david m. schneider -- (review) edward evans-pritchard. mary douglas

7/21/2019 David M. Schneider -- (Review) Edward Evans-Pritchard. Mary Douglas

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Whatever one may think of the wisdom of theundertaking, I can report that the book doescontain much of the lore of the graduate stu-

dent and young faculty subculture of the earlypostwar years, and not a little of the affect thatarose in seminars on anthropological theory inthose days. But these are retrospective ~ B M ~ ~ Y Iments, of course, and while the portraits revealsome blemishes and unsightly pores, for themost part they are rather serene likenema. in-stantly recognizable. s for the nonpersonal sideof things, there are no revelations of the sortthat will require revision of the many texts inthe history of anthropology.

Alexander Lemr offers an adulatory accountof Franz Boas as the architect of modem an-thropology and its one great theorist, a citizen-scientist, and a natural historian and empiricist.Most students will find that the discussion ofBoas as citizen-scientist contains the materialwith which they are least familiar.

For Eric Wolf, like myself, Alfred LouisKroeber was the 1iving.embodiment of Ameri-can anthropology p. 36). Wolf distilla theessential Kroeber, a natura l historian in the pre-Darwinian R I M as well as a natural historianof the superorganic. Unlike Boas, he was not acitizen-scientist, and Wolf offers abundant

evidence of Kroebers contempt for politics andhis refusal t become involved in the hues of hisday.

Stanley Diamonds portrait of Paul Radin is awork of love. The legendary quality of the manand his extraordinary c a m r are rightly empha-sized, and for those who did not know him, Dia-mond has provided an eloquent panegyric to aman who was in many ways a victim p. 97).The discussion that followa this article containsa remarkable exchange between Lesser andDiamond that makes one wish for some clarifi-

cation of the relationship between the formerand Radin.Raymond Firths amcmment of Bronislaw

Malinowski, the least biographical of the eightpieces. concentrates mainly on his theories. Itcovers much familiar ground, but it is difficultto think of another place in which so admirablysuccinct a presentation of Malinowslris mani-fold contributions to our field can be found.

Sidney Mintz accomplishes the well-nigh im-possible task of saying something new aboutRuth Benedict. In the co um of his examinationof the many ways in which she saw clearly whatmore than SO yearn later still acema problematicto many-such as the relationship between thestudy of c l w and culture, for example-he

carefully avoida a trap into which the editor hasfallen in her biographical sketch. Benedict wasnot a student of national character; she was,

aa Mintz observes, a study of national cultures.Robert Murphys article on Julian Steward is

the best of the lot. To be sure, he has some ad -vantage over the other contributors in thatSteward has not been written to death by ageneration of survey-history writers. I learnedmore about the man than I knew before, andMurphy has exercised a sure hand in placingStewards ambiguous career in proper context.

Robert Carneiro, Leslie Whites student.gives us a thoughtful appraisal of his teacherand a rather poignant picture of his last years.Carneiro and I are the same age, and it was withparticular interest that I read of the feeling ofWhites students that he spent too much time inspirited e x c h a n p with those who challengedhis views. Most of us who were students ofWhites opponents, as Carneiro calls them,felt exactly the same way. That our ancestorsleave their mark is demonstrated with greatclarity in the 40 footnotes t this paper, farmore than all the other footnotes in the bookcombined. How Leslie White would have en-joyed reading thisl

Nathaniel Tarns piece on Robert Redfield is

unlike all the others, and it is difficult for me togu ss what todays students will be able to makeof Redfield when they have read it. They maywell find the Poet more interesting than theProfessor.

That concludes this brief summary of thecelebration of the ancestral rites for some of thegreat and near-great of our profession. Thetot em never make an appearance. The propor-tion of living anthropologists who knew all ofthese people is surely very small, and it is onlythey who know what has been omitted and whatdistorted. Only the very large number who knewnone of them can finally judge the success ofthis undertaking to make the eight manifest ashuman beings whwe anthropology was shapedby their life experiences and the society andtimes in which they lived.

