Redefining Reason: The Story of the Twentieth Century "Primitive" Mentality Debate and the Politics of Hyperrationality
462
Redefining Reason: The Story of the Twentieth Century "Primitive" Mentality Debate and the Politics of Hyperrationality
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781984563644 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Xlibris US |
| Publication date: | 11/16/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 462 |
| File size: | 605 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
An Inscrutable Foreign Other
Many Westerners may have first glimpsed people from traditional nonliterate societies within the pages of Greek and Roman bestiaries. Pliny the Elder, a central figure of Roman science, attempting to survey nothing less than the universe and all the material objects that populate it, included such a bestiary of "monstrous races" in his most famous work, Natural History. These exotic races of semihuman monsters who inhabited remote lands, included the Arimaspi, a monocular cyclopean race; the Llyrians, who were able to slay with a glance; the Monocholi, who possessed only one leg but were capable of rapid hopping; the Amyetyrae, a race of "unsociable souls who ate raw meat and used their enormous lower lips as parasols to protect themselves from the sun"; and the Cynocephali, people with the heads of dogs who conversed through barking and lived in caves (Lindberg 1992:141-144). As the Roman Empire fell, some Westerners speculated that the invading foreign barbarians might be the children of the Antipodes, those who lived on the other side of the earth. European trading and crusading during the medieval period and the discovery of the New World gradually accomplished the deprovincialization of Europe; however, the human inhabitants of distant shores continued to be described with only moderately less exaggerated imagination for hundreds of years in the return tales of peregrinating Westerners.
During the nineteenth century, a consensual voice of Western sensibility often characterized the appearance and behavior of those from indigenous tribal cultures with the single and singularly expressive adjective "shocking." Initial close encounters of the imperial kind (between Westerners and aboriginal tribal culture groups) were often tempered by some degree of prior contact between the respective groups and sometimes an incipient pidgin language. However, even when such partial cultural decompression was available, the first face-to-face contacts were often, nevertheless, at least startling to the uninitiated on both sides.
For example, even in the twentieth century, in New Guinea, Europeans encountered ceremonial male transvestism and mock copulation with fruit, endemic ritualized intertribal murder and cannibalism, and ceremonies where young males were ushered in succession to have sexual intercourse in public with the same young girl. The final couple was then crushed to death, cooked, and eaten on the spot. Accounts of the initial encounter from the other side of the table (the preliterate tribal perspective) are not surprisingly few. One can only guess at the astonishment and horror of a New Guinea highlander who had had no experience with the West, familiar only with his own people and rival neighbors, encountering pale men emerging from the belly of a roaring gigantic silver flying beast, with their sticks that slay at a great distance, their bizarre possessions and the witchcraft that follows them, sickening and killing. In the early sixteenth century, the Aztec ruler Montezuma perceived Cortez to be the returning god, Quetzalcoatl (the plumed or feathered serpent). Europeans arriving upon foreign shores by ship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at times seemed to be emerging out of the sea, as the mast would appear on the horizon first, gradually followed by the rest of the ship.
As the initial period of pounding hearts subsided, it often did not take long for Westerners to notice dramatic differences between themselves and many aboriginal peoples in basic interpersonal comportment, modes of communication, focus of interest and areas of seemingly unique perception or skill, as well as areas of salient apparent ineptitude. In the 1830's, Charles Darwin was struck by what seemed to him to be notably deficient verbal language but highly developed body language and mimicry skills in the natives of Tierra del Fuego.
Concerning the "naked savages" of the West Indies, anthropologist Ruth Bunzel (1960) noted, "So strange were they that it is not surprising that Europeans wondered whether they were members of the human race, or some different and lower species. This question was promptly settled by the church, which decreed (via papal bull in 1537) that they were indeed human and might receive the sacraments." In truth, however, many Europeans had been less than fully persuaded by the papal bull of 1537. Indeed, the authority of the papacy by this time in European history had been significantly weakened in comparison to its unassailable medieval prestige. The theoretical stance, assumed by some European scholars, which suggested that "savages" were a different and lower species was called "the harder argument" by Stephen Jay Gould (1996), a position also known as polygenism, or origin from several sources. The apparent global, racial, cultural, and mental fractionation of the family Hominidae was said to be the result of "descent from different Adams." The "softer argument" (monogenism, or origin from a single source) of this general racial and cultural prejudice outlined by Gould was consistent with the biblical story of Adam, and the church's decree, admitting "savages" to the human species; however, the "shocking" differences still seemed to require explanation, and again, explanation was proffered by way of thematic variation upon scripture. It was suggested that after the fall in the garden, as all of humanity sank into sin and decline, the nonwhite races simply degenerated to a greater degree, usually it was thought due to hybridization, disease, climatic and dietary factors.
