The Eminence of Exile
No miracle of insight needed for this one! Philip gives the game away right at the start: he was converted. Not to anthropology but Zionism. Forced to leave Germany because of the Nazis, he suffers a collapse of his German identity, and seeks a new one in Israel. He fails. The reason given is empirical (a favourite word): he believed the Jews in Palestine needed to know about the Arabs. The project had become a failure of knowledge. An argument I expect from a scholar, one close to a scientist; although it is interesting that Einstein, when reaching a similar conclusion, turned against the Israeli experiment when he saw its brutal treatment of the locals. His problem not epistemological but moral.1
I suspect other reasons, due to quirks of character and that enforced departure from what would have been a heavily acculturated German education; turning him into a permanent exile, whose only home is within himself. How can you trust a state, a people, even one’s own friends; the world a fragile present, leading to short term enthusiasms - of persons, places, ideas - and long-range scepticism; as you gradually depart from those same enthusiasms. To strip away from each culture its ideas, values, theories, beliefs, until you reach the bedrock of absolute certainty: the Lockean fact.2 Exile makes for evangelical empiricists. Never trust anything until you can stamp your feet on it. Solid earth! The only faith facts, which, of course, is no faith at all.3 No wonder this man wanders around the fringes of anthropology. And the Zionism? I suspect he couldn’t accept its messianic nationalism, whose identity politicians a little too close to those that forced him abroad. A cultivated German, brought up in the sophisticated culture of an educated elite, he must have found their crude ideology, the politics repulsive.4 Odd that he should end up in South Africa, when going the same way.
A familiar story. He hitchhikes a lift with Charlie Chance - Philip bumps into Radcliffe- Browne on a bus. An invite to Grahams Town, South Africa, is followed by an offer of a chair at Rhodes. But why stay? Because he feels at odds with the society, which confirms, even exaggerates, what has become a personality trait, that irreversible exile? And in a way that was impossible in Israel, because the pressure to conform, to belong to the ruling in-group, was too strong, far too discombobulating, to resist? This man of the Diaspora could not become a settler colonialist. Always to be on the outside. And what more outside than an alien country which forces you not to belong.
Karl Popper famously wrote a book about closed and open societies. His answer to the problem was an easy one: open everything up! His disciple Ernest Gellner wasn’t so sure: there is a soulless quality about the impersonal relationships of the city; while something in us cries out for village cuddliness. There are times when the needs of the body are greater than those of the mind. For most of us. Gellner himself oscillated between the inside and the outside; wanting to belong, he found belonging suffocated him. Popper a very different chap; his mind his own village, philosophy not an exercise in cold logic but an intellectual passion where the mental and the emotional fought it out on the pages of his manuscripts. His works their own rough music. The great irony of Popper’s famous book is that its argument for the open society comes from a mind more locked than closed. Bryan Magee, who has written an extraordinary portrait of Popper, describing his intolerance - he’d rage against opposition -, argues that his hero thought as an artist; his works like symphonies, visions of the world, not cool academic expositions.5 And like an artist the work embodies something the artist himself lacks; the Open Society and his philosophy of criticism a compensation for his own inability to accept dissent.6 Popper called himself an anarchist. I believe it. Anarchists often the most authoritarian of characters; this camouflaged by an intellectual sleight of hand, where the poles of personality are reversed: the despot oppresses everybody, the anarchist is oppressed by everyone else. Neither can accept the limits to one’s liberty, and therefore compromise with the liberty of others. And yet this was his vision: critical freedom, in science and politics. Popper was not a Zionist.7 He gave up his Socialism when he realised his socialist friends were frauds.8 Never to belong. Sir Karl one of those rare geniuses who can generate friction within themselves; why so comfortable in England, that most open of open societies. Most of us need to rub against something that is close at hand. I think of Gellner, many of his best essays fisticuffs with Villagers (Marx, Freud, the later Wittgenstein...).9
This attraction of South Africa: a foe always in Philip’s face?
Exile suffuses his intellectual concerns. His interest in urban populations, that stress on migration within a country, suggest a man inhabited by exile, with its dual, even triple, personalities.10 Like the best anthropologists - like an artist - Philip discovers himself through his subject.
I want to go further. Go on! says the Schloss. For once I take my friend’s advice. I...I...I... jump...into an enormous splash of speculation.
Philip recreates the subject in the image of a self separated from the social field. A classic empiricism, which founded on experience tends to ignore (Hume, as always, the exception) one’s own being, to create a persona that extends the distance between self and object until the relations of interaction snap and are replaced by those of observation. We don’t swim in the pool but stand on a platform above it. The relationships of the body cast away, we create mental constructions, fresh from the social science lab, which in having their own reality appear more real than what they’ve replaced. It is what Richard Sennett calls the realism of the exile. Though this phrase contains a nice irony; for in philosophy Realism reverses its common sense meaning: it is to believe in the reality of abstractions. Precisely this doubleness we see here. The artificial world of social science, which treats human societies as if a transport system - only vehicles no humans - and the exile distanced from his culture.11 Exiles must negotiate with a host community using the mind more than the senses; which can overemphasise analysis and meaning. The truths of epistemology to hide, even destroy, the truths of ontology. Fancy fancy, interjects the Schloss. Ha! I’ll keep it simple: life is mistaken for knowledge; instincts are replaced by theories; as things and people become facts, mental atoms, crying out for concepts to join them.12 Removing the electricity of human relations, whose social acts are events, that complex blend of action, feeling, instinct, ideas and values, we create artificial entities requiring their own conceptual connections; our theoretical pipes and tubes.13 Body-parts in jars. Behaviours in files. No pedestrians allowed on the motorway! The products of humanity not humanity itself.
