Varieties of Social Imagination 9780226434018

Citation preview

��������� �� ������ �����������

Varieties of Social Imagination

Barbara Celarent Edited and with a Preface by Andrew Abbott

� � � � � � ����� � � � � � � � � ��� � ���� Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637 Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­43382-­0 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­43396-­7 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­43401-­8 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226434018.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Celarent, Barbara, author. | Abbott, Andrew Delano, editor. Title: Varieties of social imagination / Barbara Celarent ; edited and with a preface by Andrew Abbott. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. Identifiers: LCCN 2016021178 | ISBN 9780226433820 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226433967 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226434018 (e-book) Subjects: ����: Sociologists. | Sociology. Classification: ��� ��478 .�453 2016 | ��� 301—dc23 �� record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021178 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

� � �� � �� �

Preface  ix

���� ��� �

Michael Young

3

��

Henry David Thoreau

8

���

Frances Donovan

16

��

Bernard Berelson and Gary A. Steiner

24

�

Oliver Cromwell Cox

31

��

Herbert Marcuse

38

���� ��� ���

Gilberto Freyre

51

����

Jomo Kenyatta

57

��

Qu Tongzu

65

�

Mariama Bâ

73

��

G. S. Ghurye

80

���

Frantz Fanon

88

���� ����� ����

Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati

97

���

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

106

��

Chen Da

114

���

Ali Shariʾati

121

����

Ziya Gökalp

129

�����

M. N. Srinivas

138

���� ���� ��x

Ellen Hellmann

151

��

Euclides da Cunha

160

���

Fukutake Tadashi

168

����

Fei Xiaotong

176

�����

Deliar Noer

185

����

Radhakamal Mukerjee

193

���� ���� ���

Léopold Sédar Senghor

207

����

Gino Germani

215

�����

Taha Husayn

223

������

Fukuzawa Yukichi

233

����

Heleieth I. B. Saffioti

242

���

Alberto Flores Galindo

250

���� ��� ����

Sol T. Plaatje

259

�����

José Vasconcelos

267

������

Edward W. Blyden

276

�����

José Rizal

286

����

Joaquín Capelo

294

�����

Raden Ajeng Kartini

306

� �� � � � �

����� ��� ������ �� ���� ���� ��� �������� �� ��� ���� f rom which she came, it falls to me, as her editor and collaborator, to provide a brief preface. I shall characterize her book briefly, then make some acknowledgments of my own and tell something of my acquaintance with the remarkable Barbara Celarent. The book provides a broad introduction to social thinking. It aims to stimulate questions and to raise issues. It does not provide answers or summarize arguments, but rather invites us to read the works discussed herein and reflect on them both individually and collectively. It therefore has neither an index nor a summary nor even an introductory chapter. Only by read­ ing and reflecting can we learn. The text consists of 36 analytic reviews covering one or two works by a given author. Most of these reviews give a short biography to place the au­ thor in general context, then loosely describe the book reviewed. Each then fo­ cuses on particular issues that seem important to Professor Celarent in her reading. As for the authors reviewed, they come from the past and the other. No living author is discussed, and 30 of the 36 reviews concern authors born outside Europe and North America. (Even the six metropolitan works are nonmainstream by most standards.) The diversity of the authors is great. Their homelands range from Argentina to Japan, from Turkey to South Africa. Their works range from fiction to scholarship, from general polemic to personal life story. Their attitudes range from radical to conservative, from passionately religious to militantly secular. They are young and old, poets and presidents, social scientists and novelists. They are Catholics and Muslims, Hindus and atheists, men and women, exiles and prime ministers. A

x

�������

very few of them are professional academics, but even those few have lived colorful lives. The reviews were previously published in the American Journal of Sociology, where they appeared in a more or less continuous sequence from July 2009 to November 2015. Unlike most work in that journal and despite their often quite specific detail, they have no scholarly machinery other than for quotations from related works. However, as I shall explain below, Professor Celarent’s facts and references have been checked as well as I could manage, in original languages where necessary, whether I knew those languages or had to rely on my students’ knowledge of them. I have read all these works myself and have familiarized myself with the historical and social settings involved, typically by reading a half dozen or so auxiliary books and in a few cases by consulting area experts. No doubt some errors remain, to be sure, for which I as the final editor of Professor Celarent’s work must take responsibility. The reviews have been only minimally edited from their original publication. They have not, for example, been pushed toward a single consistent tone or toward a rigorous argument. Nor have the occasional repetitions of themes or examples been removed. Professor Celarent would have wanted the reader to notice and ponder the evolution of the author of these pieces across the six years that it took her to produce them. I have also left unchanged Professor Celarent’s original dating of the reviews, which lies in the future—­f rom 2048 to 2054. Thus, in the first review, the phrase “90 years ago” means 1958, not 1919. I should note some other idiosyncrasies. Many of these pieces involve romanizations from nonroman writing systems, and many of these romanizations have themselves changed through the years; a notable example is the shift in Chinese from the Wade-­Giles to the Pinyin system. I have left them all as they were in the Celarent originals, thereby following her policy of accepting the terms used by the books she reviewed. Particularly in the case of works touching Islam, this means that there may be multiple romanizations of a single Arabic original or, in some cases, of personal names. More generally, Professor Celarent accepts the vocabularies of the books she reads, even if those vocabularies have later changed. Hence Raden Ajeng Kartini wants to go to “Holland,” not “The Netherlands,” and Edward Blyden writes about “the Negro race,” not “blacks” or “Africans.” As for my own acknowledgements, I should thank first of all those who taught me by word or example that such a project might be intellectually

xi

�������

important and indeed necessary: Paul-­Yves Colle, John King Fairbank, Gino Germani, Edwin O. Reischauer, Roger Revelle, and Tom Weisskopf. More immediately, even so personal a project has benefited from suggestions, translations, and clarifications, and so I should thank the people who have in one way or another aided me: Ari Adut

SeungJin Kim

Mito Akiyoshi

Dave Ludden

Said Arjomand

Rocco Machiavello

Ralph Austen

Jeremy Menchik

Don Bogue

Sanyu Mojola

Dain Borges

Tetsuo Najita

Michael Burawoy

Ralph Nicholas

Paola Castaño-­Rodriguez

Peter Perdue

John Comaroff

David Schalliol

Joost Coté

Alan Sica

Saul Dubow

George Steinmetz

Eleonora Elguezabal

Susan Stokes

Philip Engblom

Geng Tian

Cornell Fleischer

Mauricio Tenorio Trillo

Marco Garrido

Liping Wang

Diana Kim

Finally, I should most especially thank Susan Allan, managing editor of the American Journal of  Sociology, for her work of copyediting and for her forbearance across the years it has taken to publish this series of reviews. They were often late and always complicated, but she handled them with care and aplomb. What then of the author herself ? I first met Barbara Celarent in the spring of 2008. I was in the library of Nuffield College at Oxford University, seeking after-­dinner reading. At dinner I had asked some of the students to send me to a randomly chosen bookstack, where I could pick out a book that looked interesting. When I arrived at that spot, Professor Celarent was there. Quietly she directed me to the two volumes of the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz. I knew his name but nothing else. So I charged out the books and took them back to my room. As I read, I was not much impressed by the cardinal himself, but was fascinated by the mere fact of the book—­its testimony to the daily life of a particular person, its unconscious revelations of his character, above all

xii

�������

the difference between my own world and that of the cardinal. I spent a pleasant two hours reading and decided to choose a new book every night. The Nuf­ field students and postdocs happily sent me all over the library. I was reading about the East African slave trade one night and mesmerism the next. I remember little about my actual research work on that visit—­I was deep in some interminable revision. But I do remember those nightly visits to Nuffield’s tower-­library and an accompanying presence that gradually became both more defined and more intellectually militant. Between them, the students and Professor Celarent sent me to the past, to work less specialized and less academic, to places and people I knew little about. By the time I returned to Chicago, I had learned a particular practice: to read in unfamiliar materials, for short periods of time, with concentrated attention. It was a practice I started at once with my students. We met at four in the afternoon every Friday, spent one hour reading books chosen at random from a specified area of the stacks, and then spent another hour or so drinking wine and discussing the various works we had encountered. “Random Reading,” I called it. Professor Celarent would sometimes be present. But Professor Celarent did not think that random reading was enough. I should be more systematic. Each year I should set myself the task of carefully examining a few older and unfamiliar works. I should read a work straight through, then read enough related books to place it in its context of time, place, and social status. Then I should reread the book and, finally, write a short piece about it. By this exercise I could recover the excitement with which I had read as a young man, which had begun to fade after 35 years of classes, conferences, and deadlines. Professor Celarent offered to choose a few books and show me what to do. Soon there arrived an essay about Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy. It was short, crisp, thoughtful. Moreover, it was in the book review format of the American Journal of Sociology, which I edited. Why not publish it? But to publish the review I would have to vet it for accuracy, and to do that I might as well follow Professor Celarent’s full instructions. So I reread Young’s book, read some related books and articles, reread Young yet again, and then revised and edited her review essay. I told the AJS managing editor, Susan Allan, that we would publish Professor Celarent’s piece, as edited. Moreover, since I had found the whole process a pleasure, we would have one of these essays in every single issue. Ms. Allan was skeptical but supportive. She did the copyediting herself, as she would for the next six years.

�������

xiii

We attributed the articles to Professor Celarent, since she was writing the original drafts. But in actuality, I knew little about her. I asked her a few questions about herself, but her smiling responses were the stuff of dreams. Af­ ter all, even her name was unreal—­merely the medieval mnemonic for two of the four valid forms of syllogism in the first figure. But the journal’s policies required that we report a name and affiliation, and so I used the information she gave—­Barbara Celarent, Professor of Particularity at the University of Atlantis. (A little research revealed that the position too was a joke: the syllogisms Barbara and Celarent do not involve particular or qualified statements, but only universal ones.) She told me a few other details, which I eventually added to the page I created for her on my website. But like her name and position, those details were all meaningless. Professor Celarent was an amalgam of many selves, which shimmered in her constantly. For use on the website, she sent me a photograph of one of them. It was just another of her jokes—­the woman in the picture looked exactly like my grandmother. In the first year, Professor Celarent sent me six essays, one for each of the AJS’s six issues. I enjoyed following in her footsteps, reading the books and then the biographies and related works, and finally writing a response in which I could strive towards her ideals. But in the essay she sent me for the end of the first year, she declared a change. From now on, we would read old works from outside the privileged center of Western culture. Many of these works would be works I did not know, from writers I did not know, about issues and problems I did not know. And the reviews would be held to a new standard of writing: no references to a canon readers might not know; no indulgences in tired polemics; no hiding from the main task of approaching a new writer with complete seriousness. And I must commit to five more years of  work. She was herself, she told me, profoundly interested in difference and par­ ticularity. But one could not expect to arrive at a summary view of such things—­indeed, that would be a contradiction in terms. Rather, one experienced particularity, both of oneself and of others. One could not escape difference, but one could learn always to find meaning in new differences, as one lost it in the old ones. Each book would begin as novelty, then become an obsession, then eventually a habit. And then I would be ready for the next book. Over the course of reading many books, I would change in some way that did not consist of adding new things to what I knew, nor of simply drifting from one thing to another, nor yet of creating some new abstractions that

xiv

�������

would “capture the whole variety” of this social thinking that I had never before read. Variety that could be captured, she said, was not genuine variety. To be sure, the guiding morality of Professor Celarent’s reading gradually became clear. One should take the past and the other seriously: on their own terms, not as not-­yet-­realized or garbled versions of one’s own supposed perfection or even one’s own supposed ideals. After all, we will ourselves be past soon enough, and we are someone else’s other already. Professor Cela­ rent also worried that universal social thought inevitably lost real content and, ultimately, stepped outside the social process altogether, even while triumphant particularity drifted sometimes toward exclusion and violence. In addition, she was clearly concerned with the decline of intellectual commitment among those supposedly most committed to intellectual life. She wished that her practice of careful reading, reflection, and writing would be­ come more general. She seemed to believe in a perpetual becoming. One was to be always moving. Not radically, to be sure: respect for the past was central to her. But memory must be challenged by anticipation, lest the mind fall asleep. Indeed, she ultimately announced to me, after about three years, that one of the last works in the series would be an enormous untranslated book in Spanish, a language I did not know. By 2015 I must know enough Spanish to check Professor Celarent’s draft review of Joaquín Capelo’s enormous Sociología de Lima. I hoped there would be no further surprises, but over the following two years I dutifully learned enough Spanish to translate 600 of Capelo’s 850 pages, trusting myself to read the rest at sight when the time came to read and edit her review of his book. Professor Celarent grew more somber as we approached the end of the series. Early on there were attempts to underscore the futureness of the writ­ ing (as noted earlier, she insisted on dating the essays about 40 years in the future) as well as the nautical theme of Atlantis. But these things were lost, and she herself became more particular, it seemed to me, as the series wore on. She grew excited about individual themes like liberalism or race or religion. She lost herself in occasional byways. She found herself dragged along paths of new particularities to strange places with unforeseen consequences. It became clear that her investigations would lead to more questions than an­ swers and that this was, in some way I could not understand, the road to a different kind of universalism. And it was to universalism, I now realized, that Professor Celarent wished to return, after her sojourn in the world of particular beings.

�������

xv

In May 2015, on my annual trip to Nuffield, I received the draft of the thirty-­sixth review. The youth and hopes of Raden Ajeng Kartini’s letters represented for Professor Celarent one ideal of intellectual and reflective liv­ ing—­the ideal of continuous learning, of personal growth in complexity and depth, of embracing another without losing oneself. It is always time, she seemed to be saying, to begin anew. As so often before, she had reimagined herself, this time in a radiant young woman. But death had taken Kartini at the threshold of  life, leaving only her radiance behind. And I had no need to read the final paragraphs to know that I would not see Barbara Celarent again. As she said there, the duty and pleasure of continuing the inquiry now fall to the reader. Andrew Abbott

���� ���

�

Michael Young

�� ��� ���� �� ��� �����������, � ����������� �� 2034 ����� back on the preceding 160 years of education in Great Britain. The book’s fic­ titious “future” (from its publication in 1958 onward) imagines the gra­du ­ al triumph of the IQ-­driven education system that had emerged in Great Brit­ ain during the war years. In this future, IQ testing continues throughout the life course, and work is allocated by strictly “meritocratic” standards—­in fact, by current IQ. The history of this dystopic system is chronicled down to its fall, whose sources the bewildered author is trying to discover. A final footnote informs us of his death at the hands of rebels. Published 90 years ago, this book raised all the issues of stratification by means of its unforgettable fantasy. Yet history betrayed Young. Scholars ig­ nored the book, but his new word entered the language overnight. In the pro­ cess, Young’s sarcastic neologism was euphemized into a positive term for a society that gives rewards to a putative “merit” of individuals. The optimistic sociology of the later 20th century believed this “meritocracy” to be not only possible, but also compatible with rigorous egalitarianism. Equal opportu­ nity would lead to true meritocracy, which would be true egalitarianism, for—­this was the hidden assumption—­every person was in effect taken to have a “merit” proper only to herself. Such a belief in the equal personal dignity of every human had long been a staple of universal religions. And it was distantly related to Young’s—­and our own—­notion that there are many different dimensions of merit, each with its own importance and its own difficulty of achievement. But in the The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–­2033. By Michael Young. London: Thames & Hud­ son, 1958. Pp. 160.

4

���� ���

late 20th and early 21st centuries scholars and policy makers alike avoided the challenge of interrelating and reconciling these conflicting ideals, in­ stead employing simplistic assumptions and deliberate silences. Both that thoughtless optimism and our own more recent anguished mul­ tidimensionality lay in the future when Michael Young stepped back from his studies of  East London’s working class and envisioned a society in which “merit” would be measured by intelligence tests administered continuously over the life course. By 50 years after Young’s book, that society had become, if not a reality, then at least a simulacrum. From IQ test to SAT to LCAT, from bachot to agrégation, tests called the tune. To be sure, Young’s prediction of lifelong testing—­with consequent demotion when scores started to fall—­did not become an explicit reality. But practice came close; the engineer’s trajec­ tory from school to practical engineering into administration was one exam­ ple. The academic trudge from assistant professor to midcareer grandee to occasional commentator was another. Culturally, “meritocracy” became so dominant an ideal that even those who opposed its interim results attacked only the “cultural bias” of the tests. They did not attack the ahistoricality of the meritocracy concept nor its ig­ noring of personal development. Nor did they, like Young’s rebels, reject the whole enterprise in the name of multidimensional merit. Nor, last of all, did they—­like Young himself—­spend their careers envisioning structures that would enable excluded people to find inclusion as well as to have happier, richer, more rewarding lives. Young’s book is important not only for its ideas and its impact, but also for its unwitting illustration of “meritocracy” in academia. The book had difficulty finding a publisher. No scholarly journal reviewed it. Indeed, by 2010 it had been cited only about 300 times. Yet in its time, Meritocracy was part of an intense polemic about British education. The 1944 Education Act had brought the eleven-­plus exam, whose results dictated a tripartite divi­ sion of students into academic, technical, and vocational tracks. Chief among Young’s targets was a great apostle of that system—­Eric James, headmaster of  the then-­famous Manchester Grammar School, which restricted nearly all its places to those who obtained high scores on the eleven-­plus. James’s book Education and Leadership (Harrap, 1951) had argued that such an elitist ap­ proach opened the upper classes to any talented child. In Meritocracy James appears at every corner, sometimes damningly quoted, sometimes covertly mocked (the purported author of Meritocracy is a graduate of Manchester Grammar), sometimes curiously ventriloquized (the approving quote from

������� �����

5

T. S. Eliot in Meritocracy’s closing chapter is lifted from James’s book.) In­ deed, Meritocracy is almost an explicit parody of its predecessor. Thus the book comes from a very particular moment. It also comes from a very particular place. Emphatically and peculiarly English is its overwhelm­ ing focus on class, which was the English way of perceiving those issues that elsewhere went under the names of status attainment, racism, syndicalism, and so on. Indeed, many of the supposed evils of meritocracy—­not only the relentless testing but also student salaries, for example—­were standard prac­ tice in France at the time Young wrote, and one cannot but suspect him of some anti-­Gallicanism. Also very English—­indeed, very English working class—­is the strong faith (on the part of the real Young, not his protagonist) in the family and family virtues, as well as in the dignity and worth of the experience embodied in older people. From Young’s adoptive family the Elm­ hirsts and their Dartington experiment comes another peculiarly English quality, the echo of William Morris and his Arts and Crafts movement that pervades the book. The Rise of the Meritocracy is, then, a very particular book, a book of its place and time. Yet the issues in it are timeless. In a way, this prescience is shown by the list of predictions that—­whether he liked them or not and whether he intended them or not—­Young got right. He foresaw the emer­ gence of China as a world power. He foresaw women having equal rights in university and workplace. He foresaw the reemergence of domestic service. He foresaw the abolition of the House of Lords. He foresaw the renaming and upgrading of many occupations. He foresaw the metric system, IQ cram­ mers, and the obsession with economic growth. It is an impressive list. Just as striking, however, are the things he got wrong. Although defeated by the grammar school culture in Meritocracy, comprehensive schools in fact spread rapidly when Young’s friend Anthony Crosland became secretary of state for education. Eric James’s own Manchester Grammar School was driven into the private sector. By the early 2000s, most of the United Kingdom had compre­ hensive, state-­funded schools, and the elite universities were down to 45% of admissions from the private sector. As for the labor force, Young (like ev­ eryone) missed the rapid shift to a service economy. Nor did he foresee the folding of clerical work back into the professions via the personal computer. Culturally, he missed the rapid eclipse of the Shakespeare-­and-­Milton/ Latin-­and-­Greek core of the grammar school tradition. By the late 20th cen­ tury, the general culture even of the elite consisted of sports, situation comedies, and “popular” trends invented by advertisers aiming at young

6

���� ���

consumers. The children of privilege proudly wore the clothes of—­and fol­ lowed the music of—­the lower classes. More important for his argument, however, Young failed to see that national boundaries would break down—­in the book, international competition is the factor that justifies dystopic meritocracy—­and that the highly planned, organized society that could have imposed such meritocracy would be energetically dismantled by neoliberal politicians in the 1980s. As writing, the book is very strong: witty and even brilliant. A footnote on page 19 tells us that “the old aristocrats bred birds which they tenderly shot, studied their amorous habits with field glasses, and themselves devel­ oped the appearance of their quarry.” On page 38, we are told “Englishmen of the solid center never believed in equality. They assumed that some men were better than others and only waited to be told in what respect.” At times, the in-­jokes get wearisome, if only because one has to know so much to rec­ ognize them; current readers won’t necessarily know that the Harvard So­ cialist Documents don’t exist, that the idea of Keir Hardie with a knighthood would have caused outrage among his miner constituents, and that Lady Avocet’s name refers to a bird—­once thought extinct—­that resettled the British Isles in the 1950s. (Some of the jokes have lasted better—­the triple entendre of “right-­thinking people,” for example.) Thus, for all its age, the book still reads easily and quickly. This is all the more important because later generations of sociologists often discussed these issues in ways less frank and certainly less interesting. In the 2000s, for example, sociologists discussed exactly the same issues as separated Young and James, but only through the most indirect of routes—­making obscure criticisms of their opponents’ statistical mannerisms or assumptions. Such periphrasis was required by the then-­conventional assumption that because sociology was “scientific,” the answers to Young’s questions would be found by discover­ ing, at last, the correct mathematics. Fortunately, we are past those years. The modern practical theory of jus­ tice did not begin to emerge from stratification theory until sociologists took seriously Young’s plea for multidimensionality and asked about a truly multidimensional quality of life. Only then could we address the question of Young, John Dewey, and even Karl Marx about how on the one hand to allow each individual to become the best version of herself and on the other to create a just social structure, at the same time managing to preserve the virtues of family life without thereby reaping a harvest of invidious privi­ lege. The Rise of the Meritocracy is thus an appropriate first reading for this

������� �����

7

year’s annual list. As always, we have selected six works of varying type and provenance: important and unimportant, famous and unknown, theoretical and empirical (and in this case, even fictional). And as always, we preempt competition by choosing only the work of dead authors, as we preempt can­ onization by continually choosing new “old books.” By reading together a set of old work across the year, we reaffirm our faith in our discipline’s past and renew our allegiance to the tradition of critical inquiry into social life. We have in many ways progressed beyond our predecessors, but rereading them reveals at once the common heritage of questions and frameworks that lies behind our surface differences in data, methods, theories, and heroes.

��

Henry David Thoreau

��� ��������� �� � ����� ��������� ������������� ������­­ ogy after 2015 brought Walden briefly into sociological prominence. But its semiautobiographical framework and allusive density made it ill-­suited to a discipline with one foot in the scientific study of society, even if its other foot was firmly placed on Thoreau’s home turf—­the normative understanding of social life. Worse yet, the endless riches of  Thoreau’s journals provided an inescapable temptation to discover “what Walden really means,” reinforcing the book’s status as fixed literary classic rather than open social theory. Yet Walden has much broader sociological relevance than we have usually thought. Of course, it is a central work for environmental sociology. But to its theory of man/environment relations it adds theories of consumption, so­ cial relations, space-­time, and action. Ostensibly autobiographical, it is none­ theless a sociological analysis. It is ironic that Thoreau’s sociological relevance should be urged by one who is not an American. But sociological canons are usually made by foreign­ ers. It was after all Americans who started the vogue for Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, just as they would later for Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. And conversely it took Europeans and Asians to release the the­ oretical core of the Chicago School from the trammels of its self-­veneration. Walden is a short text, but a long read—­a paradox not at first apparent. One revels in its simple aphorisms for many pages before realizing that every­ thing in it—­f rom metaphor and paragraph to topic and chapter—­is designed Walden; or, Life in the Woods. By Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1854. Pp. 357.

����� ����� �������

9

by a complex and even devious mind. Thoreau writes very self-­consciously. Indeed, the counterpoint of themes and references and arguments becomes at times overwhelming. For Thoreau does not write in rigorous abstractions, be they macrosociological or metatheoretical or even phenomenological. There is no list of concepts, no polemic with predecessors: no formal propo­ sitions or clearcut definitions. He simply bushwhacks through the intellec­ tual underbrush that lies between his own particularities and what is uni­ versal in the human project. That is the very definition of theory, and if one of Thoreau’s paradoxical conclusions is that our particularities cannot be (indeed should not be) escaped, we are all the wiser for having made the journey, scratches and all. Walden presents Thoreau’s reflections on two years spent living in a small cabin he built by a pond in Concord, Massachusetts, on land owned by his friend and mentor, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. It begins with a re­ view of the classical problems of social theory by means of reflec­tions on Thoreau’s cabin-­building and settlement. We see all the stuff of so­cial life: eating, drinking, talking, reading, and working, and beyond them the fun­ damentals of valuing, acting, and feeling. Love alone escapes, as it escaped—­ except in one essay and one brief moment—­Henry David Thoreau himself. The book then works through the annual cycle, from summer planting in the bean field to autumn moon and harvest, to the frozen pond in winter (whose ice literally supports Thoreau’s elaborately “scientific” investigation of its depths), and finally to the return of spring. “Thus was my first year’s life in the woods completed, and the second year was similar to it,” Thoreau tells us, managing in one characteristically dense sentence to paraphrase the Bible (AV Matt. 22:39), to emphasize cyclical temporality, and to deftly mis­ represent his own activity. He has never told the reader that his main work in two years at Walden was to write or edit three book-­length manuscripts, including the first draft (there were seven total) of Walden itself. Nor are we much aware that during his two Walden years he was at one point jailed for civil disobedience and at another took a two week trip to locate and climb Maine’s dramatic rooftop, Mount Katahdin. Any reading must begin with the most familiar Thoreau—­the Thoreau who placed man in nature. Walden’s nature is not the Enlightenment’s na­ ture: sublime, awesome, and inscrutable, a challenge to human daring and an omnipotent boundary to human power. Thoreau was not Sir John Frank­ lin, who sailed to icy immortality in the Northwest Passage only a month

10

���� ���

before Thoreau moved to Walden Pond. He did not seek the Northwest Pas­ sage; he sought himself. Like Petrarch and Augustine before him, he found humans to be the most puzzling and profound works of nature. Thoreau’s embedding of humanity in nature is clearest not in his argu­ ments but in his choice of metaphors. Throughout the book nature is de­ scribed in human/social metaphors and vice versa. In the chapter “Sounds,” the morning train leaves “a train of clouds stretching far behind and higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston,” while a few pages later “the whippoorwills chanted their vespers for half an hour.” The whole chapter “Solitude” argues that nature provides authentic society, while shortly afterward “The Village” describes Concord as a beast with vital or­ gans, defines news as a grain consumed by “worthies” with “sound digestive organs,” and identifies gossip as “whatever was in the wind” (precisely the same words Thoreau had used for his own ecstatic listening to nature in the opening pages of the book). “Brute Neighbors” allegorizes local fauna—­an ant war occupies several pages—­and “The Pond in Winter” uses the dimen­ sions of frozen Walden to discuss human ethics. By contrast, “Former Inhab­ itants” treats bygone locals as passing animals, and in “Visitors” a Canadian woodchopper becomes a (much admired) “animal man.” This melding of the human and the natural rejects the common view that Thoreau aims to exchange society for nature. Rather, he wants to em­ brace the natural: to collaborate with nature, since we are ourselves natural beings. Not for Thoreau the model (capitalist) farm, “a great grease-­spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk. Under a high state of cultivation, be­ ing manured with the hearts and brains of men.” He prefers an unmediated, noncommercial encounter with the physical and biological world around us. In sociology, we have seldom theorized such an encounter. There have been various beginnings; the turn-­of-­the-­century debate about gender essential­ ism, the 19th-­century obsession with instincts, the reductionist frivolities of cognitive neuroscience. And of course there are the arguments of more recent environmental sociology. But we still await a truly general theory of man in nature to complement our theories of man in society. While Thoreau’s insertion of man in nature shapes his theory of soci­ ety decisively, we must recognize here two very different readings of that theory. In the 19th-­and 20th-­century reading, Thoreau withdrew from so­ ciety to nature, thereby reducing society to its ultimate unit, the individual. For such readers, Thoreau rejected not only capitalism and commerce, but

����� ����� �������

11

indeed everyday social life itself. The more modern reading has noted that Thoreau left Walden without regret after two years. In later life, he would never forsake the natural world, but neither did he hide in it from future challenges. On this reading, Thoreau at the pond represents not so much an individual as he does the whole of human society itself. He seeks the essen­ tials not only of personal life in nature, but indeed of social life in nature. These essentials are set forth in the early chapters. Political economy is, to be sure, mercilessly parodied (“while [the poor student] is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably”). But at the same time Thoreau considers the basics of food, shelter, and barter as forth­ rightly as did Smith himself. Indeed, Thoreau’s hymn to the railroad and its commerce (in “Sounds”) is every bit as extravagant as anything in Smith. The railroad is a comet, a rising sun. The ripped sails it carries to the pa­ permaker are “proof sheets that need no correction,” their condition telling “the history of the storms they have weathered.” Commerce, he tells us, is “unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unworried.” In­ deed, commercial men may be among the “strong and valiant natures” that Thoreau thinks have no need to read Walden, because they already live as Thoreau would have us live: deliberately rather than habitually, in the pres­ ent rather than in the future. In his systematic shedding of  what he feels to be the inessentials of social life, Thoreau seems akin to Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, the Romantics, and the other world rejecters. But the book’s narrative is more subtle. It does begin with detachment from everyday society: from the burden of property, from the slavery of divided labor, from the dominance of clock time, from the end­ less sway of fashion and opinion. (And, it must be noted, from women; there is a fog of misogyny in the early chapters that burns off very slowly.) But af­ ter this detachment, Thoreau parts company with the Romantics, whose ec­ stasies never ripened into the rigors of subsistence living. For the shedding of inessentials leaves life—­both individual and social— founded on necessities: on the one hand, the necessities of daily life— man­ ual labor, exercise, preparation of food; on the other, the necessities of spir­ itual life—­contemplation of the natural world (and of “natural” human ar­­ tifacts like the railroad) coupled with reading of the classics, of descriptive writing, and of philosophical reflection. By refounding life on daily and spir­ itual necessities, we can finally see nature for itself, without mediation, in its full complexity. This vision in turn enables a refounding of the self (and, by

12

���� ���

implication, of society). Such a self refounded on essentials can return safely to the quotidian world, for it can see reality through the veils of cant and hypocrisy. More important, it can enact reality itself. There is for Thoreau a considerable heroism to this enactment, and the theme of heroism and nobility, strong in the opening pages (where it is tied to the misogyny—­one can read Walden as a first essay in the 19th-­century redefinition of masculinity), runs through the book like a flowing stream. Yet in the end, the hero is man the dreamer—­the artist of Kouroo who strives after perfection, the woodsman who leaves the wood lest he fall into the slough of habit. Thoreau may have admired the captains of capitalism who had no need of Walden. But the artist is his ideal. Like many great books, Walden is obsessed with place and time. It takes its name from a particular place, and the book itself is full of places: the woods, the groves, the village, the ponds and bays. It is also full of links be­ tween those places: the railroad track, the turnpike, the paths, the river. Ev­ erything in Walden is situated, placed. Indeed, this complexity of place is another device linking man and nature, for Thoreau maps nature by his con­ stant analogies to human geography. But Thoreau’s interwoven geography pales beside his multilayered tem­ porality. Walden runs on many times. These include linear times—­the Wal­ den sojourn itself, the life course of the individual, the long pattern of  human history (seen in the cellar holes around Walden as well as in the much longer endurance of the classics), and beyond all these the vast course of geological and astronomical time. They include also cyclical times—­the day, the week, the year, and the irregular rise and fall not only of the pond itself, but also of commercial establishments, of societies, and of peoples. In the midst of all this flow, however, the book focuses intensely on mere being, in which time does not pass at all. Indeed, to dwell in the present is to live at the intersection of the linear and the cyclical, “at the still point of the turning world.” All of these temporalities are run together. For example, the life course is identified with the round of seasons in the book’s very design: Walden be­ gins with the censorious certainty of youth, and passes through work and maturity to its end in the calm of wisdom. “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there,” Thoreau tells us in the epilogue. For suddenly the idyll is over. “There is an incessant influx of novelty in the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness.” To stay at Walden would be to risk that dulness, “a cabin passage”; Thoreau wants to be “before the mast, and on the deck of the world.” (The pun on “cabin” is typical Thoreau; one can easily miss

����� ����� �������

13

it, whereas the reference to Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years before the Mast leaps out to all who have read sea literature.) Beyond these themes of essentials and of space and time lies Thoreau’s central theme for sociologists: his idea of action. Much is written of Max Weber’s analysis of action. But Talcott Parsons would have done better to read Thoreau, who invites us to reflect on what exactly it is to “live deliber­ ately.” What Thoreau leaves behind in Concord are his routines. He wishes to intend everything that he does, and to do this he must leave his habits and even his past experience behind, as he will leave his woodland habits behind in the last pages of  Walden. There is (that is, there ought to be) no one set of necessities; there is only the necessity of finding a new present and living in it fully and deliberately. This is true liberation. Although he read so much in the literatures of the East, Thoreau does not follow that literature in its pervasive commitment to inaction, much less to that suppression of desire central to Buddhism (although he does speak of “the inexpressible satisfac­ tion of food in which appetite [has] no share”). He remains committed to a contemplative life, but he refuses always to contemplate the same things. He has a wish for new experience. It is an obsession with Thoreau that such experience be authentic: that it should involve only the necessities of the self, not false needs implanted by others nor action undertaken to please others nor mediation through any collective will. It is this point that makes Thoreau seem unsociological: few have seemed more insistently individualist. Thoreau’s idea of sociability is sitting with a visiting fisherman and not speaking (“Visitors”). Indeed lan­ guage itself is a problem. He much appreciates the Canadian woodchopper who cannot put his thoughts into words; so much the better, thinks Thoreau, for then those thoughts are unbetrayed. But Thoreau’s real theme here is that for which Habermas would later be­ come famous. It is not that Thoreau values society little. Rather the reverse. Society, he tells us, is held too cheap. We should be more careful of it. Tho­ reau, that is, wants social life to be like the natural world, to be authentic. He presumes authenticity in nature itself and speaks throughout of the natu­ ralness of certain human things: of architecture, of persons, of farms, of the very pond itself. Yet we who read him can see that such “naturalness” is not really “natu­ ral.” “The Ponds” hymns Walden’s purity and its place in the endless round of nature. These we too can see in the pond. But Walden is after all an insignifi­ cant “kettle pond,” the remnant of a melting block of glacier whose sand and

14

���� ���

grav­el impurities became the porous bottom that Thoreau so much admires. So when Thoreau tells us that “a lake . . . is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature,” we begin to part company with him. We see that he is Don Quixote and that Walden, however tiny and plain, is his Dulcinea del Toboso. Walden’s nature in all its purity and depth and complexity, above all in its rich symbolic panoply, is in fact the willed creation of Henry David Thoreau. And in this vision is society complete. Throughout the book, nature is itself a society: from ant wars to avian religious services to “piscine murder” to “Waldensian pickerel.” Thoreau is as much an outsider to the societies of animals, plants, and inanimate nature as he is to the society of men. Yet na­ ture, to Thoreau, is an honest society, and in that sense an ideal for a human society riven by deceptions and follies. In both societies, Thoreau admires the deliberate actor: the animal that does what it must, the pond that is what it is, the visitor who fishes in companionable silence. Even in commerce, he admires the bold and straightforward. Yet what is the aim of this action without illusion and deception, this con­ tact with the necessities and realities? On this topic, Thoreau is much less clear. He is essentially contemplative, and his aim, in the end, is merely to see fully, in fact to see both nature and society for what they are. He knew well—­as sociologists should know—­that seeing society for what it is inevi­ tably means judging it. But in Walden at least, his moral program is com­ pletely negative: simplify life, shed illusions, minimize consumption, ignore fashion. These are the themes so many have taken from him. But his hymn to commerce suggests that he didn’t really believe this program. So also does the fact that he left Walden to return to the larger world. Indeed, one can imagine Thoreau writing a book like Walden, but about human society. Hard Times, North and South, and Madame Bovary—­all appearing within a year or two of Walden and none of them read by Thoreau—­could all be taken as similarly single-­minded meditations on the “natural” life of  humans. As sociologists we are among the many inheritors of that literary tradi­ tion. And our aim, like Thoreau’s, is to see (social) life as it really is, to see it truly. This ties us to Thoreau’s program of “looking things in the eye,” of disillusionment (“disenchantment” was Weber’s word). But it also ties us to his view of that project as heroic and in some sense noble. And Thoreau ulti­ mately turns the theme of disillusionment on its head; for him, seeing things as they are leads to reenchantment. The deliberateness with which Tho­ reau went to the woods, renouncing human illusion, becomes a deliberate

����� ����� �������

15

imagination (i.e., a choice of  illusion): “If  one advances confidently in the di­ rection of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” For even in the woods, we remain in society, the larger society of nature and the universe of which we are an insignificant—­but to ourselves very interesting—­part. Indeed, Thoreau leaves us not as the stoic and disillusioned Roman farmer of the opening pages, but as the Quixote in love with his own dream of a beautiful pond. “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.” There is no better place to look for foundation stone than in Walden.

���

Frances Donovan

�� �� � ����� ����������� ������������ ���� ���� �������  analysis. Belittled in their time as “mere description” by men whose theoretical writings are today forgotten, Frances Donovan’s three books read as freshly now as when they were written more than a century ago. Moreover, we now know a good deal about their author. Like so many interesting women of early 20th-­century America, Frances Donovan was rediscovered by later feminists, and so we possess in the dissertation of Heather Kurent (University of  Maryland, 1982) a well-­researched study of  her life. Cora Frances Robertson was born in 1880 in St. Clair, Michigan. Like many successful students, she taught for a while in rural schools. Then, de­ spite her father’s wish that she remain home until marriage, she secured from a grandfather funds for the normal school at Ypsilanti. Jobs followed in a small-­town school outside Detroit and in a Chicago suburb. Then wanderlust took her in 1905 to a teaching position in Great Falls, Montana, where church activities led her to architect William Donovan and marriage two years later. Retiring without regret, she became a young matron of the frontier upper class. But the First World War demolished the Great Falls economy, and so the Donovans moved to Chicago. Shortly thereafter, William became chronically ill, eventually being institutionalized. Realizing that she would soon be alone, Donovan enrolled in the University of Chicago to complete her bachelor’s degree, at the same time becoming a waitress for nine months. After The Woman Who Waits. By Frances Donovan. Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1919. Pp. 228; The Saleslady. By Frances Donovan. Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1929. Pp. 267; The Schoolma’am. By Frances Donovan. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1938. Pp. 355

������� �������

17

her husband died in mid-­1918, she finished her degree, and soon returned to teaching, although at first only as a substitute. After briefly managing a bookstore, she returned to teaching permanently in 1924, at Calumet High School on Chicago’s Southeast Side, where she taught until her retirement in 1945. She died in 1965. Donovan published books in 1919, 1928, and 1938. All three concern wom­ en’s occupations. Moreover, all three consider women as sexual actors: wives and lovers, pursuers and pursued, virgins and prostitutes. Although Donovan never wrote theory, her work is among the first sustained analyses of middle-­class work for women, as it is among the first sustained examinations of women’s sexuality outside the home. All three books were based on participant observation: the first on nine months of waitressing, the second on two periods of two months as a saleslady, and the last on more than 30 years of teaching. The obvious explanations for Donovan’s oblivion are unpersuasive. To be sure, she wrote when the division between sociology and social reform was hardening into a gender division as well as a professional one. But Dorothy Swaine Thomas became a major academic sociologist in just this period. Or again Donovan’s work was breezy and personal when sociology was becoming “scientific.” But Nels Anderson’s quite similar The Hobo (1924) became a sociological classic. Or yet again she wrote about sex when America was becoming more conservative. But Paul Cressey’s Taxi-­Dance Hall (1932) and Walter Reckless’s Vice in Chicago (1933) were both about sex, and like The Hobo they became part of the Chicago sociology canon. One comes closer to the mark in focusing on Donovan’s amateurism. In an era of academic professionalization, she was not a professional academic. Nor did she think professional academics were her principal audience. She told the marketing department at the University of Chicago Press that personnel workers, department store employees, and vocational guidance departments would come ahead of departments of sociology as audiences for The Saleslady. To be sure, Donovan used theoretical phrases from Robert Park and W. I. Thomas, whose courses provided much of  her interpretation of  modern life. But she borrowed only scraps and phrases, and her books rest on per­ sonal experience, stylized conversations, and occasional statistics. Only in The Schoolma’am, on her home turf, does Donovan give, along with her insider’s view, a professionally comprehensive survey of an occupation. Donovan’s methodological insistence on the primacy of personal experience, her use of life history documents, her biographical approach, and her

18

���� ���

use of typologies make her the logical successor of  W. I. Thomas, himself a rather amateur sociologist. Indeed, her rendition of  Thomas is considerably more compelling than the ecological one emphasized in the many Chicago dissertations on social disorganization. For unlike the others, Donovan really participated. Cressey and Reckless were, after all, Juvenile Protective Association investigators, not a taxi-­dance hall patron and a prostitute’s client. But Donovan was a waitress, and a saleslady, and a teacher. And although she was shocked that waitressing involved varying degrees of prostitution, and although she seems a little disingenuous about the attempts on her own virtue, at least she was there and saw these things happening. Finally, Donovan does not remove herself from the picture, as the new “sci­ entism” of social analysis required. On the contrary, Donovan is very much in evidence, whether she is being disgusted by the rats on a restaurant sink or telling us that, after all is said and done, every woman loves clothes. And no one could ever mistake The Schoolma’am for anything but an insider’s book; no mere dissertation student ever elicited that kind of emotional detail. Perhaps it helped that Donovan was not young; her first essays in field method came in her late thirties. Donovan’s first book—­The Woman Who Waits—­captured in its title the fact that occupation is ultimately not a structure, but an activity. This focus on activity in part reflected the historical moment, for millions of  young immigrants still swarmed in American cities, making new lives in a whirlwind of turnover and mobility. Only after the American labor force stabilized in the 1920s did the structural notion of an enduring occupation become more realistic. But Donovan had another kind of waiting in mind. Her waitresses not only wait for the orders of restaurant patrons. They also wait for men: for the male diners whom they often disliked, for the lovers they welcomed and spurned, for the husbands they hoped to find. Waiting made the women more aware of themselves than were the men, and that self-­awareness made them more aware of others and their dependence on them. It is, after all, only men’s obtuseness that frees them from such dependence, as Donovan often reminds us. What makes this book great, however, are the fine details. Donovan tells us that her wedding ring loses her tips, that winning large tips becomes an irresistible game, that “girls” steal each other’s setups, that they eat leftovers off diners’ plates, that they point out customers known (from experience) to have strange sexual tastes. She tells us about the rats gorging themselves in

������� �������

19

the kitchen of the pleasant, home-­style neighborhood restaurant. She allows herself numerous diatribes on women customers. She chronicles the sex games of waitresses in often hilarious detail. Sex is indeed the main theme of the book. Donovan’s numbers show that nearly one in 10 Chicago waitresses was treated for venereal disease in a giv­en year (1915). Hence, her fascination with waitresses’ use of sexual favors (or more often the mere promise of them) to milk men of money was not merely middle-­class self-­righteousness. It was frank recognition of the dominant facts of the waitress world, which was less about providing food than about finding men who would fund the waitress’s clothes, rent, and entertainment. Even Donovan occasionally falls into this understanding of waitressing, as we see in her description of the grill room of  Usher Lane (probably the Walnut Room at Marshall Field’s—­Donovan intended her pseudonyms to hide nothing). With undisguised disparagement, she tells us “it would be difficult to find [there] a kissable mouth or a pair of enticing eyelashes” (p. 113). In the end, Donovan views this sexual marketplace in very optimistic terms. The waitresses are for her a political vanguard: “Here we have the feminist movement and ideals embodied in a class.” She mocks the female clerk who will marry an office worker; “[She] will live the narrow, shut-­in existence of the home-­cooking woman in utter ignorance of life in its na­ kedness and crudity.” Better the waitress: The waitress is different; she is ignorant and coarse, but genial. She is often unwashed and her teeth are unfilled, but she knows life and she is not afraid of life, which is to her big, dramatic, brutal but vivid, full of color. . . . Even when she is a grandmother, her life is still full, full to overflowing with excitement and the fierce joy of struggle. . . . To go out into the world and grab from it the right to live in spite of the competition of youth is vastly more interesting than to make weekly pilgrimages to the beauty parlor in the vain attempt to get rid of the symbols of old age that bear witness to the fact that you have never lived. (pp. 266–­67)

Donovan was a poor waitress but a first-­class saleswoman. She couldn’t do the sales forms properly, but she sold dresses like a seasoned professional. Perhaps that is why The Saleslady is a less passionate book than The Woman Who Waits. Even popular reviewers (there were many) found the book too upbeat. This may have reflected the general shift of the 1920s toward what

20

���� ���

has been called “American cool,” the detached, uncommitted emotional style that replaced the intensities of Victorianism. Donovan was herself of the older, committed generation, and perhaps her wide-­eyed approach to the pleasures of sales seemed naive to newly hip reviewers. (Indeed, one wonders whether the move to scientism in sociology may not itself have been as much part of this change in emotional tone as it was a matter of professionalization or gendering.) But it is true that the coy tone—­each chapter ends with a “daily observation”—­falls flat after the raw energy of  The Woman Who Waits. Once again, the details are the sweetmeats of the book. The salesladies change shoes every day, they do comedies of customer/saleslady interactions during the slow times, they send each other up, they have precise categories of customer (the old, the flapper, the looker, the fat, the pair of friends) and quite precise expectations for each. Donovan also gives us an excellent portrait of the new industrial relations of the 1920s, with its quotas, rules, and human relations specialists. She gives us, too, a fine picture of sexuality in this new venue: her account of selling a “good-­looking, well-­dressed business man” a flashy purse for his mistress is brilliant. So also is her surprising remark that hotels at this period kept lists of potential dates (among them salesladies) for lonely visiting businessmen, a system that undoubtedly had the same partial-­prostitution functions as she found in waitressing. Don­ ovan sees this, but does not offer the detailed analysis that she gave in the earlier book: There are a great many Kitty Klovers [the false name the “well-­dressed businessman” gives] in New York and they constitute a large proportion of the customers at this and other ultra-­smart shops on Fifth Avenue. It is inevitable that the saleswoman who waits on these customers should be intrigued by their manners and appearances and that vague speculations in regard to their lives are bound to occupy a space in her day-­dreams and reveries. (p. 100)

To be sure, such characters had already been placed before the American imagination. Theodore Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber could easily have been become a waitress in one of  Donovan’s restaurants, and while Edith Wharton’s Undine Spragg wouldn’t have been caught dead in Donovan’s “McElroy’s” (Macy’s), she undoubtedly patronized “Harold’s” (Saks). Both Carrie and Undine were women who used their sex quite frankly to climb social pyramids. But it was Wharton’s Lily Bart whom the public preferred, committing

������� �������

21

suicide sooner than barter her charms beyond an elite matrimonial market that ran to the stupid, the venal, and the poor. That market is offstage in Donovan’s reading of the saleswoman’s world, with its female managers, female staff, and female clients. Donovan revels in this: “The stores and their encounter with the real world had made [the saleswomen] free souls and women of the world” (p. 138). Moreover, she tells us, “the store itself is fascinating, chock-­full as it is with colorful merchandise, the understanding of  which is in itself a liberal education” (p. 198). Here again as in The Woman Who Waits we find Donovan’s fascination—­and that of her mentor, Robert Park—­with the sheer excitement of modern urban life. This romantic temper—­in Donovan as much as in her fellow workers—­ papers over the managed world of welfare capitalism. Donovan likes piece work (small wonder—­she sold dresses faster than anybody else), and she likes it that Macy’s has a library, a savings system, and a workers’ mutual-­aid society. But it turns out that the sales force turns over at about 75% per year and that much of  that turnover involves marriage. So this women’s world, although much more respectable and self-­contained than the waitress world, is still dependent on male sufferance. Nothing makes this clearer than the speech Donovan puts in the mouth of an enormously successful (fictitious) buyer (whom, incidentally, she portrays as a lesbian): [A buyer] must be hardboiled and she must have virgin habits. She can’t let her emotions be upset about men—­in fact, men can’t enter her life at all; she has neither time nor energy to spend on them. In the second place, she must have an iron constitution and an iron spirit, she must climb over everybody, and she must understand Yiddish. . . . Her background, her education, her culture aren’t worth a damn—­what counts is her ability to make money in the production end and to save money in the service end. (p. 236).

A hard world, then, if a romantic one. A world in which success comes at the price of intimacy. One wonders to what extent Donovan’s appraisal reflected what she knew about the alternatives—­about being a schoolteacher, a waitress, a housewife, a manager, all those other things she had done. A widow making it on her own, she saw young women by the hundred graduating from her high school every year. Sales may well have been the most attractive thing available to them. With The Schoolma’am we come to Donovan’s own world. This is the book of an older woman (in her midfifties by this time). On the one hand, it is an

22

���� ���

impassioned apologia pro vita sua. Chapter 6 is the pseudonymic life story of the author herself. Indeed, Donovan begins the book with the “romantic young creatures” who read Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) and, following its plot, headed west to teach, and “married the ranchers, bankers, lawyers, physicians, and copper kings of  El Dorado.” This was her own story. But the book is also a rich portrait of an entire profession by an insider. Donovan mixes statistics and anecdotes with the sure hand of a long-­time professional and a sometime administrator. The book covers all aspects of teaching: from types of teachers, to life histories and mobility, to private life and place in the community, to bureaucratic involvements and old age. The theme of sex and marriage returns here, for unlike the sales world—­filled perpetually by new young women seeking a brief independence while awaiting marriage—­teaching enables respectable women to support themselves over a long period without men. Like any time-­dependent demographic system, the teaching profession is thus filled with long-­stay spinsters, of whom Donovan’s understanding is profound indeed. Explaining “why [the teacher] is unmarried” (the title of chap. 3), Donovan tells us: “Still unsophisticated and romantic, she is not prepared to make the compromises necessary for a successful love adventure” (p. 36). Indeed, Donovan gives us a veritable taxonomy of spinsterdom. But the last chapter is a valedictory for Donovan’s life and her occupation, and she aims high. Had Americans followed Donovan’s prescriptions their society would indeed have become great: [The schoolma’am of tomorrow] will need both courage and perseverance for hers will be a position of leadership. She must be proud of her profession. Through her own individual efforts, and through her professional organizations, she must help to inaugurate constructive policies in the school and the community, and to improve the profession of teaching until it becomes one of the most powerful agencies for social progress in the nation. This will not be easy, but she will be an American woman with the pioneer spirit of her ancestors. (p. 353).

Professional social science this book is not. But it contains more insight into the state of teaching as a living social phenomenon of the 1930s than any survey. Donovan’s first two books had lain within the Parkian study of the social psychology of the newly exciting commercial world of the 1920s. In them we find the focus on urban loneliness from Georg Simmel, the “ro­ mantic temper” from  Park, the “gambling instinct” and “search for new expe­

������� �������

23

ri­­ence” from  Thomas—­all those themes that would resurface in Erving Gof­ fman’s later account of “where the action is.” But her third book steps back from this agenda to make a more sober appraisal of the place of women—­ espe­cially single women—­in the new society. It is a committed, noble state­ment. Taken together, these three books are the first sustained inquiry into occupational experience both by the Chicago School and by American sociology more broadly. Indeed, we can say that Donovan inaugurated the Chicago tradition in the sociology of work that would later be elaborated by her longtime acquaintance Everett Hughes and his students, and that would be still later continued by Eliot Freidson. But that later work would lack the sparkle of Donovan’s. Her books may not have the scientific detachment of the new sociology. But they have what is better—­a mix of distance and commitment that brings their data and their author alive to readers in any generation.

��

Bernard Berelson and Gary A. Steiner

������� �������� ��� ���� ������� ����� ��� ����������� Our ambition in this book is to present, as fully and as accurately as possible, what the behavioral sciences now know about the behavior of  human beings: what we really know, what we nearly know, what we think we know, what we claim we know. (p. 3)

A bold statement. And although it reads today like Ozymandias’s “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair,” perhaps we should pause before making that judgment. To be sure, the project of cumulative social science has toppled like the statue the English poet described. Yet who, exactly, should despair? Should we join Shelley’s mockery of the boastful Pharaoh whose works have vanished into “the lone and level sands”? Or should we rather take the implicit warning that our own projects will themselves come to nothing? After all, no technology was spared to rescue Ramses’ statues from the waters of Aswan, while Shelley himself drowned in the Ligurian Sea within five years of writing “Ozymandias.” His own fame would last only two centuries, until imperial decline demoted English poetry from its world-­ dominating pedestal. By 2000 it was probable that more people had heard of Ramses—­who gave his name to a condom—­than of Shelley. We should therefore approach the Berelson-­Steiner Inventory with humility as well as critique. Who knows what scholarly salvage may raise its Abu Simbel from Ozymandian oblivion? Human Behavior: An Inventory of Scientific Findings. By Bernard Berelson and Gary A. Steiner. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964. Pp. xxiii+712.

������� �������� ��� ���� �. �������

25

Unlike many books, the Inventory is exactly what its title says it is: a list of “scientific findings” about what people do or are or believe. “Scientific” here means scientific in terms of the mid-­20th century, the first heyday of modern social science. That is, science means knowledge that is based on precise definitions and reliant on objective data gathering. It is public, replicable, systematic, and cumulative. It aims to explain, understand, and predict. Historically, this is the knowledge program associated with psychological experimentation at the individual level and with survey analysis at the group level. It is thus no surprise that these are the only methods regarded by the book as scientific. (Case studies are legitimate only when their results have been replicated by experiments or surveys.) Both the concept of culture and the method of ethnography are largely dismissed, anthropology being present mainly in the work of George Peter Murdock, the lone anthropologist of that period who shared these authors’ scientism. Given the subsequent history of the social sciences, it is striking too that the book excludes most economics and political science; only the “behavioral” aspects of those fields are considered. The rest is dismissed for address­ ing unscientific value concerns. The scientist, the authors tell us, is not “directly concerned with good or bad, right or wrong, moral or immoral.” But could one say that “human behavior” is not concerned with these? Nothing could date the book more precisely than this clarion assertion of value freedom. The Inventory appeared at the end of the brief period between the religious reformism of the Progressives and the energetically politicized social science of the later 20th century. In 1900, reformer Émile Durkheim was preaching moral education and Max Weber the former law student was insisting that responsible action was the core of  human affairs. In the United States, legions of clergymen and social workers were practicing a social science of reformist action. In 2000, the situation was much the same: conservative economists traded contempt with liberal sociologists under the sarcastic eyes of the militant feminists. But between these two periods of moral polemic and controversy came the quixotic attempt to build a purely empirical science about the value-­driven phenomenon that is human existence. Indeed, the attempt to create a purely behavioral social science itself produced the later political chaos just noted. A very large book, the Inventory has 14 substantive chapters between a two-­chapter introduction and a very short conclusion. The first introductory chapter expounds the authors’ philosophy of science and investigation. The second discusses designs for inquiry and then turns to methods for data

26

���� ���

collection. There then follow four chapters on what could loosely be called behavioral psychology: development, perception, learning, and motivation. To these succeed two chapters on small units: the family and “small group relations.” There are then four chapters on medium-­size social phenomena: organizations, institutions, stratification, and ethnic relations. These are followed by two chapters on medium-­scale symbolic phenomena (mass communications and attitudes), a chapter on societal phenomena (demography, conflict, disorganization, etc.), and a desultory chapter on culture. Each chapter is organized as a list of findings in a roughly hierarchical structure. As the authors tell us in the conclusion, there are 1,045 of these findings. The Inventory is therefore not only huge, but also unreadable. Indeed, it is meant not to be read, but to be consulted. Moreover, it is also clearly meant for nonexperts—­for reference librarians seeking information or sources, for experts in one field looking for the current wisdom in another, for idle curiosity seekers seeking social exotica. As one might expect, the initial reviews universally complained about the book’s lack of any theoretical argument, and moreover contended that isolated facts and findings made little sense with­out a theoretical context. The project of such decontextualized lists, however, had a long and distinguished history. Berelson’s degrees were in library science, and librarians had been promoting decontextualization to scholars for many years. Since the classification debates of the middle and late 19th century, the librarians had claimed that all knowledge was a single unit and could be effectively searched by a universal index. But it was only in the 1920s that librarians got the ear of university administrators in the United States and forced the scholars to consolidate their local departmental collections into centralized university libraries. There, it was claimed, the librarians’ new indexes would provide instant access to just what the scholar wanted. (This was the same rhetorical program that would later launch the Internet and empty out the print libraries that we have subsequently had to rebuild.) Current information theory has shown that universal indexes cannot work, but 20th-­century scholars already knew that truth intuitively. They refused to use such indexes even when they were first mooted by librarians in the 1920s. (Ironically, it was empirical research done at Berelson’s own library school that revealed this scholarly refusal.) The Inventory thus epitomizes a longstanding universalizing program. And its failure shows us that a real mind must take one particular point

������� �������� ��� ���� �. �������

27

of view. Since different chapters rely on different mixes of articles and secondary summaries, the underlying theoretical assumptions change continuously, and one chapter often reports results that directly contradict the results reported in others. The resulting cacophony is evident to anyone reading the work. It is even inscribed into the book’s chapter structure: the “social” chapters assume things about humans that have been shown to be wrong in the earlier chapters about individual and small-­group behavior. To be fair, Berelson and Steiner knew perfectly well that their list had such limitations. In the introduction they note that “we considered semi-­ facetiously that every finding ought to be preceded by three sets of initials: UCC, OTE, and IOC standing for ‘under certain circumstances, other things being equal, and in our culture’” (p. 7). Aside from this brief caveat, however, the book unfolds under the sign of universalism. And its underlying babble of assumptions eventually deafens the reader. The reality is that there is no view from nowhere, no way to see social life from outside. You can attempt it, but either you will thereby miss the essence of what you study, as did so many of  Berelson and Steiner’s peers, or you will shift your assumptions and values as you go along, as did Berelson and Steiner. For human life is not only always saturated with values. It is also always particular. The Inventory is thus a wonderful example of the strengths and weaknesses of universalism as a social science program. Shorn of  their contexts, shorn even of the articles of which they were often the conclusions, the book’s many “findings” seem Ozymandias-­like indeed. They range from defi­ni­ tion­al truisms (“all known human societies have religions”) to specialized esoterica (“people with low self-­esteem [i.e., those persons high in measures of social inadequacy, inhibition of aggression, and depressive tendencies] are more likely to be influenced by persuasive communications than are those with high self-­esteem, but those with acute neurotic symptoms [i.e., neurotic anxiety or obsessional reactions] are more likely to be resistant”). They range from the very general (“Human behavior is far more variable and therefore less predictable than that of any other species”) to the very specific (“Responses learned on a 100% schedule extinguish most rapidly”). They range from the banal (“The large majority of adults in all societies are married”) to the optative (“Repressed motives and other unacceptable aspects of one’s own personality may be attributed to others”) to the hypothetical (“The lower classes presumably violate the law more frequently than the upper classes; in any case, they are more likely to be caught and punished”). They include

28

���� ���

performative truths (“The better the soldier’s attitudes towards the army . . . the better are his chances of subsequent promotion”), artifactual results (“Across countries there is substantial agreement on which occupations rank high and low”), middle-­class ideologies (“The higher the level of education, the less the prejudice and discrimination”), historically conditioned statements (“Drug addiction in the United States occurs particularly among men, among those in the personal service and entertainment occupations, and among those in the social disorganized sections of a very few of the largest cities”), intriguing ideas (“Human conflicts cannot usually be settled by removing the original source of conflict”), and sheer nonsense (“Men are more active politically than women”). The cynic will read this book as a textbook of absurdities, a parody of  the knowledge project it so earnestly proclaims. But the book is also, one quickly realizes, a fairly accurate representation of what is inside our own heads at any given time: a farrago of (let me repeat the list) truisms, esoterica, generalities, findings, wishes, banalities, constructions, self-­fulfilling truths, artifacts, ideologies, historically conditioned statements, intriguing notions, and sheer nonsense. It is for that reason that we must confront the book seriously. Inside most of us is just such an inventory, from which we ladle out half-­t ruths to friends, family, and students as the need arises. But these two cacophonies are very different. For one thing, the individual is a living mind, not a passive list of subdisciplinary results. That mind has a point of  view, an inevitable if  partial consistency. We may ladle out nonsense, but at least it is consistent nonsense, and at least we are ourselves present to clarify, or step back, or learn. More important, the individual mind has an internal continuity that the discipline lacks. We don’t recall the details learned in graduate school, nor the footnotes of our early work. But we recall more of that past than does our discipline, which is lighthearted and flighty like most macro structures. The disciplinary lingua franca changes rapidly around us, as young people foment the intellectual revolutions that get them through the doldrums of early professional life. By underscoring our own particularity in disciplinary space and time, that rapid change challenges us—­not to transcend that particularity, a task both impossible and pointless—­but to dereify our own theories, to see once again through our surface language to the endlessly curious phenomena of the social world itself. As a result our personal theoretical frameworks are broadened and deepened by new work and reflection. Only with such a vision—­unsaid and often unsayable—­can we more deeply know the human project and envision its new possibilities.

������� �������� ��� ���� �. �������

29

But this life journey of the individual social scientist is not the trajectory of our “larger” disciplines. For a long time, the ideal for them was cumulation. But in the natural sciences, whence the idea originally came, cumulation is like coral. At any given moment, the living part of natural science is the outermost level, the present wisdom, the current, living forefront; underneath is the dead knowledge of the past. But in the social sciences, such a model does not apply. There may be a forefront of agreed-­upon or in-­principle-­ knowable facts, like the number of human beings alive within the borders of Switzerland in 1849. (Even for those, however, it is not certain that there is convergent “truth.”) But even one short step above such facts are things like “the ideology of  Peruvians in the 1930s” and “class conflicts in Korea in the 2020s,” constructs that are in principle not measurable, because each involves constitutive theoretical concepts that are value based: “ideology,” “class,” “conflict,” even “Peruvians” and “Koreans.” At the most abstract level, if we advance at all, it is only very slowly. The entire 20th century added but one grand scheme to the 19th-­century repertoire for social analysis—­the scheme based on symbolic analysis. The rest was footnotes and elaborations. The methods changed radically, to be sure. But underneath the statistical esoterica of the 2000s were the same old debates about the same old things: inequality, mobility, life expectations, consequences of ascription, origins of deviance, and so on. This conversation may have been conducted in the language of ethnography (as by the early Chicago School) or in the language of hierarchical linear models (as by the statisticians of 2000), but the content of the discussion remained the same. The reader will argue that the invasion of the computer scientists after 2010 had a major impact. It is true that the computationalists brought to social science a technical facility that offered new approaches to long-­standing problems: how to think about networks of social relations or predict the invisible consequences of complexly interlocked interaction. But the computationalists with their atomistic ontologies could not begin to understand the social or cultural levels of the social process. Nor had they any idea what were the questions one ought to ask, now that there were methods for tracking long stretches of social life at the population level in real time. Computational social science was merely a surface advance; at the deep level, the social sciences lost ground. The old social science project of cumulation died in the ensuing chaos. Social science progress was recast on the basis not of cumulation but of deepening and enriching the intertranslation of its various subprojects. Inevitably,

30

���� ���

this project of intertranslation involved the mainstreaming of normative social science, which acquired a more subtle and complex voice than it had had in the late 20th century. It was a brave idea, this Inventory, as was the project of value-­f ree, cumulative social science itself. But the dream Berelson and Steiner pursued was a chimera. There is no view from nowhere. We live a life of values, and those values require not silence but constant critical reflection and constant confrontation with difference. And at the deepest levels, there can be no cumulation, only the perpetual elaboration of our basic approaches to understanding the social life of human beings. The lessons of this book are clear at once. Whether you see them from the viewpoint of  Ramses or Shelley—­ or both—­is your choice.

V

Oliver Cromwell Cox

���� ������ ��� ���� �� 1974 , ��� ���� ������ ������ ��� ���­ cess. Methodologically, theoretically, and politically, it spanned a new dis­ ciplinary mainstream, for Cox was a historical sociologist of considerable range, a combiner of Marxist and Weberian arguments, and a fearless stu­ dent of capitalism and racism. Moreover, he was black. Yet his explicit op­ position to black nationalism made him unpopular with young African-­ Americans seeking heroic predecessors, while his isolation from white elites hid him from the young Marxists and historical sociologists who should have rediscovered him. By the time Cox began to be recognized, however, a cultural turn was in full swing. To be sure, Cox took a strong constructivist position on race: “A race may be thought of as simply any group of people that is generally believed to be, and generally accepted as, a race in any given area of ethnic competition” (p. 319). But the new race studies found his work unsubtle and overly materialistic. Like so many great writers before him, he was now caught in the reputational doldrums: too old-­fashioned to be actively de­ bated, too up-­to-­date to be retrospectively immortalized. Moreover, contem­ porary politics continued to drive the American historiography of race, and Cox’s militant assimilationism made him as unpopular as denying the Af­ rican heritage had made E. Franklin Frazier. Such rejection was yet another indignity suffered disproportionately by distinguished black social scien­ tists of the mid-­20th century: only W. E. B. Dubois—­a generation older—­ could be safely admired. Caste, Class, and Race. By Oliver Cromwell Cox. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1948. Pp. xxxviii+624.

