introduction 3numerous attempts to save the concept, I doubt that “culture” can any
longer serve anthropology well as an analytical tool (Abu-Lughod 1991;
Kuper 1999; Trouillot 2003). The idea that something like “culture” really
exists, however, is a reality that is out there, a reality which anthropologists
have had a hand in shaping and which we encounter more than once in this
book. Seen in this light, an inquiry into the effects of “culture contact” is
a misnomer. We might more aptly speak of the experiences of cultural dif-
ference that crop up when people come into contact with other “possible
lives” (Appadurai 1996: 53), and the effects of such experiences. When
using “contact,” I am referring both to situations experienced in real life,
such as a visit paid by a colonial officer to a village head or a public parade
of colonial soldiers observed by a local audience, and to mediated forms
of contact brought about by audiovisual media, that is, by fragments—or
“copies”—of other life-worlds, such as American and Indian films sold as
pirated video copies almost every where in Africa, or world news broadcast
by international media houses via satellite and watched by global audi-
ences, including many people in Africa. Such contact with difference may
stimulate local copies of what has been encountered, from the young Bills
of Kinshasa, who took their inspiration from cowboy movies and the em-
blematic figure of Buffalo Bill, roaming the streets of the Belgian Congo’s
capital in the 1950s (Gondola 2009), a black James Bond featured in South
African photo novels of almost Pan-African circulation during the 1960s
(chapter 2), to a Nigerian Shah Rukh Khan, acting in northern Nigerian
melodramas in the early 2000s (chapter 4). Such copies, again, allow access
to, participation in, and the experience of—essentially, contact with—
other “possible lives.” The imagined possibilities offered by foreign media
are therefore brought even closer to a local audience. Such mediations be-
tween the foreign and the familiar contribute to the construction of local
modernities which do not deny their difference from the life-worlds they
copy from; by copying from and contacting these very life-worlds, how-
ever, they also express a difference from their own past. The underlying
operational logic of contact and copy and copy and contact, which has
been set forth by Michael Taussig (1993) and which I cover in more detail
later on, not only organizes ways to deal with other life-worlds in Africa.
Its very attractiveness is owed to the fact that it can be understood as the
governing principle underlying the mimetic faculty of mankind per se.