An anthropological perspective

The historical task of intellectual élites

Bridging past, industrial society and knowledge society

by Harris Memel-Fotê

INTRODUCTION: "CONNAISSANCE" AND "SAVOIR" (see note at the end of the article)

Connaissance and savoir as structural dimensions of every individual life and every collective management of society presupposes learned institutions, discourse praxes and a social activity of intellectual appropriation of the world.

If connaissance, an ambiguous concept in the French language, constitutes a social activity of personal and objective appropriation of things, as well as the result of this activity, savoir is instead more generic and impersonal. The archaeologist of human sciences defines it as an ambit, the object of discourse praxis, a space in which a person can position her/himself in order to speak of her/his own objects, a field of coordination and subordination of enunciates, and the possibility of use and of appropriation offered by discourse. Savoir can determine knowledge and may also be the result or product of this knowledge. In this sense, it is possible to distinguish three great typologies of savoir: a pre-modern savoir, of a more or less metaphysical or religious nature; a modern savoir and a post-modern savoir, of a scientific and philosophical nature.

Now, in all known human societies, knowledge is characterised by three traits. Firstly, various forms and modalities of knowledge are manifest in human societies; secondly, these forms are ordered by a hierarchy; finally, these very same forms develop through the prevailing of one form over the others.

This anthropological characteristic is illustrated very well by Third World societies, in general, and by those of contemporary Africa, in particular. In all these cases, the first problem is that of savoir what forms of knowledge may be identified; the second problem concerns the hierarchy that orders these forms and also concerns the meaning of this hierarchy; the third problem refers, on the one hand, to the form of prevailing knowledge, and, on the other, to the difference between this form of knowledge and the knowledge society - a UNESCO prospect and the dream of free men.

Identifiable forms of connaissance

To a different degree, all forms of connaissance in current human experience are present in contemporary African societies:

- initiation through initiation societies;
- science through learned societies and universities;
- philosophy through the same institutions;
- scientific technique through the industrial society;
- savoir through the post-industrial society.

- Initiation

Firstly, initiation is a learning institution that predominated in ancient societies of all kinds in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Pacific. Secondly, initiation, which introduces the neophyte to esoteric teachings, presupposes a secret, and thus the study of secret societies or that of secret rites is synonymous with the study of initiation. Finally, initiation, as a modality of revelation that recapitulates the sacred history of the tribe and of the world, perpetuates social inequalities and guarantees the initiates a degree of power in society through the possession and manipulation of a body of savoir and savoir faire (know-how).

- Science

While initiation is the acquisition of more or less sacred knowledge, science - in its modern form - is a lay, objective and experimental social activity that has gradually progressed from the field of ideas, the object of the exact sciences, to nature, society, culture and man. It is coeval with the great historical changes, in the moral order (with reference to rights and duties of the human being), in the political order (that refers to city organisation and to democracy…) and in the social and economic order (that concerns production, work and the distribution of wealth…).

- Philosophy

As a reasoned form of savoir that gives meaning to the world and to human existence, philosophy has accompanied the development of modern science. Like the latter, it has diversified according to the objects: mathematical philosophy, biological philosophy, social philosophy, etc.

- Scientific technique

In industrial society, technique, as know-how, embedded into scientific activity by broadening and developing in all fields: agriculture, fishing, fauna, trade, play, culture, etc.

The relative hierarchy

By hierarchy, here, I mean the order determined by the social preponderance, in which the forms of connaissance appear and are ordered. This social preponderance may be sociological, when the form of connaissance is practiced by many actors in an overall society, or by a group that dominates society according to the criterion of technical efficiency or political efficiency. This preponderance may also be temporal, or historical, if one considers the chronology of the forms of connaissance, or prospect, when men rely on the future of society to determine and inform the current actuality.

In both meanings, it is possible to distinguish:

- an advanced hierarchy in post-industrial societies
- an unfinished hierarchy in pre- or proto-industrial societies.

