Abstract
A major obstacle to an accurate understanding of the influence that the period Norbert Elias spent in West Africa had on his thought has been the fact that his writings on processes of civilization in Africa have remained unpublished, available only for those able to access the Elias archives in Marbach. This obstacle has been removed by the publication of Elias’s Ghanaian essays. In this review essay I examine how Elias’s essays reveal a crucial development in his understanding of civilizing and decivilizing processes, as being driven by the organisation of human social groups as ‘survival units’, in which civilizing processes are in fact always counter-balanced by contradictory tendencies in the opposite direction, towards violence and decivilizing processes. These essays suggest a new reading of Elias’s writings from the 1970s onwards, one that brings to the foreground the tension between relatively advanced intra-state and relatively underdeveloped inter-state civilizing processes.
Keywords
By and large I am using Krobo society here as an empirical model. It helps to bring characteristic structures of societies of a comparable stage of development into focus. But it will need many more comparative studies before one can be sure which structures and functions are characteristic of all societies at a comparable stage of development, which to only some of them, [and which] even to Krobo society only. (Elias in Reicher et al., 2022: 162)
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Introduction: Elias and Anthropology
In a paper delivered to the second annual conference of the Ghana Sociological Association in 1963, midway through his two-year stint as Professor of Sociology at the University of Ghana, Norbert Elias begins his discussion of the relationship between sociology and anthropology by observing that they are closely related, ‘and yet, as close relatives often are, not always on the best of terms and not quite clear how they stand in relation to each other’ (Reicher et al., 2022: 213). This formulation also captures his own relationship to anthropology from that point onwards, which, among the social sciences, has been the most difficult. The critique of his account of the gradual transformation of power relationships and shared habitus in France, Germany and Britain – beginning with a conference organized in response to his major work, On the Process of Civilisation (Elias, 2012 [1939]) in Amsterdam in 1981 – was mounted in terms of a number of concerns. They included the Eurocentric, evolutionist and colonialist dimensions of the term ‘civilization’ and its apparent implied claim to validity across cultures, and the apparently differing linkages between state formation processes and the formation of habitus both within and outside Western Europe. 2
Most of these debates remained more or less contained within the Dutch (Blok, 1982; Kellner, 1995; Thoden van Velzen, 1984; van Krieken, 1989; Wilterdink, 1982) and German literature (Kellner, 1995; Schlossberger, 2000), the latter focused on Hans-Peter Duerr’s five volume critique of Elias’s historical anthropology (Duerr, 1988, 1990, 1993, 1997, 2002; for responses, see Elias, 2008 [1988], Mennell and Goudsblom, 1997, Mennell, 2004, and van Krieken, 2005). English-language anthropologists continued resolutely to ignore Elias, until Jack Goody (2002, 2003, 2006) wrote a number of reflections on his encounter with him in Ghana, outlining how he thought Elias’s work should be understood in relation to anthropology. Goody’s account rests on, first, his personal interaction with Elias while they were both at the University of Ghana – Elias was head of department – and, second, his reading of two of Elias’s works: The Civilizing Process (Elias, 1994a [1939]) and his autobiographical Reflections on a Life (Elias, 1994b [1984]).
A major obstacle to the development of an accurate understanding of the impact and implications of Elias’s time in West Africa has been the fact that his writings on the topic, at that time and after – with the exception of two pieces on African art (Elias, 2009a [1970], 2009b [1970]) – have remained unpublished as incomplete drafts of a projected book that never came to fruition, accessible only to those able to access the Elias archives in the Deutsches Literatur Archiv in Marbach. Elias would make frequent reference to African examples in his later writings, but on the whole they tended to get overshadowed by the core narrative about the European process of civilization.
That obstacle has now been removed by the publication of a selection of Elias’s writings on Africa at the time, in 1963, and later, in 1984 and 1987, superbly edited by Dieter Reicher, Adrian Jitschin, Arjan Post and Behrouz Alikhani, titled Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation: On the Formation of Survival Units in Ghana. Although he never got to the point of considering these essays publishable himself, the editors have worked with typescripts with (often barely legible) handwritten annotations, clarified the text with subheadings, and provided an invaluable overview of the book in their opening chapter. The title Elias envisaged for the book that was intended to emerge from these essays was Ghanaian Essays, both reflecting the origins of the writings in his Ghana period and expressing what he learned during that period (p. 35). Their publication can fairly be described as the ‘missing link’ (Reicher, 2023: 197) between his 1939 analysis of the civilizing process and the ways in which his thinking developed, and in some ways changed direction, in the 1970s and 1980s. It may be an exaggeration to consider Elias’s Ghana period as constituting an ‘epistemological break’, but there are significant differences between his thought before and after Ghana, and this book casts important new light on those differences and their significance.
In order to position these essays within an understanding of the impact of Elias’s time in Africa on his thinking in the 1970s and 1980s, a number of aspects of Goody’s reading of Elias are particularly worth highlighting. First, Goody claims that Elias regarded the Ghanaians as a ‘Natuurvolk’, in contrast to ‘civilized’ Europeans, and that Elias used that term to refer to Africans generally. In a sense this echoes Anton Blok’s (1982) criticism at the 1981 Amsterdam conference on ‘Civilization Theory and Civilizing Processes’, that the term ‘civilized’ necessarily implies an opposition between ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’. This is a serious misreading of Elias, and as Liston and Mennell (2009: 5) suggest, it appears to be a projection of Goody’s own. 3 Although it is possible, as Liston and Mennell suggest, that he expressed himself poorly in conversation, Elias never used the term ‘Natuurvolk’ in his writing, his explanation of what he means by the process of civilization specifically excludes it, and he explicitly rejected any opposition between ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’. His emphasis was always on development and processes of change rather than contrasting ‘types’ of society, and his terminology revolved around the concept of increasing complexity and differentiation.
