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Introduction: Culture by Contrast and Theory in Anthropology
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Introduction Culture by Contrast and Theory in Anthropology One of the most influential anthropologists in recent memory, Clifford Geertz, said that cultural anthropology is the study of people living in “out of the way places.” For Geertz, it was because anthropologists studied people far away from the taken-for-granted of their own world that anthropology had something crucial to contribute to our collective understanding of humanity. In an earlier, more innocent era, anthropologists wrote books about “the savage mind,” about the “sexual lives of savages” or “primitive government” or “primitive religion.” They used these terms—primitive or savage—not to be pejorative, but to provide alternative visions about what it means to be human for people in societies (such as ours) who consider themselves to be civilized. Civilized people, then and today, like savages. They wish they were still like them. They wish they were still as close to nature, to each other, and to God as are savages. But civilized people also hate savages—or at least look down on them—for their slavish superstitions, for their filthiness, for their unruliness. Savages are us, by way of contrast. For several centuries—at least since Thomas Hobbes and later Jean-Jacques Rousseau, not to mention explorers and missionaries in the Age of Discovery— people of Europe and in nation-states made by Europeans have discovered in the contrast between themselves and the savage a way of illustrating the power of society to shape human behavior and belief. For philosophers such as Hobbes and Rousseau, savages were their warped mirror. Hobbes used savages to assert that humans in a state of nature would be fearful of and violent toward one another. Life would be nasty, brutish, and short as a result. Society, he argued, required some kind of centralized authority with the power to enforce rules, or order, so that otherwise selfish and shortsighted humans could survive and thrive. Rousseau, by contrast, used what Europeans in the Americas were learning about savages to claim that humans in a state of nature, or close to it, were 1 Anthropology and Egalitarianism 2 altruistic and cooperative. Civilization warped the naturally salutary proclivities of humans, corrupting them, making them greedy and self-regarding. Rousseau looked into the warped mirror of primitive people and saw a noble savage. Hobbes saw a savage beast. From so-called primitive people they each extrapolated a theory of human nature and an argument for or against particular kinds of social orders. Other influential Europeans, from the Enlightenment up through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth—from Marx to Durkheim and Freud— used savages and primitive societies in similar ways. When they looked into that mirror, they saw either what they had escaped from, emerged out of, left behind, or lost. But above all they saw the power of social forces to mold and shape human beings in a variety of ways, because whatever their attitudes toward savages, whether they felt a certain longing for a lost way of life or a sense of superiority made all the more profound by the savage’s abjection, they recognized a common humanity. If savages differed, it was because of differing social circumstances. Indeed, the modern idea of “culture” as Americans tend to use that term— that there are plural cultures much as there are plural personalities—is an extension and transformation of this long Western meditation on the savage, that person who is so different, yet nevertheless the same. Indeed, because Americans value pluralism and tend to tolerate difference, we hardly use the word “savage” anymore. It is too nakedly pejorative. So instead Americans talk about different cultures. We use the word culture constantly. Nowadays when Americans talk about how the Internet has “changed our culture,” or that “the culture” of this corporation is not in sync with “the culture” of that one, or that this grocery store chain outperforms that one because it is selling a “whole culture” rather than merely food items, Americans are using a concept that emerges out of the modern West’s collective encounters with and conversations about the savage. We are all, in this sense, anthropologists now. In this book, I explore how people in the West and in America became anthropologists in order to retrieve the reasons why anthropology is so important as a mode of understanding what we think it means to be human. In doing so I will also show how professional anthropology as a discipline of study differs from what...