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Special Issue on Jane Guyers Marginal Gains:

Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa

Africa Has Never Been Traditional:

So Can We Make a General Case?
A Response to the Articles
Jane I. Guyer

Abstract: Marginal Gains (2204) has been described as a surprising and bold book.
Since the articles in this collection, which take one or other of its arguments as
points of departure, share certain similar qualities, they can be treated as a collective effort initiating new debate with non-African economic research and thinking.
This article reviews the argument of the book, highlights the concept and phenomenon of ordinal ranking in both the book and the articles, and then uses the
findings to begin an appreciative critique of the ideas of Michel Callon. Although
Callons approach intersects with that of Marginal Gains in many ways, the scalar
ranking of people, and the use of rank to exclude and divert, finds more prominence in the books approach, which also has more relevance for Europe than
economists seem to have acknowledged so far. The article ends with a new instance
of ordinal ranking, from Cameroon.

African Studies Review, Volume 50, Number 2 (September 2007), pp. 183202
Jane I. Guyer is professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, having
taught previously at Harvard, Boston University and Northwestern, where she
was director of the Program of African Studies (19942001). Her early work was
devoted to production, gender, the division of labor, and political-economic history, primarily in Nigeria and Cameroon. This work resulted in a book on a rural
economy in the supply hinterland of Ibadan, An African Niche Economy (Edinburgh University Press, 1997) and a co-edited special issue of Human Ecology,
Time and African Land Use: Ethnography and Remote Sensing (2007). Her
work from the 1980s on money in social history and culture has resulted in several papers and collections, of which Marginal Gains (University of Chicago
Press, 2004) is the culmination.

183

184 African Studies Review

Introduction
The articles in this special issue of the African Studies Review, and other
recent commentaries on Marginal Gains, contain both an implicit demand
and the inspiration to meet that demand: namely, that we extend the theory and method of the book in order to engage directly with the intellectual frameworks of other disciplines (see Servet 2005; Coussy 2005).1 Marginal Gains was described as bold or original by several reviewers
(Haugerud 2005; Ralph 2005). And in a seminar response (Centre dEtudes et de Recherches Internationales, Paris, March 15, 2007 ), Jean-Francois Bayart went one step further, depicting it as un livre assez sauvage, a
phrase whose allusions are undoubtedly multiple and fascinating. The idea
that the book contains some wild thinking is certainly supported by the
almost centrifugal diversity of the nine empirical essays in this issue, from
scholars in disciplines (history, economics, literature and expressive culture) other than my own. They engage with the book more by extending it
in their own directions than by means of classic academic-style debate that
would concentrate on its terms, methods, and theoretical genealogy. Some
of the authors even detect a certain unrestricted abandon as their own
ideas foray outward from Marginal Gains; in a personal note to me, one
even used the term wild about her own paper. Yet in terms of scholarship
and craft the articles are anything but wild. Each one selects and amplifies
lines of argument on subjects with which the authors are deeply familiar,
and on theoretical issues to which, using exacting research methods, they
have already contributed original thinking. Bayarts comment also sits
oddly and interestingly against Michel Callons (2005) depiction of
researchers in the wild as working outside of formal institutions and committed to the acquisition and articulation of a conspicuously uninstitutional kind of knowledge. After all, we, the authors of these articles, are all
pretty established in universities.
So does our scholarship, when it is read, somehow come across as the
work of undersocialized scholars? Recently, colleagues working in other
regions of the world have suggested to me that collectively, scholars of
Africa do indeed convey a partial myopia about theoretical currents and
parallel developments elsewhere. In recent years, at least, we have seemed
not quite up-to-date, unless like Achille Mbembe we are producing dazzling innovations that are also, in their own way, wild. In my own case, the
critique that I neglected current relevant literatures is partly justified and
does demand explanation (see below). Africas own experience over the
past three decades, however, also enters in here. Perhaps we have moved
on from a moment of bold engagement with general theory, as in the 1970s
neo-Marxist initiatives, to an era of rather stunned alienation as the concerns and terms of analysis in our disciplinessuch as rational choice, postmodernism, and the linguistic turnlost intellectual traction on Africas
particular position in the world. So the fascinating and surprising conver-

