- Email: [email protected]
Rethinking orientalism: Representations of ‘primitives’ in Western culture at the turn of the century
SESSION SIX MAJOR
THEMES
WORKSHOP COLONIALISM
Chairperson:
II
THREE
AND IMPERIALISM
Paul Rich (Bristol
University,
U.K.)
7s 7
0,91-6599/92 $5.00+0.00 ‘:I 1992 Pergamon Press Ltd
RETHINKING ORIENTALISM: REPRESENTATIONS OF ‘PRIMITIVES’ IN WESTERN CULTURE AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY ELAZARBARKAN* f hope in this paper to suggest a possible reinterpretation of the role and representation of non-Europeans, and to examine the contribution of these images to the construction of modernism. My argument is that contrary to the claims of anti-colonial literature-which often emphasises a reductionist reading of the perceptions of the ‘other’, the outsider, in modern culture-the period between 1890 and World War I witnessed the proliferation of non-European representations and contributed greatly to the multivocality and fragmentation of reality, of individuals, and of the community in modern culture. Modernism is associated primarily with literature and art. Frequently the study of modernism displays the tension embedded in the subject matter by illuminating the uniqueness and creativity in the avant-garde movement while concurrently trying to contextualise, socialise, it. This tension between eschewing life and reflecting life, very often characterised the literary and artistic avantgarde. Occasionally, however, the ambivalence was liberated by an escape from modern society to the realm of the primitive, the colonised, the exotic. Highbrow explications of the ‘other’ were influenced greatly by the academic discipline which took the non-civilised as its subject matter, namely anthropology, and from there I shall draw my examples. Save for the analysis of works by few major thinkers, comparatively little has been written about the counterparts of the artistic and literary avant-garde in the human sciences. The exceptions include among others Max Weber’s theory of the imprisoning rationality, Freud’s expansive human nature, or Simmel and later Benjamin’s analysis of aesthetics. These theories address the anxieties of modem life directly and diagnostically. But many texts which studied the ‘outsider’ as a vehicle for investigating contemporary society do not ordinarily qualify as part of the modernist canon. I would suggest that if occidentalism was a multi-headed monster which devoured alien organisms-as the anti-colonialist literature justly suggests-it also constructed and transformed its own identity in the process. Anti-racist literature has extensively documented the distorted forms of western perspective of natives, savages, and barbarians of various shades and reputations. However, as the Bible and Nietzsche had observed, the leopard and the bird of prey cannot help but be what they are. The prey is a convergence point for the perpetrator and the victim, but it is obvious that the encounter exhausts neither the nature of the beast nor that of its victim. Not to push the analogy too far, it is clear that *Division of the Humanities Pasadena, CA 91125, U.S.A.
and Social Sciences, California
Institute
of Technology,
759
Elazar Barkan imperialism and racism could not but distort the nature of the victims. While the critique of racism had done much to change this power relationship, not only the perspective, between the West and the rest, there is much to be learned on occidentalism from Western writings on the colonised. Skepticism concerning true representations is justified in general. In this particular case the accuracy of the depiction of the victims by the writers is only of secondary import, since it is the representations which are the subject matter, and not the ‘realities’ behind them. The question then is how did social theorists-who were part of the imperialist discourse in their effort to analyse modern society and formulate solutions to social ills-describe the nonWesterners? *
*
*
At the turn of the century Western domination over the rest of the world had reached its zenith. The conventional political ideology had ranked nations, ethnicities and social classes along a racist hierarchy of superiority and inferiority, attributing social and cultural differences to permanent biological inequalities. A quest to endow the passing social structure with metaphysical dimension invoked theories which depicted the white upper-class man at the apex of the evolutionary process. The polarisation of the West and the rest, the normal and abnormal, we against them, was an organising principle. The specific demarcation was not so clear cut, but the images were nonetheless powerful and provided the justification for contemporary anti-racist and anti-colonial historical literature Said views orientalism as a ‘system of ideas’ that has persisted ‘unchanged as a teachable wisdom.. . from the period of Ernest Renan in the late 1840s until the present in the United States’. This durability at the assertive level led critics to blame Said for ahistorical thinking. But although Said tries at one level to present orientalism as a paradigm which characterises the orient as despotic, pervasive with splendor, cruelty, and sensuality, his story recognises changes and nuances over time. Although the key theoretical issues of Orientalism concerns the representations of the other, Said recognises that orientalism has ‘less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world’. Here lies the significance of Said’s study in the present context. Said identifies the duality embedded in the text about the other: it constructs the matrix for the domination over the colonised but concurrently provides a mirror for the west. For Said, the texts about the colonised become the colonised for the West. This is a perceptive claim, but if orientalism has more to do with the occident than with the non-Europeans, then conceivably it should be studied as such, as a discourse about Western culture. The new, expanded, view of the other was characterised at the end of the 19th century by its diversity, and close affinity to the growing role of subjectivity and pragmatism. The other had always been represented in western culture, ever since antiquity. The outsiders included the ‘primitives’ of different levels of acculturation, who were seen as spatial representation of homo sapiens’ primordial ancestry, the ancient civilizations of the Far East-with their
Rethinking Orientalism
761
changing popularity in the West -the awakening Middle East, and the no-longer existent Ameri-Indian civilisations. All of which were receiving greater exposure at the end of the nineteenth century than ever before. Individual writers had paid as much attention to outsiders earlier on, and occasionally glorified the other as the anti-thesis to a despised contemporary society. The ‘noble savage’, India, and China have often served such a role before the period under consideration. Late in the eighteenth century, a major shift in culture and learning occurred in Europe, which has been called the Oriental Renaissance. Primarily among the Romantics, the Orient was discovered and welcomed as enriching poetry, prose and philosophy. A complex phenomenon, the Oriental Renaissance encouraged comparative techniques, expanded the world, availing new, non-Western traditions. Initially, as the new renaissance assimilated and legitimised the other into the cultural tradition of Europe, the attraction was manifested in primarily verbal not visual representations. The traditional dichotomy between Europe and the Orient turned in these writings into an alliance, no longer merely an antagonism. It entailed a discovery of a new world, of culture and soul apart from the European. The newly alien traditions were assimilated in different ways, but the chief purpose of European writers was to extract new knowledge about the origins of the West. India especially lent itself to the study of antiquity not as a phenomenon long past and dead, but rather as a living tradition. In contrast China’s tradition, language and philosophy, bewildered the West and remained the least explored, conceding to the West only its ceremonies, folding screens, porcelains, and banalities. Japanese came into vogue after 1870, and primitives provided the ultimate mystique and exoticism. But beyond the sublety of attitudes to the different non-European traditions there were powerful images in search for primordial origins. The Orient, and the other as an image and an idea, became a focal preoccupation: ‘We must seek the supreme romanticism in the Orient’, declared Friedrich Schlegel, one of the most zealous and early patrons of the Orient. The foreign and the primitive became closely aligned, attracting scholars and artists, theologians and revolutionaries. The enthusiasm was largely generated by an ambition to restore to a humanity aged by modernisation its youth. Hence the allure of the ‘primitive’, and the repeated claims to have uncovered the cradle of civilisation throughout the 19th century. At the end of the century, the search for the origin of society was replaced by an emphasis on the unity of humanity and morality as a novel way to question reality. Numerous competing stories about the evolution of civilisation were legitimised by non-Western representations. The other provided ethnographic evidence for any number of narratives of progress, and with the growing skepticism, it was utilised to question the validity of truth, knowledge, and culture. This became especially pronounced as anthropology was coming of age-an intellectual enterprise and an academic discipline devoted to the study of the ‘other’. Borrowing motifs from the primitive to investigate modern society had its direct equivalent in the human sciences. Durkheim for instance has justified his choice of the most primitive religious
762
Elazar Barkan
formation for a sociological study, not as an antiquarian quest, but because ‘like every positive science, it has as its object the explanation of some actual reality which is near to us’. The ethnological study for the sociologist, Durkheim explained, was ‘better adapted than any other to lead to an unde~tanding of the religious nature of man, that is to say to show us an essential and permanent aspect of humanity*. Similarly Freud justified the study of primitive religion by comparing it to modern neurosis in order to ‘throw new light upon familiar facts in both sciences’. It is easy to marshal any number of similar illustrations from more or less prominant writers of the time. However, because I claim to read the canon differently, let me explore in some details the work of a prominent social theorist of that generation, who is practically forgotten today, but who is especially pertinent for a discussion on the fragmentation of reality. *