32

���� ���

But after 2010 Cox was finally recognized as one of the founding figures of historical sociology and one of the major American theorists of race rela­ tions. An autodidact and a maverick, he could not give his works the facility of Frazier or Gunnar Myrdal. But they read well nonetheless, their breadth and ambition were extraordinary, and as a result Caste, Class, and Race (CCR) is now recognized as one of the most important works of midcentury sociol­ ogy in the United States. Oliver Cromwell Cox was born into a middle-­class Trinidadian family in 1901. His father and uncle chose to send him to the United States for edu­ cation, following two of his brothers. Arriving in 1919, Cox went through Chicago’s YMCA High School and Crane Junior College, eventually taking his college degree at Northwestern University (B.S.). In 1929, stricken with polio, he gave up longstanding plans for the law and instead took an M.A. in economics (1932) and a Ph.D. in sociology (1938) at the University of Chicago. Almost all of Cox’s career was spent at historically black institutions: Wi­ ley College (1938–­44), Tuskegee Institute (1944–­49), and Lincoln University (1949–­70). At Lincoln, he gave learned lectures and low grades while living in an apartment in the men’s athletic dorm, where he fought a perpetual bat­ tle for civility and decorum. All the while, this personally conservative man wrote works of  broad-­ranging knowledge and radical content. His first major work frontally attacked reigning theories of race relations, and he spent the two decades from 1950 to 1970 producing an enormous history of capitalism that achieved the singular feat of being ignored by the new (white) radicals of the late 1960s and 1970s. Published exactly a century ago, CCR has three sections, as its title sug­ gests. It is a book about different “social systems,” in Cox’s phrase. But where “social system” meant for Talcott Parsons a set of abstractions adjusted to each other like a complex, self-­governing machine, “social system” for Cox meant an actual social world, characterized by particular institutions and social relations. For Cox there are three such systems. The first is the caste system, in which a large number of mutually interdependent endogamous groups are mapped into a status hierarchy that is organized around criteria of purity, but interwoven by reciprocal obligation. Although given groups can move around in the hierarchy, the system as a whole is quite stable. In an estate system, by contrast, there are a relatively small number of statuses in loosely functional relationships. Such “estates” have little internal organiza­ tion, are not necessarily endogamous, and indeed may see individual mem­ bers depart for other estates by marriage, good fortune, and so on. When an

������ �������� ���

33

estate system breaks up, there results a third system, one of “social class,” by which Cox does not mean a society of vast horizontal strata, but rather an atomized society of perpetual small-­scale individual motion within a set of continuous status rankings. In such a system emerge “political classes,” which are organized groups aiming at control of the state. In post-­18th-­ century Europe, these political classes are the capitalists and the proletariat. Cox’s three social systems are thus three types of actual societies, empiri­ cally identified and inductively theorized. Only two of these systems appear in the book’s title—­caste and class. (The estate system is to some extent tran­ sitional from the one to the other.) The book’s third (race) section argues at length that racial oppression is simply a strong variant of proletarianization and that a racially divided society is simply a particular form of class system. Although Cox’s Trinidadian childhood exposed him to caste among Indi­ ans in the West Indies, the caste section of his book is based not on primary data, but on a painstaking review of the scholarly literature. Yet so eminent an authority as the midcentury French anthropologist Louis Dumont opined in his magisterial Homo Hierarchicus that Cox’s analysis of India, although occasionally wrong in details, was correct in all major points. Cox’s second section ranges from medieval estates to the New Deal. The class literature proper is, however, discussed only after the basic concepts have already been established by reference to historians and the few theorists (particularly Werner Sombart) whom Cox trusts. Much of the section analyzes contempo­ rary class conflict in the United States, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt emerges as a hero. “Most of what he said and did was really democratic, and consequently socialistic or communistic” (p. 246), Cox tells us. The final, race section also places analysis before literature. Cox begins with “situations of race relations,” a typology of encounters between racial groups. He then distinguishes race prejudice from intolerance (the latter be­ ing prejudice against groups that are in a position to change or conceal their identity, unlike races), and nationalistic prejudice (the rubric under which Cox considers anti-­Asian prejudice in the United States). There follow two analytic chapters emphatically rejecting the notion that race antagonisms in the United States are castelike. Only then does Cox turn to the literature on race, which he utterly rejects. First, he attacks the theories of Robert Park (for regarding race antagonism as ancient and inevitable) and Ruth Benedict (for failing to see that ethno­ centrism arises from capitalist needs, not from mere cultural difference). Then he attacks Lloyd Warner and his collaborators—­the originators of the

34

���� ���

“race-­is-­caste” theory—­by name and indeed by page. He then debunks Gun­ nar Myrdal’s analysis of the American race problem for examining race in terms of moral prejudice rather than of economic exploitation. The book then closes with a long chapter (“The Race Problem in the United States”) that contains a demand for assimilation, a long analysis of lynching, and a curt dismissal of existing Negro leadership, culminating in the astonishing remark, two pages before the end, that “a great leader of  Negroes will almost certainly be a white man.” Although published when fewer and fewer monographic works contained their own data, CCR follows the older pattern; sometimes it seems like a com­ mented set of readings (and, given our long retrospect, it is all the more in­ teresting for that). At one point Cox gives three pages of verbatim testimony before the Dies Committee (on un-­American activities) to illustrate an ar­ gument about class struggle. At another, he provides the exact amounts of wergild for various kinds of individuals in the Kingdom of Wessex in prefeu­ dal times. Indeed, the footnotes—­1,400 of them in total—­provide an ongo­ ing commentary on the text, on scholarly and popular knowledge, and on the complex personality of their author. They include quotes not only from the code of Manu, the Mahabarata, and Cox’s major scholarly sources, but also from (among others) Plato, Aristotle, Columbus, Burke, Rousseau, Dan­ ton, Jefferson, Tocqueville, Lord Acton, James Bryce, William Graham Sum­ ner, Gustav Schmoller, Marx, Bukharin, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Pius XI, the Webbs, Lloyd George, Ghandi, Nehru, Toynbee, Schweitzer, Veblen, Booker T. Washington, Sun Yat-­sen, Josef Goebbels, Adolf Hitler, Harold Laski, Charles Beard, Calvin Coolidge, Friedrich Hayek, Henry A. Wallace, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst, C. Wright Mills, Leonard Woolf, Jacques Barzun, Robert Redfield, and W. E. B. Dubois. It may seem silly to list all these names (and these are simply the well known), but they are a testament to a brave and catholic mind, following its own pathway through the vast library of recorded social thought. Cox was at times cavalier about sources, but at other times quite critical, indeed often sarcastic. He speaks of “McIver’s confusion of status and politi­ cal class.” Donald Young’s ideas are “highly questionable.” Guy B. Johnson, “guided by the idea of Warner’s caste line . . . goes into the following mon­ strosity.” Pitirim Sorokin gives “a different statement but an equally faulty approach.” Discussing one of his favorite targets (Deep South by the Warner group) he remarks: “An ideally incomprehensible definition [of class] is the following: ‘a social class is the largest group of people who have intimate ac­

������ �������� ���

35

cess to one another.’ . . . One might as well set himself the task of determin­ ing where the sky begins as to go out with such a definition, say, in Chicago, to locate social classes” (p. 305). Reading the text, one gets a very distinct picture of Cox: scholarly, alone, embittered, his mind awash with learning and anger, deeply devoted to an insight that only he can see. There is, by the way, no race loyalty in Cox’s handling of sources: Romanzo Adams, Charles Johnson, Franklin Frazier, and Allison Davis get the same treatment as Pitirim Sorokin, Lloyd War­ ner, Robert Park, and Ruth Benedict. Nor is there Chicago loyalty. Indeed, the treatment of Robert Park is not only negative but uncharitable, ignoring Park on the race relations cycle and assimilation, the main places where he agrees with Cox. Toward Chicago’s Lloyd Warner, Cox is both merciless and contemptuous. One wonders, indeed, if Cox felt so isolated that he thought he had noth­ ing to lose. Perhaps he was already en route to the resentment that produced his vitriolic denunciation—­published three years after Frazier’s death—­of that most eminent black sociologist. In that denunciation are mixed grudg­ ing respect, judicious criticism, and deepest anger. Cox says point-­blank that Frazier “sold out” and that he (Cox) understands why, but cannot forgive him. That such bitterness divided two of black America’s best minds under­ scores the power of the racial regime that could produce such self-­defeating enmities among those who opposed it. Yet Cox’s passion and commitment—­as well as a curious, hidden opti­ mism—­sing out in page after page of CCR. The Bible is not seldom cited and the book’s epigraph is from the Gospel of Matthew. And like all true social­ ists, Cox is confident that the proletarian state will be different. He does not see that communist dictatorship will not wither away, and he certainly doesn’t expect planning to go away: “A stateless society need not be a plan­ less society” (p. 214). Like John Dewey (whom he elsewhere condemns), he thinks social scientists will serve a “most desirable function” in planning a socialist society. It is a sunny future. Although Cox sees the dangers inherent in the opposition of socialism and nationalism, he does not see the force that undid socialism in the end. Bismarck and his social insurance are never mentioned. William Beveridge makes only a brief appearance. The tentative socialism of postwar Britain is treated with amused indulgence. The ideas that capitalism might adapt some aspects of socialism and that redistributive transfer payments would eventually surpass 10% of American GDP never occurred to Cox.

36

���� ���

CCR was roundly attacked on its publication. The premier race journal of the time, Phylon, solicited its review from Everett Hughes, who damned the book for moralizing, for arguments ad homines, and for idealizing classical India. In the Journal of Negro History Howard University’s Williston Lofton charged Cox with excessive Marxism, with misinterpreting secondary evi­ dence on India, and with sounding like “a medieval mystic or the late Ger­ trude Stein.” In The Annals, Henry Pratt Fairchild of New York University rejected the Indian comparison altogether and attacked Cox’s penchant for idiosyncratic definitions. The American Journal of Sociology review was writ­ ten by G. S. Ghurye of the University of  Bombay (see chapter XI), a respected expert on caste, who found Cox’s understanding of caste simple-­minded. In the Journal of Negro Education, Allison Davis attacked what he called “mys­ tical sociology,” in a review as angry and spiteful as Cox’s own comments about Davis’s Deep South. These negative voices were quite predictable. Cox had attacked Warner’s “caste and race” theory with hammer and tongs, and Hughes was at the time Warner’s closest collaborator. Davis was a Warner student and collaborator. The American Journal of Sociology was the house journal of  Warner’s depart­ ment, and its editors cannot have been unaware that a caste specialist from India would find flaws in a synthetic work by a nonspecialist. Cox’s belief that the discipline—­and Chicago in particular—­was biased against him seems correct. But there were positive voices. In the American Sociological Review Sam­ uel Blizzard summarized the book carefully and praised its breathtaking breadth, although he noted that “further rumination might have improved [Cox’s] presentation.” Social Forces reviewer Mozell C. Hill also summarized the book carefully, and, while he was worried about what seemed to him Cox’s conceptual carelessness, ultimately judged the book a major—­perhaps even a seminal—­work that “attempts to transcend the obvious and pene­ trate radically into the nature of social dynamics.” In the event the book was ignored. Where Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma became one of the most visible works of 20th-­century sociology, CCR nearly vanished. It had a slight vogue in the 1970s and 1980s, the first decades of black radicalism in the United States, but even so, it averaged only a small fraction of the visibility of its highly funded opponent. Unlike Myrdal’s book, too, Cox’s was visible mostly within the race relations jour­ nals and within the disciplines of sociology and ethnic/race relations. It had only local impact.

������ �������� ���

37

Yet CCR has several important messages for a reader today. The first is that it is always possible and often necessary to step back and take a large view. No one agreed with Oliver Cox at the time he wrote: not other black in­ tellectuals, not the white people who had helped train him, certainly not the larger political world he skewered. Yet he wrote anyway. His work simply grew more and more comprehensive, more and more adventurous. Cox’s bit­ terness and solitude leaked into his work, but they don’t hide the bold design and the ambitious comparisons. We now see that it was Cox who in many ways was the American heir of Sombart, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and the German comparative historical tradition, just as it was Cox who was the American heir of  R. H. Tawney, H. N. Brailsford, J. A. Hobson, H. F. Laski, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and the other British socialists whose names per­ vade his footnotes. Second, the book was oddly prescient. For all the angry reviews, Cox’s ac­ count of class struggle in the 1930s, his analysis of  the relation between busi­ ness and academics, and his discussion of the implications of the emerging security state are quite close to the standard historical accounts given today. One wonders, indeed, if the book might not have been a popular success if it had been cut in half and shorn of its needless personal attacks, although perhaps such changes would have made the book’s radicalism much more evident and led to suppression rather than inattention. Third, the book is important for its insistence on the arbitrariness of race as a model for difference. Cox knew racial oppression and hated it. But he hated class oppression more. And he could envision the possibility of a hi­ erarchy that was not oppressive in the Western sense. The contradictions between these things are unresolved in CCR, as they still are in contempo­ rary society. But Cox faced them squarely, without the tortured reasoning through which many later liberals squared their consciences. It is to Cox and a few others like him that contemporary sociology owes the sophisticated ac­ count of difference we are developing today, an account that explicitly theo­ rizes the intersections of differences permanent and impermanent, regular and irregular, vertical and horizontal. Cox’s answers are not ours. His impa­ tience and bitterness are not ours. But his hopes, his breadth, and his honesty are a shining example.

��

Herbert Marcuse

�� �� ���� �� �������� ���� ��� ������� ����������� ���­ cern of  19th-­and 20th-­century social theory was scarcity. Despite the predic­ tions of writers from Simon Patten and John R. Commons to J. M. Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter, despite the “affluence” theories of the 1950s, social the­ o­ry focused on scarcity until well after 2000. Yet starvation levels of scarci­ty had rapidly vanished from developed societies. But then relative scarci­t y be­ came the new focus, under the rubric of “inequality.” And of course interna­ tional scarcity—­the differences then characterized as “north and south”— remained a problem of truly 19th-­century proportions. Together, these fac­ tors long preserved the dominance of theoretical approaches that told us nothing about societies that had too much rather than too little. To be sure, the environmental movement protested the consequences of abundant consumption. Yet it did not therefore rethink the practices and aims of living itself, but only those of living too extravagantly. Air, water, space, “nature”: these became the new subjects of scarcity. Economics itself dodged the fact of abundance by transferring its attention to the scarcity of time in which to enjoy abundance. Thus, one way or another, the same old theories were applied. Only the transformation of social and cognitive life by the Internet and the knowledge revolution finally forced the issue of abun­ dance. When the abundance of information on the Internet made everyone an expert, the experts finally took notice. Yet some theorists had posed the question of abundance long before, none of them more forcefully than Herbert Marcuse. In today’s histories, Marcuse survives as the avuncular European intellectual beloved by American youth Eros and Civilization. By Herbert Marcuse. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Pp. 277.

������� �������

39

of the 1960s, who turned to Marcuse for enlightenment when their tranquil coming-­of-­age was disrupted by an incomprehensible war, the radicaliza­ tion of the civil rights movement, and the new self-­awareness of American women. Marcuse’s name was made by One-­Dimensional Man (1964), which argued that modern technological rationality had managed to so invade pub­ lic and private life as to control all realms of possible freedom and critique. In Marcuse’s view, even philosophy, science, and art—­the traditional zones of critique—­were overtly or covertly controlled by the technological system, just as surely as consumers were controlled by the meaningless wants fos­ tered in them by advertising. The book was translated into 16 languages and sold well over 100,000 copies. Ironically, its commercial triumph confirmed its argument, for not only were the youths of the 1960s a great radical gener­ ation, they were also a great consumption generation. It was they who estab­ lished youth as a specific commercial market (youth-­specific radio stations date from this era, for example), a market that would serve as America’s uni­ versal training school for lifetimes of consumption. By 2000, young people were established as the unquestioned leaders among American consumers. All that lay far ahead in 1964. But if One-­Dimensional Man was Marcuse’s popular success, the earlier (1955) Eros and Civilization was the deeper book. For in it, Marcuse addressed the core issue: How should we live? It was a question he had good reason to ask. Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin in 1898, the child of  highly assimilated Jewish parents. His father was a textile manufacturer and real estate magnate, his mother came from a family of book manufacturers. After an uneventful childhood and early education, Marcuse was drafted into the German army in 1916. Although he never saw combat, he was eventually caught up in soldiers’ rebellions and counterrevolutions, for he was a center socialist and delegate to the Berlin Soldiers Council in the heady days of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. In 1919 he returned to humanistic studies, first at Berlin and later at Freiburg, taking a Ph.D. in 1922 with a thesis on novels of “artistic forma­ tion,” from J. W. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister to Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger. After spending the middle 1920s in Berlin reading radical philosophy while running a small publishing house, Marcuse returned to academia for fur­ ther study (with Martin Heidegger). Reading the dismal future better than most, he moved in the early 1930s from academia to the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. With the institute, he moved to Geneva in 1933 and then to New York in 1934, earning a meager living until 1941 by the institute’s

40

���� ���

precarious funds. In 1942, he went to the Office of War Information and in 1943 to the Research and Analysis Division of the Office of Strategic Services, then absorbing the cream of American academia for war research work. Af­ ter remaining in government service until 1951, Marcuse spent four years in part-­time academic work before accepting an appointment to the Brandeis University faculty. But the controversial success of One-­Dimensional Man led that university to decline to renew his contract in the mid-­1960s; he then went to the University of California at San Diego, where death threats and other such excitements continued to pursue him. (A veterans’ organization—­ the American Legion—­at one point offered to buy out Marcuse’s professorial contract for $20,000 if the university administration would agree.) Mar­ cuse died—­peacefully enough—­in 1979. Eros and Civilization was published in 1955 and was dedicated to Marcuse’s first wife, who had died of cancer in 1951. It poses a simple question: What should we do with ourselves now that the “economic problem” is solved, now that there is enough productivity in advanced societies for everyone to have food, shelter, health care, education, relaxation, and so on? Marcuse took the welfare state of T. H. Marshall, William Beveridge, et al., for granted. Of course there should be cradle-­to-­grave care provided by the state. Much more important was the question of what to do with one’s time once such support was available. In the essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Keynes had posed the same question in the depths of the Great Depression: Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—­how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well. (J. M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion. New York: Norton [1931] 1963, p. 367.)

This question lay beyond even the problem of inequality. Indeed, it presumed that that problem was straightforwardly solvable. What, such writers asked, is then to be done? Marcuse framed his analysis of abundance as a dialogue with the later writings of Sigmund Freud. This choice perhaps curtailed the lifetime of his book, for Freud dropped quickly from the American intellectual scene after the 1970s, just as Marcuse reached his reputational peak. But it was a necessary choice nonetheless, for Freud had what Marcuse needed: a serious theory of motivation. Most other social science of the time employed ratio­

������� �������

41

nal action theories that ranged from the simpleminded to the vacuous. They would have been little help. The Freud that Marcuse engaged was the two-­instinct, structural Freud of the 1920s. The two instincts were Eros, generalized from the earlier sexual in­ stinct into a life instinct that was a builder of  larger social wholes, and Thana­ tos, the instinct for peace and quiet, for respite from stimulation and distur­ bance, in short, for death (not death as destruction, as in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, but death as peace). These instincts ruled unchallenged in the unconscious id, which pushed unceasingly for immediate instinctual gratification. This was the Freudian “pleasure principle.” A structure called the ego emerged out of the experiences of childhood as a mediator between this pleasure-­seeking mass of instinct and the very real constraints of the outside world. It enacted the domination of the “reality principle,” summa­ rized well in a popular song of the period: “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try some time, you just might find . . . you get what you need.” The id’s perpetual response, also summarized in another song from the same musicians, was “I can’t get no satisfaction.” (That these two songs were among the most popular of the 1960s even during the so-­called counter­ culture testifies to the dominance of  Freudian theory in the postwar period.) The ego was aided in its domination of the instincts by a third psychic structure (again unconscious), the superego. This was an interiorized ver­ sion of the parents and other disciplinary authorities who had coerced the developing self into the socially proper patterns they desired. Their internal representation became guilt, which took the flow of desires from the id and redirected, repackaged, and restructured it into problematic symptoms on the one hand and socially useful activities on the other. Both the ego and su­ perego (and the socially useful activities along with them) were thus “pow­ ered” by instinctual energy redirected from the id. In the case of socially useful activities, Freud called this process sublimation (one of several types of “re­pression,” Freud’s general name for this redirection of instinctual en­ er­gy). Civilization, he argued, is just a large flow of sublimated id energy re­ directed from pure pleasure-­seeking to the sterner pursuit of reality, in the process transforming that stern pursuit from a dreary obligation into—­at its best—­an erotically charged quest. Marcuse modifies this Freudian analysis in two ways. First, Marcuse ar­ gues that only some of the sublimation is necessary. The rest is dedicated to maintaining the particular power of a particular group in society—­the dom­ inant classes—­and hence is unjustifiable. There is, for example, no need for

42

���� ���

the powerful psychic repression necessary to assembly-­line production, since we could obtain equally large outputs under workplace organization that would require less rigid disciplines of the self. We have assembly lines only because they are more profitable to dominant classes (because they utilize minimally skilled labor in inhuman ways under labor market conditions that enable the payment of minimal wages). Marcuse draws this analysis straight from Marx’s Das Kapital and predictably calls the excess sublima­ tion “surplus repression.” The combination of Marx and Freud is very clever indeed. To surplus repression then Marcuse adds the concept of  the “performance principle.” Here, too, he marries Marx and Freud. On the one hand, the “per­ formance principle” is his Freudian translation of the early Marx’s “alien­ ation” concept into a more subtle psychological construct than that permitted by Marx’s unabashed admiration of homo faber. On the other, the performance principle is his Marxian historicization of the instincts that Freud had taken to be constant forever. The performance principle, Marcuse holds, is the form of reality principle characteristic of this particular society, with its surplus repression and domi­ nation, justified hitherto (at least in part) by the necessities born of scarcity (Freud’s Ananke). Under the performance principle, men work for others, not themselves. Their work is disciplined rather than free. To be sure, Marcuse recognizes that this particular sublimation supports vast social production, which in turn does improve workers’ lives and often makes them very happy, particularly during the “leisure” time that is left to them after their (alien­ ated) labor. But as this vast discipline makes society more and more produc­ tive, it comes to dominate all of social life. Its dominance eventually colo­ nizes leisure itself, which becomes a realm of performance and discipline, as does even the erotic life, which is thereby limited and confined to one other person and one particular zone of the body. Marcuse thus anticipates most of the arguments later made by Michel Foucault, but with a far more plausible historical mechanism than Fou­cault’s “discourse” and “domination.” For Marcuse, the roots of what Foucault would call “discipline” lie in the emotional necessity to control the intense but some­­ what random human instinct for pleasure in the context of a highly produc­ tive society. There are real benefits to such a society produced in such a way, but they come at a high price: “The individual pays by sacrificing his time, his consciousness, his dreams; civilization pays by sacrificing its own prom­ ises of liberty, justice, and peace for all” (p. 91).

������� �������

43

After a chapter showing the philosophical antecedents of his argument (largely in Friedrich Schiller, on whom he had prepared a detailed bibliogra­ phy in the 1920s), Marcuse turns in the six remaining chapters to sources of liberation from surplus repression and the performance principle. A chapter of purely historical interest derives proper Freudian reasons for the historic­ ity of the reality principle. Then Marcuse turns to the central role of fantasy, art, and utopian thinking—­all the “unrealities” pushed aside by the perfor­ mance principle. From these frontiers of the performance principle, he feels, come the only real critiques. Many more doctrinaire Marxists disagree; Pierre Bourdieu’s insistence that art in the last analysis is dominated by the field of power comes to mind. But Marcuse was more optimistic. After tak­ ing Orpheus and Narcissus as his symbolic patrons because of their songs and playfulness, their contemplation and love of beauty, Marcuse explores the centrality of art as a disciplined mode of play. In such play, freedom is indifference to the constraint of reality: play obeys a liberated, imaginative logic. Marcuse also tries to overcome his creeping elitism (which infected some of his Frankfurt school colleagues far more deeply) by insisting that art become a mass phenomenon, that it return to the “lower instincts” and civilize them. In his last two chapters, Marcuse tries to put some flesh on the bones of this shadowy utopia. He tells us we must turn work into play. He tells us we must treat the world as a garden to cultivate, not a storehouse to pillage. He tells us our erotic life must move beyond monogamic reproduction, the “cen­ tral fortification of the performance principle.” At times he seems to be talk­ ing about a specific expansion of erotic activities: free love and a broader sex­ ual repertoire. At other times he emphasizes the “erotization” of  work, using Margaret Mead’s Arapesh as an example. At times he seems to be hoping for what would later be called “flow”: the timeless, rapid doing of meaningful work in a pure meditative pleasure. At other times, he seems to point toward the effortless, erotic flow of ideas that had been embodied in aristocratic con­ versation from Baldassare Castiglione’s sprezzatura to Mme. de Stael’s esprit. One wishes here for more concrete illustrations or discussions of empir­ ical cases. After all, the Fourierist phalanstères Marcuse so admired failed in short order: Was it only because of excessive bureaucracy, as Marcuse thought? Or again, the six-­hour work day persisted at the Kellogg Company for 50 years, but many workers had trouble filling the extra two hours of leisure. Would Marcuse simply have thought the workers so dominated by the performance principle that they couldn’t see their own interests? In

44

���� ���

Barcelona during the Popular Front years, the refusal of workers to work led to social chaos, even for a strongly leftist state. Could a society actually main­ tain the high production necessary to abundance by highly disciplined, alien­ ated work for three hours a day followed by a sudden and complete shift to pure pleasure? More recently, even artistic, creative leisure has seemed rap­ idly to fall under the dominance of the performance principle, as we see from birders’ life lists, competitive genealogy, and the elaborate ceremonies of the war re-­enactors. Indeed, bodily pleasure itself has succumbed to the perfor­ mance principle. What would Marcuse have said of our elaborately graded wine system or competitive restaurant hopping or consumptive tourism? One wonders, too, if there is not a strong vein of aristocracy—­indeed of schol­ arly aristocracy—­in Marcuse’s analysis. Does his Schillerian paradise make room for second-­rate art or for folk art of the kind that would turn a high­ brow stomach? After all, the great debate about cultural omnivores eventu­ ally concluded that Bourdieu had been right about “distinction,” if for the wrong reasons. Highbrows can code-­switch as easily as lowbrows. Finally, one wonders what Marcuse might have made of the revolution in sexual behavior in the late 20th century: the rise of the hookup culture with its solipsistic eroticism, the adoption by young women of the selfish sexual­ ity their feminist predecessors had derided in men, the strange divorce of sexuality and personal intimacy, the extensive public focus by both young and old on issues of “sexual performance.” A world further from Marcuse’s free and imaginative erotization of the everyday could not be imagined. This was the performance principle with a vengeance. But it was far too from the profound and overwhelming commitments of 19th-­century monogamous marriages as well as from the 19th-­century grandes passions that had chal­ lenged those very marriages. As Marcuse had feared, the new sexual world was a world of technical rationality. Or was it? Could not one also think that dismantling the elaborate taboos surrounding sexuality would inevitably result in its demotion from being the central, unspoken warp of a culture to simply another of the many wefts woven into a multiply patterned tapestry? Perhaps what seemed to the el­ ders like a frightening disregard of the dangerous power of sex was in fact a simple recognition that the sexual imperium over the individual wasn’t re­ ally much of an empire at all. It was that fact which disturbed the senior gen­ erations of the turn of the 21st century. In their youth, the new birth-­control pill had allowed them sexual indulgence at a time when sexual indulgence

������� �������

45

still seemed novel and uniquely powerful. When their grandchildren began to think that sexual intercourse was more or less like eating dinner at a fast food restaurant, the sexual 19th century was truly, finally over. It is the custom to end our annual readings with a book that is in dialogue with its five predecessors. Eros and Civilization is emphatically such a book. Like Oliver Cox’s Caste, Class, and Race, Eros and Civilization aims to rein­ terpret the historical direction of modernity. And the two share a substan­ tive theme: the problem posed by alienated work and the work practices born of domination. But where one book focuses on the structural implications of social groupings and relations, and the particular way in which class domi­ nation employs racial difference as a tool of proletarianization, the other fo­ cuses on the subjective experience of alienated work and the possibilities for its transcendence. Where one book remains within the framework of inequal­ ity and justice, the other ventures into the unknown of erotization and per­ sonality reconfiguration. From this one political stance, then, the two books move in strikingly different but strangely complementary directions. By contrast, Berelson and Steiner’s Human Behavior: An Inventory of Scien­ tific Findings seems a book Marcuse would have despised for trapping hu­ mans within a set of alienated, reified categories made up by social scien­ tists and imposed upon their objects with little worry about their subjective reality. Conversely, Marcuse’s relentlessly abstract argument includes doz­ ens of empirical assertions about modern society that Berelson and Steiner would have rejected as imprecise and unfounded. But two of the Frankfurt Institute’s Studies in Prejudice contribute findings to Berelson and Steiner’s collection (The Authoritarian Personality and Dynamics of Prejudice), and Mar­ cuse’s book—­despite its rhetorical structure as a meditation on Freud—draws on at least one of the Berelson/Steiner sources (Margaret Mead). The two books relate as yin and yang, reminding us of the perpetual tension between theoretical cohesion on the one hand and empirical cohesion on the other. To read them together is to recognize the true breadth of what social science aims to accomplish. With Frances Donovan’s three books on women and work, Marcuse shares a common theme of sexuality. Indeed, Donovan’s books—­had Marcuse known of them—­might have provided precisely the empirical foundations he needed. Like Donovan, Marcuse would have seen the waitresses as vi­ brantly erotic although he might not have accepted Donovan’s optimistic judgment that their erotism represented liberation from the performance

46

���� ���

principle: Were tips and new clothes a mechanical quid pro quo for erotic performance or were they indeed a mere by-­product of a welcome and joyous Marcusian game? With Thoreau Marcuse shares the grand project of asking what it is to live and live well. Thoreau believes that through the shedding of illusions and appearances comes the ability to know the core of life and thereby to begin again to dream. The hard part, he tells us, is to put foundations under the castles we have begun to build in the air. Marcuse too has built castles in the air—­that has been the most consistent critique of  his work. It remains for us to find the foundations for them, just as it remained for Thoreau to construct the social project merely implicit at the end of Walden. As for the rest, the two books share the aim of debunking the performance principle as they share a respect for the physical environment and for the “nature” of humanity. On the other hand, surely no book could be less erotic than Walden. Yet all the same, Marcuse wrote about sensuousness as much as about eros, and Walden is an extraordinarily sensuous book, a book of sights and sounds, smells and feelings. The two works may be closer than it seems, even on this last matter. Finally, Eros and Civilization like The Rise of the Meritocracy is a frankly utopian book. Although it lacks the practical details of Michael Young’s dys­ topia, it shares the desire to imagine a truly different future. Moreover, the terrors of the present are the same in both books: first, a focus on individual performance and its measure, and second, a meaningless, pointless perfec­ tionism whose real raison d’être is domination and exclusion. The books share too the common fate of  being misread. Young thought “meritocracy” a sham and a delusion, but his neologism has been taken to label one of the central ideals of modern society. Marcuse emphasized the constructive power of  Eros to build larger and more multiply pleasurable zones of experi­ ence, but his readers took him as advocating free love and esoteric sexual positions. In this set of annual readings, then, we have seen the classic themes in many guises: the empirical and the normative, the individual and the social, the contemplative and the erotic. We have seen class and work, race and ex­ perience, gender and feeling. But we have spent the year on metropolitan writers. In the coming year we turn back from this metropolitan work to the more customary international list, avoiding metropolitan writings entirely. The annual reading sequence renews our commitment to our common enterprise of imagining the social. In the great diversity of our work, it is easy to lose sight of one another, as it is easy to forget those forms of social

������� �������

47

knowledge that lie across the lake or beyond the hills or indeed at the very antipodes of our own. We become parochial and small-­minded. Yet we do not escape that parochialism by becoming mere polymaths or universalists, for that is to lose the focus and the commitment that make our own work co­ herent. But by reading together a series of old and possibly unfamiliar works, we leaven our specialization with the yeast of difference. It works different wonders in the work of each, but offers an intellectual repast better than any we could imagine alone.

���� � ��

���

Gilberto Freyre

����� ��������� �� 1933 � �������� �������� ���������� �� his native Brazil has been translated into Spanish, English, French, German, Japanese, and Polish. The book’s impact arose from its portrayal of a Brazil that melded races and cultures like no other place on earth. But this portrait was thought excessively idealized by postwar generations of Brazilian social scientists, who noted not only that some of Freyre’s historical arguments were wrong, but also that his hymn to miscegenation was parlayed by Brazilian conservatives into an image of  “racial democracy” that masked Brazil’s ongoing racial issues. But with the fascination for multiculturalism in the late 20th century, Freyre’s star rose again. The Masters and the Slaves now looked less like conservative apologetics and more like a visionary meditation on a remarkable society, the introduction to a trilogy rounded out by The Mansions and the Shanties ([1936] 1963) and Order and Progress ([1959] 1970), with their analysis of patriarchalism and their more pessimistic tone. By the late 1980s, Freyre was again central to Brazilian intellectual life. In the larger world of social and historical theorizing, he is today seen as one of the great writers in that tradition of social thought that we might call aristocratic: Mme. de Stael, Tocqueville, and perhaps Leopold von Ranke in the 19th century, Leo Tolstoy, Winston Churchill, and perhaps Fernand Braudel and Americo Castro in the 20th. Aristocratic theorizing claims to see all of society, but from the point of view of the insider. The bourgeois view sees the whole of society, but aims The Masters and the Slaves. By Gilberto Freyre. Translated by Samuel Putnam. New York: Knopf, 1946. Pp. lxix+537+xliv.

52

���� ���

to do so from the outside, from no particular point of view. It was the bourgeois as state of�cial (and later as sociologist) who conceptualized l’homme moyen sensuel, an empty vessel invested with the qualities of  a gender, a race, an education, an occupation, an age, and some attitudes. And it was the bourgeois as radical who imagined equality as a contentless similarity in education, life chances, expected wealth, and other abstractions, and who believed that the good society would arrive if only all influences of an individual’s heritage could be successfully removed from the unfolding of his life story. Only the middle classes could believe such ideas; both the low and the high extremes knew this view to be chimerical. Excluded groups and their allies inevitably see a two-­class world—­us and them, oppressed and oppressor. (In the multicultural version, there is not one us but many—­each us being a them to its many peers.) There is no outside. Nor is there an outside in the aristocratic view. This is by de�nition true for the aristocratic reactionaries who mistake themselves for the entirety of society. But it is also true for those more generous minds to whom privilege carries the obligation of magnanimity and self-­critique. The latter have a unique view, for it is often left to a certain kind of aristocrat—­most often in an age of aristocratic decline—­to see society as a single thing, multifarious but strangely unified, pathological as well as wonderful. Gilberto de Mello Freyre was born in 1900 in Recife, the chief city of colonial Brazil’s oldest region, the northeast sugar country. On the dedication page of The Masters and the Slaves his grandparents’ names sing out the illustrious lineages—­Mello, Silva, Teixeira, Cunha, Wanderley—­that will become familiar in the dozens of family anecdotes that pepper the pages of the book. After private tutoring and local schooling, Freyre graduated from Baylor University in 1920 and then took a master’s degree under Franz Boas at Columbia. He traveled in Europe, then returned to Brazil and took up on the one hand a bureaucratic position as secretary to the governor of his province (Pernambuco) and on the other a literary life of essays, pseudonymous tracts, little magazines, and caricatures. Complexities of the 1930 revolution sent Freyre to exile in Portugal and a year’s teaching at Stanford. Returning to Brazil, he wrote Casa Grande e Senzala, which was first published in 1933 and, after numerous Portuguese editions, was translated into English in 1946. (The translator exchanged the metonymic Portuguese title [literally Big House and Slave Quarters] for the more focused The Masters and the Slaves.) Freyre never held an academic position, but spent the rest of his life

�������� ������

53

writing and lecturing in the Northeast, where he ran a personal research foundation, the Insitituto Joaquim Nabuco. He died in 1987. The Masters and the Slaves was an instant success in Brazilian intellectual life, so dominant that its twenty-­fifth anniversary conference produced a 600-­page book with 67 contributors. In many ways this success reflects the book’s extraordinary style. It is written on a large scale, for a reader who has time for diversions and complexities, who relishes the obscure footnote and the family anecdote, who enjoys irony and contradiction, who likes an author who is present in his text—­genial but opinionated, idiosyncratic but large hearted. There are times, indeed, when the book reads like a Borges story, so involved are the textual debates and the historical byplays, so lov­ ing the description of this or that document, so complete the analysis of some traveler’s bias toward his topics. But the book’s popularity also reflected its underlying aim to make of Brazil’s vast miscegenation a positive rather than a negative thing. For Freyre’s work was not a scientific depiction of society as it was but a passionate imagining of what one might take that society to be. Freyre’s argument rests on two claims. First, he claimed that Brazil had mixed European, African, and American stocks into a stew of races and colors. Second, he claimed that Brazilian culture had so mixed the cultures of those populations that even to the extent that the original cultures survived, they were no longer distinguishable in the way then characteristic of the United States. These points were more guiding themes than explicit claims. More explicit were a number of master subthemes. The first of these was Freyre’s causal argument, which traced the origins of Brazilian society to the initial colonizing decision to create a latifundist sugar monoculture with a small and overwhelmingly male population. This necessitated slavery (because of scarce manpower), encouraged miscegenation (as a way of building capital), determined the shift from Amerindian to African slavery (because the nomadic Amerindians’ entire culture was obliterated by settlement and fixed labor), and founded the patriarchal system that still governed Brazilian culture. Another crucial subtheme was the centrality of peninsular (Portuguese) experience. The Portuguese had a longstanding and complex relationship with Moorish culture, in which they were now dominant, now subordinate, indeed in which they had been both enslavers and enslaved. This pattern produced what was already a hybrid culture when it came to Brazil: hybrid in religion, sexuality, gender roles, occupational structure, and governance. In this sense, the Brazilian experience simply continued the peninsular one.

54

���� ���

Similarly, Freyre traced numerous separate lines from African civilization to Brazil, noting in considerable detail the importance of the vastly varying African populations, religions, languages, and cultures that were brought to the New World. He emphasized that the negative qualities considered characteristic of African slaves in Brazil were in fact produced by slavery, not by African heritage. He also treated the relation of Africans and Amerindians, noting that escaped African slaves created mini-­empires in the outback, where “blacks were a Europeanizing force among the caboclos” (p. 311). Still another pervasive theme paralleled that of miscegenation: a focus on nutrition, physical development, morbidity and mortality, menarche—­in short, a history of the body. In this analysis, Freyre managed to lose most (but not all) of the baggage of scientific racism while retaining a focus on the importance of a people’s biological heritage. Sexuality pervades The Masters and the Slaves. Joyous and intense, occasionally perverse and revolting, it runs through the discussions of religion and economics as well as those of family and sexuality. (One syphilis nostrum, he tells us, claimed that “if Christ Himself were to come back into the world today, He would be the one to raise His holy voice to recommend the use of the Elixir” [p. 326].) It is this pervasiveness that persuades the reader of the importance of sexuality, even more than do the facts themselves. However, this sexuality is completely male—­by page 12 we are hearing of “the naked Indian women with their loose-­flowing hair,” who “for some trinket or other or a bit of broken mirror would give themselves, with legs spread far apart, to the ‘caraibas,’ who were so gluttonous for a woman.” Yet Freyre’s explicit—­indeed sometimes graphic—­masculinity is only one of his many particularities, alongside his northeastern provincialism, his belief in aristocracy, his faith in the uniqueness of “Lusotropicalism,” his frankness about Brazilian sadism and indolence, his constant desire to get behind the surface niceties, his love of ironic complexity, his occasional descent into racism per se (e.g., p. 278). These particularities in many ways are the book. Even more than sexual, the book is sensual. Freyre’s desire to show the extraordinary melding of cultures in Brazil leads him into endless discussions of food, of clothing, of religious rituals, of dance. We hear of the smell of certain kinds of bodies, the lushness of women’s diets, the bodily marks of the endemic venereal diseases, the importance of the color red, the heat and indolence of midday in the Big House. We hear the sound of prayers, the songs of the interior regions, the rhymes of schoolboy taunts, the hum of lullabies. Above all, we get the sharp rasp of reality: “Silk-­lined palanquins, but

�������� ������

55

in the Big Houses bare-­tiled roofs with vermin dropping into the inmates’ beds” (p. 55); “Many of the fifteen-­year-­old brides died [in childbirth] shortly after their marriage, when they were still no more than little girls” (p. 366); “Runaway slaves had spread among the Indians a knowledge of the Portuguese language and the Catholic religion before any white missionary had done so” (p. 285); “The Mohammedan Negroes brought to Brazil from that African area which had been most deeply penetrated by Islamism were culturally superior not only to the natives, but to the great majority of the white colonists” (p. 298). As one might imagine, Freyre’s sources were of infinite variety, ranging from travelers’ accounts to historical records, memoirs, newspaper advertisements, official investigations by political and church authorities, family stories, official statistics, and scholarly literature. The bibliography contains items in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Latin, in addition to Freyre’s own Portuguese. That there was, however, no systematic attempt to assess the quality of these sources would open Freyre to great criticism after midcentury. Not that Freyre did not judge his sources. Far from it, his views of other scholars range from interest to condescension to outrage. He can be amusing (Capistrano de Abreu, he tells us on page 55, is “being a little too literary for once”). He can be cutting (“In admitting [that climate has an effect on culture], it is not necessary to go along with the exaggerations of Huntington and other fanatics” [p. 330]). He can be coy (“the account of Father Cepeda [on pederasty], now discreetly stored away in the archives of the Historical Institute of Rio de Janeiro” [p. 413]). But his judgments are not systematic or professional. As one commentator remarked, he preserved an “air of amateur dilettantism.” Freyre does not spare himself or the reader the uglinesses of old Brazil. The discussion of sadism (p. 350) is horrifying. The frank racism of the colo­ nizers and of the Church are plainly discussed (see the discussions of the Por­ tuguese and the Amerindians [p. 106] and of the Portuguese and the Africans [pp. 321, 390, 426]). To be sure, the more brutal realities of slave labor are not discussed until a later book (The Mansions and the Shanties) since the focus here is on family life. But it is puzzling to a present-­day reader, given the sharpness of Freyre’s judgments, that the book was long seen as offering conservative apologetics or as unduly optimistic. A dark strain runs through the whole work, for all its occasional nostalgia. Like all great works written in the shadows of colonialism, The Masters and The Slaves has had a complex history. It should be read alongside the

56

���� ���

great anti-­Freyre text—­The Negro in Brazilian Society by Florestan Fernandes (first published in Portuguese in 1965). Fernandes’s book avoids Freyre’s conception of racial mixing and interprets Brazilian race relations through the sharp race delineations then characteristic of the United States. Under this approach, Brazil—­in particular the city and state of  São Paulo—­evinces very clear patterns of racial discrimination indeed. Given this “obvious” fact, Fernandes and the generations of writers who followed his lead could not un­ derstand the long-­standing failure of Afro-­Brazilians to mobilize. But this expectation of mobilization underscores one of the differences between the aristocratic and bourgeois styles of social knowledge distinguished earlier. The bourgeois views are explicitly dynamic; they envision and even promulgate change. The aristocratic views do not. They see change happening, but treat it as inevitable in the flow of history and, ultimately, as amounting to little. “Everything must change in order that everything can stay the same,” in the pithy remark of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (in the novel The Leopard). So also Tocqueville argues that the French Revolution merely made visible that which had been happening for centuries, and Braudel tells us that the momentous events of Cateau-­Cambrésis, Lepanto, and Vervins count for little beside the (largely unchanging) history of structures. At its worst, this view is apologetic or reactionary. But at its best it conveys a commendable breadth of vision and a corresponding humility about our own inevitable provincialism, a humility often lacking in the bourgeois “view from outside.” After all, the rich and egotistical Germaine de Stael saw at once that France and Germany were fundamentally different societies. But her portrait of France delineates precisely those patterns of opinion, integration, and collective conscience that the scientific and positivist Émile Durkheim mistook for universal social reality. The Masters and the Slaves starts this year’s series of works from beyond the 20th-­century metropolis. Classic social science was not limited to Europe and North America. In fact, the making of today’s (2049) contempo­ rary sociology began with this recognition. Freyre’s work is challenging, exasperating, inspiring, overwhelming, occasionally disgusting, perhaps even titillating. But never boring. This is one of those rare books that is better to read than to have read.

����

Jomo Kenyatta

����� ������ ������� ���� ������ �� ������ ��� ���� ��  Africans. British social anthropology was founded on the study of Africa, but almost all the anthropologists themselves were imperial: those rare Africans who did achieve education were swept into colonial law and politics. Nonetheless, a few Africans did distinguished work. Such is Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya, published in 1938 after Kenyatta, then in his forties, had studied for three years with British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. The book is a study of  Kenyatta’s own tribe, the Kikuyu. The first footnote insists that Westerners have mistaken the phonetics of the tribe’s name; it should be Gekoyo, not Kikuyu. But “so as not to confuse the reader we have used the one form Gikuyu for all purposes” (p. xv). This footnote captures Kenyatta’s stance not only in this book, but throughout his turbulent and momentous life. He always insisted on the African point of view, but made enough concessions to remain in dialogue with his opponents. Accepting his lead, we shall use Gikuyu here. Jomo Kenyatta was born Kamau wa Moigoi in the heart of the Gikuyu country, north of Nairobi, at some point in the early 1890s. (The Gikuyu kept no birth records, so he knew only his age-­set [kehiowere], which would have included a range of birth years in the metropolitan reckoning.) After the early death of his father, a minor chief, he was adopted by an uncle and soon thereafter moved in with his grandfather, a seer and magician. After an illness brought him into contact with missionaries and their medicine, he ran away to the mission and undertook Western education. In 1914 he was Facing Mount Kenya. By Jomo Kenyatta. London: Secker and Warburg, 1938. Pp. xxi+ 339.

58

���� ���

baptized and soon took the Christian name Johnstone Kamau. At the same time, however, he underwent full adult initiation into his tribe (with his age-­ set: this ritual came in late teens for boys and early teens for girls), keeping one foot firmly in his traditional past. A carpenter, apprentice, and clerk during the later 1910s, Kenyatta became involved in the drive to reclaim Gikuyu lands from the Europeans in the 1920s. In those years, he began to be called Kenyatta, after the Swahili word for the kind of beaded belt he wore. It is not clear when Kenyatta first started using the name Jomo, although his friend Peter Mbiyu Koinange claimed that it was invented by the two of them for the publication of the book in 1938. By the end of the 1920s, Kenyatta was an important Gikuyu activist and went with two others to London to present the Gikuyu Central Association (GCA) case for land return. He stayed 18 months, during which he visited, among other places, the Soviet Union. After a brief homecoming, Kenyatta returned to London, where he remained until after the Second World War, visiting the Soviet Union again in the early 1930s (he was a student there for a year). Returning to London, he took courses from Malinowski, wrote letters for the GCA, and involved himself in progressive movements both African and otherwise. On his return to Kenya in 1946, Kenyatta immediately became a central figure in independence politics. Colonial administrators imprisoned him for seven years over his role—­never fully elucidated—­in the Mau Mau affair of 1952–­59. Paradoxically, Kenyatta’s fourteen years in London and his seven in a hard-­labor camp protected him from reputational damage in the kaleidoscopic shifts of Kenyan politics, so he emerged from prison in August 1961 to a hero’s welcome, understood by British and Africans alike as the probable leader of Ken­ ya’s future. He was prime minister on Kenya’s independence in 1963 and president from 1964 until his death in 1978, when he was well into his eighties. Kenyatta was the oldest of the generation of sub-­Saharan leaders who man­ aged decolonization: a decade older than Nigeria’s Azikiwe and Ghana’s Nkrumah, two decades or more older than Tanganyika’s Nyerere, Zambia’s Kaunda, or Congo’s Lumumba, Mobutu, and Kasavubu. Even among the Ken­ yan leaders, he was, by the time of his release (at about age 70), “the old man,” commonly known as “elder” (Mzee) Jomo Kenyatta. But he was an adroit politician; one can see even in his tribal ethnography a deft blending of Malinowskian functionalism with African polemic. This ability to play both sides while never losing his African focus made Kenyatta one of  the few African independence leaders who died in office and of natural causes.

���� ��������

59

Perhaps it helped that the British colonialism against which Kenyatta rebelled was recent, unlike that in West Africa, where Britain had been involved since the late 17th century, first in building the slave trade and later in abolishing it. When Kenyatta was born, Kenya had almost no Europeans. They came in his childhood and youth, created a settler colonial state during his young and mature adulthood, and were driven out when he was becoming old. To be sure, this did not mean that East Africa had not seen other outsiders: the Arab slave trade took millions of East Africans over its 1,000-­year history. And Indian and Arab merchants were of very long standing in the areas that became Kenya, particularly on the coastal strip around Mombasa. But all this disappears in Facing Mount Kenya, which is an ethnographic rendition of the stable, peaceful Gikuyu and their disturbance by the British, who are portrayed as rapacious, hypocritical, and occasionally rather funny. When the colonized write their own ethnographies, the result is compli­ cated. On the one hand, ethnography was a metropolitan genre, created in the museums and universities of the imperial states. On the other, it had a commitment to represent the Other for itself. Paradoxically, Kenyatta is a colonized man of full maturity writing in the metropolitan genre an account of  a culture he has himself partly lost. He presents it as a unified, stable whole in the era “before the white man,” writing in the “ethnographic pres­ ent” so much decried at the turn of the 21st century. At the same time, he crit­ icizes the colonialists in the name of abstract equality, fairness, and justice, values which come more from the metropolitan canon than from the Giku­yu culture whose traditions the book chronicles so wonderfully. These pow­ erful critical passages—­sometimes angry, sometimes wry—­surface when Kenyatta’s forbearance has been exhausted and ethnographic detachment disappears in passion. The passion is first and foremost Gikuyu, not African. It is his tribe and its practices that Kenyatta discusses and defends here, not African customs in general. Of the other local tribes, only the Wakamba and the Masai make substantial appearances. The former are very closely related to the Gikuyu, and, as for the latter, it is no doubt with some pride that Ken­ yatta tells us (p. 210) that he had Masai ancestors, since the Masai were the dominant warriors in the area. On the surface, the book is a deadpan exercise in the functionalism of the later Malinowski. There are chapters on kinship, land tenure, economy, education, initiation, sex and marriage, government, traditional religion, new religion, and magic. A final chapter insists on the unity and integration of

60

���� ���

Gikuyu life, all aspects of which are based on family groups and age-­sets. This is the order followed by many British ethnographies in the interwar period. But via this Malinowskian presentation, Kenyatta addresses the metropolitan rulers, in a genre of their own making, on the great political issues between the Gikuyu and the British. The kinship and land tenure chapters address the question of expropriation. The chapter on initiation discusses the practical details and tribal justification for clitoridectomy. The marriage chapter does the same for Gikuyu polygamy. The chapter on new religions explores the misfit between Christianity and African realities. Kenyatta is at great pains to distinguish Gikuyu landholding from Western, fully alienable ownership. The Gikuyu follow a trusteeship model: the current tenant manages the property for past and future generations of his family but is nonetheless the undisputed “owner” of the land in the present. This model had prevailed in the West until the rise of capitalism destroyed it, reemerging (and then at the societal level) only in response to the environmental crises of the later 20th century. Yet Kenyatta’s stable picture doesn’t tell us that the Gikuyu often practiced agriculture in one area until it became infertile, and then moved on. He speaks of fallowing, but there was in fact a good deal of tribal movement in the medium term, in part driven by the ongoing incursions of the pastoralist and warlike Masai. As if to emphasize its polemic quality, the chapter concludes with a long and hilarious native story (probably made up for the occasion, for it fits the narrative all too well) about the relations between an elephant (the British) and a man (the Gikuyu). The parody of British colonial government is as witty as it is merciless. In the chapter on initiation, the ironies multiply. For here Kenyatta defends the Gikuyu practice of clitoridectomy, carried out on girls in their ear­ly teens as their full initiation (irua) into the tribe, in order to prepare them for their future responsibilities as wives, mothers, and agriculturalists. This had become a major political issue for the Gikuyu by 1930. The colonialists uniformly opposed the practice: the missionaries decried it, while the British administration was quietly trying to negotiate its replacement by some more limited ritual. That made clitoridectomy an ideal issue for anticolonialist politics. The GCA began to insist that even converted Africans should nonetheless circumcise their daughters, particularly aiming at those Christian chiefs who had refrained from allowing the ritual in their families. As missionary leaders responded with strong public statements, the GCA seized the occasion to pull the Gikuyu out of the missionary orbit, starting a whole

���� ��������

61

mission-­independent school system. In Kenyatta’s rendition, it is the missionaries who make the first, stupid move. But other evidence suggests that the GCA may have seen that this issue was a way of breaking Africans free of missionary tutelage. Not surprisingly, this chapter concludes with derisive remarks about missionaries and a seemingly purely ethnographic claim that “the African is in the best position properly to discuss and disclose the psychological background of tribal customs, such as irua, and should be given the opportunity to acquire the scientific training which will enable him to do so” (p. 154). But this is not the same Kenyatta who later tells us It is beyond our comprehension to see how a people can reach a “higher level” while they are denied the most elementary human rights of self-­expression, freedom of speech, the right to form social organizations to improve their condition, and, above all, the right to move freely in their own country. These are the rights which the Gikuyu people had enjoyed from time immemorial until the arrival of the “mission” of Great Britain. (p. 197) In our opinion, the African can only advance to a “higher level” if he is free to express himself, to organize economically, politically, and socially, and to take part in the government of his own country. In this way he will be able to develop his creative mind, initiative, and personality, which hitherto have been hindered by the multiplicity of incomprehensible laws and ordinances. (pp. 197–­98)

The latter passages are thoroughly metropolitan. If we apply their arguments to the case of female circumcision, the girls should choose whether or not they undergo the ritual. But such choices would presume an individualism and modernity inconsistent with Kenyatta’s insistence, in the discussion of female circumcision, that only the African can know and develop African tradition. An African male, one should note. There is no detailed analysis of male circumcision in the book, nor of the political and economic fact that the initiation ceremonies took two months total, removing a crucial group of  women and adolescents from the labor force “required” by the new European settlers. (Male circumcision rituals also disrupted the labor supply, and these facts were central in promoting colonial action to discourage these rituals.) Nor does he tell us that the missionaries he mocks based their arguments completely on the girl’s right to control her life and body, rights that, as we

62

���� ���

have just seen, Kenyatta elsewhere treats as sacred. Finally, he does not mention what is the most obvious aspect of the matter for any woman—­that the entire female circumcision debate involved no women whatever. Polygamy is another topic that divided the missionaries and the Gikuyu. The latter delighted in pointing out the polygamy of the Old Testament pa­ triarchs. But here the Kenyatta of metropolitan values returns, albeit em­ ploying those values in defense of a very nonmetropolitan practice. (Ken­ yatta himself was married four times.) It is the head wife whom he portrays as urging her husband to marry again: “Get me a companion” (p. 176). The “man­agement of a polygamous household” is presented as a matter of individual liberty: each woman has her own hut and her own garden allotments, “entirely under her own control.” A system of strict rotation between wives obtains for sexual intercourse, but Kenyatta also tells us about wives’ behavior on evening visits of age-­set peers of their husband: “On these occasions, the wives exercise their freedom, which amounts to something like polyandry. Each wife is free to choose anyone among the age-­group and give him accommodation for the night” (p. 181). He knows that the metropolitan audience needs to see some freedoms for the women, too. Indeed, the analysis of polygamy invariably employs the rights-­and-­f reedoms language of the metropolitan Kenyatta as opposed to the tradition-­is-­the-­proper-­form-­of-­ self-­determination language of the clitoridectomy analysis. This tension between the two Kenyattas is noted by Malinowski himself, who in his introduction to the volume notes “a little too much in some passages of European bias” (p. xi). Surrounding these contentious central chapters, where political issues are canvassed in both ethnographic and polemical terms, other chapters simply provide an insider’s view of a remarkable culture—­of its education, industry, music, and religion. Here Kenyatta’s wry humor often speaks. For example, “war” among the Gikuyu means raiding neighboring tribes for cattle, as in so many early societies (the great Irish epic is “The Cattle-­Raid of Cooley”). Such “wars” are low-­intensity affairs by contrast with the carnage of the First World War, in which tens of thousands of Africans had lost their lives: The only difference [in “intertribal” relations in Europe and Africa] is that the relations between European countries involve great suffering for the majority of the people, either through economic fights, tariff barriers and distribution of wealth, etc., or through actual fights in battlefields. (p. 210)

���� ��������

63

By contrast, in Africa, he tells us, “the stock was lost and the lives of a few herdsmen. Tribal warfare was an occasional raid, with long intervals in between” (p. 209). Also fascinating is Kenyatta’s account of the tribe’s rain ceremony, complete with his own participation as one of the two little children involved (to symbolize purity): In the case of the ceremony in which I took part I well remember that our prayers were quickly answered, for even before the sacred fires had ceased to burn, torrential rain came upon us. We were soaked, and it will not be easy for me to forget the walk home in the downpour. (p. 249)

And he assures us, with tongue firmly in cheek, that “I wish to put it on record that every rain ceremony that I have witnessed has been very soon followed by rain. It is not believed, however, that the rain ceremony must always be successful” (p. 250). But even then, failure gets ultimately blamed on the colonialists, although for once Kenyatta here follows pure Gikuyu logic. Through European impact and missionary activity, “the tribe has lost its unity: hence it cannot speak with Mwene-­Nyaga [God] with its full contingent of voices. That being so, he is not impressed” (p. 251). Facing Mount Kenya reminds us that great ethnography need not be apolitical. Quite the contrary, the passionate reaction to culture contact and the endless ironic inversions of  its arguments and its writing are what make the book such an intriguing document. At first it reads quite straightforwardly, but the merest hint of contextual reflection makes the text come alive with irony. In the metropolis, social scientists spend their lives in their disciplines. But in the colonialized world, as it shook itself free, social science was often a formative phase on the way to other things—­in Kenyatta’s case, national political leadership. Yet social science came for Kenyatta after his initial contact with the metropolitan cultures and his first long phase of political activism. Facing Mount Kenya is, therefore, a very sophisticated book, studiedly deceptive in its putative Malinowskian simplicity, rhetorically conscious in the carefully adjusted level of its occasional polemics. It is in its own way as much a commentary on the metropolis—­with its cataclysmic war, its soul-­destroying economic depression, its fearful fascism—­as it is an ethnography of the Gikuyu. It uses ethnography to entice the metropolitan

64

���� ���

intellectual reader with a contrasting vision of the idealized if slightly exotic Gikuyu, who want nothing more than (in the last words of the preface) that “peaceful tillage of the soil which supplies their material needs and enables them to perform their magic and traditional ceremonies in undisturbed serenity, facing Mount Kenya” (p. xxi). The book is, in fact, a great achievement, both as social science and as special pleading. It is also very good reading. Malinowski saw this all from the start: “As a first-­hand account of a representative African culture, as an invaluable document in the principles underlying culture-­contact and change; last, not least, as a personal statement of the new outlook of a progressive African, this work will rank as a pioneering achievement of outstanding merit” (p. xiv).

��

Qu Tongzu

����� �� ���������� ����� �� ��� 1930 �, ������� ��������� survived war, revolution, and rehabilitation to emerge in the late 20th century as a vibrant tradition. But the revolution marked that history ineluctably. In China, political debates over the practical utility of scholarship and the possibility of scientific detachment were not windy tempests in academic teapots, as they were in the Western metropolis. Such storms had real consequences. Many of the leaders of early Chinese sociology disappeared from view in the early years of the revolution, and only a few remained to create a post-­Mao sociology in the years after 1980. All the same, the reader of early Chinese sociology has wide choices. Fei Xiaotong wrote ethnographies and rural studies that were widely read in the West, as was his colleague Shi Guoheng’s China Enters the Machine Age, a human-­relations-­school ethnography of a factory in wartime Kunming. However, both these works bear the mark of the West more strongly than do the magisterial books of the historical sociologist Qu Tongzu. Originally written in Chinese but then expanded and translated by its author during the 1950s, Qu’s painstaking Law and Society in Traditional China, is a tightly organized exposition of the laws governing the foci of traditional Chinese social structure. Qu’s Local Government in China under the Ch’ing then analyzes the machinery that put that law into practice in the last of the Chinese dynasties.

Law and Society in Traditional China. By Qu Tongzu [T’ung-­Tsu Ch’ü]. Paris: Mouton, 1961. Pp. 304. Local Government in China under the Ch’ing. By Qu Tongzu [T’ung-­Tsu Ch’ü]. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962. Pp. xiv+360.

66

���� ���

Qu’s work is overwhelmingly rooted in Chinese sources. To be sure, he occasionally nodded to Western scholarship. His Columbia colleagues Robert Merton and R. M. MacIver made cameo appearances in the footnotes of Local Government (pp. 340 n. 3, 327 n. 87), and A. L. Kroeber, S. M. Lipset, and MacIver had all commented on portions of Law and Society prior to publication. But the West in fact had little to offer Qu’s project. Max Weber’s original sources on China comprised a few translations of central chronicles (e.g., the  Shiji of Sima Qian and the Yu zhuan zizhi tongjian gangmu san bian of Emperor Qianlong), scattered other translations, and the late-­19th-­century issues of the Peking Gazette, all of which were routinely translated into Western languages. By contrast, Qu’s Law and Society lists hundreds of Chinese language sources (along with a few Japanese and more than a few Western sources), running from law codes to encyclopedias to dynastic histories to court records to administrative materials. Local Government also draws deeply from primary materials. Thus, while exposure to Western scholarship eventually made Qu somewhat more willing to abstract and to theorize, it little affected the Chinese core of his work. And because Qu’s family was deeply rooted in Chinese learning, that core is thoroughly familial. To know his family is to begin to know his scholarship. Qu Tongzu’s grandfather, Qu Hongji, was one of the leading politicians and intellectuals of the late Qing. Born in 1850, Qu Hongji took the highest examination degree ( Jinshi) in the tenth year of Tongzhi (1871) and went to the Hanlin Academy, which acted as court secretariat and also maintained the Confucian examination system that had selected Chinese officials for centuries. He later became an examination administrator in Henan and Sichuan before returning to the central court at Xi’an during its flight from the Boxer Rebellion. There he became identified with the “purification clique,” a somewhat conservative group of scholars committed to rigorous Con­fucian values and opposed to the dominant, hands-­on politicians (and incipient war­­ lords) like Li Hongzhang and Yuan Shikai. Qu’s bureaucratic ascent was backed by Dowager Empress Cixi, and eventually he became minister of foreign affairs. (Like most senior bureaucrats, he was also several other things: member of the Government Affairs Bureau, manager of the Beijing-­Tianjin Railroad, joint director of the General Office of Railways and Mines, and, most important, joint director of the Finance Bureau.) But his position as grand councillor inevitably brought Qu into open conflict with Yuan Shikai, and the wily Yuan allied with the corrupt Prince Qing to persuade Cixi that Qu was in contact with the deposed reform leader Kang Youwei. Dismissed

�� ������

67

from court in 1907, Qu returned to private life in Hunan and later Shanghai, where he would help educate his grandson. Qu Hongji had two wives, the second of whom (the grandmother of  Ton­ gzu) was the daughter of a provincial administrator and was celebrated for her calligraphy. His two sons were similarly eminent. Qu Xuanzhi (Tongzu’s father) graduated from the imperial translation school, then served in the Bureau of Administration, and, after caring for his parents after the 1911 Revolution, later became an ambassador, dying in Europe in 1923. Qu Duizhi (Tongzu’s uncle) graduated from Fudan University and became a secretary of state in the Beiyang government (the weak central government of the warlord period). Later he became a distinguished historian. Moreover, Duizhi’s wife was the granddaughter of  Zeng Guofan, probably the single most powerful Han Chinese of the mid-­19th century. Born in 1910, Qu Tongzu thus grew up in a very elite household, albeit one that had lost its political position, and, after the 1911 Revolution, its money. Tongzu was educated in the classics by his grandfather and grandmother until the former’s death in 1919. After his father went to Europe, Tongzu was raised by his historian uncle. His school education completed, he entered sociology training at Yenching under Wu Wenzao, along with Fei Xiaotong and others. His strength in the classics led Wu to steer him toward social history, and his master’s thesis on Chinese feudal society was published in 1937. In 1939, when Yenching was overrun, he moved with Wu to Yunnan where he undertook his work on law and society, which became a Chinese book in 1947 and was published in translation in 1961. In 1945, he was invited by Karl August Wittfogel to Columbia, where he undertook work on Han social structure that would eventually be published in 1972. In 1955, he moved to Harvard’s East Asian Center, where he researched and published Local Government. After a brief tour at the University of British Columbia (1962–­65), Qu returned to China in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. Unemployed, he returned to Hunan and eventually worked there in a local history institute through the 1970s. He was invited to the Institute of Modern History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1978. Qu died—­very nearly a cen­ tenarian—­in 2008. From this extraordinary heritage and industrious career come Law and Society and Local Government. The former gives us the legal system of traditional China, while the latter portrays the local administrators who put that legal system into practice. The former shows us the law not only in its abstractions but also in dozens of actual cases and their dispositions. The latter

68

���� ���

gives us not only the social framework in which those cases took shape: the magistrates with their runners, clerks, personal servants, and private secretaries; the elaborate system of supervision and regulation looking over the magistrate’s shoulder; and the local gentry with their connections and power. But it also gives us the endless corruption—­some of it legalized—­ necessary to finance local justice and government, as well as the strangely interlocked and seemingly perverse incentives that drove the entire local government system. Together the two books make a profound impression. They present what a Western reader can only see as an enduring marriage of rationality and irrationality, both carried to extremes uncommon in the West. It is a social system organized along fundamentally different dimensions than those of Western Europe or the Islamicate world. Several aspects of that social system are immediately apparent. The first is the sheer weight of institutional memory and records. Law and Society (LS) lists about 400 Chinese language sources and Local Government (LG) lists nearly the same number. Many of these works are hundreds—­some of them thousands—­of years old. We hear that during the Liang dynasty (AD 502–­ 557) Wang Seng-­Pien’s mother beat him even when he was over 40 (LS, p. 21). We learn that in 167 BC a filial daughter asked to become a government slave so that her father would not be punished by mutilation (LS, p. 74). We learn that in Tang and Song times a semislave or his wife who struck a freeman was punished one degree more severely than if the same crime had been committed against an equal (LS, p. 186). We learn that in Suzhou at the turn of the 18th century, people used at weddings fans decorated with the mark of the Hanlin Academy, even though this was forbidden to all but members of the academy and their families (LS, p. 163). We learn that in 1764 the punishment for causing the death of a parent by accident was immediate strangling (LS, p. 48). The sheer amount of material is overwhelming. And not only do we have the regulations themselves, but also memoirs of  magistrates reporting how those regulations were avoided, or ignored, or appealed, or modified during particular dynasties. This then is a society that remembers itself in writing. The contrast with oral societies—­Kenyatta’s Gikuyu, for example—­is overwhelming. How should we think about that weight of written history? Is it a burden to escape? Is it a resource to cherish? The Chinese have had their book burnings and their “new editions” that carefully omitted whatever the ruling emperor wanted to forget. Yet at the same time, Qu’s work, following the scholarly

�� ������

69

tradition of his grandfather and uncle, bespeaks an almost avaricious sense of tradition, as if no possible fact can be lost without irreparable damage. A second aspect of this society is its intense subjection to rules. In part this is a methodological artifact. Much of Qu’s evidence comes by inference, rather than from the legal codes and cases themselves. Thus, he infers things like gender relations or kinship obligations by triangulating between the laws governing those relations and the various indicators of the meanings and efficacy of those laws. For example, he infers that the rapid passing of new laws indicates that the old ones didn’t work. More important, Qu infers the social structure from the ways in which punishments for particular offenses vary depending on relations of kinship, marriage, status, or slavery between victim and perpetrator. It is only because the punishments for a given violation vary systematically by those relations that Qu is able to discover something about the relations themselves, on which there is otherwise little data. But the dominance of rules for social relations is not only a methodological artifact. It is another central aspect of society. The reader of Law and Society is overwhelmed by the emphasis on punishment. If we look at Pollock and Maitland’s monumental History of English Law before the Time of  Edward I (Cambridge University Press, 1899), we find that punishment plays little role at all. Pollock and Maitland infer the medieval social structure not from differing kinds of punishments, but from the differing abilities of different kinds of people to hold property and to demand redress. Crime and punishment take a mere 100 pages toward the end of their two thick volumes. But if this difference between Qu and Pollock and Maitland is obvious, the reason for it is not. Was this a difference in Chinese and Western society as those societies had been, in their times? Or was it, rather, a difference in the preoccupations of the Chinese and the Western historians as they looked back on their societies? The answer becomes clear in Law and Society when Qu takes up the question of “Li versus law”: social order through rites and inner controls versus social order via rules and punishments. Although written in the 1940s, this chapter is focused on a philosophical debate more than 2,000 years old, familiar to any educated Chinese as the debate between Xunzi and his student Han Fei. The texts discussed by Qu include extensive passages from the Liji, one of the five Confucian classics and a book Qu would have known by heart. By contrast, while Maitland does quote ancient writers (e.g., Augustine on

70

���� ���

mens rea), his interest lies only in the later transformations of their doctrines. He looks back at a history; Qu looks out on a stability. If rules and punishments form the foundations of Law and Society, it is practicality and indeed corruption that are the integument of Local Government. The Qing government appointed local magistrates in five-­year rotations in order to prevent the emergence of local powerholders. But it allocated them no funds to conduct their administrations. They had to maintain order, build infrastructure, and collect the onerous central taxes using funds raised locally. Those funds were raised partly by legally recognized fees, partly by formerly illegal fees that had become legitimized with time, and partly by bribery and corruption. Since the rotating magistrates had no local power bases, a horde of corrupt workers—­r unners, clerks, even the “servants” of the magistrates—­bought and sold influence as middle men between the magistrates and the citizens, deceiving and swindling both sides. A small class of professional administrators—­the “private secretaries”—­were the magistrates’ only protection, and indeed from these private secretaries (often graduates of the lower levels of the examination system) were recruited a surprising number of magistrates. Off to the side stood the local gentry, largely exempt from the magistrates’ authority but holding substantial local power and extorting their share of profit by quietly selling that power to the highest bidder. Nothing could be further from the deadly seriousness of Law and Society. There we learn of filial children beheaded for failing to save a parent from dying in a work accident. But in the bizarre world of Local Government runners in these very cases are taking cover-­up money from the witnesses and the accused, clerks are taking money to modify (in the process of copying) the legal charges carefully drawn up by the magistrate’s private secretary, and so on. Even the magistrates themselves are sometimes corrupt, forced to violate the rules in order to raise the funds necessary to perform their duties. And if the book itself does not make this morass of practical corruption sufficiently clear, the notes—­140 pages of them—­are essentially another book, where Qu, writing in a less formal tone, explains the details, explores the scholarly controversies, provides strange examples, and further undercuts and ironizes his main text. These notes give the reader an almost frightening sense of inferiority before a scholar who knows so many sources. Indeed, one wonders if such mastery is, in fact, genuinely possible by a single individual or whether these notes may not themselves continue some ancient tradition of annotated commentary.

