Anthropology, Primitivism, Myth Jeremy MacClancy The protagonist is worried. His friend’s leg is gangrenous and they are high in the Andes. They ride slowly in the direction of a distant hospital. Within two hours they meet, by chance, an English doctor who is also, by chance, an anthropologist. After amputating the leg he talks: ‘Savage societies are simply civilized societies with the lid off. We can learn to understand them fairly easily. And when we’ve learnt to understand savages, we’ve learnt, as we discover, to understand the civilized. And that’s not all. Savages are usually hostile and suspicious. The anthropologist has got to learn to overcome that hostility and suspicion. And when he’s learnt that, he’s learnt the whole secret of politics.’ ‘Which is. . .?’ ‘That if you treat other people well, they’ll treat you well.’ ‘You’re a bit optimistic, aren’t you?’ ‘No. In the long run,’ said (the now one-legged) Mark impatiently, ‘we shall all be dead. What about the short run?’ ‘You’ve got to take a risk.’ ‘But Europeans aren’t like your Sunday-school savages. It’ll be an enormous risk.’ ‘Possibly. But always smaller than the risk you run by treating people badly and goading them into a war. Besides, they’re not worse than savages. They’ve just been badly handled--need a bit of anthropology, that’s all.’ Most of our themes are already here: the value of cross-cultural comparison, to illluminate our understanding of Western ways; the potential of the subject to help heal the ills of Western society; the anthropologist as itinerant intellectual, able to straddle worlds and bring back reports from the other side. All that is missing is the capacity of anthropology to expand our sense of cultural diversity. By the 1930s anthropology had become an accepted part of life for broad sections of the British public, a relatively common topic for gay conversation by the lighthearted and a source for rumination by the more seriously-inclined. For Huxley (the quote is from Eyeless in Gaza), it was quite plausible that his isolated protagonist might meet a thinking doctor spouting his own, idiosyncratic version of the discipline. His readers would not be disoriented rather, entertained; maybe even educated a little. In this chapter I wish to explore how and why, in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first ones of the twentieth, anthropology rose from almost nothing to this level of widespread popularity. I wish also to examine the diversity of ways anthropological ideas, exempla, models and approaches were appropriated and exploited by modernist novelists and painters during this period. The ways they used this material were strikingly diverse, for not all were as optimistic as Huxley about the therapeutic value of the discipline. Only some had so kindly a vision of other ways of life. Anthropologists In Britain an anthropology recognizable as such to modern practitioners arose in the mid-nineteenth century as a belated consequence of the anti-slavery movement. From the beginning, its supporters were keen to promote their subject broadly. The Ethnological Society of London, founded in 1844, made its sole object the promotion and diffusion of ethnological knowledge. It held both special meetings, where 'popular' topics were discussed, and ordinary meetings, at which 'scientific' subjects were debated in more technical terms. The Society amalgamated with another learned body in 1869 to form the Anthropological Institute. Its leaders came from dissenting middle-class families, upheld liberal, humanitarian, and utilitarian ideals, and maintained the utopian belief that the sustained efforts of education and science would result in a better society. Evolutionists avant la lettre, they were happy to espouse Darwinianism when The Origin of the Species was later published. All the members of this fledgling Institute were however gentlemen amateurs or professionals engaged in other areas of scholarly or scientific activity. None of them regarded themselves exclusively as 'anthropologists' but as intellectuals who occasionally studied anthropological themes. Those whom we may regard as the first true anthropological professionals only emerged in the last decades of the century, from the small group of full-time paid curators entrusted with the care of ethnographic collections. Some anthropologists of this general period, from the mid-Victorian to the close of the Edwardian eras, classified their work as either 'technical' or 'popular', but the distinction between these categories was usually negligible. Though some of their writings might assume more knowledge on the readers' part than others, almost everything they wrote could be understood by any informed person of their time. Several anthropologists of this period were particularly skilful at spreading the word, mainly because they wrote well, wrote and reviewed for a variety of major periodicals, produced popular books, and lectured widely. They were virtually obliged to do all this if they wished to keep the subject alive as the government, despite repeated appeals, refused to fund anthropological endeavours. These successful anthropologists were able to sell so many books and to fill lecture-halls so easily because, above all, they contributed to one of the great public debates of their time: the status and practical consequences of evolutionary theory. For instance Edward Tylor, who held a personal chair at Oxford and was praised for his ‘convincing method of exposition’ and the clarity of his writing, propounded that social difference was not due to biology (i.e. ‘race’) but to culture, and that all societies on earth were progressing, albeit at different rates, through the same general processes of evolutionary development. Australian Aboriginals were usually placed at the bottom of this evolutionary ladder; northwestern Europeans were always at its top. Tylor proclaimed anthropology a 'reformer's science' which could be employed, among other ways, to identify illiberal survivals fit only for elimination. Though his immediate influence was so great that some even called anthropology ‘Mr Tylor’s science’, his subsequent reputation has since been completely overshadowed by that of his illustrious successor, Sir James G. Frazer. Frazer remains today the most famous, and certainly the most financially successful, of all British anthropologists ever. His