THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN

African psychology is more universal than it may seem. It is Western psychology, based on a flawed concept of personhood, which is provincial and parochial and in serious need of help from the outside.

I have been a social anthropologist all my life, by profession and vocation, but I am also a human being convinced that people have more in common than we often tend to think. What attracted me to anthropology as a young man in the early eighties was not a voyeuristic longing for the exotic and a fascination with cultural differences, but a hunch that humans were basically made of the same materials, remaking them as they went along, everywhere in the world. When I started out, I believed that if we were able to see through the layers of convention, prejudice and cultural mores, we would be perfectly capable of understanding and empathising with each other. It was therefore a slight disappointent to discover that most of my teachers, and the authors of our curriculum, seemed to be obsessed by cultural differences, ignoring the human universals which were a necessary condition for studying difference.

Anthropology was the only university subject that did not take for granted that ‘Western culture’ was the benchmark of cultural evolution. In principle, it taught that all human lives are of equal interest and value, and in order to understand yourself, you first had to take a detour to the Amazon or the Congo. One of our main tasks consisted in giving voice, visibility and dignity to people who were conventionally ignored or looked down upon from the affluent countries. The aim was to understand the human condition and the world in order to contribute to a more equitable society.

My friends and I soon came to understand that the work of anthropology was often less progressive, the outcome less rosy, than these lofty ideals might suggest. Euro-Americans spoke and wrote about ‘the Other’; they rarely spoke back. There was an asymmetrical relationship which was often seen, rightly, as a continuation of colonialism. We built careers on studies from remote places (remote to us, that is) without giving much back. Few of our interlocutors had the opportunity to travel anywhere. So when the postcolonial critique began to be taken seriously in the late 1980s, insisting on the right of ‘the Other’ to define themselves rather than being defined by foreign scholars, it was relevant and healthy.

Just as Marx wrote about a redistribution of the means of production, the struggle was now over the means of communication, and intellectuals from the Global South now demanded the right to speak on their own behalf. Anthropologists lost their self-imposed mission to identify and describe foreign peoples, since domestic intellectuals were now perfectly capable of identifying and describing themselves.

One enduring insight from this resistance to the gaze from outside, however sympathetic, was that knowledge production about humans has to emerge from dialogue, not monologue.

This is one important reason why it is important to ask about the possibilities of an African psychology – not as a closed, self-contained system, but as a contribution to the global conversation about what it entails to be a human being. When engaging in this conversation, we soon come to discover that we speak not just about human universals, but also about human differences.

Let me begin by asking three questions.

Similar or different at birth?

First: Can there be a pure psychology, a neutral, objective theory about the human psyche? My tentative answer is yes. Clearly, human beings everywhere have much in common, although anthropology has been obsessed with differences since its inception in the late 19th century. So when I did my first proper fieldwork in Mauritius in the mid-eighties, postmodernism was fashionable among intellectuals in the Global North. I arrived with the assumption that any attempt to understand ‘the Other’ was fraught with epistemological difficulties. Our interpretations would inevitably be the brainchild of our own prejudices or ‘pre-understanding’, to use the philosopher Gadamer’s term. Culture was, at the end of the day, the product of the anthropologist, not something existing ‘out there’. I was often reminded of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s lament, in his famous travelogue Tristes Tropiques, when he finally met an indigenous group in Brazil and felt as though there was a glass wall between him and the Amerindians.

He could see them, but was unable to touch them and speak with them. They were incomprehensible to the French anthropologist, later of global fame.

This has never been my experience during fieldwork.

Perhaps my expectations were more modest. It did not take long to grasp what was at stake for people in their everyday activities. Arriving in a Mauritian fishing village with a backpack and a very rudimentary knowledge of Mauritian Creole, I soon settled in with a family that needed the extra money, and became friendly with the elderly father of the household the same afternoon. His main worries were about his children and grandchildren’s future, his dire economic situation and his wife’s ailments. I could easily see that she was not well. Later, we would speak about fairness and what happens when you die.