The most ordinary of activities to become a site of alienness; as the empiricist turns a habitat into a field of study, where actions and instincts become reasons and causes; the individual recast as an object in a field of abstract forces, occupying a peculiar space on a page.14 Insight of course, albeit a novel may describe deeper realities; its evocation of relationships, those thick descriptions of context, saying more about individuals and their social relations than a causal analysis, no matter how sophisticated. Splash! Splash! I flap around in my speculative pool: the exile needs that social scientist distance. It both grounds his being, in the empiricism of a separate self, and reverses the social values, to emasculate the community’s power, whose sheer weight of number, the telepathy of its instincts, that mystical magic, acquired over centuries, is reduced to the equality of strangers. In the artificial world of facts all are equal, everyone an exile. The facts make us so. Communities of feeling to become social constructions. This is almost inevitable if John Locke taken as a model.15 Think truth as only that which is universal - Locke’s primary qualities - then what connects these qualities has value only if they too are universalised, then encapsulated in an abstract noun: power, class, sex, utility, function.... The dream of every social scientist to find that single efficient cause, Galileo’s motion.16 The existential I is an uncomfortable guest in the house of knowledge. This self too unreliable, its relations too subjective, for the certainties of a lab. At best this I to gather dust on a library shelf, in a section marked anecdotal evidence. Fine in the early days of science, when the human mind was left off the dissecting table. But when we cut up human thoughts, cut out human relationships...?17 It is to create an artificial realm, where connection is made not through feeling but concepts.18 We live inside the glasshouse of an idea.
Facts are dangerous things, giving a false clarity, a too confident belief.19
Empiricism may be a true philosophy, but if it is it cannot be known to be true, those who assert that they know it to be true contradict themselves.20
Knowledge can deprive us of the strangeness of the world. When strangeness should be part of our understanding; which requires a letting go, not the cognitive grasp. It is why the earliest explorers may have been closest to the ethnographic truth: confronted with radically alien cultures they could make no sense of them.21 Primitive. Savage. These are epithets for ignorance.22 They also tell a phenomenological truth: all they could see were people doing things; and whose ideas appeared to bear no relationship to facts. It is to feel the difference of another culture, its separation from the self, the impossibility of our language getting a grip on a situation. It also produces an odd equality, at least at the beginning, when the locals treat the foreigner not as a threat nor a model but as an equal or an inferior: their ideas true, mine crazy.23 Most ideas are grown not thought, more like instincts when embodied in a way of life.
We grow into a framework. We don’t question it. We accept it trustingly. But this acceptance is not a consequence of reflection. We do not decide to accept framework propositions. We do not decide that we live on the earth, any more than we decide to learn our native tongue. We come to adhere to a framework proposition, in the sense that it shapes the way we think. The framework propositions that we accept, grow into, are not idiosyncrasies but common ways of speaking and thinking that are pressed on us by our human community. For our acceptance to have been withheld would have meant that we had not learned how to count, to measure, to use names, to play games, or even to talk.24
What the early ethnographers didn’t realise: their own cultural concepts were the products of a long history of ideational growth. Leaves on an ancient oak tree. Believing these ideas natural therefore true, they made them unnatural and parochial by abstracting them from out of their habitat; these ‘universal’ concepts – a cheap Platonism - then used to judge cultures different from their own. Ideas about reason, truth, science and morality thought to occupy some timeless and spaceless realm; whether in Heaven or Sir Isaac Newton’s headpiece.
It is the gunboat that turns a local idea into a universal one.
Explorer and exile. The former, secure in his culture, universalises its values and measures other societies against them; often to their detriment. The exile does something similar, but now all cultures, including one’s own, are alien; security only in the self, which in fact embodies its own set of beliefs and practices (Malcolm’s ‘framework propositions’, Wittgenstein’s language game) distinct from the local ones. It is the epistemological self, the Cartesian ego; the detached, rational observer transforming the world into a site of knowledge, a set of objects, some vast conceptual machine. The self as scientific technique produces strange effects; for to represent the links between people, and people with an environment, we turn activities into facts, replace relationships with causes, give habits reasons, and substitute rational cognition for the instincts.25 A construction replaces an organic field. Fake grass for the real thing. This apt to lead to a false consistency, an overconfident certainty, which if not rigorously tested, can produce extraordinary fictions; it is why Christiaan Huygens described Descartes’s mechanical philosophy as un beau roman de physique.26 Thinking to describe a strange society in a neutral language the exile is in fact describing it in terms of his own relationship to his own society; while social science, science tout court, is itself a self-contained community that in thinking itself independent of a subject of inquiry imposes itself upon it.27 The exile lives in the present. The social scientist describes a society founded not on history, traditions, myths or even things (they are facts), but on a set of functional relations. It was the strength of the Malinowski approach – because it removed the wild speculation about origins and evolutionary histories – but it also contained a disabling weakness: a heuristic tool morphed into an assumption that traditional societies floated free of time’s roots.28 The exile assimilates the world to the self. The social scientist theorises what is their own relationship to society, layering his techniques over it.29 The explorer leaves everything as it is; cognitively speaking. Ignorance can have more insight than knowledge.