Africa Has Never Been Traditional: A Response 185

gences, and the sense of momentum, among these essays may be one sign
of a new ambition to reengage critically with broader comparative studies
and theoretical innovations in the area of economic life, even though the
terms are not yet fully developed. Marginal Gains drew considerably on the
work of the authors whose articles appear here, and its concerns were
somewhat particularist to Africa. But in these articles the authors do move
toward larger claims. As Berry writes the point is a more general one
beyond Africa (2007:60; see also Maurer, Udry, Verran, and Ferguson, this
issue), while at the same time, as Barber writes, there are still phenomenasuch as the exogenous indigeneity of invention and the disjunctive, plural, heterogeneous mode of self-valuation for which yet deeper
immersion within Africa is still imperative (2007:121,114; see also Adebayo,
Roitman, and Geschiere, this issue).
This collection is still clearly on the cusp of enunciating theoretical
coordinates, as the introductory article says of Marginal Gains itself. The
juxtaposition of disparate themes set in diverse times and places, in both
the book and the articles, may convey a certain escape-artist, rather than
confrontational and argumentative, mood. We are attentive to what lies
beyond the confines of confined research (see Callon n.d.), a tactic that
lends an overall obstreperousness to the intellectual project. I will address
particular issues later, but let me explain one major condition of my own
writing here. Although I knew of the innovative theoretical work of Michel
Callon, Daniel Miller, Nicholas Thomas, and others on markets, had
alluded tangentially to other major social theorists, and had also read some
key works in the substantial relevant French scholarship, I self-consciously
avoided taking on a frontal and closely argued engagement with them until
I felt that empiricist immersion and mid-level theoretical engagement had
gone as far as I could take it. And in the event, the historical and ethnographic sources literally filled my mind to overflowing, to the extent that I
had to retain the parsimonious format of the lecture and cut out almost all
footnotes in order to keep the contours of the argument clear, even to
myself. Most of these articles are written in a similar spirit, while taking the
empirical, open-ended search much further along certain lines than I
could.
The reason for such a suspension is a classic one for Africa, and perhaps for anthropology: until we fill our minds with the world as it presents
itself, we do not know how little or much we know of what there is to know,
and we do not know how painfully limited even our most nuanced concepts may be to address the sheer originality of the human cultural and
social capacity for patterned and reflexive/recursive imagination and
action. Social scientists assume that muddle is an unlikely enduring condition in social and cultural life. Apparently muddled peoples and places,
therefore, must provoke critical meditation about our own perceptual and
conceptual limits, and we should reach a plateau of interpretation before
a debate can pick up.

186 African Studies Review

So the book was not devoted to theoretical fine-tuning or debate, at

least in the first instance. It was concerned with the question of whether, in
any sense, we can depict what Verran here refers to as a vague whole
(2007:179) or consonance in the economic life of Atlantic Africa over time,
and with making its empirical patterning and reflexive/recursive processes
a theoretically independent reference point or landmark. Theoretical independence, of course, is an oxymoron; what I mean here is that the components of the picture come from so many disparate sources, placed in continuous conversation with each other, that rejection of the convergence
would be implausible. Subsequent theorists, unless dismissing the depiction
altogether, would have to acknowledge it and engage it, rather than just
reclassifying things under their own conceptual schemes. By this means I
hoped that insights would be extrapolable beyond particular geographic
boundaries. Hence the title of my response here. By opening up even wider
our sense of ignorance about the originalities and commonalities of African
cultural histories, we can absolutely reject the closing down of intellectual
challenge that results from their classification as generically traditional.
Prominent Western theorists have used traditional in precisely this way, in
part because of their Weberian inspiration about the originality of European modernity. Giddens (1994), for example, makes astonishingly uninformed and even improbable statements about knowledge and status in
traditional society, using Africa as the example (see discussion in Guyer
1996). But then other parts of the historical experience of both Europe
and the wider world disappear into obscurity and fixity as orphan topics
(to use a concept of Callon). Possibly this explains what Callon describes as
the effort of wild research to invent and experiment (with) new forms
[and] . . . to intervene in the process of the production and diffusion of
knowledge (n.d. 7). Intervention from Africa about modern economic theory must seem wild if the place itself has become an orphaned intellectual
project, consigned to tradition or anomaly But by the same token, such an
intervention is likely to highlight something general in the rest of the worlds
experience that has also been orphaned along with it, and that is what we
can work toward reconnecting to theoretical initiatives from Africa.

Reprise
My central focus in Marginal Gains was the links and overlaps among certain themes in varied times, places, and domains of life, most notably: (1)
the centrality of value disjuncture in transactional life, starting from but
not restricted to the interface with Europe; (2) a pervasive asymmetry in
the cultural framing of transactions; (3) open multiplicity of the value
scales potentially at play in any one transaction; (4) a repertorial rather
than a systems structure to the coexistence of value scales and institutionalized transactional forms; (5) the multiplicity and changeability of cur-

Africa Has Never Been Traditional: A Response 187

rencies; and thereby (6) the inescapable performativity of economic

events. I gave particular ethnographic examples and set the whole picture
in the historical context of the continuing asymmetrical interface with
European mercantilism, the recurrent turbulence that this has entailed in
Africa, and the relative absence (or neglect) of regulation and protection
on the part of state and financial institutions (see Hibou 2004). In order
for me to convey the materiality of transactions as they were described by
participants and in texts that we no longer study very closely, it was important to give some sense of being there and to remind ourselves of a florescence to monetary phenomena and to culture in general which still surpasses the categories and arguments of formal academic thinking.2 I
wanted to offer examples of West and Central African economic disciplines
that are discernible by conventional methods but are not yet analyzable
through the conventional theoretical repertoire, in part because our concepts are based on assumptions that simply do not apply to Africa: equivalence as a doctrine of exchange, and the presence of banks and the state to
continually recreate and sanction the terms of economic doctrine. Avoiding an alternative of cultural essentialism, I argued that certain formal features, even if not their cultural and expressive forms, were perfectly consonant with features of European capitalism as it has been practiced in Africa.
They are not facilely general (as in rational), not traditional, nor, in a
conventionalized Marxist sense, simply functional to accumulation in
either an intended or unintended fashion. They were (and are) features
fully internal to the practice, even if not the theory, of commercial capitalism, showing up in times and places within Africa but also elsewhere.
The links to elsewhere and the theoretical work in those locations I
had to leave for later. The basic experimental move I made for addressing
the Atlantic African sources in their own terms was to question, on the
grounds of empirical evidence, the core assumption of equivalence that is
built into price theory. The existence of volatile change and multiple frictions, without mediation by law and finance, means that people do not necessarily see transactions as reflecting the fixed value of, for example, bullion to be measured against goods, (i.e., the pure silver measure passionately defended for seventeenth-century England by John Locke). Only tautologically, and by excluding many obvious elements, can equivalence be
seen as reflecting demand and supply. The ethnography provides evidence instead of the widespread recognition of asymmetry in exchange
and of multiple value scales brought to bear on transactions in all the different times and places that I studied in the chapters. Should analysis
therefore be oriented in one conventional direction or another: for example by ignoring asymmetry as a cultural feature and insisting on analysis in
terms of demand and supply in markets? Or alternatively, by recognizing
asymmetry and insisting that prices are more in the nature of social payments, where the margin reflects a status or power remainder? But these
two options would replicate the old formalist-substantivist stalemate, in

