Inside Track
Across the 20th-century you couldn’t walk around campus without bumping into some sect, although most people, even the students, were unaware of their existence. Our stay too short, our minds elsewhere, on girls, on drink, on pinball, we thought, when we did think, that the beliefs of a fashionable cult an eternal truth, the settlement permanent, not a transient camp on the intellectual landscape. No matter! A few years in municipality or corporation and our learning is soon forgotten. Professors dinosaurs in the department, are but ants in city and town. Bang! An idea explodes in our sky; then quickly falls to earth, to be trampled into the ground by our workday selves, and the next generation of graduates. Even subjects suffer this fate. Take anthropology. What pop quiz asks for its five top performers? If lucky, you’ll press the remote on a late night documentary - to see Colin Turnbull? - or wrap your chips in a newspaper controversy about Margaret Mead. Talking to someone who went to Cambridge, they are excited about their degree. I mention structural-functionalism; my interlocutor looks straight through me: ‘sorry’, she says, ‘I didn't do electrical engineering.’ Subjects collect dust. Sects come and go like monks in a monastery. Nevertheless, the Church lives on, though St Francis has long been laid to rest.
I speak in runes, and you are cross with me. Anthropology, sir, I am talking about anthropology; how it has settled down into an establishment, a regular church and a bureaucracy. Dousing the religious fire, a faith wild with meaning has been domesticated into ritual and routine. Bad times for mavericks and thinkers; as revelation is turned into accepted wisdom, knowledge becomes a means not an end, that end extraneous to the subject (I whisper promotion, honours, popularity...). It is when ideas are emptied of their substance, and reduced to symbols in a game. Belief declines, as life is no longer built around a concept and we no longer measure our existence against its values. Walking the career path; the hard trek across a desert now a romantic memory, with its Homeric legends. Of course the corridors still resound with the voices of believers, but, on the whole, it is a weaker, less fiery faith; one acceptable to the cooler spirits in the congregation; more Jesuit than Jansenist, to use an esoteric formulation.1 Today the subject has all the signs of a permanent building; a Cathedral not chapel or nomad’s tent; the atmosphere more parish Anglican than Pentecostal. Such a Church has the resources to withstand the storms of iconoclastic rage that must periodically sweep through its naves and chancels (there will always be evangelicals; those for whom meaning is essential to life, university the place to find it). Ethnomethodology, Marxism, today’s the post-colonial, all means of knocking the old bishops off their thrones. But the throne remains. The young too have their futures to think about, those academic papers to write.
Once upon a time anthropology was not an ordinary academic subject but a way of life. It was a vital new religion, attracting those with a vocation. Emanuel Marx.
Like many anthropologists of that time Marx came to the ethnographical font by an indirect route. A sign, surely, that these characters were ‘called; on the look out for a subject overflowing with meaning, that offered a new cosmology around which to live their lives. The reason why it attracted so many Catholics and Jews? The spirit of the old faith still alive, but the content of those faith leaking out; the spirit needed a new religious vessel to replace that damaged receptacle. Anthropology offering a total vision of the world; one that either rejected the Modern outright or called its fundamentals into question, and through using the most up-to-date of Western philosophies; the ideas of Wittgenstein and Durkheim embodied in actual communities, revealing the hidden secrets of our human universe. The same impetus, surely, that made Marxism and psychoanalysis so popular for so long. Was it an accident that Alan himself was deeply Christian during his first years in Oxford....
In this search for meaning, and through their quest for belief, these anthropologists made amazing discoveries into the nature of human society; their studies the great exploration into the religious experience; that fusion of community, action, body, mind and spirit. Durkheim, himself a Christ-like figure, who acted out his theories, had a powerful influence on the discipline.2 His theory that ritual engraves beliefs onto the soul, a profound insight into the relationship between mind and behaviour; which could serve as a model for a new kind of research programme.3 According to Durkheim, religion emerges from certain sorts of human activity repeated through practice and custom. Habits create a culture which recreates the individual, as a distinct cultural being, who then reinforces those habits making the culture secure; much of anthropological thought an attempt to understand the resultant stability.4 Once in the field anthropologists acted out Durkheim’s insight; embodying, through the ritual of participant-observation, the culture of a host community, to produce a new kind of knowledge, which combined the embedded wisdom of traditional cultures with the detachment of modern thought, its critical distance. The subject a curious hybrid producing the calm scholar and the excitable guru.