The result of this state of affairs is that our knowledge seems to extend much further beyond our experience than it actually does.... When we mean to think about Napoleon, we substitute the description “the man whose name was ‘Napoleon’.” We can experience the name “Napoleon”, and often we are unconscious of having used “the man called Napoleon” as a substitute for “Napoleon”. Owing to this unconscious substitution we never realized that about Napoleon himself we know literally nothing, since we are not acquainted with him.30
In the attempt to replicate hard science’s success this mistake was institutionalised in psychology; when it gave up the ecology of human mind to isolate it in the lab. It was the heyday of Behaviourism. A science of manipulation mistaken for one of explanation; an intellectual shift unnoticed until the publication of B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom & Dignity.31 Today we enjoy the consequences, as the Internet transforms us all into rats in an algorithmic maze; volunteer subjects in a Silicon Valley experiment. I splash! splash! in my speculative pool....
Time to get out of the water.
To test a theory, to make it more than a hypothesis, we must manufacture highly artificial environments, which amongst humans requires separating us from place, context, interrelationships, and from everything that gives texture to a life.32 The thinness is not only in the facts but also in the theory that joins them: many social science theories cannot be tested. To use Newton’s terminology, these are hypotheses only – informed interpretations not proven events. This science closer to the Ancient Greek than chemistry. The upshot? Our theories are much weaker than they appear; and this especially so in disciplines like anthropology, studying a snapshot in time.
A small issue when we stay close to the facts - we can see the people through the lines of prose. Much harder when the spaces between those lines are filled up with theoretical propositions. And if the theory is believed true...we see nothing beyond the theory. It is the advantage of literature: I know it is a fiction.
Back to Russell’s observation about Napoleon. What are thought facts are but names, which may be connected less by abstract lines of theory than the syllables of a sentence (ideas are often little more than labels). Words, moreover, that have no life outside the discipline’s monograph, a dry, scientific language, a dialect for the initiated. Words. Such a tricky substance. Especially for a subject like anthropology, which puts people first. Clifford Geertz was alive to the problem, but his solution may have done more damage than good.33 Although a writer himself, he is apt to underplay the pressure of the academic house-style on the sort of literariness he recommends. Literature’s secret is the richness of its language, that ability to create an alternative reality, rich with suggestion and nuance; which in turn evokes those invisible links - what is implicit in any social scene - that isn’t so much described as recreated in a different medium. The problem of the Geertz influence, as evidenced in Works and Lives, is that his followers took his thick description literally: instead of finding literary analogies for the implicit and the invisible they described it in clodhopping prose. Not just a question of talent. The emphasis is in the wrong place: such papers are written to understand not feel a subject. One of the ironies of Geertz; in thinking to make it more like literature, he facilitated the acquisition of its own scholastic idiolect, making it more amenable to theory; where the artifice of style is replaced by the artificiality of abstraction. Wittgenstein’s language game – a cultural habitat – was transformed into a game of language. Words. Words. Words.
I exaggerate. Nevertheless, we do live, as the philosopher Jordi Pigem says, in a world where the concept rules.34 A quick look at a university website confirms this. People are studied; individual lives are taken seriously; the texture of a life is given its due; and yet... the subject is seen through a too conceptual lens; one where Western categories dominate – so obvious they are not seen. It is a return to The Golden Bough, but where activism has replaced the armchair.
A legacy of Geertz, when the literary eye, once donning the scholarly spectacles, looks inward? The turn to subjectivity, a reaction against the scientism of social science, as the discipline became aware of its distance, its own role in research, was to produce an odd paradox.35 To overemphasise the self is to foreground the Western ego.36 Yet the value of the Malinowski approach was that it cast off that panoptic consciousness, our scientific ‘observation post’, to produce a vast trove of fact, difficult for a single theory to hold. So many facts produced a real equality with those studied, whose knowledge and expertise were invaluable. So much raw data, with its skeletal theoretical frame, loosened up, if only a little, a Western way of looking at the world.37 Ethnographers suddenly alive to moralities very different from their own.38
The Western attitude is unwholesome. It is moral. Morality, the great separator, divides man in half. The return to the unity of the vision is to reconcile body, soul, and the world.
And Octavio Paz continues....
