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Review article: the political

economy of bricolage
a
Richard P. Werbner
a
University of Manchester ,
Published online: 24 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Richard P. Werbner (1986) Review article: the political
economy of bricolage, Journal of Southern African Studies, 13:1, 151-156, DOI:
10.1080/03057078608708136

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 Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, October 1986

Review Article:The Political Economy

of Bricolage

RICHARD P. WERBNER
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Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance (Chicago: Chicago University

Press, 1985). Pp. 304. £13.75.

In giving 'bricolage' its distinctively structuralist stamp, Levi-Strauss made it stand for
reconstruction, especially in myth, of cultural debris from the past. Levi-Strauss gave
'bricolage' no bearing on power or dominance.' Nor did he locate it in a particular human
predicament, such as estrangement or alienation, with its own modes of consciousness, its
own varieties of experience, its own progress through time. 'Bricolage', like other structu-
ralist ideas, was decontextualised, even in its use of the past. Is 'bricolage' better forgotten
along with the structuralist methods of reading signs and significance? Or can we move
post-structuralism forward by rejecting the divorce between bricolage and power or domin-
ance? Can we contextualise bricolage historically within human quests to overcome human
predicaments, within the actualities of the experience and the consciousness of recognisable
people?
Jean Comaroff s Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance1 points a way forward. She takes into
account the debate about counter-culture and resistance through rituals which has been
advanced by members of Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.3 Her
argument is above all about powerful change in the specific objects, signs and images which
people use to make their lives significant from one historical period to another. The
bricoleurs are 'iconoclasts'. They break down the images and symbolism of dominant and
subordinate cultures in order to recombine them in a way that subverts cultural dominance.
Theirs is the 'subversive bricolage' of modern Southern African religious movements,
especially Zionist churches, in response to the changing predicament of estrangement, under
colonialism. Their reconstructions, unlike those of Levi-Strauss' bricoleurs, are made across
cultures, and it is one of the strengths of Comaroff s study that it tells us how it came about
that the Zionism of a fundamentalist sect from the American mid-west provided a model for
much of Southern African Zionism and how American Zionism could so well speak to the
experience of black labour migrants, especially at the beginning of this century. Colonialism
1
C. Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London, 1966), pp. 16-23.
2
The page references in the body of my text are to this book.
3
S. Hall and T. Jefferson (eds.), Resistance Through Rituals (London, 1976); D. Hebdige, Subcul-
ture: The Meaning of Style (New York, 1979).

© Oxford University Press 1986

 152 Journal of Southern African Studies
is thus seen to have exported not merely its dominant culture, its established ideology and its
orthodox religion but also its counter-culture, alternative ideologies, and unorthodox religion.
Dazzlingly eclectic, this is an important book which is based as much upon library research
as on fieldwork among Tshidi in the borderland of Botswana and South Africa. It makes us
rethink the colonial encounter between dominant and subordinate cultures. It opens fresh
questions about the cultural defence against domination during the great transformation in
which people become 'semi-proletarians', almost but not quite either peasants or workers.
The advance in post-structuralism is both in method, which is historically informed, and in
interpretation, which finely illuminates the concrete embodiments of a largely non-verbal
consciousness.
Following Gramsci as well as Levi-Strauss, Birmingham's Stuart Hall and Dick Hebdige as
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well as Chicago's Terence Turner and Nancy Munn, Comaroff starts from the premise that
the exercise of power by a ruling class is everywhere problematic. It cannot be taken for
granted that with political and economic dominance comes or follows hegemony in the sense
of a cultural dominance which has become naturalised, with 'the stamp of fact' in the eyes of
the dominated as well as the dominators. Hegemony, like political and economic dominance,
is itself the product of a continuing struggle, the outcome of which is not determined apart
from the struggle itself. Where cultural resistance prevails, and hegemony cannot be
constructed, there the other modes of dominance are restricted and constrained in their impact
on the everyday lives of people.
It follows that the anthropologist as culture historian cannot revert to Arcadia and its
violation, when illuminating the colonial encounter. In Marx's terms, cattle were virtually
fetishised commodities among precolonial Tswana, Comaroff suggests. The great trans-
formation she recounts thus begins with a precolonial period in which, to some limited degree,
the fetishism of commodities already underpinned a world view and externalised the basis of
inequalities outside of society itself. Building upon John Comaroff s studies of the later
period,4 Jean Comaroff perceives a series of internal contradictions. These were, among
others, between centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, agnatic rank and political hierarchy,
centralised control and domestic autonomy, with variable yet rather limited resolutions, all of
which were surface manifestations of a 'unitary socio-cultural structure'.
The struggle for control, Comaroff argues, is most importantly over key symbols and
signifying practices attendant on the body. That is because they are the ones which are
decisive for control over the self and the person. To get contemporary struggles by religious
movements in perspective, she applies her argument first to the radically contrasting treatment
of the male and the female body in precolonial initiation rites. This enables her to show which
tensions or discordant representations were managed within ritual, how that management
gave ritual its transformative power, and how precolonial signifying practice naturalised
inequality and exploitative relations. The rites engraved certain messages on the bodies of
adolescent girls, others on the bodies of boys. The rites were 'pragmatic acts'; they were
constructive of social realities, not merely expressive.5
Here the nub of her conclusion is this:

