Status, specialised knowledge and skilled performance are characteristic properties of ‘expertise’. This panel will explore how expertise is negotiated, legitimated and publicly recognised in various African contexts. It will all also consider how expert knowledge and its associated way of being-in-the-world are appropriated and embodied by students, disciples and apprentices.
Status, specialised knowledge and skilled performance are characteristic properties of ‘expertise’. This panel will explore how expertise is negotiated, legitimated and publicly recognised in various African contexts. Expert status is configured within the broader social and cultural construction of identity, and therefore intersects with the politics of gender, ethnicity, age, education and social class. Panel participants will all also consider how expert knowledge and its associated way of being-in-the-world are appropriated, embodied and reproduced by students, disciples and apprentices. Teaching, learning and the honing of skills are enacted in a participatory context defined by the social and working relationships that evolve between mentors and novices. The transmission of status and the acquisition of the skills and knowledge associated with expertise often involve hierarchical relations of power, secrets, magic, benedictions and initiation.
Certain types of African professionals and practitioners have figured prominently in former anthropological studies, including blacksmiths, potters, weavers, masons, diviners, healers, mid-wives, religious scholars, philosophers, poets, bards and praise singers. The aim of the panel is to further illuminate the social and cultural construction of these experts and their knowledge, and to critically engage with the concept of ‘expertise’. Panel participants will be invited to present ethnographic accounts that contextualise skilled performance and knowledge, not only in the realm of ritual and the sacred, but also in the everyday. Papers are encouraged to address field and research methodologies, and reflect on the ways in which anthropologists come to identify, classify and represent so-called ‘expert knowledge’. Finally, since expertise is often manifested in embodied expressions ‘beyond language’, participants are encouraged to explore the limits and potentials of ethnographic representation ‘beyond text’.
During a masons apprenticeship, the young man acquires not only technical skills, but also social knowledge and a bodily comportment. Together, these inform his performance as a professional craftsman. Recognised masters creatively innovate in a manner that effectively expands the discursive boundaries of tradition. Based on ethnographic work amongst Djennes masons, this paper will explore the construction of expert status, and the negotiation of license and limits for innovation in this internationally renowned historic urban context.
My research has been concerned with local intellectuals and the dynamics of knowledge in the Kenyan Swahili context, seeking to portray philosophical discourse as a living intellectual practice in social life. In this paper, I will discuss expertise, skilled performance, and knowledge within the spectrum of this research. Drawing from ethnographic case studies, I will follow selected instances in the construction and performance of poetry, Islamic speeches, and everyday discussions that illustrate how fundamental orientation about knowledge and values is sought and negotiated, through the intellectual effort of individuals.
This paper aims to give a description of the network of Namagan Kante, a Maninka sand divination expert from the small village of Farabako in the isolated Sobara region (South-West of Bamako, Mali). Although Namagan is relatively young (born 1964), and although his family has, of old, a reputation as sand diviners, Namagan is among the most renowned sand diviners of Sobara his fame is more than regional. Namagan owes this fame as an expert to a large extent from activities not related to sand divination; by his refusal, as a child, to work on the fields, and by his care, since his youth, for the village herd, Namagan has created himself a central position in multi-ethnic commercial networks that have come into existence in the Sobara region in the last decades of the 20th century. Hence, it will be argued that an expert must have specialized knowledge (i.c. on sand divination), but must also be able to create/maintain a context in which the specialized knowledge is part of a wider strategy/road to success.
Healers (sangoma) in South Africa are organised into schools (mpande, lit. root/ branch) around a senior teacher (gobela) and are linked into wide networks through which knowledge flows and is evaluated. Here I will examine principles by which healers assess the effectiveness of healing methods, transmit their knowledge to each other, and evaluate each others performance of the healers dance (ngoma) and music.
In a suburb of Dakar, two marabout women offer their expertise in the magical powers of the Koran. In the wide range of specialists in maraboutage, divination, and healing in Dakar, this is very rare. One is in her fifties and has a long experience, the other is in her thirties and has started five years ago. I will discuss the ways in which the two marabout women, each in her own way, acquired a large clientele and is now able to make a comfortable living in this male-dominated domain.
This paper examines the specialised knowledge practices of two sets of culturally recognised experts in Senegal: Islamic clerics and craftsmen. Their respective bodies of knowledge are often regarded as being in opposition, and in some respects antithetical, to one another. The aim of this paper is to examine this claim by means of an investigation of how knowledge is conceived by each party. The social processes of knowledge acquisition and transmission are also examined with reference to the idea of initiatory learning. It is in these areas that commonalities between the bodies of knowledge and sets of knowledge practices are to be found. Yet, despite parallels between the epistemologies of both bodies of expertise and between their respective modes of knowledge transmission, the social consequences of expertise are different in each case. The hierarchical relations of power that inform the articulation of the dominant clerics with marginalised craftsmen groups serve to profile expertise in different ways, each one implying its own sense and social range of legitimacy.
The knowledge that is necessary to apply one of the many different divination techniques that are used in Senegal and Gambia can be aquired in different ways (transmission from father to son, apprenticeship, revelation in dreams or by tutelary spirits, etc). While for the individual diviner it might be of great importance how he aquired his abilities, it is striking to note that for the client the diviners mode of knowledge aquisition has hardly any importance at all. What is crucial for the client is that the diviner is able to identify his concerns and to indicate the ritual remedies that can be used to solve his personal problems, enhance the likelihood of succes in the issues at stake, and to ward off negative influences.
Drawing on the documentation of divinatory consultations and the processual and phenomenological analysis of divinatory praxis, it will be argued in this paper that the reason for the irrelevance for the client of the question where and how a diviner obtained the knowledge that enables him to divine, lies not in the disinterest of the client but in the nature of ritual action. In other words, this paper attempts to show that the agency that lies at the basis of the divinatory ritual process must not be located in the person of the diviner but in the processual structure of the divinatory encounter itself.
Based on recent field research among the Ekiti, South West Nigeria, this paper sets out to explore the question of philosophic sages. It attempts to find traditional experts, possessing the capacity for critical and rigorous thought, as required by philosophy, but without the ability to write. Two key questions arise: Do experts in philosophic thought exist among the Ekiti Yoruba, and if so, do they match, if not surpass, the well known philosophers of the West?; Do Ekiti Yoruba 'philosophers' qualify as philosophers in the conventional sense considering that their thinking and ideas have not been disseminated through the generally expected means of writing? These and other related issues are discussed in the paper.