Anthropology was a curious subject. The most sophisticated kinds of modern thought used to explore pre-modern beliefs which were then incorporated into the investigator’s own being. It also uncovered a new kind of history (even though it was resolutely anti-historical); one that showed the continuities across the lifespan of humanity.5 The modern not so modern!6 Although we mustn’t ignore the odd character of the industrial regime (the psychic unity of humans does not extend to cultures); its break with all previous societies, from which arises its own unique religion, closer to animism than to the monotheisms of an earlier age.7 In the West the secular realm is no longer a non-religious space - the doors between temple and agora have been taken down -; it has become The Secular, a place where faith is embodied in practice: in work, in retail, in entertainment, in voting. This a totemic culture where the totem is replaced, in the high religion of academic and official, by the pure concept; while the folk religion, of celebrities, of sport, of political parties, retains its idols. An extremely strange society, where means are their own justification and faith.8 Only the Modern to have a utilitarian ethics.
After this praise, a crushing criticism. Like the literary critics of the period, anthropologists were looking at the world from upside down.9 Believing in a revolutionary shift from whole communities to atomic societies they missed that it is contemporary polities that are the complete social units; a nation’s citizens bonded together far more closely than most previous communities; for in addition to the functionalism, inherent to production and reproduction, there is the ideological conformity engendered by schools and mass communication.10 We don’t just exist in a social space, we are consciously formed by it. Inevitably we worship what we ourselves help to create, and upon which our lives depend: Society, our collective cosmos, with its magic of big numbers....
The institutions brought a new kind of man into being, the man whose essence was plotted by a thousand numbers:
'in order to obtain an accurate representation, statistical research accompanies the individual through his entire earthly existence. It takes account of his birth, his baptism, his vaccination, his schooling and the success thereof, his diligence, his leave of school, his subsequent education and development; and, once he becomes a man, his physique and his ability to bear arms. It also accompanies the subsequent steps of his walk through life; it takes note of his chosen occupation, where he sets up his household and his management of the same; if he saved from the abundance of his youth for his old age; if and when and at what age he marries and who he chooses as his wife - statistics look after him when things go well for him and when they go awry. Should he suffer a shipwreck in his life, undergo material, moral or spiritual ruin, statistics takes note of the same. Statistics leaves a man only after his death - after it has ascertained the precise age of his death and noted the causes that brought about his end.'11
For the first time in history man is god to Man.12 Albeit a special kind of man: the artificial person of the State.13 Society becomes its own self-sufficient environment, or at least this is the ideal, which modern science and technology is bringing ever closer to reality. No Nature, all City.