An inexpressible feeling of abandon and security. The vision of the gods is followed by non vision: we are at the very heart of time. This journey is a return: a letting go, an unlearning, a traveling homeward to birth.39
V.S. Naipaul puts it in a slightly different way (and one, I suspect, that was the original inspiration for Geertz); which reminds us that there is no simple East-West divide:40
The novelist works towards conclusions of which he is often unaware; and it is better that he should.41
In Philip’s time you concentrated on the fact. Alas, facts, because an artificial construct, are not what make a society cohere. So what holds these societies together, keeps them alive? A theory sneaks in almost unseen - functionalism - and replaces the bonds that actually exist between individuals.42
Peter Brown, writing about ancient religions, diagnoses the problem: the emphasis is on function not presence.43 A world seen from the outside, which, given the social science background, leads to an overly instrumental view, where behaviours are preferred to feelings and meanings. Such a stance is apt to reduce the agency and insight of those studied. Rupert Sheldrake once asked an anthropologist if rain divination worked. ‘I didn’t test it’, was the reply, ‘I knew it was nonsense.’ But how could he know....?44 Applying the Sheldrake critique to Malinowski’s Coral Gardens and Their Magic, I note that Malinowski never asks if the spells affect the plants; for him magic operates only on the individual and corporate level, as self-discipline and collective organisation.45 This changes with Lévi-Strauss, who emphasises meaning: ideas are tools to think with.46 However, even the great Claude was stuck in his own culture’s categories, when he used the ethnographic record to construct a theory of myth based on a fashionable model of linguistic structure (one that Chomsky had already undermined).47 It changes again in the 1970s, when anthropologists like Stephen Hugh-Jones and Tanya Luhrmann participated in the rituals, so experiencing a culture from the inside. Study no longer just facts, descriptions and theories, but an immersion - a baptism - into the culture itself. Social science melts and metamorphoses in the heat of phenomenological participation.48
It is to recover the strangeness felt by those first explorers.49
...to note and enumerate similarities and differences in manners and customs is one thing; to grasp their historical or scientific meaning is another. This, many successors of the old Greek historian were to find out to their confusion, notably Churchmen in the Middle Ages, who felt obliged to reconcile cultural diversities with the assumed homogeneity and historical priority of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and those eighteen - and nineteenth century social scientists who attempted to make the discovery of similarities a confirmatory adjunct of some theory of historical or evolutionary succession. Fortunately, Heraclitus was free of such an ambition. He expressed no desire to confer upon his own culture the honour of being the source or the pinnacle of cultural achievement. Indeed, similarities were usually cited with the more modest and mature intention of proving prior historical contact, the prior transmission of culture from group to group, the prior operation of a process of diffusion; or to interpret Greek culture itself as an amalgam of gifts from many donors. Apparently in fifth-century Greece, there was neither honour nor dishonour attached to worshipping borrowed gods, or in practising borrowed customs. Likeness as the result of borrowing was recognised as the inevitable and common outcome of the migration and mingling of peoples.50
Let’s turn it around. To those outside the social science laboratory, fact-world looks weird. Are we no more than animals or machines; nothing but than a human electron in society’s atom? In sister disciplines - sociology and psychology - this is indeed what professors thought.51 A period when science was the model for all intellectual endeavour; and even novelists - Alain Robbe-Gillet - tried to be objective. A world without characters. Fictions believed treatises.
It can lead to isolation. The kind of strict empiricism employed by Philip cuts him off from colleagues, most of whom tend towards the theoretically fashionable; for, despite the self-image as critical thinkers, many in academia cannot generate an idea out of data alone; unable to create their own theories, they can only use or adapt existing ones. Here is the supreme value of an exile’s experience: cut off from a tradition and fashion they must look at the world fresh; it was Malinowski’s great achievement in the Trobriands; and his gift to the discipline: anthropology became an exile subject. It is why for at least two generations, anthropologists could uncover a wealth of new facts, which being theory-lite were open to myriad interpretations. An art not a science. But there is a shelf life even to exile; your children, grandchildren, even yourself, soon to settle down on society’s plain. Today, the lowlands are flooded with theory, only a minority keeping to the mountain ranges; on campus but out of it.52
But to what avail, all this litter, these spiderweb cardboard suitcases and biscuit tins packed with junk? I always approach my chosen subject from a position of near total ignorance. Examining an Edwardian suburb, a complex network of manorial boundaries or an industrial corridor on the margins of a market town, I’m faced with and threatened by an awful blankness. I hardly know what it is I’m looking at and in spite of all the effort expended on getting to know and understand the deep topography of my region I never seem to gain the accretion of knowledge that would enable me to declare myself an expert. However often I swan in like some dishevelled, smoke-infested Richard Mabey of the buddleia set, I forget the names of plants and have to relearn them every year. I squint short-sightedly at small brown birds flapping in hedges, my lips gibbering as I attempt to name them. Rivers and parish boundaries slide around in my mind and become a squirrel nightmare of shifting lines and borders. Names of historic figures slip down through the sluice gates into the main drainage scheme of my mind. It’s a bastard.53
Under the influence of Baudelaire’s flâneur, Breton’s Artificial Hells and Debord’s dérive, a new kind of engagement with the Western mind has emerged, called Psychogeography or Deep Topography, where the categories of knowledge are scrambled. It is to freshen up the vision. Making a place, an activity, an encounter, a moment of improvisation. Free-form thinking.54
But while knowledge of structure or nomenclature can foreground discreet aspects of a place, it can also occlude. Sensory properties of locations encountered while visiting or passed through - a particular moist wind that flaps about the face like a flannel, a singular quality of light remembered but seldom encountered - are screened out all too easily if the primary focus is on the type of cornicing found on a building passed or the names of the building companies that transmuted field parcels into batches of housing back in the 1930s. Which aspect of the experiential field serves as the sine qua non for understanding a place? For me this question has never been adequately answered.55
Philip’s faith in the facts. Too simple! I know that his co-worker – his wife, Iona - was highly theoretical, while Philip mentions socialisation theory, little known to British anthropology at this time: our exile on the margins of both society and discipline! Keen to shake it up. But did he shake it up enough? A man walking under London pylons in 2010 dreams of a new society marching across the electric plains fifty years before....
In the evening I smoke cheap cigarettes and drink vodka. I will die of cancer in 1972. Proximity flight: that’s what I call this using of environment to trigger a mental journey to another place and time in which the same stimuli can be found. I find it lifts my sense of the environment out of its codified framework and into fresh possibilities of interpretation, my eyes wiped clean by the resultant defamiliarisation or - in keeping with my Soviet theme - ostranenie, a term first used by the Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky in 1925.56
It was the great promise of the Malinowski approach: that we could look at the world anew; that in this kaleidoscope of values we’d see ourselves differently; that in rare moments the West to step outside itself to look in the mirror of its craziness. And this happened! and to a remarkable extent, when those returning from the field experienced an ostranenie at home.57 Whatever went into the monographs, the anthropologist, for a brief while, stepped out of their own culture and felt it with a new mind.58
I want to go further....
