Continuing the Quest of Dialectical Anthropology in the 21st Century: Reflections on the Igbo of Nigeria (original) (raw)

2004, Dialectical Anthropology

Stanley Diamond, the founder of Dialectical Anthropology has left us with a remarkable legacy and challenge to continue his vision. Inspired by his memory, his relentless critique of Western civilization, colonialism and capitalism, and shared inspirations from the non-Western world, we carry on with his critique and search for alternatives. Diamond's oeuvre is complex, as has been outlined earlier by Wolf-Dieter Narr, 1 and others. 2 This editorial focuses on one specific aspect of Diamond's work, his search for a future vision of humanity as an alternative to contemporary Western civilization. Stanley Diamond has most succinctly formulated this search in his book, In Search of the Primitive. 3 As Wolf-Dieter Narr has pointed out earlier, 4 Stanley Diamond's notion of ''the primitive,'' is not idealized, or nostalgic, nor is it uni-lineally evolutionary, demeaning, or relativistic. Instead, Diamond's vision invokes ''the primitive'' as an a priori, original, or pristine model of human society, ''a primary human potential,'' 5 or social formation he conceptualized as having been ''first'', a primus inter pares, resulting in a ''primitive civilized dichotomy.'' 6 From this perspective, later social developments appear as aberrations, or negations of prior achievements, but a dialectical relation with this primary human potential may create new and modern forms of society. Primitive is, I believe, the critical term in anthropology, the word around which the field revolves, yet it remains elusive, connoting but never quite denoting a series of related, social, political, economic, spiritual and psychiatric meanings. That is, primitive implies a certain level of history, and a certain mode of cultural being. 7 In contrast to Diamond's version of the primitive, other authors, notably writing in the service of colonialism have used the term, ''primitive,'' differently, emphasizing as deficiencies the absence of European style institutions in non-European societies e.g. the absence of political power, or of a monolithic state structure, thus justifying colonial conquest and intervention. After first having stimulated and