While the universities have been instrumental in the rise and dissemination of the cybernetic episteme, during the 1960s, compared to the economy, they were still not fully incorporated within the circuits of capitalism.1 This, and other factors, made the academy a strategic ‘weak link’ in the revolutionary struggle. Today, it is widely argued that, over the coming decades, automation and the growing sophistication of machine learning or artificial intelligence will accelerate the elimination of swathes of erstwhile middle-class professional and knowledge-based service employment (Brynjolfsson & McAfee 2011). The beginning of the 1960s can be seen as the opening or expansionary phase of this destructive cycle. Basically, it was the time when those professional and knowledge-based jobs and services that have already disappeared, or are now under threat, were fast expanding. Structured around welfare-Fordism and Keynesian full employment, from the USA to Europe and beyond, there was a new and growing demand for university-educated professionals, technically qualified administrators and knowledge brokers necessary to create and manage a globally expanding consumer economy in all its varied practical and cultural modalities.
This chapter examines the role of the intelligentsia as the New Left’s ‘lever of history’, and the forms of struggle waged within the academy against an encroaching empiricism and behaviourism. Important here is the rejuvenating effect that the prospect of world revolution had upon the colonial discipline of anthropology. It concludes with the review of the immersive fieldwork and structural methodology that were still possible in the mid-1970s. This world of history, causation and political solidarity would be rapidly swept away during the deepening crisis of modernism. The NGO-led invasion of the global South the following decade was an important harbinger of the world to come.
Drawing on the failures of the labour movement to effectively oppose World War I or prevent the rise of Nazism in Germany, the New Left’s political view of the metropolitan working class was largely dismissive. While a place still existed for ‘unincorporated’ workers, institutionally the working class was no longer the ‘necessary lever’ of world revolution (Mills 1960: 22).2 The transfer of this responsibility to the Third World was described in the previous chapter. In terms of replacing the agency of the working class, perhaps reflecting a premonition of its coming extinction at the hands of Homo inscius, this role fell to the intelligentsia. In 1960, C. Wright Mills was already arguing that the youth, including middle-class students and intellectuals, were emerging as agents of cultural and political change. In Turkey, South Korea, Cuba, Taiwan, Okinawa, Japan, and – as members of CND – in Britain, students were making themselves heard. The same was true of the Soviet bloc. Students, academics and writers were raising their voices in Poland, Hungary and Russia. In reflecting on the problem of agency, ‘I have been studying, for several years now, the cultural apparatus, the intellectuals – as a possible, immediate, radical agency of change. For a long time, I was not much happier with this idea than were many of you; but it turns out now, in the spring of 1960, that it may be a very relevant idea indeed’ (Mills 1960: 22).
Given the rise of the US counterculture, and its visible rejection of the straight world of mass consumerism, this view of the strategic importance of the intelligentsia would grow. The youth opposition in the USA could have a political effect because it was:
free from ideology or permeated with a deep distrust of all ideology (including socialist ideology); it is sexual, moral, intellectual and political rebellion all in one. In this sense it is total, directed against the system as a whole: it is disgust at the ‘affluent society’, it is the vital need to break the rules of a deceitful and bloody game – to stop co-operating any more. (Marcuse 1967: 7)
The internal opposition to corporate capitalism was no longer organized labour but ‘the two opposite poles of the society’ – namely, in the ghettos and among the middle-class intelligentsia, especially students (Marcuse 1969: 30). While, in themselves, these actors could not initiate radical change – needing alliances with unincorporated workers and international revolutionary forces – for the New Left, the intelligentsia was the new agent of history.
During the 1960s, the universities were a contested space in the rise of the cybernetic episteme, or, as Marcuse called it, an emerging ‘technological rationality’ (Marcuse 1968: 25). Central to this rationality was the early post-human blurring of a distinction between an inner reality and an outer world. The inner was being transformed into the outer, with the consequent loss of an internal private space, under the techno-psychological weight of corporate capitalism’s claim on the entire individual. Industrial psychology, once confined to the factory, was increasingly being used to get inside the heads of once autonomous customers (Packard 1957). The loss of an inner private space, ‘in which power of negative thinking – the critical power of Reason – is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material processes in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition’ (Marcuse 1968: 25).
