The Anthropologist as Reader

Walk of Ideas, Berlin. Photo courtesy of Scholz & Friends Sensai, wikicommons

A quarter century ago, Clifford Geertz published Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Widely seen as part of the larger “linguistic turn” in cultural anthropology of that era, in fact it is better viewed as part of a sustained argument made by Geertz since the early 1960s in favor of a literary, humanistic anthropology. It was clear from his writings of that period that he considered medium and message to constitute a unified field. For instance, in his masterly critique of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques , Geertz ridiculed Lévi-Strauss’s literary conceits as much or more than he did the theoretical models employed. The fact that Lévi-Strauss saw himself writing in a continuous literary tradition going back to Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse was for the cool, ironical Geertz, laughable and sufficient evidence to indict the entire structuralist project. Geertz’s later critiques in Works and Lives, of authors he admired more, follow the same pattern. The aesthetic, theoretical, and ethical are inexorably linked.

I do not believe that the linkage is as tight as Geertz imagined, but is perhaps more like his own model of culture: an octopus, which he sees as more loosely put together (a belief I do not think would pass muster from a marine biologist). However, an aesthetic appreciation of anthropology is, I think, necessary. I once thought that the theoretical orientation one was drawn to was philosophical in nature; I believe now that it is mainly aesthetic.

Like Geertz, I was an English major as an undergraduate, who merely dabbled in the social sciences. Sociology held little attraction for me; apart from a few classics like Tally’s Corner , the literature was a wasteland. History had its great writers, but they (Tuchman, the Durants, Spengler) were generally disdained by the profession. Only in anthropology did I find great writers among the first tier. In an era when books circulated much like retweets and Facebook posts do today, I was exposed to a number of anthropological texts that, without hyperbole, changed my life. I consumed these books alongside my other leisure reading (the Flashman series, Trout Fishing in America, Tom Wolfe—the strange, eclectic world of late 70’s paperbacks).

The most obvious anthropological writer to appeal to an English major with pretentions of a career as a poet (yes, a guffaw is warranted) was Ruth Benedict. Patterns of Culture is what we might call the strong versionof an argument that cultures are organized around aesthetic principles. A poet herself, she borrowed from Nietzsche and gestalt theory, seeking to find what Gregory Bateson would later call the “ethos” of a culture. Much criticized, especially in the postmodern era for simplifying and essentializing these cultures, and for basing her writing (including her masterly The Chrysanthemum and the Sword ) on secondary sources, she nevertheless demonstrates the power of what Lévi-Strauss called “the view from afar.”

Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind really was something of a cult classic in the 1970s. In his later years, he was a guru to students (and non-enrolled young people) at UC-Santa Cruz, where his lectures attracted hundreds. Coming from a hard science background, we think of him less as a literary figure. But indeed his approach shared much with Benedict’s. He described his methodology as “abduction,” neither induction nor deduction, but a means of discovering patterns in culture. Like Benedict, he may be accused of reducing the complexity of culture to formal patterns, but these patterns could in fact be highly complex, fractal-like, and beautiful.

Mary Douglas presented an aesthetic version of culture based upon a reading of structuralism as a form of dualism (itself a creative misreading of Lévi-Strauss). Purity and Danger contains a number of memorable arguments, such as “dirt is matter out of place,” which, along with Bateson’s concept of the double bind, afforded great insight into bourgeois American culture of the 1970s. Bateson talks about the American concept of the “living room” as a paradox: rather than a place where life was lived, it was where the separation of categories was most strongly enforced. Douglas’s controversial interpretation of the Abominations of Leviticus was based on a concept of categorical purity. Although this may lose much of the nuance of cultural taboos (which Douglas acknowledged much later), as with Benedict and Bateson, it is difficult to dismiss the underlying logic.

Marshall Sahlins’s Culture and Practical Reason was bound to stir up discussion in a 1970s dormitory in Chapel Hill. Written in a satiric style reminiscent of Geertz’s (many of his students call him the second funniest Sahlins brother, which seems fair). He argues for Western economic rationalism as a specific cultural system. Both a critique of consumer capitalism and an autoethnograhy of bourgeois culture (with a comparative dimension involving France and the U.S.), it again strives to find the pattern underlying the surface complexity. When I discovered that Sahlins taught at the University of Chicago, I naively sent in my application for graduate school. Such is the power of books read as an adolescent.

Part of the attraction of all of these books is the promise of finding the underlying truth undergirding surface complexity. Frankly, this is not much different from the motivation for reading books about the Illuminati, which purport to explain all of modern Western history according to a few basic principles. The great difference lies not only in the truth conditions of propositions contained in the two vastly different types of writing (even the most po-mo anthropologist respects facts, however contextualized), but in the aesthetic stance. Why is Dan Brown such a terrible writer when all of these anthropologists are truly great ones? Perhaps it is a commitment to the patterns that present themselves within culture, patterns shaped over generations to a fineness like that of a Clovis point.

I cannot finish an essay on anthropological writers without mentioning the greatest work of anthropological literature, Tristes Tropiques. Although a memoir rather than a true ethnography, and representing a specifically Gallic sensibility, and containing numerous annoying tics and outdated prejudices, it is the apotheosis of an aesthetic understanding of cultures. As Boris Wiseman argued, to understand Lévi-Strauss, one needs to understand his aesthetic commitments and sensibilities. This is an argument that could be expanded to include all of these anthropological writers and many more as well, I hope including me.

Michael E Harkin is a cultural anthropologist and ethnohistorian at the University of Wyoming. He is editor of the journal Reviews in Anthropology and co-editor of Ethnohistory.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/11/the-anthropologist-as-reader/