Imagining Culture (Routledge Revivals)

Essays in Early Modern History and Literature

Jonathan Hart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317565031
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

Imagining Culture, first published in 1996, discusses literature as a whole rather than a partisan interest in those who are in or out of favour, and how that literature relates to other arts as well as to philosophical, historical, and cultural contexts. This title will be of interest to students of literature and cultural studies.

History, Fiction, and the Human Sciences

ANTHONY PAGDEN

---

History and Anthropology, and the History of Anthropology: Considerations on a Methodological Practice

I

“Inter-disciplinary studies” have now become professionally normative. Since at least the 1920s historians, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, literary theorists, and economists have been raiding neighbouring disciplines in an attempt to produce a more richly textured account of their respective subjects. The rather more recent abandonment by most of the human sciences of the ambition to attain the certainty and detachment supposedly offered by the natural sciences, has similarly led to a greater flexibility in practice and a greater interest in the methods of those disciplines, mainly philosophy and literary theory, with no history of positivist objectives. And few disciplines have benefited more from the slow erosion of their former frontiers than history.

But, exciting and rewarding though all modes of trespass invariably are, they are by no means unproblematical. For successful trespassing requires not only a high degree of strategic modesty, it also demands a willingness to acquire an understanding of other idioms at least as great as that possessed by their native speakers. The historians’ disciplinary boundaries are too firmly embedded in a set of professional practices for them simply to go shopping for a little bit of social or literary theory, a little bit of anthropology with which to enliven their texts. We have, at least while we are wearing our neighbours’ clothes, to act as though they had been made for us. As in the case of imported ideologies — the analogy is Albert Hirschman’s — “the distance between reality and intellectual schema is likely to be both wider and more difficult to detect than was the case as long as the schema stayed safely ‘at home’” (Bias for Hope 3–4).¹ The worst abuses of the now not-so-new social history can be attributed to the ignorance of many of its practitioners as to how and why those anthropologists or sociologists whose languages they had borrowed, had come “at home” to confront those particular problems in that specific idiom. And since the scientific agenda, and the methodologies of the “humanities” have, at least since the Renaissance, been very largely determined by a consciousness of their own internal histories, successful trespassing will require some quite sophisticated understanding of the internal history of the discipline to be trespassed upon. As Graham, Lepenies and Weingart have observed, “the humanities could almost be defined as those disciplines in which the reconstruction of a disciplinary past inextricably belongs to the core of the discipline” (xv). Viewed from this angle, the current interest in the history of disciplines seems less like a case of nervous self-examination by the academic profession, or the need for legitimating genealogies — although it is also often that too — than it does the outcome of the need to explain where that discipline currently is and why.

The problems of self-definition in the human sciences have conventionally been posed in two forms: problems of subject-matter, and problems of procedure. In this essay I wish to look at the now long-established professional relationship between history and anthropology (and the less frequent, and frequently less congenial, relationship between historians and anthropologists). It might help to begin with some rough description of professional practice. Anthropologists, so it is said, study the behaviour and beliefs of “pre-literate” or “pre-industrial” peoples — of those who, from the stand-point of the anthropologist’s own position, are irreducibly “other.” (Although if they only ever did that, they must, very soon cease to exist along with their subject matter.) Historians, for their part, study the behaviour and beliefs of past agents. These crude descriptions hardly exhaust the actual practices of anthropologists and historians, but they do cover much of what is done in modern university departments. History, both in the sense that the term is currently used, and in the way that historians currently practice it, is not, and perhaps never has been, a single discipline. There are departments of history, history journals and people who describe their profession as “historian”; but there is neither an agreed set of questions, nor a range of practices nor a common subject matter. History was once — for its Greek creators — the “record of things witnessed”: now it can only be a multi-variant analysis of “things which occurred in the past.”

That is the first problem. The second is procedural or methodological. It has frequently been argued from sometimes radically different positions, that what distinguishes history from other modes of social explanation is narrative: “The first condition of history,” Bendetto Croce once declared, “is that it should be possible to construct a narrative” (“La storia ridotta” 3–4). What is understood in this claim by “narrative” has been under constant scrutiny for the past thirty odd years. But whatever else a narrative may be, it would seem to impose upon the historian an obligation to tell the story “as it really happened,” thus limiting his or her activities to those things which did “actually happen” and which actually happened in some obvious chronological order. So long as history was thought to be primarily about the activities of human agents such a claim was not inherently incoherent. But once we change the subject matter from simple actions, to, for instance, what agents think or believe or feel, or to “mentalities” or to sexuality, or “fear,” or to parts of the historical agent’s identity — i.e., his or her body — the distinction between a “story,” and an analysis, between the narrative and the “dissertive” mode of speech becomes indistinct (see White 26–57). In these cases “narrative” comes to mean little more than sequential reasoning. Such reasoning clearly takes place in time, and attempts are sometimes made to identify a causal relationship between the distinct phases of what is being studied. But that is all. In such a professional environment, there can be no longer any special value given to a “story,” nothing, that is, which demands a necessary association between the account and the supposed unfolding of a set of real past events. And there can be no useful way of distinguishing, at least at a theoretical level, between “events” and other kinds of historical phenomenon. To say, as Lawrence Stone has done, that narrative historians organize their material “in a chronologically sequential order,” and focus “their content into a single coherent story, albeit with sub plots” (6) provides no useful theoretical distinction between one kind of history and another, much less between one kind of social science and another. Stone is clearly not referring to an analysis of the structure of, say, the Discourse sur la methode, but there is nothing in his account which could not just as well apply to such an analysis.

