Local Knowledge, Global Stage
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Local Knowledge, Global Stage
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Overview
This tenth volume of the series, Local Knowledge, Global Stage, examines worldwide historical trends of anthropology ranging from the assertion that all British anthropology is a study of the Old Testament to the discovery of the untranslated shorthand notes of pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas. Other topics include archival research into the study of Vancouver Island's indigenous languages, explorations of the Christian notion of virgin births in Edward Tylor's The Legend of Perseus, and the Canadian government's implementation of European-model farms as a way to undermine Native culture. In addition to Boas and Tylor, the essays explore the research and personalities of Susan Golla, Edwin Sydney Hartland, and others.
Regna Darnell is the Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and First Nations Studies at the University of Western Ontario. She is coeditor of The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1: Franz Boas as Public Intellectual-Theory, Ethnography, Activism (Nebraska, 2015) and general editor of the multivolume series The Franz Boas Papers: Documentary Edition. Frederic W. Gleach is a senior lecturer of anthropology and the curator of the Anthropology Collections at Cornell University. He is the author of Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Nebraska, 1997).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803288102 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2016 |
| Series: | Histories of Anthropology Annual |
| Pages: | 354 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Regna Darnell is the Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and First Nations Studies at the University of Western Ontario. She is coeditor of The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1: Franz Boas as Public Intellectual—Theory, Ethnography, Activism (Nebraska, 2015) and general editor of the multivolume series The Franz Boas Papers: Documentary Edition. Frederic W. Gleach is a senior lecturer of anthropology and the curator of the Anthropology Collections at Cornell University. He is the author of Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Nebraska, 1997).
Read an Excerpt
Local Knowledge, Global Stage
Histories of Anthropology Annual, Volume 10
By Regna Darnell, Frederic W. Gleach
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of NebraskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9516-2
CHAPTER 1
Anthropologists and the Bible
The Marett Lecture, April 2012
Adam Kuper
I
A young philosophy don, a Jerseyman at Oxford, Robert Ranulph Marett was intrigued by the subject set for the 1893 Green Prize in Moral Philosophy: "The ethics of savage races." He immersed himself in the literature on primitive religion, won the prize, and was befriended by the only anthropologist at Oxford University, E. B. Tylor.
Tylor was the father figure of the new anthropology that had emerged in the 1860s. It was a baggy, ambitious discipline, and Tylor himself wrote about race and technology and language and marriage, but especially about religion, and this became Marett's main interest too. The first objective of the anthropology of religion was to characterize the earliest creeds and rites. The anthropologists then explained the advance of humanity from the long dark age of magic and superstition to the sunny uplands of a more spiritual religion; or they showed how metaphysical error gave way to rationality and science.
In any case, they took it for granted that religion, technology, and the social order advanced in lockstep through a determined series of stages. At each stage, the beliefs and customs of societies at a similar level of development were essentially the same. So contemporary primitive societies could be treated as stand-ins for past societies at an equivalent stage of development. The notions of the American Indians, perhaps, or, at a higher level, the Tahitians provided living instances of conceptions and beliefs that had once been very widespread. To know one was to know all. Captain Cook had introduced the word taboo from Tahiti. Soon taboos were being discovered all over the place. Other exotic terms were soon taken up — mana, another Polynesian word, totem from the Ojibwa, potlatch from the Kwakiutl of British Columbia, voodoo from West Africa. All were elements of a universal primal religion. So Victorian anthropologists could write about Australian totems and American Indian taboos. They could even identify totem and taboo in ancient Israel.
Such beliefs and practices may once have been universal, but they were surely irrational. How could so many people have believed so many impossible things for so long? Some missionaries saw the hand of the Devil here, but the anthropologists argued that there was something about the ways of thinking of primitive people that led them to make mistakes of perception and logic. After all, Darwin had shown that human evolution was paced by the development of the brain. It was widely assumed that the brains of the various races developed at different rates. The smaller-brained savages, and indeed the early Israelites, were simply not capable of thinking very clearly.
