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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
I
This is a book about comparison; more specifically, about the practice of comparison in the study of history, religion, discourse, and society. It does not claim to be comprehensive or systematic. Rather, it reflects my decades-long engagement with the problem, during which I have come to see comparison as an indispensable instrument of human thought that most often goes seriously astray. Specialization surely seems safer, but only in comparison to comparison, which is thus revealed to be inescapable even in the moment one (thinks one) rejects it.
II
My views, like everyone else's, took shape in and reflect the course of an idiosyncratic trajectory. That being the case, some autobiographical background is probably in order.
I never aspired to do specialized research. Never was fascinated by or fell in love with any particular time, place, culture, or tradition. As an impressionable undergraduate, I was sufficiently dazzled by T. S. Eliot's reorchestration of world mythologies in "The Wasteland" that I tried to understand how it was done. Not knowing Eliot added footnotes to his poem mostly to justify its publication in monograph form, I pored over them as if they held the key to some hidden kingdom.
The results were decidedly mixed. Eliot's notes led me to Ovid, the Upanisads, and the Grail romances via Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance and Frazer's Golden Bough, both severely outdated texts by the time I got to them. Even so, Frazer dazzled me even more than Eliot and led to Balder, Adonis, the Rex Nemorensis, and countless others. How was it possible, I wondered, for one human being to know so many things and bring them together in such magisterial synthesis? Not for years would I realize that like most other comparatists, Eliot, Weston, and Frazer knew a few things well and the others badly. What is more, their relative ignorance proved useful, since the more superficial their knowledge of a given datum might be, the easier it was to impose their theories on it: theories that, like all others, reflected the desires, values, fantasies, era, and milieu of the theorist.
III
Proverbs to the contrary notwithstanding, there is no problem in comparing apples and oranges. The result is "fruit," a category that operates at a higher level of abstraction. The things apples and oranges have in common (seeds, sweetness, a process of ripening until they become available for consumption, etc.) provide the basis for the concept "fruit," while the qualities distinctive to one fruit but not others (specifics of color, flavor, shape, etc.) disappear from the general category. To the extent that "fruit" permits one to think beyond specifics and helps place "apples" and "oranges" in a broader field of relations, it enhances our understanding. Where it erases their unique features, our understanding is impoverished. Ideally, if the specific properties of oranges and apples could retain their significance without dissolving into the generalities of fruit the comparison would achieve its full utility, i.e., when the Many are complemented and complicated, rather than simplified and displaced by the One.
IV
I arrived at the University of Chicago in fall 1971 intending to study history of religions with Mircea Eliade, whom I naively (but probably correctly) took to be the closest contemporary equivalent of Frazer. Eliade, however, had suffered a cardiac "event" the preceding year, and the institution was protecting him against unnecessary demands, including new students like me. Accordingly, I was directed to Jonathan Z. Smith, incoming chair of the department. Having recently completed a dissertation demolishing Frazer, Smith was turning his critical energies to Eliade's methods and theories.
Asked about my projected course of studies, I voiced interest in comparative work. "Comparison is over," Smith responded bluntly. "You need to get serious and specialize." Undaunted, I persisted. Rather than ask the reasons for his pronouncement, I sought an exception to his verdict. Surely, there must be some way to do comparison that would meet whatever objections he harbored? "One only," he replied and pointed me toward Indo-European linguistics.
I have replayed this conversation many times, for it shaped my studies and early work. It is possible Smith's advice reflected trends of the place and moment. In the years just before, two giants in the study of Indo-European religions had presented Haskell Lectures at Chicago: Stig Wikander in 1967 and Georges Dumézil in 1969. Both used philological analysis, close reading of texts, and a Stammbaum model of linguistic/cultural relations to compare Indic, Iranian, Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic materials, justifying this by limiting their comparative purview to peoples who were part of the same language family and were thus understood to share a common cultural inheritance. Those who heard these lectures found them enormously impressive. Conceivably, Smith felt they displayed a methodological rigor previously lacking at Chicago: something he was willing to encourage as an alternative to Eliade's wider-ranging, more intuitive style.
