GLEBO:CIVILIZING

THE ANTHROPOLOGIST

Mary H. Moran

Portraits TOC

Anthropologists entering a new field situation expect to beconfronted with difference; different foods, different lan-guages, and different ways of performing even the most

mundane of daily tasks. But many of us also carry into the fieldthe expectation that we will share certain social categories withthe people we meet; men and women, for example, or childrenand adults. The tendency to assume that we understand the cat-egories of others increases when informants or field assistantsspeak the anthropologist’s native language. After all, if we’re allspeaking English, then we must be communicating? Reallyunderstanding each other, right? The temptation to believe thiswas the case nearly led me to overlook what turned out tobecome the central focus of my research in Liberia, a small coun-try on the great “bulge” of west Africa.

LIBERIA: AN AMERICAN

COLONY IN AFRICA

My expectations that I, as an American, would not find Liberiatotally unfamiliar were grounded in the unusual history of thatparticular country. The nation was founded in 1822 by a philan-thropic organization called the American Colonization Society(ACS) as a refuge for “Free People of Color” in the UnitedStates. Historians have debated the motives of the ACS mem-bers, who were all white men and included some slave owners.1

Although classified as a “benevolent” organization set up toassist free people in emigrating from the United States, ACSmembers clearly had their own interests in mind. Free Blackswere seen as a threat by slave owners, since by their very exis-tence they demonstrated that they could survive without thedirection of a master. They were also suspected of instigatingslave uprisings, and many were important figures in the aboli-tionist movement.

Furthermore, even many northern abolitionists, whilemorally opposed to slavery, could not imagine a multiracialsociety in which former slaves could live as equals.2

Colonization seemed the perfect solution; by contributingmoney and resources to “return” ex-slaves to their “homeland,”whites felt they could assuage their consciences and solve a vex-

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ing social problem at the same time. But while popular withwhites, the colonization plan never found much favor with itsintended beneficiaries. By the early nineteenth century, Africanshad been present in the Western Hemisphere for well over threehundred years; most had no emotional tie to the African conti-nent and little desire to “return” to the land of their ancestors. Inaddition, most saw the colonization scheme as deportation, justwhen the nation was beginning to debate the morality of slaveryand the role of African Americans as potential citizens. Still asmall group of settlers accepted the ACS’s offer to set up acolony on the West African coast, naming their new home“Liberia” for “Liberty.”

It is important to note that the initial colonists of Liberiawere not, as some accounts suggest, “freed slaves” but FreePeople of Color, some of whom came from families that hadbeen free for generations. They saw themselves not as Africansreturning home but as exiled Americans building a new,Christian, “civilized” society in the wilderness. Many of the firstcolonists were the children or grandchildren of white slave own-ers who had been generally well educated; some even had col-lege degrees. But in antebellum America, such people had norights as citizens and faced discrimination in where they couldlive and work. They could not vote (although they wererequired to pay taxes) and were in danger of being kidnappedand sold into slavery if they could not prove they had been bornfree or legally freed by their owners. They were drawn from anemerging Black middle class of merchants, craftsmen and pro-fessionals; what they were seeking in Liberia was not releasefrom slavery but the freedom to conduct their businesses with-out harassment, to practice their professions and rise in societyto the full extent of their abilities. In short, they left America forAfrica in the hopes of finding a place where they could achievethe American Dream.3

On the West African coast, the settlers attempted to recreateas closely as possible the life they had known in America.Ironically, they also reproduced many of the hierarchical struc-tures that they had found so oppressive. The territory thatbecame Liberia was, like the Western hemisphere, not empty ofpeople when it was “discovered.” About two million indigenousAfricans, speaking sixteen different languages, lived within theborders of what became the new republic. For many years and

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even after they declared their independence from the ACS in1847, the settlers exercised only sporadic control over the landsand peoples beyond their coastal towns. It must be rememberedthat the settlers from America were always a very small group;fewer than twenty thousand people emigrated to Liberia duringthe nineteenth century and they never constituted more thanabout two percent of the population. They were surrounded notonly by the indigenous people, with whom they shared neitherlanguage nor culture, but also by the French and British colo-nialists who often ignored their territorial claims and rights as asovereign republic.4

For well over one hundred years, Liberia was the only inde-pendent, Black-ruled republic in Africa, while Europeans divid-ed up the rest of the continent between them. For many AfricanAmericans, Liberia became a symbolic “homeland,” much likeIsrael for American Jews. While the vast majority had no desireto go and live there, they felt a sense of kinship and connection,supported Liberia politically and financially, and saw them-selves as having a stake in its future.

Given this history, then, it is not surprising that I foundmany things familiar when I arrived in Liberia in 1982.Although a military coup in 1980 had removed most descen-dants of settlers from the highest political offices, the nationallanguage was English, U.S. currency was the legal form ofmoney, and references to Liberia’s American past were every-where I looked. The capital, Monrovia, was named for JamesMonroe, the president of the United States at the time of settle-ment in 1822. The county in which I did my fieldwork wascalled Maryland, and its main town, Harper, had streets withnames like Baltimore Avenue. Outlaying communities calledPhiladelphia and Bunker Hill added to the slightly surreal expe-rience of finding familiar place-names scattered across the exoticWest African landscape. Perhaps, more than most anthropolo-gists, I can be forgiven for assuming that the transition wouldnot be so hard after all, that I already shared many basic culturalfeatures with Liberians, and that this would make my work thatmuch easier.