books are still in print and his influence astonishingly widespread. His ideas have made themselves felt in almost every area of the humanities and the social sciences as well as within literature. Indeed Lionel Trilling once claimed that ‘perhaps no book has had so decisive an effect upon modern literature as Frazer’s’. By the 1920s it had become essential reading for anyone with claims to an education or a critical attitude to life; hundreds wrote to its author thanking him for opening their eyes and changing their lives. Even by 1910 R.R.Marrett, an Oxford anthropologist, was able to complain how fashionable Frazer and his peers had made the subject: To show that Anthropology is becoming popular is, perhaps, superfluous. The fact is almost painfully borne in upon anyone who has allowed his anthropological leanings to become known to the world. Every headmaster would nowadays have you down to lecture to his boys. A provincial town will muster in hundreds to hear you discourse on totems and taboos. At the most old-fashioned of our Universities the youth of the nation delight in comparing the habits of primitive man with their own. In short, Anthropology is the latest form of evening entertainment. Marrett, R.R. 1910 ‘The present state of anthropology’, The Athenaeum 4298, March 12, pp. 299—300 Part of the reason for Frazer's remarkable success was his ability to convey his views, without distorting them, in a language free of technical jargon and obscure expression. Preferring eloquent elegy to clumsily-formulated dogma, he did not present his arguments in a doctrinaire manner, but skilfully blended modesty of statement with a grand literary style, one sprung with Biblical and Latinate rhythms. The weighty result he leavened with irony, humour, and an artful, sustained use of concrete imagery. Frazer, in other words, was not trying to batter his readers with the power of bald logic, but to persuade them with the appeal of his rhetoric. As the record of his sales shows, if he did not always manage to win over his enormous audience, at the very least they were prepared to read his words. In the 1910s alone over 35,000 copies were printed of each of the twelve volumes of the third edition. The custom which initially stung his interest was one from classical antiquity, from the temple of Aricia southeast of Rome. There, in a sacred grove dedicated to Diana, a man could only assume its priesthood by first plucking the ‘golden bough’ and then killing the incumbent. Of course, once the deed was done, the slayer had to live with the knowledge he would in turn and time be slain by his own successor. He laid bare his plan for the book in a letter to his publisher: By an application of the Comparative Method I believe I can make it probable that the priest represented the god of the grove and that his slaughter was regarded as the death of the god. This raises the question of a wide-spread custom of killing men and animals regarded as divine. I have collected many examples of this custom and proposed a new explanation of it. The Golden Bough, I believe I can show, was the mistletoe, and the whole legend can, I think be brought into connexion, on the one hand with the Druidical reverence for the mistletoe, and on the other with the Norse legend of the Balder. Of the exact way in which I connect the Golden Bough with the Priest of Aricia I shall only say that in explaining it I am led to propose a new explanation of the meaning of totemism. This is the bare outline of the book which, whatever may be thought of its theories, will be found to contain a very large store of very curious customs, many of which may be new even to professed anthropologists. The resemblance of the savage customs and ideas to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity is striking. But I make no reference to this parallelism, leaving my readers to draw their own conclusions, one way or the other. Letter 11 viii 1889, to George Macmillan, in the Macmillan Archive, British Museum; quoted in Stocking 1996: 138—39 Frazer has here summarized many of his main aims and methods: the concerns with divine kingship; re-birth through slaughter; vegetative symbolism; the extremely delicate handling of otherwise disturbing parallels; the explanation of one rite, symbol or myth by comparative analogy with a similar cultural facet from anywhere on the globe; a keen awareness of his need to win, and keep, a public. Magic and religion, no matter how seemingly ‘primitive’, were to be seen as logical in process, though based on faulty reasoning. His comparativism he underpinned with a thoroughgoing intellectualism: he imputed the reasoning of indigenes when performing any kind of rite or custom and tried to persuade readers of his explanations by their inherent plausibility. Evans-Pritchard, the great British anthropologist of the 1950s and ‘60s, termed this intellectualist manner of imputation and overstress on the role of deliberate reasoning as an ‘If-I-were-a-horse’ style of explanation. Frazer’s accomplishment was a complex one, for his sprawling yet ultimately unified work, achieves multiple aims. First and foremost, The Golden Bough is an astonishingly broad compendium of both ethnographic and folkloric data, held together by his version of the comparative method. Secondly, his trawl through this data is presented as a voyage of discovery, the sprawling text framed by a narrative of travel and exploration. Thirdly, in a highly indirect manner, The Golden Bough addressed many of the central issues of its time: questions about the status of religion, the value of empire and industry, the role of the classical past, as well as the nature of the domestic and the sexual, the rural and the urban. Fourthly, by an encyclopaedic display of supposedly primitive customs, Frazer demonstrated how far civilized humans had come. Yet, by providing much harsh evidence of contemporary barbarity both abroad and at home, he at the same time tempered any blind faith in progress. Frazer at times worked together with his academic contemporaries in what was known as the ‘ritualist school’ of anthropologically informed classicists, led by Jane Harrison, F.M.Cornford and Gilbert Murray. To Frazer, following Tylor, myths were post hoc rationalizations, used to explain rituals whose original meaning had been long forgotten. Harrison extended this idea by applying evolutionist