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The Kalela dance First the background Whilst the structuralist-functionalist paradigm occupied British anthropology for nearly

20 years, the study of process slowly crawled its way up through the works of Max Gluckman, Clyde Mitchell and other anthropologists within the Manchester school. These anthropologists for some time operated under the umbrella of structural functionalism, but it was them, who started to increasingly consider certain aspects of social change, rather than structure, and its characteristics. Besides, anthropology paradigms were shifting together with the changes happening within the societies themselves during the decolonization period in Africa. The process of transition from one paradigm to the other in anthropology is never quite smooth and straightforward, but we can see the influences of one method leaking through especially in the development of processual analysis. For this reason, I would like to examine the exceptional work of Clyde Mitchell, The Kalela Dance (1956), in which he built upon the previous influences of his colleagues and expanded them. Following the method of Max Gluckman, Mitchell has described The Kalela dance, supposedly a tribal dance of migrant workers in Northern Rhodesia. This dance has been assumed to have a much larger importance than just an entertainment. Hence Mitchell in his analysis isolated the elements of the dance and traced them to the wider society with the presumption that these elements will give him clues of the historical and sociological conditions of the whole structure. (The Kalela dance) By tracking the historical development of the dance, he discovers that the dance was created as a reaction to the newly established order. The urban area is newly occupied by migrant workers from numerous tribes as a result of the establishment of the colonial miner industry. The space the workers from different tribes shared within the urban area was a complicated arena to deal with a complex set of relationships between tribes. As a result, they established joking relationships between tribes, some of these were expressed in the Kalela dance. Although I would presume, this worked as a mechanism of adjustment to the forced order; Mitchell classifies this as a powerful medium of social control. (38, The Kalela Dance) Or even as an alternative to social structure: The joking relationship is invoked mainly in situations of casual social intercourse, where interaction does not take place within the framework of some well-defined social structure. (41, The Kalela Dance) There is clearly recognition of the scope which goes beyond the social structure. His argument that joking relationships were a powerful medium of social control is nonetheless a reconfirmation of his school of thought within the framework of structural functionalism as the joking relationships are seen as a mere reinforcement of an equilibrium. The Kalela dance, as one of the expressions of the joking relationships, is therefore also a reinforcement of the structure. However, the lasting contribution of his work lies in his conception of a tribe. The perception of ones tribes boundaries is expanding with its increasing distance from the migrant worker. This was because in the context of urban migration, the workers come from a variety of places

and those living in the tribes nearby perceive the area they come from as an area with clear and more specific boundaries and those who come from further tribes include other areas within their description to put themselves into a context. It is a similar situation as I would describe my place of origin within a wider context when being in a far away location. As a suitable anecdote comes my encounter in Indonesia, where I was asked where I was from. To that I answered Czech Republic, and I received a puzzled question: Chicken public?! It became easier to place ones place of origin within its wider context. With this the notion of a society as fixed in space, which was the idea of structural functionalists, is collapsing. Mitchell also uncovers the multi-identities of individual actors. This notion is one of the characteristics, which is much more elaborated in the later works of Victor Turner. Whilst the people occupying the urban areas are workers, they are also seen as tribesmen. This view then leaves much more space for other roles, which the tribesmen must have naturally embraced whilst living in the urban area. Therefore the transition between the tribesmen and workers is recognised, because they are neither one nor the other, but both at the same time. Despite his ability to recognise the fluidity of roles and tribes that flourish in the urban area, he still clings onto the idea of categories and principles to divide those according to cultural similarity, familiarity, geographic proximity and reputation. African workers were regarded as tribesmen temporarily resident in town, whose relationships to one another we fixed by the categories of social interactions appropriate to their rural origins. (31) Almost as a protection to yet unspoken criticism, he says that individuality under these circumstances must be replaced by categories. Some other authors commenting: With Mitchell's treatment of the Kalela dance (I956), on the other hand, it is the dance itself which constitutes the situation. Kalela is a dance which is regularly performed at weekends in the towns of the Copperbelt of Zambia by teams of dancers each largely drawn from one tribal group. As they shuffle around the arena the dancers sing songs which ridicule the members of other tribes, some of whom constitute the spectators. However, the songs are sung in the language of town and are phrased in an urban idiom. Noting this fact and the discrepancy between the smartness of dress of the dancers and their very lowly occupational status, Mitchell treats the situation as a vehicle for analysing the significance of tribe and class as categories for interaction on the Copperbelt. In his treatment of the situation he does not deal with the assembly of the dancers or with their dispersal, and the spatial boundaries of the situation extend only to include the dancing arena and the immediate spectators. (Garbett, the analysis of social situations) By contrast, in a network analysis of a situation, Mitchell argues (I969: 47), one accepts the inherent multiplexity of relationships and, by taking each individual in turn as a focus, maps his relationships, both direct and indirect, with other individuals in the situation and external to it. One then seeks for regularities in the ways in which the behaviour of an individual is affected by the configurations of relationships among other individuals both within the

situation and external to it. One can then proceed, if one wishes, to abstract partial networks, then to abstract groups, organisational structures and institutions, but there is a difference between this procedure and that used in institutional analysis. By mapping actual networks of relationships, one can examine the extent to which behaviour which occurs in terms of one normative framework is related to that which occurs in terms of an- other framework. With institutional analysis, on the other hand, the mode of abstraction tends to minimise the connexions between institutions, and it is difficult therefore to establish the extent of their interdependence. Abstractions from actual networks, however, enable the extent of the interdependence of institutions to be established empirically (Mitchell I969: 49). The actual systematic mapping of social relationships in the way in which Mitchell advocates raises formidable problems which he himself acknowledges (I969:30). 223

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