Secrecy and Cultural Reality: Utopian Ideologies of the New Guinea Men's House

1. Lewis Henry Morgan & Victorian Secret Societies

chapter 1 Lewis Henry Morgan & Victorian Secret Societies
it is not commonly known that, as a young man, Lewis Henry Morgan enjoyed the intimacy of male secrecy at a time when the ground between public and private cultural spaces was unstable and secret societies produced trust and mistrust between the men who occupied their reality. Morgan—the nineteenth-century lawyer whose investigation of Iroquois social organization in upstate New York is critical to the development of anthropology in the United States—created, occupied, and subsequently abandoned men’s secret societies. Secrecy was a condition of Morgan’s masculinity, sexuality, and sociality, as it was for other men of his time; however, unlike his peers, he was instrumental in founding a number of secret societies, in addition to participating in several within Native American culture. Morgan’s story, recounted here, provides insight in understanding ritual secrecy and the role of anthropology in the more exotic New Guinea men’s clubhouse societies. In detailing this little-known theme in the life of Morgan, it is not my intention to suggest that he “caused” anthropology to handle the subject of secrecy in a particular way. Nor am I interested in tracing the impact of Morgan’s work upon ensuing theories of secrecy; that is the subject of an entirely different book. Morgan’s life and work—so ordinary, yet so remarkable—shows that ritual secrecy was an uncommonly popular solution to collective problems of nineteenth-century society, especially in men’s lives. Examining the role of clandestine men’s clubs and secret fraternities in Morgan’s time not only disproves the historically dubious idea that secrecy is a sham, it also clari‹es how secrecy was once at the forefront of public concern in regard to changing gender roles and religious beliefs, rather than being caught up in the domain of individual rights and confessions, as it is in the tabloid culture of today. The men of Victorian-era America lived with their own personal and political concerns about secret societies, which share almost nothing in common with our late-modern prejudices, as we shall see. A study of Morgan’s participation in men’s secret clubs reveals the basis of how anthropology and the social sciences have viewed ritual secrecy in non-Western societies. Moreover, it deepens our understanding of the complexity of the subject, since Morgan and his contemporaries were themselves skeptical toward and uncomfortable with these pervasive men’s secret societies, even as they became fashionable among Victorian men. Secrecy in the Victorian age was not purely concerned with political activities, as it was during the cold war. In the latter case, outcry against secrecy was based on the fear of in‹ltration by “communists” and their agents in international espionage networks. At the same time, secrecy was not restricted to the realm of the purely personal, as in present-day tabloid scandals, Twelve Step programs and encounter groups, or television talk shows where the narrative of self-revelation identi‹es stories of secrecy, personal growth, and individual failure or success. Instead, the Victorians were preoccupied by social anxieties that were as much political as personal when it came to secrecy. In this respect, Morgan was not unique in his cultural experience of ritual secrecy; rather, his life experience embodied the principles of ritual secrecy and re›ected the problems of his historical era. This revisionist view necessitates an experience-near theory of how secrecy is formulated and re›ected back into sociocultural theory and methodology in the present day. Rarely, if ever, have social scientists— those who have had the most to say about secrecy in cultural studies— either experienced secrecy as a profound (not trivial) way of being or lived with the presence of institutional secrecy pervading their adult lives, unless it has been in the context of ‹eldwork or some other kind of research study. In historical context, secrecy and passing were problems related to outgroup stigma and impression management, as famously outlined by Erving Goffman (1963), and tended to be limited to institutionalized populations —both criminal and medical—and, of course, closeted homosexuals, whose sexual desires were silenced and punished by their society. However , these experiences were largely ignored or dismissed by academics and 2 • secrecy and cultural reality never brought into the process of theory formation, at least not openly. Today, a number of lesbian and gay anthropologists who grew up concealing their...