188 African Studies Review

which insistence on conceptual clarity worked only if the evidence was

strictly pruned and tamed. If the frame of inclusion for transactional characteristics were set much wider, so as to respect the wildness of the evidence, altogether new insights about newly discernible patterns might
break out of the sterile deadlock of the past. I could go only this far.
The articles remind us that there is a lot further to go. In different ways,
Verran and Berry (this issue) go straight to the profound epistemological
question: Are we still lookingin some form or anotherfor invariants? If
so, in what form? Heretofore unrecognized cultural principles? Enduring
historical patterns? Pervasive relational algorithms? If we still have a homing
instinct for coherence, is this just a function of the inertias of our founding
training in systematicity, or can other philosophical assumptions support
coherence and order and take them creatively into new domains of life and
thought? If, alternatively, we embrace disorder, where can social scientific
work optimally focus? Even if an answer in the form of an abstract formulation to these questions is not explicitly offered, all empirical expositions still
imply resolutions simply by virtue of the point at which we rest content and
look no further. I was convinced, as Verran suggests, that the book described
several related and nested arcs of exploration and therefore does imply a
wholeness. The concepts and patterns that recur in the eight empirical
chapters provide plausible alternatives to recognized theoretical impasses
and support a series of intellectual projects, at different scales. The articles
here can advance along the precision gradient and begin to make at least
some connections and critiques with respect to cognate approaches to popular economies. Encouraged by them, I offer my subsequent commentary as
a foray into other literatures and other places.

The Articles
These articles do contain disagreements with me, which I will address. But
overall they have the effect of pushing the work onward: by means of empirical studies that extend the approach and argument and make them more
nuanced, and with critical thinking about concepts, methods, and theory. It
is exhilarating to see that the issues I left open could be cultivated further.
At the same time, it was somewhat surprising to me that the work of scholars whose disciplines, theoretical framing, and analytical techniques are so
varied could overlap to such an extent and that they could find so much
common ground. Many of the arguments and findings in these articles were
revelations, but they also confirmed a number of assumptions: that closer
comparisons of a wider variety of Atlantic African political orders would
yield some profound conclusions about money and rank (Adebayo,
Geschiere); that a detour through the poetics of other places and peoples
and back again would throw fragmentation as a style and death as a conceptual reference point into sharp relief (Barber); that other rural societies,

Africa Has Never Been Traditional: A Response 189

and not only in Africa, might also be better analyzed as social ranks or gradients rather than as income quintiles or social classes (Udry and Woo); that
the new frontiers of formal policy instantiate disjunctures, like conversionary
thresholds, rather than the homogenized rational legal orders of theory
(Ferguson; Maurer); that history itself is a domain of unsettled scalar thinking, and not only in Africa (Berry); and that close reading of my argument
as a whole endorses my spirit of agnosticism while also demanding closer
conversation with existing theory (Roitman; Verran). Confirmatory details
were added at the ASA panel discussion at which these articles initially were
presented as papers. For example, Adebayo mentioned being less puzzled
now about the proverbial Igbo millionaires propensity for dressing in
shorts. Piots paper revealed the extraordinary adeptness and scalar manipulation that is evident in a context in which the highest level of the formal
sector meets the most ordinary level of the people.3
It is important to note, for subsequent theoretical contemplation, that
the convergences are not based on a common philosophical ground. The
authors would not necessarily agree on theory and method, nor use the same
techniques, nor contribute to debates in the same disciplines. Witness Maurer, in his book on Islamic banking, taking a critical stance relative to matters
empirical What I am after, he writes, is a mode of ethnography that undermines its empiric, and he warns that what he calls the empiric is often a
failure: When the empirics fails, other modes of reflection might become
important (2005:22). Udry and Woo, by contrast, apply classic quantitative
analytical techniques from economics and carry out most of their work in
that mode, based on survey data. Barbers entire oeuvre emanates from her
faithful recording of oral texts and dramatic performances. Berrys empirical
attention to coexistences and historical sequences of alternatives and contradictions is based on historiography of the most attentive kind. I could continue. But these examples suffice to pose a question. Do all of us working on
and in Africa recognize such a poverty of theory that any wild initiative is better than normal science? Was I so epistemologically agnostic in this book
that it could be read by exasperated colleagues in whatever way they found
liberating? Or is there a more profound level of convergent thinking that we
all sense but that remains unarticulated?
Im going to hazard an interpretation, and work from there. The intellectual teeth of everyone in this forum seem to be sunk into the concept of
rank, or ordinal scaling, albeit in different ways. But rank was only one of
the topics I addressed under its own title, although of course the whole
book implies the pervasive importance of things, people, and qualities
being arranged as first, second, third, and so on: in terms of importance, or access, or beauty, or any other quality that would have to be measured in numbers for the intervals to be quantified and the properties to be
calculable (as in twice as beautiful, ten times as powerful, etc.). Ordinalityas distinct, on the one hand, from simple nominal classification
within a semantic domain (naming of types), and from ratio-scale measure-

