Johannes Fabian

Bio: Johannes Fabian is an academic researcher from University of Amsterdam. The author has contributed to research in topics: Charisma & Swahili. The author has an hindex of 25, co-authored 59 publications receiving 6493 citations. Previous affiliations of Johannes Fabian include Wesleyan University & Northwestern University.

Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object

Abstract: Fabian's study is a classic in the field that changed the way anthropologists relate to their subjects and is of immense value not only to anthropologists but to all those concerned with the study of man. A new foreward by Matti Bunzl brings the influence of Fabian's study up to the present. Time and the Other is a critique of the notions that anthropologists are "here and now," their objects of study are "there and then," and that the "other" exists in a time not contemporary with our own.

Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing

Abstract: It is not without significance that in anthropological and sociological usage representation most often appears in the plural. The singular would put the emphasis on representation as an activity or process. Instead, by privileging the plural, we invoke entities, products of knowledge or culture. That this is not merely a matter of practicality-of devising terms that best fit the analytical tasks to which we put themwill, I hope, become clear from the reflections that follow. Taken as a philosophical issue, the idea of representation implies the prior assumption of a difference between reality and its "doubles."

Power and performance : ethnographic explorations through proverbial wisdom and theater in Shaba, Zaire

Abstract: "Power is eaten whole" ("Le pouvoir se mange entier"). In 1985 the distinguished anthropologist Johannes Fabian, engaged in fieldwork in the Shaba province of Zaire, first encountered this saying about power. Its implications - for the charismatic religious movements Fabian was examining, for the highly charged political atomosphere of Zaire, and for the culture of the Lub peoples - continued to intrigue him, but its meaning remained elusive. On a later visit, he mentioned the saying to a company of popular actors, and triggered an ethnographic brainstorm. They decided it would be just the right topic for their next play. This book examines traditional proverbs about power. Above all, it relates how the performance of "Le pouvoir se mange entier" was created, rehearsed, and performed by the Troupe Mufwankolo. The play deals with the issue of power through a series of conflicts between villages and their chief. Both rehearsal and performance versions of the text of this drama are included, in Swahili and in English translation. Observation, to Fabian, is itself a social process so throughout, he and the actors worked together to enact, analyze, interpret, and concretely "unpack" the meanings of the saying. The result is a book containing reflections, asides, evocative descriptions of settings and events, yet with a continuing concern for the limitations of the ethnographer's perspective and of the power relations that are never absent from ethnographic works. Much of what ethnographers study as "culture" is performance, says Fabian, and his work is an attempt to redirect the anthropologist's work from "informative" to "peformative" ethnography. His discussions of collaborative strategy of "performance" vs "text" as goals, of translation, and of a host of other issues will enrich current theoretical debates about power, representation and the dialogues of ethnography that go well beyond the immediate African context.

Popular Culture in Africa: Findings and Conjectures

Abstract: One effect of specialization in the field of African Studies has been to prevent or hinder the study of subjects which, by their very nature, demand interdisciplinary interests and competences. Emerging popular culture is such a field. Division of labor among various social sciences and between the social sciences and the humanities—late-comers to Anglo-American concerns with Africa—have long worked like a conjuring trick: making vast and vigorous expressions of African experience de facto invisible, especially to expatriate researchers. African scholars have been slow to denounce this state of affairs, perhaps out of an elitist need to set themselves apart from the loud and colorful bursts of creativity in music, oral lore, and the visual arts emerging from the masses.

Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880-1938

Abstract: Among the preconditions for establishing colonial authority was communication with the colonised. Verbal exchanges depended on a shared communicative praxis providing common ground on which unilateral claims could be imposed. Use of, and control over, verbal means of communication were needed to maintain regimes - military, religious-ideological, economic - in power. In the Belgian Congo brutal physical force never ceased to be exercised. In this study Professor Fabian examines the more subtle uses of power through controls on communication, by looking at the history of Swahili as it spread from the East Coast to Central Africa and demonstrating connections between -changing forms of colonial power and the development of policies towards Swahili. Using a wide range of sources, including numerous and sometimes obscure vocabularies, he combines concepts derived from literary theory and sociolinguistics to uncover, through the flaws and failures of these texts, deep-seated attitudes to language and communication.

We Have Never Been Modern

Abstract: What makes us modern? This is a classic question in philosophy as well as in political science. However it is often raised without including science and technology in its definition. The argument of this book is that we are modern as long as we split our political process in two - between politics proper, and science and technology. This division allows the formidable expansion of the Western empires. However it has become more and more difficult to maintain this distance between science and politics. Hence the postmodern predicament - the feeling that the modern stance is no longer acceptable but that there is no alternative. The solution, advances one of France's leading sociologists of science, is to realize that we have never been modern to begin with. The comparative anthropology this text provides reintroduces science to the fabric of daily life and aims to make us compatible both with our past and with other cultures wrongly called pre-modern.

Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method

Abstract: Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method is a systematic introduction to discourse analysis as a body of theories and methods for social research. It brings together three central approaches, Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, critical discourse analysis and discursive psychology, in order to establish a dialogue between different forms of discourse analysis often kept apart by disciplinary boundaries. The book introduces the three approaches in a clear and easily comprehensible manner, explaining the distinctive philosophical premises and theoretical perspectives of each approach as well as the methodological guidelines and tools they provide for empirical discourse analysis. The authors also demonstrate the possibilities for combining different discourse analytical and non-discourse analytical approaches in empirical study. Finally, they contextualize discourse analysis within the social constructionist debate about critical social research, rejecting the view that a critical stance is incompatible with social constructionist premises and arguing that critique must be an inherent part of social research.

Interaction Analysis: Foundations and Practice

Abstract: (1995). Interaction Analysis: Foundations and Practice. Journal of the Learning Sciences: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 39-103.

The temporality of the landscape

Abstract: Landscape and temporality are the major unifying themes of archaeology and social‐cultural anthropology. This paper attempts to show how the temporality of the landscape may be understood by way of a ‘dwelling perspective’ that sets out from the premise of people's active, perceptual engagement in the world. The meaning of ‘landscape’ is clarified by contrast to the concepts of land, nature and space. The notion of ‘taskscape’ is introduced to denote a pattern of dwelling activities, and the intrinsic temporality of the taskscape is shown to lie in its rhythmic interrelations or patterns of resonance. By considering how taskscape relates to landscape, the distinction between them is ultimately dissolved, and the landscape itself is shown to be fundamentally temporal. Some concrete illustrations of these arguments are drawn from a painting by Bruegel, The Harvesters.