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FOREWORD

This volume presents an anthropological discussion of the socio-historical emergence of the Botswana nation-state. Gulbrandsen, in the best tradition of anthropological field research, adopts a holistic perspective grounded in ethnographic experience and immersion in a diversity of social and political practices over the long-term. This is not the kind of travelogue ethnography that has begun to take a hold in anthropology, one perhaps over-influenced by postmodern cultural studies perspectives.

Gulbrandsen's observations and interpretations build from his engagement beginning in the 1970s with predominantly members of the Tswana majority, and in a great variety of contexts involving many different subject positions. The conceptual and theoretical understandings that he develops are conditional on his ethnography which is the hallmark of an anthropological approach. Here I must remark that in my opinion anthropology is not theory-driven and that this constitutes its distinction in the social sciences. That is, while anthropologists claim major theoretical significance for their work, their theoretical understanding is empirically derived (rather than merely empirically supported) and is ideally organic with the life situations examined. In this sense, anthropological theorizing does not begin in abstraction or in some transcendent authority, but in and through the grounded experience of human practice. Anthropology gives this primacy and it is in this sense that Gulbrandsen's work achieves its distinction. I say this because much of Gulbrandsen's argument – indeed its excitement – develops through a critical consideration of major conceptual and theoretical orientations in the economic, political and social sciences especially as they are applied to Africa. These have their source in European and North American contexts (in fact in the particular historical conditions of specific modernities and reflections upon them). As an anthropologist, Gulbrandsen is intensely sensitive to this fact and, more specifically, of his own Norwegian origins which bear certain assumptions that demand addressing in the Botswana context. For example, he is concerned with dimensions of democratic practice in Botswana noting some similarities with Norway where the emphasis on local participation is emphasised especially through its commune system (not unlike that of Switzerland studied by Eric Wolf). In Norway there is a strong stress on a politics of consensus, at both local and national levels, and this attunes Gulbrandsen to similar dynamics in the Botswana context although as he demonstrates this emerges from the very particu lar cultural context of Tswana traditional practice. Western democracies, of course, have had considerable influence on Botswana starting in the colonial experience. But they are grounded largely in a very different history characterized by an egalitarian ethos and a comparatively historically recent culture of individualism (e.g. Macpherson 1964, Dumont 1986, Taylor 2007). The values of consensus that have been appropriated into the governing apparatus of the Botswana nation-state are grounded in a system of ranked hierarchy associated with the still persisting, though of course continually changing, clan/lineage system of the Tswana merafe and chiefly (kgosi) rule. In other words, in effect a kind of democracy, though far from reducible to the Western kind, existed in the context of a hierarchical order and continues to have effect in the altogether different hierarchical bureaucratic structures of the contemporary Botswana nation-state which nevertheless gives ideological support to Tswana kin-based chiefly hierarchical value. What to outsiders might appear to be anti-democratic in Botswana (the continuing value placed on rank) has a democratic participatory aspect which gives the general populace a marked say in events despite what may otherwise appear as anti-egalitarian features in contradiction of western democratic ideals (themselves thwarted by what many might see as growing class inequalities).

Gulbrandsen engages his own comparative knowledge both to sharpen his understanding of processes in Botswana and to draw attention to differences that may be glossed over in superficial similarities that overlook important distinctions. Most anthropologists would argue that comparison is unavoidable and the merit of Gulbrandsen's approach is to make explicit the source of his own evaluation of the Botswana situation – and in a way which reveals crucial dimensions of it. Furthermore, Gulbrandsen's comparative orientation is not based on simple oppositions of a We/They kind and is oriented to the uncovering of differences which nonetheless contain crucial similarities at least in effect. I should note here that throughout the book Gulbrandsen is concerned to avoid an anthropological relativism whereby his discussion is merely deemed relevant to Botswana. What he achieves is to indicate the significance of the Botswana materials for wider discussion on the nature of state/citizen processes but with a strong attention to the cultural conditionality and limitation of his observations and conceptualizations as well as the tendency to universalist assessment or judgment more characteristic of other disciplines.

This work is an excellent example of anthropology as a discipline of the ‘minor discourse’. The social philosopher, Gilles Deleuze (1991) – whose work constitutes a major reference in Gulbrandsen's analysis – develops the notion of the minor discourse to draw attention to arguments, orientations or understandings that are typically marginalized and not infrequently suppressed by and in the interest of ruling orientations or theories which, as Foucault also argued, support the status quo. Anthropology has conventionally worked among marginalized populations whether those suppressed in imperial expansion or those otherwise reduced in circumstance and excluded. The discipline has made important contributions in contesting dominant/dominating opinion and thought and this is especially so concerning largely Eurocentric theoretical assertions and the submerged cultural assumptions that frequently underpin them. This received further impetus from an internal critique in anthropology that questioned its colonialist or imperialist associations which for many anthropologists was an uncomfortable aspect of its specific development as a discipline of the minor discourse.

