A Delicate Toughness

So fragile, I feel she could break before my eyes. Less an interviewee than someone under interrogation, even though Alan’s technique couldn’t be softer, more sympathetic; his questions an open palm on which he encourages Iona to bestow her gifts. A reminder of a time before TV the ubiquitous presence in every room, and few were used to such direct, raw exposure. Today, of course, everyone acts before a screen, each presentation a performance. Not so then. So tense. It is someone terrified to go on stage, only too aware of those thousand of eyes searching for each fault, every blemish.1 This is compulsive but difficult viewing.

I wish Iona Mayer had been asked about the LSE. Such a brilliant recorder of impressions - a super-fast writer taking down conversations verbatim - she must have vast filing cabinets of curiosities, a veritable museum of anecdote, about the godfathers and godmothers of British anthropology. Instead, the concentration is on her experience of fieldwork, mostly as an assistant to husband Philip.

So honest! In a space, this tight squeeze of the public screen, where honesty can be hard to convey, because of the quantity of its complications, the width of context; as if to fit such large truths inside such a tiny camera is to cut off a mental limb. Ouch! Then the danger; signalled by psychic superstition, a wariness around words, that fear of the consequences when they leave the magic circle of our acquaintance; for once out there, we lose control; as they take on their own life in the minds of others we do not and will never know. Look out! Duck your head! Even the most carefully articulated phrase apt to boomerang back on us when not expecting it.2 Ouch! Ouch! Self-lacerating, Iona feels the compulsion to tell exactly how she felt. Here is the high price of words, which today we give away free on You Tube and TikTok, but then could feel like theft.

A young, intelligent Oxford graduate cannot break the shyness barrier. Trapped within that self-conscious self, made more self-conscious by that superior intellect, she finds it difficult to connect with others. Surely university a perfect place? Not so. She finds it safer to be an amanuensis than an academic adventurer. Though I suspect deeper factors for this choice; suggested by her ambivalence about an academia that cannot satisfy her sensibility, which requires more than just ideas in the head. In many ways a typical scholar - Iona likes theories - she reacts against the scholar’s mentality and methods, which she finds inhuman.3 It is why she trains as a social worker. But then, like so many others, she stumbles into anthropology, which, in tipping the balance from the abstract to the domestic, seems to perfectly fit her personality; that need for a vocation that marries the mind to the heart, brings ideas and emotions together before the same altar. Alas, her expectations are disappointed. The same tensions resurface, and Iona reacts against her own and the discipline’s intellectual instinct, its obsession with analysis and formal patterning. Disillusionment creeps in, as the subject refuses to touch the lives of people. Divided against herself! Not helped by that iron suit of shyness, preventing full emotional contact. Every time she meets someone she hears the clang and crash of metal.

‘Should she be at the tiltyard not the typewriter?’ No no no, Mr Schloss, you go too far; stop that! The Schloss tries to retort…. I know, I know what you are going to say - ideas are the lances of today’s campus knights. It won’t do. I imagine Iona Mayer at ease only in the silence of a Quaker Meeting House. A room of peace, alive with dancing life, the spirit of thought, where ideas emerge and disappear like currents in a stream. Streets away from the bash and bang of academic combat. My metaphor, outrageous I admit, highlights how aware she is of her own presence, and how difficult she finds it to traverse the territory…forever holding herself back, frightened of making a noise. 

Can a name be a destiny?

My characterisation is slapdash. It is not so much that Iona Mayer is divided, but rather she hasn’t found an environment where the balance of her sensibility, the delicately posed scales of her intellect and feeling, finds a carefully calibrated response. The equilibrium between intellect and feeling, analysis and insight, the formal pattern, the living idea, needs a highly nuanced, a delicately coloured and sympathetic, space to find itself and be at ease. More comfortable in an artist’s clique, I think of Burne-Jones, than the modern academy?4

I suggest Iona is a typical anthropologist, albeit her reserve is extreme. This shyness the reverse of the over-confidence of a celebrity like Gregory Bateson; who, when in the field, raises up the steel shield of theory between himself and those he studies.5 Her honesty an insight into the realities of fieldwork; that gap between the academic Westerner, who thinks in generalities, and the concrete peculiarities of the life of their subjects, whose emotional richness is a sealed chamber to students not mature enough to intuit - to touch - a stranger’s thoughts.6 One source for that great era of British anthropology, from Malinowski to Goody, is the maturity of these anthropologists, who often coming to the subject late - through war, national service, the vagaries of a looser, less professional era - had already experienced the profundities of life; witnessing death and suffering, felt the brutalities of work, the alienation of travel (cultures then so much more diverse); or the hardships of social migration, itself an anthropological experience, not a train ride between two centrally-heated flats.7 Even those from the Commonwealth had to adjust to an exotic tribe; not just the Trobrianders of Oxford and Cambridge but the Barotse of the British themselves. A second source of this generation’s genius: religion. Most of the great anthropologists were seekers of meaning. A truly religious person is both highly intelligent and full of feeling; a mix which at the highest intellectual level yeasts the religious spirit, so close to the essence of the arts. The rational and faith are twins.8 And yet, this delicate combination is torn apart in a university culture dominated by the intellect.9 This how I explain Iona’s reaction to what she calls the anti-human in the academy; her instinct to combine thought and feeling frustrated by a culture that seeks not just to keep them separate but widen the separation until there is no feeling at all. Knowledge ceasing to be a way of life, a means of mining the deep levels of one’s being, it becomes but a process and a job. A spiritual quest turned into a profession. Truth the staircase you climb to the high halls of status and renown.10