approaches to classical material. She argued that myth arose out of rite, and not vice versa; that it was ‘the spoken correlative of the acted rite’; that it was not anything else or of any other origin. She underpinned these ideas with her developmental conception of rites dying out while myths continued in religion, literature and art. As an ancient rite over time became ever more misunderstood, the associated myth, freed from its origin, could become attached to historical events or people, or come to be used as a scientific or aetiological explanation of nature. Over the course of the 1910s she and her colleagues extended the application of these ideas to all branches of the arts in the classical world. By the 1920s however all this kind of anthropology was rapidly becoming obsolete within academia; evolutionism, though still popular, was coming under increasing attack. Frazer was gaining critics as well as fans. One anthropologist described his technique of ‘chopping up’ cultures, taking bits from a variety of ethnographic sources and then putting them together in the literary form of a workable, living whole as Frankensteinian in nature. A key catalyst of this change was a Polish expatriate, Bronislaw Malinowski, who in 1918 had returned to London after several years living on an island off Papua New Guinea. A tireless and skilled promoter of both himself and the discipline, Malinowski soon persuaded his students of the value of a self-defined modern form of exclusively social anthropology, one marked off from historically related endeavours. His key innovation was the necessity of ‘fieldwork’, of intensive ‘participant-observation’ for a prolonged period living with the people being studied. From now on, no self-respecting or respected anthropologist could leave collection of data to others, whether learned missionary or perspicacious colonial officer, nor could they ‘cut and paste’ information culled from many different societies. Instead they had to concentrate on studying cultures one by one, as unities in themselves. In the process Malinowski helped engender the successful image of ‘the anthropologist as hero’, as plucky intellectual not scared of going into the bush for the sake of coming home with the data. This attractive image of bold anthropologists going where no highbrows had pussyfoot before helped secure the popularity of the discipline for new generations of the educated public. Malinowski also helped change the dominant literary style of anthropology. Frazer and his peers had tried in their writings to establish a closeness between themselves and their readers. In contrast, Malinowski and his students wished to bracket off their ethnography as a professionally distinct form of intellectual exercise. By using their experience of fieldwork as a legitimating device, they created simultaneously a distance between themselves and their readers, and a closeness between themselves and the societies they studied. Tylor, Frazer and others of their general period spoke as though from their armchairs, to people who were in a similar position. Malinowski and his colleagues spoke as though from the village hut, to people who had never been in a similar position. Yet the number of anthropologists was still so low that those of the interwar generation, like their predecessors, had to write their books with both academic and non-academic audiences in mind. To that extent the functionalist ethnographies of the 1920s and ‘30s may be regarded as works of 'popular' (i.e. relatively non-technical) anthropology. On his return from his Trobriand Island fieldwork, the then unknown anthropologist had tried to establish his reputation--and make a little money--by writing a readable book acceptable to a commercial publisher. Malinowski toyed with calling it ‘Kula: South Sea Enterprise and Adventure’ or ‘Kula: a South Sea Adventure’, before deciding on the far more catchy and marketable Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Despite his avowed concern to write a new kind of ethnography, the continuities with Frazer (who supplied its foreword) are still plain: the classical allusion in the title, the framing of the work as a voyage of discovery, his concern to describe local life with ‘vividness and colour’. Soon afterwards, Malinowski attempted to revise Freud, by using the evidence of his Trobriand material to question the supposed universality of the Oedipus complex. Though orthodox Freudians summarily rebuffed his challenge to their position, his controversial endeavour ensured his views would become slogans of progressive morality and education. Thanks to such tactics Malinowski helped enable a vision of anthropology as an integral part of the British interwar avant-garde. Primitivisms, Myths Both these terms are so very usefully vague that I leave to others the usually sterile task of defining either. Instead I wish to sketch the ways key modernist writers have used anthropological writings for ends which commentators have marked as ‘primitivist’ or ‘mythopoeic’. To start, let us look at long-held images of ‘the primitive’ (here referring to non-Western, pre-industrial peoples and their ways of life). It seems that from the earliest explorations of Africa and the Americas, tales of indigenous customs and attitudes excited a complex reaction in Westerners: on the one hand, fear and horror at their supposed licentiousness, heathenism and violence; on the other, interest blending into admiration for their communal life and apparent ability to live in harmony with nature. These mirror images of the ‘ignoble’ and ‘noble savage’ are of course primarily Western constructions which tell us far, far more about contemporary Western concerns than about the ways indigenes actually led their lives. For those keen to denounce the ignoble, deployment of the ‘primitive’ was primarily a way to underline, laud and legitimate their conception of civilization. Fundamentalist preachers, missionaries and colonial apologists were among the more common exploiters of this strategy. In contrast, for those happy to praise contented indigenes lounging in Arcadia, contemplation of the ‘primitive’ was a lever for questioning the dominant Western values of the day. These eulogists sought inspiration, or confirmation of the need for social, political and personal transformation in the striking image of indigenes who seemed to have found their own paradise on earth. The key modernist writers on whom I wish to concentrate would have rejected this simple-minded dichotomy. They did not denigrate indigenous difference in an ignorant fashion but nor did they succumb to seductive visions of an Eden elsewhere on earth. Some of them, deeply unhappy with the decadent state of European civilization at the turn of the century, propounded what we might call a savage, a darker primitivism: destruction, or at least the necessarily radical revitalization of the West and the extolling of a complex primitivism. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) is an exemplar of this style. It is as much fin du globe as fin de siècle, with Kurtz as the ivory-trader gone native to wildly destructive effect. To Conrad, Europe is a museum of moribund values, and Africa horrific yet vital, a home of the primitive, providing a means of access to ‘the essential’. In a worldview which chimes with those of evolutionist anthropologists, Conrad portrays sailing up the Congo as a voyage into our own prehistory, with the jungle able to awake ‘forgotten and brutal instincts, . . .the memory of gratified and monstrous passions’. Kurtz had had the courage to voyage much further up that track than his narrator, the stolid unimaginative Marlow, would have ever dared to go. By venturing so far Kurtz throws off the moral hollowness suffered by his European contemporaries and comes close to achieving a sort of moral emancipation, though dies before the process is complete. His final cry is critically ambivalent. Is ‘The horror!’ he shrieks a deathbed recognition of the evil going bush revealed, or a final spit in the face of a degenerate self-styled ‘civilization’? Conrad leaves the matter vague. He has Kurtz’s Russian disciple state that the trader had experienced ‘both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries (he) had penetrated’, while he leaves the otherwise upright Marlow on the verge of recognizing the heroic dimensions of Kurtz’s endeavours: the gains he had made, the costs he had paid by escaping into primitivist excess. D.H.Lawrence’s view of ‘the primitive’ sustains much of the same ambivalences. This was especially so during the first years of the world war, when he was writing The Rainbow and Women in Love. To him, very different indigenous ways of life both enchant and appal, both seduce and threaten. Disgusted with the decay of the West, he turns to Africa as one of the few remaining places where savagery retains its ancient life-taking, life-giving power. An overdeveloped European civilization had, by its nature, excluded its products from so much; it was only on a still dark continent, where the forces of disease and death were yet rampant, that people could continue to tap into great sources of vitality. For this pessimistic Lawrence the last hope for the West and the self lay in a liberating release achieved through a destructive re-birth grounded on savagery. Many of Lawrence’s ideas about the ‘primitive’ and myth were confirmed and boosted by his enthusiastic readings of Frazer and the ritualists. As he wrote to Bertrand Russell in December 1915: I have been reading Frazer’s Golden Bough and Totemism and Exogamy. Now I am convinced of what I believed when I was about twenty—that there is another seat of consciousness than the brain and the nervous system. . .There is the blood-consciousness, with the sexual connection, holding the same relation as the eye, in seeing, holds to the mental consciousness. One lives, knows, and has one’s being in the blood, without any reference to nerves and brain. This is one half of life, belonging to the darkness. And the tragedy of this our life, and of your life, is that the mental and nerve consicousness exerts a tyranny over the blood-consciousness, and that your will has gone completely over to the mental consciousness, and is engaged in the destruction of your blood-being or blood-consciousness, the final liberating of the one, which is only death in result. The Letters of D.H.Lawrence II edited by George V.Zytaruk and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 469 This mode of blood-being, whose feelings were ‘always true’, was pre-eminent among indigenes. Michael Bell finds evidence of this primitive mode of feeling pervasive in The Rainbow. At points throughout the book, he argues, Lawrence succeeds in portraying certain characters’ intuitively animistic sensibility, their sense of unity with the natural world. Lawrence’s main means of achieving these effects are the slight extension of words’ meaning, so imparting a special aura to much of the text, and the investing of simple domestic scenes with ritualistic significance. By the time he wrote The Plumed Serpent in the mid-‘20s, sex had become not the point but a means to an end: the boundary-dissolving participation in larger, cosmic unities, what Marianna Torgovnick, following Freud, calls ‘the oceanic experience’. Once again ‘primitives’, this time Pueblo Indians, hold the key to attainment of a transcendental state, of quiescence, beyond words. These natives do not divide, partition off and judge the world but partake, in an unmediated manner, in an essential ‘Being-ness’. However his desire for their collective ineffable is undercut by a fear that nature, of which they are a part, is vast, alive and all too able to swallow an individuating presence such as his own. For Lawrence then, one could approach the primitive but not dive too far without paying the consequence. Lawrence’s knowledge of the Indians was based on hearsay. By this stage his ‘primitive’ was almost exclusively a projection of his own concerns, relatively unfettered by readings of the ritualists. The case of T.S.Eliot is an almost complete contrast. Eliot was so well-read in anthropology he would review key French texts within a year of their appearance. He was able to cite, accurately, Lévy-Bruhl and Rivers, Durkheim and Harrison, Cailliet and Frazer. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was a particular influence with his ‘law of participation’: indigenes were supposed to exhibit a ‘prelogical mentality’ because they were capable of not recognizing divisions between the physical and the supernatural, the human and the non-human. According to Lévy-Bruhl, natives did not separate the sacred from the profane but regarded the two as parts of a seamless whole. Though he was criticized by academic contemporaries for the racist implications of ‘prelogicality’ and though he himself later repudiated the idea, Eliot continued to use it, for his own purposes. For Eliot, an early modern ‘dissociation of sensibility’ had caused artists to separate the aesthetic from the practical, the poetic and mystical from the quotidian. Twentieth-century poets had to overcome this division and to cultivate prelogicality. They needed to be like ‘witch doctors’ or other indigenous performers, who used prelogical and ritualistic methods to elicit communal pleasures from those watching them. Poets had to work their word-magic on their audiences. They were at the bardic best as public entertainers, maintaining ‘primitive’ forms of art and performance where they relied on spontaneous interaction between actor and audience. Thus Eliot’s later shift from poet to verse dramatist may be regarded as not so much a major change of literary mode rather, a move into a more effective way of achieving the same end: awakening prelogicality. Eliot defined this ‘primitive’ prelogical instinct as: The feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word: sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and the obliterated and the trite, and the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and civilized mentality. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1933, p.111 Poets bridged the primitive and the civilized by an inherently mystical process of banging syllable and rhythm together. This acoustic forging of poetry he saw in starkly primitivist, evolutionist terms: ‘Poetry begins, I dare say, with a savage beating a drum in a jungle, and it retains that essential of percussion and rhythm; hyperbolically one might say that the poet is older than other human beings.’ Ibid., p. 148 Eliot, stimulated by the work of the ritualists, argued that the origin of drama was primitive ritual, and the essence of ritual was rhythm. Without that rhythm a performer could work no magic on his audience. An arrhythmic poet-shaman would have no clothes. Poets, like primitives, relied on not just rhythm but metaphor as well, for what was metaphor but a magical process of making two unlikes like? According to Marc Manganaro, Eliot was here relying on another idea of Lévy-Bruhl’s: that the word can hold a prelogical, mystical power. If this be the case, then wordsmiths—whether modern poets or native magicians—wield considerable power. By the deft arranging of words they can call on mystical forces in order to effect change among humans. Given this prelogic where words and spirituality are intrinsically connected, the power to name becomes a key attribute of both shamans and poets, a literal source of their authority. Lévy-Bruhl’s emphasis on the power of the word also led him to stress indigenes’ reverence for the language of rituals, where the meaning of what was said was of much, much lesser import than the efficacy of uttering the words. And Eliot valued Lévy-Bruhl precisely because he did not try to explain rituals away but concentrated on the study of mentality and the efficacious processes of ritual performance instead. As Manganaro argues, Eliot’s poet was modelled on Lévy-Bruhl’s medicine-man: ‘a figure who unites social power and transcendence. . .because his channelling of mystical participations is instrumental to the social formations and maintenance of the tribe’. On this vision poets used primitive means for civilized, but conservative ends. As influential upholders of orthodoxy, they acted as powerful participants in society. As self-elected spokespersons, one might say they pretended to constitute a government of the tongue. It was The Waste Land and its notes which first brought The Golden Bough to the attention of so many lovers of literature. But it seems it was Yeats who first realized the literary potential of Frazer’s vade mecum to myth. Yeats’s reading and use of Frazer became a key stimulus both to much of his poetry and to his evolving vision of humans’ place in the world. In his own words, ‘The Golden Bough has made Christianity look modern and fragmentary.’ To replace the creed in which he had been reared, Yeats drew on comparative mythology, theosophy, occult mysticism, and astrology. He wanted to ‘reconstruct’ (more accurately, invent) the supposedly common, age-old matrix of cosmological experiences which preceded Christianity. This matrix included visions, spiritual experiences, the presence of the miraculous (i.e. the interruption of supernatural forces into ordinary life), and the evocation of collective memory through the power of symbolism. Within this scheme spirits still inhabited sacred places within the landscape while the modern performance of ritual magic or the staging of seances held the promise of reviving and reintegrating sections of his matrical world, a world where everything, ultimately, was stitched together in a grand, cosmic unity. Frazer’s compendia provided Yeats’s poetry and projects with greater comparative scope and historical depth, and helped enable his more universalist generalizations. The profusion of examples he supplied strengthened Yeats’s conviction in the maintenance of continuity amidst constant change over the course of aeons. The Golden Bough also gave him a storehouse of compelling images (e.g. the scapegoat, the king, the prophet, the priest, the magician) and actions (e.g. sacrifice, initiation, incarnation) as well as narratives capable of arousing powerful emotion. Furthermore, since Yeats believed in the power of the word or the symbol to evoke an otherwise almost inaccessible reality then, according to John Vickery, The Golden Bough offered him ‘another perspective on the magical power of language to create a world of concrete immediacy’. Following this line of thought, poetry had the enchanting potency to revive the forgotten, make the past present, and the unconscious conscious. For Yeats however, Frazer was more a facilitator than an innovator. The poet was already well versed in folklore before he encountered The Golden Bough and, unlike Frazer, actually conducted fieldwork, whether collecting folk beliefs in the West of Ireland or participating in Soho seances. Moreover Yeats’s approach was syncretic rather than comparative and he cleaved to a cyclical, not a linear, theory of history. Denying the