So how did they think? Tylor argued that primitive peoples relied on "analogy or reasoning by resemblance" (1881:338). For Frazer, such "reasoning by resemblance" accounted for the belief in magic. Robertson Smith agreed that for the savage mind there was "no sharp line between the metaphorical and the literal," and he blamed the "unbounded use of analogy characteristic of pre-scientific thought" for producing a "confusion between the several orders of natural and supernatural beings" (1894:274). Prescientific thinkers were particularly likely to get into a muddle when it came to causality. Robertson Smith found that primal religion was characterized by "insouciance, a power of casting off the past and living in the impression of the moment" that "can exist only along with a childish unconsciousness of the inexorable laws that connect the present and the future with the past" (1894:57).
Tylor supposed that the very earliest religion arose from a misapprehension. People everywhere have dreams and visions, but primitive people confuse dreams with real experiences. When they dream of the dead they imagine that the dead exist somewhere else, in another state, the state that living people experience in dreams, trances, and fevers. And so "the ancient savage philosophers probably made their first step by the obvious inference that every man has two things belonging to him, namely, a life and a phantom" (Tylor 1871, 2:12). They then generalized this conclusion to embrace the rest of the natural world. Even trees and plants, even the planets, had souls. This was what Tylor termed "animism."
Rituals soon developed, notably sacrifices. In primitive animism, offerings were made to the spirits of the dead after they had appeared in dreams. In what might be called the higher animism, sacrifices were also made to "other spiritual beings, genii, fairies, gods." These sacrifices were gifts: "As prayer is a request made to a deity as if he were a man, so sacrifice is a gift made to the deity as if he were a man" (Tylor 1871, 2:375). Sacrifices took the form of burnt offerings, because spirits demanded spiritual food, the souls of animals or plants (Tylor 1866:77). Vestiges of the primitive cult, which Tylor called "survivals," recurred in the ceremonies of the most advanced religions.
In 1899 the young Marett achieved a certain notoriety by challenging Tylor's thesis that animism was the primeval religion. Marett identified a preanimistic religion based on the Polynesian belief in mana, which he took to mean a sort of psychic energy and power. Mana was inseparable from taboo. "Altogether, in mana we have what is par excellence the primitive religious idea in its positive aspect, taboo representing its negative side, since whatever has mana is taboo, and whatever is taboo has mana" (Marett 1911). His theory made some converts in Germany and France, most notably Marcel Mauss, who made mana the dynamic force behind both the gift and the sacrifice.
Tylor was already a frail old man when Marett became his friend, and Marett took responsibility for the development of anthropology at the university. He was instrumental in instituting Oxford's diploma in anthropology in 1908, and he succeeded Tylor as university reader in social anthropology, a position he held for a quarter of a century. When the university created a chair in anthropology in 1936, he held it for a year before the appointment of Radcliffe-Brown. From 1928 Marett was rector of Exeter College. He also served for many years as treasurer of the University Golf Club. A busy man, then, but, he recalled, "All this time ... [a]nthropology was becoming ... a passion with me. ... Yet I was still attending to the subject with my left hand, while the right tackled the philosophy which after all I was paid to teach. In fact, I became a scandal to my friends, so that one of them wrote: 'A man of your talents seems rather wasted on the habits of backward races.' As it was, I divided my attention impartially between the beliefs of the savage and those of the Oxford undergraduate" (Marett 1941:164).
II
Tylor's theory of animism was hardly original. It was in the direct line of Enlightenment accounts of the development of rationality. Indeed, it was remarkably similar to the theory that had been advanced by Charles de Brosses (1760) and Auguste Comte (1830–42). But Tylor was also responding to the scandal provoked by two books that challenged traditional understandings of the Bible. The Origin of Species, published in 1859, presented a scientific alternative to the book of Genesis. The following year Essays and Reviews appeared, seven essays by intellectuals in the Church of England, including Benjamin Jowett, Mark Pattison, and Frederick Temple (who was to become archbishop of Canterbury) (Parker 1860). They downplayed miracles, questioned the story of the Creation, denied the doctrine of eternal punishment, and endorsed German critical scholarship that demonstrated that the Bible was a compilation of sometimes contradictory texts dating from different periods.
The continental champions of the new biblical criticism, Julius Wellhausen and Abraham Kuenen, further insisted that the Jewish religion had pagan roots. The original religion of Israel was a family cult. In time, the family cult became a tribal and then a national religion. Only with the emergence of great empires in Mesopotamia and Persia, which subjugated Israel, had prophets begun to formulate a universal spiritual religion, foreshadowing Christianity. But pagan elements survived (Wellhausen [1883] 1885).