�� ������

71

We are fortunate that there is a fictional account of this magistrates’ world, the Rulin Waishi (The Scholars) of Wu Jingzasi. In this long satirical novel from the 18th century, Wu pillories the scholarly class and the magistrates, in the process portraying every bribe and confidence game mentioned in Qu’s long catalog. Wu’s one or two admirable characters are honorable but ineffectual men who “succeed” by withdrawing from active life. They reinforce the picture given in Qu’s book, which leads one to wonder how any magistrate ever succeeded in governance. Nor can we understand how such a system functioned—­apparently so effectively—­for so long. We are left by Qu’s books with a strong contradiction between appearance and reality, between rule and misrule, between honor and corruption, between rationality and irrationality. But it is a great mistake to treat this contradiction as such. It is rather evidence that the world discussed by Qu—­ and by Wu centuries before him—­is simply a world organized along different lines than the other civilizations of the Eurasian land mass. Perhaps this is not contradiction at all, but simply the untranslatability that is true cultural difference. One suspects the latter because of another striking fact: the absence from Qu’s histories of any real sense of historical development. The “traditional China” of the first book is more or less eternal. The different codes and practices of the different dynasties are discussed, indeed discussed in detail. But why those differences happened is never explored. Nor is there presented a narrative leading from one China to a later China, much less a continuously progressive evolutionary account of a changing society. Qu’s study thus presents an eternal present just as surely as does a Malinowskian ethnography of a primitive tribe. The wars of conquest by the Mongols and the Man­ chus, the recurrent famines and rebellions, the occasional breakup of China into warring states, the ebb and flow of Daoism, Buddhism, and dozens of popular sects and secret societies: nearly all of this disappears into the single present of “traditional China.” (There are for example only five pages on racial differences related to the conquest dynasties.) Rather, the core of Chinese society is made up of five elements: family and lineage, marriage, styles of life and ceremonies, formal distinctions of strata, and magic. All of these, of course, are ancient topics discussed in such classics as the Book of Changes, the Record of Rites, the Great Learning, and so on. Qu’s books thus challenge us to look at 2,000 years of time and not see “history.” By contrast, since the return to China of a generation of scholars trained in the graduate schools of the West, there has emerged a very

72

���� ���

Western history of China. In that history, this older, cyclical (perhaps Confucian?) reading of China has been exchanged for a historicist reading. The stable centuries of the past have become a teleological narrative leading to now. The new reading is full of critical events and revolutions, which are driven by underlying forces of inscrutable power. As in the social history of the West, whole subliteratures have emerged studying when exactly these forces first sprang up, when the tributaries of change flowed into the rivers of transformation that ran inevitably into the oceanic present. What were once thought to be incidental rebellions are now defined as major events. Dynastic decline has been redefined as transformative progress. But to read Qu is to read a superficially Westernized scholar who nonetheless still views the world through the lens of constancy that characterized classical China. True to his life experience, he knows that everything changed in 1911, but true to his grandfather’s training he knows that the world prior to 1911 was a world that, although constantly changing, was ever the same. The question for readers is whether that constancy is located in the events themselves or in the minds that view them. It has been said that historicism is the religion of the West. To read Qu is to decide whether you wish to attend that church.

�

Mariama Bâ

������ ����������� ������ ���� ��������� ����� �� ����­ can men. A Léopold Sédar Senghor might end up in the Académie Française. But forces both colonial and indigenous closed such avenues to women. And so women in French Africa turned to different media, like other women in other times. In particular, they turned to fiction. In her short, poetic novel So Long a Letter, Senghor’s countrywoman Mariama Bâ concentrates the social in­ sights that the more fortunate Senghor could spread over the essays, vol­ umes, and reports that were his outlets as a brilliant Senegalese man (see chapter XXV). Yet to write a novel is to reflect about social life just as if one had written a theoretical thesis or an empirical monograph. Only the format is different. One sees the social from the point of view of the individual. And is not that the basic experience of all humans? A sizable literature has debated the relation between Ramatoulaye, Bâ’s protagonist, and Bâ herself. In fact, Bâ experienced nearly all the vicissitudes she assigns to her alter ego, with the crucial exception of polygamy (although Bâ’s cherished elder sister was one of four wives). But the novel reorders these experiences and reduces them to more common dimension. For Bâ’s own life was extraordinary beyond fiction. Mariama Bâ was born in Dakar in 1929. Her father had served with dis­ tinction at Verdun and the Marne and returned to an administrative career that saw him eventually become minister of public health in the Senega­ lese transitional government. Her mother died young, and—­her father being Une si longue lettre. By Mariama Bâ. Dakar: Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1980. Pp. 131; So Long a Letter. By Mariama Bâ. Translated by Modupé Bodé-­Thomas. London: Heinemann, 1981. Pp. 90.

74

���� ���

busy with his career—­Mariama was raised in the household of her maternal grandmother, who in her widowhood had married a devout Tijani Muslim with three other wives and a mosque within the family compound. Nonethe­ less Bâ’s father overcame his mother-­in-­law’s objections to a Western educa­ tion for her. Bâ was marked out for a secretarial career. But her school direc­ tor was impressed by the girl’s ability and insisted that, for her own good and the honor of the school, she must sit the exam for the Normal School in Rufisque, an exam taken by girls all across French West Africa. Bâ took first place on this exam, and her indomitable headmistress persuaded the reluc­ tant grandmother to allow Mariama to continue her education. Bâ loved her new school and especially its feminist and pro-­African headmistress Ger­ maine Le Goff. (Bâ’s first published work was actually a school piece, on the French writer René Chateaubriand.) Once graduated, Bâ became a schoolteacher and eventually an inspector of schools. In the late 1960s she turned to active feminism, and at some point in the 1970s, with the strong encouragement of woman friends, she took up fiction. So Long a Letter grew directly out of Bâ’s feminist commitments, as its dedication makes clear: “To all women and to men of good will.” Like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and many other early feminist militants, how­ ever, Bâ was also essentiellement mère (essentially motherly), in her daugh­ter’s words. Immediately after graduation from school, Bâ married a flamboyant older man with three children. But he wanted an old-­style relationship, and after four years and three more children, Bâ divorced him. She quickly re­ married (a quiet physician, with whom she had another child) and then di­ vorced again. In the 1950s, she met Obèye Diop, a young socialist intellectual and journalist, who became her third husband and the father of another nine children. Diop’s rise in the 1950s was spectacular, taking him to the Colonial Council, the secretaryship of state for technical and professional education, and a position as minister of information, before he fell from power in a 1962 Senghorian housecleaning that followed a coup scare. As Bâ’s daughter (Mame Coumba Ndiaye) made clear in her 2007 mem­ oir, the Diop/Bâ menage was wildly exciting: intellectual, committed, pas­ sionate, and loving, if often argumentative. Both partners were preoccupied with work and family, but the one was very public while the other was very private. Diop’s work kept him on the move, while Bâ’s kept her near home. Diop had little concern for worldly things, while Bâ loved clothes, jewelry, and style (all African, for she gave up Western clothing after the 1950s). Not to mention that there were 13 children of varying ages and paternity. This

������� ��

75

extraordinary household eventually broke up over differences between its passionate principals, and Bâ established herself independently in Dakar. She was almost immediately taken ill and died August 17, 1981, at 52, with a second novel (Scarlet Song) virtually finished and a third in design. All these complexities are sea-­changed into a rich, jewel-­like novel. So Long a Letter details the reflections of Ramatoulaye, a Senegalese widow, from the day of her husband’s death until the time when her mourning has ended and she can receive the visit of her oldest friend, Aissatou. Because Islamic mourning customs require seclusion, the novel takes the form of a diary/letter written for that friend. In this text are reviewed all the possible vagaries of a middle-­class, middle-­aged West African woman’s life: moth­ erhood, polygamy, betrayal, triumph, duty, religion, friendship, and, occa­ sionally, happiness. The full story emerges not as a narrative but in complex and overlapping flashbacks. It starts with betrayal revealed. When her husband dies, Rama­ toulaye almost immediately discovers the depth of his theft of common re­ sources for his new wife. Then gradually we hear that the new wife is in fact a daughter’s school friend—­one who has been joking with the daughter about her absurd “sugar daddy.” In parallel emerges the betrayal and divorce of Aissatou by her husband. (Unlike Ramatoulaye, Aissatou chooses to leave Africa via a job as a trans­ lator—­another circumstance that calls for the epistolary format.) Again and again, we see the richness of  Ramatoulaye’s consciousness, the threads of re­ ligion, hope, duty, doggedness, even grandeur that weave through her reinter­ pretation of her past. (Bâ once remarked “I have neither the greatness of soul nor the qualities of  Ramatoulaye, and my life is much more complicated, more dramatic in its incidents, than that of my heroine.”) Like many wonderful first-­person novels, So Long a Letter has the ironic problem that its protagonist’s voice is almost too lovely. Even in English translation, the writing is beautiful, and the French original is exquisite: its vocabulary at once rich and economical, its syntax elegant, and its insights symphonically timed. An average Senegalese widow does not write such lan­ guage, we may think, nor has she the concentrated self-­insight here shown. Yet social restrictions steered many talented women into the silent roles of the everyday, where they made their lives, and those of their households, into a species of poetry. Here, too, Bâ makes a profound point about everyday social action—­that it has a profound beauty, here expressed as the beauty of the text.

76

���� ���

As social scientists, we usually forgo that beauty, for we eschew writing rooted in personal vision. We pursue abstractions and generalization, and in that pursuit we ignore the daily flow of glancing insights, of little irrev­ ocabilities, of everyday emotions, that make up the content of human life. These real life details are mere noise in our models beside the sterner stuff of gender, race, class, age, region—­the serried ranks of variables assembled. So also with networks. Where Ramatoulaye’s subtle connections ebb and flow through the incidents of life, our network models have simple links, often without content or even direction. We forget that the threads we weave were once thousands of little interactional fibers. Only the spinning of life made them the long filaments we weave so carelessly into our abstractions. More specifically, there seem to be three qualities that make So Long a Letter questionable as social science: first its presentation as fiction, second its first-­person viewpoint, and third its narrative character. Each of these “disabilities” needs to be questioned. There is no inherent problem, first, in fiction as social science. One can imagine a genre of fictional inquiry into social life (as opposed to individual life), and such a genre in fact exists. On the theoretical end of this spectrum we have the utopias of  Thomas More, Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gil­ man, and so on, as well as the dystopias of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and any number of others. On the empirical end, we have self-­consciously sociological fiction, like that of Anthony Trollope and Émile Zola or the more dramatic Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac. For many years, none of this was felt to be appropriate for social science readers except as amuse­ ment. Eventually, we saw that Trollope was every bit the sociologist that Erving Goffman was; his dissection of upper-­class life in mid-­19th-­century Britain cannot be surpassed, however fictional it might be. Perhaps, we saw, fiction is not really a bar to social science, at least in the right hands. As for a focus on individual lives and the first-­person standpoint, non­ fictional biography/autobiography has served as a method from time to time in social science, but has never been fully legitimized. First emerging in the Progressive Era casework literature, biographical documents were widely used in early studies of crime and immigration; the “life course” tradition continued them fitfully throughout the 20th century. But even then the “life course” concept did not really succeed as social science until it translated itself into the language of generalization and variables. Only in ethnography did the first-­person voice stabilize as social science, and the epistemological

������� ��

77

hypochondrias of the later 20th century questioned even that. It was well after 2000 that a serious sociology of the individual began. That sociology of the individual has reflected a theoretical unification, at last, of explanation and narrative, for the final—­and most vexing—­ques­ tion raised by So Long a Letter is the question of narration, and in particular first-­person narration. A long and distinguished literature has pitted his­ tory against sociology as modes of apprehending the social. But that litera­ ture has focused on grand questions of explanation. It has too little theorized the microscopic interweaving of social experience. The phenomenologists attempted that theory, to be sure, but their sociological followers grew un­ adventurous, illustrating their masters’ ideas rather than extending them. It was therefore rather the “individual turn” in the social sciences after 2010 that provided the impetus to and data for the theoretical interweaving of explanation and narrative. And a surprisingly large amount of that theory came from the profound contemplation of the great “sociologists” who hap­ pened to write narrative fiction, writers like Trollope and Balzac. It is not only refreshing to read a book that grasps in 90 pages the narrative experi­ ence of social living; it is also an important theoretical challenge. What exactly was it about reading works like So Long a Letter that led to the new theories? Most important, we learned something about objec­tifi­ cation. First-­person, experiential social science, whether fictional or not, re­ sists objectification. Bâ does not construct theoretical arguments. She coins no terms. One cannot, for example, cite her book to support the theory that “religious commitment trumps gender commitment,” even though Rama­ toulaye—­like Bâ herself—­through all her gender tribulations never lets go of her unshakable commitment to Islam. For within the one commitment, the other reappears and disciplines the one as if they were dancing together. Ramatoulaye obeys all the rules of Muslim mourning, but the contempt with which she rejects her brother-­in-­law’s proposal of leviratic (and polygamous) marriage is forthrightly feminist. Or again, she detests Aissatou’s mother-­ in-­law Nabou, who is driven by religious, class, and tribal conservatism stealthily to create the second bride who will destroy Aissatou’s marriage. Yet she entirely grants the logic of  Nabou’s experience as woman. Religion and feminism cannot then be distinguished as separated objects here. And what cannot be separated in a living person cannot be redeployed elsewhere as separable variables. Therefore narratives always lack concep­ tual portability, whether they are fictional or not. Generalization of such

78

���� ���

narratives requires generalization of experiences or trajectories of experi­ ence, not of qualities of persons or of experiences. That was the challenge set by fiction like Bâ’s. But this challenge is not merely negative—­a requirement that we avoid the objectification of feminism, Islam, and other personal qualities. It at the same time requires us to theorize directly the dance of feminism and Islam within the myriads of interacting selves that inhabit a social world. One Ramatoulaye is not enough. And even within Ramatoulaye, the dance is un­ clear, as we see from the two quite different readings of the book. The first and historically dominant reading is feminist. In this view, the center of Ra­ matoulaye’s self is her gender. Like Isabel Archer in Henry James’s Portait of a Lady, Ramatoulaye refuses the easy ways out of a bad situation, and, by so doing, enacts herself as both a woman and a full human being. This reading certainly accords with Bâ’s public pronouncements as a feminist. But later readings have taken the novel as a study of Islam, to which Bâ was similarly dedicated. The Ramatoulaye of the book’s early sections goes through the religious motions, but remains inwardly uncommitted. She be­ grudges her co-­wife’s mother the hajj with which her husband has won the woman’s complaisance, trivializing it by comparing it with the Alfa-­Romeos that have won the daughter. She admires Aissatou’s secular-­feminist refusal to remain in Dakar as one of two wives. She hears the news of her husband’s new marriage with grace and aplomb not because this is what becomes a Muslim wife, but rather because she “must not give my visitors the pleasures of relating [to her husband] her distress.” These are all the old Ramatoulaye. For at the crucial moment, she decides to remain in Dakar and accept her new situation, and to “prepare myself for equal sharing according to the precepts of  Islam concerning polygamic life.” It is rather her husband who violates the law of  Islam, failing to give her equal time with the new wife. In recounting this story to her friend, Ramatoulaye grows in faith, reflecting on her own failures in the marriage and remaining true to her love of her husband. At the fortieth day, she can truly say “I have forgiven him.” On the rock of this forgiveness breaks her brother-­in-­law’s marriage proposal, as well as a much more welcome proposal from an old and admirable suitor. Whom she rejects because she doesn’t love him and because the Quran gives her the right to suit herself. Seeking to build a new social world, she offers him friendship—­she has said throughout the book that friendship is better than marriage. But he refuses, still trapped in an earlier Islam that places love within duty. And when, finally, Ramatoulaye

������� ��

79

is tested by a daughter’s unplanned, unannounced pregnancy, she “sought refuge in God, as at every moment of crisis.” But the new self is quickly for­ giving; “One is a mother in order to love without beginning or end.” In the new readings, the novel concerns the rediscovery of Islam, of sur­ render to the will of the All-­Merciful. Such interpretations move from femi­ nist politics of a somewhat traditional sort—­how to advance the interests of women—­to the different question of how humans live religious lives that are simultaneously social and personally fulfilling. The privatization of reli­ gion in the Christian West surrendered to Islam the lead in imagining such patterns for religious living in social worlds. Little surprise then that the Muslim Bâ captures this performative quality of religion. Ramatoulaye has always “been religious.” But to “be” a Muslim (or any other religion) is not to be something, but to be aware that one is in the process of becoming some­ thing. Religion is thus a particular form of performative articulation be­ tween the becoming person, the social process, and the natural world in which both person and process find themselves. It is from novels and other such biographical works that this insight has come—­the rooting of what we used to call “institutions” in particular kinds of temporal articulations of selves and groups. But one need not know the detailed turns of sociological theory to know the greatness of this book. One needs only an open mind and an inquiring heart.

��

G. S. Ghurye

�� ��� ��� ������� �� �� �� ������ �� �� ������������ �� one of  his own students—­the modest but brilliant M. N. Srinivas. But the difference was as much in historical moment as in scholarship. Ghurye made his career in prepartition British India; subaltern status forged his bitterness. The more fortunate Srinivas had a postcolonial career and was able to join his friend R. K. Narayan in creating a serene vision of a new India—­the former in sociology, the latter in fiction. But Ghurye was a great man, author of ten thousand pages on subjects as diverse as caste and costume, Shakespeare and sadhus. Head of department and professor of sociology at the University of Bombay, Ghurye trained 40 PhD’s in a 35-­year teaching career, then trained another 16 PhD’s in retirement. He founded the Indian Sociological Society in 1951 and remained its president for 15 years. Several of his students were later ISS presidents, and others served as the organization’s secretaries or treasurers. Their books were as numerous as chilies in Kerala. And Ghurye himself wrote at least one truly great book: the monograph Caste and Race in India for C. K. Ogden’s History of Civilization series, in which he joined authors such as W. H. R. Rivers, Lucien Febvre, V. Gordon Childe, and Marcel Granet. Published in 1932, the book—­Ghurye’s first—­was a resounding success. By 1969 it had reached a fifth edition and almost doubled in size. So extraordinary a career signals an equally extraordinary character, and indeed the chapter titles of Ghurye’s autobiographical memoir reveal a man who found and lived a destiny: “I Arrive”; “I Learn”; “I Go to College”; “I Seek Caste and Race in India. By G. S. Ghurye. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1932. Pp. vii+227.

�� �� ������

81

an Academic Career”; “I Run My Career”; “I Retire from Service-­Career.” After such an outline, it is no surprise that we hear the details not only of Ghurye’s many scholarly successes, but also of his various intestinal difficulties and his many scholarly and bureaucratic contests. Ghurye’s wife appears in the book mainly to show how enlightened were Ghurye’s own views on things like spousal relations, caste naming, and birth control. One wonders what she thought about his informing readers as to the month of her menarche. But the symphonic egoism of I and Other Explorations does not obscure Ghurye’s remarkable trajectory. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye was born in 1893 in Malvan, at the southern edge of what was then the Bombay Presidency of the British Empire in India. His birth family being in sudden decline, Ghurye was educated with the help of relations and connections. In this process, he quite literally followed his brilliant elder brother, whose education took him first to the nearby princely town of Kolhapur, then to Bombay, and then to teaching positions first in the Gujurati princely town of Junagarh, and later back in Bombay. In Junagarh the younger Ghurye took up serious study of Sanskrit, later becoming the top Sanskrit scholar of his class at the University of Bombay, taking First Class Honors and winning the Chancellor’s Medal. In 1919 the university proposed a traveling fellowship for the study of sociology. Since his Sanskrit thesis had involved the study of social institutions, Ghurye was intrigued. But the fellowship was under the control of the professor of sociology. Strangely enough, this was the famous Scottish city planner Patrick Geddes. Geddes had been a botany professor in Dundee for 31 years, most of which he had actually spent as a sociological activist in London. But in 1914, the opportunities of imperial town planning had brought him to India at the invitation of his old friend (and fellow Scot) Lord Pentland. Having lost both his son and his wife in 1917, Geddes decided to settle in India and therefore recreated at Bombay in 1919 the same arrangement he had long enjoyed at Dundee: part-­year teaching coupled with an extensive national and international consulting practice. For some reason, the aging Scottish visionary and the ambitious young Sanskritist found each other sympathetic, and Geddes duly sent Ghurye off to England. Despite his initial efforts, however, Ghurye could not stomach the recommended London PhD in Comtean social evolutionism under L. T. Hobhouse. He followed one of Geddes’s other letters of introduction to A. C. Haddon, who in turn took him to W. H. R. Rivers, who not only became

82

���� ���

Ghurye’s patron and sponsor at Cambridge but also arranged for two extensions of his Bombay fellowship. On Rivers’s sudden death in 1922, Haddon took over and saw Ghurye through the PhD and his return to a further fellowship in Calcutta. Not surprisingly given this experience, Ghurye remained a lifelong Anglophile, to the discomfiture of his younger colleagues and students. In 1924 Ghurye was appointed reader in sociology at Bombay (and head of department, since Geddes’s tenure had been judged unsuccessful). He finally became professor in 1934. In his 1973 autobiography, Ghurye’s Bombay decades are largely a recitation of students and their theses, of bureaucratic contests won and lost, of famous visitors and their glowing testimonials. There are, however, some acrid moments. In an odd but characteristic aside, Ghurye tells with no small pride how he managed to deny a reader­ship at Bombay to Srinivas in 1950–­51, even though the latter was—­by the time Ghurye was writing his memoirs—­probably the best-­known sociologist in India and even though Ghurye’s relation to Srinivas looked disturbingly like Geddes’s relation to Ghurye. And even while revealing this scholarly pettiness, Ghurye shows its obverse vanity by lovingly lingering over the festschrift produced for him by K. M. Kapadia and other admiring students. Ghurye retired in 1959, becoming even more productive in retirement. He supervised students until 1971 (age 78) but did not attend conferences or accept honors. In 1974, he refused to send biographical data to the Indian Council of Social Science Research because “those who do not know about my writings do not deserve to get replies from me.” In 1978, he did not reply to a letter of congratulations from the prime minister because he found the format of the letter improper. Ghurye died in 1983, having published The Burning Cauldron of North-­East India, his last book, in 1980, when he was 87. Ghurye’s extraordinary productivity (his bibliography lists 30 books) reflected his mode of production. He dictated his later work, and careful study has shown that his basic theoretical stances did not change throughout his career. He remained faithful to Rivers’s diffusionism despite the parade of functionalism, structuralism, Marxism, and postcolonialism across the landscape of Indian sociology during his long life. Caste and Race is his best book, for it was written rather than dictated, and its argument is fresh and passionate in a young scholar’s mind. Had Ghurye written nothing else, this book alone would have made him an important figure. Caste and Race focuses principally on caste. The first two chapters identify the basic features of the caste system and analyze the nature of caste

�� �� ������

83

groups. These chapters are largely descriptive and consider caste as it was in the 1920s. They are quite frank about the fluctuating nature of caste and find the principal definienda of caste and subcaste in their constraint of social life and cultural patterns, but above all in their prescription of endogamy. Ghurye notes the very loose affiliation of caste with occupation, sect, and other forms of difference, but emphasizes the looseness rather than the affiliation. The next two chapters follow the concept of caste through four periods: the Vedic period with its Vedic and Brahmanic texts; the post-­Vedic period dominated by the Laws of the Aryas, the great epics, and the Buddhist writings; the period of the Dharmasastras, summed up in Manu at the outset and in the Vishnu Purana at the end; and the “modern” period, in which these various texts recombined and flowered into a more systematic tradition. As this periodization makes clear, Ghurye was uniquely positioned to write about caste; few of his sociological successors would be prize-­winning Sanskritists able to read these texts with fluency. Yet his command of Sanskrit inevitably correlated with and perhaps predisposed him to a particular theory of caste. For Ghurye, caste was fundamentally the product of underlying ethnic (he calls them racial, but the later term is closer to his meaning) differences that are deployed, scrambled, and rerationalized under conditions of continuing intercultural contact, assimilation, and conflict. By contrast, a pure functionalist might argue that caste in India as of the late 19th century had little historical depth. It could be a simple rationalization of occupational specialization in the then-­present moment, a rationalization come somewhat adrift from occupation under the pressures of colonialism. But Ghurye’s mastery of Sanskrit inevitably led him to focus on much deeper historical roots. Ghurye argues that the classical writers developed the concepts that would later be bound into the (colonial) concept of caste principally through discussion of the four varnas: Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Sudra. Through this complex discussion was expressed and explored a basic theory of endogamous groups linked in a hierarchy of  purity. But as Ghurye insists, the forces of intercultural contact, geographic mobility, occupational drift, religious change, and above all miscegenation continually blurred any endogamous groups that emerged. Then the principles of hierarchy, purity, and endogamy had to be redeployed to sharpen the boundaries again. This process eventually strewed the landscape with the castes ( jati) and subcastes that so confused the British census enumerators in the late 19th century, when they

84

���� ���

decided to freeze-­photograph the system and then interpret that snapshot within their new “theory of everything”—­the theory of evolution. By reconstructing ancient and historical societies from legal and religious texts, Ghurye followed a great sociological tradition. One of the two principal tributaries of sociology was the historical jurisprudence of schol­ ars like Friedrich von Savigny, Otto von Gierke, Rudolf von Ihering, Henry Sumner Maine, and Frederic William Maitland. (Many forget that Max Weber’s training was in law, not philosophy or history.) Yet the transition from jurisprudence to sociology saw a fundamental shift. The lawyers knew perfectly well that legal texts are in large part performative; they make what they say true by virtue of saying it. On this matter, Ghurye stands with that older legal tradition, for he recognizes that the texts he reads are attempts to rationalize and order what has become chaotic and that these rationalizations were often made in support of particular Brahmin interests. (And indeed Ghurye also relies considerably on the caste scholarship of the German Richard Fick, whose reliance on Pali texts reflects his suspicions of just those Brahmin interests.) By contrast, many 20th-­century sociologists lost sight of the performative quality of social texts; their new reliance on “science” led them to take texts at their word. It was therefore a great novelty to them when J. L. Austin rediscovered performativity at midcentury. Inevitably, the concept was applied by late 20th-­century scholars to the colonial Indian Census, which in their eyes became the inventor and thereby enactor of a rigid caste system that, it was claimed, had never before existed. But Ghurye—­in 1932—­already recognized that the British were only the latest in a long tradition of performative, rationalizing analysts of caste. Moreover, he also recognized that that rationalization had been grounded in a principle of performativity never pre­viously studied: not property as in Maitland, nor individual purpose as in Ihering, nor family duty as in Qu Tongzu, but rather ritual purity. Chapters 5 and 7 consider the relation of race and caste. Ghurye here jumps immediately into the polemic between Herbert Risley, a colonial administrator and census officer committed to “racial” theories of the origin of caste, and his predecessors Denzil Ibbetson and J. C. Nesfield, who inclined to an occupational theory. Using what were then cutting-­edge methods (nasal indexes and correlational analysis), Ghurye shows that a strong race/ caste correlation exists only in Hindustan, a fact he attributes to its location at the portal where the Aryan / Brahmanic peoples entered the subcontinent. Closeness to “ancestral” Aryan populations meant that Brahmanic

�� �� ������

85

endogamy could remain stronger in Hindustan, whereas in southern and eastern India, where contact had been longer and the “fissiparous” tendencies of intermarriage hence more dominant, caste no longer correlated with physical type. Thus was diffusionism coupled with a new view that caste endogamy was ideologically important but practically difficult. Intermarriage was perpetually creating new groups, which then had to be rationalized and systematized by intellectuals in the Brahmanical tradition, even while the exigencies of material life—­occupation, landowning, trades—­ steadily pressed against any limited or fixed notion of an occupational rationalization, even for such Brahmanical writers. Ghurye’s view of caste was thus inevitably dynamic and rejected the deep, almost primeval stability sought by—­indeed assumed by—­many of the racial and occupational theories. Ghurye’s most striking chapters concern the current situation of caste. He is under no illusions about that system; he knows well that the current “reality” of caste is in large part a creation of the British census. In this insight, he anticipated later critical theorists by half a century. Indeed, it turns out that the British themselves were quite aware of the objectifying power of the census. Among the many British critics of caste-­counting, Ghurye singles out L. Middleton, the Punjab census officer in 1921 who noted that many were refusing to give their caste, a refusal that Middleton took to show that Indians were abandoning caste altogether: “[occupational castes] have been largely manufactured and almost entirely preserved as separate castes by the British Government. . . . Government’s passion for labels and pigeon-­ holes has led to a crystallization of the caste system, which, except amongst the aristocratic castes, was really very fluid under indigenous rule” (p. 160). Ironically, the British insistence on classification reflected in part a desire for data on which to base early forms of affirmative action (such as quota representation of  lower castes in administrative bodies), thereby curing the problem that—­at least according to Middleton, Ghurye, and others—­the British were in part themselves creating. (By contrast, in the mainstream not merely random social British view of the time, only meritocracy—­ change and miscegenation—­would obliterate caste boundaries.) Like many later analysts, Ghurye noted that one obvious result of  the cen­ sus was a proliferation of caste associations aiming to change their levels in the hierarchy: aboriginals seeking classification as Hindus, Sikhs worried about undercounting, Kolis claiming to be Koli Rajputs, and so on. Ghurye’s autobiography makes it clear that he disliked these caste associations intensely, but it is perhaps also possible that personal interest lay behind his

86

���� ���

expectation that caste would wither away unless there were continuous reinvigoration via the census, Brahmanic writing, or government intervention. In Caste and Race he nowhere reports for his readers his own caste, and even his autobiography mentions only that he avoided the new caste-­advancement associations on grounds of principle. But by identifying those associations, he indirectly—­but surely quite consciously—­tells us that he was a Saraswat Brahmin, of the Bardeshkar subcaste (I and Other Explorations, pp. 25, 64). So perhaps it is not surprising that he rejects the occasional British policy of affirmative action, arguing that the classical liberal policies of open schools and free competition would break down the walls of hierarchy faster than would quotas and targets. Ghurye’s vision of India’s past is profoundly historical. In this it differs from the contemporary view of classical China in writers like Qu Tongzu, whose classical China is an eternal present occasionally ruffled by the rise and fall of dynasties. Yet underneath this surface of change, Ghurye like all writers of his time sometimes assumes ur-­groups whose relative purity and almost biological unity he takes largely for granted. In common with his peers, he denotes these as “races,” although it is never quite clear what he means by that term. That, for example, those ur-­groups were them­selves produced by intercultural contact, or by an earlier and unknowable his­ tory—­this he seems to ignore. Indeed, Ghurye’s work reminds us of the strange, almost hypothetical character of the race concept as it evolved under the dual pressures of political utilities on the one hand and knowledge transformation (especially in the sciences of evolution) on the other. In America, race meant one thing; in India, quite another; in the biology textbooks, yet a third. The meanings always included something about biology, and something about heritability and endurance, and usually something about visible difference and sociocultural patterns. But beyond that, there was little consistency. One won­ ders indeed if the peculiarly fixed character of definitions of race in the 20th century was not created by an inevitable pressure toward abstraction produced by such conflicting ideas, as well as by the hegemony of the United States with its quite peculiar “one-­drop” conception of race. Earlier conceptions of this combination (of biology, heritability, and cultural difference) were probably more flexible than the mass-­produced “race” concept widely disseminated after the middle of the 19th century. There is also a subtle temporal issue involved. At the heart of 20th-­ century race conceptions, as indeed of all things denoted in the West by the

�� �� ������

87

word “stratification,” lies the idea that something long-­term and unchangeable will always dominate something short-­term and flexible. In India it was race determining caste status and hence possibly determining current socioeconomic rewards. In other cases it would be race determining income or gender determining occupational achievement. This temporal structure of determination explains why age failed when it was proposed as a “dimension of stratification.” Age, to be sure, has large differential effects on the momentary rewards of life. But one decade’s dispossessed youth is the next decade’s middle-­aged power broker, and one decade’s power broker is the next decade’s aging has-­been. Of all the possible dimensions of strat­ifi­ cation, only age changes in a regular order. This temporal structure complements a similar, synchronic social structure built into the stratification concept. The concept of stratification, as Louis Dumont pointed out, involves a largely Western conception of the individual, and of the determination of the life chances of that individual by his or her location in some larger group with a particular structural position. The ideological project of  Western liberalism was somehow to disengage the individual from that structural position. In a sense, then, to ask whether race determined caste was to ask a peculiarly Western question, within the peculiarly Western ideological framework of achievement (the short term and the individual) versus ascription (the long term and the social). Later editions of Caste and Race would move toward that framework, so much so that Dumont would find the 1952 and subsequent editions of Caste and Race guilty of romanticizing a mythic past. But at its origin Ghurye’s vision was not romantic, but historical. He believed that caste—­whatever it actually is at any given time—­is always the momentary outcome of a structured constellation of historical processes. His interest lay in the complexity of those processes. The tumults of Indian politics continually reshape how we understand Ghurye. But they cannot obscure the importance of  his work.

�� �

Frantz Fanon

��� ������������ �� ������ ������� ���������� ���� ��  interesting study. Fanon died months after finishing The Wretched of the Earth, which appeared to mixed reviews in France in late 1961. But the American edition found a ready popular audience in the late 1960s, and the book was in eight languages by 1970. In the academic world, Fanon’s work found its audience more slowly. Of little influence in the 1960s, it enjoyed moderate visibility in the social sciences in the 1970s. Although this faded in the 1980s, by then students of literature had discovered Fanon, an engagement that grew steadily through the 1990s and 2000s, eventually returning Fanon to the social science agenda. Then his work again faded after it became clear that religious challenges to secular nationalism were far more powerful than Fanon had imagined. All this was outside France. In Fanon’s linguistic and cultural home, the collective need to forget the horrors of the Algerian war kept Fanon largely invisible, and indeed, even Algeria itself did not see an edition of  The Wretched of the Earth until 1987, just before yet another descent into political chaos. Fanon’s reputation has rested on two books. Black Skin, White Masks (1952) told Fanon’s astounded, angry reaction to French racism. The Wretched of the Earth evoked his experience in the revolution of Algeria and the politics of sub-­Saharan Africa. Between these, in 1959, came the more reflective L’an cinq de la revolution algérienne, translated as A Dying Colonialism, which captures Fanon at the turning point between two selves.

A Dying Colonialism. By Frantz Fanon. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Pp. 181.

������ �����

89

Frantz Fanon was born July 20, 1925, in Fort-­de-­France, capital of Martinique. Nurtured by an upwardly mobile middle-­class family, Fanon lived a boyhood typical for his background, but talent and ambition gradually took him to the elite educational tracks through which French colonialism hoped to promote assimilation. In lycée, Fanon was a student of Aimé Césaire, then a struggling poet and teacher, fresh from defeat in the examinations for university teaching in France, but smart, charismatic, and militantly black. (Césaire later became an internationally famous poet as well as a central figure in Martinican politics, outliving his student by 47 years.) The Second World War brought Fanon to France and combat in the black units of the Free French Army, a first taste of heroism—­he was injured and decorated—­as well as of new varieties of racism. After a brief return to Martinique to pass his orals, Fanon returned to France, where he decided to study medicine in Lyon, rather than dentistry in Paris, as originally planned. In Lyon, he drifted into an interest in psychiatry, made his first acquaintance with Algerians (migrant workers who were his patients), and met Marie-­ Josephe Dublé (Josie), whom he soon married. Once qualified, he spent two years in the remarkable therapeutic community of St. Alban, where he was mentored by its intense and eccentric director François Tosquelles. In these years, he produced Black Skin, White Masks, dictating the book to Josie. In 1953, Fanon sat his psychiatric exam and became eligible to be chief of service. He chose Algeria, saying that the metropolitan French already had enough psychiatrists. He arrived just as the long-­smoldering Algerian Revolution entered a new phase. Various forces quickly pushed Fanon into opposition, chief among them the experience of treating in his hospital the poor, the maimed, and the terrified along with those whose minds had been overwhelmed by the horrors of colonial war. By mid 1955 Fanon had been secretly recruited by the dominant rebel organization, the FLN (National Liberation Front); although he took no public stands, his views were well known. By late 1956 he was receiving death threats. He resigned his position and was officially ejected from Algeria. Moving to Tunis, he took another psychiatric position and gradually became one of the chief spokesmen for the Algerian Revolution, contributing regularly to El Moudjahid, the FLN’s biweekly newspaper. In early 1960 Fanon became the representative to Ghana for the provisional Algerian government. At the end of 1960, after a punishing exploratory trip through Mali to the southern borders of Algeria, Fanon felt weak, sought medical advice, and was diagnosed with leukemia. Treated in the Soviet

90

���� ���

Union in April 1961, he relapsed soon after, and, crossing the frontiers of the Cold War, went to the United States for treatment in October. He died December 6, 1961. In his last year, he compiled/wrote The Wretched of the Earth. It should be noted from the outset that none of Fanon’s books is really a book. None was composed with care and long reflection, in successive drafts, for a clearly conceived audience. Fanon dictated his books rather than wrote them. Of his two best known books, Black Skin was originally conceived as Fanon’s thesis for the medical degree. Although obviously influenced by Aimé Césaire’s by then widely known Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, it has none of that work’s extraordinary poetry, self-­conscious design, and disciplined thematics. Similarly, Wretched was assembled by a dying man out of some old case histories and articles, a talk to the Second Congress of Black Authors and Writers, and a long, published article on violence, all edited and filled out with newly dictated material. This collage quality is less evident in Dying Colonialism, which comprises five parts, each touching on a particular group or phenomenon as related to the Algerian Revolution: women, radio, the family, medicine, and Europeans. The last of these is a previously published article, but the other sections were dictated by Fanon to his wife in early 1959. But although the book was produced very quickly, its tone is more reflective and more revealing than those of Black Skin and Wretched. In part, this was by necessity. By this time, Fanon’s three years in Algeria were two years in the past, and his memories and notes had to be eked out with information gleaned from the many exiles whom Fanon treated in Tunis. The five essays are a wonderful mixture of insightful observation, psychopathological observation, revolutionary rhetoric, Sartrean philosophy, and sheer passion. The essay on radio for example gives us wonderful insights: that by crowing about French victories in the field, Radio Alger itself made clear to the Algerians that French power could be challenged; that French language hallucinations (among Algerians) seemed to change from threatening to benign as the Revolution wore on (and language became less of a mobilizing force); that French jamming of the Voice of Fighting Algeria led frustrated listeners to improvise their own optimistic messages out of the shrieking static. At the same time, the whole analysis is colored by relentless and rather romantic insistence on the (existentialist) creation of the new nation by its enactment of itself in the very act of revolution. So we hear of broadcasts in French, Arabic, and Kabyle, which “unified the experience [of listening] and gave it a universal dimension” (p. 89).

������ �����

91

In the essay on medicine, Fanon argues that even colonial medicine, which “in all objectivity and all humanity” ought to be perceived as utterly ben­ eficial, is perceived by the colonized as just another part of colonial oppression. (He spoke from bitter experience.) Moreover, because the colonized held back from colonial medicine until the last possible moment, colonized patients were likely to be extremely sick, and most often died, which in turn reinforced the general mistrust. Fanon’s discussion of the patient interview is very insightful (“When the colonized escapes the doctor and the integrity of his body is preserved, he considers himself the victor by a handsome margin”; p. 128) as are his remarks on patient compliance with treatment (“When he does [eventually] come back . . . an interview with the patient reveals that the medicine was taken only once, or, as often happens, that the amount prescribed for one month was absorbed in a single dose”; p. 129) Fanon examines this complex situation both in the light of cultural difference and in the light of the colonial power’s disturbance of traditional culture (“The patient gives evidence of the fear of being the battleground for different and opposed forces”; p. 131). He then moves on to discuss those doctors who become active colonialists and settlers, dispossessing native land, conniving at the French rules for informing on patients (about gunshot wounds, e.g.) and even serv­ ing the torturers by reviving patients for further torture. In the end, however, here too he succumbs to romanticism, believing that the coming of the Revolution brings rapid acceptance of modern medicine and reintegration of the Algerian doctors whose turn to modern medicine had been regarded as bet­ rayal: “Once the body of the nation begins to live again in a coherent and dy­ namic way, everything becomes possible” (p. 145). But for all the romanti­ cism, this essay—­undergirded by painful experience—­is the best in the book. The chapter on European participation in the Revolution by contrast seems to be wishful thinking. Supporters of the Algerians among the Euro­ pean population of Algeria were few indeed. To be sure, there may have been more extensive participation by local Europeans early in the war, when Fanon was still in Algeria, before the battle of Algiers. And it is important to recall that Fanon himself, although black, was undoubtedly perceived by Algerians as a metropolitan. (He spoke no Arabic, beginning the language only in 1956.) And thus in this chapter he was, in a sense, defending himself. But as to Fanon’s remark that “never has a member of the Front deceived a French democrat [i.e., a supporter of the Revolution],” that cannot for a moment be believed. The Algerian War was of unexampled brutality, the stakes were very high, and truth, as Fanon himself admitted, was an early casualty.

92

���� ���

Most debated of the chapters in Dying Colonialism, however, is the first, “Algeria Unveiled.” Here Fanon discusses the role of women in the Revolution. The first section of the essay attributes this role to a conscious FLN (male!) decision and an expanding pattern of recruitment. The second claims that even the women’s “alleged confinement” in the pre-­revolutionary period was in fact a chosen withdrawal into a secret realm untouchable by the colonizers. “The Algerian woman, in imposing such a restriction on herself, in choosing a form of existence limited in scope, was deepening her consciousness of struggle and preparing for combat” (p. 66). This is anachronism. More­ over, for all that Fanon throughout accuses the French ethnologists of exoticism, he himself had hymned the exoticism of  cross-­race desire in Black Skin, and his language here is no more neutral than there: “The shoulders of the unveiled Algerian woman are thrust back with easy freedom. She walks with a graceful, unmeasured stride, neither too fast nor too slow. Her legs are bare, not confined by the veil, and her hips are free” (p. 58). There follows an elaborate account, drawn from the French philosopher Merleau-­Ponty, of the unveiled woman’s corporeal experience. Generations of scholars have debated Fanon’s attitudes toward women. He was, after all, a man who asked his French wife to type his dictated assertion that a black man feeling a white woman’s breasts felt that he was seizing all of white civilization. But it is not the misogyny or paternalism that strikes one in this chapter as much the extraordinary romanticism. The attitude to women in this chapter is oddly close to Victorianism, from the lustful eyes with which Fanon imagines the Europeanized young Algerian women vamp­ ing the French soldiers while carrying crucial information to FLN leaders to the cult of family and inner strength with which he encircles their more conservative mothers. Undergirding this romanticism is pure will. Everything in this chapter, indeed, in the whole book, bespeaks Fanon’s determination to be Algerian, to become one with this nation with which he had—­in objective terms—­little connection. Algeria was a largely Arab/Berber and Muslim country; Fanon was a West Indian black and a secularist. Algeria was a colony; Fanon came as a senior officer in the colonial civil service. The Algerian revolutionaries were riven with factional quarrels that often ended in cold-­blooded murder; Fanon idealized them as the vanguard of a unified new nation. And the sequel was to prove Fanon wrong in dozens of ways, as the country became a one-­party, Islamicized, bureaucratic command state, largely dependent on its former colonial masters, with women thrust back into the “traditional”

������ �����

93

roles to which the metropolitans had objected in the first place. (Fanon had earlier interpreted colonial attempts to liberate women as another aspect of French oppression.) Why then is this book, and Fanon’s work more broadly, so important? It is important first for its sheer emotion, its passion, its rage at the horrors of colonialism and racism. Despite the talents and abilities that took Fanon to the metropolis at 21, even average whites there took him not for a psychi­ atrist, a doctor, or an intellectual, but simply as a nègre.  Black Skin is the enraged but nonetheless often subtle tirade against that experience. Fanon went to Algeria and found that there, far from being the oppressed, he was regarded as one of the oppressors, in effect a European Frenchman. Despised from above in one setting, he was mistrusted from below in the other. In Dying Colonialism we find Fanon at the transition point where these experiences of racism and of dominance came face to face with his sheer horror at life in Algeria: a world of bombings and reprisals, of torture and violence, of hatred and lies. He chose to act and did so as best he could. It is little surprise that he overdid his identification with the Revolution. Facing death at 36, he made in The Wretched of the Earth his romantic, existential assertion that he too was an Algerian. More broadly, by that act he asserted the unity of all colonialized peoples. Fanon’s action underscores the political and moral quality of scholarship, something at once evident when we read social science outside the metropolis. The English poet W. H. Auden spoke better than he knew when he said “Thou shalt not commit a social science.” He meant we should not reduce the rich particularities of humanity to an architecture of variables. But his words have a more biting, political sense that he did not intend. To commit social science—­outside the metropolis of America and Western Europe—­is to commit an overtly political act. Of the authors read in this past year’s essays, Fanon and Kenyatta were active revolutionaries. Bâ became a militant feminist. Freyre’s work was appropriated as rightist ideology. Qu returned to China to find himself a despised “reactionary.” Only Ghurye, of these six, lived a typical academic life. Freyre and Fanon were exiled, Kenyatta was imprisoned in a concentration camp, and Qu was sent to the countryside to expiate his class position. In the metropolis, social science is safer, in both senses of the word “safe”: more protected from intervention, but also less daring and hence less in need of drastic discipline. All too often, the scholarship of the metropolis evolved into unimaginative analysis of measures whose only reality was their enactment

94

���� ���

by existing social and political institutions: “delinquency,” “inequality,” “health-­related quality of life,” and so on. Moral commitment degenerated into ahistorical judgment of the past on criteria the judges themselves had never been asked to meet, writing as they did in comfortable metropolitan universities at the heart of world-­dominant societies rather than in the fearful crucibles of Algeria and its like. To our reading of  Fanon, then, we must bring a certain humility. His work testifies that there is no way to live a purely universal life or to write a purely universal scholarship. Any scholar must be who he or she is, in a particular place at a particular time, and must make of self and experience and place and time a body of  work. The standard for that work is that it humanely enrich our knowledge of the world. It is a high standard, but one Fanon meets. Fanon himself contemns sociologists and ethnologists repeatedly in Dying Colonialism. For him, they are fools at best, colonial tools at worst. Yet, oddly enough, in the French occupational army that Fanon so much hated there was an angry  young intelligence clerk who wrote just such sociological works as Fanon rejects. Three of them concerned Algeria itself. Read today, Pierre Bourdieu’s books on Algeria retain the muted anger of their writer, but read beside Fanon, they seem politically tame indeed. Which then was the real Algeria: the one the political scholar saw and described or the one the scholarly politician enacted and proclaimed? Both.

���� �����

�� � �

Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati

����� ����� �������� ��� ���� �� ����� 15� 1858. ���� �����  take him from a rabbi’s house in Épinal, Lorraine, to a professorship in Paris via a detour to Bordeaux: a well-­established if forbidding journey from the provinces of a world-­dominant society to its capital, following the of�cial high road of examinations and professorships. Durkheim would become an influential force in French politics and would enjoy worldwide fame and influence in his chosen field. Eight days later, a baby girl was born at the mountaintop retreat of an Indian holy man. Ramabai Dongre’s life would take her on thousands of miles of pilgrimage through the subcontinent of India, then eventually to England, the United States, Japan, and China, before she returned to her native land. By age 20—­when Durkheim was failing for a second time the entrance examinations to the École Normale Supérieure—­Ramabai was given the honorific titles by which she has since been known. Pandita (roughly, “one greatly learned in Sanskrit and religious texts”) was not enough, so her astounded admirers added Sarasvati (goddess of learning). A series of controversial life decisions—­her cross-­caste marriage, her trip to England, her conversion to Christianity, her evangelical witness—­eventually cost her her great reputation, at least in India. Yet by the late 20th century, feminists, Indian nationalists, Anglo-­Catholics, and evangelicals would all be claiming

The High Caste Hindu Woman. By Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati. Philadelphia: J. B. Rodgers, 1887, Pp. xxiv+119. Pandita Ramabai’s America: Conditions of Life in the United States (United Stateschi Lokasthiti ani Pravasvritta). By Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati. Translated by Kshitija Gomes and Philip C. Engblom. Edited by Robert E. Frykenberg. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 2003. Pp. xxii+322.

98

���� �����

her as a shining predecessor. Only the metropolitan social scientists remained unaware of this extraordinary woman. During her brief career as a social analyst, Ramabai wrote two works that command our attention. The first, The High Caste Hindu Woman (HCHW), presented Indian society to Americans via an analytic indictment of the place of women in traditional upper-­caste India. Impassioned and critical, the book yet maintained both Indian national pride and a profound sym­ pathy for the Hindu culture that Ramabai would never lose. Reversing the exchange, Ramabai’s second book, Conditions of  Life in the United States (CLUS), presented American society to an educated Indian (Marathi-­speaking) au­ dience. A synthetic work, it can be read beside the other great foreign an­ alyses of 19th-­century America: Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), Harriet Martineau’s Society in America (1837), Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1840), and James Bryce’s American  Com­monwealth (1888). Unlike them, it brings a nonmetropolitan vision to its task. The life that left us these books is the stuff dreams are made of. Ramabai was born April 23, 1858, at her father’s ashram. Anant Shastri Dongre was a learned Chitpavan Brahmin who, although a rigidly orthodox Hindu, conceived the forbidden idea of  teaching his wife Sanskrit, the sacred language. This dream failed with his first wife, who herself opposed it. But after she died, another Brahmin saw Anant Shastri bathing at a sacred site one day and offered Shastri (then about 40) his nine-­year-­old daughter as a wife. (The story is told in HCHW, without naming names.) The girl fell in with her new husband’s linguistic plans and eventually became herself a master Sanskritist. When public outcry about the language instruction grew annoying, Anant Shastri moved his new family to a site he built deep in the forested mountains. Here he became a well-­known holy man, and his ashram became a school. And here Ramabai was born. Soon, however, her father’s money ran out, and the family went on permanent pilgrimage. Moving constantly, they read the Puranas in public (receiving in return the alms on which they lived), visited the sacred sites, and gave away many of the alms they received. Through all this, Ramabai’s mother taught her Sanskrit, the Puranas, the Gita, and the commentaries. By 15, Ramabai was herself a puranika, intoning the sacred texts for a living (indeed, she could recite the 18,000 lines of the Bhagavata Purana from memory). Having wandered the whole of the subcontinent, she could speak Marathi, Kannada, and Hindi. It was now a time

������� ������� ���������

99

of famine, however, and when Ramabai was in her late teens, her father, then mother, then elder sister all succumbed. She and her brother wandered another two years, then came to Calcutta, where the girl became a sensation for her learning, receiving the titles of Pandita and Sarasvati from the most learned Indian and Western scholars of the city. In Calcutta Ramabai began her disillusionment with Hinduism as then practiced, becoming a Brahmo (a monotheistic sect). She left Purana reciting and became a popular lecturer, speaking largely on women’s topics. Here, as throughout her career, audiences found irresistible the combination of her astounding learning, her broad culture, her great beauty, and her quiet charisma. In this period, she also began reading the forbidden books—­the Upanishads, the Vedantas, and ultimately the Vedas themselves. After two years, Ramabai’s brother died of cholera. Surprising her progressive countrymen in Maharashtra (who were planning to bring her back to western India and fund her work), she quickly married a long-­standing suitor, who was a pleader in the Indian courts. It was a forbidden marriage, for Bepin Behari Das Medhavi was a Kayastha (although Ramabai nearly always referred to him as a Sudra, which may simply have shown her ignorance of all caste distinction beneath her own level). The marriage caused a furor, followed by tragedy when Ramabai’s husband died, leaving her with an infant daughter. Ramabai then went to Poona, where she caused another furor by advocating the education of women (especially of women doctors) and founding an organization for the advancement of women. After about a year, she went to England to study medicine, planning to support herself as a lecturer in Sanskrit during her studies. She first stayed with the Anglo-­Catholic Sisters of St. Mary the Virgin, whose missionary community she had known in India. Within months of  her arrival, the friend who had accompanied her committed suicide (another parallel with Durkheim, whose close friend Victor Hommay committed suicide when Durkheim was 28). Ramabai’s baptism as a Christian—­never fully explained—­came a month later. About this time, too, deafness put an end to her dreams of becoming a physician. The Sisters of St. Mary proved too rigid for Ramabai, and she moved on to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, again supporting herself in part by teaching Sanskrit. After two years of being mentored by Cheltenham’s remarkable Dorothea Beale, she went to the United States to attend a countrywoman’s graduation from the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia. Caught up in the active world of late 19th-­century American feminism, she conceived the idea of creating a school for Hindu widows (the child-­marriage system

100

���� �����

guaranteed that there were many of these). In her new language of  English, she quickly wrote The High Caste Hindu Woman as a fund-­raising tract. She traveled thousands of miles around the United States, lecturing and organizing “Ramabai Circles,” which would contribute the money necessary for her planned school. Also during these American years, she took extensive notes, and on her return to India (via Japan and China) she completed these as texts and assembled them into the Marathi book Conditions of Life in the United States. Thus by age 32, Pandita Ramabai had circumnavigated the globe, raised metropolitan funding for a feminist social reform in her native land, converted to a new religion (but only on her own terms), and written two insightful pieces of social analysis. The rest of  her career—­founding and man­ aging her schools, becoming an evangelical Christian (and thereby losing even more of her Indian supporters), translating the Bible from original lan­ guages into Marathi (and in the process producing the first Marathi textbooks for both Greek and Hebrew), and raising her daughter—­these things must be set aside here. We are concerned only with her social analysis. But there is one last tragic parallel to Durkheim. Like her French peer, Ramabai suffered the loss of a beloved child. Her daughter Manoramabai died in 1921 at age 40. Ramabai followed, nine months later. Ramabai’s two major pieces of social commentary are yoked by an eager desire to translate across cultural boundaries. In both works, the foundation of that translation is women’s experience. Ramabai takes it for granted that certain aspects of female experience—­in particular mothering and being mothered—­are universal to all types and kinds of people. This focus on maternalism reflected the young widow’s own life. In England she first lived in the all-­female world of the sisters at Wantage. Although Ramabai often disagreed with her spiritual advisor Sister Geraldine, she was filled with respect and love for the much older nun. At Cheltenham, she came under the spell of the forceful, devout, but more free-­thinking Beale, and in Philadelphia under the equally charismatic power of  Dr. Rachel Bodley of the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia. And behind all of these was her own beloved mother Lakshmibai, who had died less than a decade before. It is little wonder then that in places both works read like tracts from the militant world of late 19th-­century American maternalism, accepting uncritically the notions that women are more moral than men, that women are thereby society’s instructors in morality, and that the advent of women to any workplace or social setting inevitably improves its social order and har-

������� ������� ���������

101

mony. Her accounts of  the advances of women in education, in employment, and in such social movements as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union all suffer from this position, whose historically conditioned character would become self-­evident by the early 21st century. But when her empirical self dominates, Ramabai is plain enough about failings of women that qualify this optimistic view of maternalism. In her eyes, many American women are preoccupied with fashion that has no meaning, with clothing and food that require the massacre of animals, with small matters and trivial thoughts. Many of them, like their male counterparts, participate in ethnic and racial hatreds that Ramabai finds repugnant. As for the Hindu women, many of them have neither the education nor the emotional depth to take on mothering at the early stage of life when it is forced on them. But all the same, it is an audience of women and, more particularly, reform-­ minded women that Ramabai takes for granted. Women’s experience is the touchstone of her writing, and she is, for Indian women at least, the figure who first systematized the feminist case against traditional Hindu institutions. What made her problematic for later Indian feminists was her explicit Christian commitment, which increased with time and which, despite her own efforts to contain it, would at times become overbearingly evangelical. Yet while Ramabai remained an active administrator and social reformer to her death, she turned increasingly inward, becoming in her later years a holy person like her father: focused on prayer and meditation and on the task of conceiving the meanings of the Bible in three different languages. The complex inward self of the later Ramabai is not evident in these early works, however. Here feminism forms the universal experience that can sus­ tain translation between radically different cultures. For Ramabai remained a Hindu, despite her conversion. The writing is laced with Indian proverbs. And filling the pages of CLUS are long celebrations of the beauty of nature and the graces of the plant and animal environment. As a denizen of the tropics, Ramabai found snow unutterably beautiful, but at the same time dangerous and frightening. Accustomed to the calm waters of the Indian Ocean, she was overwhelmed and energized by the fierce weather of the North Atlantic. These passages in CLUS on the natural beauties of America are among the best in the book. No other major social commentator on the United States took the country’s physical beauty so seriously. Also Indian is Ramabai’s implicit social theory. The most obvious example is her sympathetic treatment of the “Indians” of America, whom she regards as analogous to the Indians of the subcontinent precisely because

102

���� �����

the expanding Europeans defined the two groups of “Indians” as related peoples. The American “Indians” are for her an object lesson for the subcontinent, a fate to be avoided. But there is a broader nonmetropolitan aspect to her social theory. Throughout CLUS, she uses the word jati—­t ypically rendered in English by “caste”—­to mean “kind.” Racial bigotry is thus (literally) kind-­bigotry. Women are a kind. The black ex-­slaves are a kind. Each immigrant group forms a kind. To be sure, there are “kinds” that later social critics would take seriously which Ramabai does not. Class is one. She traveled first-­class on the North Atlantic passage and makes only a mild apology about getting preferred treatment when the boat ran aground. Or again, she remarks in HCHW that high-­caste women “have inherited from their father to a certain degree, quickness of perception and intelligence” (p. 132). Thus she accepts certain differences without critique, although in the main her position is that “kind”-­ness is not a legitimate rationale for the differential treatment of human beings. Or indeed of animals: her sympathy for the freezing herds out on the blizzard-­coated Great Plains is quite of a piece with her sympathy for mistreated immigrants and slaves. One does not find such things in Martineau and Tocqueville. To be sure, one could read her entire position on “kind” as being aris­ tocratic and Brahmin, a view from “above it all.” That this was not the case became clear later in her life, for she moved steadily toward a position that all human beings are in some sense equal. A better reading of “kind” in these early works would therefore be that Ramabai was deploying an early version of what would later be called the “other” concept. She altogether avoids par­ ticular words for “tribe,” “community,” “race,” “caste,” “ethnic-­group,” “peo­ ple,” and “sex.” All are jati—­kind (see, e.g., p. 220). By doing this, Rambai insists that we view the world as filled not with particular stratification orders and groups, but rather with “kind”-­ness. This is an important advance, one sadly missed by some of  her English translators, who dutifully render the word into the specific phrases later used in the West for the specific dimensions of difference. Ramabai’s position implies that it is human to be particular and that particularity comes in many types. Ramabai had, at one point, early in her public life, a similar theory of religion: that there is, as she put it, only one religion. “Now by religion one should not understand the many doctrines such as Hindu, Muslim, Christian, etc. These names indicate doctrines and not religion. Religion is single in form” (“Strī Dharma-­Neeti” [1882], trans. Meera

������� ������� ���������

103

Kosambi [New Delhi: Oxford, 2000], p. 76). Ramabai’s implicit theory of “kinds” of  humanity thus seems an important precursor of later ideas. Ramabai’s view of temporality curiously combines a theory of decline with a theory of progress. On the one hand, her interpretation of many of the evils of her contemporary world was that they resulted from the loss of the original messages. She goes to great lengths in HCHW to show that the Code of Manu was more hostile to women than the earlier Vedas. But she exonerates Manu on the subject of sati, which she attributes to later priests and their deliberate mistranslation of the Vedas. Similarly, she was scandalized to discover that Christians were as internally divided as were the Hindus, and she attributed this sectarianism to a failure to read and follow the original message of the Bible. Thus Ramabai had a theory of decline. Yet at the same time, she accepted the 19th-­century West’s profound belief in progress, an acceptance which is evident not only in her accounts of American trade, industry, and agriculture, but also in her belief that most social problems can be overcome by sufficient education and by an end to ignorance and mutual distrust. Her faith in her American mentors Rachel Bodley and Frances Willard—­and more broadly in the American example—­is nowhere more clear. Ramabai’s ambivalence about the direction of history is complemented by her ambivalence about colonialism. It is easy to see her as having gone over to the imperialists’ side. She chose their religion, although rejecting their particular version of it. She accepted western arguments for progress and change. She got her funding and, after her Indian reputation faded, most of her personal support from outside India. Yet at the same time she was often a militant nationalist. In praising the religious pluralism of the United States, she emphasized that it did not undercut patriotism: “Although there are differences of belief among them [the Americans] there is no fundamental difference in the religion they espouse. These differences of belief do not stand in the way of anything that concerns the welfare of the country” (CLUS, p. 197). Similarly, she disliked the Church of England because (among other reasons) the name of the imperial nation was part of its name. Or again, a problem with Hindu high-­caste women is their failure to help their nation: “[Women] grow to be selfish slaves in their petty individual interests, indifferent to the welfare of their own immediate neighbors, much more to their nation’s well-­being” (HCHW, p. 119). And “The men of Hindustan do not when babes, suck from the mother’s breast true patriotism and in their

104

���� �����

boyhood, the mother, poor woman, is unable to develop that divine faculty in them owing to her utter ignorance of  the past and present condition of  her native land” (HCHW, pp. 121–­22). This nationalism occasionally crops out in the demonization of the preceding imperialists (the Mughals), on whom she blames (among other things) the rise of women’s formal seclusion. In this, then, as in so many ways, Ramabai became a woman between two cultures. One sees this especially in her analysis of sati. She gives a straightforward feminist account of sati as a device for controlling women with their “dangerous” desires. She is entirely in sympathy with the British government’s proscription of sati. Yet she also realizes that that abolition in some ways made matters worse, since many widows had chosen ritual suicide, either because widowhood itself  was so horrible, or because they genuinely believed the official interpretation of sati, or because they truly loved their hus­bands beyond life itself. The abolition, that is, removed from women even their pow­er to act and condemned them to the grinding servitude of widowhood or its only alternatives, escape and prostitution. It is a very modern analysis. Ramabai challenges us, finally, because she exemplifies those many analysts of social life who were not professionals. Pandita Ramabai produced her view of America not because she was theoretically interested in improving a body of common knowledge called social science, but because she had an ambition to change the place of women in India. She thus takes a place beside the many reformers of the late 19th century whose work laid the foundations of sociology in the United States (foundations quite different from the historical and positivistic foundations in Germany and France, respectively). Most of that reform work disappeared from the sociological canon, partly for want of method, but mostly for want of “theoretical concerns,” the trope by which an emerging academic discipline came to define itself. But for Ramabai, social analysis was a precondition to—­and a means of—­ reform. It was therefore a way station on the path to her fulfillment as an activist whose life proceded directly from her religious devotion. So also was social analysis a mere prelude to political power in the life of Jomo Kenyatta or to cultural banishment in the life of Qu Tongzu or to romanticized revolution in the life of Frantz Fanon. The nonmetropolitan world could little afford the calm contemplations of academic life. So we often find social science texts issuing haphazardly from lives whose logics quickly drove their protagonists elsewhere. This haphazard social science is all the more important for its commitment. A social science from nowhere lacks humanity because no human

������� ������� ���������

105

lives in nowhere. Hence a committed social science is doubly valuable. But at the same time, a social science purely particular is equally problematic, denying as it does the validity of others’ experience. The roots of humane social science thus lie in translation, in making the systematic leap from one social standpoint to another. Of this leap Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati provides a profound example, both in her writing and in her life.

�� �

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

�� 1845 �������� ������������ ��� ���������� ��� ���� �� ���� Facundo Quiroga, and the Physical Aspects, Customs, and Habits of the Argentine Republic. Posterity has reduced all that to one word: Facundo. First issued in pamphlet form, the book made its author so dangerous to the Chileans then hosting his exile that they at once sent him to Europe on a fact-­finding tour. Indeed, no one can read Facundo unmoved. Nor can one speak of it without revealing one’s politics and passions. For if its analysis of Argentine life and politics is perceptive and impassioned, its literary qualities are monumental. The child of a declining family, Faustino Sarmiento was born in 1811 in San Juan, Argentina, a small settled area surrounded by arid wastes and shaded by the Andean Cordillera. Educated haphazardly in local schools and by a priest uncle, Sarmiento was willy-­nilly swept up into the anarchic local politics that opposed “federalists” and “unitarists” in newly independent Argentina. A militia commission was forced on him by the local federalist leader, but Sarmiento refused it, was jailed, and emerged committed to the unitarist party. He served in various (and largely unsuccessful) military capacities against the region’s emergent federalist strongman (caudillo), Juan Facundo Quiroga. When Quiroga finally defeated Gregorio Lamadrid, the last remaining unitarist general, Sarmiento fled into exile in Chile beyond the looming Andes. Quiroga made it clear to Sarmiento’s family that return would mean death. In Chile, the young Sarmiento held various jobs—­miner, store clerk, teacher. Meanwhile, the Buenos Aires caudillo Juan Manuel Rosas manuevered him­ Facundo. By Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Translated by Kathleen Ross. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. 284.