Edward EvanePritehard. Mary D o u g h . NewYork: Viking Press, 1980. x 151 pp. 12.95cloth),

David M . SchneiderUniversity of Chicago

This book purpom to present a brief account


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7 2 0 A M E R IC A N A N T H R P O LOCIS [83 19811

of why Evans-Pritchard is held in high esteemby showing his contributions and their relevanceto contemporary intellectual problem. It takes

its stand firmly on the ground that objectivity bpossible, that this was one of Evans-Pritchardbguiding commitments. The problem that thebook presents to the reviewer is whether it is inany ordinary acme of the term an objectivestatement of what Evans-Pritchard wrote and itssignificance.

On the accond and third p a w we are toldthat

many scholars have been tempted togive up striving for objectivity and to shifttheir o w n writing into a mystical mode, in-

dulgent to their own subjectivity. In ad-vance of this critical juncture Evans-Pritchard felt the dilemma keenly. . hedid not abandon the wkh for objective com-parison there are ways of getting validevidence.

This same position is repeated on the last page,thus bracketing the entire work. At this time,younger anthropologists, beset by philwphicalquandaries from which they s no =ape, arecontent to treat the best understanding they canreport as well-obrerved, deeply interpreted fic-

tional texts p. 135). At this point there is afootnote to Ceertz Back on page 2, Douglasproceeds by suggmting that objectivity was animportant value for Evans-Pritchard and im-plies that it is for her too. But on the same acc-ond page we learn that It is only right to saythat this is not a straight summary and mme-thing different from a synthesis. I have made apersonal reconstruction upon the writings, forc-ing them into closer confrontation with prob-l e m that were evidently present to Evans-Prit-chard. I So, after bl ati ng the doubters, thewriters of interpretation, we learn that it isperfectly all right for Mary Do u g h to do apemonal reconstruction a deeply inter-preted text, that M) but that younger anthro-poiogists like Geertz who M not that muchyounger than Douglas) should not.

Let us consider one such act of objectivity.One of the main themes of the book is that acentral problem to which Evans-Pritcharddevoted his attention was that of moral some-times social) accountability, But Evans-Pritchard nowhere WS this terml I realizedthat a name for his method was missing. A

name b a powerful concentrator of ideas. Bynaming a theory of social accountability, I canahow more cogently the methodological ad-

vances that can be built upon his work.Douglas then adds with disarming, charmingnaivete, The reader will have no difficulty, I

hope, in distinguishing the masters originalwork from the pupils presentation p. 2). Herethe point is that if this book is a personalreconstruction and that one of Evans-Pritcharda major contributions was so ill-formulated that Douglas had to find a name forit, thereby concentrating the idea, then Douglasherself has produced just the same deeply in -terpreted account of what can only be deemeda fictional text as she m fiercely decries.

Douglas says that moral and social account-ability is one of the central co nc ern in Evans-Pri tchards work and that his contribution lay intaking this as a guiding theme in t e r n of whichto conduct his fieldwork and report his ethnog-raphy. She m to me to imply that the ideawas largely original with Evans-Pritchardthough she had to give it its name). I find this

difficult to accept. Durkheim spent much of hisintellectual output demonstrating that societywas a moral aystem, that constraint could not beunderstood in strictly utilitarian terms, so hat forDouglas to fail to indicate that Durkheim wasone of the most important murces of this ideapuzzles me.

There is one interesting difference betweenDurkheims treatment of morality and its con-straining features and Evans-Pritchards. ForEvans-Pritchard, Douglas telb us, there is theimportant component of individual initiative:Society is compcwed not of ciphers but of activeagencies endowed with intelligence and will. I n-tentions create and sustain institutions p. 4). Although Durkheim certainly as I read

those texts) located the main force of social con-straint or moral accountability) within the in-dividual too, perhaps he did not stress as strong-ly as Douglas does the element of will.Whether Evans-Pritchard was so clear on thispoint as Douglas, is not clear to me.