4
J. L. Comaroff, 'Tswana Transformations 1953-1975', in I. Schapera, The Tswana (London, 1976);
'Class and Culture in a Peasant Economy: The Transformation of Land Tenure in Barolong' in R. P.
Werbner (ed.), Land Reform in the Making (London, 1982); 'Dialectical Systems, History and Anthropo-
logy: Units of Study and Questions of Theory', Journal of Southern African Studies, 8, 2 (1982),
pp. 143-72; and S. Roberts, Rules and Processes (Chicago, 1981).
5
For a critique of the expressive view and a related argument for the transformative power of ritual,
see B. Kapferer, 'Postscript', Social Analysis 1, 1 (1979, reprinted 1984), pp. 192-7. See also J. S. La
Fontaine, Initiation (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 35ff.
 The Political Economy ofBricolage 153
The initiation cycle provided a particular model for the articulation of the individual and the collectivity,
the periphery and the center, the male and the female domains, an authoritative map of social and
symbolic relations that overlay, but did not totally eclipse underlying structural tensions; the latter were
reproduced as part of the overall system, their implications continuing to threaten its constitution, (p. 118)
In other words, resistance to exploitative relations, albeit ever-present, was repeatedly and
effectively dissipated, or at least redirected, in precolonial ritual. The significance of the
exploitative relations, along with the significance of disparate conflicts and paradoxes in
experience, was so constructed by Tswana in their ritual that what was imposed was a model
of a hegemonic social order. In this there was a female domain of domestic production, a male
domain of social reproduction. It was not merely that the subordination of the former to the
latter was authorised and made objective through the practice of ritual. It was also that the
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ritual practice empowered the public domain with the imagery of the domestic domain. A
higher unity transcending the tensions between different domains was thus inscribed through
an integrative ritual process.
With the colonial period came a radical change in the use to which the people put ritual.
Comaroff s argument about this merges two theses which, in my view, need to be kept
separate because one weakens the force of the other. The first, which is about cultural
resistance along with reconstruction, is strong. It is substantiated in depth in the book's best
chapters, 'Alienation and the Kingdom of Zion' and 'Ritual as Historical Practice', where
Comaroff deconstructs the subversive bricolage of the Zion Christian Church (ZCC) and the
Full Witness Church. Here her interpretation of body presentation, the gender-specific use of
regalia, such as mitres, staffs, cloaks, as well as khaki uniforms with the military pomp of
Soldiers of the Lord, is especially memorable and convincing. The second, or protest thesis, is
dubious, for reasons I give later. It makes Zionism out to be a unitary movement that falls
within a wider class of counter-cultural movements motivated by protest and defiance.
Applying the resistance and reconstruction thesis to colonial transformation, Comaroff
observes that among Tshidi,
In fact, the domestic domain itself became the periphery of the distant urban centers, tied to them by an
order of relations, rules, and bureaucratic procedures that bypassed almost entirely the apex of the
indigenous system, its public sphere having been swept away by external forces both pervasive and
unsusceptible to local control, (p. 164)
In short, the old order integrating domains was shattered
One response Tshidi made was culturally defensive. This was their endeavour to reverse
their past ritual process, from being integrative of domains to being quite the opposite. In
'rituals of reconstruction' within modern religious movements, especially Zionism, Tshidi
sought, Comaroff suggests, 'to disengage their local world from the exogenous structures that
encompassed it, and to reconstitute a bounded community centered upon the elemental
relations framed by the house' (p. 164). The key metaphor which Tshidi Zionists themselves
used was 'healing':

