Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork

"FACTS ARE A WORD OF GOD": An Essay Review of James Clifford's Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World

"FACTS ARE A WORD OF GOD" An Essay Review ofJames Clifford's Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World* PAUL RABINOW This is an important book. It is well-crafted, affording us a sensitive and intelligent presentation of complex issues by an acute and learned observer. It does its historical and biographical job of restoring to his proper station an important figure in modem anthropology; a sort of historical justice is accomplished . And it poses an open-ended challenge, an invitation, to rethink our received understandings of twentieth-century anthropology. Clifford violates a number of taboos, idees re~ues, and thereby opens in a constructive fashion a range of issues and possible future developments. There are a number of points in the book about which serious debate is possible. It hesitates. But it is exactly at those points of hesitation that important and unresolved questions are posed. The book hovers between an excellent, but rather standard biographical form, and a post-structuralist intercalation of mixed genres of texts and voices, between a successful st,,~,dard historical approach and a more dangerous post-modem one whose claims to "Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Paul Rabinow is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University ofCalifornia, Berkek:y. His works include Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco and (with Hubert Dreyfus) Miche. Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. His current research is on urban planning, social science, and political strategies in the French colonies, focussing on the career of Lyautey in Vietnam, Madagascar, and Morocco. 196 "FACTS ARE A WORD OF GOD"; AN ESSAY REVIEW 197 traditional standards are less secure, but whose claims to creativity are stronger. The tension is not fully resolved; the book's ethos is in the second camp and its form and most of its content are in the first. A certain tentativeness, however, is certainly preferable to a false closure. Maurice Leenhardt, Clifford's protagonist, was born in 1878 into a devout provincial Protestant family headed by a pastor-cum-geologist. His youth parallels that of the Third Republic, although the conflicts of religion and science, local affinities and national consolidation, colonial expansion and internal implantation and reform which racked the Republic were characteristically muted by the Leenhardt family. These seemingly polar opposites were turned from antagonistic, negating alternatives, into complexes of mutually invigorating relations through which character was shaped and an unequivocally public persona forged. The universalism of science and the particularities of locale, the universalism of an ethical calling and the need to accept the particularities of individual conscience, were both highly formative, mutually supporting, contrasts in Leenhardt's youth. He saw them, however, not as strict separations, but as a field of differences to grow in. Leenhardt never rebelled directly against his father's synthesis. But he did reinterpret these imperatives in his own fashion, emphasizing and developing different dimensions of the relational oppositions that characterized his milieu. In this Protestant family, character formation was a central duty. This is not to say that Leenhardt's youth was without conflict. Living up to his father's scientific and ethical standards was not easy. Leenhardt failed his baccalaureat twice, obviously a shock and source of shame for a member of a bourgeois family. His father, with some reluctance, sent the young man away to Paris to a Protestant preparatory school, fearing the boy would be tempted by the worldly aestheticism of the capital. He wasn't. But he did hate the austerity of the school and its dry, pedantic exercises. Rather than rejecting them, however, he was led to a search for more redeeming features within the Protestant institutional world. He discovered these in the Maison des Missions, home of the Societe des Missions Evangeliques, a non-denominational and multinational society devoted to converting the heathen. Like many other young people Leenhardt was fascinated by the reports and displays of exotic cultures he encountered at the Maison, which opened for him a model of missionary activity and a career based on "the primary role of native Christian pastors and laity and a commitment to linguistic sophistication and translation" (23). After a meeting with two articulate and dignified Malagasy ministers, he felt that he had found a form in which his own sensibilities and talents could flourish. After passing his hac in 1898, Leenhardt appiied for a position in New Caledonia. Because of his inexperience, he was accepted only with reluc- 198 PAUL RABINOW tance...