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

Afterword: Secrecy & Cultural Relativism

Afterword: Secrecy & Cultural Relativism
between the premodern absolutism of ritual secrecy, coded in utopian and millennial worldviews, and the neoliberal democracy that invented cultural relativism, there is the voice of anthropology. In the modern period, this voice was re›ective of the intellectual promotion of relativism—the cherishing of cultures as contextual systems of beliefs and practices, each having its own integrity and dignity, worthy of respect wherever they are found. Though many challenges to this modernist paradigm have emerged over the decades, none has been more misunderstood in anthropology than the meaning and practice of secrecy. What of the absolutist side? All-or-nothing initiation means to rule and share in secret reality—or else to be excluded and die: ritual secrecy is such a totalizing social strategy. That is the cultural lesson of these comparative ethnographies. Men employ threats and war to rule a society at war, through the production of an alternative cultural reality of initiation rituals in the nerve center of the men’s house. Such a rule is not just or democratic; it has nothing to do with the law in the neoliberal sense. It is fragile and tenuous, this hold; and so it lasted only as long as the warfare; and when colonial agents entered Melanesia these secret systems were challenged and began to dissolve through paci‹cation, missionization, and external hegemony. Cultural relativism was vital to anthropology’s scienti‹c idealization of secrecy in the comparative ethnography of New Guinea societies. The contradictions in the ways that secrecy was suspect but promoted in American government and culture as hegemonic to the cold war, the issue of 213 being a male ethnographer studying conditional masculinity that depended upon ritual secrecy in societies such as precolonial New Guinea, the social inequalities that typi‹ed these societies before and after colonialism, and the omission of sexuality, homosociality, and a concept of male desire from these ethnographies merit re›ection in this Afterword. Surely at the heart of the neoliberal worldview against secrecy is the pervasive historical attitude that secrecy is opposed to democracy, that it harbors sel‹sh, subversive, or antisocial interests in opposition to the collective good. Let us review the main reasons for these negative attitudes of Western bourgeois society. First, there is the libertarian attitude: the individualism of privacy is sacred, whereas the collective form of secrecy is perceived as a cabal that undermines free expression of individual rights and thus goes against democracy. Hence, privacy is good, secrecy bad. Second, the civilizing process can never be supported by privacy, much less secrecy; culture is public (i.e., rational), ritual is secret (i.e., irrational); therefore secrecy cannot be the basis for society or culture. Third, secrecy is a ruthless and anticivilized form of power; it is strongly associated with the “primitive” and the “unconscious,” and is thus disruptive of democracy (see chap. 2). Fourth, in science as well, where hypotheses are falsi‹able, method is public, and truth is a primary aim, “secrecy has no permanent place in this form of scienti‹c enterprise” (Mitchell 1993: 31). Democracy and civic life, in this modernist project, must be open and married to the rule of law—all that is unsecret. It is no coincidence that cultural anthropology in the United States, following the in›uence of its institutional founder, Franz Boas, and his illustrious protégés Kroeber, Sapir, Benedict, Lowie, and Mead, created a discipline committed to the ideals, if not in fact the practice, of democracy. Generally these great scholars were opposed to racism and critiqued prejudice . Of course, like all the social sciences of the times, anthropology harbored its own blind spots and elitist tendencies, including heterosexism and homophobia (Weston 1993), standard for the times. In this earlytwentieth -century scienti‹c worldview, democracy and freedom were thought to be foundational and transparent; secrecy should not play a part in any of them. The social reality was more complex. Moreover, anthropologists had staked a claim on the “culture concept,” one of the greatest orienting ideas of twentieth-century social study; and all through the period up to the end of the cold war, anthropology advanced the cause of culture as a “good thing” that was open and served as counterpoint to the 214 • secrecy and cultural reality “bad things” of the cold war itself—the culture of secrecy created through East/West antagonism in society, science, and art (Moynihan...