Similar experiences are shared by other travellers who take the time to listen and engage with local people. It does not take very long to understand what motivates them to get up in the morning, their dreams and hopes, their social relationships and obligations, just patience, and openness. Nevertheless, the similarities should not be exaggerated. At a deeper level, understanding others can take a lifetime. My point is nevertheless that the very possibility of engaging with and getting to know other people, notably those with very different cultural backgrounds – think indigenouse people in highland New Guinea or the tech elite of Silicon Valley – confirms what has been an axiom, even a dogma, in anthropology since the Victorian era. Notwithstanding their social evolutionism, late-19th century anthropologists, such as E.B. Tylor in England and Adolf Bastian in Germany, formulated the principle of ‘the mental unity of mankind’: Regardless of our cultural background, they argued, we are equipped with the same cognitive apparatus at birth. This principle is actually a prerequisite for cross-cultural comparison to be at all possible. Variations exist within groups, not between them. Yes, there were rabid racists and superficial armchair theorists among our ancestors as well, but their contributions have long ago vanished into the mist of oblivion, unless someone is up to the task of excavating ideas about race and culture from dusty shelves.

Geoffrey Harpham has done exactly this, and a first result of his still ongoing research is an annotated online anthology covering Western (mostly) ideas about race from 1684 to 1900. Harpham’s selected excerpts from writers and thinkers such as David Hume, Frederick Douglass and Francis Galton shows that there were lively debates and much disagreement about inherited and learned characteristics. There was never a single ‘Western, scientific’ view of race, although pure racist theorising, unsurprisingly, came to predominate at the height of slavery.

Different after birth

The second question takes, as its point of departure, what happens after birth. How can it be that human beings, similar at the outset, become different in so many striking ways as their lives unfold – and just how different do they, or we, become at the end of the day? Perhaps cultural diversity is just a coat of varnish masking essential similarity; scrape it off, and what you see is a remarkably uniform species?

In the 1920s, the philosopher and armchair anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl proposed the term pre-logical thinking to describe the thought of illiterate, stateless peoples. In academic circles, Lévy-Bruhl was much discussed, mostly critically, and his influence on anthropological thought was negligible. His view nevertheless continued its insidious journey in various forums, associating non-Western societies with irrationality. (In reality, Lévy-Bruhl was more nuanced than his supporters and detractors believed, and revised his views on several occasions.) Some African intellectuals, notably Léopold Sédar Senghor, later President of Senegal, actually defended similar views, but turning them on its head by praising African emotion as being superior to cold Western reason.

The final blow to this hierarchical kind of difference thought was delivered in 1962 with Lévi-Strauss’s La pensée sauvage (The original English title, The savage mind, loses the double meaning of the French original, since pensée refers both to thought and wild pansies – the flower, that is; a much improved translation is titled Wild Thought). In the first chapter of the book, ‘The science of the concrete’, Lévi-Strauss shows that the modes of reasoning are the same everywhere, but that people rely on the tools at hand to produce abstractions. The Westerner, the ‘engineer’, can draw on abstract crutches for thinking, notably numbers and writing. Scriptless societies, by contrast, produce bricoleurs, jacks-of-all-trades who use tangible objects – waterfalls, pieces of wood, the starry skies, what have you – to build abstractions which were just as sophisticated, but less useful as means to produce economic growth and ‘development’.

The contrast between the ingenieur and the bricoleur, initially conceived as a distinction between so-called complex societies (with state, money, letters and numbers) and everybody else, may – at a stretch – be adapted to suit other, more contemporary contexts as well. The engineer would always make plans ahead if possible, with the aid of crutches such as calendars and Excel sheets. The bricoleur, free from these constraints, or lacking these options, would instead make up the plans as they go along.

In the informal sector, where millions of Africans make their living, there is no job security, and people often have no idea as to how to procure sustenance for the day when they get up in the morning. They make do with the materials at hand, or the opportunities that present themselves: They may be paid a small sum for washing someone’s car, or they may help their uncle on his peanut farm, try their hand as tourist guides, sell dagga off the beach, clean the dishes on a busy day at a restaurant, and so on. Some time ago, I met a young man outside an airport in a small West African country. He came up to me and plainly asked me to bring him to wherever I was going. He was willing to do anything to survive. He emptied his pockets in front of me. There was the equivalent of two pounds, in crumpled banknotes, a nearly empty packet of smokes, a used bus ticket and a length of string. This, he explained, is everything I have. I shrugged and answered that what he proposed was impossible for several reasons. I gave him a few fresh banknotes, wished him good luck, and walked into the airconditioned airport building, which was guarded and off limits for this young man. He could now pay for his supper, but only today and perhaps tomorrow. This kind of life-world creates divisible people, flexible, shifting continuously between various kinds of relationship, as opposed to those who check in at work every morning at eight and operate with fixed boundaries between work and leisure.