myth of ‘progress’, he strove for the revival of magic, whose validity would be scientifically confirmed, he believed, by spiritualism. An integral part of many of Yeats’s projects were their potentially nationalist dimension and an integral part of that dimension was its exploitation of folklore. For him, transcribing folk tales from locals was not just a rare remaining opportunity to record the traces, among a European people, of primitive beliefs in spirits and the efficacy of magic. It was also of national cultural significance, as this material, appropriately deployed, could feed a nationalist myth. Through the hidden power of such a myth, a cultural renewal could be brought about, so invigorating a spiritual renaissance. On this reading, anthropology and cognate disciplines had essential roles to play in one’s encounter with oneself, one’s nation, and even the cosmos. Perhaps the wildest of all the modernist interpreters of the anthropological message was Robert Graves, whose deeply idiosyncratic approach can be seen to be as magical in style as the material he discusses. A man so learned in the subject he can justly be called an amateur anthropologist, Graves had read deeply in the work of the Cambridge ritualists and of W.H.R.Rivers, an anthropologist and doctor who helped introduce Freud to the English public and was a personal friend of the poet. Indeed the central tenets of Graves’s conception of poetry are essentially quasi-anthropological, though of a rather peculiar bent. In The White Goddess he explicitly stated his belief in a universal primordial matriarchy which was overturned by the agents of a patriarchal system. The goddess of passion and fertility was ousted by a god of reason. This change led humans to ignore the world of nature and its seasonal rituals, and to emerge from prehistory and myth into historical time. To Graves, this loss is the predicament poets must overcome, by striving to reconnect with the goddess, ‘the true Muse’, and with the original idiom of poetry, myth. Though the White Goddess is as dangerous as she is attractive, as able to kill as to vivify, it is the duty of a poet to worship her. Graves thought the poetic impulse arose from conflict, whether caused by psychic factors or external ones impinging on the self. He claimed that when a poet was unable to resolve a conflict logically, he hypnotised himself as witch doctors, ‘his ancestors in poetry’, had done. In this trance-like state, similar to that of a ‘waking dream’, all inhibitions were lost, all defences lowered, and words were able to exercise their full magical power. Committed poets had to cultivate this state of self-hypnotism if they wished to produce ‘true poems’. By means such as these Graves wished to rediscover and expose the magical principles underlying poetry, otherwise lost since the fall of the goddess. For him magic, like love, was an essential component of the imaginative life, disbelief in either diminishing the quality of one’s life experience. Graves made an exceptionally detailed study of The Golden Bough because it chimed so well with beliefs he already held, for instance in seeing the world of magic and fairies as identical with those of children and of poets. Frazer’s works both bolstered Graves’s ideas and helped him extend them much further: for instance, the mythic resonances of individuals’ actions; the use of comparative mythology to create metamyths; the futility of religious dogmatism, since Christianity was but a transformation of Judaism which was but a transformation of paganism, whose ghosts continued to harass and terrify Jews and Christians. Yet Graves’s theories were much more elaborate than Frazer’s and thus, to a disbeliever, that bit much more contrived. Also, the poet was no respecting student of the man, as he was quite prepared at times to satirize Frazer’s approach, in comic poems about seemingly bizarre customs. Furthermore, he was very ready to contradict the anthropologist on anthropological matters. Frazer is quite clear that the presence of matrilineality (the tracing of descent through female lines) does not imply matriarchy. In fact there is no ethnographic evidence whatsoever to support Graves’s fiction about universal (or even widespread) worship of a goddess, white, brown, purple or any other colour. But Graves’s mind was soon set; for much of the time, he merely used anthropology as an intellectual springboard on which to bounce his own ideas. In the 1950s when in Oxford as Professor of Poetry, the leading British anthropologists of the day tried to discuss the subject with him but quickly realized he was only interested in expounding, not listening. Perhaps, as Vickery argues, Graves’s goddess, an archetypal figure, chameleonic in her variety of forms, a mistress of metamorphosis, is best viewed as ‘an extended metaphor for the vicissitudes and exaltation that come to man from the external world of nature and society and from the internal world of his own metabolism and psyche’. Because as anthropology, strictly understood, she’s a nonsense. Given these comments it is ironic that in The Long Weekend, the social history of interwar Britain he wrote in 1939 with Alan Hodge, Graves, who knew he could be a prig at times, chose to act the severe schoolmaster admonishing modern anthropologists, especially Malinowski, whose works include The Sexual Life of Savages: Sometimes they were such poor scientists that they became very friendly with their subjects of study. The true scientist was not supposed to fraternise with his guinea-pig, for fear that he might influence its emotional behaviour. And sometimes they could not disguise their bawdy relish in the sex habits of primitives, and their reports were published rather as refined erotic reading than as stern works of research. Graves, R. and Hodge, A. 1940 The Long Weekend. A Social History of Great Britain 1918—1939. London: Faber, p. 92 As the quote suggests, the more ethnographically focused studies of Malinowski and his students had rather different effects to the works of earlier anthropologists. They might have stretched the cross-cultural horizons of their literary contemporaries but none, deliberately, provided a grand Frazer-like vision of past and present humanity. It is true that Huxley spent four pages of Eyeless in Gaza discussing the ideas of the American Ruth Benedict’s bestselling Patterns of