So Open

He has an extraordinary affinity for languages, picking them up as others coins from the street. The same with subjects. Put him in a library and he will become a master of the topic overnight - well, a few nights. He reads libraries like I books. It’s why he went to Harvard early - at seventeen. Prodigies grow early. It is the academic inheritance on both sides; his father a distinguished biochemist, his mother a strong interest in the arts. Genetics, no doubt. Also nature; every day to receive the warm bottle of ideas, the fizzy pop of aesthetics: glug glug glug…the precocious are both born and bred.

Shouldn’t such a virtuoso be a star? Yet I’ve never heard of McKim Marriott. This not one of the big names in anthropology-land. Expecting a pioneer, we find a backwoods man, who does good, important, intelligent but not spectacular work. This feeds a suspicion held for a long time - are innovators always outsiders?1

His parents - East Coast sophisticates - go to St Louis, which becomes their own peculiar mission: to civilise the frontier (and this in the 20th-century!). Good news for McKim, who loves its countryside. We follow him on long bicycle rides through fourteen states, either by himself or with a friend….God! how free children were back then. Of course, such ease with the geography, the insouciance about risk, is linked to his intelligence; the fears of the strange and strangers pushed into the background by that strong, curious mind. Precocity its own armour plating.

The Harvard years are chaotic. Wanting to do anthropology, he finds that its one professor - Clyde Kluckhohn - is on war duty during his first year. In the second Kluckhohn is around most weeks, and becomes a strong influence. Nevertheless, these years seem a tad aimless; and we note the lack of reference to friends and other professors; although he also talks - when going to the field - of his large set of acquaintances, who provide much useful information: humans a sort of book.2

Does the war save him? It gives him a direction. His army work is to learn Japanese. However, even now there’s a lack of forward thrust; due to poor organisation - it takes over a year to transport him to an area where he can interpret the radio codes - he experiences a slackening of purpose. Then, the war over, he decides he isn't fluent enough to join the occupation of Japan (he lacks verbal fluency).

Odd. I’d expect an extended stay in the country to grow that fluency. Does this suggest a scholar more comfortable with texts than people?

An ox-bow lake in this river: he learnt Japanese from a white Russian, who had lived in the country for many years. He learnt Sanskrit from another white Russian exiled in America. Strange effects of the Russian Revolution. Applying weed-killer to the mind in their own country, they sowed its seeds in others.

Sanskrit? How come we have traded the Shinano for the Ganges? During the war he spent a year in India. A key moment in his life. India to be his area of special study, once the Brits had left. This an aspect of empire that has been forgotten; the British authorities not keen on the Americans, fearful of their influence on the locals. After the war the US confirmed these suspicions; happy for Britain’s empire to disintegrate, they may even have given the collapsing colossus a shove…those social scientists adding a little extra muscle?

We leave him outside a village.

When we return, we find he’s been thrown out of a lot of villages. It’s not just the British who are wary of him; the peasants suspect him of officialdom; the Brahmins are worried about pollution; the bootleggers afraid he will report them to the police.

Though he touches lightly on the details, he shows us the political and social obstacles often ignored in most anthropological accounts, where the anthropologist is simply accepted into the community (a necessary fiction to give authority to the monograph?). In such highly conservative societies, with their suspicion of the new, it is not so easy to accommodate men and women so alien in modes of dress, behaviour and thought. Yet why does anthropology persuade us it is? The experience of this anthropologist suggests a door opening onto an unseen world, where relations between observer and observed are tricky, difficult, obstructive. How much do the locals hide?

Human relations are complex. When he does settle in a village he is treated humanely. But then discovers horrible rumours are circulating about him: because the new is strange, therefore bad. We are in classic Malinowski territory, where the outsider, once absorbed into the group, becomes acutely aware of the gap that separates public utterance from private communication, language from behaviour. Why doesn’t such a disconnect, between how people perform before him but actually think behind him, turn our man crazy? In such a schizophrenic situation, doubts must, surely, fragment his certainties, dissolve his confidence.

McKim is a clever man, with lots of connections, and his mind is distant from his feelings. From a fellow worker in the field he learns a technique for emptying these tales of their acid - he retells them to the locals. An evening’s entertainment! which the villagers enjoy with good humour. Though we should give Malinowski the last word. Although the rumours are based on feelings, and thus real, are they likely to be translated into action? Surely a rumour itself is designed to entertain. Strangers a stimulus to the gothic imagination; a village version of M.R. James.

Turning the rumours against the rumour-mongers: what effect on the nature of the village? Rumours, jokes, satire, these often diminish the outsider, so as to remove his power, and retain the community’s self-respect.3 By using such rumours to protect himself how much is this outsider using the outsider’s natural power - the magic of his otherness - against the villagers? The whole relationship between inside and outside to surely change. Elsewhere, he talks of the material improvements that follow in his train. Another aspect that is often overlooked: how the anthropological actor changes the play. Yet McKim doesn’t reflect on these issues, perhaps the reason why he can mention them; his own persona believed of little importance in the work.