Second, Goody (2002: 402) claims that Elias wanted to replace anthropology with sociology at the University of Ghana, suggesting that this was a manifestation of his incurable Eurocentrism and ignorance of anthropological scholarship. Elias had in fact long been interested in the work of the French philosopher and anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, arguing for a reissue of two of Lévy-Bruhl’s books, and one can see the influence of Lévy-Bruhl on these essays, which also display a familiarity with most of the key texts in anthropology (Elias, 2014). Goody is also misreading Elias’s intentions, not to mention of the overall situation in the department and the shifting relationships between the two disciplines. The complexity of the relationship at the University of Ghana was expressed in the fact that, while it had been headed by anthropologists, it was named the Department of Sociology. Elias did want to cease offering Cultural Anthropology in the first year of the sociology degree, but he backed down in the face of resistance from staff and students (Korte, 2013: 59–60), as well as a firm instruction from the university, despite his ongoing concerns about the dominant approaches in that field. The university, while approving generally of Elias’s revisions to the syllabus, also felt that Social Anthropology remained ‘fundamentally relevant in the present context to the sociology of change’ and ‘should not be ignored or underemphasized’ (van Loyen, 2012: 27–8).
The anthropologists of course had a much longer history of engagement with West African society and culture, but the discipline’s historical association with concerns of colonial administration (Sichone, 2003: 477–8; on which Elias also comments), its tendency to valorize tradition and cultural continuity at the expense of modernization and cultural development, and the wide-ranging processes of change generated by decolonization and urbanization – not to mention the dominance of the discipline by non-African scholars – made some sort of rapprochement with sociology increasingly necessary (Darkwah et al., 2014: 102; Hart, 1985), and that was Elias’s overall aim. Elias’s critique of the over-reliance on the concept of ‘tribe’ in anthropology reflects Richards’s (1961: 4) observation that ‘it is not surprising that anthropology should now appear to many people to be a kind of anachronism, hopelessly inadequate as a type of research and likely to be blown off the field, like so much else, by the famous winds of change’, even though Richards goes on to argue for the continued importance of tribal studies (p. 10). Indeed, Elias was supportive of Goody himself contributing to the sociology programme: George Steinmetz notes a letter Elias wrote to the registrar in July 1964, requesting that Goody be permitted to teach social anthropology ‘for at least a term if not more next session’, arguing that his ‘teaching would be of very great help to our students next session’ (Steinmetz, 2013: 364).
Third, Goody (2002: 408) really ends up in furious agreement with Elias’s orientation when he declares that Elias’s singular achievement was his development of the tradition of historical and comparative sociology, and that his engagement with the question of long-term changes in human ‘affect and control structures’ constituted ‘an interesting question and is not one that anthropologists have much discussed, certainly in terms of affect and emotion’. Elias’s arguments in the paper delivered at the 1963 Ghana Sociological Association conference in fact prefigured – or at least resonated with – the developments in anthropological approaches to West Africa in the years after his stay in Ghana, and indeed with many aspects of Goody’s own distinctive approach to anthropology. British anthropologists, as Keith Hart (1985: 240) points out in his overview of West African anthropology, had a ‘concerted resistance to historical methods’, displaying ‘little interest in the history of the precolonial period and scarcely more in colonial structures and their imminent breakdown’ (1985: 248). The massive changes wrought by the processes of decolonization made it increasingly difficult to sustain the synchronic approach to societies; anthropologists ‘could no longer claim with conviction that the peoples they studied had no history’ (Hart, 1985: 252).
Interestingly, it is precisely Goody’s work, from 1962 onwards, that is held up as the leading example of the marriage between anthropology and history (Hart, 1985: 254), exactly what Elias was arguing for, and why he was critical of the social anthropology being offered to Ghanaian students. Elias does not cite him, but T.H. Marshall had argued in 1956 that . . . one may legitimately hazard the view that the basic identity of the fundamental problems of social anthropology and sociology, in the present phase of their development, has become evident; after a period of divergence, the two disciplines are converging again. . . . the funds of knowledge and suggestion embedded in their literatures have not been fully integrated, and their contemporary thinking sometimes runs on parallel lines when it might very well all board the same train. (Marshall, 1956: 60)
Evans-Pritchard (1967: 172), no less, agrees, observing that sociology and social anthropology are inseparable, despite having become institutionalized as separate subjects. Elias’s position was thus not particularly distinctive, reflecting the complexities of the interdependencies and structural tensions between an anthropology establishment and the rising upstart, sociology. As Steinmetz remarks, Goody’s fractious attitude towards Elias ‘seems to echo the animus driving anthropologists in the early 1960s as they witnessed an unexpected reversal of fortunes between the two disciplines’ (Steinmetz, 2014: 318).
Finally, there are conflicting portrayals of the views held by students about the role of anthropology in the curriculum. Korte (2013: 59–60) reports dissatisfaction among colleagues and students, forcing Elias to ease off on his desire to reconfigure the relationship between the two disciplines. However, a survey conducted in 1964 revealed divided student opinion, with ‘a strong trend of opinion in favour of less social anthropology’ (Rollings, 1967: 61), and in any case students felt that the anthropology that was offered should focus less on ‘primitive societies which might have undergone changes in modern times’ and more on ‘modern folk societies’ (Rollings, 1967: 63). Although it is hard to tell if he is referring to the same survey – it is possible he was discussing one conducted in the early 1970s – Max Assimeng similarly reports that students claimed that what they found ‘appalling’ in the sociology programme included ethnography, the tendency to over-emphasize anthropology, the over-emphasis on traditional and simple societies, and social anthropology, and their suggestions for improvement included ‘anthropology content should be reduced’, with ‘more emphasis on rural, urban and industrial aspects of the discipline’. As Darkwah et al. (2014: 104) sum it up, ‘evidence from surveys with students over the years has shown consistently that they have not been enthused with the content of their Social Anthropology classes’. In many respects, then, rather than presenting a radical new argument, Elias appears to have been roughly in tune with the Zeitgeist, although the students would no doubt have had his insistence on familiarity with Marx, Comte and Weber in mind when they complained about the ‘over-reliance on ancient theories’ (Assimeng, 2005: 104).
