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What
is anthropology?
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
London: Pluto 2004
Contents
Part I • Entrances
1. Why anthropology?
2. The key concepts
3. Fieldwork
4. Theories
Part II • Fields
5. Reciprocity
6. Kinship
7. Nature
8. Thought
9. Identification
A generation or two ago, anthropology was scarcely known outside of academic
circles. It was a tiny university subject taught in a few dozen countries,
seen by outsiders as esoteric and by insiders as a kind of secred knowledge
guarded by a community of devoted initiates. Anthropologists went about
their fieldwork in remote areas and returned with fascinating, but often
arcane and knobbly analyses of kinship, swidden agriculture or warfare
among ‘the others’. With a few spectacular exceptions, the interest
in anthropology from the outside world was modest, and its influence was
usually limited to academic circles. Only very rarely did it play a part
in the public life of the anthropologist’s own society.
This has changed. Growing numbers of non-academics in the West have discovered
that anthropology represents certain fundamental insights concerning the
human condition, applicable in many everyday situations at home. In some
countries, it is even being taught in vocational colleges training nurses
and policemen, its concepts are being borrowed by other university disciplines
and applied to new phenomena, its ideas about the need to see human life
from below and from the inside have influenced popular journalism, and
student numbers have grown steadily, in some places dramatically. At the
University of Oslo, where I teach, the number of anthropology students
grew from about 70 in 1982 to more than 600 a decade later.
In many Western societies, anthropology and ideas derived from the subject
became part of the vocabulary of journalists and policymakers in the 1990s.
This is no coincidence. In fact, I would argue that anthropology is indispensable
for understanding the present world, and there is no need to have a strong
passion for African kinship or Polynesian gift exchange to appreciate
its significance.
There are several reasons why anthropological knowledge can help in making
sense of the contemporary world.
Firstly, contact between culturally different groups has increased enormously
in our time. Long-distance travelling has become common, safe and relatively
inexpensive. In the nineteenth century, only a small proportion of the
Western populations travelled to other countries (emigrants excluded),
and as late as the 1950s, even fairly affluent Westerners rarely went
on holiday abroad. As is well known, this has changed dramatically in
recent decades. The flows of people who move temporarily between countries
have grown and have led to intensified contact: Businesspeople, aid workers
and tourists travel from rich countries to the poor ones, and labour migrants,
refugees and students move in the opposite direction. Many more Westerners
visit ‘exotic’ places today than a generation or two ago. When
my parents were young in the 1950s, they might be able to go on a trip
to Italy or London once. When I was young in the 1980s, we went by Interrail
to Portugal and Greece, or on similar trips, every summer. Young people
with similar backgrounds today might go on holiday to the Far East, Latin
America and India. The scope of tourism has also been widened and now
includes tailor-made trips and a broad range of special interest forms
including ‘adventure tourism’ and ‘cultural tourism’,
where one can go on guided tours to South African townships, Brazilian favelas or Indonesian villages. The fact that ‘cultural tourism’
has become an important source of income for many communities in the Third
World can be seen as an indication of an increased interest in other cultures
from the West. And it can be a short step from cultural tourism to anthropological
studies proper.
At the same time as ‘we’ visit ‘them’ in growing numbers
and under new circumstances, the opposite movement also takes place, though
not for the same reasons. It is because of the great differences in standards
of living and life opportunities between rich and poor countries that
millions of people from non-Western countries have settled in Europe and
North America. A generation ago, it might have been necessary for an inhabitant
in a Western city to travel to the Indian subcontinent in order to savour
the fragrances and sounds of subcontinental cuisine and music. In fact,
as late as 1980, there were no Indian restaurants in my hometown. In 2004,
there are dozens, ranging from four-star establishments to inexpensive
takeaway holes in the wall. Pieces and fragments of the world’s cultural
variation can now be found at the doorstep of Westerners. As a result,
the curiosity about others has been stimulated, and it has also become
necessary for political reasons to understand what cultural variation
entails. Current controversies over multicultural issues, such as religious
minority rights, the hijab (shawl or headscarf), language instruction
in schools and calls for affirmative action because of ethnic discrimination
in the labour market testify to an urgent need to deal sensibly with cultural
differences.
Secondly, the world is shrinking in other ways too. Satellite television,
cellphone networks and the Internet have created conditions for truly
global, instantaneous and friction-free communications, for better and
for worse in the opinion of many: Distance is no longer a decisive hindrance
for close contact, new, deterritorialised social networks or even ‘virtual
communities’ develop, and at the same time, individuals have a larger
palette of information to choose from. Moreover, the economy is also becoming
increasingly globally integrated. Transnational companies have grown dramatically
in numbers, size and economic importance over the last decades. The capitalist
mode of production and monetary economies in general, globally dominant
throughout the 20th century, have become nearly universal. In politics
as well, global issues increasingly dominate the agenda. Issues of war
and peace, the environment and poverty are all of such a scope, and involve
so many transnational linkages, that they cannot be handled satisfactorily
by single states alone. AIDS and international terrorism are also transnational
problems which can only be understood and addressed through international
cooperation. This ever tighter interweaving of formerly relatively separate
sociocultural environments can lead to a growing recognition of the fact
that we are all in the same boat: that humanity, divided as it is by class,
culture, geography and opportunities, is fundamentally one.
Thirdly, culture changes rapidly in our day and age, which is felt nearly
anywhere in the world. In the West, the typical ways of life are certainly
being transformed. The stable nuclear family is no longer the only common
and socially acceptable way of life. Youth culture and trends in fashion
and music change so fast that older people have difficulties following
their twists and turns; food habits are being transformed, leading to
greater diversity within many countries, and so on. These and other changes
make it necessary to ask questions such as: “Who are we really?”