Both types of hierarchy are said to be relative - in the sense that they are not fixed definitively in contemporary history - and may develop; and social preponderance shifts from one form of connaissance to another.

a) Advanced hierarchy

This is the type of hierarchy present in contemporary industrial democratic societies when connaissance is shared by the majority and close to life. Even in contemporary western Europe there is knowledge based on initiation. The freemasons, whose roots go back to the ancient Egyptian tradition, and the Rosicrucians are still successful even if they do not predominate in society. It is in this kind of Europe that all modern sciences, the exact and natural sciences, social and human sciences, were born, developed in many universities and research centres, spreading through the entire world. It is here that the learned societies were born and flourished, in the form of higher professional schools or academies, in a theoretical sense. Here, in the democratic societies, we find the epicentre of modern philosophical savoir. Here, industrialisation blossomed reaching its paroxysm, with the various forms of damage inflicted on the environment and the threats of dehumanising man. The consequences are such that industrialisation in turn is suffering the movement of radical criticism and of revolution of the ecologists. It is from this post-industrial experience of western Europe that gave birth to the advanced programme of a knowledge society.

b) The unfinished hierarchy

In Third World societies in general, and in contemporary African ones, in particular, the preponderance sought for today is that of scientific technique, the expression of industrial society.

- Initiation

If before colonisation, initiation was predominant in these societies as a principal educational modality, today the situation is different. It is certainly still present in rural areas, but it is made precarious, on the one hand, by migrations to the towns that siphons off part of the population, and, on the other, by the cultural deportation constituted by the school of colonial inspiration. Except from when they are completely and definitively collapsed, the same training structures of the past still exist, such as with the Bambara and the Malinké, the n'domo of the uncircumcised, the komo of the circumcised and the korê of the completed initiates.

This form of education, destined to wrench man away from the animal in order to elevate him to the dignity of a person who is completed in and through the knowledge of God, consists of a progressive teaching that is increasingly internalised. Through this the human being begins to familiarise with the meanings of his own body, to then experience a symbolic death and rebirth, and finally to build his physical basis - his moral, intellectual, political and spiritual personality - and, at the same time, his own life space, i.e. the world that surrounds him and of which he becomes a microcosm. Ethics and social morality, physical education and paramilitary training, sexual education, civic and religious education all go to building mankind, the world and the cosmos.

Today, this education is subordinate to the one received at school, university and the national army.

- Science

Modern sciences, which became established in the colonial period, only prosper in the universities and research centres, that is, in mainly urban structures. The lag in scientific development in today's Africa is such that there are only about a dozen academies, in a theoretical sense, in the fifty-three independent states of the continent. In Ivory Coast, this institution, which should actually act as a bridge between sciences, arts and culture, will only be created in 2002. This shows that science only works for an educated elite and to the benefit of an economy that looks abroad.

Like science, modern philosophy, which also spread with colonialism, is not a mass phenomenon; it is actually even more limited in connaissance production sites, in particular, and in the social sphere, in general.

- Scientific technique

Given the poor development of science, it is clear that scientific technique - the expression of industrial society - is underdeveloped in African societies, apart from a few exceptions. However, the ambition for development, which is also a desire for freedom and independence, has provided the blueprint for industrial society.

Industrial society and knowledge society

What are the differences between a knowledge society and an industrial society, and between a Third World project, in general, and an African one, in particular?

Let us first deal with an ambiguity as regards the concept of society. In the case of an initiation society and learned society, the concept refers to elementary groups making up the overall society; in the case of an industrial society and knowledge society, on the other hand, the concept refers to the overall society.

However, the idea of industry implicitly exalts science and explicitly scientific technique in all fields (economics, society, politics, culture), while the savoir we are talking about explicitly refers to modern science and philosophy, on the one hand, and to the post-industrial era, on the other.

Similarly to an industrial society in which, alongside entrepreneurs, engineers, skilled and unskilled workers, the masses are consumers of all the products of industry, in the knowledge society, the vast majority of the social actors consume the savoir produced by scientists, philosophers, writers, artists, soothsayers and prophets.

If African societies have yet been unable to freely benefit from modern science and scientific technique, i.e. the industrial era, then all the more reason for them to have been able to access the knowledge society. These societies, though, have a technical élite in common with industrial societies, in the same way as they share an intellectual élite with the knowledge society. This elite is a bridge linking the African society's past with its immediate future, constituted by the industrial society, and its more distant future, constituted by the knowledge society.

