Ukweshwama from another perspective

Much has been said, and shouted, and debated, about the Zulu practice of ukweshwama, or the ritual killing of a bull by (if I recall correctly) 30 Zulu warriors with their bare hands. With the exception of a few sporadic signs that some of the contributors to the debate have understood the place of this ritual in a culture that is rooted in past — in fact, very old — traditions, thus implying that it may be seen as being out of step with contemporary conceptions of “animal rights”, hardly anyone seems to have grasped that the clash of opinions is due to an incompatibility of structurally and axiologically different kinds of culture.

Approaching the practice from the perspective of the structural differences among distinctive types of culture, rather than specifically Zulu, or British, or contemporary Western culture, may therefore be revealing. One of the most familiar distinctions in cultural theory is that between premodern, modern and postmodern culture(s). These concepts may seem, at first blush, to have periodising or historical significance only, which would mean that premodern culture preceded modern culture which, in its turn, antedated postmodern culture. This is not the whole truth, though, with the upshot that all three kinds of culture can (and do) co-exist today in various societies, as I would like to argue below.

Structurally speaking, premodern culture is recognisable by the fact that it is committed to a mythical and/or religious account of the universe — for example myths of the origin of the world, of the gods, or of sexual difference — and to cultural practices, such as magic, (with its concomitant superstitions) which are rooted in such religious-mythical worldviews. Furthermore, its conception of humanity is such that it conflates the universal and the particular, which means in practice that the particular culture regards itself as being the true representative of humanity; it lacks a grasp of humanity as a universalistic concept, of which there are particular cultural embodiments.

It is also the case that, historically, adherence to such premodern conceptions preceded the emergence of the modern, scientific account of the universe — and here I am not only talking about the modern (Western) worldview that took shape around the 17th and 18th centuries CE Enlightenment; ancient Greece also had its own modernity, as it were, when the philosophical and ancient Greek “scientific” approach to mundane phenomena replaced the earlier mythical explanations found in the works of Homer and Hesiod, for instance. In other words, at that time, already, one saw the structural differences between the premodern and the modern manifesting themselves.

Hence, as may be gathered from what was said above, unlike premodern culture, with its belief in myth and magic, “modern” culture is characterised by a rational, conceptual, scientific approach to experience and to phenomena, which means that it values the “universal”, as opposed to the particular. Instead of depending on faith, or unquestioned religious belief, as the premodern mindset does, it flourishes on rationally motivated, theoretically guided observation, for the understanding of phenomena across the entire spectrum of human experience by means of (supposed) conceptual “unity”. Technology is the offspring of this mindset, in so far as it requires the reduction of the experiential world to mathematically calculable relations (absent from the premodern attitude) to be able to construct the kind of apparatus intended to (presumably) “control” natural (and social) processes. Because the modern mindset is predicated on the comprehension of things in terms of universalistic concepts, humanity is grasped as a set of which there are subsets that share in the universal epithet, “human”.

The postmodern attitude is typically sceptical about any claims to universality, whether this applies to humanity or anything else, and tends to emphasise the local, the particular, the “other”, diversity, difference, fragmentation, “disunity”, and so on, as a kind of corrective to the universalistic excesses of modern thinking. In addition, historically speaking, the postmodern technological counterpart to modern technology (which is typically “industrial”), assumes the shape of advanced electronic information technology, which exacerbates the social fragmentation so typical (structurally speaking) of postmodernity (think of the internet, and the way that it promotes differences among people). This is why authoritarian regimes, such as that of China, constantly attempt to regulate internet activity: the latter is a threat to the (modern) national unity ideologically espoused by the Chinese government.

I should add (as an aside), that within the postmodern conceptual landscape, however, one encounters the poststructuralist approach, which is a critical theoretical approach that refuses the extremes of both modern and the postmodern cultural practices (as well as the naïveté of the premodern). That is, instead of rejecting claims to universality, or, on the other hand, the relativistic valorisation of particularity, it attempts to think these together, or to negotiate the difficult terrain between these two extremes: not universality OR particularity, but universality AND particularity. For example, Foucault demonstrates that the stabilisation of social activity is mediated, universally, by various discourses, but at the same time, these discourses change historically (in their “particularity”).

What does all of this have to do with ukweshwama, one may wonder. If it is not obvious, from the above, that a society such as the South African is a hotchpotch of premodern, modern, AND postmodern cultural practices, then you haven’t been paying attention. This close juxtaposition of all three structural cultural modes in South Africa makes the situation all the more postmodern of course — not only is there fragmentation and difference in the well-known “rainbow nation” sense, but different, axiologically irreconcilable cultural modes (premodern, modern and postmodern) continue existing side by side.
And South Africa is not the only country where this is the case, either. This is pretty much the case all over the world in the era of globalisation, with a predominance in different directions from one country to the next. In the Northern Hemisphere the predominance is in the direction of a combination of the modern (industrial) and the postmodern (informational), while in so-called Third World countries the premodern is more strongly represented. This is evident from, among other sources, Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book on Africa, The Shadow of the Sun, where he discusses the strong and pervasive presence of a belief in the causal powers of magic in African countries, in contrast with the more rationally-oriented approach in (Western) European countries. The persistence of “muti” murders in South Africa — something that crops up in the news from time to time — is further demonstration of the pervasiveness of a premodern collective mindset in this country.

The practice of ukweshwama should be seen in this light, too — it is rooted in a set of premodern beliefs that have nothing to do with science and technology, or with information systems — the hallmarks, respectively, of the modern and the postmodern. It harks back to a premodern belief in the efficacy of (among others, sacrificial) rituals that affirm and celebrate the connection between humans and nature, eros and thanatos (life and death), and which serves the purpose of re-uniting the people practising such rituals with the chthonic forces of nature and the deities (or ancestors, for that matter). To appeal to the concept of animal rights, or that of cruelty against animals, in this context, therefore, instantiates what Lyotard calls a “differend” — a discursive incompatibility between two or more axiological idioms that construe the world in incommensurate ways. In such a situation no one on either side of the debate (if one could call it that) will be able to convince their opponents of the validity of their own position, because their assumptions are totally irreconcilable — in the one case premodern, and in the other modern and/or postmodern.

Lest adherents to so-called Western culture adopt a superior position here, imagining themselves as being elevated above the practitioners of premodern cultural rites, let me hasten to remind them that their vaunted modernity and postmodernity (it is usually a mixture of the two) is still shot through with premodern practices, too. The Christian practice of “holy communion”, for example, is thoroughly premodern, resting as it does on the assumption of the possibility of the trans-substantiation of bread (or wafer) and wine into the flesh and blood of a contradictory deity, who is simultaneously human and divine. The same is true of many Judaic, Muslim and Hindu religious practices, for example the Muslim “stoning of the devil” ritual (if I have the name correct).

Then there is the practice of bullfighting in Spain, and the “running of the bulls” in Pamplona, which similarly go back to premodern rituals of reconciliation with nature and the deities through sacrifice and the risk of death. If one places ukweshwama in this context, its sense becomes more evident, as does the futility of condemning it from a modern or postmodern point of view — the premodern discursive rules governing it just do not lend themselves to criticism in terms of the discursive rules governing the other two cultural modes.