The result is not the cooly rational society of Enlightenment dreamers. Nor Weber’s cold bureaucratic order, his disenchanted world. Belief in utility creates a faith far more extreme and irrational than anything found in the Gurungs or the Nuer; its evangelicalism closer to the wilder shores of Christianity and Islam.14 The reason should be obvious; the drive towards conceptual uniformity, with its intrinsic intolerance, belongs to our monotheistic inheritance.15 The new man and woman an old kind of believer, one suitably adapted to a wholly human cosmos. Bureaucracy is new. The emphasis on utilitarian reason is new. As is the belief in the pure idea, not embodied in totem, symbol, or images of the divine. Such distinctive features of the Modern do not, however, make us lifeless bureaucrats. Not at all! Today it is easy to become fanatics of the concept. Just choose your notion! Nation, Class, The Market, Sex, Gender.... In modernity, ideas float free of their context; while ideological communities, cults in popular parlance, are forever trying to impose their ideas across an entire realm.16 Conceptual coercion an essential feature of the contemporary scene.17 So deep-rooted is this type of thinking that even the critics practice it. Few to escape a worldview which organises a whole life around an idea. Take big figures like Radcliffe-Brown and Gregory Bateson; they projected such a mentalité onto their areas of study, transforming instincts and actions into a sort social plumbing or sociological cybernetics.18 The beliefs of the West laid over a very different kind of human experience. Malinowski, with his looser ideas, but stronger method, closer to ritual, got nearer to the reality of these communities. Yet inevitably he overvalued the concept. It is why, back in the LSE, he created something akin to the early Christian cults.19 The experience of the field fed the spirit of its members but could not shatter the Western framework of their minds, with its conceptual obsession.20 The result was an odd kind of academic subject, part scholarly study and part existential practice; and suffused with the mental constructs of an abstract, industrial order; albeit these practitioners were liberal and tolerant, open to the strange and the disturbing.21 It offered a new way of looking at life; its religion more human and less fraught than the extremism of Bentham, Marx and Dawkins; modernity’s cosmonauts.22
Participant-observation is a method, a ritual, a way of life. To immerse the self in a culture is to lose something of that self to one’s object of study. Stephen and Christine Hugh-Jones taking this to its logical conclusion when they participated in the Barasana initiation rites; to actually join the community.23 It was to recover a knowledge which many thought lost, at least in academia, where a pastiche of scientific method had become the model for the social sciences.24 Alas, the anthropologists could not compete with the sociologists and their wholly modern faith in the Gesellschaft.25 The post-war rise of sociology intimate with a shift in moral values that it both justified and encouraged; as the technics of medicine and social engineering came to replace the homilies and rituals of Christianity, which collapsed during the 1960s.26 That revolutionary assault of traditional values spilled over onto anthropology, when radicals attacked the old guard as servants of imperialism; anthropology’s insights, its new perspective on human life, lost to a facile politics, thoroughly modern in inspiration.27 Under such attack the subject loses its purpose, and falls victim to Weber’s routinisation, to become just another production unit in the knowledge industry. A chance to instil a new kind of thinking into academia’s psyche lost.
There were special reasons for Emanuel Marx’s conversion: the Arab-Israeli war. He sought redemption for killing Arabs through understanding them; his first degree a sociological study of the Bedouin.28 Alas, this initial venture into academe disappoints; a discipline designed for an industrial society proved useless for desert tribes. Sociology a theology for those who travel by train not ride camels across the sands.
His spirit is not stilled. He works for the State, as it builds a new nation. It is not enough. This chap needs more than routine work. He visits Manchester on a sabbatical, and comes under the influence of Emrys Peters; experiencing what we must call a religious conversion.29 In the presence of powerful characters like Peters and Max Gluckman, Marx’s intellectual outlook is transformed, and he sees the world through eyes of a Malinowskian anthropologist. This modern man undergoes a metamorphosis, not into Kafka’s insect, but into a Tikopian or Trobriander...well, not quite. The promise and appeal, and to some extent the reality, of anthropology was that it created a technique to enter into other mentalités; this done less through reading the foundational texts - Malinowski, Firth, Evans-Pritchard - or mixing with its charismatics, and participating in their rituals - the famous Firth seminar - as out in the field, where one lived inside a community. To join a tribe akin to Party membership for a Marxist or a therapy session for an analysand; a place where you inhabit an alien worldview; although not quite that of the Nuer and Dinka; for anthropologists couldn’t divest themselves of their own modernity, its conceptual bias, the belief in analysis and comparative synthesis. Not a problem for the disciples of Freud or Marx, who took up this bias and made it more extreme; thinking to cure the ill-effects of modern capitalism through their own peculiar ideas - the Oedipus Complex, repression, class war, false consciousness...-; these the magic in modernity’s thought, the transformative power of a concept acting on other minds; though the real power of both Marxism and psychoanalysis lies in the sects they create, the practices that turn ideas into habits and customs. But it was a problem for anthropology. EP may have used the divination techniques of the Azande, but he remained a Western professor, writing books in recognisably Western academic style. Anthropology less a return to traditional wisdom, as a reclaiming of the spirit of the great civilisational religions - Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam - and slotting it into a modern setting, where new concepts and new rituals replace the old.30