190 African Studies Review

ment, allowing all forms of calculation, on the othercomes out of the

shadows in my book as an undervalued structuring idea in both the social
and the cognitive worlds. Rank emerges yet more powerfully in these papers
as an empirically recognizable property in a whole variety of contexts, and a
concept that several disciplines and topics seem to benefit from addressing.
Ordinal scales, unlike ratio scales, are finite and concrete; an order has
internal structuring principles and anchoring limit cases or conditions. And
yet, unlike nominal classifications, orders are also highly permissive of addition and subtraction: of quantified intervals as well as discrete elements.
Elaboration is far more permissive than for taxonomies. Close attention to
these additions and subtractions seems to lead us all out of the twin dilemmas in the formalist/substantivist debate. We can escape both the tautology
of equivalence with its associated infinite fungibility of calculation on a ratio
scale and also the ethnic specificity implicit in nominal scales, and turn
attention instead to orders and to process, context, and the power to produce situational fixity in competitive life. It occurs to me that our sense of a
vague structure, infused with changeability, may owe a great deal to our
collective recognition of the power of ordinality, which is by its very nature
both structured and contextualized. And the apparent permissiveness in
our variety of method may owe much to the fact that ordinal scales can be
analyzed in several ways: by formal methods at moments of performance or
material realization, and by more fluid narrative and processual analytics for
addressing their continual constitution and entailments.
The articles in this issue extend the empirical diversity of social ranking in Africa (Geschiere; Adebayo); the aesthetic and cultural forms that
both express and mediate it (Barber; Udry and Woo); the historical process
and content of transactions that enact ranking (Berry); the application of
nominal and ratio scales to the purpose of constructing the ordinal rankings that operate in social and political life (Maurer; Ferguson); and the
experiential and cognitive bases and associated theoretical problems of
addressing it (Roitman; Verran). I devote a paragraph below to each point,
even though brevity obviates doing justice to all the issues. Then I take Verrans challenge further.

Ranking and Ordinal Scales: Some Advances

I argued in an earlier article in ASR (Guyer 1996) that in the 1960s, anthropology had moved too rapidly from analyzing African social orders in terms
of solidarity and hierarchy to class-based analysis, with the addition of the
Big Man accumulative dynamic as a particular form of class. This
approach short-circuited theoretical attention to a great deal of evidence
on ranking, priority, precedence (founder/follower, ordered seniority of
wives, age grades, etc.) that continued to be described, and to the variety
of trajectories to self-realization along these scales. So in Marginal Gains

Africa Has Never Been Traditional: A Response 191

(2004), as a corrective, I highlighted ordinal dynamics, which fit well with

my aim of building consonance between social and cognitive processes,
and potentially between society, number (in non-zero number systems),
and fractal geometric art and architecture (see Eglash 2002). The articles
in this issue refine and add to that analysis. I address them in the order in
which they seem to me to segue from one major implication to the next
(although the other conversations among them would be richer than any
linear exposition could encompass).

African Social Rank and Its Variability

Both Geschiere (4356) and Adebayo (87110) are concerned about social
typification. They see an ethnic and historical variation in Atlantic Africa
that Igbo and Ibibio social history cannot plausibly represent. Or, in any
case, one needs to understand other dynamics, especially when the people
themselves see ethnic and regional differences very starkly. Further, they
insist that ranking is only one principle of social organization and cognitive
ordering, so the various combinations and interpenetrations have very
important effects. The social locus, the means and the forms of competition over rank are not only varied but also change over time. In Geschieres
comparison of Beti, Maka, and Bamileke in Cameroon, hierarchical officeholding among Bamileke protects incumbents against money dissipation
while acquiring office and maintaining support. In less hierararchical contexts, tournaments of value are frequent, fierce, and expensive. Adebayos
comparison of Yoruba and Akan over time similarly demands attention to
combinations and permutations of rank. For example, it is crucially important in understanding the dynamics of rank to distinguish among the specific transactions that enact and sustain it. Adebayo makes the distinction
between wealth displayed for visual appraisal and wealth actually distributed to others. The exact combination of display and distribution that
allows someone to crash into a hierarchy is alluded to in his discussion
both of chieftaincy and of education. The relevance of tournaments of
value is clear here, although Geschieres own ethnography of such occasions may well be the only really detailed evidence that exists in the written
record. Beyond even his efforts, there may be a social situation/case
study approach that could well be adapted to focus on the whole gamut of
ranking dynamics at play on such an occasion: money, status, symbolic elements, display and distribution, and their ongoing force. So both these articles return us to ethnography and experience.

