Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa

by Johannes Fabian

Explorers and ethnographers in Africa during the period of colonial expansion are usually assumed to have been guided by rational aims such as the desire for scientific knowledge, fame, or financial gain. This book, the culmination of many years of research on nineteenth-century exploration in Central Africa, provides a new view of those early European explorers and their encounters with Africans. Out of Our Minds shows explorers were far from rational--often meeting their hosts in extraordinary states influenced by opiates, alcohol, sex, fever, fatigue, and violence. Johannes Fabian presents fascinating and little-known source material, and points to its implications for our understanding of the beginnings of modern colonization. At the same time, he makes an important contribution to current debates about the intellectual origins and nature of anthropological inquiry.

Drawing on travel accounts--most of them Belgian and German--published between 1878 and the start of World War I, Fabian describes encounters between European travelers and the Africans they met. He argues that the loss of control experienced by these early travelers actually served to enhance cross-cultural understanding, allowing the foreigners to make sense of strange facts and customs. Fabian's provocative findings contribute to a critique of narrowly scientific or rationalistic visions of ethnography, illuminating the relationship between travel and intercultural understanding, as well as between imperialism and ethnographic knowledge.

Genres: Anthropology, History, Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2000

Reviews

[Sara-Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work easily tops the list of the best non-fiction I’ve read in quite some while. Certainly different (in form and style only, for the themes are consistent) from his highly abstruse work Time and the Other. Fabian invites us to the epistemological exercise of traveling ‘through the minds of travelers’: these travelers being a collection of men from German and Belgium expeditions in Central Africa during the late 19th and early 20th century, a pivotal time in the history of contact. “Our target”, he says “is imperialist reason at the front line, rather than in boardrooms and compendia. Therefore, unreason should be sought at the points of articulation between experience and judgment, description and prescription, travel and writing, not only on the grand level of imperialists’ designs and deceptions.” Necessary to this endeavor is the excavation of innumerable details of the footsoldiers at the front line; with lengthy quotes from travelogues, the banality of itinerary and intermittent incredible instances, we indeed travel alongside in some respect.

Our companions, we are shown from the start, and with important consequence, don’t correspond to the heroic image of the intrepid journeyman, staking it out on his own, blazing fresh and exciting trails with wits, courage and scientific know-how leading the way. Rather, our traveler-heroes’ journeys through central Africa are ones marked by fever, fatigue, fear, and frenzy. The critical import of this introductory unveiling maneuver is rather staggering: for starters, by intimately exploring the explorers’ various states at odds with the ideal of a disembodied scientific mind, Fabian undermines the self-stated mastery of power’s aims and methods in the production of knowledge of the Other. Stationary more often than not, lurching with a cumbersome caravan on paths already well-trod, utterly dependent on African guides, interpreters, porters and small children, beset by melancholia, prickly heat, and ‘that terrible African fever’, we get a sense of the rather pathetic tragicomedy that was the lives of the emissaries of extermination. This counterstory is one in which they are quite literally ‘out of their minds.’

To safeguard against the destabilizing potential in close contact and the madness that the contradictions of the enterprise induce, explorers, under the rubric of hygiene and in the name of science, undertook strict regiments of self-control: painstaking and obsessive routines of collecting, measuring, sorting, and cleansing intended to serve as a last defense against encroaching savagery: for ‘in Africa, cleanliness was above all a matter of maintaining discipline in the absence of the usual social pressures and amenities of civilization.’ ‘Civilization’ traveled with them, on full display: Calipers, plaster of paris, toy elephants, Indian elephants, chronometers, phonographs, music boxes--a veritable side show operation to manipulate the presumably awed Africans at opportune moments. Keeping proper time and awareness of dates, especially holidays was of the highest importance as a ritual to reenact and continuously resecure one’s European identity. Such discipline was considered all the more important because ‘self-control was generally understood as a prerequisite for the control of others’, at the expense sadly of a more robust sense of both self and other:

More often than not, their obligations to science caused them to make their conviviality into a method. Hygiene and method allowed them to create distance, to deny or avoid immediacy when they wrote about their experiences. That Europeans considered denial a condition of producing knowledge is clear when we consider the many reported instances where their travelogues instrumentalize conviviality and, indeed, friendship. 75.