In anticipation of the celebratory arrival of post-humanism, this technological rationality could be detected in the trend towards operationality in the physical sciences and behaviourism in the social sciences. Common to both ‘is a total empiricism in the treatment of concepts; their meaning is restricted to the representation of particular operations and behaviour’ (1968: 27). This operational tendency within philosophy, psychology and sociology was the means by which critical concepts were being eliminated through claims that no adequate account of them could be given in terms of their operations or behaviour. Preparing the way for Homo inscius, what Marcuse called a ‘radical empiricist onslaught’ within the universities was providing the methodological justification ‘for the debunking of the mind by intellectuals – a positivism which, in its denial of the transcending elements of Reason, forms the academic counterpart of a socially required behaviour’ (1968: 28).
Throughout the 1960s, as the ghettos burnt, student campus unrest grew. The unexpected eruption of the May ’68 events in France, moreover, confirmed the centrality of students and the university campus as an autonomous site for revolutionary agitation. For politicized students, their relative openness provided an intellectual refuge against a grey and alienating corporate world. At the same time, however, tensions were growing between the espoused independence and intellectual freedom of the academy, as a public space where contrary artistic or philosophical temperaments could stand outside and contest the norm, and what was the beginning of its subordination to the skill and vocational requirements of technological capitalism. This was captured in the widespread caricature of the ‘Fordist University’ as a conveyor belt endlessly turning eager and idealistic students into regimented lines of zombies holding degree certificates.3 At the same time, while the valuable societal role of students was being extolled, universities were administered in an autocratic and paternalistic manner, alongside ‘the contradictions within bourgeois ideology itself which make sociology faculties paradoxically the producers of Marxist revolutionaries, and so on’ (NLR 1968: 5).
Writing in 1968, Anthony Barnett could, in all seriousness, advocate that UK university campuses could be transformed into democratic ‘red bases’ operating across faculties, departments, halls of residence, flats, university societies and newspapers. Following the model of national liberation in the Third World, these bases would establish ‘the physical liberation of student existence from external controls’ (Barnett 1968: 44). Using this autonomy, students would be able to reach out to other radical and revolutionary forces. This view emerged on the back of a wave of student occupations. In the UK, the ostensible reasons for such actions were often relatively minor – for example, administrative restrictions, accommodation policy or procedural matters that were felt to infantilize students. This agitation, however, was also international in scope. At the time of the Tet offensive, when the Vietnamese peasant was breaking the back of the US military, the European student movement was seen as having joined ‘the students of Asia, Africa and Latin America in the revolutionary struggle. There was a time when the occupation of universities in Japan, Iran or Argentina seemed part of a separate realm of politics, divorced from the realities of Europe. Now Berlin, Rome, New York, London, San Francisco stand alongside Tunis, Montevideo and Mexico City’ (NLR 1968: 5).
The struggle, however, was also being waged ideologically against the ‘empiricist onslaught’ of behaviourism in the social sciences (Blackburn 1973). As reflecting ‘bourgeois sociology’, their ideological content was:
painfully obvious. They refuse to admit that the mind can act except according to the most shallow and stunted bourgeois ‘common sense’ and ‘rationality’. All must seek equilibrium and order. Every possibility of disorder and unreason must be discounted and expelled. Danger must be suppressed or corrected by homoeostatic mechanisms. It is not difficult to understand why these theories flourish in the universities. (NLR 1968: 2)
The political praxis being developed through such critique was distinguished from abstract speculation. Theory was only as good as its ability to mobilize people and translate ideas into practice. To the extent that it could overcome ideological noise and become a force of resistance and change, theory constituted itself as power (Marcuse 1969: 28). The possibility of theoretical practice, of constantly challenging the empiricism of the day, made the academy during the late 1960s and early 1970s – especially sociology departments – a bruising political battleground. Wholly dependent on the historic window of opportunity existing at the time, in retrospect it was the last concerted attempt by the intelligentsia to resist the growing dominance of capitalism over society and the penetration of a one-dimensional technological rationality into previously autonomous areas of social life.