Gulbrandsen's overall conception and analytical direction in this volume is thoroughly in line with anthropology as a distinctive discipline of the minor discourse and further establishes it as such.

Throughout the book Gulbrandsen not only addresses issues central in the anthropology of Africa but also gives practices in Botswana authority and position in the evaluation of opinion and theory (particularly political science) conditioned within largely Western frames of reference. In other words, what is made into a minor discourse or suppressed through the hegemony of Western thought inevitably tied to imperial cum globalizing power achieves authority that it might otherwise lack. In this work Gulbrandsen demonstrates the importance of the Botswana case perhaps leading to a major reconsideration of much conventional or conventionalizing opinion.

Gulbrandsen's analysis focuses on Botswana's apparent exceptionalism. Contrary to the relatively dismal picture painted by many students of Africa, Botswana is a relative success story. The society that has taken form in the context of the establishment of the nation-state has weathered the potential hazardous effects of Colonial Rule and taken advantage of globalizing forces. The myriad ‘discontents of modernity’ (see Comaroff and Comaroff 1993) that have been described for elsewhere in Africa do not appear to have taken disastrous hold. The dangers of new wealth (e.g. diamonds) have not been markedly divisive (although Gulbrandsen does not rule out such an eventuality). The conflicts born of class and ethnicity have largely been avoided and the ‘politics of the belly’ associated with the emergence of greedy elites, although by no means outside a public consciousness, has been averted in the main. What Gulbrandsen indicates is that factors which are seen widely in Africa to be associated with political and social conflict and war in other parts of Africa are shown in the Botswana situation to be far from inevitable in their consequence. Here I should add that Gulbrandsen does not present Botswana as a harmonious exception. Antagonisms and conflicts founded in class and ethnicity are developing but they have not taken the thoroughly disastrous turn that often seems to have been taken elsewhere.

Clearly various dualisms and oppositions that continue to bedevil anthropology and other disciplines pose major difficulties for understanding, and the minor discourses of the hitherto dominated, such as Botswana, expose them. Gulbrandsen presents the Botswana situation as quashing such oppositions, and powerfully questions the reasoning behind their continuing centrality in the analysis of processes in the now post-colonial margins. Much that receives a negative value in parts of Africa, in Botswana has a more positive effect. Common dualisms that would oppose tradition to modernity or change to stasis, for example, are shown by Gulbrandsen to be inadequate to say the least.

In the Botswana context what might be conceived as tradition is a powerful force both of change and of control in contemporary circumstances. Gulbrandsen approaches the idea of tradition through the cultural orientation of anthropology that both sets it within historical processes and conceives it as a continual dynamic, always open to redefinition, within contexts of practice. In this sense the traditional is not outside contemporary forces but continually being re-created in ongoing social and political relations realizing original import and achieving often innovative effects. The traditional in this approach is not a mere product or an outcome of historical forces but is ingrained within them, vital to the various directions that societal formation in Botswana is taking as this is bound up with the structuring process of the state. In this way, Gulbrandsen goes beyond the ‘invention of tradition’ perspectives (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) that operate with a kind of hiatus between the contemporary and the past (perhaps paradoxically itself engaging in the invention of tradition) without invoking a kind of primordialism.

In Gulbrandsen's analysis there are no clear pre-colonial/post-colonial or before/after demarcations for the understanding of the formation of present-day Botswana. Prior to the advent of colonialism the Tswana could not have been considered as some kind of static cold society and a hostage, as it were, to the heat of change brought by external forces. Gulbrandsen presents the Tswana polities before the advent of European forces as being powerfully expansive and incorporative. He shows how, as an aspect of this, Tswana socio-political processes were built on the basis of change, bringing other African populations within their suzerainty and as part of this oriented to engaging foreign would-be colonizers in accordance with their own terms. They were not the passive subjects of colonial conquest but engaged colonial interests to the pragmatics of their own cultural/political discourse. Official colonial policy of Indirect Rule (which so often through southern Africa involved the creation of political institutions that had no prior existence, see Van Velsen 1967) found a ready utility in already existing Tswana conception and practice. Different orientations towards political and social control within the colonial and post-colonial contexts were in some degree able to co-evolve in a way that was probably very different from some of the peoples in surrounding territories (e.g. South Africa). Undoubtedly this was facilitated by the fact that the territory that became Botswana, from the perspective of the colonizers, had few exploitative resources other than cheap labour. The Bechuanaland Protectorate that became Botswana effectively constituted a pool of cheap labour for the South African mines and the system of labour migration that developed itself was a structure of imperial control that even as it made exploitative use of Tswana political orders gave a degree of autonomy to the Tswana that was a crucial factor in the formation of independent Botswana. The force of Tswana cultural and social values not only persisted through changing circumstances but were vital agencies in social transformation.