A more thorough and accurate engagement with Elias’s relationship to anthropology can be found in the collection edited by Sophie Chevalier and Jean-Marie Privat (2004a) – unfortunately, still untranslated from French – in which they conclude that the relationship is complex, but ultimately fruitful, providing a novel perspective on anthropology that is, in reality, not a great distance away from the debates internal to the discipline (Chevalier and Privat, 2004b). Elias’s critique is not of the discipline itself but of particular approaches to the comparative study of what he termed simpler, less differentiated societies, particularly the lack of interest in history and development over time. Chevalier and Privat (2004b) foreground what Goody confines to the background, the significance of Elias’s historical and comparative sociology, and the value of an examination of what that implies for anthropological theory and research. As Anton Blok has remarked, despite his 1981 critique, ‘[t]here has always been a direct connection between anthropology and Norbert Elias’ (2004: 107; see also Brandtstädter, 2000, 2003; Hahn, 2018; van Krieken, 2025).
Elias in Ghana
Criticizing Elias for failing to conduct ethnographic fieldwork really misses the point of his presence in Ghana, which was to promote the sociological teaching and research appropriate for Ghanaian students in the midst of post-colonial nation-building and state-formation. His task was not to add to the already extensive ethnographic research but to contribute his particular perspective on the structural logic of community formation and the co-existence of differing, and at times conflicting, social and ethnic groups. This was a central issue in Ghana in the midst of the post-colonial forging of a unified national identity out of a range of disparate tribal and ethnic affiliations from the end of the Second World War, as well as in relation to the resettlement of around 739 villages – around 80,000 people, 12,000 households, and roughly 1% of the population – being displaced by the flooding of the Volta River Basin resulting from the construction of the Akosombo Dam (Kalitsi, 1970: 48; Moxon, 1969: 162). Elias’s Ghanaian period sat in the middle of The Established and the Outsiders study of community relations in Winston Parva – written together with John Scotson – after the empirical material had been gathered and before it was fully written up (Elias and Scotson, 2008 [1965]). The knowledge Elias was developing in the African context was an important resource in addressing the broader questions raised by the processes of modernization, state-formation and nation-building, and especially in relation to the Volta River Basin resettlement project
Elias wrote regularly to René König, Professor of Sociology at Cologne University, founder of the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie as well as, at the time Elias wrote to him, president of the International Sociological Association, and these letters provide an important insight into Elias’s approach to his time in Ghana. He saw it very much as a learning experience, acquiring knowledge and experience that was ‘water on the mills of my developmental sociology’ (1 Nov 1962; van Loyen, 2012: 18). ‘I would never have believed’, wrote Elias in December 1963, ‘that my knowledge of human beings and society, acquired mainly on the basis of European evidence, could prove so limited as it in fact proves to be here. I should not have believed that I have so much to learn from Africa’ (Korte, 2013: 61). He felt that Africa had been left far too much to the anthropologists, that it was time for sociologists to assert themselves, and that ‘one of the most urgent tasks are comparative community studies’ (Korte, 2013: 61).
Elias also thought that the Volta resettlement process would bring to the surface a range of community problems that would otherwise be more difficult to discern, and that a sociological investigation would be of importance not only for Ghana but also for other African countries. ‘No community studies of this kind exist’, wrote Elias in a letter to the university management in February 1964. 4 He had hoped ‘to bring out in the near future one or two books connected with my experiences’ (Korte, 2013: 61–2), an aim that was no doubt put onto the back burner by the ever-increasing attention being paid to the work for which he is widely recognized – On the Process of Civilization – in the 1970s, 5 but he had in fact started to think in quite different ways about a number of the core issues in that book, manifesting itself in the less cited parts of his work, including What Is Sociology? (Elias, 2012 [1970]), his ‘Towards a Theory of Communities’ essay (2009 [1974]), and An Essay on Time (Elias, 2007 [1984]).
He may have not done ethnographic fieldwork, but he did address the problem of understanding Ghana in his own particular way. He read some of the available histories and ethnographies of the region, two key novels, drawing on them to develop his understanding of the particularities of the state-formation process in West Africa, as well as what it suggested about the dynamics of that process in the European setting. Michael Hinz suggests that Elias based his reflections ‘empirically on his own observations, interviews and written memories’ (Hinz, 2002: 140). However, it might be more accurate to say that, given how much attention he paid to the question of historical development, he essentially replicated his mode of working in the British Library when writing On the Process of Civilization, engaging as widely as possible with the available literature and drawing out his own particular analysis from his reading of those sources. Clearly he did do some empirical observation and interviews, it would be difficult not to without remaining confined to quarters, but on the whole this was to enhance the core narrative that he gleaned from his reading. Interestingly, there is no evidence in these essays of the concern that he highlights later in his autobiographical reflections: the possibility of seeing in Africa a society and way of being in the world that displayed a similar emotional and cognitive disposition as the ancient Greeks, given the continued prevalence of animal sacrifice as well as consideration for a multitude of local gods and fetishes, which Elias understood as bound up with a different kind of super-ego formation (Elias, 2013 [1984]: 131–3).
The book is best approached, contrary to its actual structure,
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as divided into three sections: (1) the three essays and the conference paper that he wrote while in Ghana, in 1963/4: Ch 2. ‘Preface to Ghanaian Essays: Overcoming “Tribe” and Other Static Categories’; Ch 3. ‘Problems of Ghanaian Communities’ – African Village-State as ‘Survival Units’ [with Hazel King]; Ch 9. Emotions, Violence and Rituals: On Traditional Klama Songs’; Ch 11. ‘Sociology and Anthropology’. (2) the paper he wrote for the 1984 Bielefeld conference: Ch 10. ‘The Formation of States and Changes in Restraint’. (3) the five essays he dictated in 1987: Ch 4. ‘Outline of an Early State Formation Process’; Ch 5. ‘A Tribe on the Move: The Development of Krobo Society’; Ch 6. ‘Fission and Fusion: The Next Stage of Tribe Formation’; Ch 7. ‘Religion in a Village Society’; Ch 8. ‘Priests and Knowledge’.