There appear to be at least four (4) characteristics of this knowledge society: firstly, the importance given at social and political level to a savoir that is suitable for the 21st century and to the producers of this savoir; secondly, lasting peace, which is necessary for processing and using this savoir; thirdly, solidarity, which allows all groups in society and all the populations of the world to be able to use the knowledge produced by one or more of them; fourthly, wisdom, which pacifies and regulates in the three meanings of the concept: discernment (theoretical sense), virtue or excellence (ethical sense), and performance (technical sense).

CONCLUSION

The interest of a knowledge society is firstly theoretical; it concerns just as much the nature of society and the nature of savoir as the way this savoir is acquired.

The idea of a knowledge society is, in our view, legitimate only in a democratic society that has familiarised with modern scientific connaissance and is open to progress, industrial prosperity and the idea of a human relativity to progress and prosperity.

If we are putting forward the issue of a knowledge society today, it is because it is difficult to deal with the concept in this four-factor guise.

But some constitutive elements of this knowledge society are already present in existing societies. In the northern hemisphere, it is the invention of the democratic republic as an open system in which freedom, equality and fraternity are values for individual and collective salvation, a system that increasingly reduces the monarchic institution to its minimum expression. There is also the invention of the experimental forms of science, which reduce the initiation-based institution to its minimum expression; but there is also the development of a total and systematic industrialisation whose negative effects damage the phenomenon itself both as regards ecologist ideology and as regards the philosophy of communication. In the southern hemisphere, these elements of modernisation have three (3) main features. Firstly, they coexist although not being coeval. Secondly, the target of their current aspiration, industrialisation, is still not consolidated and remains a dream for some generations to come.

However, the intellectual élite of the southern hemisphere still acts as a bridge between the knowledge society and contemporary societies, both in the northern and southern hemispheres. Insomuch as the knowledge society not only has a merely theoretical concern but a practical one as well, it is through historical action that southern populations can bridge the gaps separating them from the industrial society and the knowledge society.

* In this essay, the author makes use of the distinction between the French words "savoir" and "connaissance". Such a distinction is not easily rendered in English. Since he provides a clear definition of the use he makes of both terms, we chose to keep them in French.

Harris Memel-Fotê, a cultural anthropologist, was born in Mopoyem (Dabou), Ivory Coast, in 1930. He completed his studies in his own country and in France. An emeritus professor of the University of Abidjan, he has also been Directeur d'Etudes associé at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and Associé at the Collège de France in the Chaire internationale for 1995-96. He has held many other scientific positions in Ivory Coast and abroad, and has been member of various committees promoted by UNESCO. He is currently a Member of Parliament and Vice President of the National Assembly of Ivory Coast. He has dealt with many themes in his works, such as the concept of culture, democracy, thought structures, developmental processes, religious dynamics, globalisation, education, gender, aesthetics, literature, theatre, medicine and health, the environment, the relationship between ethnicity and nation, and the history of slavery.

The airport of Cape Town, South Africa (photo: capephotolibrary)

         
     

Water supplying in Senegalese arid zone (photo: Panapress )

 
  

Demonstration of union activists, Abidjan, Ivory Coast (photo: MBODJ IBRAHIMA/PANAPRESS)

         

CONFERENCE IN ABIDJAN

"The idea of Academy and the academic experiences in modern and contemporary Africa" is the title of the international conference that the President of the Republic's Office of Ivory Coast has promoted for 21-25 May 2002 in Abidjan. The conference lies within the sphere of reflection on the projects of creating an Academy of sciences, arts, culture and African diaspora in this country. The initiative is of a multi-disciplinary nature and will see the participation of scholars, philosophers, artists, writers and personalities of African culture, of the African diaspora and from other continents. There will also be four workshops, respectively dedicated to academic experiences, the structures and action modalities of academies, financing and resources, and academy projects.

People waiting at the gates of the stadium, Dakar, Senegal (photo: Alistair Berg)

Boys in Senegalese school (photo: africaphotos)

         
            

A factory in South Africa (photo: Africa Imagery)

                       

Tafsir Malick Ndiaye (Senegal), judge of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (photo: UN)

 

Moses Otsyula in the laboratory of a research institute in Nairobi (photo: Khamis Ramadhan/Panapress)