This anthropologist is an innocent. The reason so many bad things happen to him? His house is robbed; a colleague forms a clique against him; the local bigwig, fearful of his anthropology, its army of questions, calls him in for a chat. Also those rumours: are they a consequence of his innocence? which to many people would appear odd, thus suspicious: no one is that naive! There are deeper sociological reasons for such distrust. The innocent is blind to individuals and the situation, which they cannot read with shrewdness and insight. An innocent stumbles around the social scene, offending many sensibilities; for nobody likes an oaf treading on their toes. An example of such maladroit behaviour is given. He drives with the police to within a mile of the house of the thief, then hides in the shadows when they enter the man’s house. Does he really think the children - the world’s greatest spies - won’t find this out; that no-one will know his secret….

Close contact over the longue durée allows the emotional intelligence to squeeze through the prison bars of the ingenuous. As he talks to and observes numerous individuals, he comes to realise that both his views on caste and his social science methods are inadequate to understand the society; for simple surveys, based on quantitative methods, cannot capture the complex relations of the different castes, their intermingling between friends and colleagues. Caste isn’t a rigid system whose members never meet. There are all kinds of peculiarities as people interact on the individual level, which only close observation and inside knowledge can uncover. Time has worked its wonders. Stay long enough, and the fog clears, and you can look clear across the valley…McKim produces an excellent ethnographic study. Though has he grown, become more adept at social relations? Back in the States he finds some sophisticated statistical method to analyse the data….

I assume it is through his high intelligence and his openness that he overcomes his own obstacles to the understanding of others. Though we wonder if he goes too far in the other way. In penetrating criticisms of Louis Dumont - his work on caste less on India than on the Catholic Church - he brings out the weakness of both this author’s most famous work and the Western anthropological enterprise, which can rely too much on the theories of other disciplines.4 Homo Hierarchicus is not based on original fieldwork, and thus the famous theory uses secondhand ideas. Dumont’s big reputation made not by patient analysis of the little details, with their complicated and tricksy analysis - à la McKim - but by large scale theories that capture the imagination, and which reflect back in some obscure way on one’s own society (though most are unaware of this). The value of such work not its closeness to the facts, nor even its truth value, but its stimulus to the imagination, so attuned to the self and its world.5 To intuit our self, its relations to our society, there are times we need to get the other side wrong. It also helps to believe we are writing about others, when we're actually thinking about ourselves.

This is not to welcome mistakes, merely to point out their value.

Anthropology, like all knowledge, should be a dialogue between the self and society: in understanding others we better understand our own place in the cosmos. But what if we think the other totally alien?…can they then help us to know ourselves? It is why I ponder McKim’s emphasis on native ways of thinking. We applaud his attempt to try to grasp the world from their points of view (he built up a research tradition in just this field), but doubts crawl about this keyboard. I return to his innocence, that weakness in reflexive psychology, which often leads to an obtuseness about others. Does innocence, by concentrating on the surface of things, place too much emphasis on the differences, so missing how much these modes of cognition resemble our own?6 Are native ways of thinking considered in a too intellectual, too ‘objective’, a manner; more like a specimen than a living organism? I speculate too much, and suspect I am unfair. I must read his work.

When I look at the bibliography there are no weighty tomes, no classic monographs. This seems odd for an anthropologist so alert to the quotidian nuances of a culture and to the weak points of his intellectual colleagues.7 Something seems to be lacking. I suspect a strength is also an Achilles Heel: a brilliant learner of languages and collector of facts, this man is a virtuoso in the accumulation of data and its organisation; which squeeze out the imagination, so essential to the master-thinker. Dumont may have got his facts wrong, but he was appealing to something real, that other people recognised (albeit unconsciously and in their own society not India). To be a great influence, to produce masterpieces, it is not enough to get the facts right, to stick to mundane truth; no, we have to create new worlds for others to explore. Such creative minds inevitably pull the material out of shape. Creation about making stuff up…. This anthropologist is too conscientious for that. A nice chap. A beautiful individual. We like him a lot. But is he, perhaps, too smart for his own good?

Interview: McKim Marriott

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Notes

1. Many of the great names Alan interviews come from non-academic families. 

2. Compare with Michael Mann in the previous interview.

3. For the magic power of the stranger: Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage.

4. For a the classic misreading of a culture based on Western models of thought: Gregory Bateson’s Naven.

5. In an extraordinary passage in his Ethics, Spinoza writes that the truth cannot exclude the reality of the imagination. What he means is that through imagination we actually perceive a world; this quite different from knowing whether what we perceive is good or evil, right or wrong. It is a key insight. Most major thinkers bedazzle our imaginations, not because their theories are true but because they feel real - are real - to those who believe them.

A caveat. Romanticism changed the meaning of imagination. Here is Spinoza’s definition: ‘An imagination is an idea by which the mind considers a thing as present…which nevertheless indicates the constitution of the human body more than the nature of the external thing.’ (p.121)

To feel true, to be real…. To understand the power of a thinker like Marx we have less to understand his actual ideas than the world of those who are bedazzled by them. It is the society of the disciples that gives the best insight into the ideas of genius (at least in the social sciences).

6. For a different view of the ‘Other’: see Alan’s own A History of My Mind.

7. In writing about Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf Alan makes the point that the best ethnographers are often overlooked in favour of the flashy theorists. Has McKim suffered the same fate?

Benode Behari Mukherjee: Migration