Culture. But this excursus on the congruence of certain kinds of culture and the personalities they produced is best viewed as yet another intellectual contribution to an already well-stocked novel of ideas. It is also true that section of Auden’s The Orators rely on an understanding of the anthropologist John Layard’s elision of epilepsy and Melanesian shape-shifters. However this key but recondite reference was unknown to most of Auden’s admirably perservering readers. It is because of examples such as these (I could go on) that, if we wish to seek evidence of the critical influence of any post-Frazerian anthropology upon modernism, we need to turn our attention to the Paris of the 1920s. Surrealisms, Anthropologies Famously, it was Picasso and his peers who made aesthetes revalue the artistic accomplishments of supposed savages. Their use of indigenous figures for their own artistic ends is all too well-known; Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is the exemplary icon of this revolutionary time, with its imposition of African masks and ‘Oceanic’ colours on the faces of three of the prostitutes. It is also common knowledge that these founders of artistic modernism were curious about native artefacts only to the extent they could inspire or confirm their visual experiments. Ethnography held no interest for them. Once again it is Picasso who is the exemplar. His Olympian ignorance of the origin of these objects is notorious. Exceptions to this rule were very few, and the most noteworthy of these was the Russian exile Wassily Kandinsky. A trained anthropologist who had done fieldwork in a remote corner of the Russian Empire, Kandinsky wanted to create a syncretic world-view as a way for faith to endure during the dark cataclysms of modern Western times. Ethnographic materials were to be exploited for therapeutic purpose: cultural healing and regeneration. To that end, he made discriminating use in his paintings of the entire iconography of Arctic shamanic lore, from Lappland to Siberia. At the same time he came to see the figure of the shaman himself as representing the artist on his quest for a universal legend which could dovetail with modernity. If the shamanic ideal was to restore social harmony for his own group, Kandinsky would strive to do the same, through ethnographico-artistic means, for the sake of Western culture. Petrine Archer-Straw has written of the negrophilic craze that enlivened Paris in the 1920s where the avant-garde’s fashion for ‘blackness’ furthered their desire to outrage, their sense of a sterilizing Western over-development justifying their indulgence in the ‘spiritual’ vitality of Africans. But whether in dance, dress, décor, music or other mode of cultural production, this was less a misencounter with the ‘Other’ than the old racism in bright new garb, even when illuminated by ethnography. For our purposes, the most interesting group here is also the most curious and the most anthropologically educated: the loose band of wayward surrealists typified by Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. These learned dissidents promoted a hardcore primitivism concerned with sexual deviance, fetishism, magic, and ritual violence. Sternly dedicated to épater le bourgeois these surrealists wished to critique ‘civilized’ norms in a radical manner. Their key joint production was the journal Documents, which mixed articles on ethnography and archaeology with commentary on contemporary art and music.. Bataille was editor and Leiris a frequent contributor. Both had studied under the great French anthropologist of those decades Marcel Mauss. Bataille celebrated human baseness, regarding human orifices and bodily functions as far more significant than cerebral activity. Inverting the usual cultural priorities he saw cannibalism and sadomasochism as means to validate the human condition. Bataille was also a leading member of the quasi-initiatory society Acephale, committed to the headless commemoration of viscerality, and planned secretly to stage a voluntary human sacrifice in a Paris square. As Archer-Straw observes, the interests of Bataille and his cohort might be more aptly called ‘“sousrealist”, a term that better situates their dissident thinking in a sort of abstracted hell somewhere beneath mainstream surrealism’. Bataille and Leiris kept the subversive edge of Documents sharp by deploying a cultural relativism meant to undercut bourgeois values and to replace them with non-European alternatives. They wanted to do away with the old certainties. Leiris, for instance, wanted to see the Western duality of mind and body destroyed by whatever means of ‘mysticism, madness, adventure, poetry, eroticism’. Both wished their readers to cast away their inhibitions and frolic in the sordid, the occult and the darkly primitive. For them, black culture had a savage potency worthy of nurture not denigration. Leiris’s most extended early encounter with African ways was as secretary-archvist of the 1931 Mission Dakar-Dijbouti. His famed L’Afrique fantôme, an open-ended ‘diary’ of his impressions on the expedition, details his erotic obsessions, his revelling in dirt and filth, the course of his bowel movements as well as of his dreams. A fieldworker much of his own making, he gives dada-like lists of data and describes an Ethiopian zâr sacrifice, performed for him, tasting the animal’s blood and having its entrails coiled around his brow. Though Leiris was the only surrealist to make a living from anthropology, he maintained an ambiguous distance from both. André Breton’s movement, albeit revolutionary in tone, was too constricted for his tastes while, as a rigorous subjectivist, it was easy for him to undercut the claimed objectivism of orthodox ethnography. Compared to Malinowski’s ideal of the anthropologist as dedicated would-be scientist in the bush, Leiris preferred to present himself as militant rogue tempted to go bush. The surrealism imported to London was of a much politer kind than that of Bataille or Leiris. The key group here was a band of British poets and artists, headed by Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, who joined forces with a popularizing anthropologist, Tom Harrisson, to form Mass-Observation. Its central aim was social therapy, which they hoped might help to bring about social change. Its central method was the production of ethnography of