Perhaps the ordinary churchgoer could ignore these challenges. Owen Chadwick remarks that Victorian churches were full of "worshippers who had never heard of Tylor, were indifferent to Darwin, mildly regretted what they heard of Huxley" (1970, 2:35). But the educated public did debate these new ideas, passionately. Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, son of William Wilberforce, provoked a famous public confrontation with Huxley over the descent of man: "Was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he traced his descent from an ape?" (Hesketh 2009:81). The bishop also moved to have Essays and Reviews condemned in the Convocation of Canterbury.
However, a new science of religion was emerging, with biblical and comparative wings, that engaged with the ideas of Darwin and Wellhausen. It brought together theologians, linguists, folklorists, archaeologists, and anthropologists (Wheeler-Barclay 2010). The particular project of Tylor and the anthropologists was to discover the origins of religion, origins that could never be completely outgrown, the vestiges of ancient cults haunting even the most advanced religions.
And they had fresh evidence at their disposal, for they were able to draw on a stream of reports on primitive religions from all over the world, many of them the work of missionaries. These sources were themselves shaped by the Bible and by biblical scholarship. Protestant missionaries especially made it a priority to translate the Bible into the local language. This obliged them to identify indigenous notions that were roughly equivalent to god, spirit, sin, sacrifice, and holiness. These concepts, and their ritual representations, were taken to be the essential constituents of a religion.
There is in fact no word for "religion" in the Hebrew Bible, but it seemed obvious that ancient Judaism was the prototype of authentic religion. The Bible also gave examples of false religions, which were those of Israel's idolatrous neighbors. Similar beliefs and practices were abundantly represented in the societies to which the missionaries were called. They could now be identified as not only pagan but also primitive. The idols of false religions were totems. Their laws were barbarous taboos and had nothing to do with justice or morality. Their ceremonies, shocking exhibitions of greed and lust, featured ghastly acts of cruelty, including human sacrifice. Missionary ethnographers read the reports of their colleagues, which described surprisingly similar pagan religions in distant parts of the world, and they welcomed the guidance of Tylor and Frazer, who pointed out what they should be looking for and explained the hold of superstition.
So the anthropology of religion was from the first very largely ananthropology of the Bible, with comparative notes from all over the primitive world. Precisely because it had consequences for Christianity, the anthropology of religion seemed to be very important. Tylor was raised as a Quaker, and he believed that rituals always depended on magical thinking. Frazer argued that the comparative method "proves that many religious doctrines and practices are based on primitive conceptions, which most civilized and educated men have long agreed on abandoning as mistakes. From this it is a natural and often a probable inference that doctrines so based are false, and that practices so based are foolish" (1927:282). Robertson Smith believed on the contrary that he was clearing away the debris of folklore and tribal custom so that the prophetic and historical truths in the Hebrew Bible could be properly appreciated. For their part, missionary ethnographers delighted in discovering in the most primitive communities some faint intimations of more advanced doctrines, crude versions of biblical stories, even traces in the language of the passage of one of the lost tribes of Israel. In the 1920s and 1930s this sort of thing became a specialty of the Vienna school, then a hothouse of Catholic missionary anthropology.
III
In parallel with these studies of the development of religion, another foundational research program of anthropology addressed the rise of marriage and the family. Was there some connection between religion, morality, and social organization? In 1869 J. F. McLennan provided Tylor's animism with a social context. McLennan (1865) had himself proposed a model of the earliest societies. They were marauding nomadic bands, matrilineal and exogamous, practicing marriage by capture. He now argued that these bands had an appropriate religion. Each band believed that it was descended matrilineally from a particular natural species, its totem, which was worshiped as an ancestor god and placated with rituals. Totemism was at once a religion — rather like animism, as McLennan conceded — and a social system.
Long ago, totemism had been universal. McLennan identified traces of a totemic system in Siberia, Peru, Fiji, and even classical India. The Greeks had their natural spirits. Totemism was also the point of departure of later systems of thought. It planted the seeds not only of religion but also of science. When the names of animals were given to constellations of stars, this was a legacy of totemism but also the first inklings of astronomy. Beliefs about the descent of human beings from animals gave a faint hint of what would become the theory of evolution.
