Local Knowledge (Text Only)

The rest of the essay then seeks to illustrate all this, first with some examples taken from the anthropological literature (Evans-Pritchard on witchcraft, Edgerton on hermaphroditism) to display the variation, and then with some features seen as distinctive of common sense in whatever clime (distrust of subtlety, exaltation of the practical, and so forth) to expose the form. The oscillation between looking particulately at particular views and defining globally the attitude that permeates them thus governs again the progress of analysis. Only here there is an attempt to push things on to broader issues: the construction of anthropological categories, the generality of their reference, and the conditions of their use.

When one turns to art these issues become, if anything, even more pointed, for the debate over whether it is an applicable category in “non-Western” or “pre-Modern” contexts has, even when compared to similar debates concerning “religion,” “science,” “ideology,” or “law,” been peculiarly unrelenting. It has also been peculiarly unproductive. Whatever you want to call a cave wall crowded with overlapping images of transfixed animals, a temple tower shaped to a phallus, a feathered shield, a calligraphic scroll, or a tattooed face, you still have the phenomenon to deal with, as well as perhaps the sense that to add kula exchange or the Domesday Book would be to spoil the series. The question is not whether art (or anything else) is universal; it is whether one can talk about West African carving, New Guinea palm-leaf painting, quattrocento picture making, and Moroccan versifying in such a way as to cause them to shed some sort of light on one another.

The essay in which I tried to do exactly this, “Art as a Cultural System,” was delivered at Johns Hopkins University as part of a wildly multidiscipli-nary symposium—Maurice Mandlebaum, Paul de Man, and Alan Dundes to Umberto Eco, Thomas Sebeok, and Roman Jakobson—on “semiotics” (the occasion being a commemoration of Charles Peirce, whom the University had at one time fired), with the result that I was almost as much concerned with how not to talk about such things—in terms of some sort of mechanical formalism—as I was with developing my own approach. In particular, the identification of semiotics, in the general sense of the science of signs, with structuralism seemed to me important to resist. (Structuralism, as a sort of high-tech rationalism, seems to me important to resist in general.) And so I employed my cases—Robert Fans Thompson’s analysis of Yoruba line, Anthony Forge’s of Abelam color, Michael Baxandall’s of Renaissance composition, and my own of Moroccan rhetoric—to suggest that the social contextualization of such “signifiers” is a more useful way to comprehend how they signify, and what, than is forcing them into schematic paradigms or stripping them down to abstract rule systems that supposedly “generate” them. What enables us to talk about them usefully together is that they all inscribe a communal sensibility, present locally to locals a local turn of mind.

Like common sense—or religion or law or even, though it is, given our predilections, a touchier matter, science—art is neither some transcendent phenomenon variously disguised in different cultures nor a notion so thoroughly culture-bound as to be useless beyond Europe. Not only Sweeney’s Law (“I gotta use words when I talk to ya”) but the simple fact that thinking of Noh plays and operas, or Shalako and L’Oiseau de feut in relation to one another seems a more profitable thing to do than to think of any of them in relation to canoe building or the Code Civil (though, remembering Zen and motorcycle maintenance, one ought not to be too sure) suggest that radical culturalism will get us nowhere. And the impossibility of collapsing these so very different things into one another at any but the most abstract, and vacuous, levels—“objects of beauty,” “affective presences,” “expressive forms”—suggests that a universalist tack is hardly more promising. The reshaping of categories (ours and other people’s—think of “taboo”) so that they can reach beyond the contexts in which they originally arose and took their meaning so as to locate affinities and mark differences is a great part of what “translation” comes to in anthropology. It is—think of what it has done to “family,” “caste,” “market,” or “state”—a great part of what anthropology comes to.

The following essay, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma,” written for a volume honoring the theoretical sociologist Edward Shils, focuses on one such usefully tortured category—along with “alienation,” “ego,” “anomie,” and, of course, “culture,” among the most useful and the most tortured in all social science—namely, “charisma.” Originally charisma was a Christian theological term having to do with a God-given capacity to perform miracles; later it was adapted by Max Weber as a label for the I-Am-The-Man type of leadership grown all too familiar in our century. Most recently, however, an excessive currency has obscured its genealogy and taken the political edge off it almost altogether, transforming it into an up-market synonym for celebrity, popularity, glamour, or sex appeal. In “Centers” I attempt to restore both the genealogy and the edge by comparing royal progresses in more or less Protestant late-Tudor England, more or less Hindu late-Majapahit Java, and more or less Muslim late-Alawite Morocco.