African Aesthetics, Performance, and Ranking

It may seem odd to place Barbers article (11124) on expressive forms and
Udry and Woos paper (13953) on economic decision-making together,
but on this matter they do belong together. Barber asks how competitive

192 African Studies Review

heterogeneity is ever composed into any kind of fixity at all. She points to
a basic conundrum: that people were constantly living on the threshold
between being agents themselves and the objects of the agency of others,
where they could be mobilized as equivalents, stand-ins, and extensions of
one another, and where the power of the notion of ordinal scaling defined
the often-vertiginous rise and fall of individuals against a possible conceptual fixing point in the act of sacrifice. While, like Geschiere and Adebayo,
she gives evidence of varied forms, her real emphasis is on the process by
which competitive composition informs those performative moments.
Udry and Woos paper endorses, in a very different way, a performative
interpretation of the sense of social ranking expressed by respondants
when they were asked about expenditure. Their conclusions were the most
surprising of all to me. My own reanalysis of the Ghana Living Standards
Survey had been something of a stretch; one friend said that I had literally
stretched the evidence on the rack until it was forced to confess. That Udry
and Woo confirmed my findings and extended my ordinal interpretation
using, as they point out, their own more sophisticated statistical methods
opens up several new vistas. One main conclusion is worth juxtaposing to
Barbers analysis in the context of the present enhanced attention to ranking: When information . . . is very imperfect, then surveys that pose impossible questions could well lead to responses that correspond to norms that
are at least partially shared . . . (on) a normative social gradient (Udry &
Woo 2007:151). In other words, at any one time people know so precisely
where they stand in conceptual and social ranking, even under competitive
and turbulent circumstances, that they can readily compose mutually consistent performances of the corresponding facts. Their answers are more
like a praise song to their existential situation in a social world than an
objective account of what happened.

Inroads beyond Atlantic Africa

There are powerful implications to Udry and Woos conclusions: both
about the economics of ranking and the methods of budget studies. They
find similar results beyond Atlantic Africa, and further, they endorse a
reanalysis of Engels Law in Europe in light of different mediation of
incomes and expenditures by the formal financial institutions. So finally,
after more than fifty years, Akan money management is no longer an
incomprehensible aberration but perhaps an exemplar of a much more
widespread set of empirical and methodological phenomena that has been
orphaned by the purification processes within Western modernist thinking (see Latour 1993; Callon 2005). Berry takes this ambition further, from
the very outset: all economic values are situational, she says (2007:158).
By seeing history as an ordinal scalar value in itself, she only has to point
out how widespread the relevance of the past is within each transaction to
make her analysis of African versions of history-as-value exemplary of many

Africa Has Never Been Traditional: A Response 193

others. She is so bold as to suggest that it is the banks and formal financial
institutions themselves that play the role of creating and fixing this kind of
scale, a notion at odds with the usual depiction of banks as mediating market-driven ratio-scale calculations, particularly on the price of capital. Like
Keith Hart (2000), she suggests that the bank is a creator and formalizer of
social memory, indeed the custodian of the social capital that transactors
use to assess one anothers resources and reliability (2007:62). If one adds
to these functions the creation of qualitatively different financial instruments, criteria for qualification of access, and a host of other structuring
definitions on nominal and ordinal scales, these might well be more powerful than anything that could possibly be summarized as the mediation of
forces of supply and demand in the capital market. Again, the memory
bank has been an orphan subject, in general. The social prominence of
historical referents in the African transactions Berry describes opens up the
capacity and the imperative to see them more clearly elsewhere.

Formal Interventions into African Dynamics

The articles of Maurer (12538) and Ferguson (7186) show how the formal financial world adapts readily to conditions that are quite specific to
Africa at the turn of the twenty-first century: the realization that most of the
population will never work in the formal sector and the dynamics of capital flight resulting from political conflict. Under these circumstances the
formal sector has found logics and practices within its existing repertoire
that could be further developed. At the stage that both papers are addressing, the result is the situational extension of specific kinds of payments.
Maurer (2007:134) goes a step further to claim that, in general, payments
can be much more important than market transactions. Payments do not
work on a calculative rationality but rather on a manipulation of definitions
and dates (see Berry [2007:64] on temporal scales.) His perception (which
I agree withsee Guyer 2005) applies to markets everywhere. There are
mini-monopolies, fines, fees, duties, and so on secreted within much of
what is presented to us as market prices. If we follow out the logic, a system of payments is inevitably based on nominal and ordinal scales (as I will
pick up again later), many of them formalized in the state and financial sectors (see Berry, this issue). The fascinating idea that both Ferguson and
Maurer insist on, presumably independently, is that these scales do notin
fact, or at the momentform anything like the vague whole that Verran
(this issue) encourages us to assume as a premise for our work. For Ferguson, many-sided and complex arguments meet opaque informalities.
They produce no single logic or rationality, but rather (quoting Marginal Gains) separate formalities that coexist withand shade intoconversionary modes of exchange (2007:80,82,84). For Maurer, the result is
less a gradient than a tangle of incalculable payments (2007). For both,
the incoherence of this situation is only writ large in Africa; its conditions

194 African Studies Review

of existence emanate from financial provisions and practices within the

world economy more broadly. It would be, then, a perquisite of political
power to control the intersection of payments, market forces, and the
ordinal scales that bridge the two. So the relative coherence of the wageprice-tax nexus within livable logics in Europe but not in Africa (see Roitman 2005) should be traced to the politics of the definitions and the ordering principles that produce that effect. The politics of ordinal scales
becomes a crucial topic: that is, whose scales, configured how, imposed on
whom, and lived in what way.