In the later circumstances of the development of the independent nation-state Gulbrandsen indicates that the continuing incorporative dynamic of Tswana practice is a factor (regardless of its hierarchializing and inegalitarian dimensions) suppressing the more extreme potentials of inter-ethnic conflict. Agents of the Botswana state were concerned that tribalism (a curse in much of Africa and, as the Manchester anthropologists of Gluckman's central and southern African school insisted, more a force of modernity than of tradition) should not be encouraged. Regardless of government policy to such effect there is strong evidence that Tswana's incorporative dynamics harnessed to the interests of state formation is a major factor ameliorating ethnic tension.

Gulbrandsen's direction to overcome various dualisms that have afflicted anthropological thinking (as well as that in other disciplines) is important. For example, he records very interestingly how the centrifugal social and political effects of cattle-herding societies are not a necessary outcome of such economies as some anthropologists have asserted. On the contrary, among the Tswana concentrated, relatively permanent and dense population settlements were formed that became the core of centralized hierarchical political orders. In the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, rhizomic de-territorializing forces were bound with tree-like hierarchical centering and territorializing processes that imparted to the Tswana their particular expansive and incorporative dynamic. Here I must hasten to add that Gulbrandsen does not reduce his understanding of the Tswana to ecological or economic forces, instead demonstrating how these are not to be separated from other cultural and social institutional processes which are as constitutive of the economy, for instance, as vice versa. This is especially so in the period prior to colonialism and the forging of the in-dependent nation-state when it could be said that strictly speaking there was no such thing as an economy in the modern capitalist sense (see Sahlins 1978, Clastres 1987, Dumont 1986). What Gulbrandsen demonstrates is how cultural forces that bear the traces of the past continue to have an influence on the political economy of the contemporary nationstate within globalizing realities. Beef exports are vital in the state economy and much of the success of the Botswana cattle industry is built on the fact of the centrality of cattle in practices of the creation and formation of social and political relations quite independently of any capital interest. In other words, the cultural importance of cattle in Tswana social life advantageously positioned Botswana in the processes of global capital.

I find fascinating Gulbrandsen's historical discussion of the relation of the various lineage-based Tswana kingdoms/nations or merafe and their rulers (kgosi) to the emerging Botswana nation-state. While they are drawn into the state order and to a large extent marginalized (and more recently losing influence as a consequence of the growth of new urban centres), Gulbrandsen suggests that the kgosi operate as a check on state practices. In the early period of Independence it seems that they functioned as an alternative state within the state, perhaps to play on Pierre Clastres' thesis in Society Against the State (1987), as a society of the state against the nation-state and its bureaucracy that in Gulbrandsen's argument is relatively exterior to society.

Overall Gulbrandsen addresses major sociological and political arguments that have developed recently with regard to Africa. I refer to the tendency to treat contemporary African states as more or less basket cases, which if so are views, in many instances, exacerbated in what would seem to be highly Eurocentric opinion: for example, arguments that discuss Africa in terms of concepts of the failed state, the politics of the belly and elite greed, radical ethnic conflict and war, intense dynamics of impoverishment and much else. The negative forces of so-called traditionalism and historically formed cultural orientations constituted outside European history, the maladaptation of African political cultural realities to rational bureaucratic orders are among some of the factors that have been stressed as well as the destructive forces of global capital in the circumstances of contemporary globalization. Gulbrandsen's work suggests that explanations of the plight of many state situations in Africa with reference to the above factors may be too easy. Traditionalism or cultural orientations refashioned within the context of modernity do not necessarily lead to negative consequences. The evidence from Botswana – and Gulbrandsen is relatively positive in his assessment – indicates that fast conventionalizing opinion and theory demands some more careful reconsideration.

This is a wonderful book rich in ethnography and every bit as rich in careful and considered thought. The book is exemplary in its anthropology and demonstrates the continuing value of an anthropological perspective across the disciplines.

Bruce Kapferer