*
*
Edward Westermarck was an armchair anthropologist and a moral philosopher who together with L.T. Hobhouse held the first academic positions of sociology in Britain. He was born in 1862 [died in 19391 a Finn of Swede minority, who lived largely in England from the late 1880s and is generally remembered today only in Finland. Westermarck was an early and bold partisan for ethical and cultural relativism which he saw as a source for progress while maintaining scientific realism. He viewed ethics as both scientific and subjective. This constitued his own brand of relativism, based on biological reductionism yet completely indeterministic. His egalitarianism was founded on a belief in the essential similarity between humans, although he subscribed to notions of Western superiority. Such self-contradictory positions characterised the uncertainty and confusion at the turn of the century. Writing against the background of prudish Victorian sexual ethics and sense of superiority, and out of concern for social philosophical issues, Westermarck’s relativism was manifested right from his earliest work on the The Origin of human ~a~iage, published in 1891. Its claim to fame was that it refuted the supposed promiscuity of savages. Westermarck defined marriage in functional terms as a natural institution which is directed at benefiting the young, but which was socially shaped by laws. The view of the genesis of marriage in the family followed by sociahsation Ied him to deduce that the primordial sexuai relations were monogamous, and to regard the evolution of social institutions as corrupting. This view was in direct opposition to the conventional speculation which imagined civilisation to have elevated human marriage from an initial group marriage in the primeval communistic society, through a series of polygamous arrangements to the highest stage of progress-monogamy, He reinterpreted ethnological data to conclude that either the pre-nuptial intercourse in various cultures was not promiscuous and/or that it was not proportionate to its degree of culture. ‘In the lowest tribes chastity is more respected than in the higher ones’. Primitive/civilized and promiscuity/chastity did not lie along the same continuum. Westermarck attributed ‘the wantonness of savages’ ‘to the influence of civilization’: ‘It has been sufficiently proved that contact with a higher culture, or, more properly, the dregs of it, is pernicious to
Rethinking Orientalism
763
the morality of peoples living in a more or less primitive condition’. Hence ‘Contact with a “higher culture” has proved pernicious to the morality of savage peoples; and we have some reason to believe that irregular connections between the sexes have, on the whole, exhibited a tendency to increase along with the progress of civilisation. Moreover, free sexual intercourse previous to marriage is quite different from promiscuity, which involves a suppression of individual inclinations’. Westermarck’s critique was not widely accepted, Freud for one rejected it 20 years later, and it never really became a widely held view. But it opened a rare egalitarian space for speculation on primordial society. This preceded much of the literary and artistic modernism, and definitely most of the social theorists who later explicated similar themes. In the United States Franz Boas who is well known as the initiator of cultural relativism was just at the beginning of an uncertain academic career. In France, where ethnology proper developed later, Durkheim-who as an armchair anthropologist received far less attention than as a social theorist-had not yet published any of his major works. In Germany, Nietzsche was coming into vogue and Dilthey’s historicism was popular, but Max Weber and Georg Simmel were yet unknown, as was the case with members of the cultural historical school, such as Father Wilhelm Schmidt or Leo Frobenius. Freud was yet to make his mark, and in England, where armchair anthropology was most developed, James Frazer had just published the first edition of the GunmenBough but L.T. Hobhouse was still too young. The social context for Westermarck’s work was provided by the contemporary freethinkers. While he was reluctant to worship humanity as a religion, he attended the Freethinkers Sunday services at the time he was writing TheHistory of Human Marriage, and listened to addresses by Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant and others. In later years he even delivered a sermon on the magical origin of the ten commandments. The use of the term ‘marriage’ in the title The Origin of the Human Marriage, was a misnomer, since it was used to camouflage more explicit sexual terms. It enabled the text to serve as a radical yet socially respected critique. Reading Westermarck’s pre-published manuscript Alfred Wallace, Darwin’s co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection, suggested to tone down the discussion by replacing the term ‘sexual intercourse’ with ‘marriage’, especially in the last chapter which was expected to be more widely read. Or as Edward Tylor, the first professional British anthropologist, put it: ‘some of the data in it are too sexual for even a special public’. Westermarck affronted traditional morality both in content and in form, but through the use of the ‘other’ and the language of science, maintained respectability while contributing to the construction of a new pluralistic, egalitarian, modern reality. In the name of science, Westermarck apologised to the reader who ‘may find much that will outrage his feelings, and, possibly, hurt his sense of modesty’. Yet, to ‘keep any-: thing secret within its cold and passionless expanses, would be the same as to throw a cloth round a naked statue’. Science meant truth, and Westermarck used it as a liberating force. *