For the New Left, the international was a circulatory political whole; the Marxist theoretical framework was global in scope. If Vietnam was part of the international system of corporate capitalism, then national liberation in the Third World became integral to the wider socialist revolution. Importantly, however, the struggle for national liberation was creating a political alternative to both Western capitalism and Eastern socialism, especially that of the Soviet Union. The hope was for a different way of socialist construction not just ‘from below’, ‘but from a “new below” not integrated into the value system of the old societies – a socialism of co-operation and solidarity, where men and women determine collectively their needs and goals, their priorities, and the method and pace of “modernization”’ (Marcuse 1969: 29–30).
Central to the New Left position was that the peasantry had still to be fully incorporated within capitalism. It was because they were outside, as it were, and still ‘the human basis of the social process of production’ (1969: 31), that they could furnish an alternative model of socialism. With the world a circulatory whole, achieving this alternative would require synchronization between the negating external forces and those internal forces seeking change. Moreover, this synchronization could never be ‘the result of organization alone, it must have its objective basis in the economic and political process of corporate capitalism’ (1969: 31). In other words, it would require an understanding of how global capitalism, now given a new lease of life by decolonization, was spreading in the Third World. Among students of anthropology, this proposition had a radicalizing effect.
Energized by the May ’68 critique, radical students and academics had declared anthropology to be in terminal crisis (Banaji 1970). Still to confront its colonial heritage, and still trapped in the study of so-called primitive societies, its theoretical base had stagnated. The ahistoric empiricism of functionalist anthropology had long ignored the asymmetries of international power that constituted the conditions of its existence (Asad 1973). While a few anthropologists proved uncooperative, colonial anthropology had developed as an applied discipline geared to refining domination. The studying of the social institutions of the ‘subject races’, for example, informed the creation of systems of native administration (Macmichael 1934; Lugard 1965; Johnson 1982).4 As an attempt to govern through ‘traditional’ political structures, even creating them when they did not properly exist, native administration was liberal imperialism’s main response to the growing nationalist demand for the modernity that came with independence.
Following the onset of decolonization, the conditions that had supported colonial anthropology had all but disintegrated by the beginning of the 1970s. The political emergence of the Third World had, by force of circumstance, ‘thrust itself obtrusively into the anthropologists framework’ (Asad 1973: 13). With its disruptive view that the peasantry was now the agent of history, the New Left critique, by ‘transcending itself’ (1973: 18), made it possible for anthropology to throw off its colonial heritage and become something radically different. Rather than an outsider helping to refine reactionary systems of governance, the new anthropologist was now a sympathetic ally of the exploited against such control. Radical anthropologists not only recorded and participated in the struggles of the downtrodden, they would also attack ‘the role of anthropology in creating, preserving and implementing ideologies of oppression’ (Faris 1973: 170). Functionalism was not only rejected because of its empiricism, it was dismissed in solidarity because ‘the people on whom this sort of theory was applied are rising up to change it’ (1973: 166). The new anthropology would help bring about progressive social change.
Radical students of the international, for example, created networks and journals to support national liberation and oppose Western political and corporate interests. In the USA, the Committee of Concerned Asia Scholars was formed in 1968 and used its journal Critical Asian Studies to publish anti-establishment monographs and bulletins. In 1967, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) was founded, together with its activist bimonthly NACLA Report on the Americas. The Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) emerged in 1971 and continues to publish its critical Middle East Report. Academic activism regarding Africa also emerged at the end of the 1960s. It was not until the late 1970s, however, that a unified voice emerged in the USA. The Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS) and the African Studies Association (ASA), using its journal ISSUE, mobilized against US policy in southern Africa (Wiley 2012: 147–9). In the UK, the first issue of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) came out in 1974 (ROAPE 1974). Reflecting the academic autonomy of the time, ROAPE was created to counter the conventional wisdom (today more firmly entrenched than ever) that chronic poverty is an individual behavioural problem that can be reduced by more effective market interaction and penetration. While the journal could provide a forum for discussion and analysis, ‘questions of tactics and strategy can be answered finally only by those struggling in Africa itself’ (1974: 1).
