Popular Anthropology and the State: David Maybury-Lewis and Pluralism

In 1982, David Maybury-Lewis convened a plenary session of the American Ethnological Society on the theme “The Prospects for Plural Societies” and in 1984 published an edited volume of essays of the same name from the symposium. As a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard, I worked as David Maybury-Lewis’s research assistant and helped to organize the meetings and edit the papers; as a postgraduate in 1991, I contributed research to David’s public television series and book, Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World. He was a supportive mentor and a meticulous editor, setting a high bar for the correct use of language and avoidance of professional jargon and academic obfuscation of any kind. The two projects, separated by a decade but also linked in their objectives, do, I think, contribute a substantive sense of Maybury-Lewis’s career as a public intellectual who was committed to reaching well beyond the boundaries of academia’s ivory tower.

The theme of “Plural Societies,” already topical in 1982, was prescient given the rising tempo of ethno-political conflict during the last twenty years of the century. Maybury-Lewis aimed to collect an international group of scholars to cover a broad spectrum of geographical cases (Indonesia, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, China, the Pacific Islands, South Asia, Africa) from diverse national perspectives. M.G. Smith’s The Plural Society in the British West lndies (1965) and Fredrik Barth’s Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969) were already part of the anthropological canon. Both authors contributed essays to the book, and their approach to ethnicity was comparative and constructionist. In his introduction, Maybury-Lewis cited Joan Vincent’s apt characterization of ethnicity as an “ascriptive mask of confrontation;” ethnicity was to be understood, he argued, “as a latent qualification to be circumstantially activated” (ibid.: 5) under political conditions which facilitate or indeed demand it.

For his own part, Maybury-Lewis was specifically motivated by concern over the physical survival and crises of political and cultural identity of indigenous groups in the Americas. Through his work with the non-governmental organization Cultural Survival,¹ he was engaged by the debates among indigenous leaders about political strategy. “I became aware,” he wrote, “that many of the tribal and traditional societies which Cultural Survival seeks to assist are deeply pessimistic about the ability of people to live together in multiethnic states” (1984:1). He understood that a history of genocide and betrayal led disenfranchised peoples to be skeptical about pluralist solutions and to demand autonomy and statehood, but he was opposed to separatism on both ideological and pragmatic grounds. Human beings, he argued, must “find ways to live together in multiethnic states on the basis of mutual tolerance and respect” because there is no acceptable alternative. Most importantly, the pragmatic chances for a geopolitics of indigenous microstates were then, as now, less than negligible in “a world comprised of [existing] states. . .extremely protective of their sovereignty” (1984:1).

Maybury Lewis’ orientation towards a cultural rather than purely institutional approach to ethnicity is clear in the arguments he offered in 1984. Interestingly, Fredrik Barth also focused on cultural “traditions” in his contribution on Oman rather than, as in earlier work, on boundary definition and group maintenance. Barth writes:

We’ve been asked by the convener to address questions such as the situation of tribal peoples and nation-states; the criteria for evaluating the success of ethnic groups in minority positions; and the possibilities, constraints, and impediments to various forms of pluralism entailed in the structure of modern societies. Under each of these headings, it seems to me, we need to discuss not just the relations and reproduction of social categories but the conditions for the perpetuation of cultural traditions and ways of life. For that purpose we need concepts that allow us to inquire into the content and changing forms of these ways of life. . .of the interrelations and conditions of perpetuation of cultures, not just social identities.

(1984:77)

M. G. Smith also emphasized—for different purposes—the distinction between...