*
*
Here I would like to argue for a new chronology of modernism in anthropology and social theory. The first generation of participant observers
764
Elatar Barkan
shared with their predecessors the study of institutions rather than of society as an organism. Without minimising the major methodological innovation of the later group, the purpose of both generations was similar, that is to question modern institutions such as religion, or the family, through the study of the other. While mid-century armchair anthropologists were preoccupied with tracing the origins of modern society similar to other orientalists, the motivation at the end of the nineteenth century as a result of the uncertainty of modern society led to probing the assured reality. In the course of this exploration the shift to modernism in anthropology began. Many theorists at the turn of the century advanced ‘weak relativism’ and resorted to realism as an anchor for their skepticism without opening doors to charges of moral anarchism. Westermarck belonged to this group, but was generally more outright in his relativist beliefs. As an armchair anthropologist who did some field research, Westermarck belonged to a transitional generation, who had provided the tools for the modernist upsurge, but most of whom did not themselves have the temperament to rebel. The next generation rebelled and as part of its rebellion constructed the modern memory of the discipline. This historical reconstruction thus takes the initiation of the field work by Bronislaw Malinowski, Radcliffe Brown, and Margaret Mead during the second and third decades of the century as the formative experience of the discipline. It treats all previous field research as the prehistory of the discipline. The demarcation illuminates the innovative work of the participant observer, the anthropologist who closely studies the ‘other’ through spending months or longer in one locality. The privileged knowledge thus construed by the anthropologist’s intimate, almost intuitive acquaintance with the subjects of investigation. While over the years the work of these early anthropologists has been the subject of much criticism, it remains a convention that the quality of their work was markedly different from earlier research and study of the “other”, which had largely been erased from professional memory. The earlier enterprise relied on a traditional accumulation of ethnological information from numerous sourcesmissionaries, travelers and colonial administrators-and was primarily aimed at describing institutions in a comparative perspective through a presentation of diversified ethnography around the world. Correspondents, including field workers and published sources, provided the ethnological evidence to the theoretical armchair anthropologist. However, the lack of field research, the equivalent of the scientific laboratory for the anthropologist, delegitimised the earlier armchair anthropologists, and turned them in time into the anti-heros, the rejected ancestors of the discipline. The demarcation between the rebuffed forerunners and the participant-observers who were both theoreticians and field workers, overshadowed the shared project of these two generations. This methodological emphasis highlights the field work as an initiation process into the profession, and ignores the earlier cleavage which resulted from the introduction of skepticism concerning Western progress, as it was evident in the last decade of the nineteenth century among traditional anthropoIogists, the mentors of the revolutionary anthropologists who departed to the field. The new methodology, however, was innovative in this context in that it further accentuated the tension of subjectivism. Ethnological data were represented in
765
Rethinking Orientalism
realist terms, yet the natives’ perspective was raising the specter of relativism-the very phantom which made Westermarck’s work controversial. If modernism constituted a substantial and qualitative break from all other previous revolutions in style or fashion, it was characterised perhaps more by the pluralisation of world views than by anything else. Granting the subjective-plural fragmentation to be the modernist Great Divide, I would like to suggest that the shift to modernism in anthropology, and in the representation of the ‘other’-that is the incorporation of the outsider into a large indeterministic egalitarian matrix-preceded the methodological shift in anthropology. The essential characteristic of the modernist representation of the ‘other’ became a sympathetic and receptive approach to the native’s point of view. This was true both with regard to the primitive and the orient, and resulted in the global expansion of legitimate experiences as part of modem culture. Egalitarianism depended on respect for subjective experiences, hence relativism and the fragmented modernism. Elazar
California Institute of Technology
Barkan
THEMES
WORKSHOP COLONIALISM
Chairperson:
II
THREE
AND IMPERIALISM
Paul Rich (Bristol
University,
U.K.)
