#cadaanstudies and Somali Studies: why now?

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Over the past 2 weeks a heated and controversial debate has raged on social media centering on the dominance of Western scholars who often appear incredulously unaware of the impact on their knowledge production of the structures of power that has conditioned the positions they occupy. The debate began after Safia Aidid, a Somali-Canadian doctoral student at Harvard, highlighted the absence of Somalis from the editorial board of the newly launched Somaliland Journal of African Studies. This led to a response by Dr. Markus Hoehne, a German anthropologist specializing on Somalis, in which he claimed the absence of Somalis from the editorial board was due to the lack of serious young Somali scholars because they, according to Dr. Hoehne, don’t value scholarship. This patronizing, condescending and unreflective remark was followed by an even more blatantly insulting comment when Dr. Hoehne told the group of young Somalis who were infuriated by his remark that he would no sooner leave the thread and they would go back to clannish in-fighting. What does one make of this controversy? How is it possible that an anthropologist who is relatively well known and established among those interested in and involved in Somali Studies can publicly state such opinions? What about the tremendous amount of energy and anger shown by so many up and coming young Somali scholars, including myself? In Summary, why is this controversy happening now? In the following lines I want to reflect a little on this issue.Critiquing AnthropologyThe critiques made of Dr. Hoehne and the SJAS in terms of the impact of the dominance of Westerners on Somali Studies are familiar in various fields in academia at least since the 1960s. Cultural/social anthropology as a discipline has rightly borne the brunt of these critiques because of its historical, practical and theoretical intimacy with the encounter between colonizing Europe and the colonized other. As a consequence of these critiques some anthropologists began to examine the global structures that had made plausible the emergence of anthropology as a discipline and how the knowledge it produced were utilized and by whom. In the introduction to the edited volume Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1972) the distinguished anthropologist Talal Asad wrote:

“It is not a matter of dispute that social anthropology emerged as a distinctive discipline at the beginning of the colonial era, that it became a flourishing academic profession towards its close, or that throughout this period its efforts were devoted to a description and analysis – carried out by Europeans for a European audience – of non-European societies dominated by European power. . . . We are today becoming increasingly aware of the fact that information and understanding produced by bourgeoisie disciplines are acquired and used by those with the greatest capacity for exploitation”.