Despite their theological differences, proponents of both the hard and soft arguments were typically in agreement concerning the general nature of the intellect or mentality of individuals from traditional nonliterate cultures. In a word, it was seen as "defective" or "inferior." By the nineteenth century, the most common characterizations included terms such as "arrested development," "childlike," "brutish," and "atavistic." In the late 1800s, the German zoologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) proffered the popular theory of recapitulation (ontogeny repeats, or recapitulates phylogeny), which suggested that the evolutionary history of any organism is seen in the stages of embryological development of that organism (for instance, the gill slits and tails that appear at certain points in the development of human embryos reflect the evolutionary history of humanity). Roughly applied to the intellect of "savages," Haeckel's idea was taken to suggest that "savages" represented an older evolutionary stage of mental development that in Europeans is still seen only in the mentality of their children. In the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) added, as we will see, that "savages" had much in common with abnormal "neurotic" European patients, both in mental and emotional development. In general, Victorian science suggested that "savages" were unable to conceptualize abstractly or reason dispassionately. Their thinking was described as illogical, superstitious, overly emotional, or focused only on the most basic pragmatic concerns of subsistence and procreation. The pervasiveness of this pejorative view of what came to be called "primitive mentality" in eighteenth — and nineteenth-century Westerners is hard to overstate. Gould's (1996) listing of prominent American and European political and intellectual icons expressing these views is a veritable who's who of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
A word or two about the etymology of the word savage is appropriate here. It is derived from the Latin word silvaticus, which originally referred to something that was of the woods or forest (this is also the derivation of the word sylvan) and came to take on connotations of wildness and untamability. Anthropological historian William Y. Adams (1998) notes that during the Renaissance Westerners largely regarded aboriginal people as "exotic human fauna." During the eighteenth century, the "savage" was envisaged as childlike. It was not until the nineteenth century that the word "savage" came to mean "a greedy, vicious, and amoral brute." Adams adds, "It was not coincidentally in the nineteenth century that that word savage acquired its present pejorative connotation, where earlier it had merely been another word for primitive." Perhaps this connotational change in the word savage reflected, more than anything, the globally expanding political hegemony and growing severity of moral constraint of Victorian Westerners.
Denigrating connotations of the term "savage" have also always coexisted with what Adams refers to as "one of the most enduring and endearing inventions of the human imagination, the noble savage." Adams reminds us that, as a literary figure, the noble savage is as old as Herodotus and as modern as Dances with Wolves. The noble savage rose to great popularity in ancient Greece, but "pretty much went into hiding during the middle ages when non-Christians were seen as either unconverted pagans or worse, as infidel heathens; both of whom were condemned to damnation." He adds, "The noble savage made a somewhat hesitant reappearance during the Renaissance, and then rose to his fullest glory after the discovery of America. Within a century of the discovery, the Native American emerged in the European imagination as the quintessential noble savage, the hero, not only of philosophical musings, but of countless plays, novels, poems, and even operas extolling his pure, uncorrupted virtues." In the twentieth century, the noble savage would turn out to be a British aristocrat with superhuman powers named Tarzan. Contrary to popular belief, cultural historian Jacques Barzun notes that Rousseau "did not cherish this imaginary figure" (Barzun 2000:108). The real Romantic ideal of Rousseau's imagination was more like a "noble farmer."
Overall, there has been a great deal of variability in Western accounts of indigenous tribal peoples since the sixteenth century. For example, the Spanish and English in general held different attitudes toward Native Americans, as the predominant Spanish policy of conquest was to convert and enculturate, while the English rules of engagement more often favored simple displacement or eviction. Since the French needed Indians as allies against the English, their descriptions of Indian culture were among the most sympathetic of these three European superpowers. Characterization of Native Americans also varied in that different stories were written for different prospective audiences. As Adams notes, the reports of conquistadors and missionaries were generally written to inform and influence secular and religious public opinion, while the reports of frontiersmen were designed primarily to entertain, titillate, or horrify a popular audience. Popular accounts dwelt on the bizarre and sensational, as exotica writing always has. Tales of whites held captive by Indians became best-sellers and developed into a clear literary genre. The portrayal of the Indian captors varied according to the expectations of the captives. As Adams relates, earlier explorers knew that capture was possible; therefore, there was less indignation in their accounts of the Indians. Somewhat later settlers, however, were convinced of their right to the land and were accordingly more outraged. These latter stories focused on the physical and spiritual sufferings of the captive and the eventual triumph of steadfast faith. Adams observes that in all of these nonprofessional accounts, there was little attempt to deeply understand Indians or to see the world from their point of view.
In summary, the pejorative Victorian characterization of the "savage" as an animalistic brute with a defective mind was a prevailing, though not entirely universal viewpoint that evolved out of somewhat less denigrating earlier European notions about "savages" as simply primitive or untamed people from the forest. As we have seen, popular Western literature on the subject of aboriginal people has rarely been even relatively free of bias, politics, or commercial influence, and it has rarely been consistent. The Victorian savage that emerged also developed in contrast to and against the backdrop of ancient notions about the admirable noble savage. As Adams relates, Western portraits of Native Americans have commonly been drawn in contrasting extremes of "good Indian" versus "bad Indian." In many instances the "savage" of the Western imagination has become so imbued in polarized hyperbole, legend, and stereotype that it can become a real challenge for anyone, even tribal peoples themselves, to see past the myth born of European fascination and bias. Whether Westerners were praising or berating indigenous tribal peoples, however, many were always seemingly captivated by them.