The juxtaposition of Elizabeth’s tours through her realm as an allegorical representation of Chastity, Peace, or Safety at Sea, Hayam Wuruk’s parades through his as the incarnation of the Sun and the Moon Shining Over the Earth-Circle, and Mulay Hasan’s expeditions through his as the material expression of Divine Will seeks, like the similarly eccentric juxtapositions in the earlier essays, to attain what generality it can by orchestrating contrasts rather than isolating regularities or abstracting types. It is analogy that informs, or is supposed to, in this sort of anthropologizing, and it is upon the capacity of theoretical ideas to set up effective analogies that their value depends. And it is this kind of analogy between, here, the cult of a Virgin Queen, of a God King, and of a Commander of the Faithful, that the concept of charisma, training our attention on the witchery of power, enables us to construct.

All this is perhaps acceptable enough for traditional monarchies, where the symbolics of domination are so elaborate and egregious; whether extending the comparison to modern states, as I do in a rather hurried and anecdotal conclusion, strains the analogy beyond reasonable bounds is a more difficult question. One may doubt that high politics have been completely demystified in such states, even that they ever will be. But the general issue that is raised by considering the matter against so panoramic a comparative background—how far a mode of analysis designed to apply to the long ago or far away can be applied to ourselves—nevertheless remains. The De Voto Problem is all too real: what, save impressionism and self-parody, plus a certain amount of ideological axe grinding, might come from anthropological discussions of modern culture?

In the final two essays—or, more accurately, an essay and a three-part mini-treatise—I turn to this problem. “The Way We Think Now” was originally given as a bicentennial address to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences under the general theme “Unity and Diversity: The Life of the Mind,” as a sort of dialectical counterpoint to one given by the artificial intelligencer Herbert Simon. Taking the charge to heart this time, and thinking about what Simon would be likely to say, I distinguished between two reasonably different approaches to the study of human “thought” currently in vogue: a unific one, which conceives of it as a psychological process, person-bounded and law governed, and a pluralistic one, which conceives of it as a collective product, culturally coded and historically constructed—thought in the head, thought in the world. Rather than trying to adjudicate between them (in their radical forms—Chomsky and Whorf—neither seems especially plausible), I first traced the tension between them as it developed in anthropology—“primitive thought,” “conceptual relativism,” and all that—to become a driving, and often enough a distorting, force in ethnological theory. Then, turning again to notions of interpretation, translation, disarrayed genres, and analogic comparison, I sought to show that the enormous diversity of modern thought as we in fact find it around us in every form from poems to equations must be acknowledged if we are to understand anything at all about the Life of the Mind, and that this can be accomplished without prejudice to the idea that human thinking has its own constraints and its own constancies.

To do this, to produce a description of modern thought that can account for the fact that such assorted enterprises as herpetology, kinship theory, fiction writing, psychoanalysis, differential topology, fluid dynamics, iconol-ogy, and econometrics can form for us any category at all, it is necessary to see them as social activities in a social world. The various disciplines and quasi-disciplines that make up the arts and sciences are, for those caught up in them, far more than a set of technical tasks and vocational obligations; they are cultural frames in terms of which attitudes are formed and lives conducted. Physics and haruspicy, sculpture and scarification are alike at least in this: for their practitioners they support particular modes of engagement with life, and for the rest of us they illustrate them. Where they differ is that, though we know at least something by now about the sorts of engagements haruspicy and scarification tend to support, physics and sculpture, and all the other grand departments of the Life of the Mind, remain for the most part ethnographically opaque, mere recognized ways of doing recognizable things.

The remainder of the essay then consists of some reflections on the specters (“subjectivism,” “idealism,” “relativism,” and the like) that academics conjure up to scare us away from an ethnographic approach to their thought; on some methods already at work in anthropology by means of which such an approach, dismissing the specters for the concoctions they are, might be practically pursued; and on the usefulness, if it is pursued, of such an approach for the construction of a more realistic model of liberal education than the Athenian gentleman one that, however disguised at either Cambridge, still predominates. But it is only in the final three essays, devoted to a particular Life of the Mind subject, namely law, and to a particular issue within that subject, namely the relation between fact finding and rule applying in adjudicative processes, that the program—seeing thoughts as choses sociales—is empirically tried out.

These essays, collectively titled “Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective,” were given as the Storrs Lectures for 1981 at the Yale Law School, and they are the only essays of those assembled here that have not been previously published. Faced with trying to imagine something properly anthropological that would be of interest to lawyers, apprentice lawyers, law teachers, and perhaps even the odd judge, I thought to discuss a topic central to both Anglo-American jurisprudence and to common law adjudication, the is/ought, what-happened/was-it-lawful distinction, and to trace its half-parallels in three other legal traditions I had encountered in the course of my own researches: the Islamic, the Indic, and the Malayo-Indonesian. The notion was, first, to examine the issue as it appears in the contemporary United States; second, to describe the quite different forms it takes in these other traditions—so different as to demand a fairly thoroughgoing reformulation of it; and then, third, to say something about the implications of such differences for the evolution of orderly adjudication in a world where, no longer confined to their classical terrains, contrasting legal traditions are being forced into the most direct and practical sorts of confrontation.