Did Philip need to be on the outside? For an exile the greater the distance from a society the clearer you see the self; a necessary task for a psyche separated from its instinctive supports and habitual bulwarks – the myths and ritual of the society into which it should grow. The exile morphs into the scientist. To create Hodgen’s dilemma, when, instead of discovering strange things, we think to explain them, and within a framework of explanation so deeply rooted in the self, so close to its sensibility, that the ‘objective’ analysis is also a reflection of that self’s relationship to its world.59 No problem if collecting stuff for museums. A big issue, one less easy to see, when our ideas are put not in glass cases but joined by adjectives and nouns. Modern science rests on the Humean insight – values cannot be collapsed into facts – but misses Hume’s rattlesnake bite: this precisely what we do in actual life. Life is a fact-value mess. Social science the kitchen where we clean up after the kids.... The fact-value distinction is a problem for a particular kind of epistemology, one that emerged out a Scientific Revolution that was concerned with physical phenomena; of Man exiled from the natural world.
But when you go inside....
The exile can never be a complete outsider; yet he is outside enough to need a substitute for habit and custom; some construct to connect to him to the social field.60 It is a religion, one more explicit, abstract, coherent and complete, more fixed and permanent, than the local variety, which tends to bend to commonplace beliefs.61 The Churchmen of the Middle Ages, as Hodgen argues, knew what they did, transmuting all those exotic ideas into the language of the Christian faith. What is odd about the new social science - whether of a 19th-century armchair or the 20th-century workbench - was the obliviousness to its own theology. It is not just that facts have to be created, they rely on a metaphysical foundation to give them meaning.62 The lines of reason - the forces of belief – that connect the facts are taken for granted, as if part of nature, rather than a man-made, artificial dimension. Thus this paradox: the exile is more religious than those he studies, for they will live most of their lives outside their faith’s ideas and rituals, while his life is governed by them; it is a mode of being magnetised towards the heavenly city of reason.63
A tension in anthropology, as it moves from Malinowski to Radcliffe-Brown to its theory-laden future. Artist. Scientist. Theoretician. Charismatic guru to sect to Church. This the trajectory of most disciplines, as explorers and ethnographers give way to scientists, philosophers and methodologists. A discipline touching on the amateur is turning professional. And therefore, I’d argue, increasingly distant from those it studies; for the greatest gap, in mentality, behaviour, in ways of looking at the world, is that between an official and the lay.64 But this the future. Philip at this time helping to create an eclectic mix, extending the range of ideas, keeping the subject in flux; still the oddball on campus.
Fact-faith is free of all ideologies but nevertheless rests on intellectual foundations sunk deep into an unconscious that remains mercifully unexplored. Perfect for an exile who has to distance himself from his emotions, with that ever-present danger of Heimweh, of cut-off-ness. But existence requires a framework. Those facts require a pattern of explanation, fed by theories of various sorts. Always to be looking for connections, rather than simply feeling them. The outsider is faced with a choice: a new homeland in an ideology (Freud, Marx, even Darwin) or no homeland at all, as you carry your belongings on your back: Popper and Malinowski. Theories totalising myths or maps to navigate a world? Philip tends towards an eclecticism, a willingness to go his own way; a man learning for himself. It is the true value of education; an exploration of foreign territories, growing the self not just adding monographs to a library’s catalogue.
To create a world. Is this why anthropology attracted so many outsiders? The discipline, wide open to new ways of looking at the social scene, gave a space for creation. This openness part of a general metamorphosis of the university that for a time ceased to think and act like one: it had the dynamism and experimentalism we usually associate with those outside the campus walls.65
I have forgotten...Durkheim. What did Durkheim do to British anthropology? Quite a lot! Malinowski supplied the method, but it was Durkheim who manufactured its leading ideas. To read Steven Lukes’s biography is meet a powerful charismatic figure who, far more than Auguste Comte, turned sociology into a religion, but via a peculiar path...through the wilds of anthropology. In thinking to explain anomie he in fact provided a solution to its existence: the intellectual community generating its own corporate sensibility; a social glue bonding its exiles together. Conscience Collective: less a way of understanding a society as to live in one’s own.66
As Weber and Ibn Khaldun knew, a Conscience Collective doesn't last.67 The intellectual structure underpinning the discipline was breaking down. Not just under the pressure of sociology and behavioural psychology - the 1950s and early 60s the heyday of scientism – but also of pressures within the discipline itself: the ending of empire, the exhaustion of village studies, the modernisation of the new nation-states. Philip himself has stepped out of the village.
A strength of an empirical approach: it is alive to changes in individual or small group behaviour. Its weakness: to rely on ratiocination, and its theoretical Zimmer frame: theory. We must get the balance right. To be a little outside but not too much. It is to live on the borders of emotion and reason; and how difficult this is, we saw in Iona Mayer, who was closer to an anchorite than an exile.
There are other triads. Scientist. Artist. Bureaucrat. A scientist works within a framework of ideas, practices and methods; out of which new facts are created, theories made. The artist seeks meaning in the material; art emerging out of concrete particulars. Bureaucrats organise a subject’s matter.