The Ghana Essays: 1963/4
Elias was appointed as a sociologist of community relations, intended to contribute to the Volta basin resettlement process. He did send 41 (paid) students out to conduct surveys in the villages, using all of a research budget of £4,000 within three months, but apparently there is no trace of the results of their labours. Elias’s expenditure and lack of outcome incurred the annoyance of the university administration, which terminated the research project as financially unsustainable and unworkable (Jitschin, 2022). Instead, in his writings Elias was concerned with addressing the defects of the existing anthropological literature on Ghanaian society and culture, and with developing an adequate understanding of Ghanaian pre-colonial history. For Elias the disparity between European and African experience constituted a cognitive problem, both for anthropology generally and for himself as a comparative and historical sociologist. In relation to anthropology, he thought there was a tendency to focus on the ‘strangeness’ of African in comparison to European culture. ‘The anthropological literature on Africa’, wrote Elias, ‘is full of instances which leave the reader with the feeling that it is all very strange. Very few studies on African societies set out to explain systematically in what way and why African societies differ from present-day European societies’ (p. 46). He thought that this also led to a large gap between the reality of African social life and its portrayal in the anthropological literature.
In relation to himself, he found himself in the middle of an important issue in the sociology of knowledge, observing that both his experience of Africa and the prevailing anthropological approaches to African culture illustrated how established modes of knowledge with a particular set of ‘ordering categories’ can be inadequate to the task of understanding a new reality. For Elias this was already a problem in relation to concepts like ‘individual and society’, but ‘if one comes to societies at a different stage of development, such as traditional Ghanaian societies, the deadening effect on one’s observations of the ruling techniques of ordering social data become even more apparent’ (p. 36). ‘My problem – my central problem if I can call it that – was how to do justice to the rich, fresh and often quite novel experiences I had there and to break the deadening influence of the prevalent social type of classifications and abstractions on these experiences’ (pp. 35–6)
A central target for his critique of prevailing categories was the concepts of ‘tribe’ and the ‘kinship’ in anthropology. Elias argues that the heavy reliance of anthropological analysis on those concepts has the effect of overlooking a range of other issues, such as the structuring of political relations, the management of violence, the centrality of military functions, and the question of simple survival in the face of a range of threats from both the natural environment and other human groups. This led Elias to put forward the concept of ‘survival unit’ as the primary unit of analysis of human modes of collective identity, making it central to his comparison of African and European history. For Elias, the African experience provided new insights into long-term state formation processes and the workings of the competitive dynamics between social groups best understood as ‘survival groups’ as ‘key figurations’ (Kaspersen and Gabriel, 2008: 374; see also Kaspersen and Gabriel, 2013). This appears to be the first time Elias formulated this concept, to be taken up in his 1970 Was ist Soziologie book (translated into English in 1978), and his 1974 ‘Towards a Theory of Communities’ article. Later, in What Is Sociology?, he used the term ‘attack-and-defense units’. Despite the fact that he would end up preferring ‘survival unit’, in many respects this formulation better captures his meaning, since a group’s offensive capabilities were as important as their defensive capacities. Another problem in the existing literature, for Elias, was the neglect of history, of the developmental processes by which African cultural and social forms have come to take on their current form, noting as an exception Michael Garfield Smith’s Government in Zazzau. 7 An important part of that developmental process, argued Elias, was ‘the subjection in which Africans and people of African descent have lived for several centuries’, as well as ‘their subsequent struggle of emancipation and liberation’ (p. 47).
As well as placing the question of ‘attack and defense’ more centrally in any analysis of Ghanaian society, he decided that the primary source of loyalty and identity should be regarded as the village: ‘So far as Ghana was concerned it seemed to me preferable to think of the traditional societies as village societies rather than as tribal societies’ (p. 37). He came to prefer the concept of ‘village state’, because he considered that term better able to capture the fact that, in the prevailing forms of social organization in Ghana, ‘what we conceptually divide as economic, political, military and other types of specialised organisation was not yet divided’ (p. 56), constituting an earlier stage of state formation and a case study of the combination of functions that become separated in later stages of development. As Reicher (2023: 192) sums it up, for Elias the village state was organized around engagement with the following functions: (a) control of nature, (b) management of military concerns (attack and defense), (c) provision of means of orientation and meaning via a priesthood, and (d) stabilizing habitus through ceremonies and rituals that managed fears and aggression.
Apart from his critique of dominant anthropological categories, he also made a point of stressing the value of literature as a source of insight, alongside and at times superior to social scientific analysis. He noted that he found ‘that some of the recent novels from African writers – like [Ekwensi’s (1961)] Jagua Nana and [Achebe’s (1958)] Things Fall Apart – provided better information, came closer to the actual life of people, than any anthropological book’ (pp. 38–9).
One essay drew upon a close reading of two books: the missionary Wilhelm Rottmann’s book on the god Dente/Odente, and Noa and Enoch Azu’s (1929) Adangbe Historical and Proverbial Songs. Rottmann’s (1894) report on the history of the religious practices surrounding the deity Dente – which included, possibly, human sacrifice – also highlighted the never-ending warfare between different religious and political authorities in the formation of competing empires and confederations prior to European colonization. Elias’s concern was to read the portrayal of traditional religious practices as a case study, not in ‘primitive’ culture, but in earlier stages of the civilizing process with their own particular functions in managing the relationship between social- and self-regulation. He argued that religious practices should be understood as a structuring of forms of behaviour that is produced by the existence of particular problems as yet without successful solution, subject to the changes characterizing the civilizing process as effective solutions to those problems are gradually developed.