On the other hand, it soon became apparent that the surfaceveneer of American place-names was just that, a set of labelsapplied uneasily to something distinctly African. Much as thesettlers may have wished to preserve their “civilized” Western

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culture, they, like any other human group, found that they hadto adapt to their new surroundings, including new crops, formsof political organization, and relations with the indigenous peo-ple. While much of Liberian national culture may “look”American, it is in fact a unique and creative amalgamation ofWestern and indigenous elements borrowed from the country’ssixteen different language groups. Indigenous Liberians weredrawn into national culture by institutions like mission schoolsand churches, wardship and apprenticeship in settler homes,and participation in labor migration to neighboring Europeancolonies. However, this was not a one-way process. IndigenousAfricans who became Christian, learned European languages,and used European goods did not automatically “drop” every-thing they had previously believed. Likewise, the settlers, nomatter how hard they tried, could not perfectly reproduce nine-teenth century American culture in a totally new environment.While the settlers had the power (mainly due to the presence onthe coast of the U.S. Navy) to impose more of their culture onthe indigenous people than vice versa, no one’s way of liferemained unchanged.5 In more than a century and a half ofinteraction, groups adjusted to each other by adjusting theirview of the world and how to act within it.

THE GLEBO OF CAPE PALMAS

The indigenous people with whom I went to Liberia to work,the Glebo of Cape Palmas, exemplify this long, complex interac-tion of Western and local African cultures. The Glebo occupythe extreme southeastern point of Liberian territory, with aboutthirty miles of coastline and large expanses of interior farmlandrecognized as their homeland. They belong to a larger languagegroup known as Grebo, which in turn is a sub-family of the Kwagroup of languages, which includes people far to the east, all theway to the Niger delta in Nigeria.6 As coastal dwellers, theGlebo have been in direct contact with European seafarers sinceat least the fifteenth century.7 This means that Western goods,languages, religious ideas, etc., were selectively integrated intolocal practices long before the American settlers came to whatthey called Maryland in 1833. The Glebo, in their own historical

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accounts, claim to have been “civilized” and even converted toChristianity independent of Liberian colonization.8

The Glebo and other southeastern groups were probablyhunters and gatherers in the interior forests until relativelyrecently; there is ecological and other evidence that agriculturehas been practiced in this region little more than five hundredyears.9 The environment is primarily tropical rain forest, with aparklike coastal plain about fifteen miles wide separating thepermanent towns along the coast from the interior farms. TheGlebo, like other indigenous Liberians, grow rain-fed (or “dry”)rice as a staple crop. They practice a farming technology knownas “swidden” (or “slash and burn”) in which a section of forestis cut down, burned, and planted for one or two years, thenallowed to return to “bush” for a period of seven to twelveyears. This system often strikes outsiders as wasteful ofresources, especially given the new concerns with preservingtropical forests. In fact, however, this method makes the best useof thin, fragile soils while protecting them from erosion andallowing the ecosystem time to regenerate.10 Most of the landfarmed in Liberia today is not “virgin” forest but “secondarybush,” land that has already been under cultivation some yearsearlier. The technology and division of labor are organized totake advantage of the alternating periods of rain and dry heatwhich characterize the climate.

Cutting of the bush, or “brushing,” usually begins inJanuary, toward the middle of the longest period of dryness.This is usually done by men, although women may assist or, inthe absence of male labor, even do the job themselves. Thebranches, chopped up brush and tree trunks are left where theyfall to dry in the sun; it is important that there be several weekswith no rain between the brushing and firing of the field so thefire will burn well and reduce all the debris to a fine ash. Thisreleases the nutrients and organic compounds to be absorbedinto the soil as fertilizer. Large and valuable trees, like oil palms,are left standing; a hot fire will damage but not kill them andtheir root systems will help to hold the soil against erosion.Large tree trunks which do not burn all the way through arealso left lying in the field to hold the soil. After the burning,seed rice is planted by women; the first rains usually arrive intime to speed germination. The young plants must be weeded atleast once during the growing season and sometimes more

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often, depending on the condition of the field. Weeding and har-vesting, which begins in late June or July and continues throughNovember, are both considered women’s work. Women alsointerplant vegetables like peppers, pumpkins, eggplant, corn,and cassava on the edges of the field.11

Farming is primarily a female occupation in Liberia, asindeed it is in much of Africa. As a development report from theearly 1980s noted, “A man cannot make a rice farm without awife, but a woman can make a rice farm without a husband.”12