Denial, however, was not the only condition of producing knowledges employed by Europeans in their encounters. Such a protectorate, more like a thin film really, is as ineffective as a dose of cologne over such a raucous stink, and the barrier did not hold as it should:

Inevitably, explorers who subscribed to ideals of ethnographic knowledge of other peoples based on meeting them as human subjects and tried to follow positivist rules of observing Africans as objects of natural history faced contradictions and, indeed, existential tensions and anxieties. The very choice of an episteme that must have appeared to explorers as natural, hence rational, contained the seeds of madness. 183

These drunk, high, delirious, depressed, demented and in denial explorers were often in states of ecstasy, Fabian says. As the ‘pragmatic and existential negation’ of control, ecstasis indicates “an inability to follow plans and carry out schemes, as well as a capacity to go beyond plans and schemes” (9). Being “out of our minds” becomes ‘a dimension, indeed a condition of possibility, of disciplined knowledge about Others’ (280). And Fabian is especially keen to accentuating the potential productive element of ecstasy. For at times, the imperialists heard more than wild incoherent drumming pounding into their ears at night. They could not sleep with hands covering ears forever. At times too, explorers felt something for the other, something that could broach friendship, an engagement between subjects, coevalness against all odds. Much of daily life exceeded and subverted the expectations and restrictions attendant with strident mechanisms to control and relegate the boundaries of self and other. Explorers

got to “that which is real” when they permitted themselves to be touched by lived experience. More often than not, those instances involved them in quandaries and contradictions, in moral puzzles and conflicting demands. What I find striking, and worthy of much more attention than it is usually given, is that explorers frequently overcame these intellectual and existential problems by stepping outside, and sometimes existing for long periods outside, the rationalized frames of exploration, be they faith, knowledge, profit, or domination. This “stepping outside” or “being outside” is what I call the ecstatic. (8)

Ethnography based on actual encounter with strange peoples could not rest on certainties brought along; it demanded leaps of imagination, acts of identification, choosing sides in disputes, and whatever else is required if communication is to occur in situations where participants cannot simply follow their habits and routines. I don’t think it is exaggerated to qualify such acts as moments of ecstasis. As reported in our sources, they ranged from intense pleasure caused by discovery to mad projections pronounced to cover confusion and the discomfort, indeed the pain, of incomprehension. …. Travelers differed in the ways they put these experiences to productive use or let them bring out insurmountable prejudices, more often than not the latter. The point is not that these explorers seldom if ever sang, danced, or played along but that their ideas of science and their rules of hygiene made them reject singing, dancing, and playing as sources of ethnographic knowledge. 199, 127

(On music specifically: 'The objects of marvel described so far were available to view, touch, and perhaps smell. Some also rang, exploded, or were machines that made noises. But musical instruments, in the hands of more or less competent players, lend themselves neither to selective exhibition nor to detached contemplation. Sound reaches and envelops everyone in hearing distance. Music, modulated and rhythmic sound, reveals what the exhibition of objects may hide: its production is a performance demanding a sharing of time, based on the co-presence of participants in an event. As such, music effectively subverts the controlled distance and hierarchical relations that constitute the politics of scientific observation (and exhibition). Even in its most reduced forms, music induces passion and the kind of ecstasis whose role we try to document and understand in this study of European encounters with Africa.' 109

'Letting themselves be affected by African music was, I believe, one of the qualities that distinguished explorers who were able to give themselves over to experiences from others who could and would not get ecstatic about Africa— in the epistemological sense we gave to the term.' 115)

But these flashes of insight and communion through difference were denied just as quickly as they came.

meaning and understanding came to explorers in moments only and then mostly, at least in matters of culture, against and in spite of the scientific equipment and expectations they brought along. It is as if it took all the faith in scientific truth they could muster (and a few other faiths: in their superiority, in their sponsors, in their nations) to maintain their sanity and overlook the contradictions in the very premises of European exploration. Fundamental among them were the contradictory demands made by power and truth, not just in the abstract sense in which they constitute an ageless philosophical quandary, but in the concrete form of serving imperialist and colonialist designs and scientific projects. 238

An example of a certain sort of seduction being reeled back in and tightly reigned: ‘Here, with this chief, I had for the first time since I traveled among negroes the comfortable feeling of being among kind, I am almost tempted to say among good people’ (153). We see the distancing mechanisms at work quite literally, who belongs with who and why are reasserted just in time to save the explorer from the pains of difference and doubt.