The main problem was the prevalence of war: ‘The problem evidently is what in the relationship of human groups – in the configuration of their grouping – drives them again and again towards organised mass killings’ (p. 167). Wars were endemic in the region with on-going competition between survival groups: ‘Each group was in constant danger of being annihilated or enslaved by any other with which they came in contact’ (p. 169) – produced by the structure of social relations, by ‘the configuration of groups’ (p. 170), by the faltering of the ‘machinery’ for resolving disputes, which was the political function of the chief, ‘one of the agencies for arbitration, for solving disputes without the use of force’ (p. 171).
African societies were thus a useful comparative study of how the standards of civilized behaviour are encouraged or discouraged by particular social and historical conditions: The tendency of many members of the more advanced industrial countries to treat their civilised behaviour almost as if it were given to them by nature as part of the collective charisma of a socially superior group has received, one hopes, a good jolt by Hitler and his Teutonic Männer, by the unexpected – and for many people almost unbelievable – resurgence of barbarism among members of a highly developed country. (p. 166)
Here he was reiterating a point made in On the Process of Civilisation, that the self-perception as ‘civilized’ was an expression of the collective charisma – as opposed to disgrace – of the superior group, a theme he had started to develop in The Established and the Outsiders study of Winston Parva.
The focus of Elias’s considerations is the Krobo people, the largest sub-group of the Ga-Adangbe/Dangme ethno-linguistic group in the Greater Accra region of Ghana, who settled first on and around Krobo Mountain, spreading more widely after their eviction from the mountain by British colonial authorities in 1892. Noah and Enoch Azu’s collection of Krobo songs and proverbs provides Elias with a means of grasping the ways in which knowledge has been structured in Krobo society. Elias interpreted the Klama songs 8 for every occasion as indicating that Krobo knowledge was ‘characterised by a lack of analytical differentiation and departmentalisation of thinking, by a corresponding lack of the ability to stand back from the fund of knowledge that has been handed on and to criticise it deliberately and intentionally’, resulting in a tendency simply to accept traditional forms of knowledge (p. 176). He noted the tendency for the thinking running through the songs and proverbs to be context-bound rather than abstract, and in relation to the conventions surrounding death and funerals, he was struck by the absence of ‘the peculiar sentimentality which so strongly colours the European attitudes towards the dead or towards death in general’, in favour of a more matter of fact attitude that focused on ‘the concrete issues raised by the death of a person . . . and particularly by the reshuffling of human relationships including property relations which follows from it’ (p. 187).
In his 1963 conference paper, Elias lays out a balance sheet of the positives and negatives of both sociology and anthropology. He starts by observing that anthropologists study societies and cultures other than their own, while sociologists study the society to which they belong. For sociology, this produces a problem of gaining distance from their own society’s ideologies, mythologies, and preconceptions: They are too involved to be able to emancipate themselves from the concepts, the types of classification, the very words used constantly around them with reference to social phenomena and to gain greater autonomy for their scientific enquiries into social problems in relation to the modes of social thought with which they have been brought up. (p. 222)
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Anthropologists, in contrast, find it easier to gain appropriate detachment from their object of study. The situation for anthropology was shifting towards greater involvement: when subjects within the studied culture themselves undergo anthropological training, when anthropologists are caught up, as societies and cultures change (post-colonialism), in debates between traditional and ‘new’ understandings of culture and society. However, a significant barrier to this shift, felt Elias, was the fact that ‘[e]motionally many anthropologists seem to feel a strong attachment to the traditional order of African societies which they know well and which, traditionally, formed the primary object of their studies’ (p. 223).
Anthropologists, observed Elias, focused on collection and classifying of social data, whereas sociologists are more concerned with explanation and theory-building. He thought that the emphasis among anthropologists was on close contact and endless recording of cultural events and interactions, without much analysis or explanation. In the process there is a concentration on kinship and tribal relationships. Although attention is also being paid to other forms of social organization, the relationship to their traditional concern with kinship is not examined. He felt that anthropologists ‘do not set out to analyse the interdependence of the various types of organisation in society; they do not examine, for example, how changes in military techniques and organizations affect the family organization or how differences in the political regime of closely related groups are related to differences in the family structure’ (p. 225).
At the same time, sociologists in their turn have ‘remained very backward’ in the techniques anthropologists excel at, fieldwork and participant observation, by focusing on surveys and statistical analysis. ‘The inclination to regard statistical techniques alone as a scientific instrument in sociology’, argued Elias, ‘has led to an immense impoverishment of sociological studies’ (p. 226).
The traditional methods of anthropology are ill-equipped to understand and explain processes of social and cultural change, but sociology is also ill-equipped for Ghanaian students to understand the development of their own country. The reluctance of sociologists to study societies other than their own, including African societies, also underlay the Eurocentrism of which Elias has so often been accused, making the discipline ‘of limited use’ also for ‘Europeans whose picture of the world has for too long centred on Europe itself’, and incomplete for sociologists ‘as long as they do not draw on experiences from African, Asian, and other non-European societies’ (p. 229)
Given the differing strengths and weaknesses of the two disciplines, Elias argued for greater exchange between sociology and anthropology, for a greater engagement with each other’s research. His overall conclusion was that the separation of the two disciplines studying societies at differing levels of complexity and integration should be abandoned, and that a revamped ‘sociology’ held more promise as the overarching discipline combining anthropology, sociology and history. He held out Smith’s (1960) book on political organization and development in Northern Nigeria, Government in Zazzau, 1800–1950, as an example of an anthropologist liberating themselves from their conceptual chains, but suggested that ‘this exception merely underlines the fact implied in all that has been said here, that if one achieves a breakthrough from the traditional anthropological techniques, particularly those prevalent in the study of traditional African societies, the distinctions between anthropology, sociology and history cease to be meaningful’ (p. 226).