Alternatively, his advice may have been disingenuous, designed to produce frustration and failure, followed by acceptance of the need to specialize. The price of doing the only legitimate and defensible form of comparison, Smith explained, was to learn a dozen or more very difficult ancient languages. Any reasonable person might be expected to balk, but I quickly fell in line. Within a year, I was doing Sanskrit, Avestan, and coursework in the methods of historical linguistics. Greek, Latin, Old Persian, and Old Norse followed, along with a smattering of Irish, Russian, and Hittite (Pahlavi and a few others would come some years later). When I finally approached Eliade, he welcomed me warmly and supported my efforts, encouraging me to learn more languages, read more broadly, and expand my comparative horizons. Finding his enthusiasm more inviting than Smith's skepticism, I moved in his direction.
V
Like all categories, the one named "fruit" can be misleading, particularly if mistaken for something extant in nature, rather than an artificial construct generated through acts of comparison. To continue the inquiry — which gets ever more interesting, complicated, and productive as it leads further afield — one might ask what the idea of "fruit" includes, where it comes from, and how it develops.
There are many ways one might proceed, but my training and habits lead me to start with two philological observations. First, attestations in English date from the twelfth century, with considerable orthographic variation (inter alia, frught, fruct(e), fruict, fruyt(e), frute, fruth, and fruit), but all forms derive from Latin fru ctus. Second, the term encompasses two semantic domains. One is narrower and more concrete. The Oxford English Dictionary lists it first, since it is attested slightly earlier (from 1175 on).
1. Vegetable products in general, that are fit to be used as food by men and animals.
Example circa 1325: "The power of man is like the field / that much fruit is wont to yield."
2. The edible product of a plant or tree, consisting of the seed and its envelope, as in the apple, orange, plum, etc.
Example circa 1380: "The fairest fruit that may grow in the earth / Like the orange and other fruit."
The second semantic domain is more abstract and considerably broader (attested since 1230).
3. Anything accruing, produced, or resulting from an action or effort, the operation of a cause, etc.
a. Material produce, outgrowth, increase; products, revenues.
Example circa 1450: "The fruit and profit of that land and of beasts in this time."
b. An immaterial product, a result, issue, consequence.
Example from 1413: "All the wide world is filled full with the fruit of their good labor."
c. Advantage, benefit, enjoyment, profit.
Example circa 1230: "Thus God's friend has all the fruit of this world that he had forsaken."
Surprisingly, Latin fructus is used with the general sense much more often than the narrowly botanical, which is not included in the three definitions that appear in the standard reference dictionary.
1. an enjoying, enjoyment.
Example: "I consider your singular kindness to be an enormous enjoyment and delight (fructum atque laetitiam) to my soul."
2. the enjoyment that proceeds from a thing; proceeds, produce, product, profit, income (very frequent).
Example: "In a short time, they became known for their wealth, whether from products (fructibus) of the sea or the earth."
3. consequence, effect, result, return, reward, success.
Example: "It is my greatest wish that Publius Sulla ... could have obtained some beneficial result (fructum) from his moderation."
This range of meanings reflects the verb from which fructus derives: Latin fruor, "to derive enjoyment from a thing, to enjoy, delight in." In legal contexts, its semantics are quite precise: "to have the use and enjoyment of a thing, to have the usufruct." English usufruct, moreover, is itself a compound of two complementary words and ideas: usus, "the right to make productive use of something (e.g., a plot of land)," and fructus, "enjoyment of the good things that follow." To put it differently, use (usus) is the process of transformative labor, and fruit (fructus) is the ultimate product of that labor: not just a material item, but the benefit, profit, and pleasure it yields.
To make "fruit" the category that encompasses apples, oranges, and like comestibles thus represents a narrowing of the Latin concept consistent with the interests of a society where the products that had greatest value and brought greatest satisfaction were agricultural. English shows the same semantic narrowing, although the older, broader, and more abstract sense still peeks through in expressions like "fruits of their labors" and "fruit of their loins." Careful comparison permits a fuller, more nuanced understanding of both the Latin and the English terms, as well as the history that connects them and the kind of society, culture, and economy in which these words assumed, exercised, and changed meaning. It also lets us refine our understanding of apples and oranges. Insofar as we see them as "fruit," we identify them as products cultivated by someone's labor, and things to be enjoyed, quite possibly by others.