Fabian asks, in a very concrete sense, ‘could anyone torn between the demands of comprehension and domination be consistently reasonable?’ ‘All this,’ he says ‘led only to madness and it is sobering to discover that the best among the explorers (the most insightful and productive, the ones we most readily see as our predecessors in the work of ethnography) also exhibited its most severe symptoms’ 238. Unsettling indeed is the exposition of the strengths of the explorers, not that they were bold heroic and individual (that unveiling sat happily enough with me), but that some possessed extraordinary poetic gifts, and could be seen as perceptive, articulate and sensitive in their day to day affairs. It is alluring to assume that anyone with a dint of intelligence, moral character and integrity would not continue to support and sanctify imperial rule. That they did and do, brings us closer to the explorers than might be comfortable.
But Fabian links us further yet.

The philosophical ambition of Fabian’s more abstract epistemological critique gives way to his paramount practical animating concern, the continuities between exploration and ethnography. For the travelogue, he argues, serves as the precedent to the ethnographic monograph. And the positivism of then continues to be a model for fieldwork today. “Our discipline’s role”, he says “was to construe the primitive as an object (rather than subject) of history and as a target of colonization. Actual political complicity pales beside the epistemic work anthropology performed when it fostered such images” (165).

'The inevitably political dimension of our work obliges us to ponder not just what we represent of, or imagine about, Africa but what we inflict on it, and us, when we formulate ethnographic knowledge.' 240

[Samuel Beer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabian challenges two particular conceptions of exploration and ethnography in central Africa in the late 19th and early 20th century: the explorer as a rational agent of science, and the explorer as a complicit agent of the empire, who may therefore be dismissed out of hand. In spite of (because of?) the madness often demonstrated by the cited ethnographers, accounts often contained shockingly self-aware critiques of contemporary ethnographic theory and practice, many of which remain quite relevant to the ethnographer of today. The conclusions are messy and ill-defined--intentionally so, it seems. Fabian advocates no formula for perfect ethnography--rather, he seems to indicate that simple methodological adjustments will never produce ideal ethnography. The madness that often facilitates insight cannot be made a method, and even if it could, it would not be desirable. As much as anything else, I saw in this book that history smiles less on those who accomplish all that they set out to accomplish, and more on those who treat others with grace and compassion even when their objectives fall victim to chaos.

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

In his study, Fabian shows how European explorers, just prior to the colonization of Africa, became entangled in imperial designs, and in the process reveals deep contradictions between the myths that were eventually constructed and the realities they encountered. While I enjoyed many of the topics, his style was a little hard to get used to and in my opinion could be a little too wordy.

[Tomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

[officiele recensie]

Introductie
---------------------------------
Deze recensie is geschreven met het oog op de instrumentele waarde die Fabian in Out of our minds neerschrijft. We bevatten deze tekst als een kritische blik op verleden kennisverwerving en geschiedschrijving. Daarom kunnen de ideeën die hier worden aangehaald voldoende worden geïnterpreteerd om tot een eigen kritische vorm van denken over het menselijk handelen komen. Waar Fabian zich uitlaat over het verleden, ontdekkingsreizigers in Centraal- Afrika aan het eind van de 19de eeuw in het bijzonder, gaan we proberen zijn ideeën ook toe te passen op een hedendaagse vorm van reizen en ontdekken. Na deze oefening kunnen we besluiten dat de perikelen en moeilijkheden die op de weg lagen van Becker, Coquilhat, Torday etc. vandaag nog steeds een rol van betekenis hebben.
 
Betoog
---------------------------------
Out of our minds stelt zich vragen bij de rationale capaciteit van wetenschappers – antropologen in het bijzonder. Fabian probeert doorheen zijn schrijven aan te tonen dat een zekere kritiek op een wetenschappelijk werk zeker niet overbodig is. Hij baseert zich hiervoor op zogenaamde ‘travelogues’ van ontdekkingsreizigers van eind 19de, begin 20ste eeuw in Centraal-Afrika. Dit doet hij op archeologische wijze: hij behandelt steeds de omgeving waarin deze werken zijn opgesteld en gaat later het hele gebruik van het ontdekkingsreizen naast deze historische artefacten houden. Een antropologie van antropologen kan je het noemen.