While women (and children) produce the bulk of subsistencefoods in Liberia, men hunt and trap animals in the forest, fishoff shore, gather forest products like palm nuts (from whichpalm oil, the major fat in the diet, is derived) and grow cashcrops like rubber, sugar-cane, and citrus fruits. The proceedsfrom these crops belong to the man exclusively, to do with as helikes, although he has certain specific responsibilities to his fam-ily. The role of the breadwinner, the person whose job it is toprovide the household with food not just by cooking but actual-ly producing it, falls to the woman. This identity as provider is,in fact, seen as an essential aspect of femininity, the behaviorthat is most “womanly” or “wifely.” This understanding offarming as a thoroughly feminine occupation is often over-looked by Western development planners, who continue toextend new techniques, credit, and equipment to men in themistaken belief that women farmers are only “helping” theirhusbands.13

The Glebo, like the other indigenous people of Liberia, areorganized in terms of patrilineal descent. This means that mem-bership in the kin group is traced through the father’s side only;both sons and daughters take their father’s family name, as domost Europeans, but also inherit property, political offices, andcitizenship in towns and other political groupings only throughtheir fathers.14 The right to farm in a certain area, to use certainstands of palm trees, and to build a house in a certain section oftown is also inherited patrilineally. I had studied patrilinealdescent in anthropology courses for many years before I went toLiberia, yet I still reacted with shock the first time someone toldme that his mother was not a member of his family. Under thistype of system, one’s mother is actually an in-law, someone whohas married into the kin group one shares with one’s father, sis-ters, and brothers, but who maintains a lifelong loyalty and

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membership in her own family of birth. Of course, this does notmean that mothers and their children do not share close emo-tional ties, or that children do not know and interact with theirmother’s kin group. But while an individual may recognizelarge numbers of people as being connected to him or her, onlythose related through the father count as “real” relatives; thissystem of kinship is therefore called unilineal (“one line”)descent.

The political organization of indigenous Glebo communitiesis relatively egalitarian; one nineteenth century missionarydescribed it as “the purest of democracies.”15 Similar to manyWest African peoples, the Glebo have what may be character-ized as a “dual-sex” political organization, in which town gover-nance is divided into parallel sets of offices for men andwomen.16 No centralized authority above the level of the townexisted in the indigenous system; towns joined together in tem-porary confederacies or alliances in times of war, but no unified“tribal” organization of Glebo-speaking people emerged until itwas created for administrative purposes by the Liberian govern-ment in the early twentieth century. Each town had, and stillhas, a male wodo baa or “town’s namesake” whose position“belongs” to a particular resident kin group. Other than provid-ing candidates for the office, however, this kin group has noother special privileges in town affairs and cannot be said torank above other local families. The position does not pass auto-matically from father to son but is open to all adult males in thefamily with the final decision made by the town’s council ofelder men. Each resident kin group sends one man, usually theoldest, and one woman, to sit on the town council. The wodobaa, whose position is recognized by the Liberian governmentas the “town chief,” has little executive power and makes deci-sions only in consultation with the council or, for really impor-tant matters, with the consent of the entire town. His femalecounterpart, the blo nyene (which translates literally as “groundwoman”), is elected from among all the town’s women to repre-sent their interests. She has no relationship, either kinship ormarital, to the town chief and meets with the women’s councileither alone or in joint session with the men. Also called the“women’s chief,” the blo nyene reportedly has the power to vetodecisions made by the male leaders and can enforce this by call-ing strikes and walkouts of all the women in town. Since, as wehave seen, women are responsible for daily subsistence, this can

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be quite a powerful weapon and somewhat balances the officialideology of male supremacy.17

In addition to the secular authorities, each major Glebotown has a ritual leader, the bodio, or “high priest.” With hiswife the gyide, the bodio is the embodiment of the health andvitality of the town and responsible for keeping and caring forits “medicines” or ritual objects. This position, like that of thetown chief, is held by a particular kin group but it is frequentlydifficult to find candidates when the office becomes open; all theeligible men literally “run away” to escape the onerous duties ofthe position. The high priest and his wife live a life constrainedby ritual prohibitions. They cannot spend a night outside thetown, bathe after sunset, shake hands with unrelated people ofthe opposite sex, or see a dead body, among many other restric-tions. These rules effectively keep them from farming and leavethem dependent upon contributions from the townspeople forsupport. Most tragic of all, to the Glebo, is that the death of ahigh priest or his wife cannot be acknowledged publicly; thebody is buried secretly at night and a new occupant of the posi-tion is installed immediately. When the community rises thenext morning and finds a new person wearing the black clothingand white chalk facial markings of the bodio or gyide, they maynot comment on the transformation or mourn the passing of theprevious officeholder. To acknowledge the death of these ritualspecialists would be to admit the mortality of the town and itskin groups, to compromise the health of the entire community.Glebo comment upon the sacrifice made for the good of thetown by the high priest and his wife when they note that theworst thing about the job is that “no one can cry for you whenyou die.”

In addition to these and other permanent offices, Glebotowns also stratify men into named groups based on relativeage. Since women, in a patrilineal system, tend to move away tolive with their husbands at marriage, there do not seem to becomparable formalized age associations for them. Each towndoes, however, have an association of married, adult womenwho look to the woman’s chief and the female elders for leader-ship. Women’s voices are heard in town decision-making, par-ticularly on any issue involving subsistence farming or children,their areas of special concern. Men, who are more likely toremain in the town to which they patrilineally belong, progressas a group from “small boys” (kyinibo) to “warriors in training”

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(kinibo), to adult, married “warriors” (sidibo). The eldest man ineach kin group will take his place on the council of elders, thefinal age group to which a man can belong. Much of the politicsof Glebo towns circulates around the conflicts and compromisesreached between groups defined by age and gender. This many-layered system of ritual and secular offices in Glebo towns issimilar to other African political structures which have beendescribed as acephalous, or headless. Without a single central-ized authority, decision-making is collective and more people,both men and women, have an opportunity to display their tal-ents for leadership at different points in the life cycle.

The indigenous religious system, like elsewhere in Africa, isnot set off as an institution from everyday life. Rather, spiritualand supernatural power permeates all activities and humaninteractions. A high god, Nysoa, is seen as the creator of theworld and all its inhabitants, but lives removed from life onearth and has little interest in human affairs. Ancestral and for-est spirits (kuu) are far more present and involved in the lives ofthe living and must be “fed” from time to time with offerings offood and drink. Spiritual forces reside in all living things andsome inanimate objects; all human beings have the potential toharness and direct this power, although not all have the knowl-edge or desire to do so. Translated into English as “witchcraft,”this power, or we, is capable of harming or killing other peopleand most deaths, except those of the very young or very old, areattributed to it. It is the duty of the elders in each family to pro-tect the junior members from spiritual harm; their greatestthreat, should they be angered, is to withdraw this protection,leaving the younger person vulnerable to illness and death. Thehigh priest and his wife and the council of elders, both men andwomen, perform this protective function for the town as awhole.

The Glebo are perfectly willing to accept Western explana-tions, like germ theory, as the means by which a spiritual“attack” is carried out, but not as the ultimate cause. We in theWest seem willing to tolerate a fair amount of randomness inour explanations for why things happen. I may wonder, forexample, why I got sick and my friend did not, even when wewere both sneezed on by someone with a cold, but I will mostlikely ascribe it to simple “bad luck.” The Glebo are not contentwith such a partial explanation. Why, they demand to know,did this particular individual get sick at this particular time?

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Everyone may know that there are “germs” in a well that some-times make people sick when they drink the water, but whyshould three children in one household die within a week whenothers, drinking from the same well, do not? Rather than search-ing for an explanation in the random and impersonal world ofmicrobes and immunities, the Glebo seek to find it in the realmof human relationships. Did the father of the three childrenbehave disrespectfully toward his elderly uncle just a few weeksearlier?

Human emotions, particularly intense in small, egalitarian,face-to-face communities, are understood to be powerful actorsin the material world. They can make things happen, take life orprotect it, alter the time-space continuum so that someone “hap-pens” to be in the path of an accident just when it occurs. Thedangers of the world are very evident to the Glebo, but most ofthese dangers are located in human intentions and relationships,not in the random fluctuations of luck. Their conception ofhuman beings is not one of helpless victims at the mercy offorces beyond their control, but of powerful agents, using theirknowledge and experience to make choices and be effective inthe world. Some of these choices may be immoral, but theevents that result are never without cause.

GROUP INTERACTION

AND “CIVILIZATION”

As mentioned above, the Glebo have a long history of contactwith other peoples, both African and European. Their own oraland written histories tell of their migration from the easterninterior to Cape Palmas, where they displaced other peoplealready living there. This probably occurred just at the time thataccess to the coast was becoming a strategic asset in the emerg-ing slave trade with Europe and the New World.18 Beginning inthe eighteenth century, Glebo men, along with men from othersoutheastern Liberian groups, were signing on for two-yearperiods of employment aboard European ships or as laborers inneighboring colonies. Known collectively as “Krumen,” these

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migrant workers became famous all along the coast for theirreliability and hard work. They were recruited for the railroadsand gold mines of Ghana, the palm oil industry in Nigeria, andthe coco and coffee plantations of the Spanish colonies. Somewent as porters on the great expeditions of “discovery” withexplorers like Mary Kingsley and David Livingston.19

While some of these migrant laborers never returned (andfounded “Kru Towns” in port cities like Lagos and Accra), mostcame home when their contracts expired, bringing with themtheir pay in the form of trade goods like cloth, firearms, andother manufactured items. These trips abroad became part ofthe coming-of-age experience for several generations of menthrough the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. Menused the proceeds of their trips to contract marriages by givingsome of their trade goods as gifts to the brides’ families. TheGlebo and other southeastern Liberians were thus tied into agrowing west African coastal economy and thereby to theexpanding world market. The taste for exotic manufactureditems grew along with the exposure to new ideas. Somemigrants became literate and interested in Christianity, andmost became proficient in English and other European lan-guages.20

When, in 1833, the Maryland state chapter of the AmericanColonization Society decided to set up its own colony at CapePalmas, they found themselves dealing with “natives” whospoke English (as well as some French and Portuguese), under-stood the value of various trade goods, and requested teachersand missionaries as part of the agreement to let the Americanimmigrants settle among them.21 In fact, in their own writtenhistories (in both Glebo and English), Glebo chroniclers insistthat Christian missionaries arrived, at the invitation of theindigenous people, several years before the colonists fromMaryland.22 While there is no independent evidence to supportthis claim, it is important to note that this version of historygives the Glebo credentials as “civilized” that predate the estab-lishment of the American colony.

