This symposium invites COCA participants to reflect on multiple experiences of the production of anthropological knowledge in and from African territory. Our anthropological products tend to be written texts, that might be defined as very specific narrative forms within the academic rationality of our field of knowledge. According to Benjamin’s reflection (1989[1939]), we sew together in intelligible language our experience solidified in our daily work – in many cases, stemming from relationships of mutuality (Pina-Cabral, 2010; Viegas; Mapril, 2012) forged in the field of research. There are also ethnographic experiences significantly chosen by the anthropologist-narrator to be metamorphosed into lasting experiences, capable of being transmitted, compared, and criticized by their peers.
In one of his reflective texts on the subject, Mozambican historian and novelist J. P. Borges Coelho (2011) suggests that, although History can be set as the “discipline par excellence of narration, that is, the production of representations” (idem, p. 281), no area or way of seeing the world, scientific or not, can claim a monopoly on it (idem, p. 288). The very “category of narration” is “diverse and sometimes conflictual”, among other reasons, “due to the place occupied in society by those who formulate these narrations” (idem) and, we might add, due to the power relations that operate within it (Foucault, 1977). If, as anthropologists, we cannot exempt ourselves from the task of narrating and analyzing the relations of the world from our ethnographic writing, part of our challenge is to deal with the various agencies (academic, fictional, political, national, individual, etc.) that constitute it. How do we entangle them in our anthropological production, especially through ethnographic writing? It is related to diverse experiences, forms, and expressions dear to African territory: songs, poetry, journalistic data, archival material, political speeches, fictional and non-fictional literature – a list that is only suggestive and not exhaustive.
Fictional literature, for example, has helped to complexify academic interpretation, collaborating with our perception of the diversity of trajectories, positions, jobs, and worldviews that involve the broad mosaic of individuals who took part in the various daily hardships related to both the colonial world and the one inaugurated after it, with the independence of different African countries. In the case of Mozambican literature – the research territory of the coordinators of this panel – authors of historical novels such as Paulina Chiziane (2000; 2001), Mia Couto (1992; 2016), Ugulani Ba Ka Khosa (2017) and J. P. Borges Coelho (2006; 2021) have vividly portrayed the intertwining of history, social distinction, and political power in their characters. These authors thus construct a relational universe composed of many beings – human and non-human, visible and invisible, etc. Their characters carry various identifications throughout their life trajectories (Pina Cabral, 2020), reflecting a broader social and national journey, incorporated into their daily lives. As contradictory figures, they move in a memorial imaginary (Ntahomvukiye, 2020) between the glorious and disastrous past, the projects for the future, the difficulties of the present, and, often, the hopelessness of the world in which they live.
Similarly, in Africa, we are increasingly seeing the publication of non-fictional memories with great narrative, historical and stylistic power. For instance, with A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by I. Beah (2008), Dreams in a Time of War: a Childhood Memoir by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (2010), and the S. Mukasonga books, of which the impressive and terrifying Cockroaches (2016) is perhaps the masterpiece. Most of these stories deal with war as a thread. From this perspective, in Mozambique, memorial books with a specific thematic focus, such as the massacres that took place during the various wars that devastated the country’s population, like Véu de morte numa noite de luar – história dos 24 catequistas do Guiúa, mártires de Moçambique, by Diamantino Guapo Antunes (2013), and Hassane Armando’s account (2018) in Tempos de Fúria, about the Homoíne massacre, are of great historical interest and, in the latter, of excellent narrative quality. Still about Mozambican memorial accounts, there are several autobiographical works by former combatants of the colonial liberation struggle and similar figures, centered on the (auto)biographical construction of the authors’ lives, among which those by J. Moiane (2009) and J. Pelembe (2012) are paradigmatic examples.
Equally relevant are accounts of everyday life and exploitative working relationships, such as Memórias de um Caçador de Lixo, by Celso Mussane (2025), which encourages us to look at the colonial suburban world of the then Lourenço Marques (Maputo) in the 1960s and 1970s, full of individual and collective characters, affections, environments, and materialities.
Finally, anthropological research that results from research in archives and on archives, which requires reflection on the transformation of documentary records into sources, is noteworthy. In this case, it can be said that the archive itself becomes the anthropologist’s field of research. As the historian Marc Bloch put it, issues such as the presence (or absence) of certain documents in libraries or archives, as well as other topics that arise from this discussion, are the result of human causes and are an invitation to an analysis that is both historical and anthropological.
Considering this background, we take F. Nyamnjoh’s (2017) proposition about the sense of “incompleteness” as a starting point for reflection. Nyamnjoh (2017) was inspired by the book The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952), by Nigerian author Amos Tutuola, to develop his theory. According to him, the basic and normal condition of human beings is incompleteness: as beings always “in the open,” we seek to complement each other in our relationships with other beings (human and non-human, visible and invisible, etc.), since “incompleteness is what makes us who we are” (2022, p. 2). In this way, it is in the richness of others’ incompleteness and potential that we can, through conviviality, come to know and realize our own.
Without trying to transform the results of our investigations into “complete” products, and going beyond our ethnographies, how can we keep our eyes open to the diverse experiences that make up the universe of this inhabited world (Ingold, 2015)? Where do we look and what do we incorporate into our reflections? And what epistemological status do we give in the composition of our work to each of these diverse ways of experiencing and inhabiting the world, of relating our incompleteness to so many others?
Inspired by this discussion, we invite researchers whose work results from ethnographies carried out in and on diverse African contexts; research that dialogues directly with African literature, taken as a source or instrument of analysis; reflections that result from working in archives and on archives; and, finally, texts that propose theoretical discussions on experiences that deal with different forms of production that go beyond the “classic” models of doing anthropology.