This critique of anthropology is penned in 1972 at a time when anthropology was coming under an avalanche of criticism and when the theoretical coherence of the discipline was disintegrating. Prof. Asad pointed out that the crisis the discipline was experiencing in the ‘60s and ‘70s had to with a transformation in the global structure of relations:“The answer I would suggest is to be sought in the fact that since the Second World War, fundamental changes have occurred in the world which social anthropology inhabits, changes which have affected the object, the ideological support and the organizational base of social anthropology itself”.What was happening to the world of anthropology since the Second World War?The attainment of independence by the formerly colonized, especially African countries, led to a situation where anthropology’s object of study, ‘primitive’ societies, were now being led by nationalist political leaders who were eager to recuperate the history of their peoples and quite critical of anthropology and its relationship to the colonial project. With the attainment of political independence anthropology’s object of study, the primitive, was speaking for him/herself and producing knowledge about his own society challenging the anthropology’s position as an expert on the ‘natives’.I draw attention to this brief history of anthropology because I think it sheds light on a number of issues relating to the questions raised above. It’s obvious that the discipline of anthropology has been subjected to critical analysis and some of its best practitioners have themselves spearheaded this critique of the discipline. How is it then that Dr. Hoehne responded to the criticism made of the journal and of him as though he had never been exposed to these critiques? There may be a number of factors to explain his response, but I want to focus on one. It seems to me that the tiny field of Somali Studies has not been much affected by this criticism. The reason for this is two-fold. First, no academic in this field has produced a work whose significance is such that it attracted the attention of critical voices outside of this small field. Take the work of the doyen of Somali Studies, anthropologist I. M. Lewis. Lewis’s most significant and lasting contribution to Somali Studies is his description of ‘segmentary lineage system’ as the base of Somali social organization and the key to understanding Somali social life. The notion of segmentary lineage system as the organizing principle of social life in what was then called ‘stateless societies’ by anthropologists was first proposed by the famed anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard in his monograph The Nuer (1940) based on the so-named ethnic group in today’s South Sudan. Evans-Pritchard was an instructor at Oxford at the time when Lewis did his first study of Somalis in northern Somalia.The case in pointThe point I want to make is that Evans-Pritchard’s work, The Nuer, is today considered a classic text and a must read for students being trained as anthropologists. Consequently, The Nuer has been thoroughly critiqued from every angle because of the stature of the man who wrote it and because it’s considered a ground-breaking monograph (See G. Stocking, Susan Mckinnon, Sharon Hutchinson). By comparison, Lewis’s A Pastoral Democracy (1961) is barely read outside of those involved in Somali Studies and thus is spared from critical analysis. Partly as a consequence of the absence of real critique, with the exception of few voices such as that of Prof. Abdi I. Samatar and C. Besteman, segmentary lineage system as the key to understanding Somali social and political dynamics has become a taken-for-granted assumption of the many ‘experts’ on the Somali people.There is another reason why Somali Studies hasn’t been subjected to much criticismAs noted earlier one of the consequences of the attainment of political independence by African countries was that the formerly silent native was now in a position to produce knowledge about their own societies and to challenge what others wrote of them. Due to a number of reasons including the colonial school system or lack thereof and the long period of statelessness there haven’t been many Somalis who have mastered the languages and the discourses of Western academia to challenge what non-Somalis produced on the Somali people. In other words, there have been few Somalis who were in a position to speak back, again with notable exceptions. This, however, is changing and this is what the #cadaanstudies controversy showed. With the formation of a relatively large Somali diaspora in the West, there is now a good number of young Somalis coming through the University systems of Western countries. These are well aware and well versed in the critical discourse of Western academia. They have read Michel Foucault, Franz Fanon, Edward Said, Talal Asad and many more. They are well aware that colonialism was one historical moment in the encounter between peoples, nations and continents in unequal relations of power, an encounter that continues today with a new dynamic. Some of us young and university-educated Somali diaspora will challenge what is written about Somalia because we have the credentials and we have mastered the discourse to enable us to speak back. We will also speak back not simply because we are Somalis but because we are going to Somalia to do the necessary work to pursue lines of inquiry other than the traditional ones and ask questions that reveal the half-truths that is often written about Somalia from the safety of Nairobi and security compounds in Somalia. This is desperately needed today.Today’s environmentThe paucity of credible Somali academic voices is exacerbated today by the new environment created by the war on terror. The security-development complex and the international led state-building project which is part of this new war has created a market for anyone calling him/herself a Somali expert. Individuals, organizations and think tanks are daily appearing on the scene claiming expert knowledge on Somalia and selling their services to states and organizations. Established academics in Somali Studies are serving as guest lecturers and on the boards of many of this shady think tanks based in Nairobi. The thin line between academia and intelligence work is becoming quite blurry in the case of Somalia under the war on terror. Somalis, whether from the diaspora or in Somalia, are part of this complex network. They often serve as the informants and local researchers and eyes on the ground for many of these Nairobi based think tanks and Somali experts. This goes to show, if it needed showing, that simply being a Somali isn’t enough to produce good or sympathetic work. So, to my young fellow aspiring Somali scholars there is much work that needs to be done. The energy shown by the #cadaanstudies controversy should be translated and inspire more of us to think critically and produce original work.This article was written by Ahmed Sh. Ibrahim. He is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at CUNY, currently doing fieldwork in Mogadishu for his dissertation examining the early genesis and evolution of shari'a courts that later unified to form the Union of Islamic Courts. 

http://www.somaliaonline.com/cadaanstudies-and-somali-studies-why-now/