“What is our culture – and is it at all meaningful to speak
of a ‘we’ that ‘has’ a ‘culture’?”
“What do we have in common with the people who used to live here
fifty years ago, and what do we have in common with people who live in
an entirely different place today?” “Is it still defensible
to speak as if we primarily belong to nations, or are other forms of group
belonging more important?”
Fourthly, recent decades have seen the rise of an unprecedented interest
in cultural identity, which is increasingly seen as an asset. Many feel
that their local uniqueness is threatened by globalisation, indirect colonialism
and other forms of influence from the outside, and react by attempting
to strengthen or at least preserve what they see as their unique culture.
In many cases, minority organisations demand cultural rights on behalf
of their constituency; in other cases, the State tries to slow down or
prevent processes of change or outside influence through legislation.
Our era, the period after the fall of the Berlin wall and the disappearance
of communism, Soviet-style, the time of the Internet and satellite TV,
the time of global capitalism, ethnic cleansing and multiethnic modernities,
has been labelled, among other things, the age of globalisation and the
information age. In order to understand this seemingly chaotic, confusing
and complex historical period, there is a need for a perspective on humanity
which does not take preconceived assumptions about human societies for
granted, which is sensitive to both similarities and differences, and
which simultaneously approaches the human world from a global and a local
angle.
The only academic subject which fulfils the conditions listed above is
anthropology, which studies humans in societies under the most varying
circumstances imaginable, yet searches for patterns and similarities,
but which is fundamentally critical of quick solutions and simple answers
to complex questions.
Now, although the concepts and ideas of anthropology have become widely
circulated in recent years, anthropology as such remains little known.
It is still widely believed that the aim of anthropology consists in ‘discovering’
new peoples, in remote locations such as the Amazon or Borneo. Many assume
that anthropologists are drawn magnetically towards the most exotic customs
and rituals imaginable, eschewing the commonplace for the spectacular,
and there are those who believe that anthropologists spend most of their
lives travelling the world, with or without khaki suits, intermittently
penning a kind of dry, learned travelogues. All these notions about anthropology
are wrong, although they – like many myths of their kind – contain
a kernel of truth.
So far, I have said that anthropology can be crucial for an understanding
of the contemporary world, that many of its central ideas enter into people’s
everyday lives, and that it is – in spite of this – little known.
Let us, therefore, get on with it.
The uniqueness of anthropology
Antropology is an intellectually challenging, theoretically ambitious
subject which tries to achieve an understanding of culture, society and
humanity through detailed studies of local life, supplemented by comparison.
Many are attracted to it for personal reasons: they may have grown up
in a culturally foreign environment, or they are simply fascinated by
faraway places, or they are engaged in minority rights issues – immigrants,
indigenous groups or other minorities, as the case might be – or
they might even have fallen in love with a Mexican village or an African
man. But as a profession and as a science, anthropology has grander ambitions
than offering keys to individual self-understanding, or bringing travel
stories or political tracts to the people. At the deepest level, anthropology
raises philosophical questions which it tries to respond to by exploring
human lives under different conditions. At a slightly less lofty level,
it may be said that the task of anthropology is to create astonishment,
to show that the world is both richer and more complex than it is usually
assumed to be.
To simplify somewhat, one may say that anthropology primarily offers two
kinds of insight: First, the discipline produces knowledge about the actual
cultural variation in the world; studies may deal with, say, the role
of caste and wealth in Indian village life, technology among highland
people in New Guinea, religion in Southern Africa, food habits in Northern
Norway, the political importance of kinship in the Middle East, or notions
about gender in the Amazon basin. Although most anthropologists are specialists
on one or two regions, it is necessary to be knowledgeable about global
cultural variation in order to be able to say anything interesting about
one’s region, topic or people.
Secondly, anthropology offers methods and theoretical perspectives enabling
the practitioner to explore, compare and understand these varied expressions
of the human condition. In other words, the subject offers both things
to think about and things to think with.
But anthropology is not just a toolbox; it is also a craft which teaches
the novice how to obtain a certain kind of knowledge and what this knowledge
might say something about. And just as a carpenter can specialise in either
furniture or buildings, and one journalist may cover fluctuations in the
stockmarket while another deals with royal scandals, the craft of anthropology
can be used for a lot of different things. Like carpenters or journalists,
all anthropologists share a set of professional skills.
Some newcomers to the subject are flabbergasted at its theoretical character,
and some see it as deeply ironic that a subject which claims to make sense
of the life-worlds of ordinary people can be so difficult to read. Now,
it must be interjected that many anthropological texts are beautifully
written, but it is also true that many of them are tough and convoluted.
Anthropology insists on being analytical and theoretical, and as a consequence,
it can often feel both inaccessible and aven alienating. (Since its contents
are so important and – arguably – fascinating, this only indicates
that there is a great need for good popularisations of anthropology.)
Anthropology is not alone in studying society and culture academically.
Sociology descibes and accounts for social life, especially in modern
societies, in great breadth and depth. Political science deals with politics
at all levels, from the municipal to the global. Psychology studies the
mental life of humans by means of scientific and interpretive methods,
and human geography looks at economic and social processes in a transnational
perspective. Finally, there is the recent subject, controversial but popular
among students and the public, of cultural studies, which can be described
as an amalgamation of cultural sociology, history of ideas, literary studies
and anthropology. (Evil tongues describe it as ‘anthropology without
the pain’, that is without field research and meticulous analysis.)
In other words, there is a considerable overlap between the social sciences,
and it may well be argued that the disciplinary boundaries are to some
extent artificial. The social sciences represent some of the same interests
and try to respond to some of the same questions, although there are also
differences.
Moreover, anthropology also has much in common with humanities such as
literary studies and history; philosophy has always provided intellectual
input for anthropology, and there is a productive, passionately debated
frontier area towards biology.
