Kai Kresse

The Status of Oral Traditions in the History of Philosophy: Methodological Considerations

7.-9. September 2023, Universität Hildesheim

Kai Kresse

‘Philosophizing as intellectual practice: the oral performance of verbal art that makes people think…’

Case studies from the Swahili context, and African Studies more widely

My contribution seeks to reiterate an argument for the necessity of interdisciplinary engagement for philosophy (especially with anthropology, with its mediating capacities), if the discipline really wants to become able to understand and engage with diverse traditions of thinking and philosophizing around the world that are placed outside the dominant Europhone frameworks and conceptions of what ‘philosophizing’ has been taken to mean. In this vein, I shall revisit the case for an ‘anthropology of philosophy’ (Kresse 2007) that proceeds ethnographically as well as by means of a contextualizing study of people (thinkers, poets, local intellectuals) and texts (both oral and written), placing and interpreting them within their social environments and cultural histories. This was initially inspired by H. Odera Oruka’s ‘sage philosophy’ approach (Oruka 1990).

For my discussion here, I shall focus in on the role of orality for such case studies from my fieldwork on the East African Swahili context (beyond that, I draw from African Studies on orality more widely). Here, we can witness a complementarity between orality and literacy, and verbal performance and reading/writing, that can be said to be at the core of intellectual practice, the expression of critique, and the relevance of verbal art In and for society. Looking at the diversity of Swahili genres of speech and poetry, and at the particular relevance of oral performance, also for the transmission of wisdom, wit, and critique, I shall discuss different cases (poems, speeches, songs) of how the dynamic and artistic use of orality is being played out by different thinkers and artists, to make their audiences think more deeply, attentively, and critically about the social life around them. Based on these examples, my discussion will interrogate the meaningfulness of a supposedly clear division between oral and written cultures, and it will build on engagements with the anthropology of texts (Barber 2007), the sociology of philosophies (Collins 1998), and the anthropology of knowledge (e.g. Lambek 1993; Basso 1996), apart from relevant references in African Studies and African philosophy.

Kai Kresse is since 2018 Professor of Social & Cultural Anthropology at the FU Berlin, and Vice-Director, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO). He was Associate Professor of African Studies at the Columbia University between 2013 and 2018 and is affiliated with the Berlin Graduate School for the Study of Muslim Cultures and Societies and the Department of Anthropology, at the Freie Universität, Berlin. In 2005, he was Evans-Pritchard Lecturer at All Souls College, Oxford. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology and African Studies from SOAS (2002) and a Master’s degree in Social Anthropology from LSE (1997), both University of London, and a Magister degree in Philosophy from the University of Hamburg (1996). Kresse’s research interests include African philosophy and intellectual history; social theory; intercultural philosophy; the study of texts in social contexts; Swahili genres of poetry and rhetoric; Islam and Muslim debates in East Africa; African literature; and social connectivity across the Western Indian Ocean. His interdisciplinary research engages with the study of history, literature, and religion. He is an anthropologist and philosopher who specializes in East Africa and the Swahili coast. Hi publications include Swahili Muslim Publics and Postcolonial Experience (2018), Philosophising in Mombasa: Knowledge, Islam and Intellectual Practice on the Swahili Coast (2007).