12 african appropriations
stricts his analysis to written representations, some of his exegetes have
extended its meaning to apply to colonial everyday life as well. Huggan
(1997/1998: 96) equates it with parody and finds its traces “in performative
acts of simulated obedience, as colonial subjects bow in mock-deference
to their metropolitan ‘masters,’ tacitly resisting subordination by appear-
ing to embrace it.”
Anthropologists who studied imitative appropriations of European
conduct in African dance, ritual, and plastic art were equally keen to
point out the subversive, deeper meanings of these phenomena and in-
terpreted them as acts of resistance to colonial or neo-colonial power
relations (Friedman 1990a; Lips 1937; Stoller 1984). In a recent revision
of such interpretations, James Ferguson (2002: 555) argues that such
analysis, despite being “ingenious,” may still fall short of accounting
for the desire for similarity expressed by most (post-)colonial mimetic
phenomena. He suggests that these need to be understood in terms
of claims to membership—historically, to colonial society, and more
recently, to world society—rather than acts of subversion. W hile I am
reluctant to discard the subversive potential of mimesis outright, as we
see at least some such cases in subsequent chapters, I find compelling
Ferguson’s interpretation that mimesis is an attempt to participate in the
imitated. This connects well to a strand of mimesis theory I further ex-
plore by taking recourse to the work of Walter Benjamin, Fritz Kramer,
and Michael Taussig.
On the Mimetic Faculty is the title of a short essay written in 1933 by the
Ger ma n cr it ica l t heor ist Wa lter Benja m i n (2 005). I nspi red by t he a nt h ro-
pological writing of his time, Benjamin inquires into the cultural history
of mimesis, at the base of which he assumes a human faculty for sensing
and producing similarity.^3 The essay opens with the following lines: “Na-
ture produces similarities; one need only think of mimicry. The highest
capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift for seeing
similarity is nothing but a rudiment of the once powerful compulsion to
become similar and to behave mimetically. There is perhaps not a single
one of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a
decisive role” (720). Benjamin is interested in the resurfacing and transfor-
mation of the mimetic faculty within modernity. W hile he seeks to trace
the mimetic roots of “man’s higher functions,” language and writing, for