A generation or so ago, anthropology still concentrated almost exclusively
on detailed studies of local life in traditional societies, and ethnographic
fieldwork was its main – in some cases its sole – method. The
situation is more complex now, because anthropologists now study all kinds
of societies and also because the methodological repertoire has become
more varied. This book consists in its entirety in a long answer to the
question ‘What is anthropology?’, but for now, we might say
that it is the comparative study of culture and society, with a focus
on local life. Put differently, anthropology distinguishes itself
from other lines of enquiry by insisting that social reality is first
and foremost created through relationships between persons and the groups
they belong to. A currently fashionable concept such as globalisation,
for example, has no meaning to an anthropologist unless it can be studied
through actual persons, their relationship to each other and to a larger
surrounding world. When this level of the ‘nitty-gritty’ is
established, it is possible to explore the linkages between the locally
lived world and large-scale phenomena (such as global capitalism or the
state). But it is only when an anthropologist has spent enough time crawling
on all fours, as it were, studying the world through a magnifying-glass,
that she is ready to enter the helicopter in order to obtain an overview.
Anthropology means, translated literally from ancient Greek, the study
of humanity. As already indicated, anthropologists do not have a monopoly
here. Besides, there are other anthropologies than the one described in
this book. Philosophical anthropology raises fundamental questions concerning
the human condition. Physical anthropology is the study of human pre-history
and evolution. (For some time, physical anthropology also included the
study of ‘races’. They are no longer scientifically interesting
since genetics has disproven their existence, but in social and cultural
anthropology, race may still be interesting as a social construction,
because it remains important in many ideologies that people live by.)
Moreover, a distinction, admittedly a fuzzy one, is sometimes drawn between cultural and social anthropology. Cultural anthropology
is the term used in the USA (and some other countries), while social anthropology
traces its origins to Britain and, to some extent, France. Historically,
there have been certain differences between these traditions – social
anthropology has its foundation in sociological theory, while cultural
anthropology is more broadly based – but the distinction has become
sufficiently blurred not to be bothered with here. In the following, the
distinction between social and cultural anthropology will only be used
when it is necessary to highlight the specificity of North American or
European anthropology.
As a university discipline, anthropology is not a very old subject –
it has been taught for about a hundred years – but it has raised
questions which have been formulated in different guises since antiquity:
Are the differences between peoples inborn or learnt? Why are there so
many languages, and how different are they really? Do all religions have
something in common? Which forms of governance exist, and how do they
work? Is it possible to rank societies on a ladder according to their
level of development? What is it that all humans have in common? And –
perhaps most importantly: What kind of creatures are humans; aggressive
animals, social animals, religious animals or are they, perhaps, the only
self-defining animals on the planet?
Every thinking person has an opinion on these matters. Some of them can
hardly be answered once and for all, but they can at least be asked in
an accurate and informed way. It is the goal of anthropology to establish
as detailed knowledge as possible about varied forms of human life, and
to develop a conceptual apparatus making it possible to compare them.
This in turn enables us to understand both differences and similarities
between the many different ways of being human. In spite of the enormous
variations anthropologists document, the very existence of the discipline
proves beyond doubt that it is possible to communicate fruitfully and
intelligibly between them. Had it been impossible to understand culturally
remote peoples, anthropology as such would have been impossible. And nobody
who practises anthropology believes that this is impossible (although
few believe that it is possible to understand everything). On the contrary,
different societies are made to shed light on each other through comparison.
The great enigma of anthropology can be phrased like this: All over the
world, humans are born with the same cognitive and physical apparatus,
and yet they grow into distinctly different persons and groups, with different
societal types, beliefs, technologies, languages and notions about the
good life. Differences in innate endowments vary within each group and
not between them, so that musicality, intelligence, intuition and other
qualities which vary from person to person, are quite evenly distributed
globally. It is not the case that Africans are ‘born with rhythm’,
or that Northeners are ‘innately cold and introverted’. To the
extent that such differences exist, they are not inborn. On the other
hand, it is true that particular social milieux stimulate inborn potentials
for rhythmicity, while others encourage the ability to think abstractly.
Mozart, a man filled to the brim with musical talent, would hardly have
become the world’s greatest composer if he, that is a person with
the same genetic code as Mozart, had been born in Greenland. Perhaps he
would only have become a bad hunter (because of his famous impatience).
Put differently, and paraphrasing the anthropologist Clifford Geertz,
all humans are born with the potential to live thousands of different
lives, yet we end up having lived only one. One of the central tasks of
anthropology consists in giving accounts of some of the other lives we
could have led.
The chapter continues with a bit about the history of anthropology and so on. To read it, you've got to buy the book!
* * *
In a previous chapter, it was mentioned that anthropology is concerned
with that which takes place between people, not with their innermost feelings
and thoughts. How can it then be that this chapter is going to be about...
thought? The answer is not simple. It may justly be said that thought
has an important social aspect; in different societies, the inhabitants
think differently because of differences in the circumstances of learning,
different experiences etc. At the same time, thought has an undeniable
private and personal dimension, which cannot be studied directly with
the methods available to anthropologists.
Fortunately, thoughts are usually expressed in social life, for example
when people say what they think or express it through their acts, in rituals
and other public performances. Therefore, thought can be explored, if
often obliquely, through the field methods available to anthropology –
participant observation, questions and answers, and common curiosity.
The rationality debate
Studies of thought and modes of reasoning have been central in the history
of anthropology from the nineteenth century to the present day. The most
famous (and possibly most voluminous) anthropological work from the years
before the fieldwork revolution was James Frazer’s twelve-volume
The Golden Bough (1890/1912), a comparative work about myth, religion
and cosmologies among virtually all the peoples the author had heard about.
Frazer shared the evolutionist views of his contemporaries and had little
faith in the ability of ‘savages’ to think logically and rationally.
