the rhetorical management of dangerous knowledge in Kpelle brokerage

Abstract

Anthropologists have made important contributions to the understanding of formal institutional factors that determine (1) the need for a broker role; (2) the kind of people who assume the role; and (3) the benefits, conflicts, and changes associated with the role in different societies ( e g , Wolf 1956; Geertz 1959-60; Silverman 1965). Silverman's succinct definition of the broker who links a local community and an encapsulating colonial administration or nation-state exemplifies this approach. She defines a mediator, a synonymous term for broker, as one who performs functions that meet two criteria: the functions must be critical, viz., "of direct importance t o the basic structures of either or both systems," and exclusive, viz., "if the link is t o be made at all between the two systems with respect t o a particular function, it must be made through the mediator" (Silverman 1965:173). This structural perspective, however, needs to be broadened by recognizing brokerage as a process in which individuals seek to convince others that their activities are indeed mediating, critical, and exclusive. Such a cultural approach is not intended to minimize the importance of sociopolitical structure in determining broker behavior, but to stress that this structure is itself shaped and mediated by individuals' management of meaning.This essay delineates a key premise underlying the Kpelle view of brokerage and analyzes the ways in which this cognitive resource is politically managed by those seeking broker identities. The analytical framework derives from a position outlined recently by This paper argues that Kpelle brokers draw upon the key cultural idea of danger inherent in privileged knowledge to contrive a broker role and to construe its indispensability and threatening power in local politics. Both traditional religious brokers, who mediate between the village and the mystical world, as well as modern brokers, who mediate between the local community and the wider national institutions, use this idiom to persuade the local community that their knowledge of unfamiliar domains is exclusive, critically important, and dangerously powerful. The Kpelle case supports the notion that the broker role is not simply the result of a structural need to link patrons and clients of two different sociocultural domains. I t shows that the role emerges as well from individuals'purposive use of cultural meanings to shape and manage those needs and their political significance. [West Africa, political management of meaning, brokerage, knowledge/secrecy, center-periphery relations]

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