������� �������� ���������

107

self  to absolute power, aided by the assassination of Quiroga in 1835, in which the role of Rosas remains unclear. The new federalist governor of San Juan was the somewhat more easygoing Nazario Benavídez, so Sarmiento returned, opened a school, and began a unitarist newspaper. Renewed unitarist revolts and local federalist protests soon forced Benavídez to send Sarmiento off to Chile again. He was now almost 30, and he began serious work on education: a text on reading methods, a scheme for simplified spelling, and in 1842 a normal school to train Chilean teachers. But Sarmiento also continued his anti-­Rosas polemics, and the arrival in February 1845 of an Argentine ambassador instructed to request his extradition pushed him past his limit. He rushed forward his plan for a biography of his old nemesis Quiroga. In five hectic months Facundo was written and published. Three months later the worried Chilean authorities put Sarmiento on a boat to Europe. Sarmiento spent three years studying education and society abroad, in Europe and then the United States. In Europe he met such figures as François Guizot, Adolphe Thiers, Richard Cobden, and Pius IX, as well as the aging Liberation hero José de San Martín. An accidental meeting on the packet to America gave him an introduction to the American educational reformer Horace Mann, whose work decisively influenced his own approach to education. On his return home, Sarmiento published a report on the United States, like so many other 19th-­century travelers (including Ramabai, as we have just seen). But more important, the many contacts the gregarious Argentinian made abroad would facilitate Facundo’s French translation and publication in 1853, and then its English translation and publication in 1868. In the early 1850s, Justo José de Urquiza expelled Rosas from power. Sar­ miento provided press reports and occasionally joined the fighting. In the late 1850s, Sarmiento worked on education, but also moved into political life, becoming in 1862 the governor of his home province of San Juan. Governor Sarmiento undertook many reforms—­including the intro­duction of compulsory education—­but like so many before him, he reacted violently to a lingering caudillo challenge. The murder of the defeated El Chacho by Sarmiento’s forces did not improve things, so President Mitre sent Sarmiento abroad in 1864 as ambassador to the United States. There Sarmiento ran an embassy more intellectual than political, making and renewing acquaintances throughout the American intelligentsia: Mrs. Horace Mann (now a widow), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and many others. He returned to Argentina in 1868 to find himself president. Sarmiento’s

108

���� �����

presidency was marred by the usual complexities: a lingering war with Paraguay, the revolt of Entre Rios and nearby provinces, Argentina’s disastrous financial position, and so on. After his presidency, Sarmiento held various regional and national positions in education, finally establishing a truly national education system. He died in 1888 while vacationing in Paraguay. Although Sarmiento is still revered as an educational reformer, it is through Facundo that he touches us directly. The book has three main parts. The first is a national character study of the Argentinians, in the style of the Baron de Montesquieu and J. G. Herder, tracing the national character to two sources: on the one hand the physical experience of the plains and their climate, on the other the social effects of the great distances and solitude attendant on the grazing mode of production. In glowing, romantic terms these passages make the frontier argument later associated with the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner. They draw directly on the romantic novelist James Fenimore Cooper, whom Sarmiento greatly admired. This section comprises chapters 1–­3 (and chapter 7 later adds an analysis of the political structure of Argentina in the 1820s). After chapter 4, which makes the transition from climate/structure to human history by discussing the events of the early independence years, the second part of the book takes up the life of its protagonist, Juan Facundo Qui­ roga. Chapters 5 and 6 give Quiroga’s beginnings and first essays as a caudillo. Chapter 8 discusses his emergence as a major force, and chapters 9–­12 take up the crucial years of his life, from the battle of La Tablada (a loss) through Oncativo (another loss) to Chacón (an unexpected victory) and fi­nally Ciudadela (final victory). Chapter 13 considers the federalist problem of dividing the spoils of victory, ending with Quiroga’s trip to his doom at Barranca Yaco, a tiny brookcrossing 45 miles north of Córdoba, on the lonely road to Tucumán. Embellished with dozens of colorful stories and minor characters, the Quiroga narrative is more a character study than a narrative biography per se. The third part of the book is a polemical analysis of Argentina under the dictatorship of the triumphant Rosas, a tale told in the two final chapters as well as in the many proleptic fulminations pervading the earlier chapters. Because Sarmiento portrays Rosas as a cold-­blooded, bureaucratic killer, the latter becomes a foil to Quiroga, who for Sarmiento always remains—­ although brutal and violent—­at least an authentic and honest expression of his emotions and of the limitless wastes from which he sprang.

������� �������� ���������

109

Sarmiento intended this three-­part book to make a sociopolitical analysis that would not be out of place in academic sociology. It can be summarized as follows. Argentina is divided into two types of places, and consequently two types of ideologies, and two types of politics. The cities are Europeanized, middle class, educated, forward-­looking, organized, industrious. The countryside, epitomized by the great plain (pampa), is American, brutal, vi­ olent, short-­sighted, disorganized, and lazy. These two forms of character derive from the physical surroundings (city and pampa) and the ways of life (urban production vs. cattle ranching) characteristic of the two places. (Sarmiento gives a particularly nice account of the gender differences in life courses in the countryside, portraying brilliantly [but whether correctly one is not sure] the aimless culture of self-­assertion and bravado that grows out of the male world of the pulpería [a general store and tavern on the pampa].) Argentine politics takes the form of a battle between these two life zones, the first of which favors a united republic responsibly advancing its people and relying on European models, the second of which favors caudillos governing through extortionate violence exercised in their own interests. The first is closely linked to liberal European ideas and the Enlightenment, the second more loosely tied to a conservative church and the past. But there is an irony (or is it simply a mistake in Sarmiento’s analysis?). The emergence of Rosas as caudillo in Buenos Aires province and his consequent domination of the small, liberal city itself mean that the second conception—­the gaucho/caudillo localist model with the loose attachment to conservative ideology and the church—­came to control Argentina’s relation to the rest of the world as well as, to a considerable extent, Argentina as a whole nation. Thus, although in the literal meaning of the word, Rosas was a unitarist, de jure his party was still named “federalist.” By contrast, the old liberal unitarism of the cities was destroyed in Buenos Aires and isolated in the smaller in­ land cities (e.g., Sarmiento’s San Juan). It was thus a federation of dispersed groups, not appearing “unitary” at all. Much clever sociological insight sustains this argument, as does a powerful if one-­sided reading of the political situation and a very sharp recognition of the disconnections between the names and the contents of the political parties and their ideologies. And Sarmiento’s second chapter, with its list of gaucho types, is a triumph not only of ideal typical analysis, but also of romantic character portrayal. If there are many faults of detail—­and 200 years of critics have found their name to be legion—­the analysis is nonetheless

110

���� �����

broad and compelling. (Its great weakness, to a post-­Marx reader, is its ignoring of the economic foundations of “federalism” in the emergence of a dominating meat export industry organized around giant holdings. It took more than gauchos to sustain the Rosas dictatorship.) But Sarmiento decided to realize his sociological argument only in part through this straightforward analysis. He also used the figure of Quiroga to bring the reader close to the repulsive, murderous world of the gaucho-­ turned-­caudillo. In the style of  Sir Walter Scott, whom Sarmiento had read in extenso during his time as a Chilean miner, Quiroga would embody a whole way of  life, as his foils Rosas, Lamadrid, and others would embody other ways of  life. Like the gaucho he represents, Quiroga is at once a figure of fun for his uncouth clothes and his frontier values as well as a figure of  terror for his endless violence to both friend and foe. His brutality is told and retold, whether it is his murder of gambling opponents or his beguiling of the beauties of Tucumán up to the moment they hear the shots that are executing their husbands and lovers. He is the embodiment of arbitrariness and violence. The rhetorical problem is that Sarmiento cannot avoid admiring Quiroga’s occasional kindnesses nor—­more ominous—­the man’s imperious, char­is­ matic, and ferocious will, which evokes enervating terror in all who face him. In the text, even Quiroga’s endless betrayals of friends and brutalizations of enemies are softened by his thoughtless bravery. He comes to seem simply an emanation of the soil, as brutal and capricious as nature itself. And the more Rosas emerges as a character, the more admirable Sarmiento’s Quiroga becomes. For Rosas has others do his murdering for him. “Rosas never goes into a fury; he calculates in the quiet and seclusion of his study, and from there, the orders go out to his hired assassins” (p. 176). By contrast, “Facundo wasn’t cruel, wasn’t bloodthirsty; he was just a barbarian who didn’t know how to contain his passions, which, once irritated, knew neither measure nor limit” (p. 175). Better a hot-­headed killer than a bureaucratic murderer, Sarmiento implies. In Buenos Aires, after the federalists have won, Sarmiento’s Facundo is plainly a man without a reason for living. He even starts appearing to be a peaceful, middle-­class type reformer (pp. 196, 220; revisionist histories of Argentina have taken up this theme quite strongly, but it appears even in Facundo itself.) Given the structure of the narrative to this point, Facundo is an obvious threat to Rosas, and there seems little doubt that Sarmiento believes that Rosas connived at his murder. (The French translator of Facundo made this connivance explicit.) Indeed, Rosas appears all the more cold-­blooded for foreseeing that the daring Quiroga will trust his terrifying

������� �������� ���������

111

charisma even in the face of a carefully planned assassination. And so at the end, reader and writer admire Quiroga, whose brutality and vileness all vanish in the pride that refuses the military aid and the hints to take alternate routes. “He counted on making the knives held over his head drop with the terror of his name” (p. 201). Facundo ascends to tragedy, accepting without demur the death he meted out to so many others. And that is the book’s problem. In the end, Sarmiento actually admires Quiroga, because in the last analysis the man of terror is also a man of honest and authentic action, unlike the cold bureaucrat who is probably the author of his murder. By contrast, Sarmiento’s occasional admiring recitations of middle-­class reforms (e.g., pp. 168, 185) fall completely flat, even though these are the core of the unitarist, liberal culture that Sarmiento’s sociological analysis so vaunts. And Sarmineto can’t bear actually to tell us that the unitarist cause failed because its great commander, the able and successful General José María Paz, committed the astounding blunder of mistaking his own lines and thereby being easily captured by the federalists. Sarmiento can only tell us Paz was “yanked away from the head of his army by a throw of the bolas” (p. 174). It was an unpardonable mistake for any gaucho. (Astonishingly, Paz survived to endure 20 more years of wars and exiles, eventually triumphing with Urquiza in the early 1850s.) To some extent, Sarmiento here falls prey to the power of biography as a genre rooted in the Aristotelian theory of drama. Readers influenced by the theater in the Aristotelian style cannot avoid the seductions of the tragic trajectory. (Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a scheming caudillo not so different from Quiroga, redeemed in the end by his courage before the nothingness of life.) Academic sociology evades these biographical seductions with its flat prose and endless statistics. For example, the rise and fall of Quiroga takes one or two bland pages in a standard study of Argentina’s history. Such a book spends its time recapturing the experience of common men and wom­en, lives shaped by but not determined by the elite heroics that oppose Sarmiento and Rosas. Sociology is in that sense a thoroughly middle-­class discipline. Democratic, sober, and restrained, it focuses on the good life for all of the people. Of the two social ideals Tocqueville offers in his celebrated opposition of aristocracy and democracy in Democracy in America (vol. 1, pt. 2, chap. 6), sociology has chosen the latter. But, as the example of Sarmiento shows, it never makes that choice without profound regret. If we get past this initial—­and quite familiar—­opposition of the aristocratic, daring, and ambitious versus the democratic, sober, and calculating,

112

���� �����

we come to less familiar ground. Laminated together in Sarmiento’s version of Quiroga are a number of themes, some disturbing, some noble. There is, first, a morbid fascination with violence. The text is full of gory and horrifying stories, told with a relish that tries to gainsay their horror. There is, second, a fascination with perfidy, disloyalty, and betrayal, themes that are always strong in middle-­class writing about honor societies. Betrayal is here evident in the pervasive lies, the switching of sides, and the taking of unfair advantage. This theme culminates in the enigma of whether Rosas has actually ordained the events of Barranca Yaco. There is, third, a more morally neutral meditation on the role of the arbitrary in human life. Sarmiento’s Quiroga is admirable in part because he accepts—­indeed delights in—­the human necessity arbitrarily to make a world, to enact a life for oneself and possibly others. Moreover, the near-­complete absence of women from the book inevitably associates this celebration of the arbitrary with the phenomenon of masculinity. (One could, indeed, read the book principally as a study in ideologies of masculinity.) Fourth, there is the theme of authenticity. The contrast of  Quiroga and Rosas is always one between the authentic and the forced, between the natural and the unnatural. It is here that we miss the economic analysis most, for the logical opposite of  Quiroga as emanation of  the land should be Rosas as ema­ nation of the evils of civilization, in particular of the organized cattle export that requires control not only of the pampa but also of the port city with its processing and transportation industries. Yet in Sarmiento’s original system of oppositions, cities are good because they are middle class, educated, and organized. He doesn’t see what would later be called the export-­dependency complex, although he does understand that there is something about Rosas that is disturbing in a way that Facundo, for all his violence, is not. There is finally the theme of charisma and performativity. One of the many things Sarmiento cannot help admiring about Quiroga is his success. Setting aside the content of Quiroga’s life—­fighting, murder, extortion—­ what marks him is that he makes (indeed defines) the world around him. What matters is not so much that this made world is arbitrary, but that it is made at all. Quiroga, for all his destructiveness, is Promethean, a maker of a world. If we transposed the whole story to the arts, we could imagine Qui­ roga as one of  those revolutionarily destructive artists whom the West so admired in the 19th and 20th centuries. Because he is a man who makes, he has the charisma of  the artist. Sarmiento cannot help but admire him.

������� �������� ���������

113

But Quiroga makes his world by destroying the worlds of others. He is an evil man. It is by a similarly dangerous logic that the Carlylean heroes of  the early 19th century culminated in the tawdry but merciless dictators of the 20th. What we see in Facundo is the initial set of confusions through which that shaping began. The book shows us the strangely familiar set of associations according to which we can come to find an evil man to be admirable. Inevitably, a book so powerful yet so ambivalent became a canonical and controversial text. Within months of its appearance, Valentín Alsina criticized the book for misreading the facts about Rosas and misunderstanding the inner realities of unitarist/federalist relations. Juan Batista Alberdi attacked the book for overstatement, attributing the parts he liked to a larger tradition of analysis and the parts he did not like to Sarmiento in particular. In the 1880s, with the temporary triumph of liberalism, the book and its au­ thor were canonized, although the new context of a high-­immigration Argentina led to a more Spencerian reading of Facundo, one with stronger race overtones, an interpretation given to some extent by Sarmiento himself in old age. The emergence of  José Hernandez’s Martin Fierro—­the  gaucho epic—­ led to new interpretations of Facundo emphasizing Sarmiento’s admiration of Quiroga, rather than his disgust with him, and indeed, there were eventually arguments that Quiroga had been a sort of “rural man with a broad vision.” In the metropolis, Facundo has had an equally long and interesting history, particularly in the United States with Mary Mann’s framing it (in her translation and her writing about Sarmiento) as a foundational text of progressivism-­in-­the-­making. In the mid-­20th century, national character studies found the book an ideal text, and by the end of the 20th century the work was providing a field day for humanists, academic gauchos daring each other to ever-­stranger feats of interpretive horsemanship. Whatever else Facundo is, some piece of it is great social science. The work is centrally important for us precisely because that social science is inextricably bound up with fiction, history, travelogue, polemic, and sheer egomania. It is best to end with Sarmiento’s beginning. Terrible specter of Facundo, I will evoke you, so that you may rise, shaking off the bloody dust covering your ashes and explain the hidden life and the inner convulsions that tear at the bowels of a noble people! You possess the secret: reveal it to us! (p. 31)

��

Chen Da

����� ��� ����� ������� �� ����������� � �� � � � � � �� ���� to the heroism of everyman. In Chinese Migrations and Emigrant Communities of South China, Chen chronicles the southward migration of millions of ordinary Chinese from the inner provinces to the Fujian and Guangdong coasts, and thence to the Nan Yang—­the islands and coasts that arc from China southward to Australia. And indeed to lands far beyond: Hawaii, the Transvaal, even France. In the first book, Chen looks at China, then at each major receiving society. In the second he looks at the remittance communities that live off  the wages of  emigrant labor. The first is a book of  broad brushstrokes, general statistics, and long histories. The second is an intimate work of short case studies and little life stories, of homely descriptive statistics and everyday events. Together, the books constitute one of the great migration studies of the 20th century. If  Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America more intimately describes and theorizes the social psychology of migrants, it nonetheless lacks the systematic demographic and organizational perspective that we find in Chen’s work. Chen Da was born in a peasant family in 1892 in Yuhang, slightly northeast of Hangzhou. After first steps in traditional education, he moved rapidly up through schools reformed in the last days of Qing, entering in 1912 the Tsinghua College to prepare for overseas study under the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship program. Starting in 1916, he attended Reed College in Portland, Chinese Migrations, with Special Reference to Labor Conditions. By Chen Da [Ta Chen]. Bulletin No. 340, United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1923. Pp. 237. Emigrant Communities in South China. By Chen Da [Ta Chen]. New York: Institute for Pacific Relations, 1940. Pp. xvi+287. (First published as Nan yang hua giao yu Min Yue she hui. Shanghai: Shang wu yin shu guan, 1939. Pp. 336.)

���� ��

115

Oregon, where he met Columbia-­t rained sociologist W. F. Ogburn, who was then on the Reed faculty. On his return to Columbia, Ogburn took Chen along, and the young scholar received his Columbia MA in 1920 and PhD in 1923. (Chen’s PhD thesis is Chinese Migrations. Like many American dissertations at the time, it was published in an existing monograph series, in this case the series of the U.S. Bureau of  Labor Statistics.) Returning to China, Chen became a professor at Tsinghua, which was shortly thereafter transformed from a preparatory college into an independent university. For more than a decade, Chen pursued a normal academic career of  teaching, research, and conferences, publishing his population lectures in 1934 and then undertaking the survey of emigrant communities that became the second work reviewed here. But the Japanese were attacking Beijing even as the English version of  that work was being completed, and Chen fled with his colleagues, first to Changsha, and then to Kunming. In the wartime institution that combined fugitive portions of Peking, Nankai, and Tsinghua Universities, Chen directed the Institute of  the Census, carrying out systematic demographic studies of the surrounding area. These were published as Population in Modern China in 1946. Elected in the immediate postwar to the Academia Sinica (the honorific science organization of the Nationalist government), Chen disappeared in the early years of Communism. He lost his Tsinghua teaching position in 1951 and worked most of the 1950s in labor colleges and economic positions. This was not surprising, since most sociology was suppressed in 1952, and Marxist social science dominated until the late 1970s. Although some field research continued, a major impetus of Chinese sociology in this period was toward popularized, amateur research practice, culminating in the Four Histories Movement, a na­ tionally sponsored local-­history initiative reminiscent of Works Progress Administration efforts in the United States in the 1930s. Chen resurfaced briefly during the Hundred Flowers Period as one of a number of sociologists—­most of them Western-­t rained like Chen—­who pushed for the rehabilitation of sociology in 1957. The move failed, and Chen was denounced as a rightist. Although that classification was rescinded in 1961, Chen was by then 70 and his research career over. He died in 1975. Chinese Migrations begins with a review of conditions in the main Chinese provinces of origin—­Guangdong, Fujian, Shandong, and Zhili—­as well as a brief discussion of the three types of emigration trade—­informal emigration via junk, brokered emigration through an emigration company, and government-­sponsored migration. The main argument of these chapters

116

���� �����

traces emigration to the push factors of overpopulation and famine, and to the structural factor of adjacency to the seacoast. The migrants are chiefly young men, an obvious consequence of the fact that much of the migration occurred under formal arrangements for manual labor. There follow chapters on the principal overseas emigrant areas: Taiwan—­ home of more than 2 million emigrants from the mainland—­Indonesia (with separate sections on Java, Bangka, Belitung, and Borneo), Malaysia, the Phil­ ippines, Hawaii, the Transvaal, and France. In each of these destinations, we get a basic history of the migration as well as a description of current conditions of life and labor, plus numerous specialized analyses when data are available: of miscegenation in Indonesia, of self-­funded versus servitude-­ funded emigration to Malaysia, of the impact of language laws in the Philippines, of the effects of the American annexation in Hawaii, of criminal behavior in the Transvaal, and of geographical distribution in France. The somewhat arbitrary character of the detailed analyses is driven by source availability: the work is a secondary one, based on the review of published materials. (But the bibliography includes sources in Chinese, English, Dutch, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese, indicating that Chen must have been an extraordinary linguist: even his Reed BA thesis—­written only three years after his arrival in the United States—­is written in fluent, stylish English.) Several topics cross most of the geographically specialized chapters. The theme of racial mixing pervades these studies, for example. Mixing proves to be strongest in communities where Chinese have entered the merchant ranks rather than remaining as isolated workers on latifundia and plantations. As Chen notes, this racial mixing is driven by the predominance of young single men in the emigrant population. In places like Hawaii, where Western whites were a minority and immigrants were numerous and diverse, racial mixing had proceeded far indeed. Another general theme is labor conditions, which varied much with the attitudes of the local and imperial governments that oversaw the receiving communities. In particular, many such governments forbade Chinese landownership, a policy that drove the Chinese into merchant and commercial roles, which in turn made them highly dependent on assimilation in terms of language. (It also made them, as Chen notes in various places in both books, crucial middlemen for the various Western imperialisms.) This forced commercial activity also drove intermarriage, for a Chinese merchant had great need for the language skills, cultural knowledge, and personal connections that a local bride could provide.

���� ��

117

If  Chinese Migrations shows us the worlds of the overseas Chinese, Emigrant Communities shows us the effects of this massive human mobility on the sending communities. Unlike the former book, which offers a review of secondary sources, Emigrant Communities is a work of large-­scale ethnography, with multiple investigators each studying somewhat specialized topics in several communities, under the general leadership of Chen. The chapter list follows a design familiar from American works of the same period, like Middletown and the Social Trends volumes of Chen’s mentor Ogburn. It begins with what were conceived as given background factors (environment and race; culture traits), then moves through history (social change), to a discuss­ion of   basic aspects of life (livelihood; food, clothing, and shelter; the family; education; health and habits; social organization and enterprise; religion). Alongside his study of three communities with high emigration levels, Chen also studied a nearby community that did not have high emigration. Serious, detailed comparison was thereby possible. The empirical detail in this work is extraordinarily rich. For example, we learn of the complex ways in which remittances were actually repatriated. In the overseas communities, there emerged remittance brokers who consolidated remittances (particularly from simple laborers and small merchants who had no other way of sending money) until they reached investible levels. (These brokers pocketed any interim interest on such temporary holdings.) Once that level was reached, the brokers bought goods, which could be shipped and which on sale in China (at prices unestablished ex ante and hence vulnerable to exchange rates, demand shifts, and so on) yielded shares that a receiving remittance broker turned into cash and divided up appropriately among the relevant “hometown” families. There, the monies were further distributed to individuals as needed by the local head of the household, who, as we learn in the family chapter, was often the principal wife of the male titular head of household, the family member who was very likely himself abroad, earning the remittance money and supporting another wife who, as noted earlier, provided language assistance and local contacts because she was typically of the receiving community’s race and nationality. She also usually had children by her Chinese husband as well. In such a case, the overseas head of household might not come back to China for two, five, or even ten or more years. As this story makes clear, estimating the overall total of remittances was neither possible, nor, in this general sense, really meaningful, since remittances were a complex function of fluctuating prices and transfer charges. But one can look at one particular point in the process,

118

���� �����

and Chen did so. He examined the detailed budgets of 100 families in his three sending sites and found that about 80% of family income came from remittances, a figure thought to be underreported for fear of taxation. The sending communities were thus absolutely dependent on overseas finance. In fact, the typical sending village could itself produce only a four month supply of rice—­the chief subsistence crop. A host of other topics familiar from later studies of migration are already canvassed in this volume. Family loyalty and a desire to die at home led to the return of many emigrants (although their children by overseas marriages came back only if they were boys, since the girls had no marriage pros­ pects). The returnees brought money and attitudes that transformed sending communities: the new tight clothing from Shanghai, the use of cutlery, the desire for more diverse and richer food. Their money pushed up housing and other prices. (All these forces were also observable before they came back, produced by the large flows of money to the home branches of their families). The long-­standing tradition of polygamy absorbed many of the complicated marriage arrangements produced by migration, although one senses that a team of male researchers may not have been told the details of this issue, just as they were not told all the details of income. Emigrants invested heavily in education, both within their own families, and, if they were very successful, for their home villages as a whole. They might however also devote large funds to creation of educational institutions in their overseas communities as well. Indeed, contact with imperial governments abroad tended to make emigrants less likely to support purely clan institutions in China and to create instead what they had—­while abroad—­ come to understand as “public” institutions. (The emigrant community that was a single-­clan village showed distinct differences from this pattern.) The evolution away from clan institutions was also evident in religious behavior; clan halls were sometimes repurposed in ways that would earlier have been thought disrespectful. This reflected the evolution of the clan hall as an institution in the overseas settings themselves, where the halls were perforce general institutions of Chinese solidarity. Chen’s works thus portray a vibrant global community. In the regions of China he studied, a substantial portion of the working-­age population was overseas. A steady flow of people, money, and obligation, as well as of new ideas and practices, bound together the main migrant area of Guangdong and Fujian to the vast world of the Nan Yang (literally, the “south seas”). Although a community of common, everyday people, this migratory world was

���� ��

119

nonetheless a world of heroism and betrayal, of permanence and change, of love and anguish. The first book portrays the size and grandeur of the overall phenomenon, the second gives the hundred intimate details that translate such a grand portrait into triumph and tragedy at the individual level. But it was also a world of intense culture contact, whose other sides—­the imperialists and the local populations overseas—­we see only through the eyes of the Chinese. Except in occasional snapshots, we do not see how the local populations reacted to the Chinese, to intermarriage, to Chinese dominance in commerce, and so on. We do not hear the debates in imperial parliaments about the role of Chinese immigration, debates about what they often called the “problem” of the Chinese. We do see the edicts that constrained activity by emigrant Chinese, but we lack the local and imperial logics that produced them. To be sure, this limitation is inevitable. No book or books can capture the whole of a social world, for any good book looks from a particular point of view, and such a point of view must always be limited. This further question of the impact of the emigrants in their host lands thus becomes for the reader an essential next question. (We shall see an example of this impact, in Indonesia, in chapter XXIII.) Striking as this issue of spatial limitation is, however, even more so is a great historical irony. Today’s reader knows that this vast emigrant world would shortly be submerged under war and revolution. The Japanese would conquer  the  Asian coastline from the capital of China all the way to the great outpost of the British Empire at Singapore. The Nan Yang would echo with bombers and battleships for four years, as the Japanese tenaciously resisted the avalanche of American power. Throughout China there was land war: between Chinese warlords, between the Chinese and the Japanese, and between the Communists and the Nationalists, culminating in the Communist triumph of 1949. Through all of this, the emigrant communities must have lived along, trying to find a way of  life—­perhaps, for all we know, continuing the same old ways of life under various subterfuges and arrangements. By the turn of the 21st century, certainly, the emigrant region studied by Chen was once again outward-­looking, strongly bound by ties of culture, money, and lineage to Chinese communities throughout the Nan Yang and further afield. Remittance communities were common, and agriculture had almost disappeared as the alternative form of employment. How are we to reconcile these two ways of thinking about history? Is history really the story of the grand events—­the battles, the wars, the social revolutions, the epochs? Or is it the story of the long filaments of lives and

120

���� �����

lineages that traverse all of these? After all, many people lived through the battles and the wars and the social revolutions, as indeed did Chen Da—­his book Ten Years’ Wandering (recounting his life from 1936 to 1946) is in fact his most reprinted book. Chen himself gives us no direct reconciliation of the histories of the great men and the masses, but his sympathies are clear. His works proclaim the heroism of everyday people, living everyday lives that reeve lineages across great historical changes that they themselves—­along with myriad others—­ through wondrous complexities have made to occur. To understand those complexities without losing track of the everyday lives through which they emerge is the task of a truly historical sociology.

���

Ali Shariʾati

������� �� ����� ��� ����� �� ������������ ������������ theory to the so-­called classics of the late 19th century or to the much deeper tradition of early modern jurisprudence, we do not escape from liberal social theory. The premises of that theory are ever the same. They comprise four ideas: a (common) human nature that is rational but also passionate and ungoverned; a social world of distinct, diverse, and often conflicting institutions and groups; a body of internally consistent law; and the incarnation of social order in some sovereign form that by this law unifies the passionate people and diverse groups on the basis of a few essential things that they share in common. These four premises become starkly visible when we read social theory from outside the liberal tradition, as we must if we are to encounter the true diversity of the social imagination. The work of Ali Shariʾati illustrates one alternative to liberalism. At the center of Shariʾati’s thinking is Islam, and not only an Islam embodied in a theocratic state, but an Islam conceived as a relation to God that shapes everything from individual consciousness to personal relations to state policy. In the social thought of  Western Europe, we must return to Jean Bodin at the latest to find such opinions, and even Bodin limited the sovereign with natural law, of which there is no obvious analogue in Shariʾati. And as for whether religion should authoritatively govern social life, the history of Europe after 1500 was a two-­century debate over that question, a debate conducted not only in the treatises and tracts of the Reformation and Counter-­ Reformation, but also on battlefields from Naseby and Lutzen to Moncontour On the Sociology of Islam. By Ali Shariʾati. Translated by Hamid Algar. Berkeley, Calif.: Mizan Press, 1979. Pp. 125; Marxism and Other Western Fallacies. By Ali Shariʾati. Translated by R. Campbell. Berkeley, Calif.: Mizan Press, 1980. Pp. 122.

122

���� �����

and Muhlberg, not to mention the long list of events with names like Magdeburg and St. Bartholomew. By 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the last vestiges of the tolerant Edict of Nantes, no one in Europe other than the Sun King himself really imagined that Christendom could be recreated as a unified religious, political, and personal system. Absolutism might endure, but Christendom would not. Even the early modern period, then, contains no real parallel to the comprehensive theoretical project of Shariʾati. We must rather return to the Middle Ages, to writers like John of Salisbury and John of  Paris, to find European thinkers who take as given the inherent unity of all social, political, and religious life. And even John of Paris aimed to split the spiritual and temporal powers, as did his subversive successor, Marsilius of Padua. It is such an indivisible social matrix, however, that Shariʾati aimed to restore in 20th-­century Islam. In the metropolis, his efforts were read as tra­ ditional theocracy and Islamic nationalism. But to a less political eye, his work reads more like Protestant pietism. It roots itself in the Qurʾan. It em­ phasizes personal discipline and growth. It decries theocracy as wrongheaded, materialism as vacuous, Marxism as tyranny. It decries elites and leaders and upper classes. Yet for all its self-­conscious, pedagogic simplicity, it is at the same time both literate and articulate. Its critique of metropolitan life is thoroughgoing and acute, even though it shares many themes with metropolitan arguments like Marxism and existentialism. All these facts make the long-­standing ignorance of Shariʾati puzzling. Even now, three-­quarters of a century after his death, the details of Shariʾati’s life remain unclear. He was born in 1933 in northeastern Iran (the exact location is not certain), then under the modernizing dictatorship of Reza Shah Pahlavi. Shariʾati’s father and grandfather had been active Islamists, the former having founded the Center for the Propagation of Islamic Truth in Mashhad around 1940. After high school, Shariʾati studied in a teacher-­t raining college and early took up a vocation as a teacher. While teaching in the early and mid-­1950s, he finished his bachelor’s degree and began active involvement in nationalist politics, then in crisis over British claims about oil concessions. Such political involvement led Shariʾati to radicalization and arrests. But in the late 1950s he surprisingly won a fellowship for travel to France for further education. There he pursued a degree in letters, eventually submitting a thesis in philology, but also reading widely in Western literature, social science, and philosophy. On the political side, he read the work of Frantz Fanon and became active in the latter phases of the

��� �����ʾ���

123

Algerian independence conflict. On his return to Iran in 1964 he was again arrested, apparently because of his Parisian activities. On his release, he taught at Mashhad and other Iranian colleges for some time, then lectured at Husayniah Irshad, an informal university in Tehran, in which he played a central role. In 1972, Shariʾati was again arrested (the arrest of his father seems to have been used to persuade him to give himself up). After months in con­ finement, he was released to house arrest in 1975. After two years, he went to England and died there under unknown circumstances in June 1977. Accounts of his death are many and various, ranging from natural death to assassination by the Shah’s agents to assassination by the clerical branch of Islam. There remains no scholarly consensus on the matter. More than most theorists, Shariʾati must be read both in context and out. He must be read in context to understand what he might have thought he was actually saying, to which interlocutors, and for what reasons. Above all, he must be read in context for a sense of  what he might have thought he was saying to himself. Yet he must also be read out of context because his work quickly floated free of its original venues, being widely distributed and read for the plain content of the texts, shorn of the unwritten understandings Shariʾati himself may have brought to them. As a first context, we must remember that Shariʾati’s writings were those of a young man and an activist rather than those of a mature man and an aca­ demic. They are notes to himself, or lectures explaining complex insights in simple terms, or celebrations of common religious stories and events. They are not systematic, disciplined arguments. Moreover, he wrote under a regime that permitted no overt political critique. Thus, for him Islam was not only his faith, but also the only available language for political and social discussion. Shariʾati’s contemporary Martin Luther King, Jr., used the same homiletic style and the same invocation of religious symbols and language for some of the same reasons. (That King’s successors abandoned this stance may signify less a difference between King and Shariʾati than a difference in their successors’ appropriations of them.) Immediate context also sometimes shapes Shariʾati’s remarks in more specific ways; his contempt for Marxism no doubt reflects his having met it during one of its more silly moments—­ French academia in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Shariʾati did not leave any single systematic work. After all, his intent in social theory was to midwife the umma, not to win renown as a social theorist. But as a result his writing often lacks consistency, a fact particularly

124

���� �����

noticeable in his attitude toward the other Abrahamic religions. Sometimes for him Judaism and Christianity join in the common religious critique of secular liberal society. At other times, they are part of that liberal society, themselves secularized and baleful. Yet there is a coherence of  vision underneath. Shariʾati’s thought has two basic movements. The first is directed outward, at the litany of philosophies, ideologies, and religions that is the recorded history of the world culture Shariʾati confronted when he left Iran. The second is directed inward, at a particular moment in the history of Shariʾati’s own faith. The first is objective and external. The second is subjective and internal. More important, the first is mainly concerned to judge the past, while the second aims to make the future. Marxism and Other Western Fallacies contains the crucial elements of Shariʾati’s judgment of what he viewed as the alternatives to Islam. The first essay, “On Humanism,” notes how ostensibly secular versions of humanism invariably smuggle transcendent values into their core arguments. It also begins a specific quarrel that runs through much of Shariʾati: his demonization of the medieval Catholic church, here derided for beliefs that are in fact not medieval at all, but rather Augustinian and (later on) Protestant. The medieval Catholic church was a problem for Shariʾati precisely because the Christendom it animated was the last Western equivalent of the encompassing religious society that he sought to recreate in a new umma. But he could not afford to recognize medieval Christendom as having been a prior exam­ ple, lest its degeneration serve as an unwelcome prediction of a potential future for his new Islam. In “Modern Calamities,” Shariʾati begins with a denunciation of capitalism and communism little different from that later articulated by environmental radicals. Then, after a deft rejection of Marxism and various transcendental religions (including the Islamic caliphate) for their degeneration into routinized, self-­interested societies of ideological officialdom, Shariʾati moves to a quite amusing demolition of existentialism (and particularly its Marxist variant) for its pretensions, its internal contradictions, and its more-­ than-­occasional racism. The essay is a triumph of invective, but contains many home truths. “Humanity between Marxism and Religion” is a much more serious and extended work. Here Shariʾati clears the ground quickly of the various alternatives; only Marxism and Islam, he feels, remain as serious alternatives for the advance of humanity, since only those two schemes are comprehensive

��� �����ʾ���

125

views of the religious, social, and material worlds. Again, Christendom fails as a model or precursor because of the heritage that followed it: reformation, religious war, and the privatization of religion under the ensuing liberalism. Christendom thus figures in this essay only as one of the several degenerations of (good) religion into self-­interested officialdoms. That the caliphate also figures as one of these degenerations should not be seen as “fairness” (as one might think, because Shariʾati appears to judge Islam as harshly as he does Christianity), but rather as a reminder that the concept of “Islam” as used in the text refers to Shariʾati’s never fully stated but quite particular version of that faith. In this connection, it is also noteworthy that Shariʾati’s language sometimes relegates Sufism to the status of “non-­Islam.” Shariʾati’s chief arguments against Marxism concern its internal contradictions and surreptitious borrowing of religious and transcendent language, criticisms that no serious reader of Marx can deny. Marx’s worship of man the maker, of the artisan desiring his unalienated product, is evi­ dent enough. Through much of this section Shariʾati reads the Qurʾan as if it were a text by, say, John Dewey, urging the realization of  human potential, the expression of free desire, the facilitation of personal and social growth. That the Qurʾan is full of specific injunctions about specific social practices simply disappears. But this is not so much an inconsistency as it is simply the result of Shariʾati’s turning inward to the fundamentals of his own religion. Specific injunctions are only means to a greater end. He sees through requirements and injunctions to the promise that is at the heart of Islam: personal fulfillment through surrender to the will of Allah the All-­Merciful and acceptance of the prophecies and the project of the Prophet. Here Shariʾati finds the same burning heat of values and personal realization that other devout people have found in a dozen other transcendent religions. For long stretches of the latter parts of this essay, one could substitute “Jainism” or “Mazdaism” or “Buddhism” for “Islam” and have a text completely acceptable to those faiths. We are all the more aware of this issue because Shariʾati has been so religiously tolerant in presenting the polar opposition of religion and secularism in the opening essays of the book. This is indeed the fundamental puzzle of Shariʾati’s work. His critiques of materialism and its vacuity resonate with dozens of contemporary and later writers, both secular and religious. His insistence on the meaning-­creating heart of human activity echoes themes in Karl Marx, Max Weber, Franz Boas, and a hundred other great social scientists. But his remedy—­Islam—­ immediately raises the question of whether Islam can avoid the terrifying

126

���� �����

history of Western Europe: the renewed religious commitment of Protes­ tantism, the grisly wars and repressions of the 16th and early 17th centuries, and the liberal pacification that followed, with its agreement to limit religion to private life and to subject religion to national secular law. One imagines that Shariʾati would have immediately pointed out that privatization was followed by the systematic dehumanization discussed by Marx, by the militant and indeed often “religiously” inspired colonialism of the late 19th century, and by the triumph of illiberalism in the fascist dictatorships. One seems damned either way. By contrast with the outward-­looking Shariʾati of Marxism and Other Western Fallacies, the Shariʾati of On the Sociology of Islam turns inward. He is here talking to fellow Shiʿi Muslims in Iran, speaking the language of religious reform, urging a return to deep and heartfelt faith. In fact, he often sounds like a 19th-­century American Protestant revival preacher calling the faithful to renewed commitment and self-­discipline. The discussion of non-­ Iranian traditions is here aimed purely at local listeners; Shariʾati is a returning voyager whose collected intellectual souvenirs will become helpful when they are purified of their errors and redeployed in the local, Islamic world. In that new context, they become revolutionary, because they are informed by proper, purely Islamic values. The toleration evident in Marxism and Other Western Fallacies is largely absent from this book. Thus, in the essay translated as “Approaches to the Understanding of Islam,” Shariʾati tells us that the Qurʾan contains a revolutionary theory of migration: the notion that all civilization arises in migration. But that idea has been argued often enough before. Or again, he tells us that Western history focuses too much on accident. But then he makes accident one of the four pillars of an Islamic theory of social development, alongside personality, al-­ nas (the people), and tradition [later, norms; he means here the inner logic of a people as in the theories of J. G. Herder]. Such a view is by no means absent from historiography outside Islam, and conversely Shariʾati has at times rejected thinkers who have focused on each of these themes. But again, the issue here is not sociological abstraction, but practical theorizing. We must read this essay as a call for Muslims—­in particular for Shariʾati’s countrymen—­to awaken their faith and study it: “It is shameful that after fourteen centuries, Ali should be made known to us through a Christian, Georges Jourdaq” (p. 40). The most important tenet of Shariʾati’s theory of social life is however contained in the essay on tauhid. Shariʾati argues that tauhid means not only the unity of God, but also the unity of all things with God, of now and

��� �����ʾ���

127

eternity, of natural and supernatural, of all things in the world. By contrast, shirk denotes polytheism and multiplicity. For Shariʾati, [Shirk] . . . is a worldview that regards the universe as a discordant assemblage full of disunity, contradiction, and heterogeneity, possessing a variety of independent and clashing poles, conflicting tendencies, variegated and unconnected desires, reckonings, customs, purposes, and wills. Tauhid sees the world as an empire; shirk as a feudal system. (p. 82)

Immediately, one recognizes in shirk two of the earlier-­mentioned premises of liberal social theory: a human nature uneasily compounded of passion and reason, and a bickering melee of diverse social groups. Shariʾati finds the very imagination of  liberal social theory to be mistaken. Or, rather, he finds the premises of liberal social theory to denote a state of social life that is inherently wrong. Shariʾati prefaces this passage with a long list of dualisms he feels tauhid cannot accept. Many of these were the enlightenment dualisms also rejected by the Nietzscheans of the late 20th century: spirit and body, ruler and ruled, noble and vile, logic and love, inherent virtue and inherent evil. Others were the divisions of the Marxists: capitalists and proletarians, elite and mass, learned and illiterate. Still others are cultural differences: Arab and non-­Arab, Persian and non-­Persian. All these differences are for Shariʾati so much shirk. Given the internal audience, however, one does not know what Shariʾati intended by giving this list. Did he simply mean that these distinctions, how­ ever important or unimportant in the eyes of humans, were not distinc­ tions in the eye of God, and so were in the long run quite unimportant, much as the Christian apostles insisted when they claimed that on Pentecost everyone miraculously heard the Gospel in his own language? That these distinctions are mere accidents, harmless enough in their own way, but sometimes distracting our attention from a more fundamental unity? That would be the liberal reading. Or did he simply envision the annihilation of difference altogether: of Arab and non-­Arab along with capitalist and worker, of black and white along with clergy and laity, of virtue and evil along with this world and hereafter? One hears in Shariʾati a note that becomes quite chilling out of context: Tauhid, by contrast, which negates all forms of shirk, regards all the particles, processes, and phenomena of existence as being engaged in harmonious

128

���� �����

movement toward a single goal. Whatever is not oriented to that goal is by definition nonexistent. (p. 87)

The metropolis and indeed the rest of the world knows well that human things that are “by definition nonexistent” often become nonexistent in a more concrete way: repressed, enslaved, executed, starved—­the list is long. In Shariʾati, then, we face the great conundrum of social theory. The val­ ues that animate humans arise in differences. They are created in the cru­cible of particular experience, of optimism, excitement, and passion. But differences have a trajectory that often ends in inhumanity, a trajectory that becomes more and more marked precisely as the values involved claim to define the project of humanity itself. As critique of modern society, Shariʾati’s work is quite effective. His portrayal of its emptiness echoes the many others who have argued that liberal society tends to relapse into meaninglessness and materialism. And he is right too in emphasizing the creation of new values, the making of new differences. Human life is about the positing of differences. The values that animate and drive humans are values they themselves seem to invent. But the problem lies in the word “seem.” Humans cannot know, in the last analysis, whether their values are inventions or not. Even the wildly successful materialist project of Western science came up against proofs of its own undecidability from Kurt Gödel, Niels Bohr, Ludwig Fleck, and many others. The most powerful of values, then, are those that can deny this knowledge of their own invention and pretend to absolute transcendence. Shariʾati speaks for one of them. In his view, values are not invented. They are simply discovered. There is no real difference, no passion and diversity, only a failure by many people to see the one thing that matters: the fundamental unity of human life under the rule of the All-­Merciful. If all humans would see that, it would be a new world. Indeed.

����

Ziya Gökalp

��������� ��������� ������ �� ����� �� ��� ����� �� ����.  Yet it is the universal property of humans to be particular: to inhabit a place, a moment, a society, a culture. While this particularity does not for­ bid the project of universal knowledge, it complicates that project almost beyond possibility. How can there be a universal knowledge of the particu­ lar? And given that all knowledge lives in particular humans and their in­ stitutions, how could such a universal knowledge actually be known and communicated? One family of solutions for this conundrum descends from the great ra­ tionalists. It universalizes by formalizing, by trading substantive content for structural form. From it come mathematics and contractarianism, econo­ metrics and public opinion polling: all the apparatuses of abstract explana­ tion. Within it, the syntax of reality is stripped of content and inspected in the abstract. Another family of answers descends from the great cosmopolitans. It uni­ versalizes by collecting diverse content and then juxtaposing it, deriving new meaning from combination and translation. It does not presume to re­ duce all things to one but offers to each particular knowledge some regular modes of connection to others. From this approach come anthropology and feminism, ethnography and oral history. Not syntax but semantics is its game. Its way is translation. Our discipline of rereading past works from diverse cultures follows this second way, and translation is indeed doubly central in the book before us. Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization. By Ziya Gökalp. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959. Pp. 336.

130

���� �����

It is central first because we are reading not an author’s original work, but a short collection of translations into one language of his very considerable writings in another. It is central second because its author’s project was to translate the concepts of yet a third culture into his own. Both of these cen­ tralities call for comment. As for the first matter, that of reading translated excerpts: That it lies within the power of  your reviewer to reinvent herself so as to read and grasp any work in its original language is beside the point. The universal human problem of translation would thereby disappear in the seeming magic of re­ invention. So your reviewer constrains herself to the more limited human condition of knowing two living languages, of learning a third to undertake further reviews, and having two dead languages that haunt the back rooms of her mind. As for the second matter, of the translation and borrowing of concepts: The book before us is a translation into English of some of the hun­ dreds of short essays written in Turkish by the founder of Turkish sociol­ ogy, Ziya Gökalp. Gökalp was in turn overwhelmingly influenced by French thought in general and by Émile Durkheim in particular. So we see here the English traces of a Turk’s reading of French sources. Mehmet Ziya was born around 1875 in Diyarbakir in eastern Anatolia. The name Ziya Gökalp—­a combination of blue (gök) and hero (alp)—­is one of his many pseudonyms and the one by which he came to be known. Gökalp’s origins and ethnicity are contested, not least of all by himself. In a celebrated piece of autobiography (included in the volume under review), he claims to be Turkish because he spoke Turkish and thought of himself as a Turk, two of the criteria that he himself thought central to national identity. But an­ other long line of scholarship has called him Kurdish, although not neces­ sarily making clear what is (or could be) the criterion by which one could distinguish Kurds and Turks in eastern Anatolia in the late 19th century. Locally educated by his father (who died early) and his uncle, Gökalp learned Arabic, Persian, and French in addition to his native Turkish. After an adolescent depression led him to a suicide attempt at 17, his concerned brother brought him to Istanbul, where he joined the college of veterinary medicine (because it was inexpensive) and pursued radical politics, then in a ferment in the last years of the repressive Sultan ʿAbd al Hamid. Impris­ oned for a year around 1900, he imbibed more radicalism in captivity, but he eventually returned to Diyarbakir and the round of family life, marriage having brought him financial independence. He was active against a local

���� ������

131

Kurdish military group, whose mix of quasi-­governmental status and bandit behavior was characteristic of these chaotic times. When the Young Turks took power in 1908, Gökalp left Diyarbakir for Salonika, where he was to serve as a representative to their core organiza­ tion, the Committee on Union and Progress. Salonika was then the western­ most metropolis of the Ottoman world—­both literally and figuratively—­ and there Gökalp began the first of many periodicals he would publish. He also read extensively in French sociology and philosophy: Alfred Fouillée, Gabriel Tarde, and Gustave Le Bon, but above all, Émile Durkheim. He began a normal school in social science and energetically preached his new Dur­ kheimian gospel. When the European lands of the Ottoman empire were lost in the Balkan Wars, Gökalp joined the rest of the committee in its retreat to Istanbul. Here he continued teaching, started more reviews, and laid the intellectual foundations of  Turkish national identity. The First World War destroyed the Young Turk government. But by then its last-­ditch decision to control what it thought to be fifth column activity on the eastern frontier had evolved—­whether on purpose or by accident has never been agreed—­into the death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians. Although most Young Turks fled Turkey before the Allies took over, Gökalp remained and was found guilty of war crimes by a military tribunal. After three years’ exile to Malta, he returned to Diyarbakir. Founding yet another set of periodicals, he eventually moved to Ankara and achieved some minor positions in the Kemalist government. But his health failed, and he died in 1924. Gökalp is instructively compared with Ali Shariʾati, our preceding au­ thor. Both were Muslims. Both had studied Western culture in general and French culture in particular. Both aimed to create an effective identity for those whom they envisioned to be their countrymen. Yet there were crucial differences, too. Gökalp was an almost secular Sunni, Shariʾati a much more religious Shiʿi. Gökalp’s France was Durkheim and Bergson. Shariʾati’s France was Sartre and Fanon. Gökalp’s homeland was the Turkey he inven­ ted out of  the wreckage of  Ottomanism; his ideological invention would un­ derpin Atatürk’s long dictatorship. Shariʿati’s homeland was the Iran that resulted from just such a dictatorship, founded by Atatürk’s Iranian contem­ porary and equivalent, Reza Shah Pahlavi; Shariʾati’s ideological invention would help undermine and overthrow that dictatorship. Finally, while both Gökalp and Shariʿati asserted a single ultimate solidarity, for Gökalp it was

132

���� �����

the Turkish nation but for Shariʾati it was the nonnational umma. Gökalp was the ideologist of the most ruthlessly secularizing government in Mus­ lim history. Shariʾati was the harbinger of the return of the Iranian ulama. But these differences obscure the similarities between the two writers. Both set themselves the project of constructing and legitimating a differ­ ence. In each case, that difference was a substantive one rather than a mere formality. This is obvious in the case of Shariʾati, whose turn toward reli­ gion seemed to contravene the (supposed) secularizing trend of the 20th cen­ tury. But Gökalp was no less a prophet of substantive difference. For the “old view” that he rejected was the cosmopolitanism of the Young Ottomans, the mid-­19th-­century attempt to make an ideal of the loose tolerance—­or was it simply the lack of active repression?—­of the multiethnic and multireligious Ottoman empire. Gökalp’s attitude toward the non-­Muslim minorities of the empire is deeply mixed; he admires their concentration in the mercan­ tile and educated occupations but cannot decide whether to attribute it to the Turkish disinclination for such work, to a cultural connection with the West, or to the independent achievements of the minorities involved. And he seems unwilling to admire their success in the midst of an alien society. Moreover, he ultimately rejects such cosmopolitanism because in his view it has no content. It is mere toleration. Like Shariʾati, then, Gökalp is not a true liberal. Although he accepts Durkheim’s notion that the collective conscience is only a small part of the individual in modern society, he worries lest that part be too small and too indeterminate. His oeuvre takes its main task to be giving content to the collective conscience of his society: Turkish folk tales, Turkish heroes, Turk­ ish homelands, Turkish culture. Above all, he favors the Turkish language, which he views as the heart of Turkish identity. Gökalp was one of the originators of the project to pu­ rify Turkish of its Arab and Persian borrowings, a project whose equivalent French incarnation in the Académie française he must have known well. In­ deed, Gökalp at times sounds like a politician who has read Benjamin Lee Whorf, telling us that if  Pomaks (Bulgarian Muslims) learn Turkish, they will become Turks. (For him, this argument rests on the broader Tardean notion that language brings ideas and culture in its train.) But Gökalp forgets that the natural state of  much of  humankind was multilingual until the emergence and triumph of the nation-­state, which was, to some extent, simply the idea that a state ought to be unilingual. Before Gökalp many—­or perhaps even most—­Ottomans had been multilingual and quite happy in that capacity.

���� ������

133

Where did Gökalp’s passionate nationalism come from? An obvious in­ terpretation would attribute it to growing up Turkish on the eastern march­ lands of a decaying empire, surrounded by warring Kurds, and overawed by the Arabic and Persian cultures to the south and the east. But perhaps an individual explanation is unnecessary. Nationalism was in the very air of the late 19th century: Durkheim’s version was only one of many. By the end of the First World War, nationalism may quite literally have become the only way for a government to be visible to an international community obsessed with and organized around nationhood. But there was a residual explana­ tion, too. The loss of  Rumelia and the death of much of the Armenian popula­ tion left the remains of the Ottoman empire largely Turkish speaking in any case. It is thus little surprising that Turkishness was reconstructed to have a positive meaning. At the same time, the word “reconstructed” is incorrect. It is more proper to say that Turkishness was simply created from whole cloth: the word “Turk” meant nothing more than “peasant” or “countryman” at the turn of the 20th century. There was, of course, an alternative basis for state build­ ing within the remains of the Ottoman empire—­Islam. But Gökalp’s refusal to turn to Islam reflected the fact that, unlike Iran, where Twelver Shiʿism was a more or less unique local tradition, Turkey was part of a much larger Sunni umma that included many former imperial territories, none of which desired any form of connection with a renewed (Ottoman? Turkish?) state centered in Anatolia. This problem of finding and maintaining an identity within a larger whole was central to Gökalp. That the major solidarities are concentric is one of his fixed ideas. Family, clan, community, nation, and civilization are so many Chinese boxes, one within the other. Religion, for Gökalp, comes under the last of these headings. It is a “civilizational unit”: large and amor­phous and hence not as firm a basis for society as is the linguistic and cul­tural unit—­ what Gökalp defines as the nation. As in Durkheim, occupational groups ap­ pear from time to time as solidarities, but they are less important for Gökalp than they are for his French master. Gökalp focuses rather on the processes of convergence by which the “smaller” solidarities (family, clan, community) agglomerate into larger ones and on the processes of divergence by which cultures and language units separate themselves from each other within the larger “civilizational units.” The nation is thus for Gökalp the proper box; big enough to embrace the lesser solidarities, but definite enough to lack the weaknesses of the larger “civilization.” Indeed, it cannot have escaped

134

���� �����

Gökalp, in his first years in Salonika, that European “civilization” was it­ self drifting toward Armageddon precisely because of such national diver­ gences. To take one’s place in that world necessitated drawing sharp lines. But there are inconsistencies in Gökalp’s arguments. Islam did turn out to be central to Turkism, although as some have pointed out, Gökalp’s is a very deistic Islam indeed—­“without popes, synods, or religious councils” as he puts it. (And without the sheriat, which Gökalp regards as perpetually changing with the evolution of society.) His occasional invocation of the great Turkish homeland of Turan (the area east of the ancient Oxus River) seems mere ancestral window dressing. Perhaps more important, Gökalp pays no attention to the many crosscutting solidarities that make of modern social life not a series of Chinese boxes but a web of conflicting interconnec­ tions. Occupation plays little role in Gökalp other than in the discussion of non-­Muslim predominance in the commercial sector. Nor does class make any appearance, although Ottoman society was as class ridden as any. And of the important future solidarities—­gender, for example—­there is no hint, although as a resolute secularist Gökalp voiced opinions on women’s free­ dom that made him popular with later generations seeking politically cor­ rect ancestors. But true pluralism—­or any other alternative approach to the classical problems of factious liberalism—­is invisible in Gökalp’s writing. As with Durkheim, there is some question whether Gökalp’s works con­ duce to fascism, a question made more pressing in his case by the Armenian horror and the Atatürk dictatorship. Certainly there is a line of references within Gökalp to texts and writers often identified with fascism. He speaks of Nietzsche and underscores the importance of heroes and great events. But alongside such remarks he invokes Fouillée’s idées-­forces, Henri Berg­ son’s élan vital, and William James’s pragmatist psychology. These are quite different things, and only a teleological anachronism born of knowing later history could make of them a simple genealogy inevitably leading to “the triumph of the will.” But we are nonetheless reminded how short a step it is from the principled argument that liberalism is empty and vacuous to poli­ cies like ethnic cleansing, forced migration, and cultural reeducation. Here too Gökalp reminds one of Shariʾati, but with a nationalist rather than a re­ ligious substance. In this regard it is striking that Gökalp emphasizes the sociologist’s role as educator and moralist, an argument he borrows directly from Durkheim. Thus Gökalp tells us

���� ������

135

the sociologist may influence the evolution of society only by knowing its laws and obeying them. His function is not to impose and institute, but to discover elements of the national conscience in the unconscious level and to being them up to conscious level. (p. 165)

Yet a few pages later he tells us Social disciplines are always national, because their subject-­matter is the institutions of a nation. They are, however, objective disciplines at the same time because they are interested in observing and discovering the institu­ tions existing in a nation. They will show not “what it should be” but “how it is.” They are, however, normative disciplines also, because once the rules of national institutions are discovered and become known, they assume an obligatory character for the members of the nation. We do not learn the grammatical rules of our language with only a theoretical interest, but we make the rules we have learned norms in our speech and writing. (p. 169)

The sociologist must thus do research on Turkishness, although in saying that, Gökalp takes for granted the idea that there is a Turkey. But while the sociologist thinks he is rationally discovering it by the laws of science, he is actually to a considerable extent simply inventing it. One wonders if Gökalp really believed the implication of his argument: that the national conscious­ ness could be discovered by a great public opinion poll, whose results would then become obligatory. But his comparison with language is much more subtle: language does arise from actual speech and must be discovered by re­ search on speech, but it must nonetheless be taught as a system of known and fixed rules. The Gökalpian sociologist is thus not only the discoverer but also the cre­ ator of the nation. The normal next step would be to ask “in whose interest?” But that question makes no sense in Gökalp’s view, for he does not discern groups within Turkish society. Gökalp’s master Durkheim, however, did try to address this question, in some tortured pages of his civic morals lectures, and it is no accident that it was Gökalp’s heirs at the Faculty of Law of the University of Istanbul who saw to the first publication of these Durkheim­ ian lectures, which were eventually translated into English and published in 1957 as Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (PECM: Routledge Kegan Paul). In these lectures Durkheim for once discusses not only the individual and

136

���� �����

society, but also the various “secondary groups” in which individuals are participants. He claims that the state is the referee that keeps any such sec­ ondary groups from becoming too independent (“a small society within the greater”; PECM, p. 61) for they would thereby return us to the state of anti-­ individualistic mechanical solidarity. Thus the state has the “duty of rep­ resenting the overall collectivity, its rights and its interests, vis à vis these individual collectivities” (PECM, p. 62). But then Durkheim, frightened by the power he has created, argues that the secondary groups equally serve as a check on the state, and so individualism is able to grow. Interestingly, he assumes for the most part that the secondary groups don’t overlap, thus missing the arguments that would later sustain pluralism. But the conscientious Durkheim then moves his argument up another level, to reflect on individual nations as the “secondary groups” within a world society. Here he simply assumes the problem away: There is a means of reconciling the two ideas [of nationalism and inter­ national society]. That is for the national to merge with the human ideal, for the individual states to become, each in their own way, the agencies by which this general idea is carried into effect. If each state had as its chief aim, not to expand, or to lengthen its borders, but to set its own house in order and to make the widest appeal to its members for a moral life on an ever higher level, then all discrepancy between national and human morals would be excluded. (PECM, p. 74)

Like his student Gökalp, Durkheim seems to assume that interstate rivalry will abate if each state becomes a humanely best version of itself. These were optimistic words indeed in the decade of the great naval arms race. We are confronted here again with the question of universalism with which we began. One can resolve the problem of universal political society by cre­ating an abstraction called universal citizenship and endowing that ab­ straction with the Gökalpian/Durkheimian quality of collective conscience. But Gökalp saw clearly the weakness—­as Durkheim would have said, the “progressive indeterminacy”—­of such a collective conscience. That was his argument against cosmopolitanism. But if one builds and strengthens the more local solidarity of nationhood, whether Turkish or otherwise, one must expect inevitable conflict. Durkheim simply assumes this away by hoping each nation will devote itself independently to pursuing its own version of the project of humanity in a way that doesn’t harm others. However fine a

���� ������

137

vision that might be, the history of  Europe after 1910 shows that it wasn’t a practicable reality in Durkheim’s day. As for Gökalp, perhaps simply envisioning the nation was enough to at­ tempt. The task of creating Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman empire was surely a more desperate one than Durkheim’s task of undertaking another Gallican joust with the Vatican ulama and avenging the slights of the Franco-­Prussian War. But we are nonetheless left with the horror of the Armenian events. It would be presumptuous to claim that Gökalp foresaw and approved the sometimes baleful consequences of  his creation of  Turkish nationalism. But he tells us only how to be proud and fulfilled in our own identities, not how to avoid doing so at the expense of others. Translation re­ quires both.

�����

M. N. Srinivas

������ ������� ������ ��� ���������� ��� ����� ���� �� storm and strife. Its authors were pamphleteers urging revolution, feminists lobbying for their gender, liberation fighters on their way to presidencies or dictatorships. But as academic life spread, nonmetropolitan social science drifted into the quieter waters of  university life. Even the identity literatures of the turn of the 21st century were sometimes more dutiful than passionate. In such a world, the best writing often emerged from disruption. To one such disruption we owe The Remembered Village. While visiting an American university, the Indian sociologist M. N. Srinivas saw the codings and analyses of 20 years reduced to ashes in an hour, sacrificed by an antiwar arsonist to political gods unknown in the Hindu pantheon. Only the field diaries remained, two continents away. On the advice of a colleague, Srinivas simply wrote from memory. He checked a few facts against the surviving diaries, but most of what we read today is quite literally “the remembered village,” harvested after two decades of reflection that would have been much approved by the careful farmers of the village of Rampura. Like Srinivas, they too knew catastrophe: Considering their proneness to disasters of all kinds, their poverty and their ignorance, and the fact that planting each crop was really an act of faith, it was indeed astonishing that they were activists. Withdrawal from all activity made more sense in their situation. (p. 318) The Remembered Village. By M. N. Srinivas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Pp. 340.

�� �� ��������

139

But they soldiered on, and Srinivas followed their lead. Indeed, it was to himself that he was speaking in this remark: social science is an act of faith in the face of disaster. M. N. Srinivas was born November 16, 1916, in Mysore, then the capital of a princely state within British-­dominated India. Ill health and undiagnosed myopia made him an indifferent student, but he moved steadily ahead under the guidance (and occasional funding) of a schoolteacher elder brother (EB, as Srinivas calls him). Such mentoring permeated Srinivas’s life. His short autobiography follows a sequence of such advisors, beginning with EB and continuing through A. R. Wadia to G. S. Ghurye, A. R. Radcliffe-­Brown, and E. E. Evans-­Pritchard. One is not surprised to find The Remembered Village beginning with careful portraits of three dominant elder informants. Nor is one surprised, ultimately, at the fiery origin of the book. For Srinivas recounted his life not only in terms of elders, but also in terms of such accidents. Sociology was chosen for him by a friend of  EB’s who had little actual acquaintance of the field. Through that arbitrary choice he came under the influence of  Wadia, who in turn gave him the bad grade that prevented a first-­class degree and therefore disbarred him from the Civil Service examination that might have resulted in a local teaching job and a boring, limited career. Wadia in turn sent Srinivas off to Ghurye at Bombay, who, rather than mentoring Srinivas, soon fast-­t racked him into field study (see chap­ ter XI). To hear Srinivas tell it, his life was one long series of accidents. From Ghurye, Srinivas imbibed the diffusionism of Ghurye’s teacher—­ the British anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers. But jobs in India were scarce, and, moreover, Ghurye for some reason soured on Srinivas. That souring, how­ever, resulted in Ghurye’s sending Srinivas to England for study. Although various things (among them a bizarre accident to Srinivas’s precious glasses) got him off to a bad start with Oxford’s Radcliffe-­Brown, he learned much from the latter, exchanging diffusionism for functionalism. But Radcliffe-­Brown soon retired—­another accident, but with the silver lining that Sri­nivas became the first student of Radcliffe-­Brown’s successor Evans-­Pritchard, already famous for his studies of the Azande and the Nuer. Sri­nivas was again redirected, for Evans-­Pritchard was skeptical of functionalism and believed that social anthropology was “a moral and not a natural science, and that its methods approximated those of history.” (At least, this is Srinivas’s view of Evans-­Pritchard in his personal essay, “Itineraries of an Indian Social Anthropologist”; others thought differently.) In his turn, Evans-­Pritchard

140

���� �����

recruited Srinivas for the Oxford anthropology staff and arranged to fund the fieldwork that became The Remembered Village. Again, a series of accidents. But once the fieldwork was done, Srinivas chose to return to India, called by his old teacher Wadia, who had now become pro-­vice chancellor at the new university in Baroda. Srinivas’s retrospective judgment of this choice (again taken from “Itineraries of an Indian Social Anthropologist”) captures with precision the problem of crossing the boundary between empire and metropolis: But looking back over the years I have no doubt whatever that I did the right thing in leaving Oxford and returning to a university in my own country. I am only too keenly aware that had I continued at Oxford I could have been a much more rigorous scholar and written more books and papers, but I am also certain that I would have experienced an emotional and spiritual dessication which would have affected my work as well as my relations with those with whom I came in contact. Human social relations are the stuff of an anthropologist’s analysis, and alienation from one’s society and culture cannot but have consequences on his perceptions and interpretations. This is not to ignore the great contributions made to the social sciences made by exiles and expatriates, and “marginal” members of societies. Sociology is in a sense the offspring of collective as well as personal misery.