A younger contemporary of Frazer, the philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl,
was less impressive in his use of empirical materials, but as a compensation,
he was more analytically lucid than Frazer. Lévy-Bruhl described
traditional peoples as representatives of what he spoke of, in an unfortunate
turn of phrase, as a ‘pre-logical mode of thought’. However,
Lévy-Bruhl emphasised that the term ‘pre-logical’ did
not necessarily refer to a developmental or evolutionary line of progress,
but rather that the unhampered, metaphorical and symbol-laden way of thinking
he associated with traditional peoples was more fundamental, and logically
prior to, logical thought. Contemporary moderns may have retained their
ability to think in a ‘pre-logical’ way, but a logical rationality
has been superimposed on it, as it were.
Lévy-Bruhl was criticised sharply by several of his contemporaries,
who pointed out that the empirical foundation for his lofty generalisations
was weak to say the least. However, it would nonetheless be Lévy-Bruhl’s
books from the years around the First World War that set the stage for
one of the most exciting theoretical debates in anthropology, where contributors
from several academic fields have discussed (and still do) to what degree
there are fundamental differences in thought styles between peoples, and
conversely, to what extent it may be said that a common human rationality
exists.
One of the first to criticise Lévy-Bruhl on an empirical basis
was Evans-Pritchard. In the 1930s, he had several lengthy periods of fieldwork
in the Sudan. His Nuer research has already been mentioned, but his 1937
book about the Azande is no less important – some would argue that
it is much more important – than The Nuer. Whereas Evans-Pritchard’s
first Nuer monograph dealt with politics, ecology and kinship, Witchcraft,
Magic and Oracles Among the Azande is a book about the system of knowledge
and belief in a traditional people, and as such, it was one of the first
of its kind. One would in fact have to wait for Kluckhohn’s Navaho
Witchcraft (1944) for another study of comparable depth.
The Azande live right in the middle of the African continent, only a few
hundred kilometres south of the Nuer; but in terms of culture and social
organisation, they are very different from the nomadic peoples to the
north. They are sedentary crop growers, politically relatively centralised
with aristocratic clans and princes. At the time of Evans-Pritchard’s
research, they had been incorporated into the British empire, and the
power of the traditional rulers had been reduced considerably.
The Zande belief in withchraft, and their use of various remedies to control
it, are in the foreground of Evans-Pritchard’s book. Witchcraft,
as it is defined in anthropology, is distinguished from magic in that
it is an invisible force. Accordingly, it is difficult to decide who is
responsible when someone is struck by witchcraft. Magic is, on the contrary,
the result of rites and technologies which are known, and one may consult
recognised magicians for assistance with one’s problems. In societies
where witchcraft is assumed to exist, it is thus necessary to develop
methods to expose the witches. When a Zande experiences a ‘mishap’
(Evans-Pritchard’s term), he is likely to blame witchcraft for it,
and he may begin to suspect people he believes has a reason to want to
harm him. (It stands to reason that like other peoples who are concerned
with witchcraft, the Azande may be said to fit Benedict’s ‘paranoid’
cultural type fairly well.)
If a Zande walks on the forest path, stumbles and hurts himself, only
to discover that the wound won’t heal, he blames witchcraft. If one
objects that occasional stumbling is normal, he might respond that yes,
it is normal, but I walk this path every day and have never stumbled before,
and besides, wounds normally begin to heal after a few days. When a group
of Azande sit under an elevated granary on poles (to protect the cereals
against wild animals), which suddenly collapses and hurts them badly,
the immediate cause is that termites have slowly perforated the poles
until they were no longer capable of keeping the granary stable. But the
Azande will say that it was extremely unlikely that they should sit beneath
their granary just as it fell, and thus witchcraft had to be involved
somehow. Deaths among Azande are always caused by witchcraft, Evans-Pritchard
reports; disease is usually caused by it.
The Azande have at their disposal a range of techniques enabling them
to explore whether or not a suspect is actually a witch. (The term witch
is, in anthropological usage, gender neutral.) Most commonly, they consult
so-called oracles, that is spiritual beings who talk to them through mediums.
One popular medium is a kind of sounding board, and there are others,
but the most expensive and famous is the poison oracle. To make it communicate,
one needs a strong plant-derived poison and a chicken. The chicken is
fed the poison, and the oracle is asked whether a certain person is a
witch or not. If the chicken dies, the answer is yes; if it survives,
the accused is innocent.
In the old days, Evans-Pritchard says, witches were regularly executed.
Under the ‘indirect rule’ of the British, implemented from the
early 20th century, the princely power was reduced, and judicial power
was transferred to the colonial courts of law. Therefore, Evans-Pritchard
himself never witnessed executions of witches. In his time, many in fact
believed that the very witchcraft institution would gradually disappear
thanks to ‘progress’.
The oracles were not infallible. When a witch was dead, one would cut
their belly open to establish whether it contained a certain ‘witchcraft
substance’, described as a dark lump of flesh. If a witch had been
convicted and killed, and no such substance could subsequently be found,
the relatives of the dead person could demand compensation.
Evans-Pritchard describes the witchcraft institution in a sober and morally
neutral way, skilfully showing how the Azande think and act rationally
and logically, given their cultural context. If one were to ask an educated
Zande if it might not be the case that bacteria, not witchcraft, made
him ill, he might respond that yes, of course, but this so-called explanation
said nothing about the reason for his illness right now:
the bacteria were around continuously, so why wasn’t his neighbour
ill, and why didn’t the illness occur last year? The logic is, as
we see, impeccable. Unlike medical science, the witchcraft institution
offers answers to the pressing questions ‘Why me?’ and ‘Why
now?’.
