernicious modes of domination and exclusion as they work to make South Africa a proper place for all.
Spiegel is Emeritus Associate Professor, University of Cape Town; Treasurer, International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences; Advisory Board member, World Council of Anthropology Associations.