7s 7
0,91-6599/92 $5.00+0.00 ‘:I 1992 Pergamon Press Ltd
RETHINKING ORIENTALISM: REPRESENTATIONS OF ‘PRIMITIVES’ IN WESTERN CULTURE AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY ELAZARBARKAN* f hope in this paper to suggest a possible reinterpretation of the role and representation of non-Europeans, and to examine the contribution of these images to the construction of modernism. My argument is that contrary to the claims of anti-colonial literature-which often emphasises a reductionist reading of the perceptions of the ‘other’, the outsider, in modern culture-the period between 1890 and World War I witnessed the proliferation of non-European representations and contributed greatly to the multivocality and fragmentation of reality, of individuals, and of the community in modern culture. Modernism is associated primarily with literature and art. Frequently the study of modernism displays the tension embedded in the subject matter by illuminating the uniqueness and creativity in the avant-garde movement while concurrently trying to contextualise, socialise, it. This tension between eschewing life and reflecting life, very often characterised the literary and artistic avantgarde. Occasionally, however, the ambivalence was liberated by an escape from modern society to the realm of the primitive, the colonised, the exotic. Highbrow explications of the ‘other’ were influenced greatly by the academic discipline which took the non-civilised as its subject matter, namely anthropology, and from there I shall draw my examples. Save for the analysis of works by few major thinkers, comparatively little has been written about the counterparts of the artistic and literary avant-garde in the human sciences. The exceptions include among others Max Weber’s theory of the imprisoning rationality, Freud’s expansive human nature, or Simmel and later Benjamin’s analysis of aesthetics. These theories address the anxieties of modem life directly and diagnostically. But many texts which studied the ‘outsider’ as a vehicle for investigating contemporary society do not ordinarily qualify as part of the modernist canon. I would suggest that if occidentalism was a multi-headed monster which devoured alien organisms-as the anti-colonialist literature justly suggests-it also constructed and transformed its own identity in the process. Anti-racist literature has extensively documented the distorted forms of western perspective of natives, savages, and barbarians of various shades and reputations. However, as the Bible and Nietzsche had observed, the leopard and the bird of prey cannot help but be what they are. The prey is a convergence point for the perpetrator and the victim, but it is obvious that the encounter exhausts neither the nature of the beast nor that of its victim. Not to push the analogy too far, it is clear that *Division of the Humanities Pasadena, CA 91125, U.S.A.
and Social Sciences, California
Institute
of Technology,
759
Elazar Barkan imperialism and racism could not but distort the nature of the victims. While the critique of racism had done much to change this power relationship, not only the perspective, between the West and the rest, there is much to be learned on occidentalism from Western writings on the colonised. Skepticism concerning true representations is justified in general. In this particular case the accuracy of the depiction of the victims by the writers is only of secondary import, since it is the representations which are the subject matter, and not the ‘realities’ behind them. The question then is how did social theorists-who were part of the imperialist discourse in their effort to analyse modern society and formulate solutions to social ills-describe the nonWesterners? *
*
*
At the turn of the century Western domination over the rest of the world had reached its zenith. The conventional political ideology had ranked nations, ethnicities and social classes along a racist hierarchy of superiority and inferiority, attributing social and cultural differences to permanent biological inequalities. A quest to endow the passing social structure with metaphysical dimension invoked theories which depicted the white upper-class man at the apex of the evolutionary process. The polarisation of the West and the rest, the normal and abnormal, we against them, was an organising principle. The specific demarcation was not so clear cut, but the images were nonetheless powerful and provided the justification for contemporary anti-racist and anti-colonial historical literature Said views orientalism as a ‘system of ideas’ that has persisted ‘unchanged as a teachable wisdom.. . from the period of Ernest Renan in the late 1840s until the present in the United States’. This durability at the assertive level led critics to blame Said for ahistorical thinking. But although Said tries at one level to present orientalism as a paradigm which characterises the orient as despotic, pervasive with splendor, cruelty, and sensuality, his story recognises changes and nuances over time. Although the key theoretical issues of Orientalism concerns the representations of the other, Said recognises that orientalism has ‘less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world’. Here lies the significance of Said’s study in the present context. Said identifies the duality embedded in