Anthropologists have, of course, a set of working procedures which very largely constitute their disciplinary identity. This — it is often said, and in actual practice often is — based on field work, the patient collection of data which is then carried back away from the culture under study and “written up” in some place, and often at some time, remote from the anthropologist’s original experience. Many anthropologists do other things in other ways; but very few do not have some kind of field experience, and fewer still “write up” while still in the field. This, of course, is not a method, so much as the usually inescapable condition of the work place. Although it is rarely used to define their disciplinary personae, the condition of the historians’ work place is not so very different. He or she travels to “another country,” collects data, returns to his or her own temporal culture and writes. Indeed it is the similarity in work-place conditions which have often made the fusion of the two disciplines possible. Similarly for both disciplines there is a, frequently subverted, claim to authority deriving from these workplace conditions. The “constitution of the ethnographer’s authority,” in Vincent Crapanzano’s words, derives from “his presence at the events described, his perceptual ability, his ‘disinterested’ perspective, his objectivity and his sincerity” (53). Historians, too, have been “there,” even if “there” is only a library or archive, and they, too, must be perceptive, disinterested and sincere (see Darnton, “In Search of the Enlightenment” 132).² Much of this has, of course, been either directly challenged or simply ignored in recent historical practice. (Crapanzano’s “ethnographer” is, likewise, a somewhat old-fashioned creature.) In the past the historian frequently displaced his or her authorial identity to the distributive “We” — meaning “the sources.” Now, increasingly the authorial “I” is self-consciously on display, in emulation of, to borrow Clifford Geertz’s pun, the anthropological “T witness” (Works and Lives 79). But in neither the historian’s nor the anthropologist’s cases do such claims constitute a description of a practice (although, in some cases, that may indeed be their intention) so much as what Crapanzano calls the “pseudo-deitical” construction of the ethnographer’s or historian’s place in his or her text.

A discipline in the human sciences is self-evidently constituted by a set of questions which will be intelligible to the members of that particular discipline and a recognizable set of discourses, language-games, etc., for answering them. It will be, in effect, what Imre Lakotos, in defining the objectives of the natural sciences, called “research programmes.” These are described in terms of a series of “problem-shifts.” Although each one of these is a separate moment in the history of the programme, all are, nevertheless, linked together by the fact that they belong to that, and not some other, programme, by the fact, in Lakatos’s words, that the programme itself has been “adumbrated at the start” and is determined by a set of “methodological rules: some [of which] tell us what paths of research to avoid (negative heuristic) and other what paths to pursue (positive heuristic)” And it is these rules which provide “a rough (implicit) definition of the ‘conceptual framework’ (and consequently of the language)” (46–47). Now such a definition is, as Lakatos’s understood his own to be, usefully indeterminate. But it is clear that since any such research programme can only be understood as a processes over time, any attempt to identify it will be heavily dependent upon the history of the discipline to which it belongs.

If, therefore, I — the historian — wish to trespass upon the territory of the anthropologists I have to incorporate into my own research programme something of the history of that territory, or, in Lakatos’s term, I shall have to understand how the anthropologists came to formulate the “methodological rules” of their “research programme.” It might, therefore, be helpful, at this stage, to provide a “conjectural history” — in the sense that that term was understood in the eighteenth century — of “Anthropology.”

II

The first thing to note about such a history is the early presence in all attempts to write about “the other,” of the neo-Kantian distinction (later appropriated by Radcliffe-Brown) between the ideographic and the nomothetic (Structure and Function 1). “Anthropology,” properly understood has been given many genealogies. But whether we trace it back to Montesquieu and Vico, Ferguson and Karnes, Buffon or De Gerando, Blumenbach, or only so far as Fustel de Coulanges and Durkheim, there has always existed an assumption that there must exist, at some level, a conflation of raw ethnographic data and some kind of theory of society. But the objectifying habit, which made the ideographic/nomethetic distinction possible in the first place, has clearly been embedded in European culture for far longer than any of these genealogies would seem to suggest. As James Boon once observed, it requires a considerable act of imagination on the part of a medieval merchant to ask, of the Arab, with whom he is conversing through signs and a rudimentary lingua franca, whether that Arab marries, and if so if he marries his mother’s brother’s daughter. Objectification, the ability to observe from the stand-point of the listening, rather than the speaking, subject, is an integral part of Western culture’s passion for taxonomy (see Bally 58, 72, 102). From Herodotus, through Giovanni da Pian del Carpini’s description of the Mongols in the thirteenth century, through Giovanni Ramusio and Bernardino de Sahagun in the sixteenth, Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas in the seventeenth, down to the Recueil des voyages in the eighteenth, the collection of data — largely for immediate political or religious ends — provided the European reader with some kind of access to cultures remote from his own. At least they offered a reminder that such cultures did exist. What, however, is striking about the mass of this literature is the degree to which it avoids any evaluation, beyond the initially taxonomic, of the material it describes. As Samuel Purchas told his readers in 1625,