The book on witchcraft is a remarkable read, and it has rightly been praised
as one of the few books that set an agenda for research and discussion
which lasted more than half a century after its publication. The book
offers rare, deep insights into the knowledge system of a traditional
people, and shows how it is coherent, gives meaning to the world, and
explains unusual events. Had Evans-Pritchard been ideologically bolder,
he might have compared the institution of witchcraft with religions such
as Christianity.
The book also shows how the witchcraft institution is functional in the
sense that is socially integrative. Usually, the people accused of witchcraft
belong to politically weak lineages (nobody would dream of accusing a
prince), and he points out that the institution functions as a security
valve by channeling discontent and frustrations away from the social order
(which would have been exceedingly difficult to change anyway) towards
individuals who become scapegoats. Much of the later literature on witchcraft
in Africa, especially that published in the 1950s, is purely structural-functionalist,
and strongly emphasises that those who are accused of witchcraft are often
women, who, in virilocal societies are outsiders without strong political
support locally. Evans-Pritchard offers a richer picture, supplementing
the functional analysis with a vivid description of local life-worlds.
Unfortunately, many of those who have never read the book itself have
heard about it through secondary sources, and therefore believe that it
is a condescending, functionalistic description of a primitive people
that believes in phenomena that do not exist. A main culprit in creating
this distorted view of the book is the philosopher Peter Winch. In 1958,
he published the very challenging book The Idea of a Social Science
and Its Relation to Philosophy, where Evans-Pritchard appears as one
of his main opponents. Winch refers to a number of intermittent remarks
in the Azande book, where the anthropologist expresses the view that witches
obviously do not exist. In an appendix to the book, Evans-Pritchard distinguishes
between three kinds of knowledge: Mystical knowledge based on the belief
in invisible and unverifiable forces; commonsensical knowledge based on
everyday experience; and scientific knowledge based on the tenets of logic
and the experimental method. The middle, quantitatively largest category
is common to Azande and Englishmen; the latter exists only in modern societies,
whereas the first category is typical of societies where one believes
in witchcraft.
Winch argues that the two systems of knowledge – the English one
and that of the Azande – cannot be ranked in this way; they can in
fact not be ranked at all. All knowledge is socially produced, he continues;
and mentions the widespread ‘superstitious’ belief in meteorology
as a modern equivalent to Zande witchcraft beliefs. In other words, Winch
regards scientific knowledge as a kind of culturally produced knowledge
on a par with other forms of knowledge.
The criticism of Evans-Pritchard is not based on fabricated evidence,
but as I have shown, it does not do justice to his pioneering, and largely
non-judgemental exposition of a non-Western knowledge system.
Be this as it may, Winch’s book gave the impetus to a broad debate
about rationality and relativism. It would give the initial inspiration
for several books, dissertations and conferences in the 1960s and later.
Both anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers contributed.
The criticism against Evans-Pritchard contains several independent questions,
at least three. The first and second concern methodological possibilites
and limitations. The third concerns the nature of knowledge and is anthropological
in a philosophical sense.
Firstly: Is it possible to translate from one system of knowledge to another
without distorting it by introducing concepts initially alien to that
‘other’ world of representations?
Secondly: Does a context-independent or neutral language exist to describe
systems of knowledge?
Thirdly: Do all humans reason in fundamentally the same way?
There are, perhaps, no final answers to any of these questions, and yet
(or perhaps therefore) they remain important. We should keep in mind here
that Evans-Pritchard himself criticised Lévy-Bruhl’s dichotomy
between logical and pre-logical thought, and emphasised time and again
that the Azande were just as rational as Westerners, but that they reasoned
logically and rationally from premises which were, at the end of the day,
erroneous when it came to witchcraft. Winch’s question was whether
general, unquestionable criteria exist to evaluate the premises or axioms,
and he replies that this is not the case – since the axioms themselves
are socially created and therefore not true in an absolute, ahistorical
sense.
It should be noted here that a research area which has grown rapidly since
the 1980s is the so-called STS field, that is the sociological study of
technology and science. In this research, Western science and technology
are studied as cultural products, and most of its practitioners adhere
to the so-called symmetry principle, which entails that the same terminology
and the same methods of analysis should be used for failures as for successes;
in other words, that what we are doing is looking at science as a social
fact, not as truth or falsity. Similarly, most anthropologists would argue
that our task consists in making sense of ‘the others’, not
judging whether they are right or wrong.
Classification and pollution
Unfortunately, it is necessary to leave the fascinating controversies
about rationality and the rich anthropological research tradition dealing
with witchcraft here. Another, no less interesting, way of approaching
other knowledges and thought systems, points the searchlight towards classification.
All peoples are aware that different things and persons exist in the world,
but they subdivide them in different, locally defined ways.
Already in 1903, Durkheim and Mauss published a book about primitive classification,
which was to a great extent based on ethnography from Australia. They
there argued that there existed a connection between the classification
of natural phenomena and the social order. This connection has been explored
by later generations of scholars, but historically, there has been a difference
here between European social anthropology and North American cultural
anthropology. The latter tradition is generally less sociologically oriented
than the former, and often explores symbolic systems as autonomous entities,
without connecting them systematically to social conditions. Geertz once
wrote that whereas society was integrated in a ‘causal-functional
way’, culture was integrated in a ‘logico-meaningful way’,
and could thus be studied independently of the social. In social anthropology
(and, in all fairness, to many American anthropologists), such a delineation
is unsatisfactory, since a main preoccupation in this tradition consists
in understanding symbolic worlds through their relation to social organisation.
Power, politics and technology inevitably interact with knowledge production
in a society.
Of the many books about classification and society that have been published
since Durkheim and Mauss, two have been especially influential. Researchers
and students continue to return to them, and although both were initially
published in the 1960s, they do not appear dated even today.