Rather than dragging anthropology out of its crisis, Marxist anthropologists would deny anthropology a future. Instead, a new practice was needed in which radical anthropology combined with the political struggles of the subordinate and exploited classes to work for ‘their emancipation from imperialism and capitalism’ (Banaji 1970: 85). Through solidarity with the oppressed, radical anthropology was a transitional force ‘in the struggle of ideas against things’ (Buchanan 1973). It was transitional in welcoming its own disappearance as the price willingly paid for a better world.
During the period of decolonization, the international system was relatively open to the circulation of political praxis. As a way of extending the analysis of the relationship between circulation and connectivity, this section looks at the type of structural analysis that was possible during this window of movement. What follows is a reflection on my own ethnographic fieldwork in Sudan during the mid-1970s (Duffield 1981).
The original intention had been to complete my Ph.D. fieldwork in northern Nigeria. I had spent the 1972–3 academic year at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) learning the basics of Hausa. Reflecting the student radicalism of the time, SOAS was a centre of agitation around Third World liberation and anti-capitalist issues. Because of a Nigerian government moratorium on the issue of visas, however, plans changed and I ended up in Sudan. Through a Sudanese friend in London, I had learnt that there were many long-established Hausa-speaking communities in Sudan. They had emerged during the colonial period as a consequence of the overland hajj to Mecca. Changing my travel plans and registering as a research student at the University of Khartoum, although all done by letter, proved straightforward. I eventually arrived in the village of Maiurno, in Sudan’s old Blue Nile Province, late afternoon on 16 January 1974, a little over three weeks after leaving the UK. I was twenty-four years old and would remain in Maiurno for the next fourteen months.
Anthropology students were expected to live modestly, adapt to local conditions, learn the relevant language and spend at least a year in the field to observe a complete seasonal cycle. Within reason, the object was to blend into the host community. Apart from the advice of supervisors and experienced researchers, unlike today, there were no mandatory methodology courses, upgrade requirements, risk-assessment procedures or ethical committees to satisfy. Access to the outside world had yet to be corrugated by bureaucratic barriers, insurance needs, anxiety-inducing security requirements or ethical uncertainties. The advice from my supervisor was to take gifts and make friends. A box of fragrant soap, cartons of cigarettes, photocopies of historic texts written in the vernacular, and a Polaroid instant camera constituted my attempt. During the 1970s, apart from bureaucratic delays, getting a visa and security clearance for internal travel within Sudan was a routine exercise. Basically, as soon as the grant arrived, placing trust in oneself and others, you set off. Anthropological fieldwork in post-independence Sudan was very much an individual sink-or-swim exercise. In order to succeed, you had to maintain momentum. You learnt, for example, that aspirants who failed to leave Khartoum within a month of arrival would probably never do so.
Maiurno lies about 200 miles south of Khartoum on the banks of the Blue Nile. In the 1970s, a metalled road went only as far as the town of Wad Medani, just over half-way. At the best of times, getting to and from Maiurno was a long and uncomfortable day’s journey in an open-sided bus.5 It was especially difficult during the rainy season when the road south of Wad Medani became a quagmire. It was best to avoid travel at this time of the year. Maiurno was a large, predominantly mud-built village with a central marketplace. Apart from that serving a handful of brick-built compounds belonging to leading merchant families and a renowned spiritual healer (faki), there was little electricity. Water was drawn directly from the river, transported by donkeys and sold by the jerry-can. Immunization against the likes of yellow fever, polio or typhoid was normal for research students. However, rather than endless prophylactics or sterilization procedures, the advice was to strengthen one’s personal immunity by eating and drinking as the host community did. Local dress was cheap and helped with acclimatization.