Hij besluit zijn werk met enkele waardevolle bedenkingen over rationele gebruiken en methoden van toen en nu. Het is net deze link – die doorschijnt doorheen de tekst – dat dit boek ook een heel bruikbaar instrument maakt voor antropologen in opleiding, en meer algemeen voor de reizende ontdekker ‘op vakantie’, u en ik dus.

----------------------- The solitarian European traveler -----------------------

Ik kon mezelf namelijk niet bedwingen een analogie te zien met het exploreren van het onbekende in het hedendaags (city-) trippen. The heroic adventurer die zijn veilige bekende setting verlaat en terecht komt in een (zéér) andere wereld. Hoewel veelal is ontdekt en beschreven, het merendeel van de toeristen ervaart nieuwe werelddelen /-steden nog steeds als onontgonnen terrein (Lyons & Wearing).

Aangezien vele aspecten van de toeristische bestemming onbekend en nieuw zijn, vraagt dit van een reiziger een actieve kijk op de wereld. Fabian benadrukt dat deze kennisvergaring – a condition of knowledge – op verschillende manier kan gebeuren. We moeten met name een kritische reflectie behouden over de interpretatie van het onbekende (door onbekenden). Zo geldt het extatische waarnemen als een van vele manieren om kennis te verwerven.

En het is volgens mij even belangrijk te beseffen tijdens een extatische confrontatie met het onbekende, dat het eigen individuele handelen ook daadwerkelijk als déél van het onbekende wordt aanzien: de onbekende wereld is net zo min als het 19de eeuws Congo Basin a space we just have to enter. We kunnen dus niet zomaar van uit gaan dat we ter plaatse a political vacuum moeten vullen. Fabian verbeeldt zich dit door middel van ‘rituals’; menselijk handelen en gebruiken dat symbolisch wordt geïnterpreteerd door (beide) explorerende actoren. Het is het zogenaamde oeuvre civilisatrice dat je als mens meedraagt en de wereld, met haar rituals en inwoners, daarop opneemt en afrekent.

----------------------- It’s a matter of personal hygiene ----------------------

Dit moeten we echter in het hedendaags toeristisch kader plaatsen: niet zoals ontdekkingsreizigers zichzelf dachten als afgezanten van een maatschappij, maar volgens een individuele geschiedenis in een bepaalde setting. Als mens neem je namelijk de gebruiken over van de setting waarin je bent opgegroeid (Fasokun et al.). Als hedendaags ontdekker-reiziger probeer je tijdens het exploreren daarbovenop – volgens Fabian – een persoonlijke reis-hygiëne te behouden. Deze ‘reactie’ op het onbekende geldt echter voor ieders cultuur. Het is het proberen handhaven van de eigen bekende situaties en gedragingen in een onbekende wereld.

Dit met de onvermijdelijke misverstanden tot gevolg. Het is gedurende de hele ontdekkingstrip dat het individu wordt geconfronteerd met het dilemma om de persoonlijke hygiëne te behouden of (helemaal) af te werpen – tijdens het 19de eeuw in Centraal-Afrika kan je dit zelfs heel letterlijk nemen. Dit dilemma wordt ervaren in wat Fabian beschrijft als een fever, dit kan zowel een louter lichamelijke reactie zijn als een psychologische tweespalt. Een soort van kortsluiting opgeroepen door tegenstrijdige informatie die de besluitvorming kleurt: “What should have been a matter of carrying out well-circumscribed tasks almost always turned into a battle of mere survival, with death the outcome almost as often as not.”. In het hedendaags ontdekken is deze lichamelijke reactie – met de dood tot gevolg – gelukkig veel minder intens als de 19de eeuw en kunnen we misschien beter vatten als een ‘culture shock’ ondergaan.

Naar hedendaagse normen kan je dit beschouwen als een individuele ‘openheid’ naar het onbekende. Fabian heeft hier echter een duidelijk positieve attitude ten opzichte van de uitkomst van dit dilemma: “Most of the explorers wanted to believe they served science and thereby humanity in an enterprise that had to be honest by definition, few were able to close their eyes to evidence they had of their imperial sponsors’ duplicity”. Afhankelijk van de intensiteit en duur van de ontdekkingsreis merkt hij op dat in de aangehaalde werken de eigen drijfveren – de opdrachten uitgevaardigd door de koloniale machten – vroeg of laat zelf enige kritische kanttekeningen gaan vertonen. En dit is volgens mij min of meer de essentie van etnografie en observeren in het algemeen, namelijk jezelf laten onderdompelen in het onbekende dat op zich leidt tot een observerend leren dat de gemeenschappelijke kenmerken blootlegt van om het even welke culturen.

Dit boek beeldt met name de nieuwsgierige mens in een immer veranderende wereld af die deze voor constante uitdaging zet. Out of our minds is daarom hoogst aan te raden lectuur voor zij die op zoek zijn naar (antropologische) onderzoeksmethoden en zij die zich willen wapenen tegen perceptuele valkuilen in het exploreren.
 
Conclusie
---------------------------------
Na een beknopte weergave van de tekst en ideeën van Fabian in Out of our minds hebben we deze toegepast op hedendaagse ontdekkingsreizen. Deze hebben niet zo zeer de heroïsche status als toen in de 19de eeuw, toch kunnen we verschillende parallellen ontwaren. Zo kunnen we bij het oeuvre civilisatrice als de persoonlijke hygiëne heel wat aspecten vinden die de moderne mens ook ervaart in zijn waarnemen. Maar meer dan deze is de allesoverheersende fever het symbool van de menselijke attitude tegenover het onbekende. Dit concept draagt een belangrijke maatschappelijke betekenis met zich mee: dat wat onbekend is zal sowieso een bron van ongenoegen en dissonantie zijn – dit ervaart men zelfs als men niet ‘per definitie’ aan het reizen is. Observerend leren en kennis vergaren doe je best als je weet (en aanvaardt) dat je verrast zal worden, zowel binnen als buiten ‘jouw’ leefomgeving.
 
Bibliografie
---------------------------------
Fabian, Johannes. Out of our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Fasokun, Thomas O., Katahoire, Anne en Oduaran, Akpovire B. The Psychology of Adult Learning in Africa. Cape: Pearson South Africa, 2005

Lyons, Kevin D. en Wearing, Stephen. Journeys of Discovery in Volunteer Tourism: International Case Study perspectives. King’s Lynn: CAB International, 2008

[Justin Michael James Dell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This monograph constitutes a considerable challenge to the romantic myth of the European colonial explorer as an intrepid hero, guided by reason, charting new lands for king and country. The truth is, German and Belgian explorers of central Africa, who form the case study in Fabian's text, often went 'out of their minds' in ecstasy as they were immersed in a nexus of experiences 'on the ground' in the mission field. Instead of remaining immutably European in character and deportment (in the mythical sense), explorers often risked 'going native' as they allowed themselves to be influenced by their surroundings. Frequently wracked by fever and insomnia, European explorers often amplified their delirium by turning to opiates and alcohol to soothe their malady. Add to this the hypnotic effects of African folk music and the allure of sexual conquest presented by native women, and you had an almost (pardon the anachronism) hippie-like counterculture experience of sex, drugs and rock & roll. Of course, European explorers were cognizant of the tension betwixt the lofty ideals of their mission on the one hand, and the reality of their transgression or shortfall of those theoreticals on the other, and they attempted in various ways to maintain their "hygiene" (ie. separateness from their surroundings) with limited degrees of success. Predictably, the retrospective accounts explorers gave of their journeys, which became the basis for the myth of the intrepid, stoic and enlightened ethnographer - a myth, Fabian alleges, that has been perpetuated in the anthropological profession - largely omitted these unpalatable anecdotes, presenting instead a 'sanitized' versions of their respective expeditions. Thus, Fabian turns not to formal accounts and hagiographies of the explorers he studies, but to their personal diaries and correspondence that yield a more candid picture of their experiences in the field. Indeed, the source base of this text is exceptional.

One major complaint I have about this text is that Fabian presumes his readership's familiarity with the state of the anthropological field. Thus, a non-specialist does not really get a sense of where his text 'fits' in that discipline, how it interacts with other scholarship in the field, what gaps it fills, etc. Thus, Fabian's scattered explanations of the design of his text can easily be lost on the reader.

[Naeem · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book rather quickly (sneaking it in against my ban on reading and writing this summer), in order to determine if I would read it again.

I plan to read it again with great care. There is something both fantastic and essential that Fabian has put his finger on.

I refer you to the detailed and excellent review by Sara-Maria:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/85...

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend of mine gave me this book after I returned from a year in Malawi, exhausted, depressed, and extremely self-critical for not having accomplished all (or really hardly any) of what I'd set out to do; it helped put my own experience into perspective.