Accordingly, the lectures describe, once again, a rather dialectical movement, tacking between looking at things in lawyers’ terms and looking at them in anthropologists’ terms; between modern Western prepossessions and classical Middle Eastern and Asian ones; between law as a structure of normative ideas and law as a set of decision procedures; between pervading sensibilities and instant cases; between legal traditions as autonomous systems and legal traditions as contending ideologies; between, finally, the small imaginings of local knowledge and the large ones of cosmopolitan intent. It all looks almost experimental: an effort to assay the fact-law formula by seeing what remains of it after it has been rung through the changes of headlong comparative analysis. That much does and much does not is hardly surprising; that is how all such experiments without metrics come out. But what does remain (an accommodation of a language of general coherence and a language of practical consequence) and what does not (a social-echo view of legal process) are of perhaps a bit more interest.

In the last analysis, then, as in the first, the interpretive study of culture represents an attempt to come to terms with the diversity of the ways human beings construct their lives in the act of leading them. In the more standard sorts of science the trick is to steer between what statisticians call type-one and type-two errore—accepting hypotheses one would be better advised to reject and rejecting ones one would be wiser to accept; here it is to steer between overinterpretation and underinterpretation, reading more into things than reason permits and less into them than it demands. Where the first sort of mistake, telling stories about people only a professor can believe, has been much noted and more than a bit exaggerated, the second, reducing people to ordinary chaps out, like the rest of us, for money, sex, status, and power, never mind a few peculiar ideas that don’t mean much anyway when push comes to shove, has been much less so. But the one is as mischievous as the other. We are surrounded (and we are surrounded) neither by Martians nor by less well got-up editions of ourselves; a proposition that holds no matter what “we”—American ethnographers, Moroccan judges, Javanese metaphysicians, or Balinese dancers—we start from.

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes. If interpretive anthropology has any general office in the world it is to keep reteaching this fugitive truth.

PART I

Chapter 1 / Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought

I

A number of things, I think, are true. One is that there has been an enormous amount of genre mixing in intellectual life in recent years, and it is, such blurring of kinds, continuing apace. Another is that many social scientists have turned away from a laws and instances ideal of explanation toward a cases and interpretations one, looking less for the sort of thing that connects planets and pendulums and more for the sort that connects chrysanthemums and swords. Yet another is that analogies drawn from the humanities are coming to play the kind of role in sociological understanding that analogies drawn from the crafts and technology have long played in physical understanding. Further, I not only think these things are true, I think they are true together; and it is the culture shift that makes them so that is my subject: the refiguration of social thought.

This genre blurring is more than just a matter of Harry Houdini or Richard Nixon turning up as characters in novels or of midwestern murder sprees described as though a gothic romancer had imagined them. It is philosophical inquiries looking like literary criticism (think of Stanley Cavell on Beckett or Thoreau, Sartre on Flaubert), scientific discussions looking like belles lettres morceaux (Lewis Thomas, Loren Eiseley), baroque fantasies presented as deadpan empirical observations (Borges, Barthelme), histories that consist of equations and tables or law court testimony (Fogel and Engerman, Le Roi Ladurie), documentaries that read like true confessions (Mailer), parables posing as ethnographies (Castenada), theoretical treatises set out as travelogues (Lévi-Strauss), ideological arguments cast as historiographical inquiries (Edward Said), epistemological studies constructed like political tracts (Paul Feyerabend), methodological polemics got up as personal memoirs (James Watson). Nabokov’s Pale Fire, that impossible object made of poetry and fiction, footnotes and images from the clinic, seems very much of the time; one waits only for quantum theory in verse or biography in algebra.

Of course, to a certain extent this sort of thing has always gone on—Lucretius, Mandeville, and Erasmus Darwin all made their theories rhyme. But the present jumbling of varieties of discourse has grown to the point where it is becoming difficult either to label authors (What is Foucault—historian, philosopher, political theorist? What Thomas Kuhn—historian, philosopher, sociologist of knowledge?) or to classify works (What is George Steiner’s After Babel—linguistics, criticism, culture history? What William Gass’s On Being Blue—treatise, causerie, apologetic?). And thus it is more than a matter of odd sports and occasional curiosities, or of the admitted fact that the innovative is, by definition, hard to categorize. It is a phenomenon general enough and distinctive enough to suggest that what we are seeing is not just another redrawing of the cultural map—the moving of a few disputed borders, the marking of some more picturesque mountain lakes—but an alteration of the principles of mapping. Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think.