A crucial methodological device which Evans-Pritchard is said by D o u g h to have uacd is thatof the response to mbfortune. My reading ofthis may be suspect, of course, since it is m dif-ficult to interpret texts such as Douglass. But asI understand her account, Evans-Pritchard tookthe fact that all human beings must somehowcome to t e r n with misfortune an the pivot of hiscomparative work. Closely associated, of course,is the problem of moral accountability, for one

of the questions that mbfortune nececsarilyraises is that of how to explain it and where thefinal accountability rests with a malicious


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G E N E R AL A N D T H E O R E T I C A L 721

neighbor whose witchcraft has brought aboutthe misfortune, with divine providence of somesort, or elsewhere. And here again it is made to

seemas

if this idea was first born fully formed inthe head of Evans-Pritchard.Yet one can imagine that the idea was not so

far different from what Malinowski and otherfunctionalism were doing at the time, thoughDouglas hardly mentions Malinowski and cer-tainly not as a significant influence on Evans-Pritchards thinking. These functionalists, likeDurkheim and the French School. looked to theinvariant conditions of social existence as thefoci for comparative study. For some, likeMalinowski, this meant such simple things aseating and sexual activity. For others, the fociwere those having to do with the maintenanceof the social system. Moreover, though Douglasdoes not say anything on the subject, it is saidthat Evans-Pritchard could not abide Marx orWeber. Yet surely the ideas of these men werevery much in the air at the time, and Evans-Pritchards concern with misfortune as a pivoton which his comparative work turns soundsvery much like Webers concern with ultimatevalues, for example, with the universal problemof why, as someone said, the good die youngand the evil flourish like the green bay tree. And

Marx was certainly concerned with the misfor-tunes of the working clamLet me put the matter simply. n I read this

book, Douglas talb about Bartlett as havinghad some influence on Evans-Pritchards think-ing. Even supping that this were m which Ipersonally doubt, I find it hard to understandher almost total neglect of the intellectual con-text of the times in which Evans-Pritchardworked. Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown arebarely mentioned; Durkheim is merged with theFrench school and there are mainly vaguereferences to them. The specific lines of in-fluence on Evans-Pritchardb thought areseldom clearly delineated. Was Evans-Pritchardreally sui generis, his whole lifework clearly laidout in three papers published in 1933,1934 and1936 as Douglas claims p. 25))

Not only does Douglas present Evans-Prit-chard as if he managed to do all his own think-ing almost without reference to anyone e karound, but nowhere do a she raise so much as avague question of doubt. In boldly retailingEvans-Pritchards silly equation of incest pro-hibitions with exogamy p. 80ff.) as p p e l andin failing to note iis inept attempts to accountfor the stability of Nuer mamage, to cite buttwo examples, she surely does the man a great

disservice. He was quite human after all, by nomeans infallible, and had his frailties both in-tellectual as well as penonal. His capacity for

rudeness was monumental and his scathingtongue did not endear him to all.In sum, this book is a very penonal interpre-

tation of Evans-Pritchards principal works. Itomits almost all penonal details of his life, eventhose events that might be closely related to hiswork. In my opinion, as an interpretation ofwhat was of value in Evam-Pritchards work itis one with which few will agree. The interestedreader should see the reviews of this book byBeidelman and Leach, respectively, in theTimes Literary Supplement December 12.1980) and the London Review of B o ohs 4 )December 17, 1980), as well as Beidelmans

short biography in the new 18th volume of theEncyclopedia of the Social Sciences for other in-terpretations.

Soviet and Watcrn Anthropology. ErnestGellner, ed. New York: Columbia University

Press, 1980. vii 285 pp. 37.50 cloth).

Steve RaynerR u ~ c l l age Foundation

This collection of essays originated from aconference in 1976 at which the Wenner-GrenFoundation made the bold move of bringingtogether nine prominent Soviet and ten Westernanthropologists. The tenns of reference of thatconference, chaired by Ernest Gellner. focusedon the relationship of anthropology to otherhuman sciences.

s may be expected, the Soviet participantspresent a more homogeneous approach thantheir Watern counterparts, who reflect a widerrange of interests and theoretical backgrounds.Whereas the Soviets adhere quite meticulouslyto their brief in presenting an oveMew of Sovietanthropology, the Western papers tend toreflect the more specialized fields of theirauthors. The only statements of general theoryfrom the West arc Pouillons attempt to clarifythe definition of structuralism and Godeliersreview of the major kues in the development of

French Manrist anthropology. All of the Sovietpapers, on the ocher hand, highlight the twotheoretical mainstays of Soviet anthropology,

david m. schneider -- (review) edward evans-pritchard. mary douglas

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