Founded at the turn of the twentieth century, Maiurno is one the main centres of Fellata6 settlement in Sudan. My arrival was facilitated by meeting a student from Maiurno then attending Khartoum University. He was one of the first from the village to have done so. With a suitcase and his letter of introduction, I arrived unannounced at the then-dilapidated compound of Sultan Abu Bakr Mohamed al Tahir,7 where I lived as a guest for the length of my stay, eating with the unmarried men and youths of the compound. Lying awake that first night, listening to the crickets, I felt as if I had travelled to the end of the world. There were no telephones. Even in the UK, outside of the middle classes, companies and public bodies, in the mid-1970s telephone handsets had yet to spread throughout society. Neither my family nor my girlfriend had one. Maiurno was irretrievably at the end of a three-week letter cycle. The only practical way to communicate with the outside world was to open a post office box in the town of Sennar, about 12 miles north. Over dirt roads, just getting there took an hour or so by lorry. The flimsy one-page aerogramme was the main means of international communication. Even with friends in Khartoum, you kept in touch by letter.
Since it took half a day to post and collect mail, the journey into Sennar became a mainly weekly event – not that the journey itself was otherwise wasted. Work expands to fill the time available. Through the circulatory process of posting and retrieving mail, I met people, formed acquaintances and picked up useful knowledge. Going to the post office would become a time for dropping by for a chat, drinking tea, and passing the time of day in Sennar.
Letter-writing was therapeutic and opening the PO box never failed to delight or surprise. However, letters were of little use for sorting out immediate problems or concerns. These would have either gone away or been resolved by the time any supervisor’s reply arrived. You dealt with problems directly with the knowledge or contacts at hand. What Peter Sloterdijk (2013 [2005]: 13) has called the ‘dignity of distance’, a quality properly associated with the days of ocean navigation, still had a legacy existence in rural Sudan in the mid-1970s. This dignity allowed for a level of social immersion that is difficult in today’s always-connected world with its distracting ability to be in more than one place at any given time. Today in Maiurno, the telecommunication masts stand taller than the minarets. While the network is slow, you can be emailing within minutes of arrival. There is no more dropping by for tea and a chat on the way to the post office. Instead, there is the habituated pressure to update and expect feedback while continually looking for messages. As an example of the dignity of distance, in the summer months of 1974, I contracted yellow jaundice. Given its debilitating effects, I was put on a lorry and half-carried to Sennar hospital where I was diagnosed and spent a singular five weeks recovering on a public ward. The letter cycle made it possible to finesse this event in a way that avoided unnecessary alarm in the UK. Rather than a setback, such entanglements were an intrinsic part of being there. Such a development today would probably result in a medevac.
My original research intention had been to collect contemporary folktales, as told by Hausa speakers, in order to subject them to the structural analysis that Claude Lévi-Strauss had developed in his deconstruction of South American mythological systems (Lévi-Strauss 1968). Influenced by the Marxism of the New Left, the attraction to Lévi-Strauss had been immediate. Uncovering the binary structure of mythological discourse to reveal the underlying human–nonhuman classificatory systems at work delivered, if one was needed, a mortal blow to anthropology conceived as the study of ‘primitive’ societies. Myths were revealed in their full majesty as the encoded work of meticulous observers and adept analytical bricoleurs of the natural environment. While lacking a material infrastructure of comparable density, in terms of nuanced complexity and aesthetic appeal, the mythical logos rivalled the ideological systems of corporate capitalism (Lévi-Strauss 1966). Like a message out of time, Lévi-Strauss’ demonstration of this shared ability for critical thought blended naturally with the solidarity of radical anthropology.
During the course of fieldwork, some twenty-five hours of folktales, riddles, histories and songs from a number of mainly rural Hausa-speaking settlements across northern Sudan were recorded.8 However, while continuing to collect and translate this material, the initial aim to use deconstruction to understand social change was soon abandoned. Once on the ground, questions relating to political economy became more pressing. Disparaged by their Arab neighbours as second-class citizens because of their African ancestry (Duffield 1983), the Fellata had been important to the colonial economy as agricultural labourers and peasant farmers. At the same time, the growing impact of commercial agriculture in the Sennar area was evident. Seeing Maiurno in relation to this social and economic background became the primary focus. The methodology, however, was similarly structural. In an interview recorded in 1971 touching on the work of Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault defined structuralism as the ‘analysis of relations’ or ‘delineating the relations that there can be among elements in a set’ (Foucault 2013: 40). The analogy was given of a photograph of a face. Relational points can be drawn between the main elements of the picture – for example, the distances between ears, nose, eyes and so on. If the positive photograph is now turned into its negative, these elements – in this case, their colour – change. The colours are inverted and it becomes a different picture. However, the relations between the elements remain the same. Despite a colour inversion, a face can still be recognized.
