Aspectos metodológicos generales

Recognizing hybridity as a key characteristic of how authority through these different languages is articulated forces us to take into account its different sources. As a concept, hybridity is a way of critiquing separations and categorical divisions of what a state is and what it is not and what is ideal and what is real. It is also a way of encompassing the institutional formations that exist between the pure and the hybrid itself (Strathern 1996:520). The term hybrid affirms the existence of a myriad of differently sourced forms of authority, which do not exist in isolation from one another or in a dichotomous relationship between state and non-state, state and tradition, but instead permeate and partly dissolve one another. It is their quality of simultaneity, and the fact that they exist because of, not in spite of one another, that makes orders hybrid. In Latour’s (2007:3) terms, they are organizations on top of organizations.23

This hybrid order of stateness and public authority facilitates an exploration of the way that actors in the justice and security field simultaneously draw on different registers and logics and languages of authority. This re-configuration also raises the question whether public authority can be juxtaposed with the ‘stateness’ of an institution, as Lund (2006:686)

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‘Hybridity’ (or ‘plurality’) is thus a comprehensive concept denoting inclusion of the public and private sectors, civil society and communities, as well as international and transnational entities (Bayley and Shearing 2001).

implies in his discussion of home-town associations, chieftaincies and vigilante groups that operate in the twilight between state and society, public and private.24

On the one hand, it is useful to follow Lund (ibid.) and argue that multiple government institutions, traditional institutions and “emerging institutions and organizations” such as vigilante groups are integral to the justice and security field. On the other hand, as suggested above, it is also important to emphasize clearly that since each actor within the justice and security field draws upon numerous different sources of authority, it is impossible to establish clear distinctions between state and society (or non-state), public and private.

‘Tradition’, for example, cropped up in numerous discussions with informants during my fieldwork. It was mentioned often by the chiefs, who saw themselves as mediators of the past and the present and ‘as guardians of custom’.25 _{Chiefs and other authoritative actors in}

Peyima used ‘tradition’ to explain a wide range of practices and institutions in the justice and security field, from the British colonial system’s reliance on chiefs to the emphasis on secret society membership, ‘black magic’, autochthon status and lineage.

Tradition is understood here as a way of making sense of past lifeways, which in Peyima are used as a source to bolster authority to act in the field of justice and security. The inheritance of an authentic tradition is illusory, because those who project it themselves embody an order established through processes of hybridification of different sources of authority. The use of a defining tradition exemplifies the objectification of a symbolic

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Just as the state idea, its symbols and resources may be drawn upon as sources of authority, notions of tradition, identity and locality confer legitimacy on institutions’ claims to public authority. The term ‘local’ in contrast to ‘national’, for instance, is often invoked to assume a spatial mapping between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the chiefdom. It is important to note, however, that by imagining the primacy of certain levels over others, we are likely to overlook the central question of how this primacy is established in a social and political process. Augé’s (1995) construction of the ‘anthropological place’, in all its simplicity, is alluring: “simply a place,” he notes, “the one occupied by the indigenous inhabitants who live in it, cultivate it, defend it, mark its strong points and keep its frontiers under surveillance, but who also detect in it the tracks of chthonian or celestial powers, ancestors or spirits which populate and animate its private geography.” This concept of an ideal type of ‘anthropological place’ takes seriously the sources of authority that exist in local spaces, but also appears somewhat romanticist, representing a yearning for essence, for the pure and unpolluted. Rather, what is at stake is the conglomeration of numerous sources of authority into hybrid actors operating in the justice and security field.

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As von Trotha (1995:469) says: “a chief should not only be, if he wants to survive in new political settings, an intermediary between the past and the present, but also be an agent of the present and an intermediary between the present and the future.”

construct (Cohn 1980:217). Tradition is not a coherent body of customs, lying “out there” and reified, a thing to be discovered; it is a dynamic model that shapes individual and group experience while also being shaped by it. The point is that what appears as tradition is constructed in the present, meaning that the content of the past is modified and re- defined according to current significance (Linnekin 1983:41-42).

In the field of justice and security, tradition becomes a rallying point and a symbol of power and authority. In this respect, paramount chiefs in Sierra Leone are equipped to enter the justice and security field by drawing not only on their status in formal legislation, but also from their autochthon status as descendants from those individuals who founded the chiefdom – or town – over which they rule. This cannot be understood in terms of the ‘stateness’ of an institution, or even necessarily, as van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal (1996:48) notes, as the mobilization of forces against the “hegemonic projects of the state”. Rather, it should be explained in terms of the combination of different sources of authority, of both stateness and public authority.

Above, I outline a concept of authority that is hybrid, which takes into account the multitude of sources that are constitutive of the order that is produced as a consequence. However, while I have spoken of authority as a hybrid order of different languages, I have not outlined the mechanics underlying hybridity as a concept. To do this, I now turn to Latour and Bourdieu in an attempt to avoid a dichotomous approach and to combine dynamism and structural effect in the analysis.