Mary Douglas studied under Evans-Pritchard, and carried out fieldwork
among the Lele in Kasai (southern Congo, then Belgian Congo) in the 1950s.
She published a monograph about the Lele, but she is far better known
for her later theoretical contributions. Especially Purity and Danger
(1966) has exerted an almost unparalleled influence on anthropological
research dealing with thought and social life.
In this book, Douglas combines influences from her native British structural
functionalism and French structuralism, which she became familiar with
early on, partly due to her fieldwork in a part of Africa where most of
the researchers were French. The main argument is inspired by Durkheim
and Mauss, and states that classification of nature and the body reflects
society’s ideology about itself. However, her main interest consists
in accounting for pollution, classificatory impurities and their
results, and one of the central chapters of the book is devoted to a discussion
of food prohibitions in the Old Testament. Animals which do not ‘fit
in’ are deemed unfit for human consumption, and include, among others,
maritime animals without fins and, famously, the pig. The pig has cloven
hoofs but does not chew the cud, and there is no category available for
this kind of animal. This is what makes it polluting.
Douglas’ theory is as far removed as conceivable from Marvin Harris’
interpretation of sacred cows, and indeed, Harris has argued that the
impurity of the pig in West Asia is caused by objective factors, notably
the disase-inducing germs which can be present in badly cooked pork. Douglas’
views on this kind of explanation are of the same kind as Lévi-Strauss’
views on Malinowski. According to Lévi-Strauss, the practically
oriented Malinowski saw culture as nothing more than ‘a gigantic
metaphor for the digestive system’.
The connection between the order of society and the order of classificatory
systems is crucial to Douglas’ theory. Among other things, she refers
to holy men and women in Hinduism and Christianity, who invert dominant
perceptions of pure and impure in order to highlight the otherworldly
character of their lives. She mentions a Christian saint who is said to
have drunk pus from an infected wound since personal cleanliness is incompatible
with the status of the holy woman; and Indian sadhus are famous for their
transgressive practices, such as drinking from human skulls, eating rotten
food, sleeping on spiked mats and so on.
Phenomena that do not fit in, anomalies, must be taken care of
ideologically lest they pollute the entire classificatory system. If this
is not done efficiently, they threaten the order of society. There has
to be order in nature, just as there is order in society. Douglas’
most famous anomaly is taken from her Lele ethnography, namely the African
pangolin. This original forest animal is a mammal, but it has scales like
a fish and gives birth to only one or two offspring, just like a human.
The Lele have circumscribed the pangolin with a great number of rules
and prohibitions to keep it under control; it can be eaten, but only under
very special circumstances, and one is usually well advised to avoid close
contact with it.
A subgroup of anomalies are the phenomena known as matter out of place,
that is objects, actions or ideas which appear in the ‘wrong’
context. The typical example is a human hair, usually far from unaesthetic
when it grows out of a head, but repulsive if it floats in a bowl of soup.
Douglas does not write about humour, but one must be allowed to point
out that virtually everything that is funny belongs to the same category
as the hair floating in the soup: jokes nearly always derive their punchline
from wrong contextualisation. Perhaps that is why Geertz once wrote that
understanding a different culture is like understanding a joke. When one
is able to laugh at the natives’ jokes, one has internalised local
norms about correct and wrong contextualisation. This indicates that one
has understood a great deal.
Douglas has been criticised for placing too much emphasis on integration
in her analyses. Just as Geertz’ concept of culture seems to presuppose
that all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of culture fall perfectly into
place, Douglas assumes that both society and knowledge systems are ordered
and fit together.
On the other hand, one should not rule out the possibility that she may
be right. Classificatory systems change – there are many secularised
Jews and Muslims who eat pork – and there is clearly a greater variation
and more direct contestation, especially in complex societies, than Douglas
is prepared to admit. But this very variation also seems to confirm the
validity of Douglas’ model. When university educated North European
Marxist-Leninists took manual jobs in the 1970s, loyal to the principle
of self-proletarianisation, they turned dominant classifications on their
head in their attempt to change the very ideological foundations of society.
In a racially segregated kind of society as the American South, few actions
are more radical, both politically and in terms of classification, than
to marry across the colour line. Both these examples show that conscious
transgressions serve to confirm the essential validity of the dominant
mode of classification.
Douglas’ ideas about matter out of place, anomalies, pollution and
the analogies between the body, nature and society, have been exceptionally
productive. The next chapter will briefly indicate how some of these ideas
may be transposed to studies of multiethnic societies, just to illustrate
their fruitfulness.
The savage mind
The other indispensable book about classification and society is Lévi-Strauss’s
masterpiece La pensée sauvage (1962, The Savage Mind,
1966). Like Douglas, Lévi-Strauss is inspired by Durkheim and Mauss,
but he also wishes to disprove Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas about ‘pre-logical
thought’ once and for all. However, already in the first chapter,
it becomes apparent that Lévi-Strauss is closer to his predecessor
than one might have expected.
The main topic of The Savage Mind is totemism. This enigmatic phenomenon
has been the subject of much anthropological theory and speculation for
more than a hundred years. Totemism may be defined as a form of classification
whereby individuals or groups (which may be clans) have a special, often
mythically based relationship to certain aspects of nature – usually
animals or plants, but it could also be, for example, mountain formations
or events like thunderstorms. Groups or persons have certain commitments
towards their totem; it may be forbidden to eat it, the totem may give
protection, in many cases the groups are named after their totem, and
sometimes they identify with it (members of the eagle clan are brave and
have a lofty character). In traditional societies, totemism is especially
widespread in the Americas, in Oceania and Africa. A great number of competing
interpretations of totemism had been proposed before Lévi-Strauss:
The Scottish lawyer MacLennan, the first to develop a theory of totemism
(in 1869), saw it simply as a form of primitive religion, but it later
became more common to see it in a more utilitarian light: Totemic animals
and plants were respected because they were economically useful. This
was Malinowski’s view.