Foucault’s earlier works had examined three completely different fields of knowledge that had emerged between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; namely, biology, economics and linguistics. The content and knowledge of these disciplines are entirely different and are not comparable. However, ‘you can find in each of those fields a certain number of the same internal relations as you can find in other fields’ (2013: 41). The way the grammarians isolated words and the mechanism of words, for example, is comparable to how the natural scientists classified different species into hierarchies. To the extent that his analysis demonstrated such underlying relationships, it points to another ‘more fundamental and technical point’ (2013: 42). Structuralism addresses social realities governed by rules unknown to the subjects who perform them. As a comparative method, it uncovers the unconscious forms of knowledge that Foucault calls the ‘episteme of an era’ – that is, the unconscious rules that govern the organization of the various fields of knowledge and experience (2013: 30). Structuralism is thus part of the ‘great questioning of the sovereignty of the subject we are witnessing these days in our culture’ (2013: 43).
With this in mind, one could ask what distinguishes structuralism from, say, the pattern recognition central to data behaviourism or, as we have already seen, neoliberalism’s own questioning of the rational subject with its instrumental assertion of necessary ignorance? In answering, it is important that ‘structuralism is the method of analysis that consists of drawing constant relations from elements that in themselves, in their own character, in their substance, can change’ (emphasis added, 2013: 41). Foucault saw this as a characteristic of deductive science generally. It is this assertion of a constant or historic set of relations (the same general episteme or structure) existing between elements that constantly change that separates structuralism from the broad sweep of post-humanism. The unconscious relational structures existing in the midst of elemental change are historically given. While individual ‘reality’ may change, the episteme of an era defines and shapes a more stable and enveloping ‘world’. Post-humanism collapses this distinction. It disavows any historically given relational structure in favour of the ‘complexity’ of the pure factuality of environments comprised of constantly changing and emerging elements. In place of history and the world, post-humanism defends the existence of a universal biohuman essence embedded in a never-ending process of emergence and becoming (Dillon & Reid 2000). This is returned to in the next chapter in relation to our changing understanding of famine.
Louis Althusser drew on Foucault’s work (Althusser & Balibar 1970 [1968]: 45) in support of his own antihumanist position – that is, ‘subjects are constituted through ideological interpolation, and do not preexist such interpolation’ (Rouvroy 2012: 12). In other words, in each age, socialization involves imbibing the external and unconscious relational structures that govern the organization of existing knowledge and experience. At the same time, however, the structure that this gives to history and the world creates a space or a commons between the world and individual reality. This space leaves room to contest and critique the governing rules, to understand the power effects of the different knowledges and, in so doing, to take possession of ourselves. In the mid-1970s, the underlying structure that concerned radical anthropology was that of capitalism. While still to gain complete hegemony over society, discovering how capitalism was structuring the Third World was the task at hand.
Structural anthropology requires the ability to circulate. It requires both the possibility and the commitment to spend time in a place, and to work as close to the ground as possible. This book’s Introduction briefly outlined some distinctions between ‘knowledge’ and ‘data’. In relation to the ethos of participant observation that underpins fieldwork, further contrasts can be made. Ethnographic fieldwork allows for interruption and expects delay. It gives people time to speak, to account for and justify their claims. It creates time and opportunities for causal examination, verification and refutation. Data, on the other hand, is only useful if it emerges quickly and is immediately operational. Data is epistemologically remote, turning behaviour into signals and alerts that can be recorded and actioned at a distance. In order to be immediately available, rather than allowing people to account for themselves and their actions, it avoids engagement (Rouvroy 2012).
