Abstract
This collection of papers on Ghana dating primarily from the 1960s have not been previously published. The selection was taken from 30 typescripts from the Deutsches Literaturachiv, Marbach am Neckar. The 11 chapters have been edited from papers which Elias had not fully developed for publication or indeed authorized them for such. The editors have worked hard to get them developed and organized for this timely publication.
These details are important, because many students of Norbert Elias, who was at the University of Leicester (1954–1962), would not necessarily know about his time at the University of Ghana (1962–1964) after his retirement from Leicester or about his contributions to the history of the formation of Ghana. In this regard, this collection throws a new light on Elias’s understanding of social processes, the formation of ‘survival units’ and the individual-society relationship. Furthermore, it is of major importance in understanding the basic idea of ‘the civilizing process’ from The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Elias, 2000), which was first published in 1939, but did not receive much attention outside Germany until the 1980s. In short, this small volume is a major contribution to our understanding of the Elias legacy and especially in the context of contemporary critical debates about sociology and anthropology in the legacy of western colonialism (Bhambra and Holmwood, 2021).
This collection of papers can be read at various levels, but it offers a basic introduction to the importance of Elias’s process theory for understanding institutional development. We might say that institutions such as tribes or states are always in a process of becoming. These papers can also serve as a defence of his understanding of civilization as a process not as a time bound description of western development, but as a process that can be applied to any society – in this case to the development of an African society. These papers then function as a defence of Elias’s sociology and simultaneously as a critique of anthropological approaches to tribes and states.
In the secondary literature on Elias’s sociology, this work relating to Ghana has been neglected. It was on his return to Britain that it also became clear that Elias had a comprehensive understanding of the development of African art from an introduction he wrote to the catalogue of an exhibition of African art at the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery (Elias, 2009).
One feature of these papers is the interesting contrast he makes between the foundations of British anthropology and what may be regarded as the late arrival of sociology. In the British context, anthropology was developed at both Oxford and Cambridge universities in providing appropriate training for civil servants who were destined for service overseas in the Colonial Office. From the perspective of the colonial administration, it was useful for these new recruits to have a basic understanding of ‘chieftain’, ‘tribe’ and ‘ritual’. This elite background contrasted with the low status of sociology which emerged in both the provincial universities and the ‘new universities’ of post-war Britian. The publication of these papers is timely in providing a defence of Elias’s civilizing thesis and in giving an insight into the scope of Elias’s research interests.
The other dominant theme of these papers is perhaps less obvious namely the process framework to understand the endless struggle of social groups to find the means of survival and to secure a hill or mountain that could be defended against other groups who were also engaged in the struggle to find security. Elias saw this process as applying to human history as such rather than only to Africa. In summary he argued that ‘The lack of a process concept such as “development” in the study of African societies is one of the factors that accounts for the largely static character of such concepts as “tribe”’(Elias, 2022: 52). Elias was critical of the anthropological obsession with the ‘tribe’ whereas Africans themselves appear to have stronger connections, including their identity, with village or town.
One basic criticism of traditional anthropological research has been that the anthropologist depended completely on local people to act as unpaid research assistants, but they were rarely recognized in research reports and subsequent publications. While anthropologists had depended almost exclusively on participant observation, in these papers and lectures Elias used archival material, historical eye-witness accounts and songs of the Klama people to appreciate the processes of change taking place in Africa.
Elias has often been criticised for the apparent absence of any sustained discussion of the role of religion, especially Christianity, in the civilizing process (Goudsblom, 2004). In that regard, two of the most interesting chapters from his Ghanian research are on ‘Religion in a Village Society’ and ‘Priests and Knowledge’. The priests were important in terms of the ‘considerable part to play in the pattern of self-regulation and thus in the conscience formation of the mass of the Krobo people’ (Elias, 2022: 145). Elias’s analysis of religion as the basis for self-regulation in Krobo society allows him to perceive these norms as the basis of ‘a civilising spurt’ in the population, namely ‘a move towards social regulation of a person’s self-regulation’ (Elias, 2022: 126).
These investigations into self-regulation are also an occasion for Elias to underline the limitations of understanding that were created by the colonial context and the role of anthropology. The British administrators did not expect ‘to find priests overtly in ruling positions’ (Elias, 2022: 130). Their understanding of the religious leaders was perceived through Christian assumptions by which they found the priests behaviour ‘uncanny’ and the expression ‘fetish priests’ had ‘negative undertones’ (Elias, 2022: 130).
Although Elias is generally critical of anthropology, he also comments on the limitations of sociology, especially in terms of its standard methodology. The dependence on surveys and statistical techniques involves ‘highly extensive procedures which provide answers only to a limited group of problems’ (Elias, 2022: 227). By contrast, anthropological field work is highly ‘intensive’, but these methods are not well suited to studying societies that are changing rapidly (Elias, 2022: 228).
Perhaps the most intriguing chapter is the epilogue ‘Off to Ghana: The Encounter of Norbert Elias and Malcolm X’ which is an essay written by Arjan Post, discussing a brief encounter between Elias and Malcolm X in 1964. Apparently, Malcolm X was invited to give a guest lecture that was probably hosted by Elias, where the visitor elaborated on racial inequality and discrimination in what he referred to as the ‘American Nightmare’. Arjan Post speculates on a theme in Elias’s work in terms of insider and outsiders. Elias, as a displaced European Jew, continue to see himself often as an outsider, while Malcolm X experienced America from the position of an outsider while feeling at home in Ghana.
In conclusion, this volume is a welcome addition to the evaluation of Elias’s sociology and specifically to his understanding of ‘civilizational spurts’ in terms of the emergence of patterns of self-control in the case of Ghana. This publication is also important in considering the role of religion in the civilizing process through patterns of self-regulation. In terms of the civilizational spurt the role of priests in religious rituals and customs was crucial. Finally, his emphasis on the importance of ‘survival units’ provides a valuable illustration of his general development of process sociology.