Urban Africa is a space for improvisation, and the logic of bricolage can be seen in many domains.

I have spoken with highly skilled African musicians who speak with disdain about written music. They may describe their own practice as organic or even real music, which is shaped through listening and allowing their playing to merge with the other instruments, rather than playing their notes mechanically in the expectation that something whole and tight will emerge. The magic of jazz, and indeed the entire corpus of rhythmic popular music, is born out of the marriage between the tight and the loose, the premeditated and the improvised.

This is not to say that improvisation and bricolage exclusively belong to the ‘African self’ whereas planning and formal discipline are Western. That would be a generalisation as simplistic as Senghor’s Emotion is black (nègre), just as reason is Greek, formulated at the height of the négritude movement in the 1930s.

The general point I want to make is that selfhood, including the way the human psyche works, varies owing to differences in input, impediments and opportunities.

This shift in perspective, championed energetically by Franz Boas around the last turn of the century, eclipsed racist theorising and is the main reason that Harpham’s anthology ends in the year 1900.

Knowledge about humans and the world result from the encounter between the mind (logic, thought, reasoning, emotion) and the surroundings; the environment or Umwelt of the reasoner. Our minds work differently owing to variations in our respective worlds of experience. But we are capable of understanding and learning from each other nonetheless – capable of making each others’ worlds larger and more truthful.

From the 1960s onward, the religious scholar and anthropologist Robin Horton, who died in 2019, wrote extensively on magic and witchcraft among the Kalabari in south-eastern Nigeria. Horton was intimately familiar with this world. He was married to a Kalabari woman and lived in Nigeria most of his life.

In his view, magic was equivalent to science in the sense of attempting to attain the same goals: to make sense of the world, and to improve it.

As in Lévi-Strauss’s more theoretical account, Horton’s articles argue that the respective groups – Europeans and Kalabari –  just have different tools at their disposal, but try to reach comparable insights. On close examination, what comes across immediately as radically ‘Other’ to a European reveals itself as quite similar.

What about pure, objective knowledge?

The third question goes: Are the human sciences inevitably shaped by the social conditions in which they are developed? Again, the answer is yes. No knowledge is disconnected from the environment that produces it, as pointed out by several of the contributors to this issue of herri. There are degrees of universality – five plus seven will always be twelve – but all empirical knowledge is situated.

To take psychoanalysis as an example, Freud’s patients were often upper-class Viennese women constrained by puritan values and corsets. Hysteria and fainting were widespread in that particular social environment. Freud knew this, yet he wrote about these ailments and built psychological theory that he held to be universally valid. When Bronislaw Malinowski, returning from fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands off New Guinea, proclaimed that the Oedipus complex was not universal, he created a stir. Among the islanders, the father was not an authoritarian figure, but a playmate. The Trobrianders were matrilineal, and a man would therefore inherit rights, magical formulas and property from his mother’s brother and not his father. Moreover, parents had sex openly in front of the children in their shared dwelling. Therefore, Malinowski argued, there was no basis for an Oedipal complex there.

More generally, studies of the social construction of science show that scientific truths are cultural just as much as religious beliefs. That does not mean that they are untrue, only that they are partial and motivated by specific interests, a particular world-view, funding opportunities and prestige hierarchies within the academic milieu in question. As a result, scientists often tend to overstate their case by making global generalisations on the basis of a thin empirical corpus with inbuilt bias and research questions which make sense in the scientist’s society but not necessarily everywhere else. There are many questions that can be raised about the human condition, and most of them remain unasked. As Kant once commented, using a piece of chalk as his example: This object has innumerable potential qualities, but only two or three of them are familiar – it is dry, white and a useful writing implement for a teacher with a blackboard.

