State and Society in Pre-colonial Asante

"Tom McCaskie has written extensively on the Asante polity, empire, and he’s very well known in the UK and around the world. This was his first major book based on a range of articles that were published in the 1970s and 1980s. By the early 90s this book came out, and it was a crystallization of his work on Asante. What’s really fascinating about it is that it takes us into what the French scholars refer to as our mentalités—the idea of not just looking at what people do in a robotic way or with a mechanized approach to history, but looking at why people do what they do in the way they do it rather than in another way. What he does is he looks at framing Asante history through the Odwira ritual and festival, which is both a nation building and a nation regenerational ritual called Adaduanan. He takes us through that period as a matrix and says this is a way to understand the inner workings of Asante society, of the mentality that drives them. What pushes culture through history? What are the motivating ideas and actions and mechanisms that make a society like Asante the way it is rather than another way? He looks at language in detail—in fact, there’s a glossary of about forty pages. He looks at ritual; he’s deeply invested in historiography. He knows the materials perhaps better than anyone of his generation. It’s a meditation on how a society came to be, how an empire state came to be, looking at their own ideas and actions and archives to figure them out from the inside out. Indeed. Mostly 19th century into the early 20th, but a bit of the late 18th. He doesn’t really go back further than that. He pushes back against one of the other authors on my list, which is Ivor Wilks and his seminal work, Asante in the Nineteenth Century . He pushes back on the framing device that Wilks uses, which is the sociologist Max Weber’s. McCaskie argues that it’s not enough to simply record, even in minute detail, what people do every day, every hour, without understanding what motivates those actions every day, every hour. What’s the matrix in which they operate? McCaskie uses much more the notions being offered by Michel Foucault . He uses Foucault’s approach to power, and he has, in some cases, a less-than-idyllic sense of Asante society. He says that Asante society is driven by the notion of power— tumi , in the Asante/Twi language—that, he says, is the filament for Asante society. It is what regulates it; it is what structurates it. He uses the Foucauldian notions of power as manipulative, as a means of social control, which I actually disagree with. But that’s the view that McCaskie brings to the table. But in terms of detailed research, in terms of the fine-grained approach, it’s one of the best books on Asante society."