Srinivas spent eight years at Baroda building a department and a concept of Indian sociology. He was then called to Delhi in 1959 to start the department of sociology there. Twelve years later, the very man who had brought him to Delhi—­Dr. V. K. R. V. Rao—­enticed him to return south, to Bangalore, to head Rao’s new Institute for Social and Economic Change. In later years, Srinivas was visiting professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, working on an autobiography left unfinished at his death in 1999. The Remembered Village is part ethnography and part bildungsroman. Such works became common after the 1980s, when the subjectivist reaction against midcentury scientism produced a generation of self-­absorbed ethnography. But the mix was new in 1976. Fieldworkers were then still recovering from the recent publication of Bronislaw Malinowski’s personal diaries. The hard-­won perfections of Malinowski’s writing and the objectification in-

�� �� ��������

141

evitable in later disciplinary historiography had led his successors to imag­ ine him as a disembodied, scientific ethnographer. But the trailblazing hero of modern fieldwork turned out to have been a tortured young man. The labor of intercultural translation had often overloaded his tolerance. Ambition and passion drove him awry. Loneliness undermined his discipline. That this was the actual experience of fieldwork had become widely known by 1967. But it had never been made so plain as it was in the young Malinowski’s private writings. Yet while Srinivas combined analysis and memoir in The Remembered Village, his memoir lacked the storms of  Malinowski’s, in part because the two were very different men, in part because Srinivas wrote for publication and in long retrospect. The Srinivas who remembered Rampura was almost the age of the three key men who had dominated his original research there: the nameless headman, strong and silent; Kulle Gowda, the hustler/trickster research assistant; and Nadu Gowda, head of the village’s largest lineage and Srinivas’s friend and mentor. By contrast, the Srinivas who researched Rampura in 1948 had been just an Oxford graduate student undertaking fieldwork, and so far as we know, he did not keep a secret diary. The Remembered Village has three parts. First, three opening chapters set the stage. Srinivas tells us how he found Rampura, partly through a sentimental desire to discover his own origins—­his urbanized family owned paddy land only a few miles away—­but also because it fit most of  the concep­ tual requirements he sought: multicaste, rice-­growing, nonprogressive, and small. But in the last analysis, he tells us, he chose Rampura because he went there on a beautiful morning, the waters danced in the town’s little reser­ voir, and the smell of jaggery-­making seduced his senses. I feel self-­conscious to mention that my decision to choose Rampura was based on aesthetic rather than rational considerations. However it was in line with my earlier decision to select the southern Mysore region on sentimen­ tal grounds. But the alternative of mentioning only the “rational” criteria while ignoring the “non-­rational” ones would be dishonest. (p. 8)

This passage sets the tone of the entire book, which is filled with straightforward, unironical self-­judgment. We learn for example that Srinivas is quite fastidious. He resents the villagers’ constant discussion of his bowel habits and their staring at him while he bathes. He becomes inured to the

142

���� �����

cow-­dung smells of the house in which he lives but cannot abide the children defecating calmly by the roadside. We learn that he is an atheist, a factor that causes his only differences with his mentor Nadu Gowda (pp. 97, 323). We become accustomed to his merciless self-­criticism. There is a whole section on failures in chapter 2, where he calls himself a coward, decries his excessive caution, and wonders whether he is not a hypocrite: “I was not a ruthless enough anthropologist to sacrifice good relations for better field work” (p. 49). At times, he finds himself quite unaccountable. He is puzzled, for example, that while he was unable to watch the slaughter of animals, “cruelty which did not involve killing did not affect me much” (p. 50), going on to describe a castration that was “barbarous in the extreme.” Of a bhang-­ smoking session, he remarks laconically “it did not occur to me to take a puff ” (p. 51). And he notes disapprovingly his escapes to Mysore: It was pleasant to get back to electric lights, piped water, good food, and, above all, privacy. It was delightful to walk around without having to be asking questions and making notes. It was equally if not more delightful that I did not have to answer questions all the time. (p. 33)

As this last remark makes clear, the villagers studied Srinivas in their own way. Many of the questions involved Srinivas’s status as an Iyengar (a Vaishnavite Brahmin subcaste from further south). Srinivas had become quite secular himself, but the villagers (most of them from the Peasant caste—­ there were only one or two other Brahmins resident in Rampura) expected him to behave in proper Brahmin style. The headman insisted that, as ritual required, he shave before rather than after his bath: a Brahmin should set a good example. Srinivas’s technical virtuosity as a writer allows him to show the reader this village reaction to himself  with a minimum of explicit statement. There is no need for quotes giving voice to those studied, such as later writers would include. At the same time, Srinivas is quite explicit about his Brahmin position and its effects on all aspects of his work. By presenting himself not only explicitly, but also through the reactions of three major and many minor figures, he creates a multidimensionality often lacking in the mechanical egalitarianism of many of his successors. After the introduction of the field situation and the three leading informants comes the loosely functional core of the book: chapters on agriculture, family, caste, and class/faction. A chart presents the rhythm of social

�� �� ��������

143

and agricultural practices, and Srinivas walks us through the world of planting, of land, water, and animals. Each topic gets both its general presentation and two or three shining details that etch the general argument in the reader’s mind. We learn that men are thought too weak to transplant rice; that the dominant Peasant caste was dependent for water on the Fisherman Dasi, who held the keys to the irrigation system; that the villagers thought the younger Melkote’s two pairs of magnificent bullocks—­however aesthetic they seemed to Srinivas—­to be wasteful extravagances, of a piece with his marijuana smoking and his mistresses. Above all we see the complex interdependencies that bind the village into a little world. These are elaborated further in the chapter on caste, a subject to which Srinivas made crucial contributions throughout his life. Here we see the hierarchical nature of caste, but also its baroque complexity and its constant mixing of interdependence with domination. We see the villagers not only bound by it, but also playing with it, changing it, even gaming and cheating it. (For example, we hear of the beating of a rich urban smith [from a “left-­hand caste”] by the village’s kaluvadi [the hereditary, untouchable, but “right-­hand” servant who was custodian of the village’s most important caste artifact] for the offense of wearing slippers in the street!) Srinivas’s later concept of Sanskritization—­the advancement of one’s caste by adop­ tion of ideologically “pure” behaviors—­derives ultimately from this field­ work, which presents caste not as a fixed structure but as a dynamic set of interactional and ideological resources deployed in many ways for many purposes. A similar subtlety marks Srinivas’s chapter about family and sex. He provides details on the gender division of labor, on the life course complexities consequent on marriage rules, and even on the vagaries of sex itself. The villagers’ complete acceptance of bodily functioning is disturbing to Srinivas. He is scandalized when a group of villagers, “for reasons best known to themselves,” elect to have a puny cow served by a magnificent but bored bull in the street in front of the post office. The visit of the local hermaphrodite is another high point. But Srinivas also looks at more elusive and bleaker topics: extramarital sex and rape are both discussed at length. The third section of the book is a curious amalgam. Many scholars would have rounded out the functional analysis with the chapter on religion, then discussed personal relations, and finished with a chapter on changes seen at later visits. But Srinivas curiously inserts the changes chapter before the personal relations and religion chapters in order to close the book with the

144

���� �����

episode of his farewell to the village at the end of his 1948 fieldwork. It is not for nothing that Srinivas numbered among his closest friends the novelist R. K. Narayan. The changes chapter shows the villagers adapting to some changes and rejecting others. Electoral politics have exacerbated caste conflict. Rice husking machines have been eagerly adopted. But the chapter ends on a skeptical note with a contretemps between a young official, who wants to improve sanitation by moving manure heaps away from houses, and the villagers, who are unwilling to carry the manure long distances or to expose it to the danger of theft. The young man sets fire to the valuable heaps and narrowly escapes getting mercilessly beaten by his “charges.” The personal relations chapter, however, returns us to the eternal Rampura of the opening two sections. Here are discussed envy, reciprocity, hierarchy, face, gossip, and humor. In the following religion chapter, Srinivas underscores several other themes: the ad hoc nature of much of folk religion in the village, the complexities and temporal vicissitudes of relations be­tween castes and deities, the household as (surprisingly) the level of sectarian enthusiasms, and the content of some broadly held religious ideas. The chapter ends with the one field note in the entire book; the story of a “flower-­asking oracle.” (Perhaps Srinivas is here doing homage to Evans-­Pritchard’s account of the Azande chicken oracle, which would have been familiar to every anthropol­ ogist reader.) In this oracle, water-­wetted flower petals are placed on the statue of the deity to be consulted. A question is posed, and yes or no answers are signified by a flower falling off the right or left sides of the deity respectively. The field note concerns a consultation of the deity Basava about the likelihood of rain. The flowers fail to fall, and the villagers begin abusing the deity. “Do you wish to retain your reputation or not? Please give us a flower. We have not performed your para for lack of water. Give us rain today and tomorrow we will perform your para.” Made Gowda was irritated. “Give us a flower on the left side if you so wish. Why do you sit still? Are you a lump of stone or a deity?” Someone chimed in “He is only a lump of stone. Otherwise, he would have answered.” (p. 327)

And so on. Srinivas concludes the story with the Durkheimian remark that “villagers’ relations with deities paralleled in some ways their relations with their patrons” and the functionalist riposte that “deities provided the neces-

�� �� ��������

145

sary sense of security and the source of hope for undertaking the multifarious activities essential for day-­to-­day living.” But his own presentation has undercut the theory he adduces. Religion too is part of the complex negotiations and reinterpretations through which the villagers make sense of daily life. It is both more and less than functional. And then comes farewell. There are some self-­effacing remarks about ethnographic failures. There are some portraits of those he is leaving be­ hind, through which we see their distrust of change and indeed of youth. There are two farewell events, one expected, the other—­much more elab­ orate—­quite unexpected. Then Srinivas gets in the bus, a last villager cries out in sadness over the departure she had not foreseen, and we, like Srinivas, are on our bouncing way to Mysore, with “a few brief tantalizing glimpses of the shimmering Kaveri flowing in the distance.” It early became customary to chide Srinivas for the romanticism—­per­ haps the conservatism—­that seem implicit in this exquisite text. He was said to have overlooked the larger evils of caste and the political roots of the villagers’ poverty. But Srinivas did not write a narrative. Rather, he wrote a lyric, capturing a present moment as it was experienced. In Rampura as elsewhere, only rare people live their lives as conscious agents of history. Most live in and through the moment. And Srinivas gives us such a moment. When we read this book, village and villagers of the year 1948 come alive at once. It is a triumph of  lyrical rather than narrative writing, of  the humanis­ tic over the moralistic sensibility. With Srinivas we come to the end of another year’s reading together and must look back over where we have been. A central theme is the encounter with the metropolis. Of the year’s authors, only Ziya Gökalp never journeyed to the West, yet even he read its work with almost religious enthusiasm. Of the others, Chen and Srinivas made the journey for education alone, although Chen’s journey to Reed College via the Boxer Indemnity Fellowship was a much riskier enterprise than Srinivas’s Oxford study with a student of his teacher’s teacher. The other three were pushed to the metropolis by problems at home: Sarmiento driven into exile, Shariʾati fleeing a dictatorship, Ramabai escaping political and social ostracism. All came home, in most cases to mixed result. To be sure, Srinivas returned to a distinguished academic career. But Chen had only a dozen years of academic life before war and revolution uprooted him forever. Sarmiento had brief political success, only to be forced again abroad. Ramabai was barely

146

���� �����

tolerated, her conversion and radical social program making her anathema to most Indians. Gökalp was exiled as a war criminal. Shariʾati was imprisoned, released, again forced abroad, and (probably) assassinated. Their reactions to the metropolis were diverse as well. Only Ramabai and Shariʾati took as a principal task the interpretation of the West to their countrymen, and their views are diametrically opposed: Ramabai optimistic and open, Shariʾati pessimistic and ultimately hostile. By contrast with these two, Gökalp took the West on its own terms, accepting almost without critique the obsession with nationalism he found in Western writers, no doubt because it was politically useful in the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Of equal interest is the comparison of Ramabai’s and Shariʾati’s  cri­tiques of their own worlds, for Ramabai criticizes the Hindu system on feminist grounds that come from outside it, while Shariʾati criticizes Islam as practiced for falling short of Islam’s own ideal. Another interesting compari­ son is that between Ramabai’s interpretation of the United States in terms of  jati and Srinivas’s reading of  Rampura in terms of the same concept (caste) as transformed by 80 years of historical development, intellectual inquiry, and active politics. Perhaps the most striking theme among these writers, however, is the engagement with cosmopolitanism. Their cosmopolitanism is in the first instance linguistic, for none of these writers knew fewer than three languages and several knew five or more. But some of these writers were explicitly cosmopolitan, in particular Srinivas and Ramabai. For Srinivas cosmopolitanism comes via the formal commitment of academic study; it is the premise of social anthropology as he conceives it. For Ramabai, cosmopolitanism has two sources. One of these is simple wonder at the plenitude of the world, as we see in the earlier chapters of her book on the United States. But Ramabai is also a cosmopolitan via her evocation of a solidarity that crosscuts the national and cultural divides of the world, that of gender. She never tells us, however, exactly how this different dimension of solidarity is to be related to the nationalism and civilizational difference that she recognizes so well. Like Ramabai, Gökalp and Shariʾati both draw new lines of solidarity. But in both cases these lines are sharp and differentiating, not translational and crosscutting. Gökalp explicitly subordinates the “weaker” (because broader) solidarities of civilization and religion to that of nationalism, and Shariʾati similarly subordinates all solidarities to his master force of religion. For Gökalp the cosmopolitanism of the Young Ottomans is precisely what is to

�� �� ��������

147

be rejected, as is the liberal religious compromise for Shariʾati. Strangely, it is only Chen who studies cosmopolitanism in practice. Indeed, his study of the overseas Chinese, although inevitably positioned from the Chinese point of view, tells us much about the practical reality of intercultural contact: the complexities of remittance, the second families begun overseas, the swirling differences of language, culture, and political rights. Sarmiento’s book stands apart from this concern with cosmopolitanism. Sarmiento’s political work—­his long transformation of Argentinian educa­ tion—­involved a cosmopolitan engagement with the metropolitan societies, and his own passages through France and the United States practiced cosmopolitanism of the most elite kind. But Facundo itself is not a work of cosmopolitanism, but rather a study of its reverse: intergroup violence. There is in Facundo, to be sure, an admiration of middle-­class liberalism respectful of minor differences. But the major difference of town and country, of civilization and barbarism, is not only featured but even valorized by Sarmiento’s ambivalent analysis. Sarmiento is again and again swept up in admiration of the “authentic” if  violent Juan Facundo Quiroga. For the gaucho, the peaceful cosmopolitanism of middle-­class Buenos Aires is living death. For Sarmiento, this authenticity of the gaucho is partly tied to the environing grandeur of the Argentinian landscape itself. Such romantic admiration of landscape appears in other writers but without the violent overtones. Sarmiento’s hymn to the countryside is echoed in Ramabai’s joyful moments on the storm-­tossed Atlantic and Srinivas’s quiet decision to study Rampura after watching the sun gleaming on the town’s tiny reservoir. A similar if metaphoric romanticism finds its way into Chen’s admiration of his venturesome countrymen, Gökalp’s dreams about the Turkish homeland of Turan, and Shariʾati’s increasingly fervent belief in the possible umma. Perhaps then this is not so much romanticism as it is a more generalized passion about and for the human world. Our writers this year were not just students of the world, they were its makers. Even the quietly academic Srinivas rejected a position at one of the world’s most celebrated universities for a chance to create a new discipline in a new country. Yet some of them believed in making new differences while others believed in bridging old ones. For the most part, these two aspects of the social process dance through these works without problem. But not always. On the one hand, Facundo’s violence reminds us that however necessary difference is to human life, it often takes ugly forms. And on the other

148

���� �����

hand, Shariʾati’s glowing hymn to social unity inadvertently reveals at the same time the threat that unity represents—­a life without difference. Sociology may not be a combat sport, as one of its doyens long ago remarked. But as we see in these books, both individually and collectively, it is a morally unsettling pursuit.

���� ����

���

Ellen Hellmann

������ ��� ���������� ���� �� ��� ������ �������� ������ 2000, South Africa and its regime of apartheid became a test case. From offices worldwide, scholars issued analyses of South Africa filled with politics, anachronism, utopianism, and racism in varying proportions and to varying ends. Our moralizing has since acquired more rigor and more humility. By adopting a disciplined framework for normative inquiry, sociology has moved beyond its surreptitious and uncritical politics without losing the capacity to make well-­founded moral judgments. A fundamental rule of that new framework is that the moral judgments of social science must be contextual. We can expect of actors only what is possible within a reasonable zone of moral relevance around their time and place. With that rule in mind, we turn here to a work from South Africa during its trying time. Ellen Hellman was born in Johannesburg in 1908, the child of recent Jewish immigrants from southern Germany. At the University of Witwatersrand, Hellmann studied social anthropology under Winifred Hoernlé, herself a student of A. R. Radcliffe-­Brown in Capetown. After receiving an anthropology doctorate in 1940 with a dissertation entitled “Problems of  Bantu Youth,” Hellmann worked with the Joint Council of Europeans and Bantu. For most of her career, she was a core member of the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), of which she was president in the mid-­ 1950s and whose Research Committee she chaired in the 1960s and 1970s. She also lectured at the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work (for Africans) until the government forced its closing in 1960. Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Native Slum Yard. By Ellen Hellmann. Capetown: Oxford University Press for the Rhodes-­Livingston Institute, 1948. Pp. 125.

152

���� ����

Active in politics, Hellman was in the Progressive Party from 1959 to 1971 and a member of the Black Sash, a woman’s protest group that was eventually outlawed by the government. She also appeared before important gov­ ernment commissions—­the most fateful being the multiyear Tomlinson Commission on Native Reserves, which produced a 17-­volume report in 1955. By the end of Hellmann’s life, however, the emerging Black Consciousness movement and the radicalization of the African National Congress redefined her as almost a conservative. Some of  her erstwhile allies thought that SAIRR had sold out to the capitalist funders. Her testimony before the controversial Cillié Commission, which investigated the Soweto Uprising of 1976, was her last major public appearance. She died in 1982. All that lay ahead of the young woman of 25 who “in March 1933 . . . descended on Rooiyard, armed with a large box of penny-­line chocolates and a note book” (p. 1). As this opening suggests, the book has both freshness and naïveté. It has ambition as well; a year’s fieldwork and 125 pages of print were a lot of work for a master’s degree. Yet only after Hellman had left academia was the book published. In 1948, her former classmate Max Gluckman, by then a leading anthropologist, persuaded her to publish the 1934 master’s thesis in its original form. (Hellmann and Gluckman both felt that updating the manuscript would mar its precise and detailed description of a moment in time.) It was the first serious ethnographic examination of the social life of newly urbanized Africans. Rooiyard is the study of a privately owned slum property in New Doorn­ fontein, close to the center of Johannesburg. The yard consisted of 107 “rooms” arranged in five long rows, four of them enclosing a long trapezoid, the other constituting a linear island in the middle of the enclosed space. The rooms were roughly 11 feet square. In these tiny spaces lived 235 adults and 141 children, each room typically housing a couple and their children. Most men worked as domestic servants and laborers outside the yard, while the women raised the children and brewed (illegal) native beer. Physical conditions in Rooiyard were primitive. Family possessions and cooking implements filled the open spaces. Refuse overflowed in the unemptied central bins. Two water taps and six latrines (often broken) served the 376 residents. But the rooms seemed to Hellmann surprisingly well kept, and their furnishings as modern as finances permitted. There was little survival of the material culture of the kraal. After her initial description, Hellmann gives a painstaking analysis of Rooiyard’s economic life, with detailed budgets and employment surveys.

����� ��������

153

Pride of place goes to a detailed analysis of women’s income, and in particular of the beer trade that was its main source. (Hellmann actually had little access to the men, both because of  her own gender and because most of them were not in the yard during the day, when she did her research.) Rooiyard women generally brewed a sprouted wheat beer of about 4% alcohol that took a minimum of  24 hours to produce, but the danger of police interference led some women to make faster-­brewed cane, bread, or sugar-­based beers. A woman was expected to produce beer for her own husband, as in the kraal, but her further (and paying) customers included her husband’s friends as well as male servants employed in the white neighborhoods nearby. The beer business involved many calculated risks, as Hellmann points out: Arrest is simply “bad luck.” Detention in prison is often chosen when there is an alternative of imprisonment or fine, as many women, even when they possessed the money to pay a fine, preferred to save their money and serve a term of imprisonment. If prison food were better, it is very possible that a greater number of women would choose this alternative! Childless women and women whose children are in the country are not greatly perturbed by the prospect of imprisonment. It is to the mothers with children in Rooiyard that arrest without the option of a fine or shortage of money to pay a fine comes as a real disaster. (p. 47)

Women also undertook washing, mending, and illegal grocery and liquor sales, as well as an unknown but considerable amount of prostitution. Hellmann tells us that the women concealed each others’ prostitution but sometimes betrayed rival beer producers to the police, who routinely raided the yard and destroyed any beer-­in-­process that they could find. (Beer was usually concealed underground.) Hellmann’s careful figures allow one to calculate that the street value of this destroyed beer was about £2,000 annually, at a time when the average monthly wage of urban African workers was about £4. Destroyed beer, that is, was worth the annual income of about 40 laborers, slightly above one-­third of Rooiyard’s adult male population. From economic life, Hellmann turns to the life course of the individual. Most striking here is the steady back-­and-­forth between city and countryside. Many women delivered their children “at home,” in the country, because it was cheaper, or healthier, or required by tribal custom. Many children spent much or all of their time with kin in the country. Even in the city, rural rules about seclusion and pollution were often maintained. And

154

���� ����

puberty brought explicit tribal rituals, with some sending their daughters to the country for initiation and some improvising initiation rituals in Rooiyard itself. This geographic binding of old and new was repeated in the mixture of old and new social and cultural practices, as Hellman saw in the case of marriage patterns. Of 100 couples Hellmann studied, only a fifth were not married. The 80% who were married generally had undertaken not one but several forms of marriage. Nearly all had the “native customary union” (because their families had exchanged the proper bridewealth.) But most had something more as well: a religious or civil marriage or both. Fully a third of  Rooiyard’s couples were married three ways: by traditional practice (since half the couples were intertribal these cannot be called “tribal” practices), by some Christian church (which were many, and hence we cannot say by “the” church), and by the state. The cultural content of these “marriages” itself varied widely. Bridewealth was sometimes cattle, sometimes cash. Church affiliations were sometimes changed, sometimes lapsed. (“How could they, the women asked, attend church when they had to sell beer? ‘Here beer is our church,’ they explained again and again”; p. 101.) Hellmann’s remarks about infancy and adolescence reveal more about newly fashionable psychoanalytic theories than about her subjects. She cannot but wonder at the “gentleness and gradualness of the Bantu child’s training as compared with the severity in the bodily discipline of the European child” (p. 63), a difference from which she tentatively derives enduring personality differences. But in the end she is simply puzzled that “the Bantu seems to face a cruel and unfavorable reality more happily and with greater confidence than the European slumdweller” (p. 64). Again echoing Freudian themes, her discussion of adolescents mainly concerns their extensive sexual activity. But the section ends with the somewhat innocent remark—­ echoing plaintive progressives throughout Europe and North America—­that “the greatest handicap from which maturing young boys and girls living in Rooiyard suffer is the lack of healthy recreational activities” (p. 79). Indeed, Hellmann notes that if girls walk back late from the center of town, they are vulnerable to “an attack by Amalaita groups,” the urban street gangs of the time. But this too captures a historical moment. After 2000, revisionist historiography would reinterpret these gangs as having been a positive and even political response to urbanization and proletarianization. One wonders what the girls thought about that in 1933. Hellmann closes with chapters on religion and cultural contact. While most Rooiyard residents have some Christian background, those backgrounds

����� ��������

155

are very diverse. (However, only one Rooiyarder has any connection with the Dutch Reformed [Afrikaner] Church.) But formal religion is largely dis­ avowed: “When we come to town we find white people doing sins and our hearts tell us that the ministers told us lies. And so we leave the church. The white man’s church is good for the white man but his amadlozi don’t look after the natives” (p. 102). Hellmann finds, however, that not only Christian experiences but also the traditional religions have been uprooted, with the result that the Rooiyarders generally turn to magic to handle their everyday difficulties. Hellmann sets aside much of the common wisdom of her time about tribes and tribalism. Countering the usual belief, she notes no tribal domination of particular occupations. She documents extensive intertribal contact and indeed intertribal marriage. She emphasizes the effect of white oppression and persecution (her words) in creating a common “Bantu” consciousness. “Native culture . . . is adopting elements of European culture, incorporating them into Native culture, and often modifying them so as to create a new composite culture” (p. 115). Yet on the other hand, she tells us “[The native] feels his unity with the Bantu people as a whole; but he has not emancipated himself from the feeling of tribal superiority which has caused each tribe in turn to call itself ‘The People.’” And Hellmann notes also the intertribal fights and the mutual hostility of the various medicine men. But she knew that the tribes themselves were often historical re-­creations and that this process of making and unmaking dated from time immemorial. One might speculate about pristine tribal culture in the Trobriands, but not in South Africa, where the 19th-­ century’s tribal conflicts, interminglings, and migrations (collectively called the mfecane) were well known. The book closes with yet another migration, for Rooiyard was forced to close just as Hellmann finished her work. The residents scattered. An elite of about 15% went to the black freehold townships. (These were places antedating the Native Land Act of 1913 [see chapter XXXI], where Africans could own property. With apartheid in the 1950s, all of these would be closed.) About a quarter went to “the locations,” fenced segregated rental spaces west of  the city, which, although perhaps slightly more appetizing than Rooiyard, were so far outside the town as to be economically unviable. About 20% of the families split, the man typically remaining in the city while the woman and children returned to the kraal, while another 15% went back to the country as whole families. The remaining quarter moved either to other yards, to rented rooms, or to other cities.

156

���� ����

Like many comparable works, Rooiyard survives because it makes a social setting come alive. It presents us not only its own interpetations but also enough of the facts to allow us to see around those interpretations. It is particularly strong on women’s activities, on the everyday experience of oppression, and on the complex economics of life at the margins of subsistence. In this, the book stands at the intersection of several important traditions. One such is the “slum analysis” tradition that began with Britain’s Charles Booth, continued through the American settlement and survey movements, and finally arrived in the emerging discipline of metropolitan sociology. Another relevant tradition—­which the book’s research helped begin—­is the new urban anthropology subsequently developed throughout southern Af­ rica, a line of work that eventually helped create urban anthropology in the metropolis. Rooiyard also stands in the important lineage of studies of migrant proletarian labor by scholars like W. I. Thomas and Chen Da. But Hellmann’s work is perhaps even more intriguing because it provides an entry into the particularly complex evolution of social science in South Africa, a society moving against the liberal trend of the Western metropolis after the Second World War. Hellmann was not the only sociologist/anthropologist working in South Africa in these years. Other scholars (as well as many politicians) had called attention to a “poor white” problem in South Africa in the 1920s. An investigation of that problem directed by metropolitan sociologists had culminated in a massive Carnegie Commission report in 1932. This study resembled similar investigations in the metropolis, but with the very conspicuous difference that it ignored the largest local poor population—­Africans. In 1934, a national Volkskongres considered the issue of poor whites (most of whom were in fact newly urbanized Afrikaners). A prominent figure at that conference was applied-­psychologist-­turned-­ sociologist Henrik Verwoerd. In the next decade Afrikaner sociologists from a variety of political positions sketched the “positive” case for apartheid. (It would be anachronistic to say that they made a case for the particular race policies in place in South Africa after 1955. Rather, they were sketching practical policies that could give substance to what was then—­at least to them—­a loose and ill-­defined concept.) In this task these Afrikaner sociologists were curiously aligned with earlier liberals, who had felt that the impact of urbanization and industrialization on South Africa’s African population had been so catastrophic as to require the creation of separate, economically viable homelands for Af­

����� ��������

157

ricans. They were also aligned, however, with explicitly racist Afrikaner sociologists like Geoffrey Cronjé, whose popular works helped propel the acceptance of a radical and persecuting apartheid that was far indeed from the “positive” case made by the early liberals and some Afrikaners. (As many have pointed out, when ex-­sociologist Verwoerd became prime minister he retained the ideological justification of this “theoretical” apartheid without retaining any of the investments and white sacrifices it prescribed.) The evolution and refining of biological and cultural racism through these various documents teaches us much, both about the polysemy of language and about the dynamics of oppression. A text such as the Tomlinson Commission Report of 1955 could at the time be read as liberal, nationalist, or flagrantly rac­ ist, depending on your point of view. Rooiyard stands at the beginning of this long and tortured evolution. It is part of the scholarship behind the liberal analysis of separation as articulated in the bleak Phelps-­Stokes lectures of R. F. A. Hoernlé in 1939. Yet, in itself, it gives us little sense of the fateful debate then taking shape throughout South Africa. But because of a fortunate accident, it does give us a unique insight into the dialectic of dominant and dominated, researcher and researched. Partway through her research, Hellmann introduced an older psychoanalyst friend—­ Wulf Sachs—­to her only important male informant. John Chavafambira was a hereditary healer from Rhodesia who had come to Johannesburg seeking escape from an oppressive family, better opportunities for income, and a chance to mature into an urban medicine man and herbalist. But what he had found was an unhappy intertribal marriage, erratic and alienating work experiences, and the thousands of indignities and oppressions that dominated African life in a society evolving toward extreme racism. When Chavafambira’s wife became ill, Hellmann sought for her the best medical assistance. Sachs gave that assistance, but also became fascinated with Chavafambira. He psychoanalyzed the Manyika medicine-­man-­turned-­ urbanite and wrote up his analysis in the 1937 book Black Hamlet, with a follow-up in 1947. The main body of Sachs’s text chronicles the wary encounter between these two medicine men, who were taking each other’s measure in the context of a system of overwhelming racial and cultural domination. But in the interstices, we hear much about Hellmann. We hear, for example, the details behind Chavafambira’s decision to support her research: he had been assured by a respected elder that Hellmann was not a police spy, but

158

���� ����

was simply studying Africans. By contrast, his initial impression of her had been “that rich young woman who comes here in her grand motor car and looks at you as if she didn’t see you properly. They say she is working for the police. . . . She asks questions all the time; silly questions about what we eat, how many children we have, what money we earn, and so on” (Black Hamlet, p. 123). Sachs’s report of Rooiyard’s reaction to Hellmann goes on: Soon the white woman was the constant topic of conversation. The residents agreed that she treated them kindly. But why did she question them? . . .  Why did she write down everything they said? . . . Who was she? Why did she come every day to a place such as [Rooiyard]? What was her business? Was she married? Had she children? . . . She herself tried to pacify them and was extremely kind to them, but obviously could not give them information about her private life. She tried to explain her aims, but this did not remove mistrust and suspicion. Unfortunately, too, police raids and the visits of health inspectors became more frequent at this time, and both unpleasantnesses were laid at her door. (p. 124)

Hellmann’s own text blandly corroborates this report: “I was never really accepted in Rooiyard” (p. 2). We also learn from Black Hamlet that Chavafambira’s decision to help Hellmann cost him dearly in terms of friendship in the yard. And we get the full story that Hellmann covers with the bald remark that “I made only one night visit” (p. 1). It turns out that Chavafambira rescued Sachs and Hellmann from a surreal moment, and we can see in the language of even the measured, thoughtful Sachs both the tenseness of the moment and the fears of white South Africa: A crowd of roughs, inflamed with skookiaan, came very close to her, touched her, swore at her in vile language, made sinister suggestions. Some of the women in the yard, now frightened for her safety and the terrible consequences for all of them should anything happen to the white woman, tried to form a protecting ring about her, but they were not strong enough. The roughs pulled them away. At this critical moment John appeared. (p. 143)

����� ��������

159

When read alongside Black Hamlet, then, Rooiyard provides a three-­ dimensional view of  white and black, liberal and radical, European and Afri­ can. It is a window into a time of  vertiginous disagreement. But Rooiyard also stands alone for its simple, forthright portrait of a group of slum dwellers making human lives under conditions of poverty, sus­ picion, and oppression. They are a testimony to human resilience in adversity, and their witness is Hellmann’s gift to us.

��

Euclides da Cunha

�� ���� �������� ��� �������� �� ��������� ��� �����­ t ion more clearly than does Euclides da Cunha’s Rebellion in the Backlands. Nowhere is the contrast clearer—­nor the ambivalence greater. The book is long. But that the critical literature is still longer tells us that there is good reason to read Backlands and indeed to read it with care. In the northern desert lands of the Brazilian state of Bahía, there emerged in the 1890s a millenarian movement focused on one Antonio Maciel, called Antonio Conselheiro: Antonio the Counselor. As it swelled, this movement be­ came centered in Canudos, a former ranch that grew into a town of 25,000 or more. Who exactly was in Canudos, how they were connected to the Counselor, how they lived, whom and how they offended: all these things remain to some extent matters of historical debate. But certain it is that after the failure of an ecclesiastical visitation and a secular police mission, the local, state, and na­ tional authorities of the young Brazilian Republic decided in late 1896 to sup­ press Canudos. By October 1897, after four expeditions and many thousands of deaths on both sides, the last remaining defenders were exterminated. The battle about what happened then began. Writing in a framework of Positivism, progressivism, and race science, but at the same time torn by multiple ambivalences, Euclides da Cunha portrayed the events as a tragic encounter between atavistic barbarism and modern civilization, a confron­ tation in which civilization revealed its own inherent barbarism. Revision­ ists would later see Canudos as a peaceful commune destroyed by rapacious elites angry at the desertion of their laborers. Still others would treat the Rebellion in the Backlands. By Euclides da Cunha. Translated by Samuel Putnam. Chi­ cago: University of  Chicago Press, 1944. Pp. xxii+526. (First published as Os sertões, 1902.)

�������� �� �����

161

Counselor as an ultraconservative Catholic, with the reforming Church hier­ archy as the villain of the piece. Others still would locate the Canudos affair within interregional or republican-­versus-­monarchist politics. But all of this revisionism responded first and foremost to the book of  Euclides da Cunha. The book ordained that one discussed Brazil by discussing Canudos. And one discussed Canudos by discussing Os sertões, the epic itself. Euclides da Cunha was born in 1866 in Santa Rita do Rio Negro, in the state of Rio de Janeiro. (So celebrated is Rebellion in the Backlands that its author customarily goes by his first name, like the ancient geometer: we fol­low that convention here.) Orphaned at four, Euclides was educated in vary­ing schools by various relatives in various places. At 17, he entered the Co­légio Aquino in Rio de Janeiro, encountered the ardent Positivist Benjamin Constant, and wrote his first publications—­some poems. Three subsequent years in the empire’s Polytechnic and Military Schools were ended by an uncharacteris­ tically dramatic republican protest by Euclides, who then became a civilian, only to be reinstated when a republic was proclaimed in 1889. After some years’ service as a military engineer, he again protested gov­ ernment policies and left the army in 1896 for civilian civil engineering. All this time, however, he had continued writing, and when the finale of the Can­ udos drama unfolded, he went along with the São Paulo military contingent as a newspaper correspondent. After Canudos, Euclides again returned to civ­il engineering, building a bridge by day and writing his book by night. Os sertões was published in 1902 to acclaim that has never ended. In subsequent years, Euclides helped establish Brazil’s Amazonian border—­a journey that produced its own small book. But his personal life was unhappy. Confront­ ing his wife’s longtime lover in 1909, he died of a bullet wound at 43. Rebellion in the Backlands comprises two sections. The first introduces the reader to the backlands: the land and the place of humans in that land, in­ cluding the rise of Antonio Conselheiro and the emergence of Canudos. The second section addresses the conflict itself. But neither the table of contents nor the title nor the critical literature prepares the reader for the book’s shocking effect. For it is not really about a region, but about a war, and not re­ ally about a rebellion, but about the suppression of a community. As for the literature’s critical opinion of  Euclides’s “coastal” point of view, his scientific racism, and his “ignorance of the other side”: the book is ultimately more sympathetic to the Canudenses than to the state, its racism is formulaic and inessential, and its ignorance of the other side stems almost inevitably from its author’s position as war correspondent.

162

���� ����

The book’s shocking power comes rather from what is gradually revealed as its actual topic: the disorganization of civilized society when confronted by the puzzle that is Canudos. This disorganization appears in the first in­ stance as the demoralization—­in three cases the dissolution and defeat—­of Brazilian military expeditions. But it is also the degeneration of the larger so­ ciety itself: the book’s final sentence speaks of “acts of madness and crimes on the part of nations” (p. 476). At a time when Gustave LeBon was painting the little people as irrational, emotional, and dangerous, Euclides da Cunha saw that Le Bon’s portrait fit the big people as well. The themes of disorganization and irrationality dominate the book from its opening. The first chapter takes the reader on a geological journey from the ancient rocks of Minas Gerais northward along the east bank of the São Francisco to the sertão of Bahía. There everything becomes irrational: the rivers “have no purpose” (p. 18); climate and geology interact “in an endless, vicious circle” (p. 21); droughts arise from “fugitive and disorderly agents” (p. 27); even the orderly mandacaru trees become “an oppressive obsession” in their “unnatural monotony” (p. 34), as if only disorder has meaning in this landscape of  “indescribable and catastrophic confusion” (p. 35). The plants of the backland caatinga become personified actors, warring with climate and land for survival, an analysis that will be repeated almost verbatim in the discussion of  human types in the following chapter. In this landscape, man figures only as yet another disorganizing force: slash and burn agriculture, alongside the clearance fires of the explorers, helped make the desert. With pride of profession, Euclides reminds us of the Roman engineers’ rescue of Tunisia from desertification. But both author and reader know that this was a brief and futile victory. Indeed, such under­ cutting recurs throughout. As an engineer and an educated man, Euclides from time to time makes decent if desultory protests against various under­ lying confusions and disorders. These are the passages, along with the fac­ ile race science, that have been read anachronistically to interpret Euclides as a middle-­class apologist or a Republican triumphalist. But the central theme of the work is in fact dissolution and confusion. Rebellion in the Backlands breathes the late 19th century’s disenchantment with progress, even though it refuses the Nietszchean embrace of the irrational. Like its predecessor, the chapter on man begins with the contrast of  north and south, in this case their contrasting cattlemen: the consistent discipline and graceful energy of the southern gauchos is contrasted with the strange lethargy, sudden activity, and vacillating stoicism of the northern desert cow­

�������� �� �����

163

boy, whom Euclides calls sometimes jagunço and sometimes sertanejo, as if he can’t make up his mind whether to accept the pejorative quality of the former word, just as the sertanejos sometimes cannot decide whether to remain in the desert during the dry season. But there is nothing confused about the descrip­ tion of the daily life and annual round of the sertanejo as he faces the roundup, the drought, the absentee landlord, the pitiless sun. These passages are both descriptively acute and magnificently written. As for their theoretical argument, Euclides formally explains his human types by climatic determination, which he believes is reinforced over time by a Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics. (This theory was still scientifically acceptable at the time.) But that is only in theory. In prac­ tice his accounts of the jagunço, the sertanejo, and the vaqueiro rest on en­ vironmental, social, and cultural forces rather than on biological reproduc­ tion. The race science is a mere overlay. A similar overlay occurs in Euclides’s account of the emergence of Anto­ nio Conselheiro and Canudos. His theoretical language often invokes the then-­popular organic and hereditarian theory of insanity in writers like the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley. But his actual account focuses on the resonance that emerges between Antonio Conselheiro and his followers. Euclides argues that the Counselor’s “insanity” comes to capture and reflect the social and cultural life of the backlands, “doing no more than to con­ dense the obscurantism of three races. And he grew in stature until he was projected into History” (p. 129). Thus the people of the backlands invest their hopes and their fantasies in the Counselor, even as his own personality ex­ pands to fill the role thus created. This is a dialectical account of charisma, not only more detailed and elaborate than Max Weber’s, but also far more effective because it demonstrates charisma to be a social relationship rather than a personal quality. Euclides is however less acute in his analysis of the content of the external conflicts of the Counselor, first with the Church (by the late 1880s) and later with the state (by 1893). He describes the emerging social movement simply as it appears from the viewpoint of authority: as an incomprehensible spread of nonsense, misinformation, and irrationality among people who fail to see that authority’s wisdom. Canudos is for Euclides “the objectivization of a tre­ mendous insanity” (p. 144). Yet at the same time he grudgingly acknowledges the power the Counselor has come to exercise: his resolute defeat of government forces in 1893 on the retreat from Bom Conselho, his self-­consciously apostolic gestures against

164

���� ����

the Church, and so on. And however blinded by his Positivism, Euclides does see that both state and church have failed to understand the nature of Canu­ dos and its people. He recognizes the different cultures of coast and back­ lands, and if he overdoes the contrast of atavism and progress in his theoret­ ical musings, his story evinces a good deal of respect for the Counselor: for his judgment and not uncommon restraint, for the military prowess and wis­ dom of the Canudenses, and for the other virtues of  the backlands. By the end of the book, it will be the nation, not Canudos, that is said to be mad. The first part of the book thus portrays the organic emergence of a so­ cial movement out of the natural and social forces that make the backlands: a movement that, however irrational it seems to the coastal culture, com­ mands a certain respect. The second half of the book portrays the attempt of the coastal culture to suppress this social movement. It is a 300-­page tale of incompetence, demoralization, and brutality. The Canudenses here appear largely as preternaturally able adversaries: wily, brave, committed, occa­ sionally whimsical in their brutalities, but always strange, always other. Their perpetual religious singing disturbs the dutifully Positivist Euclides; religion should be a thing of the past. Yet somehow this religion provides a vibrant moral core to the living community of Canudos—­the one thing that the state’s forces lack. The tale of the first expedition against Canudos—­the 100-­soldier expedi­ tion ordered by Euclides’s father-­in-­law General Sólon—­is told as farce. The inhabitants of Joazeiro flee all the faster when they see how few soldiers the government has sent. At the town of Uauá (“pompously inscribed on our maps” but really “a sort of cross between an Indian camp and a village”; p. 183), the similar flight of the inhabitants is unnoticed by the army sentries. When the Canudenses arrive, in broad daylight, praying and singing, the soldiers are asleep. In the event, the army’s repeating rifles kill dozens of sertanejos, but “the very idea [of another attack] caused the victors to tremble” (p. 188). They race back to Joazeiro. The next expedition is larger, but because of a states’ rights controversy has two separate lines of command. After the inevitable delays, which allow the Canudenses to prepare, the army eventually arrives at Monte Santo (about 60 miles from Canudos), although not without having left many of its sup­ plies behind. It then delays again. Morale plummets. The advancing troops proceed under traditional military discipline, foolishly disdaining guerilla or counter-­guerilla tactics, and in the first engagement the sertanejos display great tactical cleverness. (Even while mocking the army’s troops for their

�������� �� �����

165

credulity about the supernatural abilities of their opponents, Euclides shares some of that credulity himself. The actual advantage of the Canudenses seems to have been a willingness to suffer great casualties.) We also see the first chaotic brutality of war, when 40 sertanejos are buried under a single cannon-­induced rockfall. Despite their advance, the troops are low on am­ munition, exhausted, and unable to dislodge the sertanejos. So the army eventually retreats. On their way back to Monte Santo an accidental encoun­ ter with a herd of wild goats leads to an ungodly banquet: “The flickering light from the coals glowed on their faces, like a band of famished cannibals at a barbarous repast” (p. 223). Already, civilization seems a thin veneer. The tale of the third expedition elaborates the themes of confusion, de­ moralization, and degeneration. The Republic itself is now criticized: Presi­ dent Floriano Peixoto “put down disorder with disorder” (p. 226). Expedition commander Colonel Antônio Moreira César is presented as a caricature epileptic—­Euclides follows then-­standard psychiatric beliefs about the ex­ treme confusions of that disease. (“Epilepsy, the truth is, feeds on the pas­ sions”; p. 233.) Euclides also makes what are by now his customary military criticisms (about taking the long road, about failing to adopt new tactics, about endless marches at the peak of the drought season), but more impor­ tant he dissects the psychology of the Brazilian common soldier and shows him to be undisciplined, emotional, and reactive, if brave and loyal. It is, in fact, the psychology of the jagunços themselves. Arrived at Canudos, the troops attack. But Canudos “the weed-­t rap cita­ del” (p. 260) makes a mockery of standard tactics. It has “hundreds of cor­ ners” (p. 260). It has “the lack of consistency and the treacherous flexibility of a huge net” (p. 261). It is “a labyrinth of  lanes” (p. 262). Overseeing the house-­ to-­house fighting from a distance, Moreira César is mortally wounded, and command devolves on the genial but ineffectual Colonel Tamarindo. Since the enemy refuses to do the sensible and civilized thing (i.e., surrender), the army is perplexed. So it starts to withdraw from the town. Panic ensues. The soldiers quickly become “an army in an advanced state of decomposition, all that was left being a number of terrified and useless individuals” (p. 266). In the night Moreira César dies, and the troops lose heart. In the morning, the planned retreat becomes a rout as the jagunços harry the retreating army from its flanks. Only the artillery behaves properly, covering the retreat. It is annihilated, its weapons and ammunition seized by the Canudenses. Colonel Tamarindo is shot, and the troops flee the entire area, many passing even Monte Santo to arrive at the railhead, Queimadas.

166

���� ����

Militarily, the third expedition was a catastrophe, because the fleeing troops left behind their guns and ammunition, thereby arming their oppo­ nents with modern weapons and artillery. But Euclides’s central point is not military. His theme is the moral dissolution of the troops and their command­ ers: the suggestibility and emotionality of the one, the inadaptibility and foolishness of the other. This theme of moral dissolution leads directly into the account of the fourth campaign. For the suggestible coastal society sees in the third Canudos defeat a monarchist plot and therefore loots and burns the offices of monarchist newspapers. In a core passage, Euclides sets aside his progressivism: “We ourselves are but little in advance of our rude and backward fellow-­countrymen” (p. 280). And he hammers that truth home with a joke, discussing the widespread story of  the heroic Corporal Roque who died defending the body of  Moreira César (which was left behind in the rout). “[The Corporal] cut short the immortality that was being thrust upon him by making his appearance in the flesh, along with the last remaining strag­ glers, in Queimadas” (p. 282). Rumor, suggestion, and irrationality are thus at the very heart of the civilized world. It is no better than the traditional one it seeks to suppress. In the five-­chapter chronicle of the fourth expedition we find at last a com­ mander (Savaget) who realizes that the army must become overtly like the jagunços, must throw off the mask and choreography of “civilized” military practice. We find the randomness of war when a new and giant cannon (a “monstrous fetish”; p. 335) accidentally ignites a gunpowder keg. We find chaos and depression along the supply lines, as the wounded stagger back from the front (pp. 373–­83), while the replacement brigades dissolve from dis­ ease, cowardice, and dejection (pp. 389–­93). But finally the troops surround Canudos and commence a series of terrifying house-­to-­house battles, one that ends in the death of the last defenders and the execution of all male prison­ ers. The book closes with a precise parallel to the jagunço atrocities at the end of the third expedition. The Counselor had died a few weeks before the end, but the victorious army sends his head to the capital, where it is “greeted by delirious multitudes with carnival joy” (p. 476). The civilized coast has be­ come what it thought to destroy. Like Sarmiento’s Facundo, Rebellion in the Backlands has seen generations of critique and analysis. Many of its facts have been questioned or disproved, its intellectual and practical roots have been analyzed a thousand ways. But all this has little importance for us as readers. Of course, Euclides was a par­ ticular man with particular literary habits and a particular point of view. Of

�������� �� �����

167

course, he breathed the mephitic social and political theories of  his time. All that is clear in the text to any careful reader, as is Euclides’s own bewilder­ ment at the contradictions into which those theories inveigle him. But he saw clearly the fundamental problems of  modern societies: that they weren’t essentially different from the societies they defined as traditional and that their supposed universalism was generally a cloak for particular interests. He also knew intuitively—­what he could not explicitly formulate—­that the mob psychology and insanity theories on which he relied were not really up to the task of serious social analysis. Although his resonance theory of the Counselor’s charisma gropes toward a better argument, a full theory of cul­ tural difference evaded him. But greatness did not.

���

Fukutake Tadashi

���������� ��������� �� �������� �� 1964� �������� ����� So­ciety was translated by Fukutake Tadashi’s friend and fellow ethnographer Ronald Dore. The two exchange friendly barbs in their respective prefaces. “In his more polemical moments [Dore] accuses me of ‘neo-­agrarian fundamentalism’ ” (p. ix) says Fukutake. Dore retorts, “I suspect that Professor Fukutake overstates his case and overestimates the extent to which farmers are being, or have been, exploited by governments wholly subservient to business interests” (p. xiii). This gentle, academic debate no doubt began when Fukutake and Dore first tramped around Japanese villages together in the late 1940s and continued after Dore presented the positive example of Japanese industry to Western observers in his influential British Factory, Japanese Factory (University of California Press, 1973). Already amicable, the tone mellowed even further: But Professor Fukutake needs sticks to beat his government with as I need sticks for mine. And Japanese politics and politicians, to be sure, are hardly the paragons of rational enlightenment whom I would want to defend from Professor Fukutake (although I might go into battle for the bureaucrats on occasion). (Preface to T. Fukutake, The Japanese Social Structure, trans. R. Dore [University of Tokyo Press, 1982], p. xiii)

Thus were the neoliberal trade wars of the 1970s and 1980s gently debated by these two academics. Restraint is the glory but also in some ways the weakness of academic life. Japanese Rural Society. By Fukutake Tadashi. Translated by R. P. Dore. Tokyo: Oxford University Press, 1967. Pp. xiv+230.

�������� �������

169

Fukutake Tadashi was born in 1917 in Okayama, on the Inland Sea between Kobe and Hiroshima. He entered the Tokyo University Department of Sociology in 1937 and moved on to its graduate school in 1940. Although Fukutake’s university status apparently protected him from wartime conscription, he spent the middle war years doing fieldwork in Chinese villages, one of a number of social scientists who did fieldwork in occupied territories, much of it under the auspices of the military. Fukutake had become a member of the department’s staff by the time university students began to be drafted (1943) and went on to be successively an assistant (1942–­48), assistant professor (1948–­56), associate professor (1956–­60), and full professor (1960–­77) at Tokyo University. Occasional excitements punctuated this uneventful career. Fukutake’s long-­standing Marxism and “the degree of personal trust he enjoyed on all sides” (the phrase is Dore’s, in the preface cited above) made him a principal negotiator between students and university authorities during the radical student uprisings of 1969. Fukutake retired from the university in 1977 and became, briefly, president of a governmental institution in social welfare. He died in 1989. Fukutake’s productivity was prodigious, perhaps even excessive. He undertook scores of fieldwork projects, in diverse fields. His bibliography numbers dozens of monographs, books, edited volumes, and textbooks, alongside dictionaries, handbooks, and hundreds of minor pieces in scholarly journals, newspapers, and elsewhere. But rural sociology was his love. And for many reasons, the story of Japan during his career was a story of agriculture. The war had driven the Japanese back to the land, both because food was a crucial resource and because the bombed cities eventually became uninhabitable. (Even as late as 1955, 41% of the Japanese labor force worked in agriculture.) Moreover, agricultural land reform was the cynosure of the Occupation reformers from the United States, who were bent on producing yeoman farmers of a kind rapidly disappearing from their own country. And, most important, farmer votes guaranteed the 40-­year dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party, although less through Jeffersonian democracy than by a curious transformation of the urban machine politics of prewar America into the rural machine politics that characterized postwar Japan. Of course, the sequel to this story is well known. Rural Japan would disappear almost completely over the half century after Fukutake’s book. By the early 2000s, less than 5% of Japanese workers worked in agriculture, and even that figure reflected optimistic counting. A third of the supposed farm

170

���� ����

households had trivial agricultural income. In half of the others no individual spent more than 60 days a year doing farm work. And of the households with one such worker, half drew less than 50% of their income from farming. There were in fact fewer than half a million households in which at least one member did farm work more than 60 days a year and for which farming provided more than half the household’s income, down from 5 or 6 million in the 1950s. The country had become an industrial titan and then moved beyond manufacturing toward postindustrialism. Fukutake’s  Japanese Rural Society captures the moment when the rural world was known to be rapidly changing but was not yet known to be doomed. He does not mourn a passing world, but rather envisions a sturdy rural utopia, one that will owe more to Karl Marx than to Thomas Jefferson but that nonetheless will remain a central constituent of a modernizing na­ tion. Reading him therefore reminds us that every descriptive study, no mat­ ter how up-­to-­date its focus on the affairs of its day, ultimately becomes a historical work. The open potentials of the present will inevitably become— ­in later eyes—­nothing more than the fixed narrative steps by which the later present arrived. The book has five sections. The first provides a general history and descrip­ tion of agricultural practices and economics. The second discusses family and kinship, while the third turns to the organizational structure of hamlet and village. The fourth focuses on political structure in particular, while the fifth considers culture and mentality. Fukutake’s surveys of Indian villages in the early 1960s had used a similar design. But kinship and the economics of village life had fallen to other investigators in those studies, and in the present volume, one is therefore not surprised at Fukutake’s lovingly detailed analysis of the organizational and political matters that had long been his central concerns. The broad resemblance of Fukutake’s design to the functionalism characteristic of Western modernization theories, however, seems adventitious. There is no reference to functionalist theory. If there is a theoretical background, it is rather Marxism, but a Marxism without a proletarian party, a powerful state, or an intellectual vanguard. It is a Marxism of class interests and of material determination, to be sure, but at the same time of democracy and of self-­actualization. It is closer to Fabian socialism or progressivism than to any form of Western Marxism. Most important, the book avoids the fallacy of so many Western modernization stories, as indeed of the American Occupation itself. It does not view

�������� �������

171

the past as a long and stable body of tradition. Fukutake shows that the supposed long-­standing feudalism of Japan is a mirage. The “feudal landlords” against whom the Occupation launched its expropriation program turn out to have arisen because of Meiji (i.e., late nineteenth century) tax policy. Insistence on cash payment had driven the small farmers into tenancy; their precarious finances could not allow the cash reserves required for scheduled tax payments. For that very reason, even the pre-­Occupation Japanese government planned postwar land reform, and the Occupation simply insisted on more extreme standards (tenant-­farmed lands were expropriated down to one hectare, not five). The productivity rises thereupon observed simply continued rises that had been steady before the war. (Fukutake’s own fig­ ures show that 70% of 1965’s post-­Meiji doubling in rice productivity had been achieved by 1935, under the tenancy system.) Thus, the postwar landholding changes are merely the latest of a long sequence of transformations in farm organization. They are not the sudden revolution of which the Occupation dreamed and the modernizers wrote. The same is true of the family system. At the core of the “traditional” Japanese farm family was the ie system, in which lands were inherited by primogeniture and the current head of a household acted in theory as trustee for a patrilineage deemed to be the true owner of land, goods, traditions, and so on. The ie system, like all such systems, also involved a larger structure capable of adjusting it to the contingencies of lineage evolution: splits, mergers, demographic disasters, and so on. This was the dozudukan system, a complex of interdependencies, rights, and obligations governing relations between senior and junior lineages, and extended by numerous fictive kinship relationships. Yet in Fukutake’s discussion, it quickly becomes apparent that the ie system was relatively new to Japanese peasantry, a downward transposition of the family structure of the Tokugawa (pre-Meiji) samurai to those rural households able to afford it. The poorer farmers could not afford ie-­consciousness. Thus, far from being eternal, the “traditional” Japanese family pattern had its origins in Meiji legal changes aiming at a productive and governable agricultural community. Moreover, the dozudukan system was already in considerable motion in Meiji times, being undercut by affinal relations. (Fukutake is an enthusiast for affinal relations rather than lineage relations, as he is for marriages of affection rather than marriages of obligation or strategy. They are all part of his preference for individual choice over social constraint.) The oyabun-­kobun (roughly, patron-­client) relationship that grows out of

172

���� ����

dozudukan had thus already freed itself from purely lineage definition by the immediate postwar and provides yet another steadily changing under­ current in social relationships. To be sure, once Fukutake has introduced the changing phenomena that are ie and dozudukan, their contingent quality tends to vanish. We seem to enter the serene flow of the modernization narrative, with its implicit fixing of the past. Ie and dozudukan are emplotted in the standard forms of that narrative: a steady chronicle of gradual disappearance, of inevitable decline postponed by meretricious defense, of curious “survivals” driven by local conditions, of the danger lest these forms—­to which Fukutake objects—­ might not survive all the same. But this “modernization framing” has been undercut from the outset. The older family system itself had been produced by political changes and deliberate policy. And, as Fukutake makes clear, it is not some gradual “detraditionalism” that is making the old family system disappear, but new policies and new economic conditions in which preservation of an undivided family farm no longer represents an optimal strategy, even for the most benighted of peasants. One can now get more from a city employer than from an oyabun patron in one’s village. Fukutake’s resistance to the normal modernization narrative reaches its apogee in his accounts of the organization of hamlets and of the politics of villages. It is impossible to summarize the baroque complexity of village organization, for Fukutake outdoes himself, tracing survivals not only of  Meiji but also of  Tokugawa polities. There is the buraku, the Tokugawa local gov­ ernmental unit. There is also the village or hamlet itself (not always identical with the buraku). There are the bodies for governing hamlet common lands and water. There are the kumi or immediate neighborhoods. There are age groups, funeral groups, religious societies, Agricultural Practice Unions, youth groups, fire brigades. Nearly all of these are the relics of this or that governmental intervention: the Tokugawa trying to improve taxation, the Meiji trying to centralize and amalgamate, the wartime militarists trying to use the kumi as vectors for national propaganda. It becomes evident that the notion of a “traditional hamlet” is silly. Yet sometimes Fukutake cannot himself avoid falling into this locution: “The traditional hamlet of the past carried on a unified hamlet social life, in which the hamlet kumi played a part as subordinate organs. The hamlet had, however, a variety of social groups apart from the hamlet kumi” (p. 102). In this short passage, we see Fukutake’s central problem. Starting out with the modernization rhetoric of a unified, fixed past, within the next sentence

�������� �������

173

he finds himself forced to qualify that picture. The hamlet was in fact a grouping of a few hundred individuals organized into dozens of crosscutting groups: by kinship, by function, by politics, by age, by location. These groupings were of varying historical depth, of varying importance, of varying vulnerability to the new social forces sweeping postwar Japan. The hamlet could not have been further from the stable, enduring, fixed community of the modernizers, as Fukutake’s own analysis makes very clear. In the modernizing rhetoric, anything old must be breaking down, losing force, shedding legitimacy. But while Fukutake describes such changes for many of these systems independently, his own account shows that these various “traditional” systems, with their varying depths, are often weakening each other. Their breakdown is triggered as often by some other “tradition” as it is by the forces of modernity, which are present in Fukutake’s discussion only as the nebulous “part-­time jobs” drawing farmers and younger sons away from full-­time farming. Yet many of these jobs were in small local industries, not large, distant factories. Modernity was not elsewhere, but often close at hand. Thus, for much of the book, Fukutake avoids the fatal dangers of the modernizing narrative: its gradualism and its presumption of a stable past. But when he enters the realm of culture and values, he does surrender to the modernizing story. This side of the book is quietly but emphatically ideological. Affinal relations are better than lineage. Why? Because they are “horizontal” rather than “vertical” (p. 73). Or consider Fukutake on marriage. After quoting the rural proverb that “Brothers and sisters are like hands and feet, but wives are like a kimono—­one can change them” (p. 49), he goes on to tell us that “since the bride had no opportunity to be with her husband before marriage there was no question of their entering on marriage in a spirit of loving intimacy” (p. 49). Or, speaking of the strength of ie, he tells us, “It would be much more accurate to say, not that harmony [in the ie] was maintained at the cost of brutal sacrifice of the individual ego, but rather that the system did not permit the development of any egos to be sacrificed” (p. 51). These statements are not the views of the social scientist, but of the moralist. This strong moral position, with its hint of contempt for the traditional farmer and his culture, broadens in the closing chapters on village life and culture: The days when farmers were prepared to suppress their desires for the good things of life, when their strength lay in their ability merely to “exist,” to

174

���� ����

be satisfied with the fact that even on a meager piece of land careful tilling would ensure enough food for survival—­these days are soon to end. When they are finally no more, then farmers can look forward to “living” in a truly human sense. That new age is already beginning to dawn. . . . A man whose whole life is taken up with work and sleep has little to do with culture. . . . The cultural life of the man who devotes all his time to cultivating the fields is likely to be lived at a very low level. (p. 208)

To be sure, Fukutake does admit that the driving variable producing a new age of farmer culture was neither war nor his own favored variable of class interest, but rather the Meiji government’s need “for men who were to become useful conscripts or play their full part in capitalist factory production” (p. 209), a need that drove that government to universal primary education and universal literacy. But more disturbing here is the hint that the traditional farmer was in some sense nonhuman, a mere animal. Fukutake tells us: “Consequently, while recognizing that farmers are ceasing to ‘exist’ and beginning to ‘live,’ one cannot be wholly optimistic about the future of village culture. . . . . Individuals can no longer be prevented from having desires of their own, but nevertheless the ie and the ‘hamlet’ which required the suppression of such individuality are still living concepts” (p. 212). Among the things Fukutake blames on the ie and the hamlet later in this passage are vanity, the need to keep up appearances, and “unnecessary waste.” But surely he knows that loveless marriages, personal vanity, waste, and nonindividualized behavior are just as characteristic of modern socie­ ties as of traditional ones. “Desires of their own” drove Japanese schoolgirls in the later 20th century to become bywords for sheeplike consumption, and even by the time Fukutake published this book, Japan already had the world’s fifth highest level of advertising expenditures per capita. In such a world, what exactly were “desires of their own?” More broadly, modernization’s focus on satisfying the current generation rather than the future (as had been required by ie-­consciousness) led quickly to pollution and ecological deterioration. And the big business Fukutake so much disliked profited as much from the modern world as it had from the village-­based one. Why

�������� �������

175

then should one be so hard on the traditional farmers, whose world was rapidly crumbling as Fukutake wrote? The modern liberal cannot but agree with Fukutake that the Japanese farmer deserved a better life. But how is one to imagine that better life with­ out rejecting the past life as meaningless? More specifically, how is one to imagine a rural life lived as a conscious choice that did not require the sac­ rifice of many kinds of well-­being? And what exactly is the meaning of “conscious choice” when we know that the personality itself is a social phe­nomenon? Beyond those questions, however, Fukutake’s strong if partial rejection of the modernization narrative poses an even deeper puzzle. Émile Durkheim had argued that traditional societies were undifferentiated groupings of similar individuals and that these give way to differentiated societies of interdependent but different individuals. But Fukutake’s analysis shows that this is merely a difference in what we choose to see. “Traditional” societies have one kind of differentiated interdependent individuals (the people in a hamlet), while modern societies have other kinds of differentiated interdependent individuals (the people in the various occupations, for example). In “modern” societies, geography is seldom the basis for solidarity, which is rather organized around occupations or age-­groups or manufactured ethnicities or consumption groups. Is it not perhaps the case that a modern looks at traditional societies and does not see the difference there? Perhaps the endless complexities of hamlet politics and social jockeying simply do not interest us, any more than the difference between occupational therapists and physical therapists would interest Fukutake’s farmers. Perhaps the much-­vaunted complexity of modern societies lies simply in our own inability to see the complexity of other types of societies. Perhaps the much-­vaunted changeability of modern societies is simply an ideology, and fashion is simply something we force on ourselves out of fear that we might descend into stability and prove—­perish the thought—­to be no less traditional than all those others. There are in Fukutake two warring tendencies: the gradualist modernizer who has a slight superiority over those he studies, and the contingent historian who sees the perpetual flow of history that sweeps him along with those he studies. It is ultimately not clear which he is. But more than most of his generation, Fukutake recognizes that the supposed historical drift from tradition to modernity was in fact just a modern’s way of interpreting a particular synchronic difference.

����

Fei Xiaotong

��� �������� ��� ���� �� ��� ���� ����� �� ��� ���� d ynasty. In his lifetime, China would see revolutions, wars, and invasions. It would see empire, republicanism, nationalism, and communism. By his death, China had been not one but many Chinas, and Fei himself not one but many Feis. For man as for country, the question remains: Should we see continuity or difference? In Fei, at least, many readers have seen difference. For them the first Fei was a Westernized academic researching the countryside, the second Fei a popular writer forcibly adjusted to New China, and the third Fei an elder statesman who brokered the reemergence of Chinese sociology after 1978. But Fei himself saw not separate phases but a continuous line of develop­ ment. In reading him, then, we must mingle these conflicting views. This mingling is the harder since language constrains us to the early Fei. As she has mentioned, your reviewer must maintain the appearance of par­ ticularity, and so considers only works accessible in certain languages (En­ glish, French, and to a certain extent Spanish). She must otherwise rely on translation. But Fei wrote nothing substantial in English after 1945, and little of his later work is translated. Yet that we read only from Fei’s ear­ly, West­ ernized period should not limit our view. Those books are part of a larger intellectual and practical life. Fei Xiaotong was born November 2, 1910, in Wujiang, just south of Suzhou in coastal China. His people had been small gentry: minor landlords, low-­ Peasant Life in China. By Fei Xiaotong [Hsiao-­Tung Fei]. London: Routledge, 1939. Pp. xvii+300; Earthbound China. By Fei Xiaotong [Hsiao-­Tung Fei] and Zhang Zhiyi [Chih-­I Chang]. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945. Pp. xv+319.