In the 1840s, Americans and Europeans interested in the exotic world of the "foreign other" began to form anthropological societies to study the ways of "savages" who did things that Victorians would never dream of doing (or only dreamed of doing), and who populated "their" colonies and frontier territories. Such lines of inquiry or avocational interest, however, proved to contain certain inevitable unpleasant insidious questions that caught Victorians like a rogue wave might surprise absentminded beachcombers who had turned their backs on the sea. When confronted with such dyspeptic questions it turned out that, just as many Victorians didn't like the idea of being descended from an "ape," they didn't like the idea of being descended from a "savage" either. The distasteful ideas of that perplexing Mr. Darwin, it seemed, had further encouraged everyone into thinking like this and spouting all sorts of preposterous notions about European pedigrees. More deeply, of course, such ideas were seen by many to undermine the literal historical bedrock of European theology. As we all know, there followed an extended academic and not-so-academic brouhaha, at least as colorful as the O. J. Simpson and Bill Clinton disputations and one that was undoubtedly more personal and more protracted for everyone observing. Indeed, on certain counts (descent from apes) the litigation continues in popular, if not scientific arenas.
Although the general philosophical roots of professional anthropology are almost as old as Western civilization itself (many think of Herodotus as the first ethnologist), the academic discipline the world came to know as cultural or social anthropology (the scholarly field most immediately confronted with the "problem of the primitive mind") quickened with the above-noted anthropological societies of the early Victorian period and began its parturition in Darwin's wake, via the labor of the great circumnavigators of books ensconced and growing old in hallowed European libraries, such as E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer. It was finally delivered to the neonatal ward of scientific academia through the efforts of individuals such as Tylor (who was appointed the first professor of anthropology at Oxford University in 1896) and the first true anthropological fieldworkers. These actual circumnavigators of the globe included notables such as Adolf Bastian of the Berlin Museum, a true globetrotter; A. C. Haddon, of the 1898 Torres Strait expedition fame and founding father of anthropology at Cambridge University; and Franz Boas at Columbia University in New York, who, after the obligatory encamped sodality of the Arctic's frozen season and concomitant exposure to a long winter's tale of native islander folklore, (and by some accounts a bit of a conversion experience), turned at the age of twenty-five from the study of the color of seawater around Baffin Island to the study of its Eskimo hunters, and later to the examination of the cultures of the Northwest coast of North America. Boas was appointed professor of anthropology at Columbia in 1899.
At heart, early professional anthropology was a scientific search for human origins and evolutionary history. Physical anthropology or paleoanthropology was, and still is, predominantly the study of the biological and anatomical origins and development of our species. Archaeology was and remains the examination of the material traces, or remnants of our ancestors' activity throughout prehistory. Cultural anthropology initially sought to understand contemporary "primitive" humanity primarily in order to comprehend Western civilization's own psychosocial origins and development. Questions concerning the origins and evolution of human thinking abilities and language are, of course, perennial and inherently compelling. During the eighteenth century, borrowing a page from Herodotus, a few French clerics and aristocrats actually pursued their curiosity about language origins to the point of taking infants (before the onset of speech) to the forest, where they were brought up in isolation, in order to see if they would spontaneously start to speak in the natural language of human kind (in the language of Adam, that is). When the anthropological pioneers received their mandate from academia, their marching orders had acquired a sense of urgency, and fieldwork among aboriginal peoples was not uncommonly referred to as "salvage" ethnology (because of our own Western tendency to eliminate, disrupt, or at least despoil what was considered to be the surviving remnants of primeval physical and psychosocial human conditions). Also, because social and cultural anthropology were born in a Victorian world of Western imperial hegemony that included semi-captive populations of third-world indigenous tribal research subjects, some scholars thought it might be possible to actually chronicle or delineate human mental, linguistic, social, and cultural evolution by studying these living aboriginal societies.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Foreword, xi,
Preface, xv,
Prologue: A Crossing, xix,
Part I: Context, xxix,
Chapter 1: An Inscrutable Foreign Other, 1,
Chapter 2: An Invisible Familiar Self, 19,
Chapter 3: The "Savage" and the "Age of Reason", 48,
Part II: Highlights, 75,
Chapter 4: Freeing Reason from Race: Franz Boas, 77,
Chapter 5: Linking Irrationality to Savages, Children, and Neurotics: Freud, 93,
Chapter 6: The Philosopher and the Prelogical Savage: Levy-Bruhl, 113,
Chapter 7: An Aristotelean Among the Azande: Evans-Pritchard, 150,
Chapter 8: Dismantling Reason and the Rational Platform of the Rationality Debate: Sartre, 190,
Chapter 9: Reason Goes Underground: Claude Lévi-Strauss, 220,
Chapter 10: The Politics of Reason: Sartre and Levi-Strauss Ratifying "The Magna Carta of Race Equality", circa 1962, 256,
Part III: The Larger Picture, 357,
Chapter 13: Hyperrationality and an Old Miscalculation of the Human Equation, 359,
Epilogue: A New Century, 391,
Bibliography, 399,
Acknowledgements, 419,
Index, 421,