Within the discipline itself there is a tendency - we see it in Radcliffe-Browne, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss - to borrow too uncritically from science when creating models of human behaviour. Durkheim, with his social facts, his division of labour, his anomie, his Conscience Collective, offered concepts that could be purely anthropological (surely the reason for his enormous influence). Yet it was the Malinowski method that was the discipline’s alchemical secret, bringing a galaxy of new facts into view, and touching them with the lightest of theoretical fingers. The portrait of the Trobriander is at once rich and clear, with the vividness of literature; it is filled with human truth. This anthropology’s greatest attraction; it is the academic discipline closest to the novelist’s art.
Philip: an academic novelist? My jury is out: I must read his work.
Clifford Geertz pops up to protest: I got there first! I disagree. For it is a strange fact that in self-consciously turning anthropology into literature you created an odd kind of literary criticism; where we encounter not the realism of fiction but the fairy tales of semiotics. Too harsh! Too harsh! cries the Schloss, who takes The Interpretation of Cultures into the office each day. Amazing how one reads the room, he says....
Characteristic of time and discipline: Philip came to anthropology late and by accident. A chance meeting on a bus with Radcliffe-Brown decides his fate. And then...he’s in the field before learning the subject! This less an academic than an adventurer. Also the way of the autodidact, one I know well. We cross the continent of knowledge as travellers not tourists or officials. The subject to become strongly personal and idiosyncratic, as turning off the main highway we lose ourselves down country lanes, where we meet odd characters (that socialisation theory?) and are lost to strange worlds. On such trips we drop the ideological backpack... I hear Mike the Maverick cheering. But are apt to lose some sophistication and discipline. Mike bows his head, muttering gloomily.
Such experiences temper the social science mind, bringing it to closer to the people met.
For the exile, chance contacts and personal relations are extremely important. I think of a Chekhov hero telling their life story to a stranger, as they train-travel over the Steppe. Friendships tend to be short and intense. No wonder Philip gets close to Radcliffe-Brown. He gives us an excellent pen-portrait of the man, through which I sense something of his charisma; its dynamic combination of social aloofness with that maximum concentration on an interlocutor: God descends from Heaven to Earth to meet you! Add the dandy...life is a performance. It cannot be easy to don the lab coat after meeting such a character. Exile doesn’t feel quite so like exile when you have friends as vital as this. It also reminds us of how important friendship is, both to an academic career and one’s own intellectual growth. The impact of the personality more important than any theory or ideological kink.
There are complications. Exiles are perhaps prone to ideologies through meeting such charismatics, who, in these immediate, electric connections, transfuse their ideas into the spellbound’s head. But then such receivers, with their own ambiguous personalities, are apt to be suspicious of authority; a charismatic to encourage their own maverick streak. I think of E.E. Evans-Pritchard actively resisting the Malinowski effect. The guru tends to attract strong characters around him, who often go their own way; it is only later, after the guru’s demise, that their ideas are frozen into immobility by straighter disciples.68
The exile’s world is a strange, unstable, ever-changing one; albeit the island rock of that exiled self remains intact and grows evermore self-secure. I think of Arthur Koestler, who, when he came to write The Case of the Midwife Toad, was resistant to all dogmas, even to one - neo-Darwinism - many still believe is scientific truth. This exile had a strong attraction to cults, but then he equally strongly reacted against them. Is such a self too secure, too intact? The danger of reason and theory, of the facts and their logical connections, is that they are slow to change, easy to freeze, lack flexibility. Koestler didn’t so much grow as continually break his intellectual links; to make another, then another; until they in turn became too rigid, too brittle...snap, snap, snap!69
I worry too much. Trust the discipline. Trust the times. Trust Philip’s own crazy initiation into the subject. This chap never a straight technician, a follower of intellectual fashion.
Read his work, read his work, the Schloss says. I will! I will!
Philip has interesting things to say about colonial rule; a hot topic during this period, when it had become a reflex to attack both empire and those anthropologists who worked in its territories.70 Philip Mayer tells a complex story. Although working through the Colonial Office there was no overt censorship and little pressure, while the officers on the ground were intelligent and sympathetic; for this a time when the imperial administration was trying both to understand the locals and ameliorate their living conditions. The last liberal stage before an empire collapses; when explorers, crooks, soldiers and manager-bureaucrats are replaced by clerks, careerists and scholars.71 The regime is loosening, the separation between ruled and rulers closing, as the administration and country merge.72 Of course there are constraints, and he is fully aware – a surprise to the radically naif? - of the unconscious pressure and cultural bias of a policy of amelioration. Aware too of official prejudice against political activists - paternalists don’t like independents - he is also more acute; for Philip foresaw what these officers missed: that the long-term consequences of trying to improve a culture and a people from the outside – bureaucrats, colonial or otherwise, tend to be progressives – can have severe negative effects on the population; as improvements, such as to nutrition and sanitation, are likely to see a corresponding loss in cultural strength and spiritual unity. Managed by others we cease to act ourselves.
It is a paradox with bureaucrats. They are the most moral of God’s creatures; for their professional life is dedicated to codes that transcend the individual’s own needs and desires. Here is objectivity. It is why they are the source of material which uncovers their shortcomings, and allows scholars like Philip to truly grasp the nature of their rule. Maintaining the guns that one day will fire on them...Philip and the new historians use the colonial legal and administrative records to reconstruct the history of the Ciskei and the Transkei from the 1840s.