it emphasized the reintegration of matter and spirit, the practical agency of divine force, and the social
relocation of the displaced; in short, it drew together everything that had been set apart in the black
experience of colonisation and wage labor, (p. 176)
The force of this argument is weakened by the inadequacies of the protest thesis, and most
strikingly in the case of the ZCC. First, if the protest thesis were right, it would be unthinkable
for the head of the ZCC, Bishop Lekganyane, to give his blessing to the apartheid state in
1985. Yet, not long after the publication of Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance, that is what
Bishop Lekganyane did. At Zion City Moria, near Pietersburg in the Transvaal, in the
presence of millions of pilgrims to the 75th Easter Paseka of the ZCC, Bishop Lekganyane
 154 Journal of Southern African Studies
awarded the Freedom of Moria to State President Botha. Botha accepted the award as 'a
symbol of peace and love'.' The themes of the Bishop's own sermon, which he had first given
at the 70th Paseka in 1980, were the justification of sinners through faith, 'the Law of God',
'duties to the government':
The Bible teaches that man's first and highest duty is to love and obey Him. It teaches us that a man cannot
be a follower of God without rendering due respect to the earthly government which he has ordained. . .
One may ask the following question: How many of the laws of the government must Christians obey? I
cite with Peter Chapter 2, verse 13 when he says: Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the
Lord's sake. The President, Prime Minister, Ministers of States, chiefs and all members of administra-
tions are in authority over you. Laws of a country are the Lord's laws because of the preservation of peace
and security for all (of) the highest possible state of happiness.'
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In other words, the unmistakable message, contrary to the protest thesis, is the acceptance of a
divide between church and state, with a lawful place for each.
A second mistake of the protest thesis is to turn purity consciousness into protest
consciousness. The people's own stress, at least in the ZCC, is on Zionism as personally
redemptive, on separating the saved from the unsaved through a new code of practice in
everyday life as well as ritual.8 This purity code is marked by the avoidance of pork, alcohol
and cigarettes. Zionism in Southern Africa is strongly — and explicitly — motivated by
opposition, not to colonial dominance per se, but to an indigenous definition of the person and
interpersonal relations. More specifically, it opposes the way this definition is embodied, and
thus powerfully enforced, through the use of substances, both negatively, in sorcery, and
positively, in ritual. Yet the protest thesis makes little allowance for a worldview in which evil
is highly personalised and in which the person continually has to be redeemed through acts of
purification. It may be that the protest thesis seems attractive because it promises an
apparently more comparative explanation, embracing broad social movements and locating
religious innovation within a very wide historical context. But that promise is offered at the
cost of obscuring the religious motivation of the highly diverse churches constituting the
Zionist movement in the specific Southern African context.
An example from the ZCC is useful to make the point more concretely. In the ZCC's dance
ritual men say they 'stamp evil underfoot'. They tramp the ground, sometimes in the style of a
military march, with their outsized, thick-soled 'cricket boots'. These pure white shoes
grossly exaggerate the size and thus the power of their feet. As recreation or re-creation boots,
they are never worn in the workplaces. One might argue, following the protest thesis, that 'a
composite show of defiance is being acted out. . . The boots beat out a tattoo of resistance and
resolve' (p.248); that through this the dancers 'signal a protest and a gesture of frustration',
even though the boots 'invoke both precolonial and colonial signs of power' (p.245). It is
worth noting, however, that it is tobacco in cigarettes which is stamped underfoot in the one
picture of men dancing in the first and, so far, the only, issue of the Church's official
magazine, The ZCC Messenger (April 1985). Above the picture was the caption, 'Tobacco is