the text about the other: it constructs the matrix for the domination over the colonised but concurrently provides a mirror for the west. For Said, the texts about the colonised become the colonised for the West. This is a perceptive claim, but if orientalism has more to do with the occident than with the non-Europeans, then conceivably it should be studied as such, as a discourse about Western culture. The new, expanded, view of the other was characterised at the end of the 19th century by its diversity, and close affinity to the growing role of subjectivity and pragmatism. The other had always been represented in western culture, ever since antiquity. The outsiders included the ‘primitives’ of different levels of acculturation, who were seen as spatial representation of homo sapiens’ primordial ancestry, the ancient civilizations of the Far East-with their
Rethinking Orientalism
761
changing popularity in the West -the awakening Middle East, and the no-longer existent Ameri-Indian civilisations. All of which were receiving greater exposure at the end of the nineteenth century than ever before. Individual writers had paid as much attention to outsiders earlier on, and occasionally glorified the other as the anti-thesis to a despised contemporary society. The ‘noble savage’, India, and China have often served such a role before the period under consideration. Late in the eighteenth century, a major shift in culture and learning occurred in Europe, which has been called the Oriental Renaissance. Primarily among the Romantics, the Orient was discovered and welcomed as enriching poetry, prose and philosophy. A complex phenomenon, the Oriental Renaissance encouraged comparative techniques, expanded the world, availing new, non-Western traditions. Initially, as the new renaissance assimilated and legitimised the other into the cultural tradition of Europe, the attraction was manifested in primarily verbal not visual representations. The traditional dichotomy between Europe and the Orient turned in these writings into an alliance, no longer merely an antagonism. It entailed a discovery of a new world, of culture and soul apart from the European. The newly alien traditions were assimilated in different ways, but the chief purpose of European writers was to extract new knowledge about the origins of the West. India especially lent itself to the study of antiquity not as a phenomenon long past and dead, but rather as a living tradition. In contrast China’s tradition, language and philosophy, bewildered the West and remained the least explored, conceding to the West only its ceremonies, folding screens, porcelains, and banalities. Japanese came into vogue after 1870, and primitives provided the ultimate mystique and exoticism. But beyond the sublety of attitudes to the different non-European traditions there were powerful images in search for primordial origins. The Orient, and the other as an image and an idea, became a focal preoccupation: ‘We must seek the supreme romanticism in the Orient’, declared Friedrich Schlegel, one of the most zealous and early patrons of the Orient. The foreign and the primitive became closely aligned, attracting scholars and artists, theologians and revolutionaries. The enthusiasm was largely generated by an ambition to restore to a humanity aged by modernisation its youth. Hence the allure of the ‘primitive’, and the repeated claims to have uncovered the cradle of civilisation throughout the 19th century. At the end of the century, the search for the origin of society was replaced by an emphasis on the unity of humanity and morality as a novel way to question reality. Numerous competing stories about the evolution of civilisation were legitimised by non-Western representations. The other provided ethnographic evidence for any number of narratives of progress, and with the growing skepticism, it was utilised to question the validity of truth, knowledge, and culture. This became especially pronounced as anthropology was coming of age-an intellectual enterprise and an academic discipline devoted to the study of the ‘other’. Borrowing motifs from the primitive to investigate modern society had its direct equivalent in the human sciences. Durkheim for instance has justified his choice of the most primitive religious
762
Elazar Barkan
formation for a sociological study, not as an antiquarian quest, but because ‘like every positive science, it has as its object the explanation of some actual reality which is near to us’. The ethnological study for the sociologist, Durkheim explained, was ‘better adapted than any other to lead to an unde~tanding of the religious nature of man, that is to say to show us an essential and permanent aspect of humanity*. Similarly Freud justified the study of primitive religion by comparing it to modern neurosis in order to ‘throw new light upon familiar facts in both sciences’. It is easy to marshal any number of similar illustrations from more or less prominant writers of the time. However, because I claim to read the canon differently, let me explore in some details the work of a prominent social theorist of that generation, who is practically forgotten today, but who is especially pertinent for a discussion on the fragmentation of reality. *
*
*