Of central importance in Maiurno was getting to know a social cross-section of the host society. While today the town is less conservative than it was – there being a cultural bar on talking to women, especially married ones, in the mid-1970s – for me there was an inevitable gravitation to the world of men. This meant making the acquaintance of a range of farmers, artisans, lorry drivers, labourers, merchants, fakis and teachers; from the highest to the lowest, the educated and the illiterate. Deliberately seeking out differences in opinion, experience and social standing was vital. Apart from entertaining in my room, hours were spent in the fields talking to farmers or labourers, hanging around the lorry stop, drinking tea with market traders or chatting to artisans, as well as passing time in the compounds of acquaintances and friends. Given that the main concern was to find the underlying relations between the main social elements, the methodology involved a patient circulation between them: recording views, experiences and life-histories, at the same time as looking for patterns and relationships within a wider narrative of the development of rural capitalism.
Participant observation cannot be rushed. Ideas and conjectures grow at walking pace, and insights and discoveries worthy of the name reveal themselves slowly. When not visiting other areas of Fellata settlement, my normal routine in Maiurno involved a continuous movement between informants, acquaintances, friends and confidants – mostly turning up rather than making appointments. If people were away, or occupied, you moved on. Carrying a notebook and taking notes was essential. Usually in the evening, the day’s work would be pulled together, systematized and written-up in duplicate books. The carbon-copies were saved as an original record, while the top-copies allowed a basic level of sorting and classification. The regular write-up of observations, casual conversations and interviews maintained momentum by helping to refine questions, form causal conjectures and uncover gaps that would provide the basis of future expeditions into the life of the village.
These excursions were not exercises in entitlement or expectation. Fluent in Hausa and working alone, it was all about building relationships over time. Respectful of people’s wishes and confidences, as much time was spent explaining my world as asking about theirs. Rough maps, for example, were often drawn in the sand to show unschooled labourers or farmers the position of Sudan in relation to other countries. Marriage and burial customs, together with the nature of work and politics in the UK, were regular discussion topics. My own lack of religious conviction, which was not concealed if questioned, was also a hook for theological debate. The Muslims I mixed with were invariably bemused by my naivety rather than offended or angered. At his suggestion, I made an agreement with one renowned faki to explain Marxism in exchange for his views on the psychological dimension of the spiritual healing he practised among the elites of Sudan and Saudi Arabia. After several sessions, how much dialectical materialism I had managed to impart in Hausa was uncertain. I was left in no doubt, however, as to his perceptive skills, grasp of human foibles and general savoir vivre.
In the process of gathering evidence, over the fourteen months of walking, talking and exchanging views in Maiurno, some acquaintances became friends, and some friends turned into confidants. Either directly or through their now adult children, these friendships endure to this day. Participant observation morphed into joint adventures within and outside Maiurno. In terms of ushering in a world revolution, the new anthropology failed. Perhaps, it could never have succeeded. Being there, however, led to memorable evenings of camaraderie, jokes and card-playing with the young lorry and tractor drivers who, by temperament, I gravitated towards. Through being there and having time slowed down, they changed my life, just as I changed theirs. At the end of the day, maybe these ties of friendship are what it was all about.
Supplemented by archival research in Khartoum and the UK, the results of this fieldwork questioned a basic tenet of New Left internationalism. By the mid-1970s, an autonomous peasantry had effectively disappeared in northern Sudan (O’Brien 1983). Sudanese independence helped to fertilize the seeds of capitalism that colonialism had sown but, for its own security, had held back (Duffield 1981: 12–13). The power and influence of the Fulani aristocracy in Maiurno had been courted during the colonial period. With independence, this would decline in concert with the integrity of the peasant-based subsistence economy. During the 1950s, large irrigated pump schemes were established around Maiurno. At the same time, the area under commercial rainland cultivation made possible by tractor ploughing began to increase. Given this impetus, wage relations spread through the agricultural economy. Based on large-scale farming and lorry trade along the Blue Nile, a new commercial elite emerged.
In the mid-1970s, two opposing but interconnected tendencies were observed. Namely, ‘for the economic function of the family to break down among the poor whilst it [was] transformed and maintained among the rich’ (1981: 159). Being dependent upon household labour, the commercialization of agriculture had worsened the terms of trade among small farmers and weakened family ties. Young men sought escape through labour migration or were drawn into seasonal employment on the surrounding mechanized farms. The rich and better-off benefitted in many ways from this process of dissolution and proletarianization among the poor and disadvantaged. Among the former, family relations consolidated around a range of interconnected agricultural, professional and mercantile activities that were divided between sons, brothers and relatives.
