SM 1: SEEING MAKISHI ON THE INTERNET

Seeing Makishi. Issue 1: What is Seeing Makishi and what lead to its publication on the Internet?

Version: 3 February 2012

Chizaluke at a village just down Zambezi, NW Province, Zambia in 1985. Photo by author.

By Way of Preface

Yesterday surfing the web I ran into a photograph of Mwana Pwevo. The accompanying text was supposed to be a quote out of my work on makishi, or perhaps a rephrasing, of my description of what kind of beings makishi are. The text was muddled up and prompted me to look into the voluminous manuscript of 1987 titled Seeing Makishi. Seeing Makishi is about the way makishi are constructed.

Seeing Makishi combined two major units of the M.A. in cultural anthropology at the Rijksuniversiteit Leiden (RUL, the State University of Leiden); the M.A. thesis and the field research. I took my time for these things and put much more work into them than the obligatory requirements. One reason was that I hoped to reduce the time needed for the Ph.D., which I intended to do following the M.A., and which was to be on the same subject - now carried a step further.

That was not to be. The universities, at the time, were in turmoil including my beloved RUL. The government had engaged itself in a massive “restructuring” of the universities and university education. This affected the availability and accessibility of Ph. D. positions. On top of it professor Adam Kuper, the main professor for my study, had left Leiden to go to Brunel. I did not get a grant for the Ph.D. place despite the cum laude qualifying my M.A. The “restructuring” was working!

Instead I became involved in that strange thing called international development cooperation. I was engaged from 1988 to 2008 by several international development organizations to do management and consultancy work in Zambia. My main work during the period was the establishment and subsequent support for a combined museum and craft project now called the Choma Museum and Crafts Centre Trust Ltd. It was established with Netherlands technical support and financial support. I had little time for academic pursuits.

In 1988 I deposited copies of the manuscript at the University of Leiden, the Library of the University of Zambia (special collections), the Institute of Social and Economic Studies (formerly Institute of African Studies) of the University of Zambia, and the Library of the Evelyn Hone College at Lusaka. A number of people actually read the manuscript including professional anthropologists, Ph D students (!) and museologists. I was advised, for example by Professor Elisabeth Colson, to publish the manuscript.

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The manuscript was typed from 1986 to 1987 using an Apple IIa laptop; stationed in the “computer room” of the faculty. It was the second (or was it still first?) generation of laptops - portable computers. Indeed it was a small thing. It operated with floppy disks, the truly floppy ones. To get the machine going you first had to load the word processing programme and following that there was a bit of memory left for your actual text. It worked and was great. It had 125 Kb memory and no internal drive. The computer room, by the time I finished writing, had been equipped with a few IBM desk tops having the spectacular memory of about 600 Kb. Technology was moving fast!

Editorial notes

The text is entirely my own as my coaches had given me complete freedom to go about the study the way I wanted to. I handed in a “finished” product without prior discussion or modification due to directives by coaches. For the sake of “publication” I shall do some editing of the cosmetic kind. I shall not mark these. In places where content has been adjusted, updated, commented upon or added I shall indicate such clearly.

Why publish on the net?

Makishi are an interesting subject, both from the ethnographic and artistic point of view. The study, I believe, still offers a unique approach to the study of makishi. First, by relating sets of makishi to sets of people. Second, by taking the idea that makishi are “visual descriptions” further than the common acknowledgement of the validity of that statement in the anthropology of art by extensive iconographic documentation and classification.

Weaknesses in the study pertain in the first place to lack of field data and insufficiently verified ethnographic information. For example, my interpretation of the role of Chizaluke, as a “shared” makishi for all the boys going through mukanda (initiation) is not confirmed by any other publication.

I do believe that the text and imagery of the manuscript is of interest to artists and students of the anthropology of art. I like the idea of publishing on the net as I can do it right from my current location and it makes in principle the information accessible to any interested party.

Finally, IT publication also offers a unique (fast and affordable) way of discussion. I do appreciate your reactions and comments, be these private or meant to be public.

Choma, February 3^rd, 2012