Is there then no objective, neutral, universal knowledge? A lot of knowledge is true without being universally applicable. Perhaps with the exception of mathematics and logic, thought is always imbued with facts, and facts tend to amount to local knowledge. It is hardly a coincidence that Hobbes’s philosophy on the need for a strong state (a Leviathan) was fleshed out during the English civil war. And one should not be surprised to discover that ‘positive psychology’ is an American specialty. In this limitation lies the main problem with mainstream, hegemonic psychology.

To sum up what I’ve said so far: People everywhere have more in common than what is often assumed; there is considerable cultural diversity, but that does not preclude mutual understanding; and there is an inevitable cultural bias in scientific truths. As argued by Augustine Nwoye in this issue, the positivist methodology favoured in Western psychology is flawed, misleading and incomplete.

The individual and the dividual

Most of what has been written about the African self, including African psychology, emphasises how it differs from standard Western conceptualisations of the self. Relationship and social obligations recur in accounts of African personhood, unlike in Western psychology, where the conceptual universe is built around a certain idea about the individual.

Yet the issue may be framed in a different way. The Western self, as portrayed in academic subjects such as economics and psychology, is an indivisible entity, an in-dividual, which stops at the skin. In most traditional cultures, the self is not an individual, but a dividual created by its relationships and provided with opportunities and constraints through embeddedness in an environment.

The concept of the dividual was, mind you, not coined in an African context, but in India. During his research in village India during the 1960s, the recently deceased anthropologist McKim Marriott saw that the villagers he was working with did not conceive of themselves as independent actors, but as nodes in a meshwork which faded out only where their social obligations and acquaintances ended.

In comparisons between India and Western Europe, the contrast has been drawn between a sociocentric and an egocentric concept of personhood: Indians, it has been argued, place their entire social world at the centre of the universe, whereas Westerners see themselves as the pivotal point around which the world moves. Let me rush to add that this contrast is simplistic, but it is not entirely off the mark.

The concept of the dividual has been taken up by researchers and others working elsewhere as well, from the Amazon to the Pacific. The renowned Melanesianist Marilyn Strathern speaks of ‘her’ people as dividuals and has pointed out that the Melanesian ‘dividualistic’ view of the person is sociologically more precise than the Western concept. After all, the smallest unit in social life is not the person, but the relationship between two.

In other words, it may be said that the outlier, which needs to be accounted for, is not African psychology, but standard Western psychology, which gives a skewed and partial picture of the human condition owing to its homeblindness and ethnocentrism.

The research subjects are often Americans from a particular social class and age – college students are overrepresented – and the questions raised take individualism for granted.

So perhaps the relevant question is not in what way Africans differ, but how individualism came to be globally dominant. (Hint: Capitalism.) There exists a huge literature about the origins of individualism, but not much of it deals with personhood in a comparative light.

Thinking about the divided self, or rather the social self, an old article about communication with ancestors just came back to me. Published in the early 1970s, it was titled, appropriately, ‘Ancestors as elders in Africa’. Drawing on long-term participant observation among Suku people in south-western Congo (now DRC), Igor Kopytoff described how old people slowly became less mobile, less talkative and alert to their surroundings, drier and thinner, until one day they simply stopped breathing and began to communicate with their relatives by other means. At least that was how I remembered the most poignant segments of the article. Re-reading it after forty years, I couldn’t find that vivid depiction. I must have dreamed up the narrative bit myself, retrospetively, in an effort to flesh out Kopytoff’s dry, academic account. His perspective, and comparative linguistic data covering many African peoples, from Igbo to Zulu, nevertheless confirmed that there was a seamless transition between the living and the dead, and living elders often went to the burial site to plead with their elders for health and prosperity. The Suku and many other Bantu-speaking people drew no semantic boundary between the living and the dead, only distinctions of relative seniority. So if I am older than you, you address me in the same way as I would address my dead father.

A few years earlier, Meyer Fortes, respected for his work among Tallensi in northern Ghana, had claimed that there was a surprising resemblance across sub-Saharan Africa regarding relationships between the living and the dead, and that African villages could often be described as communities encompassing both.

This should not be reduced to the ethnocentric category ‘ancestor worship’, but rather tells us something significant about different conceptualisations of personhood and, accordingly, African psychology. This unbreakable tie between the living and the dead is anathema to a Euroamerican convinced that the person ends at the skin, and that there is a sharp dividing line between life and death: When you stop breathing, you are no longer a person. To an African, according to this interpretation, the person’s material existence ends where their relationships wither and disappear, and life therefore by necessity continues in a new form after physical death.