the people by the people for the people. Through the collation of ‘mass-reports’ by a mass of observers about key and minor moments in the life of the country, they hoped to perceive the leading ‘collective images’ of society and to lay bare its social unconscious. Their most significant publication was their first: May 12th, 1937. An edited collection of reports taken on the day of George VI’s coronation, it revealed the diversity of public responses to the event, in the words of the participants themselves. Thus their’s was not just a democratic surrealism, but a demotic one as well, giving voice to the people, in the people’s own tongue. Its editors, Madge and Jennings, wished to underline the poetry of everyday speech and, in their more inspired moments, to dissolve the distinctions between poetry and science. They also provided a diversity of indexes, so enabling the interested to read the text in a plurality of ways and undercutting any authoritativeness attributed to the editors’ ordering. Though Mass-Observation won great literary and public interest, the pragmatic and overbearing Harrisson ensured that the work of Mass-Observation soon turned almost exclusively pop-anthropological. The promise of an ethnographic surrealism was abandoned. Professional anthropologists, at first in favour of the movement, did not lament the demise of this potentially destabilizing competitor. There is however a final twist to this tale of the meetings between anthropology and surrealism. For the Oxford anthropologist Rodney Needham has mischievously suggested that Claude Lévi-Strauss, participant in the wartime New York circle of exiled surrealists, should be regarded not as the famed proponent of structuralism but as the greatest surrealist of them all. Trying to account for Lévi-Strauss’s indisputable popular success, Needham argues his work is best viewed as an essentially surrealist enterprise since it ‘can evoke a response liberated from the confinements of exactitude, logic and scholarly responsibility’. The source of his appeal for the public does not lie in his academic ability but Must be sought in the idiosyncracies of Lévi-Strauss himself: the ‘poetic’ quality in his writing; his very obscurities can be seen as enigmatic and hence profound; there are intimations of great mysteries, refractions of perennial insights, echoes of oracular utterances. His vision is hermetical, and his writings have prospered because they promise to reveal what is hidden, the occult factors by which human experience is shaped. ‘The birth of the meaningful’ (review of Le regard éloigné by C.Lévi-Strauss), Times Literary Supplement, 1984, April 13, p. 393 *** Needham’s comment is a deft reminder that anthropology, for all the pretensions of some of its practitioners, can be as much one of the humanities as of social studies, as much an art as a purported science. One of the points of this chapter has been to underline that there is no singular anthropology, with its own tidy definition, but a kaleidoscope of possible anthropologies, different patterns appearing with each turn. The same with primitivism and the analysis of myth. It is not just that the work of anthropologists can be used in different ways by different factions or generations of writers, rather that anthropologists are always also writers and some writers also anthropologists. Misleading then to score a sharp divide between the two and trace the supposed interconnections between them. Best to acknowledge the ambiguities and the overlaps, and to tease out their consequences. For there will be new anthropologies, new primitivisms, new myths. Bibliography/Further Reading Archer-Straw, Petrine 2000 Negrophilia. Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s. London: Thames and Hudson Barkan, E. and Bush, R. (eds.) 1995 Prehistories of the Future. The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism. Stanford: Stanford University Press Bell, Michael 1972 Primitivism. London: Methuen ------- 1997 Literature, Modernism and Myth. Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Fraser, Robert (ed.) Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination. London: Macmillan Harmon, William 1976 ‘T.S.Eliot, Anthropologist and Primitive’, American Anthropologist 78 pp. 797—811 Hyman, Stanley Edgar 1958 ‘The ritual view of myth and the mythic’ in Myth: A symposium. Edited by T.A.Sebeok. Bloomington: Indiana University Press MacClancy, Jeremy 1986 ‘Unconventional Character and Disciplinary Convention. John Layard, Jungian and anthropologist’ in Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others. Essays in Culture and Personality. History of Anthropology 4, edited by G.W.Stocking, University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin, pp. 50—71 ------ 1995 ‘Brief Encounter: the meeting, in Mass Observation, of British surrealism and popular anthropology’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1 (n.s.) pp. 495—512 ------- 1996 ‘Popularizing Anthropology’ in Popularizing Anthropology, edited by J.MacClancy and C.McDonaugh. London: Routledge, pp. 1—57 Manganaro, Marc 1986 ‘”Beating a Drum in the Jungle”. T.S.Eliot on the artist as “Primitive”’, Modern Languages Quarterly 47 pp. 393—421 ------ 1992 Myth, Rhetoric and the Voice of Authority. A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye and Campbell. New Haven: Yale University Press Manganaro, Marc (ed.) 1990 Modernist Anthropology. From Fieldwork to Text. Princeton: Princeton University Press Ruthven, K.K. 1968 ‘The Savage God: Conrad and Lawrence’, Critical Quarterly X, pp. 39—54 Stocking, G.W. 1987 Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press ------ 1996 After Tylor. British Social Anthropology 1888—1951. London: Athlone Street, Bryan 1975 The Savage in Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Torgovnick, Marianna 1990 Gone Primitive. Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press ------- 1997 Primitive Passions. Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Vickery, John B. 1972 Robert Graves and the White Goddess. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press --------- 1972 The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough. Princeton: Princeton University Press Weiss, Peg 1995 Kandinsky and Old Russia. The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman. New Haven: Yale University Press Endnotes 15