the Mau Mau contestation concerned simply the position of various (age) actors within the hierarchy, though, importantly, not the character of the hierarchy itself. His distinction between an idealised moral conception of the ethnic and an authoritarian personalised and communitarian (‘tribal’) politics is welcome, as it reminds us that not all politics which use traditional and cultural idioms are of necessity communitarian. Yet, at the same time, that Lonsdale finds it necessary to explain what the response of the Mau Mau activist ‘really meant’, and thus to develop a culturalist argument that goes beyond merely pointing to the fact of cultural idioms as forms of resistance, seems to counterpose an idealised ahistorical version of ‘ethnic consciousness’ in ‘moral ethnicity’ to a despised (colonially produced) ‘tribalist’ one, while simultaneously anthropologising what could be easily read as a simple demand for dignity. The danger of Lonsdale’s argument is that it fails to completely transcend the Western colonial image of the Kikuyu as tribal or ethnic ‘subjects’, and therefore fails either to allow the militant rebel to speak for himself or herself, or to provide at least an opening for an understanding of politics as subjectivity in Africa that does not collapse into culturalism of the neo-colonial variety.
I want to suggest in what follows that this problem, illustrated here by Lonsdale’s argument, is largely inherent in what, following Foucault, could be called the ‘epistemic reason’ of the human sciences as presently constituted, and is not simply the result of bias, of the limits of Lonsdale’s choice of theory, or indeed of the scientific method itself. In order to do this, I wish to discuss some of the debates that arose within the Indian Subaltern Studies Collective, as they constitute to my mind one of the most sophisticated ways currently available of addressing this particular question of the Eurocentrism of the human sciences and the subjectivity of the subaltern. Before this, however, a few words are required on the origins of the concept of ‘moral economy’. Fortunately there is not much to say on this score as, if we put aside the normative accounts regarding what an economy should be, the expression seems to have been first popularised by the historian E.P. Thompson (1971) to refer to the idea of social justice – the defence ‘of traditional rights and customs’ (p. 50) – among the English working class in order to counterbalance economic deterministic accounts of popular riots. It was then picked up and organised into a general principle by James Scott (1979), in his study of the ‘subsistence ethic’ of peasants in Southeast Asia, in which he argued that it was precisely the violation of this ‘moral economy’ by colonial power that had turned peasants into revolutionaries. However, the idea of ‘the moral’ in the Mau Mau case seems to be a signifier of the fact that Western categories are inapplicable (or applicable only with difficulty), rather than providing a coherent alternative conceptual proposal which would allow the consciousness of the subaltern to speak for itself in its own categories.4
There are three general points to make regarding this notion that are of importance for the present discussion. Firstly, it is applied to the situation of ‘outsiders’ or those ‘marginal’ to a capitalist market economy, who, it is said, propose a distinct social ethic in the face of expanding and encroaching capitalist relations; this ethic is to be celebrated in opposition to capitalism, as it exhibits features of a ‘non-capitalist’ economy extolled as ‘virtuous’. Of course, few seriously celebrate an ethical content of the capitalist market economy; what is more, any economy is always socially embedded and this may include various moral features. Secondly, such an alternative conception is often idealised and seen as unchanging, as ahistorical, with a consequent inability to fully investigate the contradictions within it. Thus Lonsdale takes as evident that Kikuyu ‘civic virtue’ is given in a form which leaves the location, for example, of age differences uncontested; of course, younger men want to become elders – this is why they uphold such civic virtue. Finally, of course, the subaltern does not speak here, as Spivak (1998) would say. The category of moral economy is simply invented by Western intellectuals to make sense of popular consciousness in the ‘non-modern’; it is equivalent to a concept of ‘culture’ in which the Other is located. We have little sense of what the Mau Mau rebel would say, let alone think, about his or her own conception of ‘land and freedom’; if the idea is to understand popular consciousness, then we are not much closer to doing so. The Mau Mau rebel is simply said to think as an (African) peasant; she or he is simply the bearer of that structural category and hence must think access to land in primordial ‘ethnic’ and ‘tribal’ terms, and therefore in moral-cultural terms, which are to be celebrated or deplored depending on one’s political orientation. Moreover, for Lonsdale, there is no attempt to think the Kikuyu as a nationality, like the Scots or the Irish, for example; they are African, therefore they must be ethnic. There is little fundamental difference here between the prejudices of colonial and postcolonial human science. Finally, Lonsdale himself admits that he cannot speak Kikuyu and that his analysis ‘gives weight to the words of senior men’ (p. 321). He thus admits that his work ‘will not explain Mau Mau. It hopes to uncover the moral and intellectual context in which explanations may be found’ (p. 326). Of course, despite the personal diffidence and the protocols of positivist science, what Lonsdale offers is a reading of both the objective location (the Kikuyu peasantry) and the subjectivity (‘civic virtue’) of Mau Mau militants, based on his theoretical assumptions and the evidence which, as a historian, he is able and willing to muster from the archive.
SUBALTERN CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS
It is at this point that some of the debates in the Subaltern Studies Collective become pertinent, for the concern of that historical school has been precisely to understand the political consciousness of the anti-colonial peasant rebel primarily in colonial India. The emphasis here is directly placed on making sense of the political subjectivities of the subaltern. In undertaking this project, Subaltern Studies has been forced to distance itself from colonial, nationalist as well as Marxist social history, with the result that the disciplinary logic of history – what Lalu (2009) calls ‘disciplinary reason’ – has had to be unpacked. I shall draw on their work in order to elucidate the problem of accounting for the subjectivity of popular rebels through a discussion of some aspects of the work of Ranajit Guha, the founding intellectual figure of Subaltern Studies.
The whole of Guha’s intellectual enterprise, as I understand it, is to begin from the statement that if the anti-colonial peasant rebel is to be understood as the subject of his or her own history, then it is the political consciousness of the subaltern that must be the object of the discipline of history and his or her thought must be taken seriously. It is a fidelity to this axiom which, it seems to me, guides Guha’s historical work on India. This, I will argue, leads him and the Subaltern Studies project into an impasse, as the discipline of history is unable to provide the means whereby this axiom can be fully effectuated, because it comes up against the limits of its own scientism. Ultimately, Subaltern Studies is caught up in a ‘disciplinary’ or, perhaps better, an ‘epistemic’ reason which is unable to transcend a state-thought of politics from which the subjectivity of the subaltern is excluded.5 In this sense Spivak (1988) is quite right: the subaltern cannot speak from the confines of history; her voice cannot be heard without transcending the discipline of history itself, as history cannot identify political subjects, only bearers of social locations. The subaltern’s subjectivity is apprehended through and forced into categories (colonial, liberal, Marxist, nationalist, masculinist, etc.) that are not her own and, in any case, when she rebels she is no longer in a subaltern position, at least politically speaking.6
Guha’s starting point is that there existed, during the colonial period in India, a distinct domain of politics beyond the elite domain of state institutions, policies, laws and practices introduced by the British colonial power. This domain was an ‘autonomous domain, for it neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter’. The ‘principal actors’ in this realm were neither the dominant groups of indigenous society nor the authorities, ‘but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country – that is the people’. It is within this parallel and autonomous domain that ‘the politics of the people’ could be found (Guha, 2000: 3, emphasis in original). One of the more important