Elias was attempting to make his own modest – and unpublished – contribution, then, to the ‘explosion in historical research (much of it by anthropologists) on West Africa’s precolonial kingdoms’ (Hart, 1985: 251), underpinning what Hart terms the marriage between anthropology and history. The 1960s and 1970s was a time when ‘the fieldwork method lost its primacy in West African anthropology’ (1985: 255), exactly what Elias was arguing for in his 1963 conference paper, albeit with the addition of sociology.
The Bielefeld Conference Paper, 1984
The paper that Elias delivered at the 1984 conference he hosted at the Bielefeld Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung (ZiF) (Bogner and Mennell, 2022), turning to longer-term processes of social change, encompassed at least in part a generalization of what he had learned in Africa in order to understand longer-term processes of historical development in Europe, drawing parallels between the histories of Africa and the Roman Empire. He referred to Africa as effectively a case-study in the pre-history of Europe, making comparisons between Africa and Europe with reference to the shift from nomadic to sedentary formations, from village-states to city-states, and from smaller to larger survival units (driven by what he termed the monopoly mechanism).
I myself, in my stay in Africa, have seen many – and that is really where the concept of village-states comes from. I’ve seen many of these village-states in action, the assembly of the elders, perhaps in many cases surrounded by the rest of the male community [who were] sometimes making remarks to the negotiations of the council of elders. (p. 204)
One of the contributors to the conference was William McNeill, and Elias made a point of connecting his African reflections to McNeill’s (1964) study of the incorporation of the steppe lands of Eastern Europe into the Russian, Austrian and Ottoman Empires between 1500 and 1800, noting the ‘regularity of city-states and territorial states emerging from the nomadic multitude’ (p. 201). He also developed an argument against the economic determinism he thought characterized the work of Childe (1936), highlighting the importance of the military functions of the priesthood and its relationship to warriors/princes.
Again, drawing on his African experience, he emphasized the role of the priesthood in managing the assimilation of newcomers through rituals, and also their ‘civilizing function’ of the social regulation of self-regulation. A central thread in the formation of city-states was the permanent tension between priests and princes: ‘You find in antiquity again and again priests and kings in competition’ (p. 207). Elias also cites contemporary Africa as an example of the complexities of the state-formation process: ‘Why do we live today for the first time in an age where all tribes, all units on the tribal level, have practically disappeared, or are so powerless they don’t count any longer? You can see that the state-formation process goes on in Africa and you can see the same process going on all over the world’ (p. 211). 10
Reicher suggests that Elias’s work overall can be approached as dealing with three different types of temporality, so that social processes can be understood as falling into three different types of development of varying durations. Type I processes are those spanning two or three generations, as discussed in studies like The Established and the Outsiders. Type 2 processes span several centuries, such as in the formation of nation-states. Type 3 processes span many thousands of years. Reicher notes that this is his own reading of Elias’s work, that Elias himself does not make these distinctions. The essays that Elias wrote directly in connection with his African experience then fall into the category of type 2 processes, unfolding over a number of centuries. His Ghanaian essays look at how type 2 civilizing processes can be found in stateless societies, or societies at an early stage of state formation – among Krobo and other pre-colonial groups in Southern Ghana – drawing on the concept of the ‘village state’, over several centuries.
In this 1984 paper, however, he appears more concerned with type 3 processes across much longer periods. Reicher (2023: 196) describes Elias’s approach in this paper as follows: In an extremely long line of development drawn by Elias, various forms of survival units are categorised in an ascension scheme based on size and complexity. This ranges from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies comprising relatively few people to more complex village states, city states, large empires and modern, highly differentiated and populous nation states with a high degree of integration of more and more groups and individuals.
The overall transition from nomadic to sedentary forms of sociability is, then, a type 3 process that McNeill described as an ‘ecological cycle’ (McNeill, 1964: 7), with Elias preferring the term ‘sociological cycle’ (pp. 200–1).
The Dictated Essays, 1987
When Elias returned to the question of Ghana’s pre-colonial historical development – he stops at 1892, when the British authorities evicted the Krobo from Krobo Mountain – he returns to the questions raised in his 1963/4 writing in greater depth, saying more about the comparison with the developmental processes addressed in On the Process, with greater sensitivity to how state-formation processes can vary in different settings, and stressing again the long-term transition from migratory/nomadic to sedentary, settled social and cultural forms. He was particularly interested, here and in ‘Religion in a Village Society’, in the parallels with Ancient Greece and Rome, writing ‘[n]ot only for the Athenians and Romans, but for other people as well, hilltop settlements were the first stations on the road from migrating tribe to statehood’ (p. 62). He also noted the absence of land scarcity, and therefore of conflict over land, making Western Africa a particular example of migratory agriculturalism.
He was taken by Azu’s (1929) Adangbe History as outlining useful material to reconstruct Krobo state-formation processes. The book was a recording of oral history, songs and proverbs, contrary both to conventions regarding restricted knowledge and accepted historiography. At the 1984 conference, Wallerstein had complained about the empirical foundations of historical anthropology (Bogner and Mennell, 2022: 88–9) and the reliance of historical analysis on this kind of material, but Elias was unrepentant: I have heard social scientists say that they cannot do this, that they have not enough evidence in order to present testable models of the process, during which human societies became what they are at a later stage. But the scarcity or maybe the absence of evidence does not give scientists licence to pretend that – and to proceed as if – such processes have not taken place. (p. 64)
He drew the parallel with Ancient Greece again, suggesting in relation to Azu’s book that it was ‘as if an old Athenian living many generations before Herodotus had put on record what had been orally transmitted to him about the settlement period of his Hellenic ancestors’. Historians, he noted, were likely to regard such a source as unreliable, but the sociologist ‘can hardly fail to notice that it contains a good deal of reliable information about such a group’s social development’, and he felt this also applied to the material in Adangbe (Adangme) History.