Studies from the Pacific mirror the African view. A person is not considered dead until all their debts are paid, outstanding debts similarly collected, and suitable eulogies are offered at the funeral ceremony in order to suture the loose threads that can no longer be connected to a breathing person. This is why death rites are the most important rituals in most traditional societies: The living confirm the continuation of society by gathering, exchanging gossip and feasting; they pay homage to the departed person, well aware that a thread in the tapestry has now been pulled out; and they connect with the spiritual world by showing their respect to the ancestors, including the most recent member.

Again, it may seem as though African psychology cannot merely show how traditional African life differs from that of Euroamericans, but can also serve as a reminder of human universals which have been lost or mislaid in mainstream Western psychology.

Ubuntu personhood

Many accounts of the African self, which illustrate the contrast between individual and dividual, refer to ubuntu. Familiar to South Africans, related concepts nevertheless exist in many African societies, especially among speakers of Bantu languages. Ubuntu philosophy places sociality and solidarity at the foreground rather than individual achievement and competition. Oft-quoted expressions of this view are, ‘A person is a person through other people’ and ‘I am because we are.’ The concept of personhood is irreducibly relational. There can be no ‘me’ without a ‘you’, and I am a mere thread in the social tapestry, or – as Gandhi phrased it in the Indian context – we individuals exist, but only as drops in the ocean, and a single drop cannot exist without the surrounding sea. This was an insight lost to people like Mrs. Thatcher, infamous for the phrase ‘There is no such thing as society’, but as many have shown, the spirit of ubuntu and Gandhi’s thought can still be found in European societies not totally overrun by individualism and the logic of the marketplace.

Ubuntu is an invitation for you and me to add our voices to the boundless cosmic choir which ultimately resounds across the planet. Yes, there are folks who sing out of tune, and individual voices inevitably come and go, but the chorus endures across time and space. This inclusive, boundless, relational view of the self is accessible to us all, provided we find the keys and open the right door.

Yet, although some have claimed that ubuntu should be taken to encompass all humanity, this is not always the case in practice. Granted, hospitality towards strangers is a central ubuntu value, but it is not restricted to Africa. In Marcel Mauss’s seminal essay The Gift (Essai sur le don) from the 1920s, the epigraph is from the Norse epic poem Hávamál, extolling the virtues of hospitality, and the entire essay shows how, in non-capitalist societies, gift exchange was (and is) the very glue of the community. Gifts and favours are moral prestations which create enduring ties and obligations between people everywhere. Mauss’s worry was that the capitalist society in which he wrote (France in the interwar years) was about to relinquish gifting by replacing it with cold and impersonal market exchange. A hundred years on, it is hard to fault him for this view.

However, there is never an either–or situation. Calculations, often cynical, often enter into gifting, as a way of buying loyalty and friendship. Besides, when the idealistic values of sharing and solidarity meet the gritty reality of scarcity and social obligations, there is a tendency that the latter wins. The relational self does not encompass everybody. That would be impossible. Different standards are always applied to different people. When I decided to study interethnic peace and democracy in Mauritius, the reason was not an assumption that Hindus and Afro-Mauritians (Creoles) would by default seek harmony, but rather that interethnic violence, suspicion and oppression were so common in complex societies that it deserved to be explored how Mauritians had managed to move beyond this dismal state of affairs.

Few of those who write about ubuntu address the importance of kinship. Yet in fact, the web of kinship is a main source of both existential, social and economic security, especially in societies such as most African ones where the state is weak, absent or hostile. You have obligations towards your cousin or niece that do not apply to an outsider.

The term nepotism, derived from the Italian nipote (nephew), is seen, from a bureaucratic logic, as a transgression of legal norms, but seen from a kinship perspective, you would be a very bad person indeed if you failed to find a job for your nephew if you could.  

The relational self, thus, has not done away with the bounded group. To do so would be an absurdity beyond the imagination of all but the most hardened neoliberalists. Humans need the security offered by our herd, and every group needs criteria for inclusion and exclusion: If everyone can join, you no longer have a group.  