VI
My earliest works were broadly comparative, most often within an "Indo-European" paradigm, but occasionally not. But opinion was turning decisively against comparatism in those years, and this was not an idle change of fashion or swing of some pendulum. The transition from structuralism to poststructuralism, for instance, came not because Lévi-Strauss's ideas lost their novelty and cachet. Rather, their shortcomings became apparent in the course of sharp challenges by Foucault, Bourdieu, Deleuze, and others, who focused critical attention on structuralism's ahistorical and apolitical nature, its preference for the mind over the body, its relative disinterest in and inadequacy for addressing urgent problems of the here and now.
The critique was sharper and even more damaging with regard to other influential styles of comparison and their foremost practitioners. Eliade's involvement with the Romanian Legionary Movement came back to haunt him, as did Dumézil's enthusiasm for Charles Maurras and the Action Française. In both cases, critics perceived connections between these scholars' past political commitments (never acknowledged, let alone repudiated) and aspects of their scholarship. Particularly troubling was the privileged status Indo-European (a.k.a. "Aryan") examples enjoyed in the work of both men and the way some of their core themes — e.g., Eliade's disdain for secular modernity or Dumézil's interest in warrior fraternities and the sacred nature of sovereign authority — showed continuity with the fascist beliefs of their youth.
Persuaded — albeit with profound regret — that most of the critiques were justified, I became uncertain how to proceed, as the enterprise in which I'd invested heavily had proven appallingly tainted. The problem was not just whether the competences I'd acquired could be redeployed, but whether there was anything to salvage from comparatism's recurrent train wrecks.
VII
Italian has several words derived from fructus that anglophones find surprising. Most important is the verb sfruttare, where the prefix s- functions like dis- in English. Literally, the word thus denotes "de-fruiting." The question is whether the fruits in question are agricultural (Apples + Oranges) or more abstract (the enjoyment and profit derived from the products of labor). Modern dictionaries show both possibilities.
1. (literal) to obtain the maximum possible return from a given piece of land; to exhaust its vigor.
2. (figurative) to extract illicit profit from the labor of another; to remunerate inadequately those who work.
However tempting it might be to imagine a historic development whereby the second sense developed from the first as agriculture yielded to industrial production, earlier dictionaries show both well before industrialization, as in the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca of 1741.
1. With reference to plots of land, to make them unfruitful, sterile, and less productive (meno atti al frutto); to weaken them.
2. With reference to other things, to seek to extract from them more profit (più frutto) than can be done with regard for proper maintenance.
The same dictionary distinguishes between frutta (feminine) and frutto (masculine), both derived from Latin fructus. The first denoted the edible produce of trees and plants. In contrast, the primary sense of the second was "annual income, proceeds, profits." The verb sfruttare relates equally to both nouns and the de-fruiting action it describes can apply to comestibles (frutta) or surplus values (frutto).
If comparing apples and oranges leads to the idea of "fruit" ... and comparison of English fruit to Latin fructus leads to the idea of profit ... the comparison of fruit and fructus to Italian sfruttare leads to the idea of exploitation.
VIII
Trying to understand why comparatism has repeatedly — and rightly — fallen into discredit, I'd begin with processes of decontextualization and exploitation. When scholars treat the complex products of another society's imaginative labors as the raw materials from which they confect their theories, and when they regard their theories as an intellectual product of a higher order than that of the materials they extracted, grievous abuses have been committed.
• Valuable goods have been appropriated, often by those who have little claim to or investment in them.
• The makers of those goods have been recognized and compensated, if at all, in very inadequate fashion.
• Sign-values have displaced use-values as items of discourse and practice that actively shaped people's lives are transformed into "comparanda" and "examples."
• As examples accumulate, they are treated with increasing superficiality and inattention to whatever aspects (all of which had import in their original context) fail to support the comparatist's point.
All too often, comparative reprocessing makes different fruits look and taste alike, while none of them tastes very good. In effect, they have been de-fruited: distanced from the soil in which they grew, deprived of the specifics that gave them flavor, converted into cheap, homogenized goods for undiscriminating consumers, yielding profit that comparatists call theoretical gain, but which usually amounts to little more than a transient spike in their reputation.
IX
Although the idea of exploitation has become ubiquitous (much like its practice), the word acquired its modern sense only recently. From the fifteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, the verb exploit had a variety of senses, all of which became obsolete. In 1838, however, an anonymous author redeployed the word to describe something for which English previously had no terminology. Surprisingly, the first acts of exploitation named as such were not industrial, but academic.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Apples and Oranges"
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