With the collapse of the British Empire, and the economic transformation of the globe, the opportunities for a complete immersion into an alien space are disappearing; one reason, I suspect, that anthropology has settled down into a standard academic discipline.31 A cult has become a church. One consequence is a revolt from within the subject, as, the religious spirit lost, the evangelicals criticise and attack an anthropological history they mistakenly equate with the current bureaucratic scholasticism they (ironically) perpetuate. A new, absolutely modern, metaphysics - politics - has colonised the subject, which dismisses the old ways of thought and action; while individuals preen themselves on their radicalism, and their empathy for their subjected folk.32 The anthropology of mid-century was a melding of two traditions; the craft of the medieval scholar and the life of pre-modern tribes; which combined with a scientific-industrial mentalité to create uneasy but fruitful tensions, producing new ways of looking at both. Today, the focus is wholly from modernity’s side of the telescope, despite an ideology that says otherwise.33
Marx is not a typical British-trained anthropologist. Because he is an Israeli. This has huge effects. Israel is a new country, which emerged directly out of a secular faith.34 Therefore, Emanuel Marx cannot simply be a spectator; the religion is too hot and too close for cool observation. He is inside what he studies, and in a way not true for most anthropologists. There is a personal connection with the Arabs; a topsy-turvy kind of ancestor worship, where he feels not reverence for dead relatives, but remorse over those that he has killed. He needed a subject that could employ these emotions. He found it in Manchester. Now equipped with his anthropological techniques Marx can truly redeem himself by properly studying his subject, gaining real insights, and making actual contact with people’s lives. We are back to the roots of knowledge, and its intimacy with spiritual health. Malinowski has done the business! His act of redemption over - a study of the Bedouin, situating them within a modern economic and political reality - our man immerses himself in the nation state. Through his department of anthropology-sociology, in Tel Aviv university, Marx and his colleagues study Israel itself. No need for this man to go to the exotic to find a total cosmology, an old-style religion; though this one is closer to the medieval church and synagogue. I speak of the closed society of a new state, that modern gemeinschaft.35
In Israel sociology and anthropology were not at odds. Unlike here, where the sociologists seem always to squeeze the latter into some departmental annex. The chief weakness, I’d argue, of the radical turn in anthropology in the Seventies is that young academics were too quick to use sociological concepts against their own more traditional and thus fragile discipline.36 Big Geselly stamped on little Gemeiny, until little of Gemeiny’s original spirit was left.37 This couldn't be the case with Emanuel Marx, for country and tribe are one; the nation also an ideological community, put under the extreme pressure of rapid creation and combat. Knowledge and existence, observers and members, analysis and participation, fuse into a single, continuous activity. In such places and at such times study becomes worship; and the differences between sociology and anthropology dissolve, as a wholly modern state, in the furnace of its formation, takes on the characteristics of both gesellschaften and gemeinschaften, to create a new monotheistic culture.38
Marx describes hubris. After the quick rise there is a rapid fall, as academics lose sight of their mission, and the faith - useful to state officials and the citizenry - is turned into an empty academic game. Grants decline, numbers fall; and the profession is forced to rethink itself; to look outside the university window.
At the time of this interview, the anthropologists are returning to the fold, once again listening to the national liturgies, to partake of the rituals of Israel’s second-coming, as it builds a fortress to protect itself from a shift in intellectual atmosphere and world opinion.39 In a time when nation states are losing their liberal cachet, and nationalism is academically troublesome, this particular national religion became even more extreme, as Likud replaces the Labour Party, and a new kind Zionism takes hold.40 The country’s treatment of the indigenous population, leading to international condemnation, and the diaspora’s increasing distance from the country, has its fugueing effects on mass opinion and the more liberal of Israel’s citizens.41 Marx talks of his advocacy work with the Bedouin; of how, following a government decision to build an airport on their pastoral lands, he helped resettle them on equitable terms in another desert area. It is one way of living with the tensions that increase year on year. How long can a faith last, when the actual world, with its material culture, its vulgar politics, its war and terrorism, insists on barging in? Over the short run these strengthen the faith, making it utterly resistant to outside influence. But can it last....
