Review Science and an African Logic

Trustees of Boston University Review Author(s): Barry Hallen Review by: Barry Hallen Source: The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1, Special Issue: Leisure in African History (2002), pp. 188-189 Published by: Boston University African Studies Center Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3097396 Accessed: 28-05-2016 02:58 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Trustees of Boston University, Boston University African Studies Center are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The International Journal of African Historical Studies This content downloaded from 128.250.144.144 on Sat, 28 May 2016 02:58:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 188 BOOK REVIEWS Science and an African Logic. By Helen Verran. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. viii, 277. $55.00 cloth, $19.00 paper. This is a rich, new, and provocative source of insight and conjecture about an African frame of reference on topics too often downplayed because of their sensitive nature. "African science" and "African logic," when addressed in a forthright manner, have often been rated as fairly rudimentary. Scholars have felt more comfortable and found more of interest in fields such as aesthetics and ethics. Hence the overall humanistic bent to contemporary African philosophy. Helen Verran tells us that this study of number and numbering in Yoruba culture (although it is much more than that) is the product of decades of field- work, analysis, and reflection. All of this involved some fairly revolutionary moments involving the author's own critical rejection of her preliminary relativistic renderings of Yoruba numerical discourse. Indeed it is her telling the story of this process that contributes the pulse to this book. According to Verran, Western epistemology takes for granted as its basic framework the model of a "subject" trying to understand an independently exist- ing "world" by means of various abstract (intellectual) "theories." Among the latter is the discovery and use of numbers. The truth of this basic model is said to be either explicitly or implicitly affirmed by both Western universalists (those who maintain that there is one, true way for subjects to understand the world) and relativists (those who maintain that there are a plurality of ways by which the world may be understood, which are all entitled to legitimacy). Verran rejects her own initial relativistic rendering of Yoruba numbering because she came to realize that she had been guilty of assuming this basic (West- ern) epistemic model must also be formative of any indigenous Yoruba epistemic point of view. In the end she was to conclude that this is not the case, as well as that a variety of other Western presumptions about the way the "world" must be constituted-via forms of predication based upon stable spatiotemporal particulars and their attributes (or qualities), of numbers as "natural" in the sense that they are ontologically real and thereby independent of the knowing subject and merely represented by numerals-were peculiarly and ethnocentrically Western. What does she propose as an alternative Yoruba relationship between the subject and the world, and of the process of numbering that may involve? This is the most intriguing portion of Verran's argument. A shift from a disinterested epistemic observer to a subject "working with" objects is crucial to her revisionist epistemology. The Yoruba person, she suggests, does not relate to the "world" or to "reality" as some distant, gigantic "thing out there" to be understood on the basis of abstract theories. The Yoruba persona is engaged via the performance of various activities with that world (subject and object are said to "clot") in a manner that makes both actions and language as (per)formative of understanding. This content downloaded from 128.250.144.144 on Sat, 28 May 2016 02:58:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BOOK REVIEWS 189 Furthermore, as reflected by both verbal and nonverbal human behavior, the nature of things in that world is of a fundamentally different ontological or meta- physical character than is generally presumed in the West. Physical matter in all of its forms is potentially and diversely active, thereby manifesting itself as having various capacities and identities in different kinds of situations. This emphasis on doing, acting, and manifesting is said to be reflected in Yoruba grammatical discourse, for example, by a preference for the Yoruba to refer to matter's differ- ent manifestations with verbs and the modalities thereof (adverbs). In effect, this becomes the alternative to Western conventions regarding predication. Rather than objects being processed by epistemologically sacrosanct categories of human understanding, it is matter, via its interactions with humans that reveals itself as having various forms or modalities. One of these is the capacity for the "same" matter to manifest itself, depending upon the circumstances, as both the whole and the parts (a whole hand that may alternatively manifest itself as five parts) that can then serve as a basis and reason for numbering. Although Verran seems to insist on a rigorously behavioristic approach to her subject matter, since her findings are also meant to be of ontological import, one wonders whether the view that emerges-the emphases on manifesting, acting and doing-might share something in common with the vital force ontologies proposed by Placide Tempels and Alexis Kagame and thereafter elaborated by various proponents of Bantu philosophy. Or perhaps there could be a common bond with the ontological alternatives proposed by such Western process philosophers as Henri Bergson and Alexander North Whitehead, meant to overcome the arbitrary and false divisions they felt had been imposed on human understanding and experience of the "world" by excessive analytical, conceptual abstraction. As will hopefully be clear from the above, in Verran's view it is in the emerging and merging of subject with object that understanding (and numbering) arises in the Yoruba form of life. BARRY HALLEN Morehouse College and W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University Cameroon's Tycoon: Max Esser's Expedition and Its Consequences. Edited by E. M. Chilver and Ute Roschenthaler. Cameroon Studies, Volume 3. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. Pp. xx, 204; 24 illustrations. $69.95 cloth, $25.00 paper. Max Esser was a man with a mission. A restless German business entrepreneur (1866-1943) and son of a prosperous Cologne commercial leader, he was in to This content downloaded from 128.250.144.144 on Sat, 28 May 2016 02:58:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms