Times of Travel

A witness to modernity. Yet the ironies are fantastic in an epoch of speed and change. This man given the elixir of eternal youth; ninety-five years old, but looks not a month past seventy. Recall, articulation, response…almost as if age has slowed down, freeze-framed. Methuselah in the age of the motorcar.

What he’s seen is the passing of a way of life; the vanishing of traditional societies that so close to nature they were absorbed into it; the gravel roads between the South Indian villages disappearing into the fields. No boundary between humans and the landscape. Which suggests a porosity of the human psyche that has been lost, as we drive on tarmac, put glass screens between us and a biting, buzzing scene. It is to lose a sense of the immensity of Nature, our need to serve and humour it. Once we listened to the seasons, kept our ears on earth and to tree; for how else hear the signs of our survival? Always asking for mercy from forces stronger than the self. A precarious life, where humans just another creature on the land. Once there were huge distances to navigate. Even in the 20th-century there wasn’t a person to be seen between villages. One effect is beauty. A word Adrian Mayer uses a lot, suggesting the impact of these places upon him. It tells of the power of the beautiful, how it overawes the human animal, to create very different relationships with the environment. The scientist’s idea of cause and effect replaced with the aesthetic imagination; form to lord it over function. A problem for the modern anthropologist who thinks in terms of social mechanics not portraiture. There is tragedy too. In losing the beauty we escape from Nature’s grip; which lacks the force to bow us do down to its grandeur. Everest not a mountain to be worshipped but a number of metres to be climbed.1

The Schloss raises his hand: what happens when the beautiful is lost, trampled under the ramshackle world of the modern imagination? How much of our humanity do we lose, when no longer making chivalric love to the flora and fauna?2 Our gods created out of the human head, not given to us by plants and animals, we are cut off from the full impact of nature’s force; its infinite resources, its energy, of magic and superstition.3 A broken connection. Our plant life loses its electricity.

Power up the plant-station!….

We must not be sentimental. There are gains as well as losses. For there are other ways of vanishing into the landscape: famine. Following the Bengal catastrophe there were real fears of a similar occurrence in the South. This was averted by the distribution of milk and vitamins; a reminder of what a life-saver is modernity. The modern. It saves the body while risking the soul, itself so intimate with the world that infuses it.

The father is described as an organiser and networker. We can’t help think the same of his son. Adrian Mayer has a remarkable ability to get on with people and manage them.4 From setting out surgical instruments in an operating theatre - his mother a Quaker, he was an orderly during the war - to distributing food to organising research projects, this man knows how to get things done. It helps that he’s a born-traveller. Who else to take a train during the Chinese civil war, it chugged along between the Communists and the Kuomintang, to meet with friends in the remote province of Honan. Born or made? That old quandary! The answer seems obvious in this case: both grandfather and father were traders between Germany and Britain.

A popular argument for the high ratio of Catholics and Jews in anthropology is their outsider perspective on British society; a mental distance, its self-consciousness, the ideal background for social investigation. Yet there seems no such sensibility here. His first language French - the language of his governess - he insists on his Englishness when in France: his French is verboten! No sense of distance, separation, alienation from the national scene. Religious observance is non-existent, and his father’s treatment in the First World War - he belonged to the ‘Kaiser’s Own’ regiment5 - was a family joke; reminding us of just how civilised was the Britain of that time. There are other reasons why he wore the anthropologist’s helmet.

Adrian picks up languages like a child: Latin, German, Hindi (and there are others). I assume linked to the musical talent of his mother - an opera and lieder singer - and father, a pianist (who set up the Robert Mayer Concerts for Children).6 The artistic background of his parents certainly played into his education: both prep and public school on the progressive end of the educational stage, while his degree was from a liberal arts college in the States (trapped there during the war: a key to the anthropological lock?). I push the locksmith away. There is never just one explanation. It is a combination of these qualities and experiences that makes an anthropologist; especially during the subject’s youth, when it was more an art than an academic discipline; a place people came seeking meaning, in those grand temples of the LSE and SOAS. Meaning. Why do some seek it is so intensely? A lost religious background, a strong religious sense, an aesthetic gift, a fragmented personality, an exile, a traveller, a transmogrification of the artistic sensibility…. The locksmith will have his say: travel the key that opens Adrian’s door. It’s in his bones, a Lamarckian inheritance from his father (who travelled around England) and a grandfather who knew the Baltic and the North Seas. In age of epigenetics, it is an explanation we are happy to deploy. He acquired the habit to know strange places. 

Never forget chance. Like many anthropologists of the period, he falls into the discipline through a random contact; it was Bill Holland, who got him a job at Chatham House, where he met Cyril Belshaw, who suggested the subject. With academics who want everything explained, all things, they insist, to have a cause, it is an odd fact that chance plays such a role in their careers. What if explanation is simply a useful fiction, that we’d be better off turning to real novels and actual plays….

What if beauty and myth are better ways of grasping the world than academic reason? I smell the smoke of bonfires, I hear the cries of heresy! Yet if one is not tuned into beauty and myth how does the observer understand the observed, whose relationship to nature is through the senses and the imagination?7

An established academic, with a university post, and publications to his name, Adrian Mayer appears not to have been prolific. Rather, he is a first class explorer and collector of ethnographic material; less a writer and thinker with an influence on the field. Much appears unpublished - a never completed network study of village, town and municipality; his interviews with the king-makers during the time of the Maharajahs. A lost treasure to be discovered by later generations….

That natural bent towards organisation and travel. Little wonder that in the fourth age he gave guided tours around India (how I wished I'd known). It suggests a different model for understanding the subject; one more personable, ad-hoc, attuned to the beauty, the aesthetics, of a place - he mentions participating in the Krishna festival, memorably described by E.M. Forster in A Passage to India. Surely the best way of acquiring knowledge and respecting a place; whose people are not treated as raw material; a quarry to be mined for monographs. Adrian closer to the age of explorers than to the contemporary scholar. His experiences a reminder that much of the richness of academia is contained within the lives of academics themselves, and is lost when they part the scene. But I’ve just checked…whew! Adrian Mayer is still going strong. One hundred and two!8 A colossus of his kind.

Interview: Adrian Mayer

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Notes

1. For both the inspiration and limitation of anthropology for an understanding of history: Peter Brown, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History. Anthropologists like Mary Douglas, E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Ernest Gellner helped him understand how religion fitted in with a society; but they could say nothing of the religious presence.

2. For the connection between domestic agriculture and beauty: Bronislaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic.

3. For the power of superstition: Arnold van Gennep: Rites of Passage. For the disappearance of this world: Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1603. The old world wasn’t lost through science but via Protestantism, which replaced the magic of nature with the magic of words; a wholly human place.

4. This may also be due to a public school education - see my Safe Places. Like John Machin this boy quickly adapted to the boarding-school existence. Home from home.

5. It was made up of anyone with a German-sounding name.

6. Though interestingly there’s no mention of music in his own life.

7. Both Hume - A Treatise of Human Nature - and Kant - Critique of Pure Reason - argue that imagination is our strongest faculty. Indeed, Hume implicitly, and Kant explicitly, argue that a pure reason leads to fantasy….

8. His father, remarrying at 101, lived until 105.

 

NS Bendre: Untitled