In any event, it was the Episcopal church of America whichaccelerated, if it did not begin, the process of “civilizing” theGlebo. The availability of mission education and employmentled to a new status division in the Glebo communities, as didthe establishment of “mission towns” surrounding the churchesand schools. Most converts in the early years were young men

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who had had experience abroad and who were willing to chal-lenge the controlling power of the elders. The white Americanmissionaries expected their converts to take on a completelynew lifestyle with their new religion: “A good Glebo Christianobserved Sunday, pulled down gree grees [indigenous religiousobjects], and refused to participate in traditional sacrifices, but agood Glebo Christian also wore Western clothes, built a Westernhouse, married only one wife, and cultivated a garden of flow-ers.”23

The civilized Glebo who occupied the new mission towns,much as they may have appeared to take on Western culturealong with Christianity, did not find themselves welcomed bythe American settlers. The settlers were concerned that these“civilized natives” would combine their Western and indige-nous connections to monopolize trade with the interior andmight challenge the settler dominance of the Liberian state.Educated Glebo found themselves shut out of high-level gov-ernment jobs and encouraged to build their own churches andschools rather than integrate settler congregations. In addition,civilized Glebo chose to maintain their identification as Glebo;they continued to participate in kin group activities, taught theirchildren Glebo as a first language, and in several nineteenthcentury wars allied themselves with native Glebo against thesettlers.24 Although legally no longer under the jurisdiction ofnative chiefs, they continued to show respect for indigenousauthorities and never gave up their belief in the power ofhuman beings to affect each other’s lives through witchcraft.And, while the church officially recognized only one marriage,prominent men continued to have several additional “countrywives” married according to indigenous practice in addition tothe “ring wife” at home. This practice was also taken up by set-tler men, and served as an important way of forming kinshiplinks to indigenous authorities and trading partners.

By the time I arrived to begin fieldwork with the Glebo in1982, this system had been in place for over one hundred years.People, places, things, and activities were designated as eithernative or civilized with a clear difference in the status accordedto each. While civilized, in general, ranks higher in overall pres-tige than native, it is important to understand that these termsonly make sense when applied to various social contexts, ratherthan as absolute standards of value. In the case of a witchcraftaccusation, for example, civilized people will defer to the

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greater knowledge and experience of native elders to handle theinvestigation. If the activity in question is a proper Christianburial, on the other hand, civilized people will step in to managethe event for their native kinsfolk. As I was to discover, thereare no hard and fast definitions of what civilized and nativemean to the Glebo; this allows the terms to be applied flexibly,negotiated, contested, and reinforced through daily practice.25

CIVILIZING THE ANTHROPOLOGIST

I arrived in Cape Palmas knowing that the Glebo were dividedinto civilized and native communities and thinking that I under-stood what this entailed. I assumed, for example, that nativeGlebo would be non-Christians which, like many of my assump-tions, turned out to be false. I was, in fact, quite ambivalentabout the term “civilization” itself. My training as an anthropol-ogist had included the concept of cultural relativism, whichholds that all cultures are equally valid and complex means ofadapting to a given environment. I abhorred the idea that anyone culture’s standards (particularly my culture’s) should beused as a yardstick to measure the beliefs and values of otherpeople. The whole notion of “civilized” as meaning “better” ormore “advanced” was one I had rejected in the course of becom-ing an anthropologist.

The Glebo, however, had not rejected this idea, and part ofmy exercise of cultural relativism was accepting their acceptanceof civilization as something valuable and worth striving for.Furthermore, civilized Glebo were convinced that they and I (asan obviously civilized person from a civilized country) sharedthe same set of standards for behavior. Since I also thought Iknew what they meant by civilization, none of us could under-stand why I seemed to be making a series of embarrassing pub-lic “mistakes.”

One day, soon after my arrival in Cape Palmas, I purchasedsome doughnuts from a woman selling them, fresh and hot, on astreet corner. I was walking along, on my way to the public mar-ket place, enjoying my donut, when a young man approachedme. He very gently began to reproach me for setting a badexample for “our native people.” How could they learn correctbehavior, he asked, if civilized people went about “eating in the

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street?" I argued with him; to my mind, eating in the street hadnothing to do with civilization, which I equated with Westerneducation and employment in the wage sector. I assured himthat people in America ate food in the street all the time. He wasdisbelieving; it could not be true—everyone knew that civilizedpeople ate in the proper way, sitting down in their houses. Wecontinued the conversation for some time, neither one managingto convince the other and each of us ending up confused at theobvious miscommunication. We were both speaking Englishand the young man was a student at the local technical college.We both expected to share the meaning of the words we used,but obviously we did not.