I speculate. Iona Mayer had come to anthropology at a moment of change; the subject growing away from the Malinowskian embryo, when closer to a sect than a scholastic discipline, to fix itself as an academic phenotype; the subject going mainstream, with all this implies: vocation reduced to a career; charisma emptying out into routine; method and theory pushing away improvisation and insight; academic formalism to evict Lord and Lady Substance.11 The weakly meshed sides of her personality cannot accommodate to this no-man’s land, where a once united country is put under heavy pressure, and where emotions and thoughts fire from opposites of the line; to leave the neurosis of frustrated feeling and the psychosis of the idea.

It is many years before the two sides of Iona’s personality find harmony. Although there is some irony here, for this woman who doesn’t like women it is through Feminism she finds freedom.

In our times of identity politics, whose assumption is that like only understands like, Iona reminds us of a deeper, more disturbing truth: our greatest distaste is usually for those closest to us. Like repels like…think of the ferocious academic disputes, the civil wars inside a subject; I recall Leach against Fortes.12 ‘I hate mothers and children!’ Iona says to Lucy Mair, who responds: ‘I agree!’ It is to take a cold shower on a hot day: truth refreshes when it penetrates.

The irony is terrible: she is expected to study mothers and children. This made fieldwork almost impossible. Shyness Iona’s biggest obstacle, a purdah screen; for she couldn’t deal, had a tendency to retreat from, the curiosity of these women who had never seen a white woman. Their friendly, but I expect sardonic, and playfully aggressive, interest was too much for her fragile persona. Iona says that she should have made friends with girls of her own age; although this, perhaps, underestimates a ‘laboratory’ bias against friendship, seen as corrupting the ‘scientific’ relationship.13 Her reluctance to engage with these women not just the high-strung nerves of a self-conscious student; it is embodied in an idea of the subject (one Malinowski had disturbed). It had become orthodoxy to believe that the only important stuff was what happens in public life, that all-male circus; it was thus natural she wanted to study it; be reluctant to go backstage, confine herself to the dressing room of female task and female feeling; which to properly understand one has to inhabit, requiring an openness to emotion, a letting go of that overly rational, too closely protected, ego; it is to discard Western armour, go naked, don local clothes. Smart, strong-willed, a successful product of an educational system purposively designed for public life, one geared specifically to furnishing an imperial bureaucracy, Iona's instinct is to get into that circus ring. She becomes her husband’s stenographer. She admits it was partly a means of avoiding human contact. 

Again I speculate on wider anthropological issues. Think of the subject’s tilt towards theory and an abstract (and thus puritan) politics since the 1960s. Theories are only one kind of explanation, yet they tend to monopolise the academic mind. This instinct to abstraction offset slightly in the discipline’s early days, when the influence of Malinowski, that lightest of theoreticians, his ideas more a framework to pin descriptions than a causal blueprint, was not yet lost to the vast Byzantine palaces, those abstract scholarly structures, of its later, professional, decades. One chance event, that extended stay in the Trobriands, Malinowski’s shipwreck off Papua New Guinea, led to rich innovation and fruitful destruction: all previous ethnographic theories washed away in the monsoon of his experiences. Such theoretical lightness affected at least two generations of anthropologists, who, finding more congenial places for their sort of intelligence, would otherwise have left university life. 

I walk off the plank of conjecture: since the 1970s, has anthropology hidden behind theory because of the emotional deficiencies, the immaturity, of young anthropologists, who have never left the classroom? Unable to grow, to open the senses to the strange and the different, as campus becomes a closed community, a sealed environment, impervious to the influence, to the challenges, of an alien society: their own.14 Which in turn suggests an  explanation for the activism in today’s anthropology departments: unable to feel the world you must change it.15 All exacerbated by a suffocating managerial culture, which closes the circle with the academic sensibility, so intimate with bureaucratic reason.16

I let you scramble over for my ideas, as I quote Kenneth Rexroth.

“…. They lived in

The days of the good comrades.

It must have been wonderful

To have been alive then, though it

Is very beautiful now.”17

The 1960s an important time for Iona. Affected by the radicalism of the period, she became an activist in South Africa; while also rebelling against the main assumptions of her discipline and the society she studied: these traditional communities, she says, were a patriarchal conspiracy!18 It is now she at last relaxes. She participates in a ritual ceremony. Something of that need to belong, to let go, to join in, to feel one’s self whole, has been fulfilled. She has found her Themis.