the most subtle poison known to chemists except the deadly prussic acid' and below it, "These
are the guys that are aware of it!'. In their dance ritual the feet of churchmen are powerfully
protected, for among colonial as among precolonial Tswana, 'the foot was permeable to
6
The Citizen, 8 April 1985, p. 1. Botha inveighed against 'the forces of darkness' which 'stand in the
way of peaceful development' (ibid). His praise was for the ZCC members: 'You respect law, order and
authority. I have come to tell you that we see this', (p. 3)
7
ZCC Messenger, 1 (April 1985).
8
On the impact of these avoidances in reducing the span of social networks and the everyday sociability
of labour migrants, see J. Kiernan, 'Where Zionists Draw the Line: A Study of Religious Exclusiveness in
an African Township', African Studies, 33, 2 (1974), pp. 79-90; 'Poor and Puritan: An Attempt to View
Zionism as a Collective Response to Urban Poverty', African Studies, 36, 1 (1977), pp. 31-43.
 The Political Economy ofBricolage 155
pollution and sorcery concoctions' (p.245). For this church, wickedness is 'of the world
beyond Zion, continuing immersion in which is a constant source of pollution' (p.247).
Nevertheless, Comaroff concludes that 'While there is seldom overt reference to the diffuse
coercion of the neocolonical marketplace, or to the more concentrated oppressions of the
apartheid state, the identity of evil is unmistakable' (p.248). This admits a difficulty, but it
does not get around it.
The identity of evil, like the identification with the state, takes on another guise, when we
regard the complementary bits of ZCC bricolage, the khaki uniforms which go along with the
'cricket boots'. As Comaroff herself points out, the khaki uniforms recall 'both the dress of
British imperial troops and the uniform of modern South African civil servants, such as
administer the bureaucratic intricacies of apartheid' (p.243). In my view, the appropriation of
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the uniform of service is an embodiment, and not the only one, of the church's acquiescence
towards the state, its stress on duty under law, its project of becoming part of the estab-
lishment, even the colonial establishment. These are characteristics of the Zimbabwean-based
ZCC, as I have demonstrated fully elsewhere,' and the available evidence confirms that they
are also characteristics of the South African-based ZCC. 10 To argue otherwise is to create a
reading of implicit culture and signifying practice which runs flatly against what people do and
explicitly say they are doing in their religious movement. But let me add immediately, lest I be
misunderstood, that I am not suggesting that all Zionists, or even all ZCC members, are one in
their politics. There has been a whole spectrum among them, from acquiescence in the
colonial state and opposition to nationalist politics, to political ambivalence, to dissent and
outright rejection of the colonial state; and this is a spectrum which I try to account for
elsewhere, recognizing that some churches' policies are more changeable than others."
At the heart of the matter are questions of method, for which post-structuralist, like the
structuralist, anthropologists do not have, and perhaps cannot have, ready answers. Every
interpretation of religious imagery and non-verbal behaviour must turn upon a reading of
motivation. But how do we arrive at that reading of motivation? What weight must we give to
the explicit intent of the people themselves as against our inferences about the implicit and the
unspoken?"
This leads me to a further major difficulty with the protest thesis, married as it is to the
notion of counter-culture. The notion of counter-culture is, I would argue, too gross, too
indiscriminate, for the analysis of the actual spectrum of movements in contemporary
9
See R. P. Werbner, 'The Argument of Images: From Zion to the Wilderness in African Churches' in
W. van Binsbergen and M. Schoffeleers (eds.), Theoretical Explorations in African Religion (London,
1985). Comaroff refers to my discussion, highlighting other parts of it. Thus she does not consider the
basic disagreement between her protest thesis and the church project of material establishment, the
acquiescence in consciousness, as well as the other features of ZCC imagery and organisation which are