��� ��������

177

ranking officials, and a surprising number of teachers. After attending lo­ cal primary and middle schools, Fei went first to Suzhou University, then to Yanjing University in Beijing, the best of the missionary colleges. He chose social science early, drawn by the American-­t rained Wu Wenzao. He was also strongly influenced by foreign scholars like S. M. Shirokogoroff and R. E. Park. Fei married Wang Tonghui in 1935, and the couple went to study the Yao tribes in Guangxi. They became lost in the mountains, Fei was desperately injured in a tiger trap, and his bride died while seeking help. After a pain­ ful recovery, Fei spent two months studying the village of Kaixiangong near his hometown, where his elder sister was an extension specialist for the lo­ cal sericulture school. Through Wu’s influence he then went to the London School of Economics, where he worked for two years with the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, himself then drifting toward the functionalism of his later years. Fei’s Kaixiangong fieldwork became a dissertation and even­ tually Peasant Life in China, published in 1939 after Fei’s return to China and dedicated to the memory of Wang Tonghui. The Japanese invasion drove the Beijing sociologists to Kunming in south­ western Yunnan province, where Fei quickly became professor, head of de­ partment, and leader of several research projects. A comparative ethnography of three villages—­one studied by Fei, the two others by his student Zhang Zhiyi—­became  Earthbound China in 1945. Fei spent much of 1943–­44 in the United States on a trip funded by the U.S. State Department. He found the United States active and creative, but also heartless, even soulless. In the late 1940s, Fei combined active academic work with extensive pop­ ular writing and political activity in the Chinese Democratic League. Nar­ rowly escaping assassination by Nationalists in Kunming, he traveled again abroad, visiting Britain and observing the rise of postwar socialism. Like most Chinese academics and intellectuals, Fei underwent thought reform af­ ter the Revolution, enduring the long process of study and small group discus­ sion that had evolved in earlier phases of the Chinese Communist Party. At the same time, sociology was abolished, partly following the Russian claim that the discipline was unnecessary in a Marxist-­Leninist society, but also because of Party skepticism about the politics of a noncommunist sociol­ ogy. Fei’s career derailed. He was shifted into work with national minori­ ties. He published little, although he retained some official positions. During the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Fei emerged as a respectful proponent of sociology’s rehabilitation, but in the immediately subsequent Anti-­Rightist

178

���� ����

Campaign he was denounced. He confessed errors publicly and at length. In the 1960s he was largely invisible, spending two years at physical labor at the close of that decade, but by the late 1970s sociology was being recreated, with Fei as leader, his return to eminence signaled by service as a judge in the Gang of Four trial. Fei finished his career as an honored leader of Chinese sociology, particularly known for the concept “Chinese Nation” (zhong hua min zu). He served as vice president of the National People’s Congress. He died in 2005. Peasant Life in China reports two months of fieldwork at Kaixiangong in 1935. The chapters recite the standard topics of early 20th-­century anthro­ pology: The Chia (the main kin structure), property, kinship extensions, household and village, livelihood, occupational differentiation, character of work, agriculture, land tenure, silk industry, marketing, and finance. There is an impassioned closing chapter on agrarian problems. The book was writ­ ten in English and, according to Fei’s wishes, was removed from sale by its English publishers in 1963. It was, however, twice translated into Japanese during the Second World War and eventually into Chinese after the rehabili­ tation of sociology. As Malinowski’s introduction emphasizes, the importance of the book lies in its wealth of description and detail. So we hear of siaosiv marriage (elsewhere known as tongyangxi), in which a couple raises a girl from early childhood as a bride for their son, thereby avoiding expensive wedding prep­ arations and exchanges. We hear that five generations are venerated. (After that, coffins and their contents are removed from family burial sites to make room for new occupants.) We hear that the three local calendars for agricul­ tural and ceremonial affairs (Western, lunar, and solar) interact in such com­ plicated ways that locals must purchase a “little red booklet” to enact their culture properly. Although the Nationalist government has made the book­ let illegal in order to enforce the Western calendar, villagers buy bootleg cop­ ies anyway. Similar unexpected effects undermine other Nationalist poli­ cies. Laws ordaining equal inheritance across genders simply scatter farm ownership faster than ever. The revival of the ancient Pao Chea (baojia) sys­ tem (as an administrative structure and an anticommunist mobilization mechanism) is doomed by its irrelevance to existing local structures. But although we hear these and many other interesting facts, the village seems to fit oddly within Malinowskian functionalism. There is a “function­ ing” village life in the foreground, to be sure, but many of its parameters are determined by the village’s unhappy encounter with the Nationalists and

��� ��������

179

the world markets. The book moves toward a historical posing of its prob­ lems, and once we get to agriculture, land tenure, and industry, the change­ over is complete, and we see a village fully contextualized in historical time and place. Despite its magnificent rice lands, the village is unable to live on agricul­ ture alone. Abortion and infanticide provide a certain amount of local popu­ lation control, but partible inheritance guarantees that even families with large holdings inevitably slide back toward the impoverished mean. The lo­ cal silk industry has in the past provided necessary supplementary income, but is now dying because of the worldwide depression and the competition of higher-­quality and lower-­price Japanese silk. Erratic prices for silk and rice often leave villagers without ready money for taxes and other regularly recurring costs. They must turn to usurers (the local usurer is “Sze, the Skin-­ tearer”; p. 279), and with interest rates exceeding 50% per month, land is quickly lost. Landlordism is thus rapidly spreading, while the village de­ scends into absolute poverty. The reform of the silk industry via a coop­ erative factory seems the only way out of the problem, but brings its own unintended consequences: unemployment of many women and consequent continued outmigration, as well as a general disappointment because the promised benefits are so long in coming. Like Mao Zedong, Liang Shu-­ming, and many others, Fei saw that rural problems were central for China, and the book starts and ends with the claim that rural hunger is so large a problem that it will inevitably produce revolu­ tion in the present circumstances. But Fei has a Deweyan faith that informa­ tion will suffice to produce change: A systematic presentation of the actual conditions of the people will con­ vince the nation of the urgent policies necessary for rehabilitating the lives of the masses. It is not a matter for philosophical speculation, much less should it be a matter for dispute between schools of thought. What is really needed is a common-­sense judgment based on reliable information. (p. 5)

This is the Progressive and Fabian creed, whose lineage is clear in the vocab­ ulary of the book—­phrases like “definition of the situation,” “lack of adjust­ ment,” and so on. When Fei was condemned in the 1950s, a key text would be a remark in his peroration: “I have tried to show that it is incorrect to condemn landowners and even usurers as wicked persons. When the village needs money from the outside to finance [its] production, unless there is a

180

���� ����

better system to extend credit to the peasants, absentee-­landlordism and usury are the natural products” (p. 284). While the critics were perhaps unjust in singling out this one sentence in a book unrelentingly critical of the existing state of affairs, they had identified thereby the central problem of postprogressive sociology of both the Chicago and the British functionalist schools. Although hard ethnographic work enabled those scholars to undermine some of the ideological pieties of colo­ nialism and other forms of domination, their analysis lacked an account of action. The ecological metaphors of the Chicagoans and the systematic ab­ stractions of the functionalists may have “explained” many social behaviors, but they inclined their practitioners to treat those behaviors as “natural,” when they were to a considerable extent shaped by human action itself. Earthbound China is considerably more sophisticated than Peasant Life. The book’s comparative design aimed to investigate explicitly the dynam­ ics only implicit in Peasant Life. Three villages were studied, one with little industry and no landlordism, one with well-­developed rural industry, and one of mixed type adjacent to and influenced by the local urban center. Fei contributed the design, the conclusion, and the first study. Fei’s earlier book had rested on thin evidence: two months’ work and overreliance on key—­and probably elite—­informants. But Fei’s sections of Earthbound (the study of Luts’un [Lucun] and the conclusion) evince a far more skeptical sifting of data and a great deal more primary information: quotes, budgets, and so on. Again there are many interesting details—par­ ticularly about the elaborate collective staggering of planting and oth­­er ag­ ricultural tasks in order to smooth out labor demand. Fei uncovers a tiny leisure class, living marginally above subsistence. It is all male, for the wom­­en are treated simply as farm laborers: “[Male idleness] is made possi­ble through the cutting down of labor costs on the smaller farms by means of work per­ formed by the women of the family” (p. 74). The portrait of this marginal leisure class—­and its willingness to be idle even at the cost of obvious plea­ sures—­is unforgettable. “If I work in the field it will save us only 30 cents [the hire of a laborer]. If I don’t smoke [opium] tomorrow, we shall save the same amount. So I won’t go to the farm” (p. 82). At first it seems that Luts’un is immune to the larger social forces trans­ forming Kaixiangong, although its basic realities are the same: partible in­ her­itance and overpopulation guarantee the reduction of any family to pov­ erty over time (here including even those who have returned from successful careers in the cities, a group nonexistent in Kaixiangong). But the par­ticu­

��� ��������

181

lar dynamic of Kaixiangong is absent in Luts’un; there is no rapidly emerg­ ing landlord class. (Luts’un landlords are clans and other groups.) Yet here emigration is producing serious labor scarcity and consequent sharp read­ justments. And much more important, it gradually becomes clear to the reader (Fei merely tells us in passing) that Luts’un has recently lost its basic cash crop (and pleasure source): “Since Luts’un produced opium of an ex­ ceptionally good quality before its cultivation was made illegal, the use of the drug required no expenditure of money” (p. 104). Even if Fei’s calcula­ tions are wrong by a factor of two, the village’s 38 addicts spend an amount equaling 20% of the cash value of the village’s entire rice production. The real force behind the impending transformation of Luts’un is thus its ongo­ ing agricultural restructuring in response to an external legal change—­the criminalization of its main cash crop. More than Peasant Life, Earthbound captures the dilemma of social sci­ en­tific detachment. On the one hand, we get a subjective sense of a world unknown, a world where people make lives profoundly different from our own and do that making with a recognizable and very human resilience. On the other, that world includes exploitation and callousness small scale and large. Women work in the fields while their husbands smoke opium. Roofs fall in on poor families eating dinner. Bodies of poor laborers are thrown to the dogs. One understands why some revolutionaries had little patience with an investigator who could see these things without rage and radicalization. To be sure Fei’s conclusion is quite radical. It delineates the many forces leading to the concentration of wealth. It notes the importance of power and violence in that concentration of wealth, alongside the market forces, inheritance practices, and customary expenses that maintain peasant pov­ erty. And Fei has a remedy—­r ural cooperative industry. In all this, however, he follows an engineering model of social science: “We firmly believe that scientific knowledge should be helpful in promoting the good of the people and serving as a guide for our actions in the future” (p. 313). He quotes Mann­ heim, for whom social scientists are the thoughtful teachers of an informed public: “There will be no effective Democracy until the man in the street adopts the concepts and results of rational social analysis instead of the magical formulae which still dominate his thinking on human affairs” (p. 313; from Mannheim, Diagnosis of Our Time [London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner], 1943, p. v). But Fei’s remedy lacks a practical politics, and the arguments sustaining it lack the persuasiveness of the fieldwork. Moreover, the notion of a thoughtful

182

���� ����

man in the street seems noble but naive, then as later. By contrast, the commu­ nists began from the premise that the current situation was morally and po­ litically wrong and deduced from that premise—­and a few of their own magi­ cal formulae—­the analysis of peasant life necessary to mobilize the peasantry and command the allegiance of a militant party that transformed China over the next 40 years. The notion that landlords and usurers were simply the natu­ ral result of grand social forces no doubt struck them as absurd. If we believe social life to be natural and beyond our control, then it will be so; if not, then it will not. How then are we to think of Fei’s life and thought? To a Western liberal the story is one of oppression. Fei started as a standard Western academic and produced distinguished work. Although he moved rapidly left, it was not far enough for the party, so he was eventually forced to publicly recant. After many years of obscurity, he reemerged in the late 1970s, acknowledg­ ing some continuities with his earlier work, but in large measure disown­ ing it as insufficiently “useful,” by which many understand him to mean insufficiently “politically correct in terms of the current official party line.” By contrast, Fei’s own retrospective vision in translated talks after 1980 fo­ cused on shortcomings of his earlier work; the lack of any analysis of agency and indeed the weakness of its normative and political argument more gen­ erally. He explicitly rejected the engineering model with its independent ex­ perts and insisted that scholarship is part of the process of reform itself and has no reality outside that process. This is the classic Marxist position on theory and practice, but it also follows from the notion that the social process is a process of values and that therefore an absolutely value-­f ree social sci­ ence is not only difficult but logically impossible. Is there really something fundamentally different between the intellectual history of Fei and that of many Western academics, setting aside for the mo­ ment the amplitude of the political swings? Political fashions blow through the West as well. Over the course of the 20th century not a few distinguished Western academics trimmed their sails to all kinds of political whims—­ Marxism, fascism, neoliberalism, and so on. The American discipline of eco­ nomics was just as surely purged of critics of capitalism in the period 1890–­ 1910 as was Chinese academia purged of sociologists in the early 1950s, although in their favor the Americans sent their radical economists not to manual labor in the countryside, but to the gentler exile of academic irrele­ vance and to professorships in the politically ignorable discipline of sociology.

��� ��������

183

But there is another issue involved. That one should live a highly consis­ tent and progressively focused life is the personality ideal of very particular parts of very particular societies—­the western societies of the 19th century, whose elites had the luxury to envision and sometimes even to realize this particular ideal. In much of the world, being many different versions of one­ self over the course of a life or even in the various simultaneous compart­ ments of an ongoing life has been not only acceptable but also normative, perhaps even necessary. The “consistent and progressive” personality ideal does have echoes in many parts of the world, but many of those societies also recognize and even value lives constituted of the complex and the inconsis­ tent: of betrayals and conversions, of compartmentalization and multitask­ ing. One person’s “duplicity” is another’s “adjustment.” Only in formal biog­ raphies are these multiple and sequential selves rationalized into particular, progressive life courses. Fei protested both in the 1950s and later that his Western friends should not speak for him. In responding the Karl Wittfogel’s review of China’s Gentry, Fei wrote, “Wittfogel’s tactics are pretty despicable. He tries to put me in a position of finding it hard to plead for myself. If I write something to refute him, he can say I have no freedom of speech, no moral fibre. What is worse is that he goes beyond concocting rumors and allegations to pretending that he is in a better position to know my innermost feelings than I am myself” (Encounter 6, no. 2 [1956]: 69). But by 1980, in accepting the Malinowski Award, he told his listeners, I found myself warmly received among the minority people after liberation. These people were sincere with me and I had the feeling that I was talking with my kinfolk. It was simply because the people I investigated knew that I meant to help, to help solve their problems so that what they dreamed of could come true. The terms “researchers” and “investigators” and the “ob­ jects of study” or “the investigated” thus were no longer suitable. For both parties were actually working hand in hand to observe and explain truth­ fully the existing social phenomena. (Toward a People’s Anthropology [Beijing: New World Press], 1981, p. 15).

Yet while he had contested Wittfogel’s right to speak for him, Fei himself had no difficulty speaking for the Chinese minorities, and his language often drifted in a direction that could be read as quite ominous.

184

���� ����

We tried to understand things and study theories for practical reasons, namely, for the purpose of producing scientific, factual bases for the minor­ ity peoples to carry out social reforms, for the purpose of making sugges­ tions that were in the interest of the minority peoples. . . . The purpose of this broad branch of study [anthropology] is, if I may look into the not-­too-­ distant future, to make the broad masses understand full well the society they live in, to organize their collective life in accordance with existing so­ cial laws, and to help satisfy their ever-­growing needs. (Toward, pp. 14, 19).

On one reading, this is a blueprint for totalitarianism. On another, it is little different from the language of the American John Dewey in The Public and Its Problems (1927). What makes Fei and Dewey different is the actual substance intended by phrases like “existing social laws,” “ever-­growing needs,” “what they dreamed of,” and “interests of the minority peoples.” But that actual substance is deeply contested. Who defines those needs, dreams, and interests? That there is no resolution of this reversing perception of difference and similarity is one of the great insights of modern social science. But like all insights, it too has inevitable practical implications. There is no mere watch­ ing of social life. Willy-­nilly, one lives it.

�����

Deliar Noer

��� ��� �� �������� �� ��� ������� ��� ��� ������� ��� universal history. What varies is only the location and the nature of the mistake. And correction does not avail. For if we remove, one by one, the omissions and commissions inherent in any particular standpoint of interpretation, eventually nothing remains but a jumbled recitation of facts. It is the interests of men that give organization to the histories they write, and it is the particularities of their thinking that color the threads they trace through the past. In the European concept of universal history it was perhaps inevitable that one such mistake would be the devout inference, drawn in exhaustion after 150 years of wars between Catholics and Protestants, that religion would vanish in the chill light of reason. This inference ignored the mystical qualities of reason itself, which would eventually flower in the quasi-­ theology of high energy physics and the secular soteriology of 20th-­century medicine. But it also ignored widespread religious revival across the world, both Christian and non-­Christian, during both the 19th and 20th centuries. Nowhere was this revival more evident than in Islam, where religion often coupled with nationalism to help demolish the commercial empires of the Western metropolis. In his twenties, journalist Deliar Noer became the field research director of a project on this Islamic revival as it unfolded in In­ donesia. Originally his Ph.D. thesis, the work here reviewed covers the first four decades of the 20th century. It tells its story from the inside, for Noer was a lifelong Muslim activist. The Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia, 1900–­1942. By Deliar Noer. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1973. Pp. xi+390.

186

���� ����

Deliar Noer was born in 1926 at Medan, in North Sumatra. His father was a minor government official whose service posting had removed him from his roots in Bukittinggi, one of the cradles of  Muslim modernism in Indonesia. Noer was 16 when the Japanese invaded and threw out the Dutch, thereby inaugurating a short-­lived regime whose desperate vicissitudes forced it to open numerous opportunities for both Muslim modernism and In­done­ sian nationalism. But early in the transition period after the Japanese defeat, Noer’s family was arrested by Japanese military units, and his father was killed. Noer served with the Republican government during its exile in Singapore, learning English and beginning his collegiate education. In the 1950s, he worked for a news agency and was active in the Muslim Students’ Asso­ ciation, through which he met the central figures of contemporary Muslim political activism: Vice President Mohammad Hatta, of  whom he would later write a biography, and Mohammad Natsir, the leader of Masjumi, the common front organization for Muslim political parties. At their recommendation Noer became the lead Indonesian research assistant for George Kahin, a Cornell University professor much interested in the modernist movement. Assembling a research team, Noer interviewed dozens of aging Muslim leaders and tracked down thousands of documents and historical details. He also received his undergraduate degree, and the delighted Kahin recruited him to Cornell, where he wrote a book-­length master’s thesis on Masjumi and the Ph.D. dissertation whose book version is reviewed here. Noer’s later career was marked by resolute political stands. The Sukarno and Suharto regimes, aiming to manage religion for state purposes, could not stomach Noer’s vocal support for a primarily Islamic polity. He spent only three years on the law faculty of the University of North Sumatra before being fired for anti-­Marxism. He then worked for a Jakarta research organization, moving to the politics department of the University of Indonesia after the military coup of Suharto. But his activities in Muslim political parties made him persona non grata, and his support of student protests against the regime led the government to revoke his right to teach. He fled to Australia in 1975, where he taught at various universities until 1987. Eventually he returned to Indonesia as head of a research institute on Islamic society begun by Natsir and other old friends. With the overthrow of Suharto in 1998, he became active in the new Islamic political parties but had little success. Disillusioned with politics and even with Muslim parties and politicians, Noer died in 2008.

������ ����

187

That the story Noer tells in The Modernist Muslim Movement has many complexities is to be expected in an archipelago that is full of peoples, languages, and ethnicities, that had absorbed Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, and that had attracted numerous and various imperialisms. The hundreds of islands were themselves diverse. More than three times the size of Java, Sumatra by contrast had only one-­tenth its population, and many of the lesser islands were even more sparsely populated. Indeed, Noer begins his story underscoring the wide cultural range of Indonesia: “Although Java has a railroad system, motor cars, television and aircraft, much of the interior of West Irian has not progressed beyond the Stone Age” (p. 1). At first reading, the book seems buried under such complexities. There are organizations created, transformed, renamed, merged, and banned. There are arguments between Islamic modernists and traditionalists, and between different Islamic modernists, and between different Islamic traditionalists. There are reconciliations and coalitions that disintegrate only later to reconstitute as new alliances and collaborations. The acronyms and nicknames are dizzying. Noer mentions a PAI, a PKI, a PII, a PMI, and a PNI. Some organizations have nicknames as well as acronyms (PMI is Permi; both are short for Persatuan Muslimin Indonesia), but others have acronyms only (PKI is the communists) and still others have nicknames only (Persatuan Islam is Persis). Organizations that appear briefly can resurface later in new guise. Budi Utomo, a 1908 Javanese protonationalist organization, eventually reappears as a constitutent of Parindra, the major religiously neu­t ral nationalist organization of the 1930s, which arose in 1933 from the reunification of  Budi Utomo with its own splinter group, the Surabaja Study Club (1924). At other times, lengthy minor disputes traverse both years and chapters. Djamiat Chair, a 1905 Jakarta organization that drew heavily on wealthy Arabs and focused on education, long warred with its splinter group Als-­ Irsjad (founded 1913) over the issue of whether Sajids (male descendants of Fatimah, daughter of the Prophet) should receive special status. Still feuding in 1932, the groups sought a binding judgment on this question from—­of all people—­the Dutch colonial rulers (p. 68; the Dutch decided against the special claims of the Sajids). Noer kindly provides the reader with a detailed glossary covering these many organizations as well as basic Islamic and Indonesian concepts. But the ramified details of his story are so overwhelming that the book sometimes reads like a dictionary or an encyclopedia, in which the reader cannot know the meaning of one word without tracing it through a long path of

188

���� ����

other words that eventually leads back to where she started. Yet underneath the details, the book’s underlying organization is very clear. An introduction presents the basic ideas of Islamic modernism and the basic nature of Islam in Indonesia. Two long chapters then review the development of the modernist Muslim movement: the first studying its general and social aspects, the second its political embodiments. A fourth chapter considers the Dutch reaction to Muslim modernism, and a fifth considers relations between Muslim modernism and its traditionalist opponents, as well as between these two Muslim groups on the one hand and the religiously neutral nationalist movement on the other. As is obvious, this sectoral design privileges analysis over chronology, which unfortunately guarantees that the Dutch, the traditionalists, the religiously neutral nationalists, and even the modernist political party (Sarekat Islam) appear many times before the respective chapters that “introduce” them; after all, evolving Muslim modernism reacted to those other actors from its very beginning. But a chronological account would have paid a worse price in analytic disorganization. The book thus well illustrates the problem of analyzing a complexly interwoven religious and political ecology—­there is no sensible place to start. As a result, it should be read twice. A first reading accustoms the reader to the vocabulary and the characters, while a second reveals the swirling and fateful encounters of the various actors. Not only is Noer’s underlying design simple and clear, his theoretical dispositions are also quite straightforward. The book rests on three central distinctions. The first is the distinction of modernists and traditionalists. Taking their lead from Muhammad Abduh and others, the Muslim modernists sought to purge Islam of the accretions of years: of magic and mysticism, of legal traditions that postdate the four madzahib, of practices adopted from animism or Hinduism. At the same time, however, the modernists sought to adjust Islam to the modern world. This necessitated freeing the individual from the constraint of taqlid, that is, treating the rules (fatwa) of religious leaders (ulama) as definitive. As in the Christians’ Protestant Reformation, it was thought necessary to “open the gate of idjtihad,” to allow the individual to seek personal guidance in the Quran and Hadits. (All Arabic and Indone­ sian words are here romanized following Noer’s practice, although many have changed since, and some were not stably romanized in Noer’s time.) A second crucial distinction is between the religious and the political. Co­ lonial Indonesian society had two non-­Dutch elites. In Java, the kijaji were the religious elites—­the ulama and other religious teachers. (Sjech was the

������ ����

189

comparable title in Sumatra, although interisland differences in the religious elites meant that the terms were not exactly equivalent.) The prijaji were the political elites, who by the turn of the 20th century were largely co-­opted into Dutch indirect rule. (In Sumatra, the political elites were the adat princes, who figure in Noer’s story only when they support the traditional inheritance of sister’s child against the modernists’ insistence on inheritance by the deceased’s own children.) The importance of the religion/politics separation is twofold. First, Islamic modernist organizations typically favored one or the other. It is thus crucial to know that Sarekat Islam was a principally political organization while Muhammadijah was a principally religious one. But second, the modernists rejected on principle any clear distinction between politics and religion, because they felt that Islam did not allow that distinction. This second principle meant that a continuous pressure operated to draw the religious groups into politics and the political ones into religion. But at the same time the two sides fought with each other almost continuously. Typically, the religious groups accused the political ones of being excessively worldly and compromising, while the political groups accused the religious ones of taking subsidies from the Dutch (see, e.g., pp. 235–­37). Indeed, particular groups would routinely ban their members from joining other organizations disapproved for their religious practices, political alliances, or collaboration with (or excessive opposition to) the Dutch imperialists. Noer’s version of the religious/political distinction leaves one important group on the sidelines—­the communists and, more generally, the organized workers, and beyond them the larger economy. We do hear that Sarekat Islam emerged in reaction to Chinese presence in the batik trade. We also hear that Sarekat Islam endured internal fights over socialism and that its major figures were involved in the pawnshop employees’ union. We hear that the modernist schooling organization Sumatera Thawalib was torn by conflicts over communism in the 1920s. But since the communists were, in Noer’s view, unrelentingly hostile to Islam, they simply vanish when not immediately active in the story. Yet they were, in some sense, the other “religion” of Indonesia: the secular religion of communism. Not only the communists but also the abangan—­the nominal Muslims—­ to a large extent disappear from Noer’s account. They appear briefly in the book’s introduction, then equally briefly in the conclusion, where they are considered to be religiously neutral—­in effect, nonreligious. But as Noer knew well (he had written of this in his master’s paper) most modernist

190

���� ����

proposals for the new Indonesian constitution in the 1940s included a constitutional requirement that all Indonesian Muslims—­nominal as well as faithful—­obey the  sjari’ah (law of Islam). If the abangan foresaw this, surely their reaction to modernism was consequential. The third central distinction in the book is that between Indonesian and Dutch. On this question, Noer has a distinct view. For him, Islam must be cen­ tral to any conception of Indonesian nationality. He also feels that Christian­ ity is central to the national identity of the imperialists, although it is not clear which of these two centrality judgments comes first in his logic nor whether there is a causal/historical as well as a logical relation between the two. Noer generally makes this religious claim to the exclusion of other bases of nationality. In part this reflects the reality of the archipelagian ecologies. Islam was the most pervasive cultural system across the islands, although that too was in part a new creation—­of the Dutch, in fact, whose increasingly uniform and Christianizing colonial policies did much to create both cross-­island nationalism and a stronger Islam. But one still feels in Noer a specifically Muslim vision. For example, he spends little time on the traditional power elite—­the Javanese prijaji and Sumatran adat chiefs, taking it for granted that their co-­optation by the Dutch made them irrelevant to a new national identity. But he thereby overlooks the fact that they also tended to be only marginally Muslim and that this coincidence to some extent delegitimated nominal allegiance to Islam as a basis for national identity, leaving the national identity field open to the modernists. In this regard, it is also interesting that Noer mentions only in a footnote the already famous prijaji Raden Ajeng Kartini, whose feminist opposition to (Islamic) polygamy and support for women’s rights had already made her a heroine of the secular nationalists by the time Noer was writing. (Kartini will be discussed in chap­ ter XXXVI.) Nor do we hear much about the Chinese, even though anti-­ Chinese sentiment lay at the foundations of organizations like Sarekat Islam. As for the Dutch, Noer judges them to a considerable extent on their own terms. He notes frankly that modernist religious organizations learned much from Christian missionaries, borrowing such tactics as orphanages, clinics, scouting, and modern social welfare programs. But Christianity and Islam are not for Noer equivalent enterprises, any more than they were for the Christian missionaries. When Noer tells us that the Dutch government is “prejudiced against Islam,” he means that the Dutch fail to meet their own secular (not

������ ����

191

religious) standards. Western secular law seems to imply a religious toleration that the Dutch do not practice. But Noer’s discussion of  the Sukarno/Natsir debate (pp. 275–­95) seems to imply that he would expect an Islamic government to promote Islam in the same ways the Dutch favored the Christians: reserving jobs, promulgating religion in the schools, and so on. Here he—­or rather Natsir, to whom Noer carefully gives the last word­—j­udges Islam by the eternal standards it sets itself. (One cannot say “eternal religious standards” because for the modernists there were no separate “religious standards,” but only comprehensive rules for all of life.) By those standards, it is the believer’s duty to promulgate the faith; faith and state should not be separate, and hence practices like reserved jobs, religious education in school, and so on follow from faith itself. By contrast, in his view, because the Dutch accept the liberal separation of politics and religion, and follow the liberal position that the public sphere of liberal politics ultimately dominates the private sphere of religion, they ought by their own rules not to favor Christianity. The same issue is joined over the question of whether nationalism can be separate from Islam, a question that divided modernists deeply. The Permi position was that “our basis is Islam and kebangsaan [secular nationalism]. Islam and kebangsaan do not contradict each other, but are like the right leg and the left leg” (p. 263). By contrast, Hadji Rasul and others argued that Islam “is already complete, sufficient in itself, and does not need any additional attributes” (p. 264). When Rasul argued that “Islam is tolerant: kebangsaan is not” (p. 264), he seemed to mean that “tolerance towards the other” is defined as “whatever Islam commands towards the other” (or, from the outsider’s point of view, “tolerance” is simply defined as “whatever Islam chooses to do”). He does not mean that tolerance has some independent definition which, as it happens, is met by the behavior of the institutions of Islam as we observe them in the real world. The definition of tolerance must flow from Islam itself. Like the Christian missionaries (but not necessarily the Dutch politicians), modernists genuinely believed their faith. It should have no standard but itself. The debate between the modernist Natsir and the nationalist Sukarno is therefore the crux toward which the entire book leads. On the one hand we have Sukarno’s explicitly liberal and abstract approach to government through toleration of observed differences, and on the other we have Natsir’s Islamic and substantive approach to government through a foundation in first—­that is, Islamic—­principles.

192

���� ����

Sukarno: How do you realize your ideals [about this unity] in a country in which you uphold democracy and in which part of its population are non-­ Muslims, as in Turkey, India, and Indonesia in which millions of people are Christians or embrace another religion, and in which the intellectuals in general do not entertain Islamic thoughts. (p. 285; bracketed phrase in original.) Natsir: All this [routine governmental tasks like traffic rules and foreign exchange] can certainly not and need not be arranged in Allah’s revelation which has an eternal value and is unchangeable. For all this is concerned with questions which are subject to change according to the demand of time and place. . . . What Islam regulates are those things which are not subject to change. Questions which are concerned with the principles for administering a society, and which will not be changed as long as man remains man . . . (p. 290; ellipses in original; bracketed interpolation added.)

Sukarno admired the regime of Kemal Atatürk in Turkey and quoted with approval the Young Turk ideologist Ziya Gökalp, an apostle of  Turkish secular nationalism (See chapter XVI). But Natsir thought the example of Turkey pernicious: “They had the power to introduce reforms in the spiritual life of the people, to combat superstitions, polytheism, and tarekat—­to purify Islam, but they did not do it” (p. 292). The book leads, ineluctably, to this clarion debate over what it means to be an Islamic nation. And both reader and writer know the sequel—­that Sukarno won, but that Indonesian national identity would continue to evolve, and at times disintegrate, up to the very present. The  Modernist Muslim Movement is a spectacular success. It combines profound historical sensitivity, diligent archival and oral historical work, and a quiet but firm commitment to Islam. It is difficult to read, but the reward is great.

����

Radhakamal Mukerjee

�� �� ��� �� ��������������� ���������� �������� ��� � man who knew everything. Not only had he read the multilingual literatures of his homeland but also an astonishing breadth of Western philosophy, history, economics, psychology, and even popular culture. He wrote 50 books in a long academic life, rising at 3:00 a.m. for yoga and meditation, and then spending part of every morning at dictation and writing. (Mukerjee once told a student, “Write ten pages a day and you will have fulfillment.”) And his writings range as widely as his reading: everything from rural studies to class analysis, personality theory to regional ecology, population problems to mysticism and Indian arts. Even the books’ genres are diverse: from creative summaries of existing work to empirical analysis to pure theory. The seemingly impossible choice of  which of  Mukerjee’s books to read is eased by a family resemblance among them. For Mukerjee did not himself distinguish between topics. Religious texts might bear on the interpretation of village life, and biological and geomorphic themes might pervade a discussion of class relations. (For example, Mukerjee thought that the ever-­ changing Ganges/Brahmaputra river channels had interacted with the differential social regimes of Muslims and Hindus to determine much of the politics of religion in Bengal.) This family resemblance was to a large extent a conscious choice. For the central strain of Mukerjee’s work is toward what he called “the universal.” This was not an abstract argument governing a set of particular instances, as in Western thinking. Rather it was a commodious process of  aggregation The Dynamics of Morals. By Radhakamal Mukerjee. London: Macmillan, n.d. [1950]. Pp. xxvii+530.

194

���� ����

and adaptation by which different kinds of knowledge, different kinds of political concern, and indeed different kinds of readers might come together in some harmonious process of mutual influence. So biology, geography, class interest, history, morals, and spiritualism were all of a piece for Mukerjee. The choice of a particular work is thus less consequential than it might be. Our choice here falls on Dynamics of  Morals, because the book illustrates very well the pervasion of Mukerjee’s sociological thinking by mysticism and religion. But Mukerjee is equally well-­known for his early works on ecology and institutions, and it is useful to say a few words about those more familiar works. A good example is Mukerjee’s Regional Sociology (1926), the first recognizably modern text on that subject. The book combined a broad-­ ranging reading of Friedrich Ratzel, Frédéric Le Play, and Edmond Demolins with a detailed application of ecological thinking to India (and Asia more broadly) from the Indian point of view. Mukerjee’s processual and cultural approach softened the geographical and climatic determinism of his predecessors. To be sure, later, metropolitan versions of human ecology ignored him, in part because he retained enough of the early 20th-­century scientific vernacular about race to be unacceptable to the political generations of the turn of the 21st century. But since that time, his focus on holistic analysis of social life—­ranging from the biological to the cultural—­has reinstated him as a major forerunner of a truly environmental sociology. Yet Mukerjee the environmentalist was only one of many Mukerjees. Dynamics better illustrates the thread of Hindu thinking that binds together the diversity of his reading and reflection. Radhakamal Mukerjee was born in 1889 in West Bengal. His father was a Kulin Brahmin who grew up in poverty but made himself an eminent barrister and married the daughter of a wealthy Calcutta family. Although he died when Radhakamal was five, the family flourished nonetheless. As the youngest of many children, Radhakamal was his mother’s darling. (Much of Mukerjee’s character, discipline, and writing style is captured in his remark, in his posthumously published autobiographical fragments, that “the recall of my mother’s piety, penance, and purity saved me from many temptations, allurements, and excitements of life”; India: The Dawn of a New Era—­an Autobiography [New Dehli: Radha Publications, 1997], p. 27). He excelled in school, although he mainly remembered the brutality and occasional futility of his teachers. In 1905, when Mukerjee was about to go to college, came the thunderbolt of  Lord Curzon’s partition of  Bengal. Eventually rescinded in 1911, this policy

���������� ��������

195

radicalized the (Hindu) Bengali elite that stood to lose professional opportunities, landholder privileges, and political power by the creation of a majority Muslim East Bengal. Like his brother, Mukerjee threw himself into the massive Bengali reaction and made his first real contacts with the general population. But the cautious family allowed only one brother the nationalist gesture of leaving the imperial school system for the Bengali-­sponsored schools. So Mukerjee enrolled at the celebrated Calcutta Presidency College, where he graduated with double first-­class degrees, in history and English. His classmates included many who would become India’s pre-­and post-­ Independence elite, and his teachers and acquaintances included men like the physicist  Jagadish Chandra Bose and the poet Rabindranath Tagore—­the latter of whom would suggest the title for Mukerjee’s Regional Sociology. Mukerjee had already finished a draft of his first book (Foundations of Indian Economics 1916) when he graduated in 1910 and became a teacher of economics at Krishnath College in his hometown of Berhampore. Actively religious since boyhood, he deepened his practice of yoga and meditation at this time, but he also began working in the cooperative movement and running night schools for adult education. At the same time he edited a prominent Bengali journal (Upasana), joining the intellectual elite that was creating a new Indian nationalism on Hindu foundations. In 1914, Mukerjee met Patrick Geddes, the Scottish city planner/sociologist/prophet who was seeking in India new worlds to transform and who would himself become the first professor of sociology at the University of Bombay in 1917 (See chapter XI). From Geddes, Mukerjee learned a broad and ecological vision of social life, which complemented the economics he had studied in college and the bioecology he had absorbed from the Principal of Krishnath (E. M. Wheeler). To all this he would add a focus on culture and values that Geddes lacked. In 1915, Mukerjee’s night schools were suppressed by the British on grounds of possible sedition, but Mukerjee escaped jail through a teaching appointment at Lahore that eventually turned into a lectureship at the University of the Punjab. He then lectured briefly at Calcutta before receiving his Ph.D. in 1920 and taking a position at Lucknow as professor of economics and sociology. He remained at Lucknow for his entire career, living in a bungalow on campus. He was Vice -­Chancellor in 1955–­57. Mukerjee died in 1968, orphic and ambivalent about the student radicals of that time. Like most academics, Mukerjee did not live a life of events, but of everyday practices of teaching and knowing. Not surprisingly, his autobiographical fragments reveal few details, but some general facts are evident. He was

196

���� ����

widely known (and published) in the West, and his 1937 tour of  Western universities saw him at Oxford, Cambridge, and London, as well as Columbia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Chicago. He even found time to visit Russia on this trip, visiting cooperative farms and factories, and remarking somewhat cryptically that “for me, a foreigner, there seemed to be little excitement about [the show trials] in Moscow” (India, p. 171.) A 1948 trip would take him to Harvard and Montreal. At some point, he married and had children, but his wife figures in his autobiographical fragments only when he recounts the misery he felt when she had an incurable illness. To be sure, J. W. Goethe’s Eternal Feminine—­in its Indian version as Shakti the Mother Goddess—­commands an entire chapter of his autobiography. But other than his mother, the women in Mukerjee’s life (a wife and two daughters) are invisible. He thought sex itself something to be “curbed and assuaged,” transformed into the universal Shakti Divine. Mukerjee trained dozens of students, many of whom went into the Indian planning bureaucracies. Some were his followers not only intellectually but also spiritually. That he was for them a guru and a saint is clear from their an­nual birthday memorials and assiduous publishing of  his remaining man­ uscripts, but even more from their extravagant memorial essays, some of which are appended to his autobiography. Reading Dynamics reminds us that sociology can be embodied in many kinds of texts. In this series we have encountered several of the common forms: ethnographies, histories both large-­scale and small, historical epics, overviews, pure theories, and even fiction. But Dynamics is a new kind of text: a meditation. In this it resembles works by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Frie­ drich Nietszche, and Søren Kierkegaard—­writers who made short, coherent arguments but seldom connected them into larger architectonic wholes. It is more a philosophical than a sociological genre, but one that suits Mukerjee’s project of creating a kind of universal knowledge not by deductive or inductive systems, but rather by encountering and reconciling vast territories of knowledge. As befits such a project of encounter, the book was not written, but dictated. Dictation is evident in the long sentences, the abundant repetitions, the myriad triads of terms. The prose is often incantatory: Conscience is as much sustained by laws, folkways and institutions as the latter are nourished by conscience. The ideal values and the entire framework of social relations and institutions, laws, moralities and manners are

���������� ��������

197

inseparable and continuous. It is in the invisible world of meanings and values that conscience, honour, law, morals and folkways mingle and mutually judge and interpenetrate one another, safeguarding both the full and complete expression of the human personality and rightness of social relations, freedoms and laws. (Dynamics, p. 257)

Mukerjee’s arguments do not flow with logical rigor from defined terms to grounded assertions. They swirl and overlap. Meaning emerges gradually and indirectly. Chapter subheadings float relatively free of the text they pre­ cede, being either starting points for meditations or—­more likely—­retro­ spective attempts to order a meditative oral text. All this means that reading the work as a linear text is foolish. One must encounter it a chapter at a time. One must pause to reflect, disagree, wonder. The hasty reader searching for “Mukerjee’s core argument” will find little or nothing. Indeed, one of Mukerjee’s basic themes is the multiplicity and processuality of knowledge. This theme is echoed in his theory of the self, which reverses the argument of Georg Simmel that more and more social in­ volvements make individuals more and more uniquely individualized. For Mukerjee, increasing numbers of social involvements free the individual from his particularity. Freedom from habit and routine allow one to enjoy the un­usualness of all things and their reconciliation in the absolute. The universal is not what comes by abstracting away from content, but what comes by experiencing that content in many ways and many forms. At the outset, the book seems strongly influenced by psychoanalysis (Freud’s superego concept is central) and by the Gestalt psychologists (whose “field” concept is equally central). But with these, as with the hundreds of other authors quoted, Mukerjee is simply using a contemporary vocabulary to say things he feels to be permanent truths. Freudian and Gestalt psychology are moreover only two of Mukerjee’s Western interlocutors. There are cameo appearances by the pragmatists ( John Dewey most of all), the evolutionist/processualists ( Julian Huxley, C. H. Waddington, A. N. Whitehead), the mainstream psychologists (Gordon Allport, Jean Piaget) as well as classical writers from Plato to Marx and Nietzsche. The index contains hundreds of names, and, as often as not, one finds on the indexed pages an apposite quote. Indeed, the multiplicity of references and examples gives the book a vertiginous quality. On page 266 the text concerns the character of the In­ ternational Labour Organization. Ten pages later we are deep in the Bhagavad Gita.

198

���� ����

The book has 19 chapters, whose titles ring the changes on the words morals, conscience, ethics, virtue, and value. Hence we have “Conscience and Culture,” or “Evolution and Ethics,” or “Morals beyond Society.” The internal headings add to these a vocabulary of units and embodiments: crowd, culture, individual, laws, myth, norms, personality, self, and symbols. The argument gradually and circuitously brings into focus the relations between all these things, as theorized by Mukerjee. Indeed, the later chapters restate and in some cases reinterpret Mukerjee’s earlier works in the light of the moral arguments made here. Yet even these vocabularies omit some of the core concepts of the book, in particular the four types of groups (crowd, interest-­group, society/community, and commonalty) and the four attributes that are associated with each of them: values, means of evocation, moral imperatives, and means of control. Thus, for interest groups, in Mukerjee’s theory, the value is goals. The means of evocation is education; the moral imperative is reciprocity and fair play; and the means of control is physical and social coercion. As this list suggests (and as Mukerjee says explicitly), Western social theory is largely concerned with (Mukerjee would have said “bogged down in”) the theory of interest groups. For society/community, the value is ideals, the means of evocation is art, the moral imperative is justice/equity, and the means of control is shame/ s­ocial honor. Mukerjee imagined shame in a broad sense, meaning the shame of violating social ideals rather than the pecking-­order shame of what are usually called “honor societies” by the Western social scientists who disapprove of them. Mukerjee thought the concerns of society/community were central in Asian societies and thought their focus on shame arose from this concern. Finally, for Mukerjee’s true ideal—­the commonalty—­the value is norms, the means of evocation is religion, the moral imperative is love/sympathy, and the means of control is self-­conscious conscience. Much of the book discusses the nature of self-­conscious conscience, a fact that explains Mukerjee’s interest in psychoanalytic therapy with its project of creating a mature conscience to replace the “tyrannical superego.” Curiously, the crowd—­the first and for Mukerjee the lowest type of group—­has no such properties: no value, no means of evocation, no moral imperative, no means of control. It is mere sociality. Given Mukerjee’s neo-­ Hindu pedigree, one cannot help recalling that of the four Brahmanical varnas, only the upper three are “twice-­born.” The four types of social groups

���������� ��������

199

thus seem an echo of the four varnas. But Mukerjee to a great extent avoids reification of his categories. In much of the text, neither particular social groups nor particular epochs and times are seen to be “commanalty” or “interest-­groups”; rather these may all be aspects of one group or of one individual’s experience. They may come and go in the ceaseless changing of society over time. For Mukerjee is militantly processualist: “Groups are episodes in man’s adjustment to the environment that is both physical and social-­cultural” (Dynamics, p. 74). “Like every other tool of the human hand and mind Ethics constantly changes and evolves” (p. 77). “Morality thus becomes a phase of the social configuration, an episode in the social process in which are converged all the evolutionary forces of life, mind, and spirit. All values are essentially social values in which man shares his experience with fellowmen” (p. 127). But most important, Mukerjee does not expect an end of differences, as we see in the following long passage: Such values are those of goodness, justice, love or solidarity that lend the final meaning to any action and relationship in society. Their imperatives are universal for all men, but their contents vary from man to man, and from social situation to social situation. These are normative ideals or norms into which man focuses both the consummation of his concrete specific values of the moment and the bafflement of his long-­cherished dreams and aspirations. These arise often from stresses and conflicts that his social self must experience as it cannot reconcile the ideals, loyalties and virtues of the different groups among which it is distributed. (pp. 131–­32)

But at the same time, he thought the actual present (1950—­three years after the partition and decolonization of British India) so full of change that he doubted the possibility of the universal. Perhaps the question in morals as to what are the universal moral values and standards is less significant than the fact that the current moral values clash and are undergoing momentous transformation. Theories of morals based on first principles or basic norms or on the methods of dialectical analysis are less valuable than those based on factual relations and valuations in the group situation, which, as the moral situation, can be approached empirically through the investigation of change, substitution or new integration of moral standards. (p. 199)

200

���� ����

But in the end, Mukerjee expects the triumph of commonalty, both as a personal discipline in individual lives and in the evolving complexity of society. In part, this expectation is rooted in his obvious engagement in the social and religious practices of Hindu culture in general and yoga in particular. But it is also rooted in his early contact with evolutionary thinkers like Geddes and Friedrich Ratzel and his continuing reading of Western writers who had similar visions: forgotten scholars like Nikolai Berdyaev and Max Scheler, whose strong religious commitments have elided them from the theoretical mainstream of Western social science. Mukerjee refers to these two from time to time, along with other spiritualists like the Henri Bergson of  The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Yet Mukerjee’s analysis is complicated by a drift between empirical and moral judgment. The reader can have no doubt that Mukerjee himself believes on purely moral grounds that commonalty and its virtues of love and sympathy are the highest form of life and that crowd behavior is bad behavior. But the reader also can have no doubt that Mukerjee’s analysis of crowds and interest groups—­both here and elsewhere—­is strongly empirical, as is his analysis of the moral impact of Western invasion on the society/community of India and other subordinated nations, and of the precariousness of commonalty in the face of certain social changes. Indeed, one cannot tell whether he speaks as an empirical scientist or a moralist when he gives the apophthegm “[Man] is thus the evaluating animal” (p. 89). Indeed, Mukerjee can on occasion seem decades ahead of his time about such matters: The endeavor during the last few decades to make sociology “value-­f ree” has over-­shot its mark. In the anxiety lest his personal valuation distort social reality, the sociologist leaves human values out of account, unexplored and unanalyzed. The consequence is that certain established values are often tacitly accepted though concealed in the methods of analysis of social relations and institutions. Indifference or neutrality in the matter of valuations stands for traditionalism or opportunism.” (p. 121)

In this discussion, we have but scratched the surface of  Mukerjee’s work. He engaged the sociology and philosophy of morals and values in a way that is profound as well as unusual. There are many challenges to his analysis. Marxists have long argued that Mukerjee’s type of moral theory, along with the religions that elaborated it, permitted millennia of domination of the

���������� ��������

201

Asian masses by various overlords. One wonders how Mukerjee might have responded to such an argument. Perhaps he gave that response somewhere in his huge corpus. Or perhaps he might tell us that we will know what he thinks when we can imagine it for ourselves. Certainly he makes a persuasive case in this book for taking morals seriously on their own terms, rather than on Durkheim’s terms as simple social facts requiring explanation. For that reason alone, the book should be carefully read. Mukerjee brings us to the end of another year of reading, which has taken us from Ellen Hellmann’s Johannesberg to Euclides da Cunha’s Canudos; from the Chinese villages of Fei Xiaotong to the Japanese villages of Fukutake Tadashi; from the modernist Islam of Deliar Noer’s Indonesia to the neo-­Hinduism of Radhakamal Mukerjee’s Bengal. Those pairings themselves already suggest interpretative linkages. The first pairing speaks of doom: Hellman’s Africans will face 50 years of militant oppression while da Cunha’s sertanejos are exterminated before our eyes. The second pairing speaks of rural villages, the world of landlords and rice paddies and local organization, but their futures are different: in the short term, the Chinese villages face revolution and transformation, while the Japanese villages will disappear in the consumer culture that will come to the Chinese only much later. The third pairing speaks of religion, of Islam and Hinduism. Unlike Western social scientists, both writers are profoundly committed to and ac­ tive practitioners of religions that are not limited to the civil or “private” world as then-­contemporary Christianity was in the liberal West. This makes them important counterweights to Western theorizing. All six books have their roots in the contact between cultures. This contact can be imperial, as in Noer, Hellmann, and Mukerjee, or economic, as in Fei, Fukutake, and Hellmann, or religious, as in Noer, Mukerjee, and da Cunha. In all six it is profoundly political. Yet these writers were not activists. Only Noer took major political stands, and he had exile to show for it. Fei, Hellman, and Mukerjee were active reformers in various ways, but only Fei worked in a country where reformism could and did lead to (internal) exile. Unlike last year’s writers, these six were not inveterate travelers. Fei and Noer received academic degrees abroad, and Fukutake, Mukerjee, and Fei took occasional academic trips. But for the most part these were homebound scholars, widely read in world culture, but dedicated to their own countries. A more striking common factor is that Fei, Fukutake, Noer, and Mukerjee

202

���� ����

were all profoundly affected by the Second World War. The Japanese invasion fatally weakened the nationalist government of China and liberated the Indonesians from Dutch imperialism, before it quickly succumbed itself to an American power that insisted on reorganizing Japanese society in important ways. In India, the war-­bankrupt British could not afford to remain. They cut the Gordian knot of religious difference (which some historians claim they had themselves created) by a hasty partition that left hundreds of  thousands dead and 10 million homeless. In each case, the scholar’s  work reflects the war both in its objects of study and in its conception of the role of  the social thinker. But the most important issue raised by this year’s readings is the nature of unitary societies. Fei, Noer, and Mukerjee all argue, one way or another, in favor of societies characterized by a fundamental unity: Communist, Muslim, Hindu. All believe their proposed societies to be characterized not only by a cohesive and meaningful set of values, but also by toleration of difference. There is much to admire in these visions, for they are founded in aspirations and ideals common to most humanity: a fulfilling and meaningful life, social difference tempered by cohesion, common welfare and assistance, mutual support. And all avoid to some extent the vacuous materialism that seems to be the fate of liberal societies where ultimate concerns have been banished to the private, personal realm. But this toleration of difference may be illusory. As we have seen, one way of reading Fei’s life is as a progression toward enlightenment. But another is as a slow recovery from forced recantation. On one reading, Noer’s proposed Muslim state is tolerant of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and even secularism. On another, it would pursue religious homogenization and enforcement. In some views, Mukerjee’s commonalty is an exciting, because alternative, form of  universalism. In others, it is a neo-­Hindu orthodoxy from an author whose nationalism reflected opposition to the liberation of East Bengal’s Muslims from Hindu domination. For all three, then, the unitary societies can be read either as fulfilling and supportive or as constraining and oppressive. As for liberalism, in neither da Cunha nor Hellmann does it make a strong appearance. Da Cunha’s Brazilian Republic is an embarrassing mass of corruption and irrationality. Hellmann’s tiny liberal group is impotent against overpowering forces, and its own proposed policies were to be remodeled and then married to racism to produce the bizarre offspring that

���������� ��������

203

was apartheid. Only Fukutake seems optimistic, and the reader knows that as of his writing his country was only 15 years past an apocalyptic involvement with militarism and, moreover, that his proposed liberated villages would soon be gutted by the triumphant forces of state-­managed consumer capitalism. Social life is indeed a process, a process of difference. We need the difference. But not the tragedy.

���� ����

���

Léopold Sédar Senghor

�������� �� ������ �� ��������������� ����� ��������� leader, throughout his life Léopold Sédar Senghor remained an intellectual. His poetry is enshrined as canonical. His incidental writings make up five thick volumes of elegant prose. His concept of “negritude” remains a vibrant challenge to the many varieties of racism. If politics did not leave Senghor the time to transform all of this insight into a systematic analysis of society, it nonetheless provided him with a breadth of experience and a depth of understanding unavailable to the writers of systematic treatises. And in the modern culture of superficial summaries, Senghor’s writings stand out for their combination of brevity with precision, of accessibility with grace. They say much in little space, and their consistency is the consistency of the man himself, always changing over the course of a long and eventful life, yet always remaining the same. Léopold Sédar Senghor was born in the coastal town of  Joal, Senegal, but grew up in his mother’s inland village of Djilor, his mother having refused to join her husband’s other wives in the elder Senghor’s compound in Joal. Senghor’s father was a hunter-­turned-­merchant, brokering the rural peanut trade for a French firm and practicing a loose Catholicism despite his polygamy. The family hybridity was evident in Senghor’s name, the Catholic “Léopold” being added to the Serer “Sédar.” For seven years, Senghor grew up in the rural countryside, dreamy and thoughtful. His father then called him to Joal and sent him to school. Although Senghor himself felt a vocation Liberté 1: Negritude et Humanisme. By Léopold Sédar Senghor. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964. Pp. 445; On African Socialism. By Léopold Sédar Senghor. Translated by Mercer Cook. New York: Praeger, 1964. Pp. 173.

208

���� ����

for the priesthood, a combination of French assimilationism, astounding talent, and amazing luck took him through various schools to the top of the French educational system. In 1928, at age 21, he arrived at the Lycée Louis-­ le-­Grand to prepare for the exams to enter the École Normale Supérieure, the alma mater of six prime ministers, as well as of Henri Bergson and Jean-­ Paul Sartre, of Louis Pasteur and Émile Durkheim. Among Senghor’s close friends at Louis-­le-­Grand was classmate Georges Pompidou, who introduced the reclusive Senghor to the broader social and intellectual Parisian world and who would be prime minister and then president of France from 1962 to 1974 when Senghor was president of Senegal. Choosing not to retake the École Normale exam after his first failure (Durkheim, for example, passed only on his third try), Senghor took a university degree and began teaching in Tours, meanwhile pursuing studies in ethnography and linguistics with an eye to a university post. At the same time, he began writing poetry and, with Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas, built the negritude movement. In the mid-­1930s, he became agrégé of the University of Paris, the first African to do so, and in the late 1930s, he gradually emerged as an important political spokesman for French West Africa. The French assimilationist ideal included military service, and during the war, Senghor was captured and spent 18 months in a POW camp. There he wrote what would become his second main collection of poetry (Hosties noirs) and rediscovered his African roots perforce, since German policies segregated prisoners by race. After the war, Senghor decided to enter politics, becoming an elected deputy to the French Assembly under the tutelage of Lamine Guèye, then Senegal’s leading politician. Although both men affiliated with the French socialist party, Senghor found European socialism irrelevant to the African situation and broke with both the party and Guèye. He built his own political organization, based on the rural masses and, in predominantly Muslim northern Senegal, on the marabouts, the traditional religious leaders. He was aided in this task by a Muslim schoolteacher and rural organizer, Mamadou Dia (toleration was characteristic of  both Senghor and Senegal). As a result, Senghor’s party dominated Senegalese politics in the years leading up to independence in 1960, and Senghor emerged in this period as one of the two most important politicians of  West Africa, alongside the more radical Félix Houphouet-­Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire. In 1960, Senghor became independent Senegal’s first president, a position he held until 1980. Throughout all this time, he continued to write poetry, to produce elaborate and learned political analyses, and to participate actively

������� ����� �������

209

in literary and intellectual life. But his popularity waned during his presidency. In part this reflected his break with Dia in 1962. More important, the inevitable problems of development in a country with few natural resources led to public disillusionment, although the post-­Senghor years produced a certain nostalgia as well. Senghor was one of the few African leaders of his time to give up power voluntarily, continuing a Senegalese tradition of democracy that extended well before independence. Senghor’s retirement held further surprises, however. In 1984 he was elected to the Académie Française. His writing continued unabated, and his poetry became established in the French canon. He died in France in 2001. Senghor’s published work takes two forms. First are the poetry collections, which appeared in 1945, 1948, 1956, 1961, 1964, 1969, and 1979. They constitute a sustained examination of Senghor’s life, from the first poetic memories of Africa, written in the gray winter of Paris, to the elegy for his son Philippe, who died in an automobile accident when Senghor was 76. Sen­ g­hor’s poetic gift was lyrical and self-­consciously African. His poetry is per­ vaded by repetition, rhythm, and assonance—­devices he identified as central to negritude, the black experience of the natural and social worlds. Likewise, his choice of the lyric genre paralleled his identification of negritude with direct sensual experience and a “surreal” connection to the world (for Sen­ ghor, “surreal” meant “beyond the real” or “more than real”). Indeed, Senghor once remarked that a black man always possessed a lyrical sensibility [Liberté 1, p. 66]). Although Senghor was both an adept practitioner as well as an admirer of the abstract thinking that he found in Europe, he contrasted European abstraction throughout his life with the lyrical and direct mode of experience for which Africa was both his personal source and—­in the abstract, European sense—­his symbol. It is the merit of thinking in poetry that Senghor could always sustain this ambivalence between abstraction and concreteness, where the pressures of consistency and discipline would have forced a writer of treatises to choose the one or the other. This persistent ambivalence also pervades the second form of Senghor’s work, the collections of other writings that form the five volumes of Liberté. Here are contained speeches, lectures, introductions and prefaces, reviews, essays, reports: all the prose Senghor generated in a long intellectual life. The volumes are loosely organized by topic, but since they appeared in 1964, 1971, 1977, 1983, and 1993, they are also inevitably chronological. Liberté 1, reviewed here, contains two prewar pieces, but the majority of its contents date from 1950 to 1964, the years of Senghor’s rise to political eminence. The

210

���� ����

book contains everything from Senghor’s first major public lecture in Dakar (1937) to essays on Senegalese poets and folklore, from analyses of the Harlem Renaissance to discussions of 16th-­century French poetry, from essays on linguistics to elegies of famous Senegalese. That the longest of the 58 pieces in this book is 35 pages shows that Senghor the social and cultural theorist writes in the same form as does Sen­ ghor the poet. He does not make a long and systematic argument. He writes in short pieces that we might call theoretical lyrics. In these are deployed, again and again, the basic terms of Senghorian thought: negritude, surreality, image, rhythm, integral humanism, sense and symbol, civilization and culture, and “the civilization of the universal.” Indeed, the longer pieces of Senghor reveal themselves, on inspection, to be linked chains of smaller theoretical insights. In keeping with the lyrical—­as opposed to narrative—­ tendency of Senghor’s thought, there is no long logical thread of theoretical argument, but rather a detailed sense of the central realities of a present, expressed again and again, in various settings and with various materials. And the three most important of these realities are that black African culture has something profoundly important to offer to European culture, that this something has been largely lost in Europe itself, and that a universal civilization cannot lose any major part of the human project. (For readers who prefer traditional exposition of theory, the essay “Eléments constitutifs d’une civilisation d’inspiration négro-­africaine” [Liberté 1, pp. 252–­86] is as close as Senghor gets to a systematic presentation of the underpinnings of negritude.) The three longer essays contained in the translated volume On African Socialism date from the period of  Senghor’s political triumph, and one finds in them a much more practical approach. Here Senghor the politician is demonstrating that classical Marxism is irrelevant to Africa, but that a renewed socialism, rooted in African culture, can provide Senegal with a way forward. These essays present Senghor the pedagogue, working his way through the details of Marx and then onward to the contemporary French Marxists like Lucien Goldmann and Henri Lefebvre. He is concerned that his listeners get the definitions right, but also that they follow him in his rereading of Marx as a humanist who got lost in the details of economic materialism. (Sen­ ghor very much preferred the earlier, more philosophical and abstract Marx to the later and more historically localized one.) He wants his hearers not to reject the Negro-­African heritage for a Europeanized materialism, for Marx’s “terribly inhuman metaphysics, an atheistic metaphysics in which

������� ����� �������

211

mind is sacrificed to matter, freedom to the determined, man to things” (African Socialism, p. 76). Yet these essays are also filled with specific political and social recommendations, as befits their origin as lectures to party audiences in Senegal. One can only guess what the young Senegalese cadres must have made of Senghor’s extended elaboration of the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose writings became central to him after the mid-­1950s. Senghor’s ideas changed slowly but steadily over the course of his life, since both his habits of thought and his immediate political needs drove him to focus on present matters. One sees this first of all in his sources. The ear­ly works employ the writings of Leo Frobenius and other European ethnographers to undermine racist descriptions of black “primitivism,” whereas the later ones engage directly with Marxism as an analysis unhelpful for present-­day Africa. The early works derive their tolerant humanism in part from the attempt of  Jacques Maritain (in Humanisme Intégral, 1936) to envision a world society in which Catholicism would be but one of several religions, where the later ones rely heavily on the progressivist evolutionism and scientized moralism of Teilhard de Chardin. (It is striking that both writers were considered dangerous by the Catholic church, to which Senghor remained dedicated throughout his life: Maritain’s book was nearly placed on the Index, and Teilhard de Chardin’s major work was suppressed during his lifetime by the general of the Jesuit order to which he belonged.) But the change in Senghor involves not only sources, but also ideas. Sen­ ghor’s earliest pieces make much of métissage—­hybridization. He saw métissage everywhere—­in his father’s combination of native beliefs with Catholicism, in the Senegalese racial mixture of  Berbers and sub-­Saharan Africans, in his own combination of  French and Senegalese experience. But hybridization eventually staled for Senghor the politician and writer, however much it may have described Senghor the man. His later work argues the need for a different African way, less a hybridizing of  Western and African ideas and more a newly envisioned form of socialism, rooted in what Senghor took to be the traditional society of Africans. The judicious professor, standing above the fray, had to take sides when he became a politician and president. It has been common to belittle Senghor’s social theory as having mistaken the distinction of traditional and modern societies for the distinction—­ correlated with the first in Senghor’s experience—­of black and white socie­ ties. This is false in two crucial respects. First, Senghor was well aware that not all nonmodern societies were black, as one notes from his scattered re­ marks about China, the Arab Middle East, North Africa, and India. To be

212

���� ����

sure, he never evinces the broadly historical consciousness that typically sustains a narrative sensibility’s concept of the universal. But that was not his way. He seeks the universal realities of the colonial encounter through a profound mastery of his own case, as the lyrical sensibility requires. But more important, Senghor does not think that the virtues of negritude are either absent from or indeed optional in modern life. Quite the contrary, for him negritude embodies the direct experiencing of the world that must be recovered if humanity is to advance. So he identifies the key signs of negritude in Western writers as diverse as Louise Labé, Victor Hugo, and even J. W. Goethe. Western philosophical movements like existentialism and phenomenology were for Senghor merely more evidence of this fact, and so we find him citing writers like Jean Piaget and Maurice Merleau-­Ponty. Negritude was thus for Senghor not by any means unique to Africans. As he said when discussing the reverse case, of whether Negro Africans had the European virtue of discursive abstraction: Does this mean, as certain young people would like to interpret my remarks, that the Negro African lacks discursive reason, that he has never used any? I have never said so. In truth every ethnic group possesses different aspects of reason and all the virtues of man, but each has stressed only one aspect of reason, only certain virtues. (African Socialism, p. 75)

In sum, negritude was for Senghor a universal attribute, but one which Negro Africans had developed to a particularly high degree: Let us then consider the Negro African as he faces the object to be known, as he faces the Other: God, man, animal, tree or pebble, natural or social phenomenon. In contrast to the classic European, the Negro African does not draw a line between himself and the object, nor does he merely look at it and analyze it. . . . Immediately, he is moved, going centrifugally from subject to object on the waves of the Other. . . . Thus the Negro African [literally] sympathizes, abandons his personality to become identified with the Other, dies to be reborn in the Other. He does not assimilate. He is assimilated. . . . Subject and object are face to face in the very act of knowledge. It is a long caress of the night, an embrace of  joined bodies, the act of  love. (African Socialism, p. 73)

For Senghor, there was a long list of European versions of this immediate perception of, this identification with, the Other. But they had been lost.

������� ����� �������

213

A renewed awareness of them was what black Africa could give back to Europe. As the first of these passages reveals, Senghor’s ideas have been widely caricatured. His insistence on the centrality of rhythm and emotion in negritude has been turned by a sound-­bite culture into trivial beliefs. In fact, Senghor’s concept of rhythm is extremely complex, having been strongly influenced by his linguistic studies of the formal varieties of rhythm in Wo­lof and Serer poetry and folktales. Or again, his concept of emotion is not the simple one usually attributed to him, but a complex theory of un­ mediated, direct experience of the sensual world by assimilating oneself to it and searching for the sens beneath the surface, whether of reality or symbol. (The word sens in French can mean “meaning,” “intuition,” and “sensation.” Most often, Senghor intends all three.) Senghor’s theories therefore make an important contribution to our conceptualization of personal and social experience. In the long run, the direct attachment of them to racial difference may not survive, although the notion that there are societies that particularly value unmediated experience is a possible and interesting one. But the depth of Senghor’s theoretical contribu­ tion to the theory of social experience is unquestioned, even though that contribution came not through a systematic treatise but through a flexible set of concepts and ideas deployed again and again throughout his writing. The historical facts matter, too. It is important that a black African confronted the entire edifice of then-­current Western theory about race, accepted it more or less on its own terms (with some modifications by paleontologists like Teilhard), and then found a way to turn it on its head. Senghor used Western knowledge itself to say that African experience represented something every bit as important as European experience. That this feat later came to seem pointless because those old theories of race were pushed aside in favor of newer theories does not lessen Senghor’s achievement. Reinterpreting European ideas in the light of African experience, he found something essential that black Africa could contribute to a French civilization wallowing in military defeat, imperial decline, and materialist emptiness. If there is a question that remains after reading Senghor, it is what he actually meant by “civilization of the universal,” a phrase that comes from Teilhard. Senghor made much of  Teilhard’s insistence that unity alone permits differentiation and that difference is complementary, not hierarchical. Yet the unity Senghor saw in Africa fell victim to a hundred particularisms. His projected West African federation foundered at Independence. His political

214

���� ����

coalition cracked within two years of his presidency. The ideal Africa of his memory/theory dissolved under the pressures of dependent development. (If one peruses the later volumes of Liberté, one finds him in 1975 paraphrasing Goethe somewhat mournfully, saying “everyone should be hybrid [métis] in his own way” [Liberté 5, p. 51]). As a practicing politician Senghor changed with his times, but like all politicians he could not change fast enough nor escape the prices he had paid for power. For all their size and authority, social structures change much faster than men, and the ideologies that made Senghor an ideal leader for peaceful independence did not serve as well in a nation suddenly on its own and challenged by internal differences that had been hidden by the fact of a commonly suffered imperialism. In the world of action, there can be no men for all seasons. But what Senghor bequeathed us as social scientists is not his political heritage, but a body of social thought unlike any other. For he addressed one of the great questions of his century—­the question of race—­through the unusual perspective of a lyrical sensibility. He wrote his ideas in poems. He elaborated them across dozens of occasional pieces. He avoided consistency of argument for consistency of sens. It is this consistency of his immediate sensibility as a thinker that one encounters when reading Senghor. Not an argument summarizable in short statements or an example of this or that position. Instead, one encounters a unique man with a unique perspective compounded of unique experience, who has the gift to tell his thoughts in page after page of  beautiful prose and poetry. There is no other social thinker like him.

����

Gino Germani

����� ���������� ��������� ��� ����� ��������� ������� ��� each does so in its own way. One writes of the burdens and evils of empire, another of the possibilities and problems of democracy. Still another studies the duties and pathologies of administration. Behind them all lie questions of rights and obligations, conflict and rebellion, interest and altruism. But while these great political issues are everywhere the same, they are nonetheless everywhere experienced through the particularities of a time and a place. Politics cannot exist purely in the abstract, but is always incarnate in the real interests and real conflicts of a here and now. Since that here-­and-­now is always changing, political knowledge of it must also change, and so in the course of their own political theorizing, generations always set aside the political knowledge of their predecessors. Sometimes they ignore it; sometimes they reject it ritualistically; sometimes they enshrine it in anachronistic splendor. The most current form of rejection is to reduce past writers to mere index terms for this or that current political position, like the names of forgotten capitalists on university buildings. A complex and nuanced lifework becomes a few “keywords.” An impassioned life becomes a superficial encyclopedia entry. To reread the past for itself, then, is to recover the complex and impassioned here-­and-­now of another. The Germani text read here requires such an exercise. Surprising as it may seem today, the second half of the 20th century was perplexed to discover that democracy offered no guarantee of human progress. Formal democracy had produced, among other things, Fascism Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism. By Gino Germani. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1978. Pp. xi+292.