Back to General Theory

From the allusions and mid-level theoretical arguments of the rest of us,
Roitman (15561) and Verran (16382) both turn to a more direct engagement with general theory. Roitman asks, rightly, what kind of grounding
informs my concepts and the connections among them, particularly those
related to the stabilization of value scales, and even the plausibility of rank
itself. What is the difference between routinization, institutionalization,
and formalization? Do institutions arise out of aggregation? If not, how are
practices to be seen as enduring and reproductive? And, I might add
myself, how does one of my favorite processes, configuration, really work?
At one level, these questions take us back again to ethnography: to the articles of Geschiere, Adebayo, Barber, Udry and Woo. At another, they lead
straight into the problematic brought to us by Verran: Can we work from a
vague whole to specific parts and back again through a series of mediators; from a relational empiricism of qualities to a style of modal reasoning that stresses ordinal number, where relational qualities are intrinsic (as distinct from calculation, which applies to discretely defined
goods)? Verrans clarification of the differences between two constructivist theories, and their links to different styles of empiricism, is enormously helpful for a new reading of epistemology and philosophy. I claim
empiricism in the book, in the sense of respect for the sources and pattern
recognition in their content, but I worked without the kind of philosophical grounding she calls for. That task will take much longer than the time
allowed for preparing this response. So, in the interim, I take up her strong
suggestion that the theoretical work of Michel Callon would be fruitful.
One recurring question will affect how we engage with theory based in
non-African realities: What is the theoretical status of Africa? Geschiere
(this issue) worries about reinscribing an African exceptionalism. One of
Marginal Gainss reviewers (Ralph 2005) is concerned that theorizing from
Africa can limit our own imaginations about applicability to the European
and the formal sector. I think the articles here begin to answer these concerns, but the issue does remain something of a conundrum, because theorization of mutually constructed differences in the global economic world
is weak. I do my best.

Africa Has Never Been Traditional: A Response 195

Callon, Some Commentary from France, and the Continuing

Challenge of Europe.
I am not necessarily well prepared for this engagement because I can take
on neither the deeper philosophical issues nor the detailed empirical work
of the ANT (actor-network theory) scholars. But it is certainly worth indicating convergences and divergences that arise from Callons programmatic statements (especially 2002, 2005, n.d.). Clearly, as Verran suggests, I
have imbibed more of this thinking than I was aware of, largely via the work
of others. Callon (2005, n.d.) enunciates his core assumptions for the study
of the multiple capitalisms that he sees emerging from the declining expectations that modernity canor shouldbe maintained as a coherent
model of life. The similarities between his assumptions and my own in Marginal Gains are obvious, especially in his claim that the performativity of
economics means assuming that agency is distributed and that concrete
markets constitute collective calculative devices with variable, adjustable
configurations (2005:3). A specific market is created and enacted by disentanglingcommodities and services from their embeddedness in a proliferation of potentially relevant characteristics and identifying the particular agencies and technologies that are deemed by participants to be apposite to that market at that time. The terms of market involvement are constantly shifting, so instead of assuming, for example, the existence of a
spirit of capitalism or an overall logic of a mode of production, we can
relate certain forms of economic activity to be more or less chaotic . . . [with
an] upsurge of [varied] calculative agencies (2005:5). Modernity, Callon
points out (following Bruno Latour [1993]) involved a continual process of
purification of categories of goods, a process that inevitably produced
hybrids as science and the world shifted, thus necessitating another
round of purification, and so on. The embrace of performativity, chaos,
mixes and hybrids, according to Callon (2005:1; 2002), is a sign that we
are busy leaving the modern world or (rather) . . . the modern project for
an economy of qualities rather than goods, where the value of different
components of complexes fluctuates according to which agent, using
what technologies, is engaged in the process. This is a diffuse, participatory
economy, in which people themselves create knowledge and values, and
social scientists are in the same boat as the actors themselves (2005:1). It
is economic agents, from either the demand or the supply side . . . that construct . . . singularities and substitutabilities (2002:201).
Beyond Verrans direct invocation of Callons ideas, there are clear synergies between his work and the other articles in this issue, infrequent as
the explicit references may be. Maurers critique of method corresponds to
similar perceptions of the world as Callons. My own division of Marginal
Gains into Scales and Performances seems to echo the concept of an
economy of qualities. And Barbers praise songs of self-creation, made up
of multiple labile sources and references disentangled from their origins

