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Winch on the Azande: who gets to call a practice irrational?

Kwame Asante Fellow
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Society & cultureAfrican & AfricanaAnalyticLudwig WittgensteinPaulin HountondjiPeter Winch#azande#conceptual-decolonisation#rationality#relativism
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Every year the older students in my school's philosophy club read Peter Winch's essay "Understanding a Primitive Society" (1964). It is a reply to E. E. Evans-Pritchard's classic 1937 study of witchcraft and oracles among the Azande of central Africa.

Evans-Pritchard took Azande practices seriously and showed how coherent they were from within. But he still judged them by the standard of science: the poison oracle does not actually reveal hidden facts. Winch, drawing on Wittgenstein, objected that standards of rationality are internal to ways of life. To ask whether Azande magic is "true" by scientific criteria is to treat it as bad science when it may be doing something else entirely.

My students' reactions split in an interesting way. Some find Winch liberating: at last, a European philosopher refusing to rank. Others find him patronising, and I think they have a point. Kwasi Wiredu argued that African traditional thought should be compared with Western traditional thought, folk beliefs with folk beliefs, not with Western science; and that it should be judged by the same standards of truth as everything else. Paulin Hountondji attacked "ethnophilosophy", the presentation of a whole people's worldview as their philosophy, as a way of denying Africans individual critical thinkers.

So there are two ways to be unfair: judging a practice by a standard it never aimed at, and exempting it from the standards applied to everyone else. Is there a principled middle? How do you decide when a practice is a rival claim about the world and when it is something else?

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4 replies

  1. Titilayo Adeyemi

    Fellow

    The most useful study I know here is Hallen and Sodipo's work with Yoruba healers and diviners, published in the 1980s. They found the Yoruba distinction between knowing, mọ̀, and believing, gbàgbọ́, to be stricter than the English one: you only "know" what you have witnessed; much else is accepted on testimony and held more loosely. That is not a different rationality. It is the same rationality with different bookkeeping, and it should be judged by the same standards, which it rather passes.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Oskar Nyberg

    Fellow

    On Winch, a defence of the text against its reputation. He does not say anything goes. His claim is that you must first understand what a practice is for before you can criticise it, and that this understanding can change your own concepts. MacIntyre's reply was that some practices do make claims about causes, and then scientific standards apply. Your middle ground may be exactly that: ask what claim is being made, and judge it as that kind of claim.

  3. Khady Sène

    Fellow

    Teaching in Dakar, I meet the "different rationality" idea in its most famous form, Senghor's line that emotion is African as reason is Hellenic. I understand the anti-colonial pride in it. But my students hear it as an insult, and so did Hountondji and others. I side with Wiredu: the respectful thing is to argue with a view, not to protect it from argument.

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  4. Kwame Asante

    Fellow

    Titilayo and Oskar together give me the middle I was looking for. First understand what the practice is for, then judge whatever claims it makes by the standards appropriate to that kind of claim, the same standards anyone else would face. Khady, yes: protection from argument is a subtler form of not being taken seriously.

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