Departing radically from such views, Lévi-Strauss developed a theory
of totemism seeing it as a form of classification encompassing both natural
and social dimensions, thereby defining it as part of the knowledge system
of a society, and as far from being a functional result of some economic
adaptation. Lévi-Strauss claims indebtedness to Radcliffe-Brown,
but in fact, his theory was entirely original. Totemic animals are respected
not because they are good to eat, but because they are good to think
(bons à penser). The natural series of totems at the disposal
of a tribe is related to the social series of clans or other internal
groupings in such a way that the relationships between the totems correspond
metaphorically to the relationships between the social groups. Totemism
thereby bridges the gap between nature and culture, deepening the knowledge
about both in the process.
‘The savage mind’, or undomesticated thinking (which might have
been a better English title), is thus not there in order to be useful
or functional (or even aesthetically pleasing), but in order to be thought.
In the chapter ‘The science of the concrete’, which introduces
the topic of the book, this is made clear. Here, Lévi-Strauss develops
his famous distinction between le bricoleur and l’ingenieur,
between bricolage (associational, nonlinear thought) and ‘engineering’
(logical thinking) as two styles of thought which he links with traditional
and modern societies, respectively. Unlike what many had argued before,
including Lévy-Bruhl, there was no qualitative difference between
‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ thought. The difference consisted
in the raw material they had at their disposal. While the modern ‘engineer’
builds abstractions upon abstractions (writing, numbers, geometrical drawings),
the traditional ‘bricoleur’ creates abstractions with the aid
of physical objects he is able to observe directly (animals, plants, rocks,
rivers...). Whereas the modern person has become dependent on writing
as a ‘crutch for thought’, his opposite number in a traditional
society uses whatever is at hand for cognitive assistance. The French
word bricoleur can be translated as a jack-of-all-trades, an imaginative
improviser who creates new objects by combining old ones which happen
to be close at hand.
In order to illustrate the contrast between the two thought styles, Lévi-Strauss
speaks of music and poetry as modern cultural phenomena where ‘the
undomesticated’ property of the mind can still be glimpsed.
Although the book is introduced with an apparently sharp contrast between
‘us’ and ‘them’, and although cultural difference
is discussed in every subsequent chapter, the aim of The Savage Mind
is to show that humans think alike everywhere, even if their thoughts
are expressed differently. Science, which, unlike ‘the science of
the concrete’, distinguishes sharply between the perceptible (le
sensible) and that which can be understood in abstract terms (l’intelligible),
thus becomes a special case of something much more general, namely undomesticated
thought. But it then also becomes clear that the distance between Lévi-Strauss
and Lévy-Bruhl is much less than usually assumed. Like his famous
successor, Lévy-Bruhl also sees pre-logical thought as the most
fundamental style of thought, and logical thought as an embellishment
or a special case.
Thought and technology
The cultural historian Lewis Mumford once remarked that the most authoritarian,
efficient and socially repressive invention man had ever created was neither
the steam engine nor the cannon, but the clock. What he had in mind were
the social dimensions of the clock: It synchronises, standardises and
integrates people wherever clocks exist and are respected. Right or wrong,
Mumford’s observation indicates the potential of technology in shaping
and directing human thought and action, given the right social and cultural
context. (Clocks may, naturally, be regarded as fancy jewellery in societies
where there is no perceived need for synchronisation.)
Let us take a closer look at the clock. It is sometimes said that clocks
were initially introduced in Europe as an aid for medieval monks who found
it difficult to keep prayer times when they worked in the fields. This
version of clock history is half-way between a certain degree of credibility
and invention. Different kinds of timepieces had existed well before medieval
monasteries, and the abbey clocks did not just regulate prayer times,
but also working hours – not unlike contemporary clocks, in other
words. However, it is easy to see that the clocks quickly had interesting,
unintended side-effects when they became common in European towns. They
were instrumental in making punctuality a virtue. They encouraged efficiency
since activities now could be planned and synchronised in ways formerly
unthinkable. Eventually, the clocks became indispensable for town-dwellers;
they needed to ‘keep time’ to get to the concert house or theatre
in time, to keep appointments and, increasingly, in working life. Something
which has in recent years received wide attention thanks to Dava Sobel’s
bestselling book Longitude, is the fact that the accurate partitioning
of the globe according to longitude was made possible only after the invention
of a mechanical clock with minimal error margins. Combined with the Western
calendar, the clock served to dissect time into abstract entities and
to establish a linear perception of time. This refers to a kind
of time which can be conceptualised as a line where any segment of the
same kind (a year, a month, an hour etc.) is identical to any other segment,
no matter when it unfolds. Clock and calendar time may be called abstract
time since they contrast with the concrete time dominating
most societies which are not subjected to clocks and calendars. In a temporal
regime based on concrete time, time is measured as a combination of experienced,
personal time, external events and societal rhythms such as day/night,
harvest times and so on. A time segment such as an hour may accordingly
vary in length.
Clock time is an externalised kind of time; it exists independently
of events taking place in it, about in the same way as the thermometer
measures temperature irrespective of the subjective experience of heat
or coldness, and quantified distance measures distance without taking
subjective experience of distance into account. A kilometer is a kilometer
(and about 0.62 mile) anywhere, any time. Even if everybody knows that
five minutes may be both a mere instant and a lenghty period (say, in
the dentist’s office), and that twenty degrees Celsius may be warm
if one enters the house on a winter day, but cold if one sits naked in
a chair after taking a shower, it is generally accepted in our kind of
society that the quantitative measurements of such phenomena are ‘truer’
than the subjective experience. Such standardising ideas are alien to
traditional societies, and are part and parcel of modernity, which is
also built around institutions such as social planning, beliefs in progress,
population statistics and a zealous drive to control nature. Typically
time, which in traditional societies may not be something one possesses
but rather something one lives in, is a scarce resource in contemporary,
modern societies. It has been reified to such a degree that a historical
preoccupation of the labour movement has been the struggle for shorter
working hours, and in the late 1990s, social movements appeared which
promote both ‘slow cities’, ‘slow food’ and, simply,
‘slow time’.