McLennan suggested in passing that the serpent story in Genesis may have had a totemic significance, but his theory of totemism was first systematically applied to the Hebrew Bible by his friend William Robertson Smith, who had been appointed to the chair of Hebrew and Old Testament at the Free Church College at Aberdeen in 1870 (see Black and Chrystal 1912). Robertson Smith accepted Wellhausen's demonstration that the Bible was a compilation of sources of various dates and that it included both mythological and historical elements. Following Wellhausen again, Robertson Smith aimed to identify the religious beliefs of the most ancient Israelites and to trace their progressive enlightenment. He also adopted Wellhausen's view that rituals were often hangovers from more primitive times but given fresh justifications.
How were the primitive elements to be identified? An obvious first step was to consider the practices and beliefs of Israel's pagan neighbors. Robertson Smith wrote that some ancient Jewish laws were based on principles "still current among the Arabs of the desert" (1880:340). He himself traveled in the Arabian interior to collect firsthand materials. However, even the Bedouin had progressed beyond the totemic stage, and they had been Muslims for many centuries. The comparative method practiced by McLennan offered an alternative approach. Early Israel could be understood with reference to better-documented societies at the same level of development.
In 1880 Robertson Smith published an essay titled "Animal Worship and the Animal Tribes among the Arabs and in the Old Testament" in which he argued that ancient Semitic societies were totemic. The evidence was admittedly patchy. Robertson Smith pointed to the queen of Sheba as proof of early matriarchy. Some Arab marriage rituals might be interpreted as survivals of marriage by capture. Taken together with other hints scattered in the literature, Robertson Smith later pronounced, "These facts appear sufficient to prove that Arabia did pass through a stage in which family relations and the marriage law satisfied the conditions of the totem system" (1894:88).
Similar bits and pieces of evidence might indicate that the early Arabian religion was also totemic. Tribal groupings were often named after animals and sometimes after the moon and sun. Sun and moon were evidently worshiped as gods, so animals presumably were also once treated as gods. And crucially, it seemed that totemic beliefs survived in ancient Israel, if in an attenuated form. Robertson Smith suggested that the heathen practices against which the Hebrew prophets inveighed were totemic in origin. And the second commandment itself was apparently directed against nature worship.
This argument did not go down well with his employers. The General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland issued a swift condemnation: "First, concerning marriage and the marriage laws in Israel, the views expressed are so gross and so fitted to pollute the moral sentiments of the community that they cannot be considered except within the closed doors of any court of this Church. Secondly, concerning animal worship in Israel, the views expressed by the Professor are not only contrary to the facts recorded and the statements made in Holy Scripture, but they are gross and sensual — fitted to pollute and debase public sentiment" (Black and Chrystal 1912:382).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Local Knowledge, Global Stage by Regna Darnell, Frederic W. Gleach. Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Editors’ Introduction 1. Anthropologists and the Bible: The Marett Lecture, April 2012 Adam Kuper 2. Dead and Living Authorities in The Legend of Perseus: Animism and Christianity in the Evolutionist Archive Frederico D. Rosa 3. Anthropology in Portugal: The Case of the Portuguese Society of Anthropology and Ethnology (SPAE), 1918 Patrícia Ferraz de Matos 4. A View from the West: The Institute of Social Science and the Amazon Priscila Faulhaber 5. Scientific Diplomacy and the Establishment of an Australian Chair of Anthropology, 1914–25 Geoffrey Gray 6. The Saga of the L. H. Morgan Archive, or How an American Marxist Helped Make a Bourgeois Anthropologist the Cornerstone of Soviet Ethnography Sergei A. Kan and Dmitry V. Arzyutov 7. “I Wrote All My Notes in Shorthand”: A First Glance into the Treasure Chest of Franz Boas’s Shorthand Field Notes Rainer Hatoum 8. Genealogies of Knowledge in the Alberni Valley: Reflecting on Ethnographic Practice in the Archive of Dr. Susan Golla Denise Nicole Green 9. The File Hills Farm Colony Legacy Cheyanne Desnomie Contributors