As well as marking the peak of Sudan’s liberal hour, the mid-1970s was, in retrospect, a high point of post-colonial internal rural development. Although marked by emerging divisions and inequality, like the welfare-Fordism that was then reaching its zenith in Europe and the USA, the relative security of the period is often invoked with some nostalgia among older Sudanese (Bannaga 2002). By the end of the decade, things were changing. As a result of growing debt dependence and increased donor leverage, Sudan would open its agricultural economy to the competitive forces of the world market. The transition of Fordism to post-Fordism and the reconfiguration of the corporation as networked global factory was accompanied by structural adjustment in Sudan, a drop in living standards and a growing informalization of the economy. Formally autonomous peasants were fast becoming a dependent precariat.
In 1977, the construction of a road was begun, starting at Wad Medani, linking Khartoum to Demazin in southern Blue Nile. Within a few years, this all-weather road would run within 100 yards of Maiurno. On unpaved roads, Demazin had been a gruelling day’s journey to the south of Maiurno. It now became a matter of hours. This opening up enabled mechanized commercial farming to extend further south, helping to accelerate the dissolution of peasant agriculture at the same time as introducing outside competition into what had been a locally controlled lorry trade. When the rekindled civil war in South Sudan engulfed the southern Blue Nile region in the mid-1980s, this already-declining business, once an important means of wealth creation in Maiurno, suffered a fatal blow (Abu Manga 2009). Within a decade, the Maiurno uncovered through fieldwork, a place where the dignity of distance still had a legacy presence, was a fading memory. Sudan was being connected into new flows of capital, polarized by Islamist resistance and, importantly, it was becoming known through new forms of humanitarian knowledge introduced by the NGO-led aid invasion of the mid-1980s.
In 2014, almost forty years to the day since first arriving, I returned to what is now better described as the small town of Maiurno for a short retrospective study (Duffield 2014). In the mid-1970s, I had entered through the front door, so to speak. However, due to the ground friction of barriers, bureaucratic hurdles and institutional requirements that now corrugate and striate international space, returning would have been difficult, maybe impossible, without being able to go around the back. Having recently retired, there was no need to navigate the now-mandatory university risk-assessment process, satisfy ethical guidelines, follow private security advice or comply with insurance requirements (Jaspars 2015: 23–4). As in the 1970s, I travelled without insurance – or, at least, decided to forgo the time and complications of trying to get it. Being able to self-fund travel costs meant avoiding the competition for research grants at a time of increased management prescription. The complications of awaiting sabbatical leave, again more restricted than before, were also avoided.
Given the history of Western sanctions against Sudan, obtaining an entry visa for academic research is no longer straightforward. Fortunately, an old friend provided a letter of invitation from the University of Khartoum. For international aid workers or researchers, getting travel clearance to leave Khartoum can be a lengthy and often fruitless process (Jaspars 2015). A longstanding hotelier friend obtained a general tourist travel permit that, centred on Khartoum, covers the main areas of tourist interest. While its validity was then being challenged in the areas of archaeological interest to the north, fortuitously, the permit also extended to the less-travelled south as far as Sennar near Maiurno. Unlike in the 1970s, there is now a visible police and security presence in the village. Early on my first morning, I was detained by plain-clothes security and taken back to Sennar for questioning. Fortunately, I had lived in the same compound as the present Omda, or local representative, when he was a teenager. He was able to intercede and vouch for me. With this assurance, I stayed for the next five weeks in the hands of my surviving friends. Given the ground friction that now exists, going through the expected channels would probably result in never getting there, let alone being granted leave to stay. However, if you did make it, you can be checking emails and updating social media pages within minutes.
The following chapter focuses on the NGO invasion of the 1980s. In terms of growing remoteness, of particular importance is how the new aid-based ontologies and methodologies would quickly negate the area expertise, language acquisition, structural methods and forms of ground engagement described above. This invasion would help to prepare the ground, so to speak, for the computational turn that accelerated from the end of the 1990s.