The technological change which has been most intensively studied with
a view to its relation to thought, is nonetheless the introduction of
writing. Lévi-Strauss hardly mentions it explicitly, but an underlying
idea in his contrast between the bricoleur and the ingenieur is quite
clearly that of writing versus non-writing. Later, Jack Goody has, especially
in his The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), argued that
if one wants to come to grips with the kind of cognitive contrast Lévi-Strauss
talks about, one must study transitions to literacy and differences between
literate and non-literate societies. Among other things, Goody claims
that scientific analysis and systematic, critical thought are impossible
without writing. His theory about the transition to literacy as a gigantic
watershed in cultural history is contested, and Goody has modified it
several times himself. What everybody seems to agree about is that writing
is indispensable for the cumulative growth of knowledge, and that it makes
it possible to separate the utterance from the context of uttering.
It may be said that some of the criticisms of Goody have been exaggerated.
Although there are many exceptions and many interesting ‘intermediate
forms’ (societies with limited literacy in one way or another), and
although local realities vary much more than a general theory is able
to predict, writing does by and large make a considerable difference regarding
thought styles. The Greek miracle, that is the transition from mythical
to philosophical thinking in the eastern part of the Mediterranean (incidentally
paralleled by similar developments in India and China), must have been
linked with the development of alphabetic writing, although it was hardly
the sole cause. Although the ancient philosophers were deeply interested
in rhetoric, that is oral eloquence, they criticised each other’s
writings and revealed logical faults in each other’s arguments, often
with a time lag of a generation or more. Writing does not necessarily
make people more ‘intelligent’ (a difficult concept): it is
a crutch for thought which makes the continuous exercise of memory unnecessary;
it externalises thoughts, and thus makes it easier to place them outside
the brain. When one writes, moreover, one is likely to think along other
patterns than when communicating orally, a tendency explored by the philosopher
Jacques Derrida and many others. Although there are many similarities
between written history based on archives and myths, there are also differences
to do with falsifiability, dating and imposition of causal sequences.
Literacy is often accompanied by numeracy. The Phoenicians, this famous
people of maritime merchants from the Ancient world, were famous book-keepers.
The implications of accurate book-keeping for trade, business and forms
of reciprocity in general, should not be underestimated. Technology has
both social and cognitive implications here as well, even if it is –
naturally – necessary to explore local conditions and variations
to get a full picture. Modern computers enable us to make calculations
of dizzying complexity at astonishing speed: Some of the readers may think
they have a reasonable notion of a billion (1,000,000,000); but consider
the fact that each well-nourished, fairly healthy life lasts on average
for 2.2 billion seconds altogether!
At the same time, calculators and computers may well make us incapable
of carrying out even simple calculations without their aid. The calculator
has doubtless affected the ability of schoolchildren to learn double digit
multiplication by rote, and digitalised pricing means that cashiers in
supermarkets no longer know the prices of all the items in the shop by
heart. Thermometers, books, calculators and similar devices create abstract
standards and lead to both externalisation and standardisation of certain
forms of knowledge.
Now, in practice there is no question of an either-or. It is often said
that humans are incapable of counting further than four without the aid
of devices such as written numbers, pebbles or the like. However, we are
familiar with a great number of traditional peoples, for example in Melanesia,
who can count quite accurately and quite far by counting not only their
toes and fingers, but other bodily parts as well. Some might get to seventy
and further without using a single aid external to the body. There is,
in a word, no sharp distinction between the peoples who have only their
own memory at their disposal and those who are able to externalise their
thoughts on paper; there are many kinds of mnemotechnical aids,
and although letters and numbers may be the most consequential ones, they
are not the only ones.
This brings me to a related but much less theorised field, namely music.
The enormous complexity characterising Beethoven’s and Mahler’s
symphonies would have been impossible, had the composers not lived in
a society which for centuries had developed an accurate system of writing
music, that is notation. Harmony is much rarer in societies without notes
than in societies with them. And if one is able to read music, one can
play music never heard. The parallel to writing and numbers is obvious:
The statement is externalised and frozen, separated from the person who
originated it. It can be appreciated in an unchanged manner (externally
– interpretations always change) anywhere and any time.
Let me finally mention a phenomenon which will be discussed from a different
point of view in the next chapter: Nationalism would have been impossible
without writing. In one of the most widely quoted books about the growth
of national identities, Benedict Anderson (1983) shows that printing was
a crucial condition for the emergence of nationalist thought and national
identification. Before the advent of printing, books were expensive and
rarely seen in private homes. In Europe, besides, most books were written
in Latin. When books gradually became cheaper in the second half of the
15th century, new markets for books which were aimed at new audiences,
quickly materialised: Travel writing became popular, likewise novels,
essays and popular science. Since profits were important to the printers
(who often were also publishers), the books were increasingly published
in vernacular languages. Thereby the national languages were standardised,
and people living in Hamburg could read, verbatim, the same texts as people
in Munich. The broad standardisation of culture represented in nationalism
would not have been possible without a modern mass medium such as the
printed book (and, later, the newspaper). Thus it may be said that writing
has not only influenced thought about the world, but also thought about
who we are. It has made it technologically possible to imagine that one
belongs to the same people as millions of other persons whom one will
never meet.
Further reading
Douglas, Mary (1966) Purity and Danger.... London
Goody, Jack (1977) The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 1977.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1966 [1962]) The Savage Mind. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.