A more immediate problem, for the Glebo and for me, wasthat I could not seem to distinguish civilized from native peopleon sight. This caused first amusement, than real social embar-rassment for my very civilized foster family, headed by the localGlebo Episcopal priest. That I was also inept at using largeknives, carrying water on my head, or keeping my skirt out ofthe cooking fire they could understand; while worried about myphysical safety, they realized that my culture had not preparedme with these skills. But why I could not pick up the same visu-al cues they used to type others as civilized or native (and evenworse, that I was so rude as to keep asking) was a mystery.

Clothing, usually a good indicator of socioeconomic statusin the West, was no help to me here. Both civilized and nativemen wore Western clothes, and appropriate “traditional” attirefor the town chief and his councilors turned out to include a suitjacket, tie, and bowler hat. On the other hand, my civilized fos-ter father, the Episcopal priest, changed into a cloth wrappedaround his waist when relaxing at home in the evening. Nativewomen never wore Western style dresses, but civilized womenoften dressed in native “lappa” suits, with a cloth wrapperinstead of a skirt. Professional market women, I discovered,were always native, but some of them were literate, had been toschool, and seemed to have quite successful businesses.Likewise, there were native men who were doing quite well,economically, with their sugarcane farms and were obviouslybetter off than civilized schoolteachers who had not receivedtheir government paychecks in months. Church membershipwas not a reliable indicator; there were many devout nativeChristians and people loved to remind me that “civilization isdifferent from Christianity,” although they could not seem to

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tell me how it was different. Communities as well as peoplewere designated as native or civilized, but some Glebo profes-sionals lived in native towns and my neighbors in the civilizedtown included market women and subsistence farmers. Mostpuzzling of all, local gossip seemed to revolve around how so-and-so “used to be civilized” but was now selling in the market.Interestingly, all of these backsliders seemed to be women.

What then, if not Christianity or income level, defined civi-lization? Asking this question to my Glebo friends and family,the social scientist in me wanted an answer phrased in terms ofsocioeconomic standing, occupation, or years of formal educa-tion. Instead, people talked about what seemed to be details ofhousekeeping. The first thing civilized people do when they getup in the morning, they said, is to sweep out the house. Thiswas certainly true, but I had also observed our native neighborssweeping out their houses every morning. Civilized people, Iwas told, covered their food to keep off the flies and sat off theground on chairs or stools rather than on the ground on mats.Yet native homes in which I had eaten seemed to serve food inthe same covered bowls and passers-by had reacted with delightat seeing me sitting on a mat on the veranda. Furthermore, inthe context of a sympathy call, everyone, native and civilized,sits on the floor with the bereaved family; not to do so is toinvite suspicion of witchcraft. People mentioned that civilizationrequired long “training,” but this did not seem to take place inschool. And what was this business of some women who “usedto be civilized?"

Puzzling about these questions has kept me busy for yearsafter I left Cape Palmas at the end of 1983. I came to see that civ-ilization, for the Glebo, is applied differently to men andwomen, that it has little to do with material wealth or class posi-tion, and that it is a continual process of “becoming” rather thana static state to be achieved and occupied. It is also tightlylinked, in the Glebo conception, to indigenous status distinc-tions of age and gender which had formerly been the primarybasis of ranking people. And, it bears almost no relation to theWestern distinction between “modern” and “traditional” withwhich outside observers attempt to sort and define the samephenomena.

The civilized/native distinction does not simply reproducethe division between the descendants of the settlers and theindigenous people, since it differentiates between people in the

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same ethnic and language group and, often, within the samefamily. For example, a native family will often choose to investin a formal education for just one child, usually a son. While theother children remain at home to help with the farm work, theboy who is destined to be civilized is sent to live with a civilizedfamily, preferably relatives, for “training” and to attend school.In my 1983 census of six Glebo communities, it was clear thatnative towns were losing population in the age groups six to tenand eleven to fifteen, while the civilized towns showed a cleardemographic “bulge” for these age groups.26 The “training”received in a civilized home involves the instilling of values andattitudes central to the civilized ideal, including an orientationtoward Western material goods, expectations of upward mobili-ty, and a certain disdain for manual labor. It also includes learn-ing to recognize all the subtle clues about an individual’s statusto which I was so blind when I first arrived among the Glebo;how to recognize in an instant where any one person fits intothis two-part hierarchy; and the ability to act accordingly.

If a boy manages to stay in school, at least into the uppergrades (and this is no easy feat, considering the overcrowdedconditions and endless fees for registration, tuition, uniforms,books, shoes, and so on which must be borne by his family), heis pretty well assured of being recognized as civilized. Hisbrothers and sisters who remained on the farm, however, arestill natives, who will look to their civilized brother for assis-tance in dealing with government matters like court cases andtaxes, and in taking in their children for training in civilized lifewhen the time comes. They will also expect him to visit fre-quently, bringing exotic gifts of bottled beer and soft drinks; toexpose his children, however civilized, to Glebo language, histo-ry, and tradition; and to provide financial help to family mem-bers in need. He, in turn, will expect hospitality and a certainamount of respect when he visits, gifts of rice and bush meat,and advice on dealing with serious illness or misfortune thatseems beyond the reach of Western medicine. Although nativeand civilized Glebo are divided by the differing levels of pres-tige attached to the statuses they occupy, there are many recip-rocal rights and duties which continue to hold them together.