It is a curious paradox that Iona discovers herself through ideas, which release her feelings; whereas with most academics concepts are used to lock them up.19 It again suggests the peculiar nature of her sensibility, that open border between her ideas and her emotions. A life of the spirit, her soul’s liberty, far more than a prisoner of the intellect.20 In the old days she would have been a missionary.

The price is high: to confront the ugliness that is South Africa is painful. But Iona is a conscientious woman; so the pain has to be endured, because to live in truth, and confront its consequences, is the right, the only, thing one can do.21 This a tortured soul, who sits on the sharp edges of the modern world; there is no retreat to the comfort of soft cushions and deep sofas. Even anthropology - the most sympathetic of academic subjects - cannot offer a refuge. But then, in the Middle Ages, an anchorite felt the flea bites, lived in the dark, suffered the dank, in a cramped and unattractive, her mortifying, cell.

Interview: Iona Mayer

________

Notes

1.  There are other reasons. In The Cult of Fact, Liam Hudson describes a tortoise mentality at Oxford - that instinct not to give away too much of the self, to retreat inside one’s intellectual shell. The super sharp, nit-picking, criticisms of linguistic philosophy inhibited the practitioners from publishing; for they knew that everything they wrote would be subjected to devastating attack. This philosophical fashion the most extreme version, the pure essence, of the academic mind, where analysis has the monopoly, and imagination is given no space at all.

2.  For what happens when we lose our sense of danger around words: Mark Ronson: You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

3.  Giacomo Leopardi says it well: ‘And reason, which as we have all too often shown is the greatest of vices, is also innate. But in its original state it was not a vice, whereas as we find it and use it today, it is.’ Passions, translated by Tim Parks, p.50

4.  A brilliant biography, describing the milieu, is Fiona McCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination.

5.  Naven. An extraordinary work which is as much about an anthropologist’s misunderstanding of his subject - as a theoretical exercise - as a misreading of the subjects themselves; the Iatmul seen through the super-thick lens of his abstractions. It is somebody who cannot think outside Western categories, though because smart and open he knows something is wrong. And so the tries again - in the afterword - and goes way off beam: cybernetics!  A solution? No! an even bigger problem.

6.  This is brilliantly brought out by Hudson when he translates a Michael Frayn novel into the jargon of behavioural psychology. He also gives an example which exposes the fundamental weakness of participant-observation: its tendency to hide or massively downplay the participant-observer’s effect on the people studied.

7.  The classic studies of exile are the middle to late novels of V.S. Naipaul - from The Mimic Men to Magic Seeds.

8.  Forgive the brevity, but I’ve discussed this relationship at length in my (as yet unpublished) book Cartoons and Their Concepts.

9.  Hudson describes a culture that is excessively narrow in its rationality. No room not only for imagination but the history of its own subject, the details of its empirical past. Here was a pure reason - the psychological laboratory its own self-created and self-enclosed world - that sought independence even from the rest of the human mind. A bureaucratic rationality at its most extreme. No wonder the classic account of an institution was written around this time: William H. Whyte, The Organization Man.

10.  Hudson is very clear on this point. For a contemporary study which confirms Hudson’s assertion: Michael Billig, Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences.

11.  For a brilliant analysis of Christianity using Weber’s model: Geza Vermes, Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth To Nicaea, AD 30-325. From Jewish charismatic to Christian bureaucrat. For a careful review: Rowan Williams.

12.  There is a wonderful anecdote in Alan’s interview with Stephen Gudeman.

13.  This wasn’t a problem for the greats: both Malinowski and Raymond Firth acknowledge their relationships to key individuals (Coral Gardens and Their Magic; The Work of the Gods in Tikopia). However, when a discipline becomes institutionalised a distance grows been the impersonality of the institution and the humanity of individuals outside the main doors. Scientific objectivity and bureaucracy walk together down the same corridor.

14.  For the origins of this closed society: David Bromwich, Politics By Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking.

15.  The contemporary academic cliché is our fear of the Other. Yet in fact we are often dazzled by it. Anthropologists who study traditional societies, historians ancient Greece and the Middle Ages, all show that curiosity is stronger than distaste.

16.  The epithet is Bernard Williams, The Limits of Philosophy.

17.  For Eli Jacobson, in The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth.

18. Though I wonder how much is an escape to the safety of ideas. Think back to those powerful, inquisitive women from whom she shrank. The problem with an ideology, the reason it is so attractive, is that it both disguises and validates, makes positive, one’s own neuroses; which, I suggest, are as much to do with the specific nature of academia as due to gender or class or race or sexuality (today’s displacement concepts).

19.  ‘…it is the ‘intellectual who tends to be caught out by his irrational feelings; and dons are notorious amongst analysts as being difficult patients, as they are apt to exhibit obsessional, intellectual defences against experiencing emotion.’ Anthony Storr, Jung, p.77.

20.  For a brilliant discussion on this topic: Rowan Williams, Passions of the Soul.

21. May Sinclair’s novel The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, especially the chapters on the heroine’s young adulthood, may be insight into Iona’s character. I am thinking of how that need to be good produces a rigid fragility. Otherwise their personalities are quite different.

John Craxton: Eleni Psari