At the same time, ubuntu philosophy respects the integrity and intrinsic value of other groups than one’s own, which is a major advance over world-views which frame social life in terms of competition built on enemy images of strangers.

Relational psychology in the Global North

How different are we? For the sake of the argument, I have simplified and generalised in ways which would have been unacceptable in a standard academic publication, speaking of ‘the African self’ and drawing a crude contrast between the West and the Rest. Let me therefore finish by arguing that this abstract generalisation is really a roundabout way of speaking about a fundamental duality in the human mind. Although the individualist view of selfhood predominates in the so-called advanced capitalist societies, this has not always been the case, and besides, there have always been dissenting voices, whose views of the human psyche resembles the African selv, as I have simplistically and partially described it. Many could have been mentioned here. The radical psychologist Erich Fromm contrasted the cult of property and consumption with the relational webs of social life that offer enduring meaning and security. The radical historian Theodore Roszak described humans as enmeshed not just in webs of relationships with other humans, but also with the ecology of the planet. Both Fromm and Roszak could align themselves with earlier Western thinkers such as Spinoza and Rousseau, and their ideas continue to matter today.

One of my all-time favourite thinkers is a third dissident, namely Gregory Bateson (1904–80). In his books, notably Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature, Bateson argues against what he calls the major ‘epistemological fallacy’ in Western thinking, namely the idea that the individual is ‘the captain of his soul’. To Bateson, everything was relationship and process, and what mattered were differences that make a difference. He saw the cult of the individual as misguided and dangerous, and did not regard free will as particularly free. The choices people believe that they make are, in his account, the outcome of relationship and circumstance.

Bateson’s perhaps most famous theory, discredited by most psychiatrists but still widely used in family therapy, is the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. A double-bind is an irresolvable dilemma, a Catch-22, a ‘damned if you do, damn if you don’t’ kind of situation. ‘All Cretans are liars. I am from Crete’: If the speaker lies, they tell the truth and vice versa. Bateson held that many cases of schizophrenia were caused by destructive communication in the family, typically between mother and child, where the mother’s double communication – praising and scolding at the same time, for example – made the child confused and uncertain of itself. Bateson tells of a visit to a family with a child afflicted with mental ailments. He brings a bunch of flowers, presents them to the hostess, who sniffs the flowers, smiles, says that they are lovely, and goes on to throw them into the bin. In another seminal article, Bateson describes the predicament of the alcoholic, explaining why appeal to will power is futile and counterproductive. What needs to be understood, he explains, is that the alcoholic’s affliction is the outcome of his relationship to the bottle, his job, his family and his wider social environment. All these threads need to be mended for him to stop drinking.

Bateson’s thinking is consistently ecological in that he sees relationship, process, difference and adaptation where others might see competition and ambition. This approach to human psychology represents a healthy alternative to the hegemony, and reveals a very different view of the human self, one which has much in common with the relational, dividualist self associated with the African self, and for which there ought to be a prominent niche in mainstream psychology.

There is no either–or. (Actually, there is generally much less either–or in the world than many are inclined to think.) When it comes to personhood, it is not as if competitive individualism is absent in societies where a sociocentric or dividualistic concept of personhood predominates. Greed and scheming are hardly unknown factors in human lives, whether in India or Zambia. Similarly, relational or sociocentric thinking is far from alien to most Westerners, although the emphasis is on self-realisation rather than care for others. Rights nearly always override obligations, while the situation in other societies may be the opposite.

There exists a shared human psyche, but which parts of it are triggered and given pride of place depends on the opportunity space and wider social ecology in which people find themselves. The issue at hand should therefore not be framed as the peculiarity of African psychology or the African self, but how it could be that a skewed, one-sided and simplistic view of humanity came to be dominant.

African psychology should not be seen as an alternative or a supplement, but rather as an organic element, and an essential one too, in the global conversation about the human psyche, making inroads into the hegemonic psychology and challenging orthodoxies emanating from the sterile laboratories and misplaced positivist ambitions of many psychologists in Europe and North America. Both these families of ideas are needed – confident one-sidedness is for zealots and fundamentalists – although we have a long way to go before a proper balance is reached. Two descriptions are always better than one.