He also discusses in more detail the migratory movements of the Krobo, in search not of aid but of security, which included the absorption of migrants in order to sustain population size, as well as the role of the priesthood in stabilizing Krobo habitus and through knowledge management and the channelling of fears and anxieties, and indeed the ‘controlled decontrolling’ of aggression, through rituals, ceremonies, and rites of passage. For Elias, based to a large extent on his reading of Huber’s (1963) The Krobo: Traditional Social and Religious Life of a West African People, the Krobo state-formation process displayed a ‘primeval struggle between priests and warriors for a more or less monopolistic possession of the ruling functions’ that was close to universal (p. 103), and which displayed the gradual shift in the power balance towards the warrior – that is, the chief.
At this point he also comes to revise somewhat his account of the development of self-constraint throughout the civilizing process, insisting that there is internalized control in all societies, but tying its configuration to the degree of insecurity and fear in human experience: Members of later-stage societies may imagine that only they have built-in self-controls and repressive restraints – or perhaps even that people of earlier societies do not have any individual self-control, any restraints which curb some of their impulses. But that would be a mistake. No human baby can develop into a fully functioning human being without acquiring in the course of a learning process a capacity for self-regulation. It is never entirely independent of regulation from abroad, but the balance between self-regulation and social regulation can differ widely in different societies. (p. 157)
A great deal of this shift in the balance between social and self-regulation concerns the legibility of sources of fear, danger and uncertainty, and the degree of a sense of human control over the world. The more events, actions and experiences are seen as driven by the inclinations of the gods, the more the balance will be tilted to social regulation, whereas it will shift to self-regulation the more events, actions and experiences are seen as the product of human activities (p. 155). 11
Shifts in Elias’s Thinking
These writings of Elias’s are clearly still in a very early stage of development – given the opportunity, he would have reworked them significantly. Still, it is always interesting to see early drafts of a writer’s work. A bit like the unfolding of a piece of choreography, it gives some insight into a writer’s engagement with their topic. The editors have performed a very valuable service in polishing Elias’s very rough typescripts, including providing sub-headings, to a standard that gives the reader an excellent sense of Elias’s thought processes. At times, it has to be admitted, it is not an entirely pretty sight: Elias made no effort to connect with the work that had already been done to survey the resettlement communities (Butcher, 1970), he overlooked some key studies that had addressed many of the issues he regarded as pertinent (Manoukian, 1964 [1950]), and he mismanaged the task he was appointed for – providing sociological insight into the Volta basin communities that would assist the resettlement process (Jitschin, 2022) – in favour of going off on his own particular conceptual tangents.
Nonetheless, as van Loyen (2012: 23) remarks, he gained a great deal from his encounter with Ghana, conceptually as well as in relation to the collection of traditional African masks that he brought back to Leicester and then Amsterdam. Dieter Reicher points out that his conception of sociogenesis and the logic of state-formation processes became more complex, drawing greater attention to the broader geopolitical environment of those processes: On the one hand, African Processes paints a picture of an ‘international’ system of village states in which the Ashanti held a hegemonic position and the Krobo were comparatively small ‘players’. On the other hand, Elias describes the figuration between the Krobo and the European colonial powers that were increasingly advancing into the interior of the country. Both the convergence of other village states and their co-operation with the British against the hegemony of the Ashanti and the withdrawal of the Netherlands from the Gold Coast led to drastic changes in the internal balance of power in Krobo society, which had to forfeit its political sovereignty completely in 1892. (Reicher, 2023: 195–6)
This understanding of the African context then also shifted his thinking in relation to Europe. Hans Haferkamp argued in 1987 that Elias’s emphasis had clearly shifted from intra-societal to inter-state-societal processes of civilization. As Haferkamp (1987: 553) puts it, by 1987 one could say that Elias ‘no longer just studies the processes which lead to civilization, to a reduction in the use of violence and so to the creation of pro-social situations, he now increasingly focuses on the danger zones, the potential disintegration of societies’. It becomes evident from Elias’s Ghanaian essays that it was his observations of the volatility and multi-directionality of Ghanaian state formation that played a central role in nudging him in this direction. Thinking about state-formation and the civilizing process in terms of survival units engaged in ‘elimination contests’ – as Elias felt obliged to in order to grasp Krobo history – draws greater attention to the ‘losers’ of the civilizing process as a process of increased complexity and differentiation, the violence encompassed by that process, and the potential for the process to have decivilizing effects, although he would only turn to that concept later (Elias, 2013 [1989]).
The editors point out that Elias’s discussion of primal contests as an important example of a game model in What Is Sociology? is indebted to his thinking in his Ghanaian essays, given his focus on contests much like that running through Krobo history between migratory and settled groups, and the same is true of his emphasis on survival as a basis for the bonding of social groups. 12 His An Essay on Time similarly stresses the role of priests in the development of forms of time-perception and management tied to agriculture and the seasons. ‘Already in this small African village-state’, writes Elias, ‘the priest possesses, by virtue of his secret knowledge about finding the “right time”, sufficient power and authority to decide for the members of his society when the communal food-producing activities or, alternatively, the seasonal cult-actions should begin’ (Elias, 2007 [1984]: 44).