shared by the South African- and Zimbabwean-based churches. See also M. Daneel, Old and New in
Southern Shona Independent Churches, Volumes 1 and 2 (The Hague, 1971, 1974).
10
Sundkler observed a swing from an initial tendency to prophetic protest during the 1913-43 period
towards a tendency to accommodation and acceptance of apartheid under the Nationalists. In the latter
period, both in Zululand and in Swaziland (as in Zimbabwe) the church leadership fostered a prime
commitment to industriousness, profit-making, business enterprise and government-sponsored peasant
schemes. B. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (London, second edition 1961), pp. 307-8. In the
earlier period, state authorities were sometimes initially suspicious and hostile towards Zionists.
Eventually, persecution was replaced by much sought-for official recognition and the granting of
imprimatur for selected churches. Botha's Easter address to the ZCC was thus a peak in long-standing
recognition of mutual accommodation, not a new departure. On the emphasis on law, dutifulness and
morality in Tswana churches of the Spirit, see B. A. Pauw, Religion in a Tswana Chiefdom (London,
1960), pp. 218ff.
11
See note 9.
12
These methodological problems are debated in G. Lewis, Day of Shining Red (Cambridge, 1981).
 156 Journal of Southern African Studies
religious pluralism. Indeed, using that notion hinders Comaroff from pursuing the full
implications of her own deconstruction of the unlike bricolage of the ZCC and the Full
Witness Church.-Religious pluralism is reduced to the logic of uniform protest. We are left
wondering about the rest of the Spirit Churches among Tshidi, whether the diversity across
the spectrum has been fully recognised in the analysis, whether members' distinctions, such as
the widespread contrast between Zionists and Apostles, have been taken into account. Some of
the distinctions overlap — a church may call itself Zionist and Apostolic — and are blurred in
practice; but they do indicate recognised extremes. More generally, the unfulfilled need is for
a theoretical framework which accounts for the diversity in church-state relations, and for the
construction of this diversity in organisation, as well as signifying practice. In brief, Zionism
has to be deconstructed, not reduced to a 'unitary movement'.
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Finally, something must be said about the overall approach to historical reconstruction.
Comaroff is well aware that very diverse cultural forms might have emerged during the
precolonial period. But she defends her usage of 'the Tswana system' and 'the Tswana
cosmos'. Her contention is that internal contradiction was contained: 'dominant patterns of
social, economic, and ritual practice in the immediate precolonial context tended to perpetuate
the system in place' (p. 10, italics in original). This contention is essential for her method. In
interpreting the meaningful nuances of the precolonial implicit culture, she has to make up for
the fact that the historical record, whether written or oral, is simply far too thin when it comes
to the observed symbolic practices of Tshidi themselves, in particular, rather than Tswana in
general. Hence she puts precolonial signifying practice together, such as in the finely detailed
and subtly interpreted initiation ritual of the Tswana, from very different times, places and
people. It has to be highly selective; it is on the basis of what are bits and pieces in the partial
accounts by early nineteenth and twentieth century travellers, missionaries as well as
anthropologists. The methodological difficulty, often rehearsed in debates about the unit of
study, is obvious. It is real, nonetheless; it represents a major stumbling block, and not merely
in Comaroffs work.
Anthropologists are commonly faced with the poverty of history about the implicit culture
of people whom they know from their fieldwork. Without essaying a view of past implicit
culture, anthropologists must fail as culture historians; but with a construction and interpreta-
tion stitched over a whole culture area, the doubt remains about what was specifically
embodied in ritual and other signifying practices of the people actually studied. In other
words, the danger is that in becoming culture area historians, anthropologists may subvert
their own quest for understanding local knowledge and local experience.