“What a world of travellers have by their own eyes observed in this kind is here … delivered, not by one preferring Methodically to deliver the History of Nature according to, rules of Art, nor Philosophically to discuss and dispute; but as in the way of Discourse by each traveller relating what is the kind he has seen.”

“And as David,” he went on, “provided material for Solomon’s Temple or (if this be too arrogant) as Alexander furnished Aristotle with Huntsmen and Observers of Creatures to acquaint him with these diversified kinds and natures … so here Purchas and his Pilgrims minister individual and sensible materials (as it were with Stones, Birches and Mortars) to the universal Speculator for their theoretical structures.” (1: n.p.)³

In the sixteenth century, however, travel, and the record of foreign customs, had come to form an important part of the humanist educational programme. Such manuals for the curious, and learned, traveller as Theodor Zwinger’s Methodus (of 1577) and Hieronymus Turler’s De arte perigrinandi of 1576 provided more extensive principles of classification, generally by subdividing categories, and then transforming them into elaborate stemmae (see Stagl 303–38). For such “universal speculators” as these, customs could be classified like plants, material objects and other souvenirs and, like them, brought home.⁴

The description of alien customs — ethnography — belonged with those new kinds of Baconian science — cartography (with which anthropology has considerable affinities), hydrography and geology — which emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and which, as Antonio Perez Ramos has argued, by aiming not at epistemic certainty, but at a measure of descriptive accuracy had generated “a whole cluster of now attainable ‘objects of knowledge’” (46).

But if the collectors of travel accounts were compelled to ask themselves questions about methods of classification, they still had no need to ask themselves the more baffling “why” questions: “why are they not like us?” So long, that is, as the contact between the narrator and the object of his narration remained limited to the voyage, no such questions were likely to present themselves. At this point nothing, as Bruno Latour would say, had “stood in the way” of the traveller’s field of observation. He simply did not need to ask himself why? Nothing, to use another of Latour’s metaphors, from outside “his network” had got inside it (180). European legal norms, after all, allowed for a considerable measure of cultural divergence. Even Christian cultural expectations permitted variety — the frequently celebrated varietas rerum — in those areas which did not touch directly upon either belief or religious practice. At this stage we have “ethnography,” the writing about “others,” but no “anthropology.”

The epistemological questions only presented themselves — only crossed the spectator’s angle of vision sufficiently acutely to make him aware of their existence, when colonization of, rather than trade, or simple conversation with, the “other” demanded a reconciliation of antithetical cultural norms. For the colonist, and more immediately for the would-be missionary, the question why someone should chose to marry his mother’s brother’s daughter could be of crucial importance.

The earliest attempts to confront these questions, as I have argued elsewhere, are to be found within a tradition of Thomist natural law. The answers were given first in terms of psychology — “they” are different because their minds are different from (and, by implication, inferior to) — “us”; and then by reference to the historical force of cultural norms (they were different because for centuries they had been misinformed about the natural order of the social world). Although these answers made use of ethnographical material they failed to align the theory with the data because the very generality of the theory made it applicable to all human types. The failure to consider the historical specificities of each individual culture had, in the end, resulted only in the proliferation of arid abstractions. As Nicole Antoine Boulanger complained in 1776, surveying nearly two centuries of social theory of this type, “The Philosophers, Metaphysicians and Jurists in default of any history have sought to create [their natural men] through reason alone” (3–4). The first text to attempt to historize the relationship between the “them” and the “us” was Joseph Francois Lafitau’s Moeurs des sauvages americains comparees aux mouers des premiers temps (1724), a work which drew exhaustive analogies between the recorded customs of the Spartans and the Lycians and those of the Iroquois and Huron tribes among whom Lafitau has spent several years as a missionary. It brought long and systematic ethnographical accounts and historical sources into line with an entire system of analysis which Lafitau dubbed “symbolic theology” (see Pagden, Fall of Natural Man 198–20...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Imagining Culture: Crossing Boundaries in Early Modern Europe
• 1. History, Fiction and the Human Sciences
• 2. Gender and Representation
• 3. Early Modernity/Modernity/Postmodernity
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Contributors
• Index