South Africa in the 1960s and 70s was a very different place. A liberal academic working in this country was more like a spy in enemy territory. Yet even here, if one is sensible and canny, you can do authentic work.
Listening to Philip we get a sense of the real constraints on anthropological investigation; how each social formation places limits to free investigation; not just a colony, a community, a racist state, but also an academic discipline and a radical politics, which in pulling the ideological corset tight, squeezes out the empirical fat, keeping its adherents epistemologically thin. Such limits are not fatal to free enquiry, especially for loners like Philip and Iona Mayer. The outsider to navigate his own way around inhospitable territory. And this perhaps - along with the shear expanse and stability of the British Empire - accounts for the success of British anthropology in the 20th-century: so many of these characters were oddballs, always on the margins wherever they found themselves. An uncomfortable but necessary place if we want to do interesting work.
Interview: Philip Mayer
___________
Notes
1 Fritz Stern, Einstein’s German World.
2 A marvellous novel that investigates the fluidity of exile: Stevie Davies, The Element of Water.
3 You note the irony. Such extreme empiricism is itself a religion. It was the fashionable belief in social science at the time: Liam Hudson, The Cult of Fact. This a period when the emphasis was on science; which tended to produce a parody of the scientific method, one that refused to recognise the peculiarity of the human animal, of how much we are decided not by facts but by values and fictions. Ignore the mind! Stick with body; treat as if a rat’s, a cat’s....
4 For the difficulties of Hannah Arendt: Idith Zertal, Israeli’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood. A sophisticated and liberal member of the Diaspora is disgusted by the chauvinism she finds in Israel, at the time of the Eichmann trial.
5 Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey Through Western Philosophy.
7 Karl Popper & Brian Eccles. Once Israel was created he accepted its existence. This crucial distinction is missed by most anti-Zionists.
8 Karl Popper — Philosophy Against False Prophets. He became a journeyman carpenter.
9 Though interestingly not Durkheim. For a possible explanation see my Cartoons and Their Concepts.
10 The Element of Water.
11 An interesting character study is Stefan Brandt in Elizabeth Berridge’s Rose Under Glass. That curious mix of passion and coldness; sympathy and utilitarianism. He loves Bonny Chalmers, but he uses her too....
Compare Stefan with that half-exile Fergus Mac-Ivor, in Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, who both admires his sister and is not above using her for a marriage alliance, with the English Edward. However, there are limits to his utility; the marriage is to a man he likes and for a cause he loves; his own interests inextricably mixed up with Highland ideas of honour and glory.
12 It is not a mistake Malinowski made. His stress was on relations. Coral Gardens and Their Magic. Sometimes I wonder if it was a catastrophe for anthropology that he wasn't called a relationist rather than a functionalist. To see the the world in terms of relations instead of function is to shift the perspective from science to art; the latter needed just as much (if not more) to understand human communities.
In the forward to the third edition of The Sexual Life of Savages in North Western Melanesia, Malinowski defines functionalism:
Functional field-work consists always in the study of concatenations or the correlations of aspects in actual usage. (p.xliv)
Reword this passage as patterns and forms and we stray into aesthetic territory.
13 The Cult of Fact. See also my Too Small to See....
14 In a wonderful conversation with Bernardo Kastrup, Rupert Sheldrake tells us of a paper he had just read, where the authors point out that science reduces a 3D world into two dimensions. What we think of as a real account of a phenomenon is actually missing its most important facet!
15 Leibniz picks this up in his New Essays on Human Understanding: Locke’s argument for the divide between primary and secondary qualities is in fact a dogmatic assertion.
16 What is often forgotten about modern science: just how abstract it is. This is brought out when we look at its origins. A.R. Hall, The Scientific Revolution 1500-1800: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude and E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. In moving from Aristotle to Descartes we move from the human to the abstract. And yet this shift contains a curious paradox: the foundation of medieval science is God, for the modern successor it is Earth. The more material we make life the more metaphysical it becomes; because it abstracts out all those secondary, those individual, qualities.
17 Experiments are a way of breaking down thoughts. In Greek science, where there were no experiments, science tended to use evidence for rhetorical effects. G.E.R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience.
18 Captured in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. The mentality described here has been globalised through the Internet. Via Silicon Valley we are all becoming Californians; living the Hollywood dream. One day life will be defined as that which is lived on screen.
19 Hudson has a nice phrase, when warning about the media; but it can be applied to facts and concepts as well: the danger of encapsulation.
20 Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, p.195.
21 For just how long it took to absorb intellectually the evidence from the New World: Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology.
22 Although in Malinowski’s case they are tinged with irony; as a Pole he calls himself a savage. Coral Gardens and Their Magic.
23 There is interesting discussion in Malinowski’s, Religion, Science and Magic, and Other Essays. For the pride of a tribe: E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer.
24 Norman Malcolm quoted in Terence Penelhum, God and Skepticism: A Study in Skepticism and Fideism, p.149. It is a curious feature of this passage that although Penelhum uses it to endorse the validity of the religious view, he ignores it when discussing the fideism of thinkers like Pascal and Kierkegaard, whose arguments, though given a context, are treated as if they belonged to the ‘framework propositions’ of analytic philosophy.