During the 1960s, when the Liberian economy was expand-ing due to exports of iron ore and rubber, high school graduatesand even those without diplomas were almost assured of well-paying jobs. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, a declining world

18 PORTRAITS OF CULTURE

economy combined with an ever-growing population of school-leavers made such jobs difficult to come by. This makes themaintenance of a civilized lifestyle and the meeting of kinshipobligations more difficult. As urban anthropologist MerranFraenkel, who studied the civilized Kru community ofMonrovia in the 1960s, has described it:

The most important component of “civilization” is educa-tion, but while to the outsider the question immediatelyarises of how much education a man needs in order to beregarded as civilized, to the Monrovian it does not occur inquite these terms…. The question becomes one of howmuch education a man needs to get a job sufficiently well-paid for him to lead a “civilized” life.27

Or, to paraphrase another anthropologist, Elizabeth Tonkin:“A salary makes you civilized and civilization is necessary for asalary.”28

Even when unemployed, however, men seem to hold ontocivilized status. For civilized women faced with adversity thesituation is different. Native parents are less willing to invest ina daughter’s education since they know that men are more like-ly to be hired for the few available professional and semi-profes-sional jobs. In addition, parents worry that girls will becomepregnant and interrupt their schooling, leaving them unwillingto return to farming but undereducated for the job market.These difficulties are faced by civilized parents as well, whomust send their daughters to school anyway, given the civilizedcommunity’s emphasis on education. A few women manage tocomplete their education and go on to become teachers, nurses,clerks, or other salaried professionals, but many more leaveschool early and spend the rest of their lives struggling to holdonto civilized status.

Of course, a woman who is lucky enough to marry a well-employed man can maintain her status by financial dependenceon her husband. This is out of keeping with the indigenousGlebo construction of femininity which, as we have seen,defines women as breadwinners. But it is very much consistentwith the nineteenth century Western missionary view of civi-lized (or middle-class) women as economic dependents.Civilized Glebo women are hardly ladies of leisure; in fact, they

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do most of the “training” of the next generation of civilized peo-ple, both their own children and those of their and their hus-bands’ native kin. They also are responsible for all those detailsof “housekeeping” and household decoration that figured socentrally in my friends’ description of what civilization was allabout. When one considers that all this sweeping, cleaning, andpressing of school uniforms must be accomplished without run-ning water or electricity, the civilized woman’s work is hardlyless onerous than that of the native female farmer.

But while a native woman can farm without a husband andhold political office based on her own accomplishments, the civ-ilized woman’s status is dependent upon her husband’s contin-uing employment. For those women who lose financial supportthrough widowhood or divorce or whose husbands cannot finda job, often the only alternative is selling in the public market-place. Here is the source of all that gossip I heard about womenwho “used to be civilized.” The fact that these women havetaken on the economic support of their households reducesthem to the status of native women, signaled by the fact thatthey no longer wear Western style dresses. “I would ‘tie lappa’and go in the market, never wear dresses again,” one womantearfully explained to me as she described her devotion to herchildren and her determination that they would finish school,no matter what the cost. In her eyes, it was clearly the greatestsacrifice she could make.

This is a clear example of how the Glebo have incorporatedWestern concepts into their existing system of ranking, ratherthan simply exchanging one set of values for another. But inaddition to what my research has revealed about the Glebo andtheir view of the world, I think it also reveals much about theconcept of culture in anthropology. If we insist on viewing cul-ture as a static “thing,” maintained by endlessly reproduced“tradition,” then the civilized Glebo are anomalous hybrids, tee-tering precariously between an “authentic” African way of lifeand a curiously frozen world of nineteenth century missionar-ies. If, on the other hand, we see culture as a dynamic processwhich is always in a state of change, and “tradition” as a peo-ple’s selective reading of their past in order to justify anduphold their present social arrangements, the Glebo’s creativemixing of cultural elements looks less unusual. Rather thanworry about global homogenization and the presumed “loss” of

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“traditional cultures,” we need to look beyond the proliferationof Western ideas and commodities to the unique and endlesslydiverse ways in which people use them. Coca Cola has penetrat-ed to even the most isolated villages in Liberia, but when bothcivilized and native people use it to pour offerings to theirancestors, we surely are not witnessing the demise of culturaldiversity. Civilized Glebo are not “Westernized” in the sense ofhaving “lost” their ancestral practices any more than are theirnative kin whose practices have also changed over time. The factthat the Glebo had such difficulty in civilizing a blunderinganthropologist is proof of that.