216

���� ����

and Nazism. “Elections” and “congresses” could be observed in obviously to­ talitarian states. Even the few countries where elections resulted in actual changes of government had seen strongly authoritarian currents like McCarthyism and Action Française. And of course thinkers from the colonized world rightly questioned the democracy of those “democracies” in the first place. The discussion was everywhere tense, even extravagant. In the Cold War, there could be no apolitical discussions of politics. Through this tortured landscape, the writings of Gino Germani provide a road less traveled. Hounded out of Italy as an undesirable, Germani soon found himself embroiled in the baroque politics of Argentina. From Argentina he would flee to the United States, where he worked uncomfortably as a “pure social scientist” before returning—­with equal unease—­to postfascist Italy. His work is one long inquiry into the fascism and authoritarianism that shaped his quietly tumultuous life. Yet it sees those phenomena from the viewpoint of the sojourner. Germani was nowhere at home. The child of a socialist tailor, Gino Germani was born February 4, 1911, in Rome. At 19 his erratic—­often autodidactic—­education was interrupted by a short imprisonment for antifascist leafleting. Exhausted by the subsequent police surveillance, Germani and his widowed mother left for Argentina in 1934. (The Italian embassy there would continue to harass him episodically until 1945.) In Buenos Aires he worked for his uncle and became active in antifascist activities. (For many reasons, not least among them the cumbersome procedures, immigrants generally did not naturalize in Argentina. They therefore could not vote and turned their political activity toward their home nations.) In 1938, a government job enabled Germani to begin part-­time study at the University of Buenos Aires. Active in student politics, he eventually took his degree in 1944. Politics in Argentina were notably complex in those years, with coups in 1943 and 1945. Political positions ranged from extreme conservatism and nativism to the furthest edges of communism, and they addressed not only Argentine issues, but also fascism and war abroad. More immediately, there were repeated student demonstrations and government suppressions at the universities; Germani had two more trips to jail. During Germani’s university years, historian Ricardo Levene recruited him to the Institute of Sociology. There he discovered some unopened boxes full of contemporary sociological work from the United States, which turned him in a strongly empirical direction and also introduced him to writers like W. I. Thomas, Florian Znaniecki, George Lundberg, and Talcott Parsons. Although still a student, Germani was already in his thirties and became the

���� �������

217

leader of the empirical program of the institute, undertaking major research projects on the middle classes, public opinion, and other topics. He also became the institute’s representative to the Fourth Argentine National Census, where the characteristically incisive questions he recommended were uniformly rejected by the conservative commissioners. In 1945 the first Perón ad­ ministration sent Germani into internal exile; he worked in publishing and taught at the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores, an alternate university. In 1955 Perón fell, and Germani returned to the university as director of the Institute for Sociology, where he rapidly developed the field, following an em­ pirical agenda parallel to that of sociology in the United States at the time. In the early 1960s, however, Argentina’s liberal development project foundered, and a newly left student politics flowered in the wake of the Cuban revolution. Germani was redefined as a pettifogging empiricist and accused on the one hand of uncritically accepting the new American sociology and on the other (somewhat inconsistently) of recycling familiar Argentine theories. His skeptical appropriation of Marx alienated the leftist students, while his frank antifascism alienated their rightist peers. In a haze of visa difficulties, delays, and accusations reminiscent of his departure from Italy 30 years before, Germani left Argentina in 1966. Three months after his departure came the first of the military takeovers that would begin Argentina’s slow descent into a time of disappearances, torture, and death. Germani had no illusions. In a biography of  her father, his daughter quotes him as foreseeing either “an extremely shallow and calm life in the United States” or “an excessively unpredictable and chaotic one in Argentina” (Ana Alejandra Germani, Antifascism and Sociology [New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Press, 2008], p. 159). Although the American students were themselves restless, the veteran of three imprisonments and two exiles was unimpressed: “I find that these American youngsters are not very talented. I would like to teach a course on riots Latin American style” (p. 163). Germani was usually on the road when not teaching the bewildered Harvard under­ graduates. Cambridge, too, was unbearable. He wrote his daughter: The problem is that I get thoroughly depressed by the sight of Americans’ very serious faces. But do you think it’s possible to express emotions in New England, or, even worse, among Harvard sociologists? . . . It’s true there is less noise, everything seems smooth, but there does not seem to be life, or at least not what I have learned to call life since I was young—­laughter, tears, anxiety, anger, fights, voices. (Antifascism and Sociology, p. 200)

218

���� ����

In the mid-­1970s and with extraordinary difficulty, Germani reestablished his Italian citizenship in order to take a part-­time position at the University of  Naples and find a home in his native Rome. He died there in 1979. Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism is one of three books is­ sued at the close of Germani’s career. The original manuscript was most likely a compilation of various existing materials, for Germani tells us in the introduction that it was written in a mixture of English, Spanish, and Italian. Translators have flattened this exciting hybrid language into dutiful but occasionally misleading English. (Germani himself surely never used the English word “peronism” in his life.) The book’s main argument is that fascism proper should be seen as primarily a middle-­class reactionary movement, while lower-­class authoritarianism of the Argentinian sort demands a separate category, which Germani calls “national populism.” The book’s first section sets out theoretical positions, beginning with general presuppositions and then turning to the two core concepts of middle-­and lower-­class authoritarianism. The second section analyzes the roots of national populism in Argentina, employing methods ranging from historical and cultural study to demography and detailed political and institutional analysis. The third section comprises a single chapter on the political socialization of the young in Italy and Spain, revisiting in retrospect the experiences that had started the young Germani on his life­ long odyssey. Germani’s opening section dutifully situates his analysis with respect to contemporary metropolitan theoretical writing, which was then (for political reasons related to the Cold War) seeking a definition of totalitarianism that would put all the enemies of the United States in one category and that would simultaneously define the fascisms of Germany, Italy, and Spain as passing events in “fundamentally democratic” societies. Germani cared little about this effort to square the circle. Like so many social scientists, he was mainly interested to understand his own life, and in particular the two authoritarian movements that had transformed it: Mussolini’s Fascism and the Argentinian movement that, following Latin American custom, is known by its leader’s name: el peronismo. Germani’s opening chapters also ventriloquize the functionalist theories of political development that were common at Harvard when he arrived in the mid-­1960s. One hears echoes of  Talcott Parsons, Seymour Martin Lipset, Gabriel Almond, and other theorists who believed that the age of revolution was past because social change had been “institutionalized.” Curiously,

���� �������

219

however, these functionalist references are far fewer than those in the opening chapters of Germani’s prior analysis of Argentina (Politica y sociedad en una épocha de transición [Buenos Aires: Paidos, 1968]). Familiarity had apparently bred contempt, and it is soon evident that functionalism is seldom used in Germani’s analysis. We meet the real Germani in the empirical chapters of Authoritarianism’s second section. Here he details the political heritage of el peronismo and the pattern of underlying social structural changes that produced its constituencies. He then undertakes an internal comparison between the rise of el peronismo and that of the middle-­class Argentine populism of the 1890s, which had culminated in the universal male franchise of the Saenz Peña law of 1912. The second section closes with a comparison of the Argentine and Italian cases. These four chapters are the heart of the book, painstakingly researched and argued, at once both subtle and compelling. As these core chapters make clear, the book is an inductive attempt to derive from two closely argued empirical cases a theory of two pathways leading from the breakdown of democracy to authoritarianism: one the well-­ studied route from middle-­class mobilization to fascism, the other the less-­ studied route from lower-­class mobilization to authoritarian populism. Germani tries to discover within his cases a sequence of stages or configurations of powers that will capture—­even explain—­the inevitability of these stories. In choosing a stage theory framework, he follows the metropolitan social science mainstream of the time, which found stage theories very appealing, perhaps because they provided a first (and, for the metropolitan countries, a self-­interested and optimistic) way to think about decolonization. But stage theories were also common in psychology as well, Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget being well-­known practitioners. (Such theories were perhaps a broader intellectual fad, although a momentary one: they disappeared almost completely in the latter years of the 20th century.) As Germani’s argument proceeds, his stage conceptions break down into the complex contingencies more characteristic of ecological arguments. The demographic foundations of el peronismo prove to lie in a combination of four things: dramatic upward mobility in the large immigrant working class of the Argentine littoral, sudden cessation of external immigration around 1930, expansion of the rural latifundia and cattle grounds at the expense of smallholders and peasants, and continuing industrial demand, which gradually increased as international depression drove Argentina toward import substitution. As Germani shows with extensive demographic data (most of

220

���� ����

it his own or reworkings of the very scarce census material), this combination resulted in a massive flood of rural workers to the cities, where they became a new and unabsorbed working class, relatively disconnected from the strong unions of the immigrants. Unlike the immigrants, these internal migrants could and did vote, and when Perón became minister of labor in 1943, he immediately recognized them as the potential foundation of a mass party. Thus Germani’s stages relax into a conjunctural account based on alignments between somewhat independent trends in a constrained system of political actors with various means and levels of political input, all of them subject to dramatic forces from abroad (depression and war in particular) because of Argentina’s international position as a food-­exporting powerhouse. But Germani’s stage theories are unusual for another reason—­their insistence that there can be stages leading to fascism as well as to democracy, to economic regression as well as to economic development. There is no uniform direction, as in most stage thinking. There is only a ceaseless rearranging of power and control, occasionally arriving at the temporarily stable authoritarianism that was Germani’s principal concern. If in his summaries he presents lists of sequential factors that lead ineluctably to totalitarianism, the care of the analysis belies those lists; at heart Germani was a pure conjuncturalist. Germani’s distance from the metropolitan mainstream is also evident in his idiosyncratic use of the various concepts he borrows from it. Thus, he speaks of center and periphery in Argentina, but he doesn’t mean by this the metaphysical “center of society” that Edward Shils had idealized but rather the literal geographic contrast between the modern littoral and the more con­ servative, smallholder, and traditional areas beyond the commercial agri­ cultural heartland. This was for Germani a contrast recalling the “civilization and barbarism” of Sarmiento’s Facundo (see chapter XIV; Germani had cited Facundo in Politica y sociedad.) But, typically, Germani insisted on complicating that earlier contrast by noting the creole nature of the internal migrants, their peculiar relation to the cattle barons, their low skill levels, and their lack of the urban culture of syndicalism. Similarly, Germani’s definition of “integration” is much less metaphysical than that of  Talcott Parsons (or of  Parsons’s master Émile Durkheim). By integration Germani means simply political participation that is (1) within channels provided by the current regime and (2) perceived and experienced as legitimate by both sides (i.e., regime and participant; p. 107.) For Germani,

���� �������

221

integration could occur via institutional forms completely repugnant to the Anglo-­American tradition—­riots and demonstrations, for example. For similar reasons, Germani’s concepts of mobilization and demobilization are very broad. Voting was only one among many institutionalized means of political influence in Argentina, alongside strikes, corporate action, mass marches, Church politics, and so on. This broad concept of political participation sets Germani strongly apart from the conventional metropolitan political science of his time, with its intensive focus on voting. (Most Argentines thought that the country’s voting system was hopelessly corrupt, in any case.) It is also particularly noticeable that Germani focuses on demobilization as much as on mobilization. For he sees that, although politics changes as continuously as does the weather, there are occasional calm days. Yet at the same time, for Germani demobilization could be coercive; groups could be denied political access as easily as they could gain it. And therefore no regime could be permanent. His world is one of ceaseless change. Germani’s work is conspicuously eclectic in methodology. We have already seen his extensive demographic analyses. Indeed, his earlier-­published summary of Argentine social structure was the first of its kind. But he also used the new inferential statistics: ecological level regressions investigating the class origins of el peronismo appear in the work under review here. Side by side with these quantitative and empirical approaches, however, are elegant interpretive analyses. There is, for example, a fine discussion of how economic liberalism was early defined as conservative in Argentina and, per­ haps more important, how democracy became a pejorative term for many Argentines because of the hostile trade policies of the metropolitan democracies, which profoundly disturbed the country’s economy. Germani also spends a good deal of time on the institutional and structural analysis of elites, focusing especially on the union leaders whose divisions and choices would play into Perón’s hands during the crucial years between 1943 and 1945 (pp. 174–­85). All these institutional and interpretive analyses complement the quantitative ones, making the empirical sections of the book singularly compelling. But in the context of  Germani’s own life, perhaps the most telling chapter is the last, a thoughtful analysis of fascist indoctrination of the young, focusing on Italy, but treating Spain as a short comparative case. Germani emphasizes the self-­defeating quality of fascist indoctrination. On the one hand the fascists needed the dynamism and excitement of the young, which could be released only by open discussion and debate. (“Discussion is a

222

���� ����

fascist obligation,” says one astounding quote from the fascist press; p. 259). On the other, they needed conformity with their general project of protecting vested interests and demobilizing the lower class. As if this dilemma were not enough, the fascists also had no institutional plan to bring young people into the party hierarchy. The resultant ambivalence and blockage drove young people to apathy, conformist alienation, and—­once the war started—­ underground opposition. Germani himself left Italy long before that. As he said, he believed that life meant laughter, tears, anxiety, anger, fights, and voices, and his own voice had been one too many for the fascists of the late 1920s. But his voice may also have been one too many—­or at least one too loud—­for Harvard as well. There is no idealizing of the United States in the book, as there was in so much Cold War social science. Germani quotes without comment a fascist’s remark that elite replacement in the United States takes place via the spoils system. He notes the size of the U.S. underclass (p. 62), takes for granted the hegemonic and deleterious nature of U.S. political and military interventions (pp. 72, 113), and remarks that there is considerable authoritarian support for U.S. “democracy” (p. 93). His judgment of American politics probably echoed his judgment of  the Harvard sociology department: uninspired, unemotional, uninvolved—­thoughtless and dominant at one and the same time. But in the end Germani’s own politics are themselves elusive. He favored liberty and inclusion. But he wrote a whole book on marginality without mentioning his own life as a marginal man. He favored fights and voices, but spent his life analyzing loud men who fought too much. Germani was a sojourner, and we hear his story without really knowing whence he came and where he wanted to go. His work is perhaps the more powerful for that very silence.

�����

Taha Husayn

����� ��� ���������� �� ��� ������� �� � ����������� �� history and a social theorist, it is surprising that the first full appraisal of his social thought in a Western language was written by a blind Egyptian exchange student. Taha Husayn’s 1918 doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne analyzed the Muqaddimah, the 1,200-­page theoretical preface to Ibn Khaldun’s immense Book of Examples and Archive of History, which attempts a universal history of the world. Husayn’s reading was not only early, but also unique, for he was a traditionally educated Muslim studying a great work of his own heritage but in oral and translated form, and for a French dissertation supervisor who was—­like Ibn Khaldun—­persuaded that he had invented the true and universal science of social affairs. It is perhaps inevitable that so adventurous a young scholar would eventually become central to his country’s political, educational, and literary life. Taha Husayn was born in 1889 in Maghaghah, about 100 miles south of Cairo. Seventh of 13 children, he was blinded at three by poor treatment of an eye infection. After study in a local Koranic school—­described in his autobiography The Days (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1997)—­he enrolled in 1902 at al-­Azhar, the great theological university of Cairo. Al-­ Azhar was then under the reforming control of Muḥammad ʿAbduh, the leader of Muslim modernism (see also chapter XXIII). After eight years of study in the traditional manner at al-­Azhar, following particularly the lectures of ʿAbduh’s protégé al-­Marṣafī, Husayn discovered the new, secular Egyptian University (founded 1908), enrolled there, and pursued a thesis La philosophie sociale d’Ibn-­ Khaldoun. By Taha Husayn. Paris: A. Pedone, 1918. Pp. vi+222.

224

���� ����

on Abū al-­ʿAlāʾ al-­Maʿrrī, a medieval writer who like Husayn himself was blind, passionate, and unorthodox. Having received the university’s first doctorate, Husayn overcame numerous obstacles to travel to France for further education. This he pursued in Montpellier and Paris during the First World War, ultimately obtaining a first degree in history as well as (and at the same time as) a doctorate under the joint supervision of the Orientalist Paul Casanova and the sociologist Émile Durkheim, who died shortly before Husayn defended his doctoral thesis in January 1918. While in France, Husayn fell in love with and married a reader whom he called his “sweet voice”: Suzanne Bresseau. The couple returned to Cairo, where Husayn began to teach history and literature at his alma mater, now renamed the University of Cairo. In 1926 he published an analysis arguing that much of pre-­Islamic poetry was in fact later forgeries, igniting a religious controversy that persisted even beyond his appointment as dean of fac­ulty in 1929. In the same years, he published the first volume of  his autobiography. By 1932, however, Husayn was forced out of the university and turned to journalism for a living. He also wrote novels: The Call of the Curlew in 1934 and Adib in 1935, the latter drawing on many aspects of his own life and painting a bleak picture of an Egyptian intellectual lost in the Western luxuries of France. In addition, he published translations from both Greek (Sophocles) and French (Racine, Voltaire). Husayn returned to the university, however, and throughout the 1940s played a large role as a controversialist, strongly supporting the modernist position and publishing in the periodical press unforgettable fictionalized portrayals of poverty. (When these tales were gathered into a book—­even­ tually translated into English as The Sufferers in 1993—­it could not be published in Egypt, appearing first in Lebanon.) Husayn also spent much of this period writing on education, producing The Future of Culture in Egypt in 1938 and eventually becoming minister of education in 1950. Although he left office with his colleagues of  the Wafd Cabinet in 1952, just prior to the Revolution, Husayn had by then helped spread primary and secondary education throughout Egypt. In later years he edited a daily newspaper and continued writing. He died in 1973. The young Taha Husayn’s profound but idiosyncratic reading of Ibn Khal­ dun arose in part from the conditions under which he worked. He read the Muqaddimah in the summer of 1917, having fled war-­torn Paris for the South of  France. He was then in the first blush of a passionate love that would last until he died.

���� ������

225

Here were a youth and girl in the first days of their engagement, filling most of the day with study, Latin in the morning, reading the French translation of Ibn-­Khaldun’s  Al-­Muqaddimah in the forenoon, and then after a break at the table for lunch, Greek and Roman history. At 5 p.m., we left these for French literature, continuing until we went for a stroll outside the village where we lived. (The Days, p. 358)

Blindness meant that Husayn encountered the main body of Ibn Khaldun’s text in the “sweet voice” of a young French woman, reading a translation done by an Irishman who came to France in 1830 to study Oriental languages. Aiming to make the work accessible, William McGuckin de Slane had deliberately made a free translation from the Arabic and had therefore translated crucial words in different ways in different places, trying to “render always in an exact manner the thought of the author.” Thus, asabiyah—­arguably the central theoretical term of Ibn Khaldun’s analysis—­becomes morale, esprit de corps, grande influence, zèle, and other things, depending on the context. By contrast, Franz Rosenthal, who undertook the first full English translation and who like de Slane was translating between two nonnative languages (he was German), made the opposite decision, translating asabiyah as “group feeling” throughout his text. The same happens to mulk, which Rosenthal renders throughout as “royal authority,” but which in de Slane is most often souverainté, but sometimes is parti imposant, royauté, or monarchie. This divergence reflects a central dilemma of translation: whether to reproduce the grouping of meanings in the origin language by employing a non-­idiomatic but constant term in the target language (Rosenthal) or to privilege idiom in the target language at the cost of dismantling conceptual units in the original (de Slane). Husayn often criticizes de Slane’s choice of the latter strategy (as well as many of  his particular translations). As these criticisms indicate, Husayn must also have had Arabic readers who could read him portions of the text from the Arabic originals. A second aspect of the de Slane translation also shaped Husayn’s reading decisively. To hear a text is inevitably more linear than to read it, and it was therefore particularly consequential that—­again aiming for popularization—­de Slane inserted Ibn Khaldun’s autobiography before the text of the  Muqaddimah, even though the autobiography is usually considered the final segment of the Book of Examples. Husayn therefore encoun­tered the man before his arguments, and he found Ibn Khaldun’s life immoral, self-­centered, even irreligious. Ibn Khaldun spent his early years seeking positions of power

226

���� ����

in the treacherous eddies of eighth-­century North African politics. He wrote his great work only once his failures closed that world to him, retiring to a well-­defended castle for four years of writing before moving to Tunis to continue his work’s historical sections (and subsequently fleeing Tunis for Cairo). The opening chapter of Husayn’s dissertation presents this story in a singularly unflattering light. For Husayn, Ibn Khaldun’s autobiography is a middle-­ aged man’s self-­serving rewriting of his past as a timeserver and betrayer, a switcher of sides and breaker of promises. In Husayn’s reading, Ibn Khaldun’s Egyptian years become a time of overreaching and self-­aggrandizement. Ibn Khaldun’s celebrated interview with the conqueror Timur becomes yet another piece of fast dealing. Worst of all, Ibn Khaldun’s laconic reaction to the loss of his wife in a shipwreck becomes for the happily affianced Husayn a mark of inhumanity. The intensity of Husayn’s reaction, however, derives in part from strong similarities between the two men. Both were passionate and determined. Both had traveled far in their lives. Both were associated with al-­Azhar (Ibn Khaldun taught there five centuries before Husayn was a student). Both had complex—­perhaps ambivalent—­relations with Islam. Indeed, Husayn’s most striking accusation is that Ibn Khaldun was not really a committed Muslim. One sometimes wonders whether Husayn is not, in his critique of  Ibn Khaldun’s life, exorcising fears about himself. The book on which Husayn bases his discussion of Ibn Khaldun’s social thought is itself merely the introduction (Arabic—­muqaddimah) to Ibn Khaldun’s monumental Book of Examples. In the full Book it is followed by a lengthy history of the world, the North African Berber kingdoms, and the Arab kingdoms that surround them, each much longer than the Muqaddimah itself. Organizationally, the Muqaddimah begins with two introductory chapters and various prefatory remarks. Chapter 2 then discusses nomadic life and chapter 3 royal authority, the khalifate, and other forms of dominant politics. Chapter 4 turns to sedentary societies and chapter 5 to means of getting a living. The sixth and final chapter considers forms of learning and teaching, and constitutes nearly a third of  the Muqaddimah. In the simplistic view, this complicated design and these hundreds of pages all reduce to what has sometimes been called the Khaldunian cycle. Nomadic societies are tested and tried by the rigors of desert life. They are strong militarily because they are strong socially, because they are bound by intense blood ties of solidarity, and because they are selected by intense competition. They inevitably seize the goods, houses, and persons of sedentary

���� ������

227

societies, creating empires over these weaker if wealthier and more civilized societies. But they succumb with equal inevitability to the luxuries and ease of sedentary life and fall victim to later nomads. The substantive chapters of the Muqadimmah thus divide naturally into the “cycle” chapters on nomadic emergence, preeminence, empire, and fall (chaps. 2–­3), the “society” chapters on sedentary societies as realities (chaps. 4–­5), and the long final chapter on the nature of learning (chap. 6). (Ibn Khaldun, incidentally, demolishes such a “brief summaries” approach to knowledge in chap. 6, sec. 35.) The second chapter of Husayn’s thesis confronts the still open question of whether Ibn Khaldun was a historian or some variety of social scientist. On the one hand, the main body of the Book of Examples is indeed a detailed history of the Berber and Arab kingdoms. On the other, Ibn Khaldun insists that one cannot understand that history without his new cultural science, for which he makes strong claims in both the first and sixth chapters of the Muqaddimah. Husayn sees both sides of this issue. He minimizes Ibn Khaldun’s elaborate techniques for critique of past documents and histories, which he believes derive directly from the traditional Muslim discipline of ousul el fiqh, the formal critique of sacred legal texts. On the other hand, he virtually identifies the modern Western discipline of history with such positivist techniques, referencing not so much traditional Muslim sources as the historian Charles Seignobos, from whom he had taken courses in France. Or again, Husayn notes that Ibn Khaldun has created his science of culture precisely to provide grounds of plausibility and likelihood that will allow a critical historian to question reports and interpretations of  past facts (if  they don’t seem theoretically likely, then they should be regarded as empirically questionable). But at the same time, he notes that the science of culture itself seems to be established principally by inductive analysis of historical materials. On another aspect of  Kahldunian history, Husayn is more clear and more unequivocally admiring. Ibn Khaldun, he tells us, is the first to abandon the idea of history as annals, that is, as lists of important events. What matters in history is the development and trajectory of peoples over time, not this or that event. In this Husayn chooses against Seignobos and the positivists. But there is a difficulty. Neither Ibn Khaldun nor Husayn sees that by so focusing on the trajectories of peoples, Ibn Khaldun ends up privileging a purely developmental and even internalist understanding of history, despite the fact that Ibn Khaldun’s own histories show again and again that history—­at least political history—­is not determined so much by the internal trajectory

228

���� ����

of one people as it is by the conjunctures of such trajectories across different peoples: what matters is the encounter of one people at a certain stage of one trajectory with another people at a different stage of another. In his third chapter, Husayn turns to the status of Ibn Khaldun’s theory of culture. This chapter is firmly Durkheimian. Husayn asks whether Ibn Khaldun has founded a new science sui generis, using one of  Durkheim’s favorite phrases. He criticizes Ibn Khaldun for having relied too much on concepts of human nature (i.e., psychology), even though Ibn Khaldun repeatedly remarks that “man is the child of customs, not of nature” (Muqaddimah, chap. 3, sec. 5; this remark actually appears several times). He criticizes the psychologism implicit in Ibn Khaldun’s use of life course metaphors for the “aging” of societies, even though these are mere metaphors. He also chides Ibn Khaldun for ignoring nonpolitical “society” (e.g., the Sufi brotherhoods, which Ibn Khaldun did not in fact completely ignore) and speaks of the “faits sociaux dont on aperçoit aujourd’hui l’originalité et l’intérêt,” employing the terminological banner—­“faits sociaux” (social facts)—­of the Durk­ heimian school. It is clear that Husayn had learned the Durkheimian view thoroughly. Husayn then turns to the prefatory remarks of the Muqaddimah, which address questions of climate and geography that would preoccupy writers after Ibn Khaldun like Giambattista Vico and the Baron de Montesquieu. In his fourth chapter, Husayn calls these “extrasocial factors.” (The labeling and the placing of these by Ibn Khaldun prefigure Durkheim’s similar isolation of extrasocial factors in the first section of Le suicide.) Ibn Khaldun’s theories of the social impact of climate and geography are not unusual or forward-­looking, and Husayn thinks them unimportant. But Ibn Khaldun’s last “extrasocial factor” (the term is Husayn’s, not Ibn Khaldun’s) is one of Durkheim’s most important social factors indeed—­religion. Ibn Khaldun’s analysis of religion is central for two reasons: first because religious issues permeate all of  his later theoretical sections (as they do Husayn’s analysis of those sections), but second, and much more important, because, as Husayn says, “among Muslims [that is, among those Muslims whom Ibn Khaldun was studying], politics was part of dogmatic theology” (p. 134). That is, religion and politics are identical. Husayn’s reading here is both ambiguous and ambivalent. On the one hand he writes as a religious insider. He cannot resist correcting Ibn Khaldun on points of interpretation relative to the Quran and to the actions of the first four caliphs; indeed he makes such corrections (often controversial ones)

���� ������

229

throughout his analysis. But on the other, he takes the outsider stance, believing that Ibn Khaldun has given a first general theory of prophecy. Even more important, he asks rhetorically “to explicate religion in studying the human spirit, is this not a step toward the modern idea which sees in religion a social phenomenon?” (p. 100). That is, because he is looking through the eyes of the Durkheim of  The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Husayn to a considerable extent sees Ibn Khaldun as a modern, secular theorist of religion. The relation between religion and politics was one of the central concerns of modernist Islam and is fundamentally different in Islam than in the secularized, nominally Christian countries of the Western metropolis. The strong Christian separation of public and private life after 1650 makes little sense in Islamic thinking, and the modernism of  Muḥammad ʿAbduh and his peers had no such separation in mind. On the contrary they thought a modernist Islam could be the ideal religion for a modern world precisely because it could provide a public faith, not only providing models and governance for personal behavior, but also unifying the whole of experience in a single religious manifold, embracing phenomena like economics and science that had proved incomprehensible for Christianity under modern conditions. It is to this feeling of the unity of  life and in particular of Islamic life that we owe the recurrent argument by Husayn that there is nothing truly revolutionary about Ibn Khaldun. Husayn again and again traces Khaldunian themes and styles of argument to long-­enduring Islamic concerns: to classical theological concerns still canvassed at al-­Azhar, to ousul el fiqh and tedjrîh oua tâdil (improbability and justification) as interpretive disciplines, to preexisting encyclopedias (pp. 62–­67), and so on. For Husayn, it is merely the project of universal history itself that is new in Ibn Khaldun, a novelty particularly with respect to earlier writers like Plato and Aristotle, who were general political theorists, but theorists of a world comprising only city-­ states. The reader comes away with the sense that Husayn believes that the universalizing project is Islamic in general rather than Ibn Khaldun’s in particular, and indeed that it proceeds from the universalizing tendencies of Islam itself. Yet even while he establishes this universalizing Islamic theme, Husayn also brings to his analysis of  Ibn Khaldun a number of quite particular loyalties. He is a militant Egyptian patriot. Sometimes this appears in minor claims: that Ibn Khaldun’s real insights come only when he arrives in Egypt, for example, or that only Egypt could provide the historical sources and support Ibn Khaldun needed. Yet eventually we get a full blown statement:

230

���� ����

But there are many nations, of which the power has lasted much longer than that of the Arab empire, which have existed and have been able to resist all sorts of shocks and external invasions, not by means of links of blood [Ibn Khaldun’s “group feeling”] but thanks to a sentiment more large, which itself constitutes the national spirit. The invincible resistance of these nations did not attract the attention of Ibn Khaldun. What counted for him was the succession of reigning dynasties, not the nation itself, which lasts in spite of external changes, a complex ensemble of material and moral heritages, transmitted since far distant times. If, from the Muslim conquest down to the times of Ibn Khaldun, eight dynasties had succeeded to the throne of Egypt, for example, the Egyptian nation stayed always the same. (p. 125)

This is rampant late 19th-­century nationalism. Yet at other times, Husayn supports not Egypt against the non-­Egyptian Arabs, but Arabs against Persians (for Husayn, the Persians weakened the true nature of Arab Islam) or against the Turks (Husayn feels that if the Turks hadn’t destroyed Egyptian intellectual institutions, Egypt would be as advanced as the West). Husayn’s politics thus have a concentric quality, reaching out in circles from Egyptian nationalism, to Arabism, to Islamism; it is therefore surprising that he chides Ibn Khaldun for believing in only one social form (one “society,” in the Durkheimian sense). That social form is the organized state, and Husayn himself notes that Ibn Khaldun uses two words for it: chab (which Husayn renders as French peuple) and ommah (which Husayn renders as French nation). Yet the second is precisely the term usually used for the larger Islamic community of peoples taken as a whole and, in fact, used for that purpose by Ibn Khaldun. Thus, the relation (or the identity) of religion and politics is in fact an open issue for both Ibn Khaldun and Husayn. On the one hand, Husayn, like his predecessor, considers Islam a single enterprise and unit. Both take it for granted that despite all apparent variation there is a single enterprise called Islam. Both also take it for granted that this enterprise involves indistinguishably those behaviors that later social thought would insist on differentiating as religion and politics. The question of their relation/identity is discussed in the Muqaddimah in chapter 3, sections 23–­28. In discussing those central passages, Husayn argues that Ibn Khaldun was chiefly a theorist of politics. This is a Durkheimian critique; Ibn Khaldun has not really seen

���� ������

231

“society” as a whole but is preoccupied with kings and leaders. But Ibn Khaldun’s discussion of the caliphate ranges quite broadly across not only the (later) political and religious spheres, but the economic and social spheres as well. His argument aims to show how prophecy and royal authority emerge separately, can (and do) sometimes then merge, and then finally how religious vitality ebbs away, leaving mere political authority, which then falls in the usual Khaldunian fashion. (This is Max Weber’s routinization of charisma argument, five centuries earlier and in more detail.) More important, this analysis involves central and long-­contested questions of Islamic polity. Ibn Khaldun and Husayn both note that the Prophet declaimed against “group feeling” as well as against (the authoritative procedure of) taxation, and the Muqaddimah discusses in detail the issues of lineage, authority, and prophecy in the Mecca period that underlie the difference of  Sunni and Shiʿi. But Ibn Khaldun also draws evidence from the histories of the Abassids and the Ummayyads. Yet in analyzing this discussion, Husayn gets lost in the matter of  whether the caliph must be a Qurashite, an issue Ibn Khaldun him­ self left unresolved, despite its profound importance in the history of Islam. Ultimately, Husayn’s analysis seems less clear than the original. This may reflect the modern situation in which Husayn found himself. For Husayn’s analysis of the “election” of the caliph is particularly striking. By the language Husayn chooses, he seems to suggest that the responsibility of the caliph to the people and the right of the people to “elect” a new caliph are signs of the inherent modernism of Islam, perhaps even of a compatibility with modern liberal government. Ibn Khaldun’s analysis of this “election” of the caliph, by contrast, is much more like the Chinese concept of tianming, according to which Heaven’s withdrawal of its mandate from an unjust ruler is paralleled by that ruler’s fall from power (an analysis open to the interpretation that “the mandate of heaven” is simply a rationalization of material events). This is a much more general concept of “election.” Yet Husayn tries to paint Ibn Khaldun as a divine right theorist like J.-­B. Bossuet (p. 122). Husayn’s dissertation was his only foray into social thought. His later career would take him to literary studies, fiction, popular social commentary, and educational reform. But that one foray shows us how a modernist Islam juxtaposed Western secular thinking and classical Muslim historiography. The metropolitan and Christian appropriators of  Ibn Khaldun have selected their themes very carefully, finding in the great philosopher only those ideas that comfortably correspond with modern metropolitan thinking. For they

232

���� ����

seek merely a forerunner, a prophet of modern social science—­indeed, a prophet of themselves. Husayn’s Ibn Khaldun is much more alive. He lives in his times, his place, his religion. Husayn judges him not only as a theorist and historian, but also as a Muslim, as a political actor, even as a husband. Whole areas of  Ibn Khaldun that modern historiography has passed over—­ his detailed discussion of the caliphate, for example—­become matters of controversy and importance for Husayn, precisely because they are seen within the living tradition of  Islam. This depth of interpretation happens because it was Husayn’s gift to straddle different worlds: blind and sighted, Egypt and France, social thought and literary studies. In her memoir after his death, his widow left a picture of this gift: Recalling today that morning [a Sunday during their later years], I think of that mysterious agreement which always unified us in the respect of our different religions. Some were astonished. Others understood that I could say my rosary while you were listening to the Quran in the next room. I still now turn on the radio to hear verses of the Quran when I start the rosary, and in any case I hear it internally. You spoke to me often of the Quran, translating favorite verses for me, you read the Bible, I spoke of Jesus. You often said, “One does not fool God.” St. Paul said it as well. Certainly, one does not fool God. (Avec Toi [Paris: Editions de Cerf, 2011], p. 49.)

No, indeed. Those who would fool God fool only themselves.

������

Fukuzawa Yukichi

�����  ���  19 ��  �������’�  � ��������������  ���������, ����  Japan quickly imitated the economic development, military organization, and imperialism of the Western powers. That imitation owed much to the writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi, for unlike many of the social thinkers we have read in this series, Fukuzawa was not primarily a university professor, politician, or literary figure—­although he was active in all of those fields—­ but primarily a popular writer, so successful that he was one of the 500 wealthiest residents of  Tokyo in 1890. Of  Fukuzawa’s dozens of  works, three have attracted notice outside Japan. The first is An Encouragement of  Learning (1872–­76), a collection of pamphlets making the case for modern education and culture. The second is “Leave Asia,” a controversial editorial of 1885 arguing that Japan must reject old (i.e., Asian) ways and customs and that since neither China nor Korea had done so, Japan should not wait for them as if to make common cause against the West, but must treat them as did the Westerners. (Many have found this evident imperialism perplexing, because Fukuzawa had earlier encouraged Korean nationalism and indeed had fostered a failed liberal coup in Korea in 1884.) Fukuzawa’s third well-­known work, which we read here, was published between these two others. Aimed at the older generation, Outline of a Theory of Civilization (1875) presented the implications of Western culture in a tone that mixed the rigorous and the conversational. Although not as popular An Outline of a Theory of Civilization. By Fukuzawa Yukichi. Translated by David A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst III. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. xxvii+278.

234

���� ����

as Encouragement, Outline sold well and has been regarded by many as Fukuzawa’s greatest work. When Fukuzawa Yukichi was born in Osaka in 1835, Japan was still organized in feudal domains of  varying sizes and power. Its overlord was the shogun, the current descendant of the clan whose progenitor Tokugawa Ieyasu had emerged victorious from the wars of the late 16th century. Although the shogun’s regime (bakufu) had loosened its grip over two centuries of peace, Japanese feudal society remained sharply divided into the two classes of samurai and commoners. Despite the irrelevance of soldiers during the long peace, samurai were nonetheless paid soldier stipends (in rice), which for the upper tier were large enough to permit a life of culture, politics, and idleness. Lower-­tier samurai could not survive without side employment or paid work in domain business affairs, which their superiors thought beneath their own dignity. Fukuzawa’s father was a lower-­tier samurai who ran his domain’s Osaka rice warehouse—­a businessman, negotiator, and accountant. He died shortly after Fukuzawa’s birth, and the family returned to the domain town of Nakatsu, where Fukuzawa grew up in poverty. A lucky chance and some help from his brother took him in 1854 to Nagasaki, where he began learning Dutch and reading Western works. Fleeing domain politics, he soon moved to Osaka, where he entered the best local school specializing in Western knowledge. In 1858 he took over direction of the similar school founded in the bakufu capital by his own domain. He also began the study of English. As a result of this study, in 1860 Fukuzawa contrived to be a bakufu translator on an official mission to the United States, a role he repeated in 1862 (London) and 1867 (United States). On both later trips he bought large quantities of Western books, which he translated and published in Japanese on his return. This was a daring practice, given the period’s many assassinations of westernizers and bakufu officials. (Fukuzawa stayed inside after dark for 15 years.) There was also danger from the bakufu itself, which in 1863 executed a minor official who had expressed in a private letter his hope that great leadership might come to Japan. But the risky translation services and his extremely popular book Conditions in the West brought Fukuzawa wealth. In 1868 (the year the bakufu was overthrown and the imperial government was “restored”) he was secure enough to begin his own school, which would eventually (1890) become Keio University. Duly instructed in Western classical economics, the school’s graduates connected Fukuzawa to

�������� �������

235

the emerging Japanese business community. Indeed, Fukuzawa himself cofounded a general importing business in this period. Throughout the 1870s he continued writing and publishing, on topics ranging from accounting to physics to military science—­sometimes translating directly, sometimes writing on his own. Encouragement and Outline came in this decade, the high point of Fukuzawa’s so-­called enlightenment period. He was also active in civil society, founding in the 1870s the Mita debating society and then in 1880 the similar but larger Kojunsha. His successful publishing operations, his importing business, and his former students brought contacts with Mitsui and Mitsubishi among the emerging Japanese commercial giants, and his writings about economics led to a connection with Finance Minister Okuma Shigenobu. All this enabled Fukuzawa to help found the Yokohama Specie Bank (1880), which would eventually become Japan’s international bank. In the early 1880s, Fukuzawa briefly considered the possibility of running a government-­sponsored newspaper, but his patron Okuma fell from power and the possibility closed. Fukuzawa then founded his own daily newspaper, Jiji shinpo; his later books would all be collections of its editorial material. After the failure of his attempt to propagate liberal ideas in Korea, he became more explicitly nationalistic and more openly hostile to China and Korea, the latter of which was on its way to Japanese protectorate status (and eventual annexation) by the time of  Fukuzawa’s death at 66 in 1901. An Outline of a Theory of Civilization is not, as its title might suggest, a treatise for experts. It envisions a general audience, as did the books on which it draws heavily—­François Guizot’s General History of Civilization in Europe (1829; Fukuzawa had read the 1842 English translation) and Henry Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilization in England (1857, 1861), which had been at the height of its popularity when Fukuzawa was in London. But while Guizot and Buckle could presume extensive general knowledge in their audience (many of Buckle’s pages have more footnotes than text), Fukuzawa could not. Thus, where Buckle has scholarly machinery, Fukuzawa has homely metaphors and everyday examples. Where Guizot is urbane and learned, Fukuzawa is brusque and commonsensical. Indeed, the book’s drastic simplifications suggest real weakness until one recalls that it was written less than 10 years after the imperial restoration and less than 20 after the Western powers first forced themselves on a reluctant Japan. The 10 chapters of Outline fall into three implicit sections. In the first

236

���� ����

section, Fukuzawa lays out the stage theory of social progress then common in Western sources. He posits three stages, which in the English translation are labeled “primitive,” “semicivilized,” and “civilized.” Later social theorists would transform these into Third, Second, and First World or periphery, semiperiphery, and core, just as later two-­stage writers would speak of less developed and more developed countries or Global South and Global North. As these labels all suggest, the many avatars of the 18th century’s theory of progress embody substantive positions that differ profoundly in whether they believe the stages to be naturally induced or artificially imposed and whether they found them just or unjust. Fukuzawa too conceals a particular position under the seemingly general label of “civilization.” This concealment is first evident in the many incidental metaphors for civilization, which is at one point a stage on which institutions, learning, and commerce are actors, at another an ocean into which in­ stitutions flow, and at a third a warehouse containing everything useful for society, even if bought at the price of evil. (In “Leaving Asia,” Fukuzawa would compare civilization to the measles because it spread rapidly!) Fuku­ zawa’s indeterminate meaning for “civilization” is also implicit in his appro­ priation and judgment of Western culture. Throughout, one hears the great ideals of the Western liberals Fukuzawa had read: enlightenment, impartial justice, exercise of liberty, overall public good. But while Fukuzawa’s argument mentions such things, it does not by any means proceed from liberal first principles. Similarly, Fukuzawa makes occasional admiring remarks about the West; the American Civil War, he tells us, started with “admi­ ra­ble concerns” over the “evil custom of slavery.” But such admiration is always undercut. The Civil War soldiers degenerated into “a pack of devils fighting one another in the fields of Paradise” (p. 56). As for the Americans of the 1870s, “Their men spend their lives in the feverish pursuit of money. The only function of their women is feverishly to propagate dollar hunters” (p. 57). When Fukuzawa finally turns to explicit theory, he gives a theory not of civilization, but of the nation, defining what will become a core term in Japanese social thought: kokutai or “national polity.” A nation is, first and foremost, a race of people with a consistent set of institutions, a strong we-­ feeling, and a desire for independence. It is not necessarily a government, as the German case makes clear (Fukuzawa passes over the proclamation of the German empire in 1871.) Moreover, that Fukuzawa uses China and British India to exemplify loss of national polity shows in turn that of the four basic

�������� �������

237

constituents of the nation (race, institutions, we-­feeling, and independence) the most important for Fukuzawa is independence. Two structures organize these constitutents of the nation. The first is political legitimation, by which Fukuzawa means a government not ruling by force, although it may have taken its original position by force. (He is ag­ nostic about the forms of government, seeing both good and bad in mon­ archy, democracy, and republicanism.) The second is a lineage of rulers. Fukuzawa’s discussion of lineage is cautious, no doubt because of the danger of assassination. He makes much of the unbroken line of the Japanese imperial house, but also argues that loyalty to that house is best shown by strengthening the national polity. Again, the core matter is independence. Fukuzawa repeatedly notes that Japan has never been dependent, and that the combi­ nation of unbroken national polity with an unbroken imperial line makes her “unique among the nations of the world” (p. 42). That the book might have been better titled Outline of a Theory of National Strength becomes clearer as the second section unfolds. Although in the first section Fukuzawa has traced civilization to inward spirit rather than such outward forms as clothing, weapons, and institutions, here he emphasizes Buckle’s argument that intellect (meaning for Fukuzawa natural science, engineering, social science, and other applied forms of knowledge) is more important to progress than morality (meaning religion, ethical systems, and the like). He repeats and elaborates Buckle’s contention that since the standards of human action change perpetually while moral systems change very little, morals cannot be the source of progress. Rather, since only intellectual doctrines change substantially, they must be the source of progress. As this summary makes clear, both Buckle and Fukuzawa confused change with progress. That change of knowledge is inevitably progressive is a mere assumption—­precisely the assumption that Japanese conservatives disputed. Moreover, both men had their history profoundly wrong. The notion that “morality” is constant while knowledge is changing could be sustained only definitionally, by allocating all changing cultural understanding of social life to the realm of intellect, as a “technology” of society. Thus, jurisprudence, as a form of understanding and governing human affairs, is “intellect,” while religious practice is “morality.” In the second section Fukuzawa makes even less use of the vocabulary of individualism. Like Émile Durkheim after him, he notes the constancy of national suicide statistics (which come to him from Adolphe Quetelet via Buckle). He downplays great-­man history. He argues that the national spirit

238

���� ����

is found by averaging individuals’ spirits—­an almost statistical notion. But for Fukuzawa more important—­in fact more or less identical with this national spirit—­is the “trend of the times.” The great men succeed because they are in tune with the trend of the times, and conversely even a gifted man cannot succeed unless he is in tune with the trend of the times. This position rapidly veers toward the idea that success must necessarily signify agreement between man and moment, a view that Fukuzawa had already ridiculed in its Chinese version as the theory of the mandate of heaven (tianming) and that was identified as profoundly conservative in the West (as in Alexander Pope’s dictum “Whatever is, is right.”) But even this “national average” trend of the times quickly disappears. By the fifth chapter, Fukuzawa is arguing that “what we mean by national or public opinion is, in reality, the views of the intelligent minority among the middle and upper classes; the ignorant majority simply follow behind like sheep and never dare to give free rein to their ignorance” (p. 83). It is unclear whether this passage describes a current but temporary empirical reality or a valued terminal state of affairs. Indeed, by later in this chapter, Fukuzawa has moved to the position that men like himself—­educated lower samurai in­terested in westernization and beating the West at its own game—­are the ones in tune with the times (by which we infer that he means in tune not with the average of  Japanese opinion but with the “reality” of  Western dominance). And even public opinion he views from the top down: “This process [of opinion formation] is like a certain number of soldiers forming a regiment, a number of regiments forming a battalion, and a number of battalions constituting a great army” (pp. 93–­94). The book’s second section also underscores Fukuzawa’s belief that virtue and morality are private, individual matters, and thus mostly irrelevant to national strength. In this he is following the Western liberal tradition, with its consignment of religion to private life after the long religious wars. (Indeed, Fukuzawa regards Protestantism as an advanced religion precisely because it is private. Among his sources, Guizot, it should be noted, was a devout Protestant.) To be sure, in chapter 7 Fukuzawa paints a glorious future in which private virtue will expand into the public world and government itself will become unnecessary because of pure virtue. But in the long meantime, the only place for morality is the family (p. 154). Money spent on the poor is wasted, a mere consoling of the private conscience that will lead the poor to expect a dole rather than to work hard. Not surprisingly, Fukuzawa also accepts the 19th-­century liberal belief that most men are lazy and

�������� �������

239

dishonest and that success in government comes by mastery of this weak nature: “By investigating the nature and functions of mankind, they [the Western governments] finally gain insight into its laws and according to its nature and functions they devise methods to channel it” (p. 160). Surprisingly, Fukuzawa hardly mentions education as an example of such Western social control, although both he and Guizot played central roles in shaping the education systems of their respective countries. In summary, Fukuzawa’s position is in effect that of the early and middle 19th-­century mainstream Western liberal writers whom he had read so carefully, combined with the long-­r un vision of Auguste Comte and the positivists. This interpretation becomes more certain in the final section, which compares the West and Japan. Chapter 8 summarizes Guizot’s view of European history as a story of emerging liberty. Although Guizot’s original had considerable hesitations and qualifications, these were somewhat ritualistic, and in Fukuzawa they simply disappear. In Fukuzawa, for example, the poor of the West—­who were then actually in the state of profound poverty described by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, and many others—­are idealized as at least having the sense of individuality necessary to upward mobility. As for Fukuzawa’s understanding of  Jap­ anese history, it employs present usefulness as its main criterion for ideas, materials, and practices. The 250-­year Tokugawa peace is said to constitute “economic tuberculosis” (p. 219), even though it had been in fact a time of agricultural advance, economic and commercial development, and cultural flowering in kabuki theater, haiku poetry, and ukiyo-­e painting. In Fukuzawa’s version, the samurai are responsible for such advance as did occur, and the wealthy commoners—­with whom Fukuzawa’s father and brother had negotiated over many years—­are misers or sensualists, greedy like the Westerners. “The upper class had the requisite time to cultivate virtue and knowledge while the lower class seemed solely concerned with money and sensual pleasures” (p. 222). It is evident—­and Fukuzawa had said as much before—­that for him only the lower samurai have real virtue and vision. After all this, the final chapter is no surprise. Although there is general talk about progress, and the occasional utopian remark, When it comes to relations between one country and another only two things count: in times of peace exchange goods and compete with one another for profit; in times of war, take up arms and kill each other. To put it another way, the present world is a world of commerce and warfare. . . . War

240

���� ����

is the art of extending the rights of independent governments, and trade is a sign that one country radiates its light to another. (pp. 234–­35)

The book that began as a hymn of enlightenment ends in realpolitik. Fukuzawa’s analysis of Japan’s economic and political situation is an unsparing portrait of Western colonialism. But the conclusion he draws is that one must imitate the imperialist reality—­rather than the idealistic protestations—­of the West. Japan must avoid the fate of India. It must, for example, escape the imposition of indemnities by the British. (Fukuzawa mentions celebrated incidents in the early 1860s that had cost the bakufu millions, but ignores an event of the previous year, in which the Japanese had themselves extorted a similar indemnity from China over some shipwrecked Ryukuans massacred on Taiwan.) Fukuzawa tells us “There is only one thing, namely to establish our goal and advance toward civilization,” but concludes that “the first order of the day is to have the country of Japan and the people of Japan exist, and then and only then speak about civilization” (p. 254). In the present, that is, “civilization” means whatever produces national independence. It is all too easy to read Fukuzawa in moralistic hindsight, knowing that ahead lie the Sino-­Japanese and Russo-­Japanese Wars, the takeovers of Korea, Manchuria, and eventually China, and the culminating holocaust of the Second World War. Yet one could read Guizot and Buckle the same way; 19th-­century Western liberalism was itself followed by similar imperialistic squabbles and the twin nemesis of the two world wars. And the anachronism is wrong in both cases. It took much more than Guizot, Buckle, and Fukuzawa to make the horrors of the early 20th century. More interesting are the problems of what Fukuzawa’s sources themselves really meant, whether he misread them, and, indeed, whether he was really as militantly nationalistic as the reading here makes him seem. On an “enlightenment” reading, his sources were in fact devoted to positive civilization, he read them correctly, and Outline is a work of genuine enlightenment. In this case, its apparent nationalism is mainly a reaction to the intense imperialistic pressure placed on Japan by the West. On an antienlightenment reading, Fukuzawa’s sources were in fact simply ideological covers for world commercial domination, he read them correctly, and produced his own equivalent ideological cover. Its relatively naked nationalism merely signifies that he was less effective at hiding his realpolitik than his sources had been. On an optimistic Western reading, the Western liberals in their texts took for granted certain aspects of  Western social order that were

�������� �������

241

neither stated nor explained in their texts but that were in fact necessary to its proper functioning (legal order, religious morality, etc.). Fukuzawa then read these sources literally, but as a foreigner did not know what they took for granted. He therefore produced a mere shadow of what the Western liberals had actually thought, a shadow which in turn could serve as a basis for extreme militant nationalism. On yet another reading, the price of rapid economic development in Japan was imperialist expansion on the mainland, and Fukuzawa merely provided the Meiji oligarchs with the ideology they needed. Whether he read or misread his sources is irrelevant. One could go on. The reality is that Fukuzawa’s book holds a very different mirror to the West than do those of other writers. In him the stories of liberation and domination are inextricably mixed. His example raises the possibility that they cannot be separated.

����

Heleieth I. B. Saffioti

��� 19 �� ������� ��� ��� ���� �� ��������� ���������� among women in the metropolitan countries. This solidarity emerged from the new bourgeois family with its nonworking wife as well as from the working-­class household with its “family wage.” Both were products of a historically rapid separation of work and home. Like many reactive solidarities, women’s new consciousness began by inverting the hierarchy implicit in that new separation, claiming for women a finer and more moral nature. Women were separate but more than equal. (Negritude was another such example, as we have seen in chapter XXV. Leopold Sédar Senghor accepted white racial definitions but inverted them to claim for blacks a fully independent and centrally important cultural role.) But even while the separate spheres ideologists claimed the moral superiority of women, other feminists claimed an equality with men more in the style of Enlightenment universalism. For them, separate spheres was a male ideology and women who followed it suffered from what the more radical women would eventually learn—­f rom the Marxists—­to call false consciousness. By the early 20th century, metropolitan women had begun to acquire the full political rights that middle and lower class metropolitan men had wrested from the aristocracies only shortly before. And as the European welfare state took shape, its new programs often treated the individual—­ rather than the family—­as the unit of society, thereby laying the axe to the 19th-­century family system and broadening the Enlightenment concept of citizenship to include social and economic as well as political rights. After Women in Class Society. By Heleieth I. B. Saffioti. Translated by Michael Vale. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978. Pp. xxiv+378.

�������� �. �. ��������

243

the Second World War, a generation of women sought to define and elaborate these new rights. The transformation of the advanced economies toward service work had drawn legions of women into the labor force, most often because their new employers hoped that they would deploy in those employers’ interests the cooperative and facilitative personality that a century of familism had made common among women in advanced economies. Yet there was an obvious contradiction between the new status of worker and the old ideology that underwrote what might be called the separate-­ spheres personality. The major works of midcentury feminism grew out of this contradiction, which was particularly acute in the historically Protestant countries, with their heritage of militant individualism. But the contradiction emerged also in Catholic countries, where familism’s hold on social structure was both older and stronger, and was further transformed as the ideology of feminism began to spread globally. It was in this context that Heleieth Saffioti wrote Women in Class Society. Heleieth Iara Bongiovanni Saffioti was born in 1934 in Ibirá in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. Her parents—­both the children of very large families—­ were occasional workers: her father in construction and her mother as a home seamstress. When her wealthy godfather offered her father work in the countryside, Saffioti was left behind with grandparents for four years of primary schooling. When she rejoined her family in the outback, there was no schooling beyond the primary years, so she acted as a school monitor for younger children in order to retain what she had learned. She was then shuttled between various aunts, uncles, and in-­laws in various cities, arriving in São Paulo at age 14. Here she did her secondary schooling at night, holding secretarial jobs and teaching Portuguese to foreign families during the day. Graduating at the top of her class in 1954, she took the entrance exams for the University of São Paulo in social science. Meanwhile, a short courtship led to marriage to physical chemist Waldemar Saffioti, which disrupted her education while they spent a year in the United States. Saffioti graduated in 1960. Her husband had a new appointment in the inland city of Araraquara, and they moved there in 1962. Once Saffioti passed the necessary teaching exams, Araraquara sociologist Luiz Pereira enlisted her to teach courses in pedagogy and, increasingly, sociology. Meanwhile, she did her graduate studies part-­time. (Graduate work was at that time not formally organized in the Brazilian university system.) In 1967 she defended her dissertation at a stormy session, overcoming critics concerned about her Marxism, then unacceptable given the recent transition from the liberal

244

���� ����

regimes of Juscelino Kubitschek and João Goulart to the conservative military dictatorship of Humberto Castelo Branco. The dissertation immediately became the book A Mulher na sociedade de classes, whose English translation is reviewed here. Saffioti’s subsequent career was largely uneventful. She became a professor at the Araraquara faculty, which eventually became part of the State University of São Paulo, and she gradually acquired joint affiliations with other institutions as her fame spread. Her intellectual focus remained on women’s work, domestic violence, incest, and patriarchy. She was politically active, but never actively affiliated with particular movements, once remarking that “I have my positions, but no affiliation, because I don’t want to lose my freedom of thought.” But she was often an activist: at one point, she went to law school, hoping to create a law firm dedicated to women’s issues. She also taught courses on violence against women to police officers, lawyers, and others. Saffioti died in 2010. Women in Class Society has three main sections. An introductory section on women and capitalism presents the classical Marxist analysis and poses the question of how to position women within that analysis. The somewhat longer second section discusses the position of women in Brazil. The third section returns to the more general level, investigating the Marxian superstructural relations of sex by examing its place in cultural systems like psychoanalysis, anthropology, and kinship. Unusually for a book of this length and substance, Women closes with a summary of its argument—­a welcome relic from its origins as a doctoral thesis. The English version is, however, considerably shorter than the Portuguese original, and its first and third sections have been considerably reorganized. Subsections have also been designated within the chapters. Perhaps most important, the considerable section on the Roman Catholic Church has been omitted. Saffioti’s youth marks the book decisively. She told an interviewer 40 years later that “the older you get, the more questions there are. When one is young, one has no doubts.” And the book is indeed a confident one. Karl Marx and Talcott Parsons, Max Weber and Karen Horney, Gilberto Freyre and Florestan Fernandes: Saffioti mixes all these and dozens more in her first, theoretical section, despite their many disagreements and contradictory theoretical schemes. On the one hand we have Parsonian equilibrium and functions, ascription and achievement, social system and stability. On the other we have Marxian relations of production, commodity production, and capital accumulation. This mixture never coheres: one still wonders

�������� �. �. ��������

245

whether the bourgeois family form with its separation of home and work was truly necessitated by the triumph of capitalism. But Saffioti’s empirical insights are consistently interesting. For example, she notes the power conferred on labor by the withdrawal of women from the labor force (via the induced scarcity of labor power and its consequent bargaining strength). This not-­very-Marxist argument proves to be one of the main joints between the analysis of sex and that of labor. (Strangely, she spends little time on reproduction itself—­the necessity of creating a labor force through family sexuality—­even though Gilberto Freyre had long before noted the centrality of this process in colonial Brazil; see chapter VII.) In the end, Saffioti cannot reconcile the theory of class conflict she borrows from Marx with the more mainstream view of stratification that undergirds her conception of sexual hierarchy and that permeates her arguments about the oppression of women. Yet the book’s first section abounds with insights and, even more important, makes broad intellectual connections that were soon to be forbidden as theory about women formalized and began to subdivide into conflicting schools. That Saffioti cannot ultimately synthesize the concepts of class and strati­ fication reflects in part her being ahead of her time. The demographic and mobility histories of families under capitalism were not empirically clarified until the 1960s and 1970s. The increase in the nonreproductive portion of the life course; the consistent relation of fertility and class; the impact of health changes (especially the fall of maternal mortality after the introduction of antibiotics): the ramifications of these things were not fully understood. Yet they would prove central to thinking sensibly about the economic dynamics of households in the 20th century. The book’s second section is the heart of Saffioti’s contribution. In four core chapters, she outlines the historical experience of women in Brazil: first in general, then in education, in the workforce, and in the feminist movement. Here the footnotes are rich with primary sources, and the analysis is broad and sweeping. The section begins with a discussion of Brazil’s position in the international economic system, its dependence on the metropolis as a consumer of its primary products, and the economic relation of that dependence to slavery. (Curiously, Saffioti ignores the shift from sugar to coffee that accompanied and in many ways facilitated abolition of slavery.) She notes throughout this section that the women of historical Brazil were often more conservative than the men, attributing this fact to a false consciousness forced on them by the “larger system.” The argument is sometimes

246

���� ����

anachronistic. Saffioti often judges both the women and the men of earlier Brazil in terms of their resemblance to an abstract ideal, rather than as living in a dynamic present that shaped them as they shaped it. But nonetheless, there are dozens of interesting insights, such as that upper-­class women lost status when the emancipated male slaves were immediately given the vote that elite women did not have, or again that urbanization and industrialization brought more and more Brazilians out of the informal family sector with its fluid sex roles into a more formal and regularized bourgeois family form, with consequent loss of status for many women. Within a few decades, such insights were routine; in 1967, they were pathbreaking. The chapter on education is excellent. This had been Saffioti’s field of specialization, and her own experience of education had been diverse. Indeed the last sections of the chapter describe from the inside the normal school system that had been the setting for Saffioti’s climb to the top. Earlier sections present extensive statistics, detailed discussions of major legal changes, and similar archival details. Here too there is occasional anachronism, as if Brazilian politicians of the mid-­19th century should be faulted for not having created ex nihilo an education system that would have been appropriate to the psychology of a Heleieth Saffioti of the mid-­20th. But Saffioti softens this judgment with a wide-­ranging analysis of different shades of contemporary opinion, showing herself fully capable of identifying different moralities among actors in the past. The chapter on work is similarly trenchant. We find here labor force statistics showing what Saffioti’s theory predicted—­the departure of women from some work sectors in the earlier part of the 20th century. The analysis is to some extent questioned by the immense proportions of  Brazilians in the subsistence sector (of the population over 10 years of age, only 13% of women and 36% of men are gainfully employed; p. 187) But the figures do show that as Saffioti’s theory predicts, industrialization facilitated the split of work and home, driving women out of gainful employment. It is striking to those familiar with metropolitan statistics that there is not yet (as of 1960—­the latest figures here) an expansion of women in the services. Indeed the service sector is not even shown in the data. But as is often the case in this book, Saffioti is doing her best with dubious historical statistics, and it is impressive that she managed to find as effective statistical evidence as she did. Saffioti closes her empirical section with an overview of the Brazilian feminist movement. Brazilian feminism has a long lineage, generally

�������� �. �. ��������

247

thought to start with the 19th-­century figure Nísia Floresta, whose status has sometimes been challenged by those who find her brand of feminism problematic. But Saffioti focuses on the 20th century and in particular on Bertha Lutz and her proposals for women’s advancement, noting their controversial status both at the time and later. Already visible in the 1930s and 1940s are debates within the feminist movement over class differences and indeed over essentialism. (Is the only real difference between men and women the possibility of maternity, and, if so, is maternity merely biological motherhood or a larger, sexually-­based ability for child care?) For Saffioti, the crucial problem is earlier feminists’ failure to see the danger of legislation specifically protective of women, which must in her view inevitably help push women out of the labor force and hence reduce their economic power. But Saffioti has harsh words for socialist as well as petit bourgeois feminism, for she feels it has “failed to come up with any completely satisfactory solution to the feminine question” and has simply forced the capitalist system to “refine the processes by which it mystifies women” (p. 228). Yet she herself seems to believe in some special status for women, which is difficult to conceive as anything other than biological maternity: On the other hand, while making work into a genuinely felt need for women goes far beyond any other solution to the problem of female labor that has been proposed or applied so far, woman’s unique position requires that she think about other aspects of her life as well. . . . In woman’s existence there are other factors which make her a worker of a fundamentally different kind. (p. 221)

The processes of mystification are the subject of the book’s third section. Saffioti first considers psychoanalysis, then still strong in the social sci­ences. She finds Freud often insightful, but feels his theories were too shaped by the sex roles of his time to offer much insight about the broader possibilities for women in other classes, times, and places. She turns rather to neo-­ Freudians like Karen Horney. Again the account is strongly radical on the one hand (housewives were “deprived henceforth of the opportunity to develop their capacities as human beings” [p. 249]) but at the same time makes extensive use of the functionalist arguments of 1960s sociology (“The feminine mystique serves highly integrating functions in competitive societies” [p. 252]).

248

���� ����

Saffioti then turns to Margaret Mead, whose Sex and Temperament she lauds as demonstrating the plasticity of sex roles, but whose Male and Female she finds intolerably conservative because it accepts as given certain differential personality traits of men and women that, although socially constructed (if we accept Mead’s earlier work), were in Mead’s eyes fixed enough in the short run to be treated as factual, at least for the moment. At the end of the chapter Saffioti remarks, “Obviously I am not trying to deny either women or men the opportunity of realizing any inherent potentials they have by virtue of their sex” (p. 270), but she then concludes with a fairly skeptical argument from which one can only conclude that she does not believe that such potentials could be found. This is perplexing, for Saffioti makes clear both in the content and indeed in the entire subject of the book her belief in woman as a permanently different type of human being from man. That she approved of this difference is shown by her remark, much later in life, that a world without men would be “an infinite bummer.” Saffioti’s final chapters summarize the main argument, again combining functionalist and Marxist language in a way that reminds us that the two had much more in common than was seen by the radicals of the 1960s: a systematic view of society, a sense of the tension between equilibrium and conflict, a belief in the inevitability of progress. This marking by the moment is evident also in Saffioti’s lack of a distinction between sex and gender, and her happy disregard for what would later—­for a brief time—­be called heteronormativity. For her, men are men and women are women. This makes her book somewhat easier to read than many later works; she does not combine special pleading for a group with theoretical denials that the group exists. The achievement of this book is at once simple and grand. It imagines a group of people—­women—­and by that imagining itself helps create the group. That the book studies women systematically is essentially its way of making its claim that women exist as a bona fide social group: not simply a category, but a conscious group as well. In a social science that consists often of debunking, such work is profoundly creative. All social groups must be so made, whether by charismatic leaders, social movements, or even social scientists. Human life does indeed seem to consist of such daring imaginations, whose implications and results are then lived out by others. Yet we seldom see social scientists in the act of making such a bold leap. That it was political—­even that it was rooted in Safffioti’s own personal experience—­ does not gainsay the work of imagination that brought together so diverse a body of sources in the service of social creation.

�������� �. �. ��������

249

For all its revolutionary claims, however, the book does not escape the liberal view of the world rooted in thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Indeed, it is a specific instance of the liberal gaze, one of a number of such original texts envisioning women not simply as political citizens, but also as social and economic ones. In it, social life has a direction, and that direction is toward emancipation. History means the removal of oppressive social structures, just as it did for Jean-­Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith two centuries before. The present is therefore the most privileged moment, for progress inevitably implies that privileged status. Past actors and their actions are thus judged by the standards of the present rather than by the morals of their own time. Nor does such a text invoke some abstract, time-­relative morality, in which we also will be judged—­as we judge others—­by our failure to meet our own standards. Still less is the book unitarist, as have been some earlier works we have read—­those of Ali Shariʾati, for example. Seeing the book as local and particular does not lessen its achievement. We are all local and particular. But few of us dare an intervention like this one.

���

Alberto Flores Galindo

�� ��� ����������, ��� ���� 20 �� ������� ��� � ���� ��  connection and convergence. There were melting pots and migratory labor, world capitalism and international organizations. In the face of these centripetal forces, there were also attempts to preserve difference: multiculturalism, “rainbows,” and other such movements. But these usually remained within the limits of the homogeneous consumer capitalism of that time. Outside the metropolis, of course, there was no need for reminders about difference. The power of the center provided harsh reminders continuously. Yet even in the metropolis, difference flourished. To be sure, national difference had to some extent subsided after the terrors of  1914–­45. But racial difference evolved toward new complexities under the pressure of immigration; religious difference perplexed the secularists with one of its periodic revivals; and new solidarities like gender and age swirled into the mixture. We finish the year with a work that aims to create—­or re-­create—­such difference: In Search of an Inca by Alberto Flores Galindo. Flores Galindo was born in Peru in 1949, the son of a lawyer. His interest in history dated from his primary and secondary studies at the Colegio La Salle and was confirmed by his university studies at the Ponitificia Universidad Catolica. A trip to a mining camp in 1971 led to his bachelor’s thesis, later published as Los Mineros de la Cerro de Pasco, 1900–­1930. In 1972–­74 he studied at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, a trans-­Paris graduate school of history and social science, then the center of the Annales School of history. In Search of an Inca. By Alberto Flores Galindo. Edited and Translated by Carlos Aguirre, Charles F. Walker, and Willie Hiatt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xxix+270.

