This study sought to attempt to develop a Sociology of Malawi through a dynamic structural approach. The justification for a dynamic structural approach has been implicitly discussed throughout the historical presentations of Malawi and explicitly tackled when the Sociological theory was presented. The prominent historical processes that were central to the formation of the Malawian society were the colonialism factor because of their forceful creation of a society which collectively assembled activities in that priory open territory around a common authority entity called the State. From this forceful creation, the study demonstrates how nationalism or a sense of collective identity emerges as a unique and distinct consciousness from other external peoples outside the established territory of that State. Due regard is also given to the created political identities of ethnicity and regionalism out of the patronages forged amongst Nyasaland Africans in distinct areas governed by the satellite centres of the State.
Furthermore, it was argued that the institutionalization of the capitalist economy into the Nyasaland context contributed to the creating of new African tastes derived from the new economic order. These new tastes and the created ethnic and regional consciousness of various people propelled the ambition to attain self-rule as an aggregated effect of disaggregated political and economic ambitions. Come independence, new African leadership is instituted – but the character of the State and the structure of its economy remains unchanged. Politically ambitious ethnic identities, feared to destabilize the newly born nation, attract political manipulation and repression that result in failed interethnic and interregional integration, creating a climate of gross suspicion. These suspicions contribute to the establishment of an autocracy as they induce pro-State social performances to ward off misinterpretations which could lead to sanctions. The Malawi population thus becomes highly political and demonstrates this by committing to prove the opposite. Citizenship as such becomes nothing more than the exhibition of apolitical or pro-state content – everything to the contrary is rendered sinisterly anti-Malawian, and attracts brutal sanctions from the State acting on behalf of other citizens.
The performative aspect of social life in Malawi is thus fully instituted.
Come democracy in 1994, performances no longer need to be pro-State – rather, they just need to be legitimate. Action thus explodes on the Malawian social scene resulting in an increased state of flux and fluidity. Actors more freely appropriate the things of their society in order to claim legitimacy but at the expense of undermining the stability of their own entitlements and positions. There thus emerges an inherent hunger within the social setting to acquire clarity and some form of standardization. With this, the Malawi Judiciary emerges as the highest and
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broadest expression of an institutional normative, while in the localized contexts, history finds itself in the doubly-bound position of proving the legitimacy of an actor’s performance as that actor strives to transgress while being used to restrict others from acting freely so as to limit the fluidity.174 The similarity between the institutional and social aspects is that both are visibly personneled by actors, and therefore are open to varying levels of influence. The argument is that this visibility of actors behind the veil of the institutional set-up owes its origins to the imposition of the State in the first place, and its subsequent personalization throughout colonialism into independence. As such, the divide between society and state, within a model of appropriation and performance, is argued to be right within the domicile of action after consciousness optimizes between the two concurrent obligations or expectations, and effects its own action in view of its desired outcomes.175
These obligations or expectations, in a society that is almost entirely personalized by visible actors beneath the veils of the institutional as well as the social expectations, are in fact not just the general expectations arising from internalized norms. Rather, they are the indications of social ontologies by which the society’s intersubjectivity is instituted. Sociability is thus the process of on-going intersubjectivity characterized by the co-perception of social things, and haggling or contestation about those co-perceived things. By implication, social ontologies also therefore denote things that are collectively made invisible as a reaction to the dominant things that order daily life. This as has been seen provides a basis of the inherent intensely political character of Malawian social life.
A technique is sketched to point towards how intersubjective research could be carried out, albeit with due regard to its complexities, with the study reverting to a demonstration of two randomly selected instances in the Malawian context. One is of a journalist who writes an apolitical report full of political implications and another is of the actions toward electoral broadcasting taken by the Malawi government which somehow escape their own inherent contradictions. Both these random instances qualify simply because in a symbolic analysis, any instance that involves symbols qualifies automatically for analysis (See Garfinkel, 1991). The analysis there shows the social ontologies that informed both the writing and the governmental decision, and because they were both carried out with regard to a known thing, both actions successfully realize their ends. With this however, the epiphenomenal nature of social performances are given their due regard in the light of the observations made by prominent
174 This is also were the instituting normative becomes more implicit to the discussions of this study.
175 Again the undefined space of tension within the normative finds expression in this argument.
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sociologists such as Bourdieu (cf. Calhoun, 2012), Adorno and Horkheimer (1973) who indicate in their writings that there is an undergirding order from which such epiphenomena erupts from.
Thus people are not aimlessly engaged in the creation of and participation in symbols, but that there is essentially an orientation towards certain things which are themselves mediated by an ordering societal process or an under-arching societal logic.
At this point, it became pertinent that a Theoretic Synthesis be presented in which a list and description of epistemic foundations are outlined followed by summarizing synthesis of how the theoretic system conceptually works in the Malawian society. The implied notion of an instituting normative is the explicitly tackled and argued leading to further connected arguments aimed at showing how the instituting normative provides a way out of the micro-macro divide or dichotomy. It is posited deductively that this dichotomy is essentially of an analytical origin, arising out of an overemphasis on certain aspects of the instituting normative which ultimately skews analyses into either an agency or structural focus. A close reading of this dissertation also shows this struggle to render arguments in a pro-agency or pro-structuralist way do not emphasize one aspect over the other of what is essentially in this work’s view the same thing.
And lastly, a concession is made to the effect that in the absence of a properly articulated technique for researching intersubjectivity the burden of accounting for research bias remains ominous. Perhaps in a bigger study, a greater amount of effort could be designated towards this problem so as to develop a comprehensive framework that could guide objective intersubjective research. This is how “Using a Dynamic Structural Approach” this work attempted “to Develop a Theoretical Sociology of Malawi”.
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