There is a perhaps more urgent question for Britain, Europe and America. Is Israel, a modern nation under threat, with its turn to the extreme right, a precursor of our own polities, whose mainstream politicians appear incapable of dealing with our contemporary malaise?42 Marx suggests one way of answering the question.
Interview: Emanuel Marx
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Notes
1 Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters. A wonderful satire by a religious ascetic on the looser faith of what were essentially Christian bureaucrats.
7 This is because cultures are centred around ideas, which by their nature isolate and separate. Although see Bertrand Russell, The Scope and Limits of Human Knowledge, where he argues that most ideas are pre-linguistic, belonging to animals as well as humans. Russell then goes on to analyse the connection between ideas and words. OK. Let me change the formulation: cultures form around ideas that are expressed in words; these words to take on magical significance.
8 Think of the criticisms of Kant against a means-based morality: Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Even in the late-18th century pure utility was thought an odd way of looking at human behaviour.
11 Ernst Engel quoted by Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance, p.34. Elsewhere Hacking writes of our being defined by the mean, that abstract conception of a society’s ideal. Our essence lies less in our being than in our relation to the collective.
12 Christ was a half-way house.
13 Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Modernity’s foundational text.
14 John Gray has the best insights on this phenomenon; see in particular his Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia and The Immortalisation Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death.
15 Nicely caught in Ippolito Nievo, Confessions of an Italian. The two Enlightenment dreamers, Amilcare and Lucilio, are enthusiastic rationalists. This, of course, to have massive effects; for the nation state grows out of the disenchantment with the Enlightenment and its French Revolution. This novel a brilliant description of the false promises of both.
Contrast the early-modern origins of the modern British nation. In reaction against the religious fanaticism of the Civil War there was a conscious move to suppress enthusiasm: Christopher Hill, The Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution. What marks Britain out from nearly all the modern nation-states is its lukewarm nationalism; the tepid Christian spirit carried over to its national religion. Though this is changing. As the nation’s identity comes under threat, Britain is moving closer to the modern European pattern; the template for Gellner’s original thesis.
16 Discussed at length in my One Side of the Equation.
17 One Side of the Equation highlight’s the influence of Kant.
18 A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society. Gregory Bateson, Naven: The culture of the Iatmul people of New Guinea as revealed through a study of the “naven” ceremonial.
19 Think of the centrality of the Logos.
20 Alan an unusual exception. See in particular his A History of My Mind.
21 I offer one wonderful study - Raymond Firth’s The Work of the Gods in Tikopia - and one marvellous interview: Alan’s with Christoph von Führer-Haimendorf.
22 See the Myer Fortes lecture on Alan’s website.
23 Alan interview. From the typescript:
Feel very much a psychic unity with the people; sometimes worrying that things become too familiar; Christine and I went native, partly for ideological reasons, but also for practical reasons; it was a difficult and dangerous place to get to so we couldn't take much with us; also knew that the previous experience of the Barasana with outsiders was with a rather brutal rubber gatherer and semi-enslavement; thus we never got anybody to carry anything for us; we lived in the long house, dressed as they did, ate what they ate; soon took the impressive architecture of the long house for granted and only much later looked at again; I get an enormous amount of pleasure that I can now walk into an Amerindian long house and be treated like an elder, and know how to behave....
24 Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery.
25 Interestingly, at the height of the sociological craze, the kind of scientism espoused by the economically determinist of the profession was already out-of-date in physics. See Fritjof Capra in the documentary The Mystic Spiral; also The Scope and Limits of Human Knowledge and The Taming of Chance.