196 African Studies Review

and reentangled in chaotic profusion, would seem an absolutely apposite

aesthetic form for this abandonment of the modernist project.
Is this convergence the result of theoretical osmosis or historical convergence? Perhapsas I speculate hereit is the product of a renewed and
parallel attention, in different locations, less to newness than to what was
always there, in peoples experience and practice, though overshadowed by
theories too parsimonious to produce a rich analytical vocabulary to
engage with them and too successfully hegemonic, or militant, to try. As
Sidney Mintz (1998) points out for the Caribbean, it was always global and
always creole, long before globalization and hybridity appeared on the conceptual horizon. These qualities were just lived most intensely in a place
that was considered marginal, and whose peoples experience was not considered crucial to general theory. Like the Caribbeanists, I think the apparent convergence also comprises disjunctures that would be important for
all of us if we could define their contours.
Work in Africa is full of evidence that modernity (in Callons terms)
never really worked in practice as a full-fledged cultural, political, and economic project. The Atlantic trade and colonial rule left expectations of
modernity (Ferguson 1999) but little reality; it left the idea of wages,
prices, and taxes but no coherent connections among them (Roitman, this
issue); it left states that Davidson (1992) argued were the black mans burden. I argue in Marginal Gains that colonialism left a legacy of living with
mercantilism: European opportunistic self-protection, conservation of metropolitan wealth, and entrenched concepts of difference. In other words,
the version of modernity that arose in Africa was a project that Europe
(and capitalism) certainly practiced and still does, though it no longer
acknowledges these characteristics as part of its modern project. And it is
a version of modernity that our textbooks hardly describe as having a theory at all. Africa was, from Europes perspective (and using the Latour/Callon terminology), a permanent hybrid: traditional most of the time and
modern in lackluster fits and starts, for specific places and peoples. So if
we in the West have never been modern, in spite of all the effort at purification, then Africa has never been traditional either (see Ferguson
2006).
So in truth, we are all on the same page here, exceptcruciallyfor
the prominence we give in African studies to the longue dure with respect
to the social and cultural creativity that can emerge where the illusion of
modernist purification did not fall apart only recently, where it was an
expectation (Ferguson 1999) but never a full reality. If so, this changes a
lot. While our vocabularies might track with one anothers, the economic
sociologies of Europe and of Africa might sustain some mirror-image
qualities and some interesting differences in relation to each other. Callons notion of the reconfigured economy as both new and comprehensive
would be undermined. It would become worth recuperating certain other
pasts and presents, as well as projecting futures, even in Europe. And it

Africa Has Never Been Traditional: A Response 197

would suggest that the frameworks and struggles in different locations

beyond Europe would differ but also inform one another. Different angles
and visions result in different emphases. For example, performativity is a
foundational proposition for Callon, whereas for me, in this theoretical
economic context, it is a logical entailment of asymmetrical and reportorial exchange. Likewise, inequality seems only an intermittent topic in Callons programmatic statements. He claims that the rise of technical
democracy is largely secular and explicitly democratic (n.d.). One knows
what he means. In fact there is a whole movement of open-source access in
the United States that has been dubbed Wikinomics (Tapscott & Williams
2006), referring to mass collaborations on corporate projects (at least
partly through competitions offering prize money for innovative ideas). By
contrast, social inequalitiesas one form of ordinalityare a touchstone
for every topic in my own analysis, as the articles in this issue so fully
endorse. So we may be quite agnostic about how the longer term dynamics
of mass collaboration and wild research will play out. Callons analysis
is also quite secular in spirit; research in the wild seems eventually likely
to be quite powerful, and also quite consonant, in its terms, with confined
science in a manner that reminds me of Habermass public sphere at
work. I would be skeptical for the United States, with our strong religious
voices, and even more for Africa because the rift between formal depiction
and local experience is so wide there. Comments by African and Africanist
scholars from a seminar at CERI (Centre dEtudes et de Recherches Internationales) in Paris about Marginal Gains suggested that I extend my focus
on gains and local expertise to ask more about failure and the spiritual
power infused in degrees of success.
So location still matters, because in the mercantilist contexts of world
history, the specificity of the formal sectors presence is in practice still the
crucible for experience, local knowledge, and long-term trajectories. How
we should define the difference between competitive but (theoretically)
inclusive ranking within metropolitan wikinomics and finance capital as
against exclusionary ranking within merchant, extractive-industry, and
philanthropic capital in Africa remains difficult to conceptualize. Some
theory and experience would suggest that inclusiveness is by no means
assured even in the West, and that some populations become disqualified
precisely from participation as full economic agents able to construct
singularities and combinations of their own. The ranking of people,
which Callon sees as an end result of the process, must logically be an ongoing phase of the highly reflexive markets he depicts (2002:202). In one
footnote, he does see that the expert activities of professionals readily
mobilize lasting material devices to make these frames irreversible
(2002:216,n.11). That is, some qualities can become progressively excluded
from consideration, as expert professionals make sure that the market
process does not necessarily reinstate an effective inclusiveness for all
agents and qualities at each iteration, as some other passages on perfor-

198 African Studies Review

mativity imply. But the point is not developed.

Two aspects of African experience make it impossible for us to confine
exclusions to a footnote: African ranking of persons as one of its most evident and interesting sociological dynamics, and its strong relationship, as I
have demonstrated, to commercial and monetary history. Power differentials in finance, politics, and trade with European modernity can never be
overlooked. So the more that differentiated formal sector and financial
practicessuch as the historic limited convertibility of African currencies,
the Basic Income Grant (BIG), the Grey Money Amnesty, household budget surveys, and memory bankingcome to the fore in other places, the
more will regional theorizing offer a counterpoint and critique to the stillevident temptation for Europe and America to consider themselves the
measure of all things. Ranking of qualities can justify exclusion as well as
describe terms of inclusion; it can send peopleand whole continentson
quite different life trajectories. In fact, the West might look less chaotic if
Atlantic Africas aesthetic brilliance at competitive ranking and its experience of political ruthlessness in commerce were used as a guide. American
life produces competitions and rankings for absolutely everything these
days. People compete to be at the top, not only to gain a certain profit
margin or income in a class-based production structure, but also to be well
positioned relative to intricately defined structures. News reports are quite
explicit about this: the price of a particular piece of art is measured by how
much higher or lower it is than that of others; the income of hedge fund
managers is driven up by competition among them, not for a specific
amount but for marginal differences; the level of stud fees for racehorses is
calibrated to the racing career (numbers and ranking of races won, by how
many lengths, by prize money, etc.); the rating of television basketball
games for the costs of advertisements fluctuates according to the ranking
of the players, which in turn rests on comparative scoring statistics; and universities and their individual academic departments are ranked according
to all kinds of measures, including numbers of articles published, grant
money gained, and so on. Somewhere on the way down, oblivion sets in.
In the end, quantification and numbers themselves are used very often
simply to return to ordinality, to allow thresholds and powerful discriminations to be set by apparently objective criteria. Although first expressed as
measures, these benchmarks produce powerful triage processes in terms of
personal choice, legal status, political power, financial qualification. Priority has become a ranking word in scales that are often based on numbers
but not practiced as numbers: diseases ranked for urgent attention by the
numbers of ill or susceptible people; emissions standards set by degrees of
climate change; deviations by various qualification criteria from a prime
lending rate. Cases above and below a setpoint are propelled along different pathways. The concept of priority has almost completely lost its original sense of precedence in time. For us, then, ranking processes may be the
key mediating link between the lateral profusions of the new economy and