We need not accept hermetic views of écriture as so many signs signing signs, or give ourselves so wholly to the pleasure of the text that its meaning disappears into our responses, to see that there has come into our view of what we read and what we write a distinctly democratical temper. The properties connecting texts with one another, that put them, ontologically anyway, on the same level, are coming to seem as important in characterizing them as those dividing them; and rather than face an array of natural kinds, fixed types divided by sharp qualitative differences, we more and more see ourselves surrounded by a vast, almost continuous field of variously intended and diversely constructed works we can order only practically, relationally, and as our purposes prompt us. It is not that we no longer have conventions of interpretation; we have more than ever, built—often enough jerry-built—to accommodate a situation at once fluid, plural, uncentered, and ineradicably untidy.

So far as the social sciences are concerned, all this means that their oft-lamented lack of character no longer sets them apart. It is even more difficult than it always has been to regard them as underdeveloped natural sciences, awaiting only time and aid from more advanced quarters to harden them, or as ignorant and pretentious usurpers of the mission of the humanities, promising certainties where none can be, or as comprising a clearly distinctive enterprise, a third culture between Snow’s canonical two. But that is all to the good: freed from having to become taxonomically upstanding, because nobody else is, individuals thinking of themselves as social (or behavioral or human or cultural) scientists have become free to shape their work in terms of its necessities rather than according to received ideas as to what they ought or ought not to be doing. What Clyde Kluckhohn once said about anthropology—that it’s an intellectual poaching license—not only seems more true now than when he said it, but true of a lot more than anthropology. Born omniform, the social sciences prosper as the condition I have been describing becomes general.

It has thus dawned on social scientists that they did not need to be mimic physicists or closet humanists or to invent some new realm of being to serve as the object of their investigations. Instead they could proceed with their vocation, trying to discover order in collective life, and decide how what they were doing was connected to related enterprises when they managed to get some of it done; and many of them have taken an essentially hermeneutic—or, if that word frightens, conjuring up images of biblical zealots, literary humbugs, and Teutonic professors, an “interpretive”—approach to their task. Given the new genre dispersion, many have taken other approaches: structuralism, neo-positivism, neo-Marxism, micro-micro descriptivism, macro-macro system building, and that curious combination of common sense and common nonsense, sociobiology. But the move toward conceiving of social life as organized in terms of symbols (signs, representations, signifiants, Darstellungen . . . the terminology varies), whose meaning (sense, import, signification, Bedeutung . . . ) we must grasp if we are to understand that organization and formulate its principles, has grown by now to formidable proportions. The woods are full of eager interpreters.

Interpretive explanation—and it is a form of explanation, not just exalted glossography—trains its attention on what institutions, actions, images, utterances, events, customs, all the usual objects of social-scientific interest, mean to those whose institutions, actions, customs, and so on they are. As a result, it issues not in laws like Boyle’s, or forces like Volta’s, or mechanisms like Darwin’s, but in constructions like Burckhardt’s, Weber’s, or Freud’s: systematic unpackings of the conceptual world in which condottiere, Calvinists, or paranoids live.

The manner of these constructions itself varies: Burckhardt portrays, Weber models, Freud diagnoses. But they all represent attempts to formulate how this people or that, this period or that, this person or that makes sense to itself and, understanding that, what we understand about social order, historical change, or psychic functioning in general. Inquiry is directed toward cases or sets of cases, and toward the particular features that mark them off; but its aims are as far-reaching as those of mechanics or physiology: to distinguish the materials of human experience.

With such aims and such a manner of pursuing them come as well some novelties in analytical rhetoric, the tropes and imageries of explanation. Because theory, scientific or otherwise, moves mainly by analogy, a “seeingas” comprehension of the less intelligible by the more (the earth is a magnet, the heart is a pump, light is a wave, the brain is a computer, and space is a balloon), when its course shifts, the conceits in which it expresses itself shift with it. In the earlier stages of the natural sciences, before the analogies became so heavily intramural—and in those (cybernetics, neurology) in which they still have not—it has been the world of the crafts and, later, of industry that have for the most part provided the well-understood realities (well-understood because, certum quod factum, as Vico said, man had made them) with which the ill-understood ones (ill-understood because he had not) could be brought into the circle of the known. Science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science; without the dyer’s art there would be no chemistry; metallurgy is mining theorized. In the social sciences, or at least in those that have abandoned a reductionist conception of what they are about, the analogies are coming more and more from the contrivances of cultural performance than from those of physical manipulation—from theater, painting, grammar, literature, law, play. What the lever did for physics, the chess move promises to do for sociology.

Promises are not always kept, of course, and when they are, they often turn out to have been threats; but the casting of social theory in terms more familiar to gamesters and aestheticians than to plumbers and engineers is clearly well under way. The recourse to the humanities for explanatory analogies in the social sciences is at once evidence of the destabilization of genres and of the rise of “the interpretive turn,” and their most visible outcome is a revised style of discourse in social studies. The instruments of reasoning are changing and society is less and less represented as an elaborate machine or a quasi-organism and more as a serious game, a sidewalk drama, or a behavioral text.