KEYNOTE
RE-CONTEXTUALIZING SELF/OTHER ISSUES: TOWARD A HUMANICS IN AFRICA
Itsuhiro Hazama
Director of Nairobi Research Station, JSPS
This joint symposium is organized by young researchers from Makerere University and Kyoto University. Presenters and discussants specialize in various areas of study, such as social anthropology, social philosophy, comparative literature and aesthetics, and they are invited from various parts of the world as East Africa, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States for the purpose of an exchange and its promotion of information and views. We open this symposium to general audience to activate discussion and insure the involvement of researchers and under- or post-graduate students of all faculties. Under these formations, we are intending to raise an intellectual platform in Makerere University conducive to international multidisciplinary integration centred on re-contextualizing self/other issues.

The presenters' main discipline will be anthropology. This is because the aim of this symposium is anthropological reconstruction through discussion on its potential as a 'Humanics of alternative social vision' that takes into consideration the problem of politics of representation as well as the risk of blind belief in a given ideal world. Each presenter will show 'one of the possible ways', based on data derived from close participation in and observation of daily life in the field. The symposium will seek to demonstrate the possibility of an alternative world or worldview, concerning topics such as peace construction, social change and dilemma of rural society, ethnobotany, sense of the world, and lifestyle of urban youth. Each presentation will endeavour to provide a key to make the concept for imaging the ideal society as a bundle of the world of possibilities. In contrast to mainstream economics, which is based on the framework of prescriptive model, anthropology aims to rely on the descriptive model based on the theory of middle range and tireless renewal of the same from case studies.

Now, what is the meaning of anthropological researches in contemporary Africa? At present, African countries are in the midst of the continent's turbulence of modernization and globalization. Reductive explanation of those changes in terms of modernization or dependency theory, however, fails in understanding of the fertile and vivid dynamism of reality; the inner tension within the society and social mobility and plasticity. The most important tasks in current anthropology consist of understanding African reality through the fine observation of the everyday life of people and then producing discourses, which can intervene into the development-oriented policies trying to conceive societies by the overwhelming power.

It goes without saying that we cannot conclude that 'application' as mentioned above grasps all the meaning of anthropology. Anthropology has explored the ethos/culture of societies as unique entities which are alive in the 'non-modernized' spheres like Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and has reversed the understanding of the concepts such modernity as well as what life meaning or happiness is. As the factor of making relativistic the obviousness in the modern civilization, it has given the amplitude of imagination for a new social plan and the clue to conceive 'another way possible' to people in the developed countries who are suffering the distortion arising in the course of the economic growth.

On the other hand, African thinkers such as Okot p'Bitek have criticized anthropology, since even before Orientalism criticism by Edward W. Said, which has alienated 'They-Africa' as a mirror image of 'We-West,' with assigning 'primitiveness' and 'innocence' to Africa. Even though anthropology defines itself as 'the study on understanding of other cultures,' scholarship in the field has failed to be an exceptional case but succumbed to objectifying Africa through the Western-biased scope and represented it as a homogeneous entity in this context.

As socialist regimes in Soviet and Eastern Europe collapsed around 1990, communism, which was the most influential alternative social model in Africa during 1960-70s, lost its influence. Now that American capitalism triumphs, intellectuals argue and talk about the 'End of history,' and discussing on new social vision has come to be regarded as silly. Anthropology, as a discipline that stimulates and offers alternative social vision, seems to be negated in terms of politics of representation inside the context of anthropological argument and relevance to the real world outside of anthropology.

We voice opposition to such trend. We should inherit the critical attitude toward dominant (Western-biased) ideology and its value of criticalness which anthropology has kept since its birth. However, we do not offer 'another and only way.' The history of social movement and its theory witnesses us that we must be consistently careful about any form of exclusion or attempt at making a utopian world. Instead, we try to show 'other many ways' or multiple possibilities and construct the ideal social image as a complex bundle of possibilities. Such practice is suitable for anthropology which has formed middle-ranged descriptive models and persistently renewed them.

Today in Africa, 'economic/social development' is the most vigorous ideology that invokes the images of possible worlds. Modernity and its way of thinking enwomb the arts of 'familiarization' and elimination, which turn unknown things to understandable things. In the course of understandings, this way of thinking tends to create 'the other', to grasp unknown things, eliminate their various 'otherness' themselves, and consequently construct undoubted 'the self', the idea of 'development' basically rooted in the same soil. Such sort of bias, so to say 'blind obviousness', covers up perplexing incommensurability of 'otherness' to lay the ghost of agnostic; and what is more, structurally oppresses it subconsciously. Considering 'subjectivity' of the other and de-familiarizing given 'the self', this seemingly incompatible back-and-forth is the marrow of anthropological thought. In this sense, we believe that anthropological approach and practice for encountering 'the entire other' with 'otherness' can free us from modern desire to rule and control the other.

In this symposium, twelve presentations will be made in three sessions set up along the issues and questions as follows;

(1) Theoretical Issues on African Anthropologies and African Studies
---What Is the Self/Other in the Contexts of African Anthropologies and African Studies?
(2) Creational Issues on African Anthropologies and African Studies
---How Can We Express the Self/Other's Experiences in African Contexts?
(3) Practical Issues on African Anthropologies and African Studies
---How Can We Interrogate the Relationship between the Self and the Other in the African Contexts?

We will illuminate various creative practices and wisdom in African societies and open arena to discuss our longings for emancipation. It is not until we have discussion through the mediation of these key ideas, creativity and 'emancipation', that we bridge anthropological case studies to the social theory based on 'various other ways'. We named this intellectual liberation itself as 'Humanics' ad interim.

Since every case study in anthropological scholarship covers only a particular topic, it may have some limits. It is for this reason that this symposium proposes to bring together various scholars in the field of anthropology in Africa in order to bring together the studies, exchange ideas, and inspire each other and therefore rise above the limits. We will also welcome guests and participants from related fields of social sciences, philosophy and other arts and sciences.

We believe this is one of the best ways to make 'Humanics' work as a tool of long dialogues with other fields of modern science or with real dimensional development politics. This will be our contribution in this very important area of African scholarship and development.