Edward Westermarck was an armchair anthropologist and a moral philosopher who together with L.T. Hobhouse held the first academic positions of sociology in Britain. He was born in 1862 [died in 19391 a Finn of Swede minority, who lived largely in England from the late 1880s and is generally remembered today only in Finland. Westermarck was an early and bold partisan for ethical and cultural relativism which he saw as a source for progress while maintaining scientific realism. He viewed ethics as both scientific and subjective. This constitued his own brand of relativism, based on biological reductionism yet completely indeterministic. His egalitarianism was founded on a belief in the essential similarity between humans, although he subscribed to notions of Western superiority. Such self-contradictory positions characterised the uncertainty and confusion at the turn of the century. Writing against the background of prudish Victorian sexual ethics and sense of superiority, and out of concern for social philosophical issues, Westermarck’s relativism was manifested right from his earliest work on the The Origin of human ~a~iage, published in 1891. Its claim to fame was that it refuted the supposed promiscuity of savages. Westermarck defined marriage in functional terms as a natural institution which is directed at benefiting the young, but which was socially shaped by laws. The view of the genesis of marriage in the family followed by sociahsation Ied him to deduce that the primordial sexuai relations were monogamous, and to regard the evolution of social institutions as corrupting. This view was in direct opposition to the conventional speculation which imagined civilisation to have elevated human marriage from an initial group marriage in the primeval communistic society, through a series of polygamous arrangements to the highest stage of progress-monogamy, He reinterpreted ethnological data to conclude that either the pre-nuptial intercourse in various cultures was not promiscuous and/or that it was not proportionate to its degree of culture. ‘In the lowest tribes chastity is more respected than in the higher ones’. Primitive/civilized and promiscuity/chastity did not lie along the same continuum. Westermarck attributed ‘the wantonness of savages’ ‘to the influence of civilization’: ‘It has been sufficiently proved that contact with a higher culture, or, more properly, the dregs of it, is pernicious to
Rethinking Orientalism
763
the morality of peoples living in a more or less primitive condition’. Hence ‘Contact with a “higher culture” has proved pernicious to the morality of savage peoples; and we have some reason to believe that irregular connections between the sexes have, on the whole, exhibited a tendency to increase along with the progress of civilisation. Moreover, free sexual intercourse previous to marriage is quite different from promiscuity, which involves a suppression of individual inclinations’. Westermarck’s critique was not widely accepted, Freud for one rejected it 20 years later, and it never really became a widely held view. But it opened a rare egalitarian space for speculation on primordial society. This preceded much of the literary and artistic modernism, and definitely most of the social theorists who later explicated similar themes. In the United States Franz Boas who is well known as the initiator of cultural relativism was just at the beginning of an uncertain academic career. In France, where ethnology proper developed later, Durkheim-who as an armchair anthropologist received far less attention than as a social theorist-had not yet published any of his major works. In Germany, Nietzsche was coming into vogue and Dilthey’s historicism was popular, but Max Weber and Georg Simmel were yet unknown, as was the case with members of the cultural historical school, such as Father Wilhelm Schmidt or Leo Frobenius. Freud was yet to make his mark, and in England, where armchair anthropology was most developed, James Frazer had just published the first edition of the GunmenBough but L.T. Hobhouse was still too young. The social context for Westermarck’s work was provided by the contemporary freethinkers. While he was reluctant to worship humanity as a religion, he attended the Freethinkers Sunday services at the time he was writing TheHistory of Human Marriage, and listened to addresses by Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant and others. In later years he even delivered a sermon on the magical origin of the ten commandments. The use of the term ‘marriage’ in the title The Origin of the Human Marriage, was a misnomer, since it was used to camouflage more explicit sexual terms. It enabled the text to serve as a radical yet socially respected critique. Reading Westermarck’s pre-published manuscript Alfred Wallace, Darwin’s co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection, suggested to tone down the discussion by replacing the term ‘sexual intercourse’ with ‘marriage’, especially in the last chapter which was expected to be more widely read. Or as Edward Tylor, the first professional British anthropologist, put it: ‘some of the data in it are too sexual for even a special public’. Westermarck affronted traditional morality both in content and in form, but through the use of the ‘other’ and the language of science, maintained respectability while contributing to the construction of a new pluralistic, egalitarian, modern reality. In the name of science, Westermarck apologised to the reader who ‘may find much that will outrage his feelings, and, possibly, hurt his sense of modesty’. Yet, to ‘keep any-: thing secret within its cold and passionless expanses, would be the same as to throw a cloth round a naked statue’. Science meant truth, and Westermarck used it as a liberating force. *