25 Poking fun at the French, Sir Walter Scott captures this mentality:
Another part in this concert was sustained by the incessant yelping of a score of idle useless curs, which followed, snarling, barking, howling, and snapping at the horses’ heels: a nuisance at that time so common to Scotland, that a French tourist, who, like other travellers, longed to find a good and rational reason for everything he saw, has recorded, as one of the memorabilia of Caledonia, that the state maintained in each village a relay of curs, called collies, whose duty it was to chase the chevaux de poste (too starved and exhausted to move without such a stimulus) from one hamlet to another, till their annoying convoy drove them to the end of their stage. Waverley, p.35.
26The Scientific Revolution 1500-1800, p.182.
27 I discuss at length in my Cartoons and Their Concepts.
28 That structural-functionalism was a heuristic device was apt to be forgotten. Jack Goody rectified this oversight, to show that history is fundamental to all societies. See his interview with Alan and Eric Hobsbawm.
29 For a fascinating history of one such worldview and how it helped create the fractured society of identity politics: Jill Lepore: If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future.
30 Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, pp.103-105.
31 Noam Chomsky’s review in The Chomsky Reader.
32 Richard Westfall, The Life of Isaac Newton.
33 Compare the rich texture of Raymond Firth with the newer, self-conscious, style of Loring Danforth, in the first chapter of Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author.
35 This idea gets a ferocious battering by Ernest Gellner, in Postmodernism, Reason and Religion.
39 Octavio Paz, Introduction to Henri Michaux, Miserable Miracle. Johan Huizinga has a similar, though more complicated, argument in Homo Ludens, pp.237-8.
40 For the importance of literature to Geertz: his interview with Alan.
41 Forward to the Vintage edition of The Middle Passage: A Caribbean Journey. He is worrying about the predetermination inherent in non-fiction; that tendency to intellectual foreclosure.
42 Although there are problems with Huizinga’s Homo Ludens - the most serious: the categorisation of too many distinct cultural practices as play - the perennial value of this work is its emphasis on culture itself as an organising and dynamic principle. And why this concentration on play? I think for Huizinga it is a synecdoche for chivalry, the ideal ethic.
43 Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History.
44 ‘The scientist must have some idea, which is essentially philosophical, of how he is going to set about acquiring an understanding of nature before he can apply himself to this task.’ The Scientific Revolution 1500-1800. p.159. Such a philosophy assumes an idea of nature before the investigation begins, ruling out certain questions and methods.
45 This is not as bizarre as one first may think. Consider Malinowski’s own description of the magic rites: the formulas are breathed onto the materials. I’ve lost the Sheldrake reference. But for an example of the belief in the power of the words to work magic cures as against the skepticism of an English observer: Waverley, pp.124-125.
46 Totemism.
47 See also Edmund Leach, Social Anthropology. The abstract patterns of Lévi-Strauss, although illuminating, often don’t map onto the ethnographic evidence.
48 See Alan’s interview with Stephen Hugh-Jones. Also Àlex Gómez-Marín’s conversation with Tanya Luhrmann.
49 There is a wonderful moment in his lectures where Stephen Hugh-Jones describes the ritual and how it felt it be a red pepper.
50 Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, p.26.
51 The Cult of Fact.
52 There is a marvellous conversation between Tim Ingold and Àlex Gómez-Marín.
53 Nick Papadimitriou, Scarp, p.78.
54 For a wonderful example of this in biography: Julia Blackburn, Old Goya.
55 Scarp, pp.78-79.
56 Scarp, p.44.
57 This is mentioned in a number of interviews.
58 See the wonderful conversation between with Àlex Gómez-Marín and Tanya Luhrmann, where she describes her fieldwork amongst British witches. Even in late 20th-century London there was a magic land to live in.
59 Liam Hudson puts it nicely: a discipline is the world seen through a temperament. The Cult of Fact, p.157 (where he quotes Zola).
60 Nicely caught in Rose Under Glass: it is the isolated Welsh hill farmer who is the independent one, not Stefan, who needs society.
61 Raymond Firth, The Work of the Gods in Tikopia. Firth notes how parts of the ritual are forgotten are from one year to the next. The form of the ritual remains the same, but details change.
62 The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.
63 You know the reference: Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. My view is that religions are highly rational and that all societies are religious; an argument I explore at length in Cartoons and Their Concepts. What is odd about modernity is that we have a religion - Secularism - without an explicit sacred (there are plenty of implicit ones); which distinguishes us from the monotheisms, as well as Hinduism and Buddhism.
64 I would argue that the bureaucratisation of the university has seeped into the ways of thinking of academics. For the bureaucratic colonisation of campus: Benjamin Ginsburg, The Fall of the Faculty: And the Rise of the All-Administrative University.
65 The Scientific Revolution was made on the margins of the university, the majority of scholars orthodox Aristotelians, who resisted new ideas: The Scientific Revolution 1500-1800. In the 19th-century the great pioneers of thought – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, Mill, even Weber - were outside the academy.
66 Cartoons and Their Concepts.
67 For Weber it is charisma; for Khaldun, asabiyah. For a discussion of Weber, Khaldun and Durkheim: Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society.
68 An interesting study of charismatics is Anthony Storr’s Feet of Clay: A Study of Gurus. For an excellent portrait of Evans-Pritchard: Jack Goody, The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918-1970.
69 Hudson’s description of psychology is similar. The Cult of Fact.
70 There are wise comments in The Expansive Moment.
71 Illustrated in Gerald Hanley’s The Year of the Lion and The Consul at Sunset.
72 Robert O. Collins, in A History of Modern Sudan, describes Britain’s education of a local elite.
Le Corbusier: Nature morte du pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau
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