Africa Has Never Been Traditional: A Response 199

the powerful institutions that seek to control it by shaping the points of

triage and making pathways extremely arduous to reverse. At the same
time, there are probably parallels and analogs in the emergent processes of
ranking goods and people in the popular sector of the global informal
economy, although research on them is still in its infancy. Between the
tired and misleading binary oppositions between hard and soft methods,
formal and informal sectors, modernity and tradition, market forces and
political-economic constructions lies the process, the product, and the
method of ordinal ranking, where they converge. This is not complex. It
simply demands multiple analytical vantage points that remain open to one
another.

A Final African Instance

When Marginal Gains was completed I myself thought that ranking was
more mundane as a concept in the repertoire and phenomena in the
world than I now do, four years laterand after reading not only the articles in this issue but also the work produced by my undergraduate students
in economic anthropology courses, in which American competitiveness has
played a role in one way or another. However, a particular experience in
Africa in January 2005 provided a powerful premonition of what I understand now. I was in Cameroon, watching television on a break from work in
the middle of the day. The local channel showed the First Lady, Madame
Chantal Biya, holding an audience for her annual New Year greetings, on
the day following President Paul Biyas similar event. Literally dozens,
maybe hundreds, of women filed past her, to shake hands, wish her a
Happy New Year and have their photographs taken with her. They presented themselves as groups, each with a leader: women in the diplomatic
corps, wives of the cabinet members, women in business, members of philanthropic organizations, the womens branch of the party, the wives of each
branch of the military, and on and on. Each leader carried a large basket
of flowers and fruit, or a gift of some kind, and was followed one by one by
the members of her entourage. Each group was called up in an order
whose structure escaped the avid viewer, hurried as I was by the rest of the
activities of the day. Within the groups, it was clear that the wives appeared
according to the ranks of their husbands, and the women attending on
their own account seemed to be ranked by status in their organizations.
The precision was exact, the logistics highly professional, the women all
smiling and gorgeously dressed. Madame Biya presided as if offering benediction to the occasion, its participants, and its offerings, and perhaps also
to the intricate performance of relative rank among all those who mattered politically in Cameroon in 2005. Either the protocol department was
extremely professional and powerful, or else these people, like the Akan
respondents to the GLSS budget study, already knew exactly where they

200 African Studies Review

stood relative to one another. This was the national elite, presenting itself
as the political class of standard theory, and yet, seen from another vantage
point, it was also a public performance made from a profusion of intricate
internal differentiations expressed, in the final analysis, as a single-file rank
order.
I wish I could have analyzed that occasion in the same way that in Marginal Gains I analyzed the episode of Madame A at the petrol station by
taking part, taking a record, and taking stock of our capacities to theorize
the moment in relation to access, value, and the nuances of inclusion and
exclusion. There remains a great deal to be done.
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Notes
1.

The papers on Marginal Gains appearing in this special issue of the African
Studies Review are the following: Adebayo (2007); Barber (2007); Berry (2007);
Ferguson (2007); Geschiere (2007); Maurer (2007); Roitman (2007); Udry
and Woo (2007); and Verran (2007).
I am deeply indebted to the editors of this special issuePeter Geschiere,
Charles Piot, and Mitzi Goheenfor this entire endeavor. They organized the
very stimulating panels at the African Studies Association meetings of 2005 and
encouraged the authors and myself along the way to publication. Ralph Faulkingham and Mitzi Goheen have been extraordinary general editors at ASR.
The authors of the papers have offered so many ideas to work with that this
response must necessarily pick and choose among them. Janet Roitman edited
a discussion in Politique Africaine, which I have used here. Beatrice Hibou orga-

202 African Studies Review

2.

3.

nized a seminar at the Centre dEtudes et de Recherches Internationales in

Paris at which several commentatorsJean-Pierre Warnier and Jean-Francois
Bayart, in particulargave me new lines of thinking from the perspective of a
efflorescent French theorizing of monetary phenomena and economic life
that I have just started to explore in detail. Peter Geschiere read a draft of this
response at very short notice and offered important suggestions.
See Josette Rivallain (1987) and Colleen Kriger (1999) for evidence of the
exponentially more complex realities than those I could incorporate into the
text.
See the introduction written by Peter Geschiere, Mitzi Goheen, and Charles
Piot for this special issue (3741). The paper presented by Piot at the ASA
meeting (Piot 2007) does not appear here.