Russell, however, makes a distinction between Quantum Mechanics and classical physics; indeterminacy applying only to the former. This leaves the problem of mental phenomena, which his book accepts as real but unexplainable. The Scope and Limits of Human Knowledge perhaps the most rigorous attempt to prove the truth of empiricism, but which ends up showing its limitations: the framework of our knowledge, the mental structure that gives it epistemological substance, stands outside pure empirical practice.
26 For the Christian collapse: Oliver Roy, Is Europe Still Christian? For the sociological explosion: Noel Annan, Our Age: The Generation That Made Post-War Britain. To my mind this book shows just how closely linked to the Welfare State was sociology’s rise. A institution with new techniques and a new metaphysic had come to replace the Church. No wonder there was such a reaction! though oddly the radicals weren’t Christians but New Agers, anarchists and those on the fringes of respectable intellectual life.
27 A vivid description of the Marxist assault on anthropology is Alan’s interview with Thomas Hylland Eriksen. For wise comment against such schoolroom extremism: Jack Goody, The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918-1970.
28 I wonder if he is being altogether honest with himself: war justifies the killing of an enemy. Is his conscience camouflaging a deeper, national, wrong: the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland? The truth about Israel’s actions were not revealed, and then controversially, until the 1980s, when the so-called revisionists - Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev - destroyed the myths about a good war.
29 For the initiation into another modern religion: Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement.
30 Such an attempt at a new synthesis is explicit in Jill Purce’s The Mystic Spiral.
31 Gellner makes a similar point in Postmodernism, Reason and Religion; and argues that this has increased the irrationality quotient in the subject, as academics turn inwards to an extreme subjectivity. A contradiction? No! Rex Warner shows in The Aerodrome that bureaucracy increases irrationalism. My (as yet unpublished) Cartoons and Their Concepts includes a long discussion of this novel.
32 An extraordinary example is given in Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. I think he misreads it; my analysis in Cartoons and Their Concepts.
It is the problem of the do-gooder: an abstract idea of the good replaces actual human contact. The West full of such interventions by the higher-ups upon the lower-downs; and whose effects are ambiguous: material improvements on the one hand, spiritual impoverishment on the other, at least for the direct beneficiaries. A paradigm of modernity: we improve our bodies at the expense of the spirit. Though I must add this caveat: only a few maniacs would reject this imbalance in toto.
33 A devastating exposure of this kind of thinking is Robert Irwin, The Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies. It is a demolition of Edward Said’s Orientalism.
34 Gellner’s functionalism downplays the religious nature of the modern nation state, whose roots where as much ideological as economic and social. Confessions of an Italian describes the atmosphere.
35 I turn Gellner upside down. Gellner believed that nationalism was the very example of modernity, with its embodiment of the abstract impersonality of gesellschaften. I think he got the latter wrong. Cartoons and their Concepts suggests why: the modern state is a curious amalgam of the abstract-impersonal and the social-collective; this combination the cause of much psychic confusion, best explored through literature.
36 Hyland Erikson interview.
37 Geoffrey Hawthorn explains why this wasn’t a good idea: Enlightenment & Despair: A history of social theory.
38 Something similar happened in Britain before and during World War Two: Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper.
39 For the change of religion from a secular Zionism - a pure modern faith - to a new hybrid, which mixes Orthodox Judaism, land mysticism and the new nation state: Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. The Messiah becomes the modern country. For a detailed account of this movement: Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007.
40 For the background: Colin Schindler, The Land Beyond Promise: Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream.
41 There is much insight in Sylvain Cypel, Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse.
42 Gellner’s formulation of the nation state as a modern creation had to be adjusted to include the older countries like England, France and Spain; an adjustment he recognises in his later Nationalism. However, since Gellner’s death, it is becoming increasingly noticeable that Britain, in the decades since losing its empire, is morphing into a typical nation state; an ideological community, where the past does not inform the present but is used as material for an endless transformation.
Shani Rhys James: Yellow Wallpaper
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