NOTES

1. J. Gus Liebenow, Liberia: The Quest for Democracy (Bloomington,IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 12–13; Amos Sawyer,The Emergence of Autocracy in Liberia: Tragedy and Challenge (SanFrancisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 1992), pp.16–25.

2. P. J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865(New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 1–5.

3. D. Elwood Dunn and S. Byron Tarr, Liberia: A National Polity inTransition (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988), pp. 21–25.

4. Liebenow, Liberia, pp. 27, 35.

5. Ibid., p. 27.

6. Joseph H. Greenberg, “The Languages of Africa,” InternationalJournal of American Linguistics 29 (1963): 8.

7. Sir Harry Johnston, Liberia, vol. 1 (London: Hutchinson, 1906),pp. 35–36.

8. Samuel Yede Wallace, “The Complete History of Yesterday andToday in Glebo” (unpublished manuscript, Cape Palmas,Liberia, 1983).

9. Warren L. d’Azevedo, “Some Historical Problems in theDelineation of a Central West Atlantic Region,” Annals of theNew York Academy of Sciences 96 (1962): 520–521.

10. Jeanette E. Carter and Joyce Mends-Cole, Liberian Women: TheirRole in Food Production and Their Educational and Legal Status(Monrovia, Liberia: U.S AID/University of Liberia, 1982) pp.

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66–77.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., p. 37.

13. The literature on women and agriculture in Africa is quiteextensive; for just one example, see Constantina Safilios-Rothschild, “The Persistence of Women’s Invisibility inAgriculture: Theoretical and Policy Lessons from Lesotho andSierra Leone,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 33(1985): 299–317.

14. Ronald J. Kurtz, Ethnographic Survey of Southeastern Liberia: TheGrebo-Speaking Peoples (Philadelphia: Institute for LiberianStudies, 1985), p. 63.

15. Jane J. Martin, “The Dual Legacy: Government Authority andMission Influence among the Glebo of Eastern Liberia,1834–1910” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1968), p. 15.

16. Kamene Okonjo, “The Dual-Sex Political System in Operation:Igbo Women and Community Politics in Midwestern Nigeria,”in Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay, eds., Women in Africa:Studies in Social and Economic Change (Stanford, CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 1976), pp. 45–58.

17. For more on the political roles of Glebo women, see Mary H.Moran, “Collective Action and the ‘Representation’ of AfricanWomen: A Liberian Case Study,” Feminist Studies 15 (1989):443–460.

18. Wallace, “Historical Lights,” pp. 25–26, 39.

19. George E. Brooks, The Kru Mariner in the Nineteenth Century(Newark, DE: Liberian Studies Association, 1972), pp. 22–23, n.68.

20. Jane J. Martin, “Krumen ‘Down the Coast’: Liberian Migrantson the West African Coast,” (Boston University African StudiesCenter Working Paper no. 64, 1982).

21. Martin, “The Dual Legacy,” p. 76.

22. Wallace, “Historical Lights,” p. 73.

23. Martin, “The Dual Legacy,” p. 212.

24. Ibid., pp. 210–211.

25. See also David Brown, “On the Category ‘Civilised’ in Liberiaand Elsewhere,” Journal of Modern African Studies 20 (1982):287–303; Elizabeth Tonkin, “Model and Ideology: Dimensionsof Being Civilised in Liberia,” in Ladislav Holy and MilanStuchlik, eds., The Structure of Folk Models (London: Academic

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Press, 1981), pp. 305–330.

26. Mary H. Moran, Civilized Women: Gender and Prestige inSoutheastern Liberia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990),pp. 86–87.

27. Merran Fraenkel, Tribe and Class in Monrovia (London: OxfordUniversity Press, 1964), pp. 67–68.

28. Tonkin, “Model and Ideology,” p. 321.

SUGGESTED READINGS

Belcher, Max, Svend E. Holsoe, Bernard L. Herman, and Roger P.Kingston. A Land and Life Remembered: Americo-Liberian FolkArchitecture. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Acollection of photographs documenting the continuity of archi-tectural style between Liberia and the southern United States.

Dunn, D. Elwood, and S. Byron Tarr. Liberia: A National Polity inTransition. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988. A political andeconomic study by two former Liberian government officials.

Liebenow, J. Gus. Liberia: The Quest for Democracy. Bloomington, IN:Indiana University Press, 1987. The standard source onLiberian history and politics.

Moran, Mary H. Civilized Women: Gender and Prestige in SoutheasternLiberia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. For a fulldescription of how the concept of “civilized” operates in Glebosociety, especially as it pertains to women.

Sawyer, Amos. The Emergence of Autocracy in Liberia: Tragedy andChallenge. San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary StudiesPress, 1992. Most current available source on the dissolution ofthe Liberian state and the present situation, written by the for-mer Interim President of the country.

Shick, Tom W. Behold the Promised Land: A History of Afro-AmericanSettler Society in Nineteenth Century Liberia. Baltimore, MD:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. An excellent account oflife in colonial Liberia, using the settlers own letters and jour-nals.

Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865.New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. Places the originof the Liberian state in its American context.

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Portraits TOC