*
*
Here I would like to argue for a new chronology of modernism in anthropology and social theory. The first generation of participant observers
764
Elatar Barkan
shared with their predecessors the study of institutions rather than of society as an organism. Without minimising the major methodological innovation of the later group, the purpose of both generations was similar, that is to question modern institutions such as religion, or the family, through the study of the other. While mid-century armchair anthropologists were preoccupied with tracing the origins of modern society similar to other orientalists, the motivation at the end of the nineteenth century as a result of the uncertainty of modern society led to probing the assured reality. In the course of this exploration the shift to modernism in anthropology began. Many theorists at the turn of the century advanced ‘weak relativism’ and resorted to realism as an anchor for their skepticism without opening doors to charges of moral anarchism. Westermarck belonged to this group, but was generally more outright in his relativist beliefs. As an armchair anthropologist who did some field research, Westermarck belonged to a transitional generation, who had provided the tools for the modernist upsurge, but most of whom did not themselves have the temperament to rebel. The next generation rebelled and as part of its rebellion constructed the modern memory of the discipline. This historical reconstruction thus takes the initiation of the field work by Bronislaw Malinowski, Radcliffe Brown, and Margaret Mead during the second and third decades of the century as the formative experience of the discipline. It treats all previous field research as the prehistory of the discipline. The demarcation illuminates the innovative work of the participant observer, the anthropologist who closely studies the ‘other’ through spending months or longer in one locality. The privileged knowledge thus construed by the anthropologist’s intimate, almost intuitive acquaintance with the subjects of investigation. While over the years the work of these early anthropologists has been the subject of much criticism, it remains a convention that the quality of their work was markedly different from earlier research and study of the “other”, which had largely been erased from professional memory. The earlier enterprise relied on a traditional accumulation of ethnological information from numerous sourcesmissionaries, travelers and colonial administrators-and was primarily aimed at describing institutions in a comparative perspective through a presentation of diversified ethnography around the world. Correspondents, including field workers and published sources, provided the ethnological evidence to the theoretical armchair anthropologist. However, the lack of field research, the equivalent of the scientific laboratory for the anthropologist, delegitimised the earlier armchair anthropologists, and turned them in time into the anti-heros, the rejected ancestors of the discipline. The demarcation between the rebuffed forerunners and the participant-observers who were both theoreticians and field workers, overshadowed the shared project of these two generations. This methodological emphasis highlights the field work as an initiation process into the profession, and ignores the earlier cleavage which resulted from the introduction of skepticism concerning Western progress, as it was evident in the last decade of the nineteenth century among traditional anthropoIogists, the mentors of the revolutionary anthropologists who departed to the field. The new methodology, however, was innovative in this context in that it further accentuated the tension of subjectivism. Ethnological data were represented in
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realist terms, yet the natives’ perspective was raising the specter of relativism-the very phantom which made Westermarck’s work controversial. If modernism constituted a substantial and qualitative break from all other previous revolutions in style or fashion, it was characterised perhaps more by the pluralisation of world views than by anything else. Granting the subjective-plural fragmentation to be the modernist Great Divide, I would like to suggest that the shift to modernism in anthropology, and in the representation of the ‘other’-that is the incorporation of the outsider into a large indeterministic egalitarian matrix-preceded the methodological shift in anthropology. The essential characteristic of the modernist representation of the ‘other’ became a sympathetic and receptive approach to the native’s point of view. This was true both with regard to the primitive and the orient, and resulted in the global expansion of legitimate experiences as part of modem culture. Egalitarianism depended on respect for subjective experiences, hence relativism and the fragmented modernism. Elazar
California Institute of Technology
Barkan