One of the more elaborated examples of how Ghana affected Elias’s thinking is his 1974 essay ‘Towards a Theory of Communities’ (Elias, 2008 [1974]), where he uses the example of African community relations systematically as a case study in their operation in ‘simpler’, less complex and less differentiated settings, constituting the pre-history of the kind of state-formation found in Western Europe, and reiterating his point about the concepts of village-state and survival unit being more appropriate than ‘tribe’. He describes the Ghanaian setting as an example of shorter chains of interdependence, simpler, less complex, less functionally differentiated, less specialized, with a greater prevalence of violence and conflict in absence of the monopolization of violence by a state at a higher level of integration. He notes the importance and the breadth of decision-making at the level of the village as the highest level of integration, fulfilling the functions of the state in more highly differentiated societies, and the centrality of the problem of carrying the means of orientation across the generations. In a footnote Elias refers to his request to the village head, who was also the priest, to attend a sacrifice to a local god, to understand the role such animal sacrifices played in Krobo culture and in the village community’s power structure. He declines to report the response to his request, saying enigmatically that ‘it would lead too far’, but he does note the robustness of the decision-making process in the village council as well as ‘the high debating and diplomatic abilities of the people concerned in such decisions’ (p. 134, n.15)
An important aspect of Elias’s thinking in incorporating the African example is a greater sensitivity to the volatility of processes of civilization and state formation, and the extent to which they encompass painful and destructive aspects. He had already started to incorporate a plural concept of differing civilizing processes of varying rhythms and duration, but his Ghanian essays make more explicit the inclusion of societies beyond Europe. He also drew attention – again, implicit in his writing to date, but not highlighted – to the concept of continuing processes of civilization, referring to the present day as that of ‘late barbarians’ (Elias, 2013 [1988]). It is worth remembering, he observed in discussing the ubiquity of violence in supposedly ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ societies, that ‘we, too, still live at an early stage in the development of humanity’. He thought that ‘one should probably think of it as humankind’s prehistory where humans are still unable to understand and to control the social dynamics which threatened to drive rulers of different states towards settling their conflicts through the use of force’ (Elias, 2007 [1984]: 128).
He thought that the state-formation process had been less stable and continuous in Africa than in Europe, with earlier dynastic states and empire forming and then breaking up, and notes that these processes always encounters resistance and conflict ‘with a loss of identity, pride and meaning’ accompanying ‘integration conflicts’ (2008 [1974]: 136). ‘Almost invariably’, wrote Elias, ‘the threatened loss of function and power of social units on the verge of becoming a lower level of integration leads to struggles of dominance, to balance of power struggles of a specific kind’ (Elias, 2008 [1974]: 137). Overall, he argues for a non-linear approach to development, so that differentiation is always accompanied by de-differentiation, integration by partial disintegration, and for the ‘dialectic’ character of societal development, in which shifts in the structure of power relations mean that gains are always accompanied by losses.
After the Ghanaian Essays
Rough and unpolished though these essays are, they constitute Elias’s own tentative efforts to develop his ideas in relation to the world beyond Western Europe, and they provide an important insight into the ways in which his approach to his central themes had in fact shifted as a result of his efforts to understand and analyse pre-colonial Ghanian history. 13
There is a growing body of research into the ways in which Elias’s categories and mode of analysis can be used to understand processes of civilization and decivilization beyond Europe, in relation to Singapore (Stauth, 1997), Japan (Lau, 2022), Thailand (Jory, 2021), China (Brandtstädter, 2000, 2003) and, indeed, the United States of America (Mennell, 2007). The more anthropological reading of Elias facilitated by his Ghanaian essays – as a comparative historical sociology and anthropology examining a diversity of civilizing and decivilizing processes, and not only as a theory of ‘the’ civilizing process – puts more into the foreground aspects of his post-1970s writing that will provide additional support to those developing efforts.
Given the present state of the world, it is perhaps appropriate to conclude by suggesting that the value of a careful reading of these essays, one that draws out the ways in which the changes in his thinking in that period worked their way through in his later writing, is brought to the surface by reflecting on a section of Involvement and Detachment, where he develops the implications of his concept of ‘survival unit’ for inter-state relations. As Haferkamp noted, he distinguishes between inter-state and intra-state relations, confining his account of the civilizing process to the latter. In relation to the former, however, his analysis is unremittingly realistic: one determinant plays a key role in the ranking of states – their violence potential, the capacity of a state for using physical violence in its relationship with other states as a means of maintaining or improving its position in the hierarchy. Nothing is more characteristic of the structure of inter-state relations than this fact. It indicates that human beings, at the level of inter-state relations, are still bound to each other at the primeval level. Like animals in the wilderness of the jungle, like tribal groups in humanity’s early days, like states throughout history, so the states of today are bound to each other in such a way that sheer physical force and cunning are, in the last resort, the decisive factors in their relationships. No one can prevent a physically stronger state from lording it over weaker states, except another state which is its match in terms of physical force. If another such state exists, the two experience one another, with great regularity, as rivals, each trying to prevent the other from attaining hegemonial power within the whole field. Thus, unless a state is checked by another state that is militarily its equal, there is nothing to prevent its leaders and the people who form it from threatening, exploiting, invading and enslaving, driving out or killing the inhabitants of another state, if they are so minded. (2007 [1987]: 139–40)
At the time he wrote this, Elias was thinking primarily of the relationship between the USA and the USSR, but the point is even more salient in the current configurations of geopolitical relations. Making the survival unit the primary unit of analysis, and survival – or rather, attack and defense – the primary driver of human action and power relations, constitutes a significant counter in Elias’s own thinking to his conception of ever-expanding global interdependence underpinning a continuing worldwide process of civilization (Linklater, 2010: 175–85). This conceptual move draws attention to the contradictory tendency in the opposite direction, towards continuing violent conflict, and Elias himself was undecided which tendency was more likely to dominate the other. Elias highlights the ‘Janus-faced’ character of the state’s monopoly of violence, in which a decrease in intra-state violence can be, and often is, combined with an increase in inter-state violence (Elias, 2013 [1989]: 188).
To the extent that this complexity in Elias’s thinking tends to get overlooked – with the exceptions including the work of Linklater (2010) and Mennell (2007) – tracing the first, very tentative steps that Elias took towards the more complex analysis of state-formation and organized violence could facilitate a different reading of his post-Ghana writings. Such a new reading would help bring to the foreground the tension between relatively advanced intra-state and relatively underdeveloped inter-state civilizing processes, a tension that shows very few signs of abating and can only be addressed with the benefit of, at the very least, a nuanced understanding of its dynamics.