������� ������ �������

251

Encouraged by leaders of the École, including Pierre Vilar and Fernand Braudel, he did his doctoral studies under Ruggiero Romano of the University of Paris at Nanterre. Eventually accepted in 1984, the thesis was published as Aristocracia y plebe en Lima, 1760–­1830. A second edition was retitled as La ciudad sumergida. The change of title was no surprise. Flores Galindo had been active in left student groups in both Peru and Paris, and his strong support for dominated populations took shape in a newly written section on Andean populations as another of the submerged groups in 18th-­and 19th-­century Lima. On his return to Peru in 1974, Flores Galindo became professor of sociology in the social science department of his alma mater, the Pontificia Universidad Católica. He threw himself into Peruvian intellectual life. He ran congresses, edited journals, published academic papers and books, and wrote extensively for the popular press. He also supervised students (BA theses are often cited in Search) and initiated numerous new research projects, all the while finishing his own doctoral studies, marrying, and raising a family. Throughout the 1980s he evolved the “Andean utopia” concept, culminating in 1986 in the first version of the book we read here. But then he was suddenly stricken with brain cancer and died in March 1990. Although it has extensive footnotes, In Search of an Inca is at heart a political intervention, addressed to an intensely local audience of intellectuals. It cites sources and debates only insiders can know, and it takes for granted a broad command of Peruvian history. It does little to compare the Peruvian case with others, and when it does so, it cites the Peruvian view of those cases. Thus, Brazil’s Canudos rebellion appears through the eyes of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel (Guerra del fin del mundo) rather than Euclides da Cunha’s earlier nonfiction account (Os sertões), reviewed in chapter XX. Flores Galindo’s central concern is to reinterpret crucial moments and themes in Peruvian history, bringing together a set of ideas, symbols, and stories that he molds into the concept of “Andean utopia.” This concept is introduced in the work’s opening pages, and on first reading one expects a book in the tradition of  Johan Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages or Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: an evocation of a pervasive but hidden cultural current that others have missed. But Flores Galindo is not simply evoking the Andean utopia, he is also espousing it. He does see its flaws, and he does realize that it must be reinvented. But the Andean utopia is for him truly utopian: an ideal to be recreated in a new form. His central audience is not the wider scholarly community, but the local political and intellectual

252

���� ����

one. And if the book has been read by many scholars from other countries, it has been read precisely for this combination of articulate and often self-­ critical scholarship with a political commitment that is itself subtle and self-­ reflective. Few have merged research and passion so well. The book comprises a series of snapshots, chronologically ordered and linked by the common theme of Andean utopia. The first chapter addresses the original European occupation as lived and construed by those Andean peoples who survived the avalanche of disease unleashed by the conquerors. The second chapter concerns the Catholic church’s attempts to stabilize conversion and suppress idolatry. Chapters 3 and 4 address two rebellions of the 18th century: those of Juan Santos Atahualpa in the 1740s and of Tupac Amaru in 1780. There follow three short chapters: chapter 5 on the governing projects of the Spanish rulers and of the rebellious Andean peoples; chapter 6 on the highlands during the period of independence; and chap­ter 7 on concepts of race as they evolved in the 19th century. The long chap­ter 8 looks at three basic aspects of 20th-­century Peruvian history: the pro-­ indigenista movement, the populist Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) of Raúl Haya de la Torre, and the indigenous socialism of José Carlos Mariátegui. Although mainly a study of Mariátegui, the chapter uses his work to understand the others and comments in passing on various minor rebellions and other historical events. Chapter 9 is both the crowning moment of the book and its most controversial. It first frames its argument as a comment on the writer José María Arguedas, then follows with a quick recitation of the vicissitudes of Peruvian politics in the years after 1960. But at its core is the position that the organization Shining Path (terrorist or emancipatory, depending on one’s politics) was in fact yet another expression of the Andean utopia. This claim is elaborated in chapter 10, which asserts that the Peruvian state was more terrorist than Shining Path and that even the extreme violence of Shining Path came from the same lineage of Andean utopia that had produced the earlier rebellions. By this unexpected conclusion Flores Galindo makes the conception of Andean utopia come suddenly and disturbingly alive. Earlier in the book, we have gradually built up a sense of Andean utopia as a fascinating, elusive cantus firmus of history: not quite a millenarian fantasy, but something beautiful and enduring, if nonetheless alien to the modern sensibility. We have seen that the phrase captures a kind of faint historical memory—­unwritten outside the hearts of the andinos—­of an Andean civilization comparable to

������� ������ �������

253

those of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, or China. For Flores Galindo, the recurrent use of Inca symbolism in Peruvian life—­in open rebellions, in indigenous socialist theories, in clandestine violent movements, even occasionally by the colonialists themselves—­evokes less the Inca rule in particular than this more general Andean civilization, whose memory was in part overwritten by the Incan expansion and in part destroyed by the Spaniards’ attack on the artifacts of Incan civilization and in particular on the quipus (and their interpreters, the quipucamayoc) through which and through whom the Inca empire and other Andean groups had kept their historical records. This Andean utopia is an imagined world of peaceful communalism, of rural socialisms tied together into an egalitarian and just empire that preserves difference even as it mobilizes the labor necessary for the public goods—­such as roads and storehouses—­so necessary in a physical environment much less welcoming than the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris/Euphrates, the Indus, or the Chang Jiang. But by interpreting Shining Path as yet another expression of the utopian impulse derived from the faint memory of this Andean past, Flores Galindo inverts our assumptions. For many or even most of his peers, Shining Path was a terrorist organization—­arbitrary, brutal, violent. To make it part of the tradition of Andean utopia was to turn the reader from spectator to participant. One had to take sides. The debate Flores Galindo enters by this inversion is centuries old: the debate over the justness of the Inca and Spanish empires. The Andean archeological record speaks of a sophisticated civilization or civilizations before the Incas, and the Incas themselves seem to have suppressed the history of their predecessors to some extent. The succeeding Spanish colonial power then rewrote Inca history largely on its own propagandist basis. But even within the first century of the Spanish conquest, two opposing traditions had emerged. For writers like Pedro de Cieza de León and Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, the Incas were tyrannical conquerors and the andinos were primitives in need of Spanish tutelage and organization. For such others as Juan de Betanzos and Garcilaso de la Vega (both of whom had family connections to the Inca royal house), the Incas were, in the words of Flores Galindo, “the Romans of the new world,” who had found “only hordes and scattered chiefdoms” and “imposed a sense of organization” (p. 30). Of course the debate would have been just as profound at the moment of the Inca and Spanish conquests themselves had there then been salaried professors to have such debates. The work of Bartolomé de las Casas remains

254

���� ����

to remind us of that. It is not pastness that makes this debate, but rather the present conflicts between the values represented by the various sides. There is no scientific politics—­only the empirical reality of humans disagreeing, fighting, killing. And at the last, it seems that the project of humanely understanding all sides in such a debate is a hopeless business, for such an understanding prevents the decisive moral judgment that alone can move through and beyond such a conflict. Understanding may be the necessary preliminary, but it proves fatal to action. Perhaps one can take from such a debate only the will to understand more deeply and the confidence that un­ derstanding must in the end triumph, not so much in these insoluble past debates, but in those of our own times. Difference need not mean death. In Search of an Inca is thus simultaneously beautiful and disturbing. The invitation to exoticism is beguiling, for Flores Galindo was a profound romantic and his story is lovingly researched and brilliantly told. But the reader who surrenders to it will eventually find herself in frightening company and will reread the earlier chapters with a new eye. The more so, perhaps, given the technologies of terror and terror suppression that emerged shortly after Flores Galindo’s death. The debate is never far away, but always close at hand. Taken together, the texts of this year make a discordant ensemble. The striking uniqueness of each writer is easily stated, although in each case that uniqueness involves a surprising contradiction. Senghor writes social theory, but in a mode of lyrical effusion. Saffioti writes as a woman, about women, for women, but mixes sociologies later seen as opposed and even as antifeminist. Husayn comments on a great and ancient text, but comments sometimes as a Westernized scholar and other times as a devout Muslim. Fukuzawa writes of the society of enlightenment, but ends by showing us—­ unintentionally but effectively—­the disturbingly close link between liberal enlightenment and ethnocentric nationalism. Flores Galindo shows us the flickering afterlives of a great idea, but then suggests they may not be afterlives but way stations to a dubious present. Germani writes mainstream social science, but does so always as an exile, an outsider. Yet these very disparate writers have at the same time some perplexing similarities and connections. These can involve something as simple as age and cohort. We read young work by Saffioti, Husayn, and Flores Galindo: doctoral dissertations in the first two cases, an early collection in the third. These books are confident and clear, sometimes even brash. By contrast we read midcareer work from Senghor and Fukuzawa; in both cases the work

������� ������ �������

255

is more conflicted and sober than the work of younger people. Yet the end-­ of-­career book by Germani, although in some ways highly detached, still retains the hopefulness of an old exile who dreams of return. As the case of Germani suggests, too, it matters whether we have later works and lives to contextualize what we have read. Flores Galindo and Germani died immediately after writing the works we read, while Senghor and Husayn lived a half-­century or more and Saffioti and Fukuzawa nearly as long. For the lat­ ter four, we inevitably interpret the texts in terms of their later lives. Public life played an important but diverse role for these authors. Popularization dominated Fukuzawa’s career as to a lesser extent it did Husayn’s. Husayn and Senghor were both literary figures in addition to social thinkers. Flores Galindo was as assiduous a participant in public debate over indigenista issues as Saffioti was in public debates about feminism. This public voice often led to political action. Some of our writers were politically central—­Senghor the president and Fukuzawa the friend and advisor of the Meiji elites. Others were politically active at times, but not central: Germani the jailed radical and Husayn the controversial culture minister. By contrast, Saffioti and Flores Galindo were both professional academics with standard careers that were partially leavened by continuous activism. Such a life was perhaps not available or not compelling for earlier writers: both Senghor and Husayn left academic careers for political activity—­the one by choice, the other by force of circumstances. And Fukuzawa combined academia and politics by creating a school and university where he shaped graduates who would play a central role in Japanese political life. As often before, we see here the centrality of the voyage to the West for the earlier cohorts: Fukuzawa the translator and culture broker, Husayn the French exchange student, and Senghor the goatherd whose brilliance took him to the Lycée Louis le Grand. Forty years later, Flores Galindo too was profoundly shaped by the French academic system, whose Annalist masters taught him the detailed, quantitative historiography of his earlier work. Like some authors in previous years, however, many of these writers were partly self-­educated: Saffioti struggling in the school-­less Brazilian outback, Husayn dealing with the burden of blindness, Fukuzawa traveling from Nakatsu to Nagasaki to Osaka to Edo in search of learning. Even Germani gave himself much of his own sociological education. But the metropolis was for most of  these writers a bitter lesson in colonialism, and it is no surprise that several turned to Marxism. Saffioti and Flores Galindo in particular tried to move the arguments of historical materialism

256

���� ����

to new areas. But those areas proved unfriendly. Saffioti’s gender concerns do not really need the Marxist underpinning she gives them, and Flores Galindo is, in Marxist terms, trying to rehabilitate a precapitalist economic formation, albeit in the name of socialism. Senghor’s Marxism is thor­ough­ly eclectic, and he is frank about adapting socialism to new circumstances, although like Flores Galindo he is trying to rehabilitate a precapitalist form as socialist in the modern sense. More general reactions to colonialism place one against all the others. Fukuzawa addresses colonialism directly and decides that the only effective response is to become a colonialist. By contrast, Senghor rejects colonialism absolutely in the name of African socialism and negritude, while Flores Galindo rejects it in the name of Andean utopia. Husayn’s anticolonialism was little evident in what we read, but is strong enough in other contexts. So diverse a collection of writings reminds us that understanding is often a burden. Certainty is comforting, and to read such works is to lose that comfort. The righteous optimism of Senghor and Safiotti finds its match in the realpolitik of Fukuzawa and the inversions of Flores Galindo. Husayn is a writer of continuous controversy, and Germani a double exile. Faced with such a collection, it is little surprise that most of us choose our certainty and cling to it.

���� ���

����

Sol T. Plaatje

�� ��� ����� ��� ����� �� ��� ����� �� ����� ������, ���� the warp and weft of apartheid were not yet fully spun. The political, so­ cial, and economic groupings that later composed that unstable fabric were themselves not yet enduring social realities; in different worlds they might have made a different cloth altogether. We must therefore ask when and how apartheid as practiced in the 1950s and 1960s became inevitable. We ask this question in order to avoid teleological narratives of this case: of nationalism and racism, of secret societies and amoral capitalism, of strug­ gle and emancipation. We seek rather the contingencies of social perception and action that swirled in the decades before the momentous election of 1948 and the links and arrangements through which those local contingen­ cies gradually chained themselves together into the settled phenomenon of apartheid, a phenomenon with its own seeming teleology, which doomed the heirs of its proponents just as surely as those proponents had believed themselves to be doomed without it. To rediscover the contingency from which apartheid somehow emerged—­the contingency that characterizes so­ cial life as it is actually lived—­we need views from within the ongoing social process. One such is Sol Plaatje. Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje was born in 1876, sixth son of African farm­ ers of the Barolong people. Since his parents were members of the Berlin Missionary Society’s communities at Doornfontein (and later Pniel) on the Vaal River, Plaatje studied and taught in mission schools until he was 17. In surrounding Barolong communities, he observed the ways of Native justice, Native Life in South Africa. By Sol T. Plaatje. London: P. S. King, 1916. Pp. 382. Mhudi. By Sol T. Plaatje. Francolin: Capetown, 1996. Pp. 190.

260

���� ���

while the missionaries introduced him to Western literature. In 1894 Plaatje took a job in the Kimberley post office and began an active social and politi­ cal life in the city’s community of mission-­educated Africans. (Since Afri­ cans could then vote in the Cape Colony, the politics were real and conse­ quential.) He read Shakespeare, sang solos in concerts, and became active in court challenges to the pass laws, already being used to harass Africans. In 1898, Plaatje married. The couple came from different tribes and spoke different languages, but the marriage was long, happy, and productive, al­ though in later years Elizabeth and the five surviving children saw far less of the always busy Plaatje than they might have wished. Also in 1898, Plaatje secured a job as court interpreter, one of the few highly skilled jobs open to Africans at the time. (Fluent in English, Dutch, German, and Tswana, he spoke many other native languages at varying levels.) Plaatje arrived in Mafeking in time to enjoy a year’s work as interpreter before the British and the Boers finally drifted into war. In October 1899 the town was placed under siege by the Boers. During the siege, Plaatje was involved not only in administrative and court activities but also in arranging the cattle raids that fed the beleaguered town. His diary provides an African perspective on this much-­studied event. In 1902, the war ended, and Plaatje left the civil service for journalism. He edited Koranta ea Becoana and its successor newspapers Tsala ea Becoana and Tsala ea Batho until 1914, surviving numerous financial reverses and becoming an important interpreter of political life in a South Africa drifting toward segregation. The war settlement had led to annexation of the Boer republics but had postponed the issue of native franchise to the moment of the republics’ return to self-­government, in effect guaranteeing that the Cape franchise for Africans would not expand to the rest of unified South Africa. A constitutional convention in 1908–­9 in turn produced union-­level institutions whose form gave control to the Boers by virtue of their numeri­ cal dominance among South African whites. The fading of African politi­ cal hopes inevitably led to the negotiations—­in which Plaatje was deeply involved—­that produced in 1912 the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), later the African National Congress (ANC), which would itself be­ come an exiled body, a revolutionary organization, and, eventually, a seem­ ingly perpetual governing party. For Plaatje, a central moment in this drift toward oppression came in 1913, when the Union Parliament passed the Natives’ Land Act (NLA), which forbade the interracial share-­cropping arrangements characteristic of much

��� �. �������

261

Boer farming and simultaneously prevented the Africans currently in those arrangements from purchasing or renting farm and grazing land except within the already overcrowded “reserves.” The act’s intent was to create a cheap and docile labor force, both for the mines and for the poorer whites, who hoped to enter the arable farming business in which Africans had al­ ready rapidly advanced. The NLA was rightly regarded as catastrophic by Africans, and Plaatje went with other leaders to remonstrate with the British Parliament about native affairs in South Africa. The British government de­ clined to interfere in what they now regarded as an independent dominion. Marooned in Britain by the coming of the First World War, Plaatje pursued his campaign of publicity, documenting the effects of the NLA in the book we here read. He addressed hundreds of public meetings around England, many with the support of the then-­active Brotherhood movement, which he subsequently introduced to South Africa. In 1917, Plaatje returned to his homeland, turned down the presidency of the SANNC, and traveled the coun­ tryside to learn more about current conditions. It was in this period that he began writing the historical novel Mhudi, his fictional version of the case for Africans. In 1919 a new SANNC deputation went to England, aiming also to attend W. E. B. Dubois’s Pan-­African meeting in conjunction with the Paris peace conference. Although Plaatje failed to secure a visa for France, he did travel to England and, with the help of Dubois and others, went on to tour the United States and Canada for two years. In 1923 he returned again to South Africa. By this time, the Congress had become much more radical. Plaatje’s conciliatory and cautious stance was unattractive to younger Africans. Ironically, this new world that rejected Plaatje had been created by the NLA he so strongly opposed. The act had in­ deed driven Africans off the land and into an absolutely dominated—­if not legally enslaved—­labor force for the white mines and farms. But another re­ sult had been African urbanization and proletarianization, and with them had come a newly radical consciousness among younger Congress members. (White strategy had changed too; there was now a Native Affairs Commis­ sion.) Plaatje had outlived his political role. His last major public controversy concerned the Hertzog Bills, which stripped Cape Africans of the franchise while promising in return a small amount of virtual representation, an ex­ panded Native Council, and an undefined amount of further land to be set aside for Africans in the future. Plaatje fulminated against the bills in all the major newspapers, speaking for the older, educated, and less radical African class from which he came. As the political horizon grew steadily darker, he

262

���� ���

turned increasingly to the task of preserving Tswana literature against the eradications of modernity. Translations and other literary pursuits filled his life. Suddenly taken by influenza and pneumonia, he died in 1932. “Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth” (p. 21). With that clarion call begins Native Life in South Africa. The book comprises a prologue, an epilogue, and 24 chapters. It falls into two natural divisions: the first detailing the background and consequences of the NLA, the second telling about the 1914 deputation to the Imperial Parliament and events in South Africa during the First World War. The first section begins with an overall retrospective, which is followed by two chapters about the bill and its passage, and then by two chapters of ethnographic detail and stories of the NLA’s effects in the Transvaal. A short chapter then highlights an ethical white farmer’s wife—­as a good newspa­ perman Plaatje dwells on exemplary cases at length—­and leads into two chapters on the NLA’s promulgation and effects in the Orange “Free” State . (Plaatje never refers to this most conservative of the Boer republics without the quotation marks.) After two transitional chapters (one on the fateful­ ness of the number 13 [in, e.g., the date 1913], the other on the great colored activist Abdul Abdurahman), Plaatje turns to the effects of the NLA in the Cape Province. The second of these Cape chapters—­“The Passing of Cape Ideals”—­is one of the great set pieces of the book: a celebration of the Cape franchise and of the idealistic native policy of Saul Solomon and similar Cape leaders. (When Plaatje arrived in England in 1914, Solomon’s widow was one of his strong supporters; she was then recently out of Holloway Prison after having chained herself to the railings of the House of Commons in the cause of woman suffrage.) There follows a brief chapter on John Tengo-­Jabavu, Plaatje’s senior by many years and South Africa’s first major African journalist. Tengo-­Jabavu had close relations with senior government officials and in particular with J. W. Sauer, who had been the government’s proposer of the NLA and who was a longtime Cape Liberal who nonetheless felt that the NLA—­although it contravened most of his own principles—­was better for Africans than any politically likely alternative. Tengo-­Jabavu supported Sauer and the NLA, a support that cost him Plaatje’s personal friendship (he was godfather to one of  Plaatje’s children) and gave him a reputation as a turncoat unchanged un­ til the enduring power of the ANC almost a century later enabled his reha­ bilitation. (Ironically, he had opposed the formation of the ANC in the first

��� �. �������

263

place.) Plaatje’s chapter is uncharacteristically bitter, bespeaking what he evidently believed to be a personal betrayal. Not surprisingly, the formation of the ANC and the creation of the depu­ tation to Britain take up the next two chapters. This is an often-­told story, but Plaatje’s version of the crucial SANNC meeting at Kimberley is striking for its careful acknowledgement of white allies. The bishop of Kimberley, the De Beers Company (which “provided hospitality”), and the Diamond Fields Advertiser are thanked, as are a number of white speakers. But the narration leads ineluctably to the appearance of the secretary for native affairs, who brings the disappointing message that no changes could be contemplated in the NLA until a commission reported on its results and on possible exten­ sions of the reserves. The Africans rightly expected that this report would come to nothing. (About the time Native Life was first published, the com­ mission reported, saying that there was no substantial way to expand the reserves. Plaatje added an analysis of the report to later editions.) Plaatje then turns to the African deputation against the Native Land Act. The deputation first talks to Lord Gladstone (the governor general) who tries to dissuade them from going to London, and then to Prime Minister Botha, who does the same. Then they go to England and get the same response from the Secretary of State for the Colonies, first in a private interview, then in Par­ liament itself during the vote on the Colonial Office. In closing the chapter, Plaatje calmly demolishes all of the reasons these white officials give for in­ action. He turns in two succeeding chapters to the massive public and press support for the Africans once they take their case to the British newspapers and lecture halls. (Plaatje was a spellbinding lecturer. A later governor gen­ eral [Lord Clarendon] was to say in 1931 that he might usefully have learned from Plaatje some lessons in English public speaking.) In the second section, the chapters are more historical and sweeping. They cover such matters as black participation in the Boer War (amusingly, Plaatje compliments Boer General J. P. Snyman, who agreed to take Sun­ day as a day of rest from the siege of Mafeking, so that the besieged could visit their families, do some wash, keep the Sabbath, and “make all-­round preparations for another week’s bombardment” [p. 284]). They also cover the whites’ reluctance (both in South Africa and in the British empire as a whole) to allow black soldiers to serve in the combat arms in various white wars, despite several African offers to raise substantial forces. These chapters about black willingness for military service set up a contrast with the fol­ lowing two chapters, in which Plaatje discusses, first, the mass resignation

264

���� ���

of Boer officers from South African forces poised to enter the German ter­ ritory of Southwest Africa at the start of the First World War and, second, the subsequent rebellion of those officers against the Union government and their collaboration with the Germans. Indeed the whole book is a setup for its final chapter: a polite skewering of Piet Grobler—­Boer politician, nephew of President Kruger of the Transvaal, mover and activist behind the NLA, fu­ ture Minister of Lands, and, in the First World War, rebel against the Union government. Mr. Grobler, it is said, was caught red-­handed in the treasonable act of lead­ ing a force of fifty armed rebels against the Government, and for his breach of his oath [as a member of Parliament; the text of the Parliament oath is given in Plaatje’s preceding paragraph], he was taken prisoner. Last week, whilst his trial was still pending, he applied for bail, and in support of his application, he pleaded that he was anxious to attend to his Parliamentary duties. (p. 392)

Yet at other times, Plaatje is frankly mystified by the Boers’ failure to recognize that their position subordinate to the British is precisely similar to the blacks’ position subordinate to the Boers. He notes that South Africa welcomes refugees from oppression in Europe, but oppresses its own natives (p. 123), or again, that the Boers accepted African help against the Matabele leader Mzilikazi but then reneged on promises made to secure that help (pp. 124–­30). Throughout, he underscores the many times that Africans sup­ ported the South African government in prior rebellions and difficulties. Overall, the book is a peculiarly gracious polemic. Powerful without be­ ing one-­sided, extensively researched but written as lively journalism, it was very successful with the white public in Great Britain, however little its in­ fluence on those in power. But Plaatje himself did not think Native Life made a sufficient case. He soon began writing the historical novel Mhudi, which was completed in 1920, but not published until 1930. Mhudi is an introduc­ tion to mid-­19th-­century South African history from the African point of view. The novel is set in the aftermath of the rise and expansion of the Zulu under Chaka in the 1820s, whose consequences led to the general period of migration, conflict, and disorder known as the mfecane. One major migra­ tion took Mzilikazi—­an erstwhile Chaka ally—­over the mountains to the high veld, where he and his Matabele created a quasi-­Zulu imperial system,

��� �. �������

265

placing the local Tswana chiefdoms under tribute. Mhudi’s action is set in motion by the murder of two of Mzilikazi’s tribute envoys by one such chief, a murder that leads to the annihilation of the chief ’s city, from which hero and heroine make separate escapes and after various adventures find them­ selves in another Tswana chiefdom when Dutch voortrekkers arrive. The voortrekkers are fresh from a disastrous defeat at the hands of Mzilikazi. Avenging Tswana and voortrekkers then make common cause against Mzi­ likazi, who is driven from his capital across the Limpopo. In the foreground of this historically accurate framework are a set of ar­ chetypical figures: on the Tswana/Boer side Ra-­Thaga the Tswana warrior, his indomitable wife Mhudi, the young Boer De Villiers, and the great chief Moroka; and on the Matabele side Mzilikazi, his brave wife Umnandi, and his wise counselor/general Gubuza. The interactions of these characters do not obey the rules of 19th-­century literary realism. Many are essentially frame­ works for the African proverbs in which the book abounds. (Plaatje had pub­ lished a book of English translations of Tswana proverbs in 1916.) But others are emblems of acute historical conflicts—­Mhudi’s and Ra-­Thaga’s horror at the Boers’ brutal physical punishments for erring African servants, for ex­ ample. As in Native Life, the whites are divided into the reasonable few and the unreasonable many. Like many great historical novels (those of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, for example), Mhudi concerns transiency and loss. Much of this loss is prophesied by one or another of the main characters, who are given to long Shakespearean speeches (Plaatje was a lifelong lover of Shake­ speare and translated Shakespeare into Tswana). Indeed, Mzilikazi’s great prophecy (in chap. 22) that Africans who collaborate with the whites will be betrayed and enslaved by them is a more bald statement of the African posi­ tion than exists anywhere in Native Life. But Plaatje himself did not or could not heed the warning he put in Mzi­ likazi’s mouth. Viewed in the light of later history, it is hard to imagine a better example of the futility of liberal and humane politics than Native Life in South Africa. On the one hand, the book is a model of restrained polemic. It is witty and thoughtful, fair and scrupulous. Its handling of its enemies is respectful if occasionally bemused or passionate. It praises dozens of  white South Africans who defend the Africans’ interest, both Boers and Britons. It is filled with common sense, with a willingness to forget the past in a brighter future and an overwhelming optimism about British justice and

266

���� ���

law. More broadly, it is a hymn to conscientious political activity in a liberal society: to due process, law, civil society, reasonability, and the universal dig­ nity of all people. But on the other hand, the reader knows what will be the result of  Plaatje’s restraint. The result will be a 30-­year descent into oppression he did not imagine to be possible. We return then to the question with which we began. When did that descent become inevitable? From the 21st century, it is easy to say that the demography among whites guaranteed Afrikaner dominance in the medium term once the Union of South Africa had been formed, just as demographic forces across the whole society ultimately guaranteed the end of apartheid and indeed of white South Africa in the long run. It is likewise easy to see in the gold of the Witwatersrand a resource that international capitalism could not ignore, whatever its price in human terms and whoever might be the locals in charge of it. But for all those grand historical forces and their retrospectively obvious inevitability, the history of South Africa in the 20th century still had to be lived year to year, month to month, day to day. Plaatje could not take solace in the inevitable eventuality of African control of South Africa, for it was no more obvious to him than to his white countrymen, and he would be long dead when it arrived. So in his work Plaatje committed himself to a normative theory of social life that was careful, passionate, and self-­consciously both magnanimous and optimistic. But it was premised on political assumptions that may seem to later readers not just overly optimistic but simply wrong. But do we con­ clude that he was a fool and should have been more radical, or that in the long run the shining example of his character and work outweighs his po­ litical ineffectiveness in the short run? Our answer to that question tells us more about ourselves than about Plaatje.

�����

José Vasconcelos

������ ���������� ������� ��� ���������� ��� ����� ���� from activists who found themselves in a quiet moment—­exile, foreign study, prison, house arrest. Sarmiento’s Facundo came at one such low point, as did Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya and much of the work of Ali Shariʾati. Others wrote in the heat of active political engagement—­Ramabai and Fukuzawa, for example. But few wrote important works of social thought in the process of interpreting their own lives. One such was José Vasconcelos. Vasconcelos played an important and complex role in Mexican politics for the 20 years between the fall of the dictator Porfirio Díaz and the failure of his own bid for the presidency in 1929. In the same period, he wrote five sizable monographs (on Pythagoras, Hindustani thought, metaphysics, race, and native culture in the Americas) and pursued an erotic life of considerable complexity. While his most famous work is La raza cósmica of 1925, his autobiography illustrates his theory more effectively. For it is pervaded by a sensual aesthetic of individual life that is Vasconcelos’s most striking contribution to social thought. José Vasconcelos was born in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca in 1882, but his family moved almost immediately to Sasabe on the northern border. Vasconcelos’s father was a minor customs official. His mother, who loomed large in his life, was the progenitrix, organizer, and sustainer of a large family. Some of Vasconcelos’s early schooling was across the border,

La raza cósmica / The Cosmic Race, bilingual ed. By José Vasconcelos. Translated by Didier T. Jaen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Pp. xxxiii+126; A Mexican Ulysses: An Autobiography. By José Vasconcelos. Abridged and translated by W. Rex Crawford. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972. Pp. 288.

268

���� ���

and he learned early both the English language and the hostile attitudes of the yanquis. In search of better schools, the family moved to Campeche, where Vasconcelos went to high school and was recruited to teach English to the pretty daughter of the principal, who became the first of his many erotic attachments. Vasconcelos finished preparatory school in Mexico City, attended law school, and became a practicing lawyer in 1905. In 1906 he married a hometown girl from Oaxaca, who had been his comforter at his mother’s early death and whose ambiguous position in his multivalent life resurfaces often in his autobiography. Vasconcelos became associated with Francisco I. Madero’s reform movement almost as soon as he took up the law. After the first of many exiles he returned to Mexico City when Madero took over from Díaz in 1911. Shortly after the battle of Ciudad Juárez, he met the founder of the Mexican “White Cross,” Elena Arizmendi, who needed legal services (because of internal troubles in the organization) and had been referred to Vasconcelos by Madero. Arizmendi was smart and beautiful, an aristocrat but trained as a nurse, a supporter of the revolution but a lover of old regime niceties. Her first marriage had dissolved years before. She and Vasconcelos became lovers almost immediately. Madero’s assassination in 1913 sent Vasconcelos (and Arizmendi) into exile. From abroad he helped mobilize constitutionalists against the Huerta regime, then returned to Mexico in 1914 as minister of education in the Government of the Convention. The forces of Venustiano Carranza soon overthrew that government, and Vasconcelos again left Mexico, this time for five years. He spent most of this time in the United States, where he made a living as a writer and an international lawyer (his earlier legal career had been as a representative of a New York firm in Mexico City) and prepared for the inevitable turn of the Mexican kaleidoscope. After numerous temporary separations, he and Arizmendi parted for good in 1916. (Vasconcelos maintained his wife and children in San Antonio, Texas, throughout most of this period; his daughter was conceived when the Arizmendi affair was beginning.) Carranza fell in 1920, and Vasconcelos returned to Mexico as president of the National University. Soon afterwards, he became minister of education. Afire with transforming zeal, he built schools and libraries throughout the country, worked for literacy among the masses and the Indians, and sponsored the arts—­particularly the folk arts and the spectacular murals that remain world-­renowned more than a century later. In 1924 he ran for governor of his native Oaxaca, was defeated (probably by force and chicanery),

���� �����������

269

and again left the country. He returned in 1928 to run for president after Álvaro Obregón—­the president-­elect and one of the great strongmen of the 1920s—­had been assassinated. In an election almost certainly managed by fraud and violence, Vasconcelos was defeated, and the Partido Nacional Revolucionario consolidated its one party rule, which would endure under various names until 2000. During the election Vasconcelos took a new mistress, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, the estranged wife of an American engineer. Vasconcelos briefly awaited a popular uprising with which to claim the election that had been taken from him, but it never came. An embittered man, he again fled the country, for the United States, Panama, and then Paris, where Rivas Mercado—­unwilling to countenance Vasconcelos’s continued marriage—­killed herself at the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral. Vasconcelos left Paris in 1933, wandering to Argentina and the United States and writing his memoirs in a voice that rapidly became both pessimistic and conservative. In 1939 he returned to a Mexico in which he was no longer an important politician. His long-­suffering wife died in 1941, and he remarried. He directed the National Library from 1941 to 1947, and thereafter the Biblioteca de México. He continued to write energetically, becoming a devout, even fervent, Catholic. He died in 1959. La raza cósmica as usually read is merely the introduction of a much longer travel book. Three short essays on mestizaje (literally, cross-­breeding) in­ troduce much longer sections recounting Vasconcelos’s 1922 trip through Brazil, Argentina, and Chile on an official mission of the Mexican government. Again Vasconcelos traveled with a woman—­the internationally acclaimed Mexican opera singer Fanny Anitua. An erotic relationship is unproven but widely suspected. The travel sections of La raza cósmica prefigure the style of the later autobiography, intermingling the personal and the abstract indissolubly. But the more abstract opening sections argue that Mexicans (and by extension the “hybrid” Ibero-­Americans) represent a synthesis of all the great races of the past. These races are the black (or Lemurian), the oldest; the red (or Atlantean) and second oldest, ancestor of the current indigenous civilizations of the Americas; the yellow (about which Vasconcelos says remarkably little); and the white, among which Vasconcelos distinguishes the two great strains of Anglo-­Saxons and Spaniards. Vasconcelos is not particularly committed to the details of this race system, although literal-­minded readers of the early 21st century, for example, found him intolerably racist. To be sure, the evidence for racism is plain enough. He speaks at one point of  “the Chinese,

270

���� ���

who under the holy counsel of Confucian morals multiply like rats” (p. 19). He repeatedly speaks of blacks as ugly. But he also notes that “the mestizo, the Indian and even the Black surpass the White in an infinity of properly spiritual capacities” (p. 32). And certainly his sexual eye finds women of all races attractive: in Mexican Ulysses he lovingly tells the story of a four-­day idyll with a beautiful black woman in Havana during his return from Lima, where he and Arizmendi have just had a stormy parting. However, while his nonracist sexual tastes might seem to mitigate his racial views, they at the same time imply an absolute sexual egotism. But in among all this mixture and ambivalence, what really matters to Vasconcelos is that the Mexicans—­not so much as they are but as they could be—­(will) synthesize all prior racial types into a fifth race. As he put it in a lecture of 1926: From a purely intellectual point of view I doubt whether there is a race with less prejudice, more ready to take up almost any mental adventure, more subtle, and more varied than the mestizo or half-­breed. I find in these traits the hope that the mestizo will produce a civilization more universal in its tendency than any other race of the past. Whether it is due to our temperament or to the fact that we do not possess a very strong national tradition, the truth is that our people are keen and apt to understand and interpret the most contradictory human types. (Aspects of  Mexican Civilization [University of Chicago Press, 1926], p. 92).

Yet despite La raza cósmica’s subtitle of  el mestizaje, little of  its argument concerns miscegenation as a historical reality, unlike Gilberto Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves, written less than a decade later (see chapter VII). And Vasconcelos would by the 1930s retreat into a position presuming the superiority of the unmixed criollos in Mexican culture. The real heart of La raza cósmica is less el mestizaje than Vasconcelos’s unrelenting hostility to the society and culture that he associates with Great Britain and the United States: sober rather than bold; calculating rather than risk taking; calm rather than passionate; commercial rather than aesthetic; mechanical rather than creative; pedestrian rather than grand. It therefore makes little difference that Vasconcelos’s argument is pervaded by extravagant—­even bizarre—­historical interpretations: the conquistadors were creative visionaries, Napoleon “betrayed the cause of Latinity” by sell-

���� �����������

271

ing Louisiana to the Americans, contemporary Mexicans need to remember and avenge the defeats of the Great Armada and of Trafalgar. For at other times he calls the conquistadors “brigands,” admires British commercial determination, and envies the Americans their relentless discipline. Nor does it matter that he calls the United States an Anglo-­Saxon country when in 1920 over a third of its citizens were either foreign born or first generation, and those of Anglo-­Saxon ancestry constituted about 3% of its population. Nor does it matter in the end that the “Anglo-­Saxon” commercial world he seems so to despise is in reality a projection of the very Mexican world of Porfirio Díaz: commercial, scientific, exploitative, tawdry. For Vasconcelos wants to make a “spiritual leap,” to rise above the specialists through “intuition informed by specialist data.” He wants to paint a nonexistent but possible world, an alternative to the early 20th-­century American/British commercial culture that engulfed his Mexico. The organized, disciplined, Victorian world of Spencer is what Vasconcelos detested—­a world of “rules, norms, tyranny, from which it is necessary to escape” (p. 29). (Vasconcelos could be quite amusing; he once remarked, “What [Spencer] could not forgive Christ was his not having been British” [Mexican Ulysses, p. 42].) But in particular, La raza rejects a world in which “matrimonial ties are imposed on people who do not love each other” (p. 29). Suddenly, we are in the middle of  Vasconcelos’s unhappy marriage to Serafina Miranda: “In the third period, whose approach is announced in a thousand ways, the orientation of conduct will not be sought in pitiful reason which explains but does not discover. It will rather be sought in reactive feeling and convincing beauty. Norms will be given by fantasy, the supreme faculty. That is to say, life will be without norms, in a state in which everything born from feeling will be right” (p. 29). Here, after 10 years of philosophical reflection, Vasconcelos’s passionate affair with Elena Arizmendi has become a world historical trend. “Above scientific eugenics, the mysterious eugenics of aesthetic taste will prevail. . . . Marriage will cease to be a consolation for misfortunes that need not be perpetuated, and it will become a work of art. . . . Sincerely passionate unions, easily undone in case of error, will produce bright and handsome offspring” (La raza, pp. 30, 31). This emphasis on physicality (and on an aristocracy of beauty) is indeed inherent in Vasconcelos’s concept of the new race: “As an instrument of  this transcendental transformation, a race has been developing

272

���� ���

in the Iberian continent; a race full of vices and defects, but gifted with malleability, rapid comprehension, and easy emotion, fruitful elements for the seminal plasma of the future species” (p. 37). The essence of  this new race is its preoccupation with beauty: Fortunately, such a gift, necessary to the fifth race, is possessed in a great degree by the mestizo people of the Ibero-­American continent, people for whom beauty is the main reason for everything. A fine aesthetic sensitivity and a profound love of beauty, away from any illegitimate interests and free from formal ties, are necessary for the third period, which is impregnated with a Christian aestheticism that puts upon ugliness itself the redemptive touch of pity which lights a halo around everything created. (La raza, p. 38)

One finds in La raza cósmica little about the new caudillismo of Vasconcelos’s Mexico. The conquistadors are admired (“There is no Anglo-­Saxon writer who does not admire Hernán Cortés”; Mexican Ulysses, p. 141), but we hear nothing of Carranza, Huerta, Calles, and Obregón, who have teased Vasconcelos with the lesser trappings of power, then shunted him quickly aside when the need arose. Perhaps the focus on a personal, aesthetic paradise was forced on Vasconcelos by this dangerous political world that crassly but effectively destroyed his political pretensions in 1929. Since the Vasconcelos of La raza writes an ostensibly political theory that in practice consists of prescriptions about the individual and his experience, one expects that his autobiography will embody these views in every line. This expectation proves correct; the autobiography practices what the ostensibly theoretical works preach. In the English translation, the four original books of memoirs (almost 2,000 pages) are abridged to a volume of around 300 pages and given the title A Mexican Ulysses, a slight modification of the title of the first volume of the full work. The original Spanish (Ulises criollo) referred not to a Mexican nationality but to the racial status of criollo, a Mexican putatively of purely Hispanic ancestry. For by this time, race transcended nationalism for Vasconcelos. Yet race for Vasconcelos most often meant culture rather than genetics. The travel sections of La raza, with their plain admiration of Brazil and Argentina, had already made that fact clear. In Mexican Ulysses we see Vasconcelos in the full round: his intellectual life, his political vicissitudes, his family and erotic lives. The only thing veiled is the (well-­known) identity of  Arizmendi, who is called Adriana throughout

���� �����������

273

the book (a convention followed here.) Not surprisingly, given the conflicts involved in the various parallel lives of  Vasconcelos, the “aesthetic unity” proclaimed in La raza is often absent. For example, in the commentary sections of Mexican Ulysses, Vasconcelos often argues that great thinking and sexuality do not go together. He repeatedly announces plans to forsake women and pursue a monastic life. (Adriana’s departure from Lima inspired a “half-­ dream” of  Jesus [Mexican Ulysses, p. 131], and curiously enough Adriana herself at one point left him in New York for a convent in San Antonio; he later arrived at the convent—­with his wife—­to extract Adriana and go off with her again.) But Vasconcelos’s monastic projects never succeed. More important, the separation of thought and sexuality in these moments of tension does not fit Vasconcelos’s theory of esthetic monism, which not unexpectedly dates from the midpoint of his passion for Adriana and which insists on the absolute unity of experience. The beginnings of his great loves—­the first passages with Sophie in Campeche and the first transports with Adriana in Mexico City—­celebrate such unity of experience. To be sure, it dissolves at times. Vasconcelos at one point in the New York Public Library gives Adriana a copy of Plato to “keep her entertained” (Mexican Ulysses, p. 117) while he reads the church fathers; he actually has contempt for her intellectual abilities (p. 80). Yet although he is secretly glad when she finally leaves him in Lima, even their parting insults allegorically link the personal and the theoretical (Mexican Ulysses, p. 128). Vasconcelos accuses Adriana of   want­ ing to show off  her legs in the new revealing fashions of  New York, while she tells him she will marry a gringo, because Latin men don’t know how to treat women. The hypersexuality Vasconcelos has so often admired in Adriana is now an insult, for she had by this time read widely in Ellen Key and other feminists and to accuse her of mere sexuality was the supreme slur. On her side, her threat to marry one of the sajones stabs the very heart of the racial theory Vasconcelos would set forth in La raza. (She did indeed marry a gringo in 1918, but the marriage foundered quickly.) The idealized (and largely imaginary) underlying unity of ideas and sensuality was yoked—­explicitly in Vasconcelos’s self and implicitly in his theories—­with an absolute self-­involvement that could lead him to write 2,000 pages of autobiography in the first place. Even the most cursory reading of  Mexican Ulysses will persuade the reader that Adriana is for Vasconcelos simply an instrument of his own experience (“What I sought in Adriana was her unique, irreplaceable quality of being for all eternity part of my

274

���� ���

destiny”; Mexican Ulysses, p. 131). As such incidents make clear (and as became plain when a biography of Arizmendi finally appeared in 2010), it is Vasconcelos’s life whose aesthetic monism was at issue, not the shared life of a mutual relationship. There is no persuasive theory of mutuality in his writings on aesthetic monism, no sense that a profound relation with another would involve the merging of not one but two complex subjectivities and that this would involve compromise, an activity Vasconcelos identifies with the despised sajones. In the works reviewed here Vasconcelos thus did not resolve the inner contradictions and antisociality of aesthetic monism. It remains an interesting but incomplete evocation of a line of social theory running from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment to Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters and Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (see chapter VI). But Mexican Ulysses provides a profound if sometimes sobering view into an aesthetic concept of life as Vasconcelos lived and theorized it, and La raza cósmica sketches a culture whose social characterology might sustain a society of such people. These are real achievements, even if, as in the conclusion of his Chicago lectures, Vasconcelos acknowledged that they were dreams rather than actual expectations: Many of our failings arise from the fact that we do not know exactly what we want. . . . Democracy and equal opportunities for every man has been the motto of the great American nation. Broadness, universality of sentiment and thought, in order to fulfil the mission of bringing together all the races of the earth and with the purpose of creating a new type of civilization is, I believe, the ideal that would give us in Latin America strength and vision. (Aspects, p. 93)

And fittingly, it was as a dreamer that he described himself: My race is grave, profound, and moves itself to tears in the intense sweetness of prayer. It also has known how to laugh, but with the Cervantesque laugh that lashes out at the inadequate execution of the highest aims, the ineptitude of reality in accommodating itself to our dreams. After all the failures of Don Quixote, the ideal remains still most high and glorious. Humor, by contrast, is the uncontrollable triumph of  Sancho Panza. I have spent many years in the Anglo-­Saxon countries, and I am fed up with sanchopancismo. (El monismo estético [Mexico City, 1918], p. 8)

���� �����������

275

Vasconcelos will always be a thinker of controversy—­not for him the serenity with which Don Quixote so often meets his reverses. But the controversy is worth having and the dreams are worth dreaming, flawed as they so often seem. For these books confront us with a crucial aspect of cultural difference—­the centrality of passion, which Vasconcelos so much lived and so much admired.

������

Edward W. Blyden

�� �. �. �. ������ ������� ��� 20 �� ������� ��� ������� �� race, there were others who thought it the century of religion. Such were the Bolsheviks with their secular religion of development, the Islamic modern­ ists with their dovetailing of religion and modernity, the many and diverse fundamentalists, the millions in the growing religious groups like the Latter Day Saints and Falun Gong, and the secular spiritualists who took up yoga, meditation, and other byproducts of  Hinduism and Buddhism. But long be­ fore all this, Edward Blyden had combined the two themes—­religion and race—­examining the role of religion in the development of a new Africa. In the process, Blyden began to set forth a general analysis of domination. Edward Wilmot Blyden was born in St. Thomas (then Danish) in the Vir­ gin Islands in 1832. His father was a tailor and his mother a teacher, both free (slavery was abolished in St. Thomas only in 1848) and both literate. The family claimed “pure Ibo” ancestry, a fact that would be of great importance in Blyden’s later polemics against mulattoes. The Blydens lived in Venezu­ ela from 1842 to 1844; Blyden there learned Spanish, the first of his many foreign languages. After his return to the Virgin Islands, his education pros­ pered, and he made connections with a Dutch Reformed clergyman, whose attempt to send the young man to his denomination’s American seminary failed because of racial prejudice. While Blyden was on this futile visit, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 came into full effect. He felt seriously threatened and jumped at a chance to emigrate to Liberia, which had recently become a sovereign nation. Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. By Edward W. Blyden. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1994. Reprint of 2d ed. London: W. B. Whittingham, 1888.

������ �. ������

277

Blyden remained in Liberia for 22 years. He enrolled in the tiny Alexan­ der High School, where he studied Hebrew and the classics. He became an ordained Presbyterian minister and, eventually, principal of the school. Like any well-­educated citizen of a new country, he was active in public debates and served in various official missions, both to the world powers and to the Islamic kingdoms of interior West Africa. From 1862 to 1871 he was professor of classics at the new University of  Liberia. He began to learn Arabic and also served briefly as secretary of state (1864–­66). Distantly involved in the 1871 controversies surrounding Liberia’s foreign loans, he was nearly lynched and went into exile in Sierra Leone, then a British dependency. He spent two years in Sierra Leone: writing actively, undertaking missions to the interior for the British, and working with British missionary societies. Through cor­ respondence, writing, and travel he became known internationally, particu­ larly to the British Liberal elite, which he met through statesman William Ewart Gladstone and A. P. Stanley, dean of Westminster Abbey, men whom he had contacted through direct personal correspondence. On his return to Liberia in 1873, Blyden briefly headed the Alexander High School and then again became professor at Liberia College, of which he was the president, 1880–­84. In this period he was also ambassador to Brit­ ain and secretary of the interior. When he lost a bid for the Liberian presi­ dency in 1885, he returned to Sierra Leone, where he remained for the rest of his life, with brief returns to Liberia as ambassador to Britain (1892) and as head of Liberia College (1900). He was now heralded as one of the lead­ ers of  West Africa, despite his often controversial views. He loosened his ties with white Christianity, espousing a Native African Church that would, like Islam, embrace most aspects of traditional African life, possibly including polygamy. From 1901 to 1906 he was director of Muslim education in Si­ erra Leone. Blyden was supported in his old age mainly by African friends and the income of his writings, with additional help from a small pension arranged by an old acquaintance in the British Colonial Office. He died in 1912. Published in 1887 by W. B. Whittingham, and with a second edition fol­ lowing a year later, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race contains 14 of Blyden’s occasional pieces: articles, speeches, and three new pieces written for the book. The texts are stylish and erudite, widely informed on current events and literature, and garnished with references from Blyden’s broad reading in original sources. With the exceptions of one early article and the papers written for the volume, the chapters all date from the period 1875–­84.

278

���� ���

As these dates imply, Blyden wrote just before the so-­called “scramble for Africa,” in which metropolitan nations concerned for markets, raw ma­ terials, and strategic protection suddenly “partitioned” the to-­them-­largely-­ unknown continent. This rush to formal imperialism was no more expected by Blyden than by most of his English connections. Blyden’s work also just preceded a great religious transition—­the fading of the middle-­class Chris­ tian revival that had produced (among many other things) the antislavery movement and the increasing flood of foreign missions, and that would soon expire in its final guise as metropolitan Progressivism, a halfway station to secular social democracy. But as with imperialism, Blyden did not see this coming change. The long revival had decisively shaped his life, and although his own religious positions changed steadily, his book is quite unaware that secularism is soon to dominate the metropolis itself. Of the two other great movements that would soon dominate metropoli­ tan affairs, Blyden addresses only one—­the nationalism exemplified in the Americans’ bloody Civil War, the unifications of Italy and Germany, and the emergence of Zionism, all of which Blyden mentions. The second, unmen­ tioned movement was socialism, a metropolis-­wide movement growing out of the economic transformations of which the scramble for Africa was an­ other result. Blyden does mention international political economy: he is quite explicit that the expansion of the metropolitan nations into Africa is driven in part by “the depressed factories of Lancashire” (p. 110). He also recognizes that export dependency is a danger for both Liberia and Sierra Leone (pp. 119–­29; Blyden hopes for a stable African society largely self-­ sufficient in agriculture and traditional manufactures). But socialism itself does not appear. Blyden’s book is thus an odd combination of past and future, of romanti­ cism and realism. In this, it is profoundly Victorian. (“Victorian” here stands for a set of attitudes common across the upper-­middle classes of the metrop­ olis in the mid-­19th century.) The combination of passion and restraint, of worldwide vision with a local and particular lifestyle, of unusual commit­ ment with everyday conventionality: these mark Blyden just as they mark the British Liberals he knew so well. Indeed, the text itself abounds in Vic­ torian qualities. Blyden accepts sharp racial difference, the doctrines of evo­ lutionism and inexorable progress, European “Orientalist” studies, and sepa­ rate gender spheres. He speaks of “East” and “West,” of “manliness,” of “fitness for life.” He uses dozens of canonical quotations in original languages, draw­ ing on the authors and allusions that all Victorian gentlemen would have en­

������ �. ������

279

countered. It is no surprise that the book’s frontispiece shows a confident Blyden at ease in full frock coat nor that the children of his good friend R. Bosworth Smith (schoolmaster at the elite Harrow School) found him “awe-­inspiring.” At Smith’s table, Blyden would have dined with eminent Britons like Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold, James Bryce, and George Tre­ velyan. Students at Harrow in the period of Blyden’s friendship with Smith included future prime ministers Winston Churchill and Stanley Baldwin. Blyden moved in very exalted Victorian circles, and his Victorian qualities come as no surprise. Blyden’s romanticism and optimism could also be called Victorian, al­ though other times and moralities might choose to call these qualities by other names—­vision and leadership on the positive side, or illusion and bra­ vado on the negative. He says pointblank, “The fate of the Negro is the ro­ mance of our age” (p. 150). (Following long-­standing practice in this series, we shall use the author’s terminology—­in this case “Negro”—­throughout this re­ view.) He tells us “his [the Negro’s] hands are free of the blood of other men” (p. 161). In splendid language, he hymns the Negro’s return to Africa as a great homecoming (pp. 149–­47, 171–­173). His sermon (pp. 174–­98) on the story of Philip and the eunuch (Acts 8:26–­39) weaves together a theory of evange­ lization, a concept of Africans as uniquely open to experience, and a rich sweep of history from domination to freedom. These and many other pas­ sages have a warmth and vision that is extraordinary. Yet Blyden must have known well that the recent Zulu expansion in the south had brought death and disaster to millions; that the Sudanic empires south of the Sahara were slave societies; that Africans had sold millions of their brothers into slavery both east and west. But he chose to see the positive and the possible—­a mix of romanticism and performative vision. Blyden romanticizes not only Africa, but also Islam. Much of the book concerns the greater African success of Islamic rather than Christian mis­ sion. (It is thus ironic that the latter was Blyden’s main source of funding in his early years.) Yet Blyden never addresses the most obvious reason for this differential success—­that the Muslims had been in the field for a millennium by comparison with the Christians’ century. Rather he founds his argument on two mechanisms of influence: Islam’s prohibition against images and its spread through trading. The first of these arguments is as simple as it is per­ suasive. Because Christians are allowed to portray the holy family and even God himself, they gave God a (biological) race, with obvious alienating con­ sequences for black folk in both Africa and the Americas. By contrast, Islam

280

���� ���

cannot alienate proselytes in this way, simply because it forbids images of the All-­Merciful. It is rather the second, trading argument that is romantic. Blyden holds that Islam spread across Sudanic Africa by peaceful means, through trade and through cooptation of  elites, who then helped spread the religion. In this he was relying heavily on sources like Bosworth Smith’s 1874 book on Is­ lam, a popular work by the highly educated schoolmaster who thought (in good Victorian manner) that the Muslims needed “fair play” in the British public sphere and so wrote a careful but strongly positive work. Yet while trade and elite cooptation had played important roles in the spread of Islam in Africa, so also did conquest and forced conversion, often of the masses by elites who saw in Islam a way to stabilize the social order. More important, much of the trade across Sudanic Africa was trade in slaves, and the insa­ tiable demand of the Islamic empires of the Middle East for slaves took mil­ lions of Africans from their homelands over the nearly thousand years that this trade endured. That many or even most of these slaves were employed in services rather than agriculture—­a fact Blyden notes alongside his rare ac­ knowledgements of the eastward-­flowing slave trade—­does not obscure the fact of slavery (pp. 137, 324). Similarly, Blyden is effective in portraying the ignorance of many of the Christian missionaries (e.g., pp. 65–­72) of the languages, customs, and reli­ gion of Africa. But the same tools are not applied to the equivalent Islamic missions, for Blyden’s extensive firsthand knowledge of Islamic kingdoms and empires in inland West Africa was knowledge of societies that had been Islamic for centuries, often under extensive and stable regimes. Blyden is certainly right that “the Negro of the ordinary traveler or [Christian] mis­ sionary—­and perhaps two-­thirds of the Christian world—­is a purely ficti­ tious being, constructed out of the traditions of slave-­traders and slave-­ holders” (p. 68). But it is not clear that slaveholders in Arabia held ideas any less fictitious, and if local Islamic images of the Negro were more realistic it is because the religion had come to dominate the West African interior long before Blyden’s arrival there. Similarly questionable are Blyden’s notions that Arabic contains no ethnic slurs (p. 267; that was perhaps true of the classical literary Arabic he knew, but not of everyday dialects) and that the Islamic missionary wars in the Maghreb were justified because they were proselytizing wars (p. 284). But despite his occasional romanticism, Blyden made two major intellec­ tual advances. First, he developed a comprehensive vision of cultural differ­

������ �. ������

281

ence. Second, he produced a truly revolutionary analysis of the impact of domination on the psychology of the dominated. Blyden’s theory of cultural difference unfolds through his use of the word “race.” Writing before the systematization of biological racism, he uses the word race to refer sometimes to biological groupings (in practice, groupings in terms of appearance) but more often to refer to cultural units (e.g., Ital­ ians, Germans, and “Slavonic tribes” are races, as also are “Africans,” whom he views as both a cultural and biological unit). Indeed, this dual concept accords with Blyden’s extensive use of the new language of “nationalism,” which melded culture and biology. To be sure, Blyden’s concept of African-­ ness sometimes leans toward biology, in keeping with his polemic about mu­ lattoes. But his use of “Ethiopian” to mean any African is certainly more cultural than biological. For example, in much of the book, he includes Egyptians and Egyptian culture in Africa (pp. 143, 174, 227; at other times he specifically omits the Egyptians, e.g., pp. 125, 179, and 320). In addition, he treats Moses as African, praises Egypt as the savior of the Jews, and notes—­ as Senghor would emphasize almost a century later—­that Africa is the “cra­ dle of  humanity,” the geographical source of  the human organism. That Blyden derives his concept of African racial identity in part from the rising conception of nationalism in the metropolis is evident throughout. “This seems to be the period of race organization and race consolidation. The races in Europe are striving to group themselves together according to their natural affinities” (p. 141). “Among the conclusions to which study and research are conducting philosophers, none is clearer than this—­that each of the races of mankind has a specific character and a specific work. The sci­ ence of Sociology is the science of Race” (p. 108). Like everyone of his time, Blyden has no idea that this rising nationalism would soon lead to colos­ sal wars, hecatombs of tens of millions of  young men, and the bankrupting of Europe. “The law of God for each race is written on the tablets of their hearts and no theories will ever obliterate the deep impression or neutralize its influence on their action” (p. 115). This concept of nationalism as a form of cultural/biological essentialism seems to Blyden both obvious and good. But having seized the dominant discourse, Blyden uses it to produce not only an argument against domination but also a vision for the future. In the chapter “Liberal Education for Africans” he attempts this vision. He posits an Africa free of foreign influences. He expects African civilization to “or­ ganize itself according to the nature of the people and the country” (p. 82). He does not envision Africans as liberal “citizens of the world,” but rather

282

���� ���

a (united) Africa as one citizen of a world of nations. This new nation is to be author of itself: an argument that comes not only from the contractar­ ians’ notion of the people’s sovereignty but also from the nationalism that Christianity—­and particularly the protestant Christianity in which Blyden had been trained—­derives from the Jewish scriptures, which essentially identify religion with nationalism. (Note also the masculinist framework: for Blyden, Africans must achieve “manhood.”) There is a strain of inter­ nationalism. Africans must achieve “self-­respect, a proper appreciation of our own powers and of the powers of other people” (p. 85). But much more important is the argument that Africans must develop independently; they must reject European influences. And for that purpose, Blyden is willing to omit from Negro education all of European literature since the slave trade began in the West, to reject the canon of which he was so great a master—­ Shakespeare and Milton, Gibbon and Macaulay. Everything European from the early modern period onward must be rejected. African education must rely only on the works of ancient civilization. It must also turn toward the in­ terior of Africa, away from the societies of the coast, which Blyden thought hopelessly degenerate. Race memory (Blyden is not clear on the mechanisms of this) is more solid in the purely black societies of the interior. The turn to the interior echoes Blyden’s increasing dislike of mulattoes. Indeed, he ultimately employs a “one drop rule” in reverse; only full-­blooded Africans can participate in the making of Africa’s future. Blyden’s biogra­ pher attributes part of the virulence of this dislike—­which is much stron­ ger in his letters than in the book read here—­to his profoundly unhappy marriage to an elite but uneducated mulatto woman, Sarah Yates, in 1856. (Blyden eventually developed another relationship, with an educated Libe­ rian woman, Anna Erskine, with whom he later lived and had five children, in Sierra Leone). But Blyden’s dislike no doubt also derived from his own failures as an organizer or politician. Although the mulatto elites of Libe­ ria gave him many chances at practical leadership, none seemed to succeed. Blyden’s letters show a man often out of place in organizational life and verg­ ing at times on paranoia. His position on race purity probably derived its vehemence from these unhappy life experiences. As a result, Blyden did not become an apostle of mixture, as did so many others on the border between the metropolis and its other. He urges instead that the “races” be separate and equal, quoting James Johnson that “the Ne­ gro or African should be raised upon his own idiosyncracies” (p. 75). Al­ though we never get a clear statement of those idiosyncracies, Blyden here

������ �. ������

283

and there suggests a position like the one Senghor would later articulate: the superiority of Africans in unmediated, direct experience of the world (see chapter XXV). Such a position presupposes a racial version of the division of labor, thus employing another of  the late 19th century’s favorite concepts. Indeed, Blyden was in some ways following a George Eliot essay (quoted on p. 125) that argues that one’s own nationalism should not come at the ex­ pense of that of others, but that all must nonetheless recognize the impor­ tance of particular culture and indeed of nationalism itself. But if Blyden’s analysis of race and nation seems sometimes awkward, his analysis of the impact of subordinate status on subordinate peoples is penetrating and timeless. Much of it is concentrated in the essay “Echoes from Africa,” but Blyden’s penetrating anatomy of the subordinate con­ sciousness pervades the book. Thus, education is a problem “because [the Negro] is taught from the beginning to the end of his book-­t raining—­f rom the illustrated primer to the illustrated scientific treatise—­not to be himself, but somebody else” (p. 43). Or again, “We have no poetry or philosophy but that of our taskmasters” (p. 105). He recognizes the shallowness of religion received under slave conditions, which made it almost impossible to grow and become independent individuals through religion. “Imitation is not dis­ cipleship. The Mohammedan Negro is a much better Mohammedan than the Christian Negro is a Christian, because the Muslim Negro, as a learner, is a disciple, not an imitator. . . . With the disciple, progress is from within; the imitator grows by accretion from without” (p. 44). Blyden also understands the subordinate’s paranoid insistence on doing everything oneself, the need that makes subordinate groups unable to ac­ cept any dominant invitation, however well-­meant, that might bypass the winning of equality on the subordinate’s own terms. “We must show that we are able to go alone, to carve out our own way. We must not be satisfied that, in this nation, European influence shapes our polity, makes our laws, rules in our tribunals, and impregnates our social atmosphere” (p. 90). “We must study our brethren of the interior, who know better than we do the laws of growth for the race” (p. 90). But he notes certain species of false consciousness as well: for example, that Negroes are more numerous in the orthodox Christian denominations ever though these denominations are the weakest in support of racial equal­ ity. He notes the seemingly perverse hypersensitivity of the dominated: “Next to ridicule one of the most repulsive things to a sensitive mind is a sympathy unduly extended, especially when the sympathizer has no means

284

���� ���

of correctly estimating the situation which he imagines calls forth his sym­ pathy” (p. 164). He feels no compunction in rejecting white help: “We beg most respectfully . . . to assure our white friends that [conquering the race prejudice of whites and assimilating] are matters for which the Negro . . . will care very little. He will feel that in his own race-­groove and on his own con­ tinent he has a work to accomplish equal to that of the European, and that caste and race prejudices are as natural to him as to the next man” (p. 168). (The contrast with the late-­20th-­century metropolitan idea of multicul­ turalism is striking.) And he also sees the self-­hatred that can arise from the situation of domination. “Hence some of us are found repeating things against ourselves, which are thoroughly false and injurious to us, and only because we read them in books or have heard them from foreign teachers” (p. 252). Or again, he speaks of  “influences which warp [the Negro] in the direction of self-­depreciation” (p. 400). Nor is Blyden’s searching eye on his own race alone. He notes almost clin­ ically the drift of Christianity into justifying slavery, remarking the new eu­ phemisms with which “Christian divines” tried to avoid their guilt (p. 36). And he sees danger even among friends: “The white man under a keen sense of the wrongs done to the Negro, will work for him, will suffer for him, will fight for him, will even die for him, but he cannot get rid of a secret contempt for him” (p. 153). This is a subtle insight, recognizing that in every gift rela­ tionship domination is inherent in the (potentially dominating) presupposi­ tion that one has something to give. It is this inevitable suspicion that leads Blyden to the strong claim that he detests “the class who are professionally philanthropic [who] at the sight of the Negro, go into ecstasies over this ‘man and brother,’ and put themselves to all sorts of inconvenience to prove to this unfortunate member of the human race that they believe God made of one blood all nations, etc. . . . The race has scarcely suffered more from the vio­ lent antagonism of its foes than from the false and undue admiration of its friends” (p. 305). Oddly, this unsettling exposition is somewhat undercut when Blyden tells us on the same page that he prefers “those who treat [the Negro] as they would a white man of the same degree of culture and behavior, basing their demeanours altogether on the intellectual or moral qualities of the man.” For this measure is simply the test of a Victorian gentleman, not the radi­ cal African test that has seemed his goal theretofore. And one is surprised to find this trenchant essay followed by a review of Bosworth Smith’s most recent opus, his biography of the “good imperialist,” Lord Lawrence. Blyden

������ �. ������

285

admires Smith and Smith’s hero Lawrence because he “would make room, not for one race only, nor for one element of human nature only, but for all the races and all the various elements of the whole world. Not that he would bring them all to a dead uniformity. He would respect the religious and so­ cial institutions of alien and non-­Christian races, and he would not interfere with their harmless customs” (p. 341). But who is to define harmless cus­ toms? Lord Lawrence was admired in some circles for his attempts to stop female infanticide and sati. These were the “customs of alien races.” But were they harmless? The consistent moralism of Blyden and his sources was repeated in metropolitan social science a century later. That period too had the confi­ dent moralism of the Victorians. Its strong sense of self-­righteousness was founded—­like Victorianism—­on a firm and enduring foundation of enlight­ enment liberalism and on the “multiculturalism” that seemed so easily to follow from it. And like the Victorians the multiculturalists could not see that their desire to impose a particular kind of equality, a particular kind of group politics, and a particular vision of human rights was in any way par­ ticular. Like all dominant groups, they thought themselves truly universal. Blyden speaks for those who resisted this and all similar forms of metropol­ itan hegemony. His opposition to the Europeanization of Africa prefigures the resistance of many places to the hegemony of the Western metropolis, not only resistance to its material and economic power and to its religion of personal well-­being through consumption, but also in some cases to its social ideals of antistratification and maximization of social diversity. In summary, a brilliant but difficult African man who was a Christian missionary in 19th-­century Liberia and also a Victorian gentleman with friends among the great figures of Liberal England was the forerunner of later radical theorists of domination like Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon. Edward Blyden is one of  the great figures of  19th-­century social thought.

�����

José Rizal

���� ���������, ������� ��� �� � ���� �� ������ ��������. Both view the social process from the life position of the individual, focusing on individual consciousness and experience. Unlike scientific social analy­ sis, both explore a purely local world. In that world, they see different people and groups, each in its complex particularity, each from a particular and in­ evitably limited point of  view that is itself  within the flow of  interaction. By contrast, scientific social analysis generally sees abstractions—­properties of social beings—­and from a position outside the flow of interaction. Even its models of action imagine abstract beings making isolated and formalized decisions in formal structures, not particular beings struggling in a loosely woven mesh of possibility and constraint. The individual standpoint makes fiction and biography very persuasive to readers, who after all are particular individuals themselves. But it can hide the social forces and implicit connections that are so often invisible to indi­ viduals. Explicitly scientific social analysis has precisely the opposite vir­ tue. By looking at social categories, or social groups, or even social proper­ ties, it easily finds the hidden forces and structural constraints so invisible to actors. But it does so at the price of irreality. The social process does not happen in abstractions, but in complex experiences. Abstractions do not act. Yet sometimes there is fiction whose abstract, almost scientific focus is plain to see. Writers like Anthony Trollope, Émile Zola, and R. K. Narayan Noli me tángere. By José Rizal. Translated by Harold Augenbraum. New York: Penguin, 2006 (in Spanish, 1887). Pp. xxix+444.; El filibusterismo. By José Rizal. Translated by Har­ old Augenbraum. New York: Penguin, 2011 (in Spanish, 1891). Pp. xxiii+339.

���� �����

287

created entire worlds of activity in linked series of novels, ranging across characters and classes to represent whole societies. Novels like Sasame Yuki of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Hongloumeng of Cao Xueqin, and Cien años de soledad of Gabriel García Márquez trace in detail the rise and fall of large and complex families. Writers like Chinua Achebe anatomize the colonial experience. In­ deed, some writers have turned social analysis into fiction in order to inter­ vene politically. Political analysis of social class took fictional form in the work of  Upton Sinclair and Elizabeth Gaskell, for example, while feminism produced Mariama Bâ, Teresa de la Parra, Rosario Castellanos, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Nationalism also has presented social analysis through ac­ tivist political fiction, as in Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi. Among the most politically successful examples of such nationalist fic­ tion are the novels of  José Rizal. Although there is continuing debate about Rizal’s brief, complicated, and much-­mythologized life, the main outline is well known. José Mercado was born in 1861 in Calamba, a small city south of Manila. After 1872, José used an alternate family name, Rizal, on the ad­ vice of an older brother distantly connected with an earlier rebellion against the Spanish authorities. (Rizal would later claim that association outright, by dedicating his second novel to the three priests executed for that rebel­ lion.) The Mercado family was of high social status: Rizal’s grandfathers had held local government posts; his father was a well-­to-­do planter renting lands from the Dominican order; the household was well staffed with nurses and other servants. Ethnically, the family had Philippine, Chinese, Spanish, and even some Japanese roots, a combination not unusual in an archipelago that had seen repeated immigrations. As tenant farmers, the Mercados stood near the top of local hierarchies and could afford to educate their sons well. But this did not protect them from harassment, and Rizal saw his mother im­ prisoned and, later on, his family’s tenancy revoked and his parents ejected from their house because of a complicated lawsuit with their Dominican landlords. Rizal took his first degree at Manila’s Jesuit school in 1877 and matricu­ lated at the Dominican University of  Santo Tomas, where he quickly turned to medical studies even while beginning to write for publication. In 1882, he met his uncle Antonio Rivera, who became a helpful adviser. More im­ portant, he fell in love with Rivera’s daughter Leonor, then 13 (to Rizal’s 21). But at the urging of Rivera as well as of his own brother, Rizal left for Eu­ rope. While he pursued further medical education in Madrid, he organized

288

���� ���

expatriate political groups and began to write the novel Noli me tángere. Rizal finished his novel while studying ophthalmology in Paris and Heidelberg. In 1887, Rizal returned to the Philippines, his novel (already published in Berlin) preceding him by some weeks. The book created a furor. His parents and brother expected his momentary arrest, and the Spanish governor, hop­ ing to find out more about him, insisted that he have a personal bodyguard. The groups that were attacked in the book protested vigorously, the lawsuit about the family land reached a new stage, and the Spanish governor, real­ izing he could not protect Rizal, soon advised him to leave the country. Rizal left in 1888, not to return until 1891. During his brief Philippine stay, he had been unable to see Leonor Rivera. He went to Europe via the Pacific, enjoying a brief sojourn in Japan before crossing the United States and then the Atlantic. Working in the British Museum, he undertook a revision of An­ otonio de Morga’s 17th-­century study of the Philippines and began a sequel to Noli me tángere. He moved to Barcelona, where he helped animate the so-­ called propaganda movement, which aimed to enlighten the Philippine pop­ ulation about themselves. He then moved on to Paris, where his political views steadily radicalized: Rizal was now explicit about Philippine indepen­ dence from Spain. But drastic personal events seized his attention. His family was evicted from its farm. Leonor broke off their engagement (her mother had been intercepting both their letters, it seems; Rizal had in any case had some affairs of the heart in Europe). Rizal printed the final version of his second nov­el,  El filibusterismo, in 1891 (in Belgium). During its writing, the work had been darkened as Rizal reacted to the drift of Philippine politics toward crisis. In late 1891, he sailed for the Philippines, seemingly committing himself to fate. In Hong Kong he found his entire family, which had fled (or been ex­ iled) from the country. He negotiated vaguely with the British about Filipino colonies in North Borneo. In June 1892, he returned to Manila and was almost immediately sent as a political prisoner to the southern island of Mindanao. There he ran an eye clinic, while others, inspired in part by El filibusterismo, created the secret societies that would soon revolt against Spain. In 1896, once the revolution got under way, he volunteered to do medical service in Cuba—­site of a similar revolution. After various maneuverings by the au­ thorities he was executed on December 30, 1896, at age 35. An ideal martyr—­he saw himself as a Tagalog Christ—­Rizal proved in­ valuable to generations of radicals, apologists, and even colonialists. The new American overseers of the Philippines, for example, happily furthered the

���� �����

289

Rizal myth, which helped conceal their hijacking of the Philippine revolu­ tion. Indeed, there would eventually be groups worshiping Rizal as an incar­ nation of Christ or, in some cases, as an independent god. But the stories of Rizal were many and conflicting. For a century and a half, scholarship has swirled around the minutest details of  his life. There is little agreement, per­ haps because of the qualities of  indecision that once led Miguel de Unamuno to say that Rizal was not a Tagalog Christ but a Tagalog Hamlet. But our concern here is not with the mythologization of  Rizal but with the novels that led to his execution. The two are such central texts of  Philippine nationalism that they even have standard nicknames (the Noli and the Fili), which we use here. Completed when Rizal was 26 and 30, respectively, the novels chronicle the two returns to the Philippines of Crisostomo Ibarra, a European-­educated  illustrado (an educated man of purely Filipino ancestry). In the Noli, the Ibarra character is in fact little more than a projection of José Rizal into a series of possible events—­family matters, romantic re­ lationships, political life—­that are used to examine the internal structure of Philippine society from the illustrado point of view. Ibarra returns to his homeland seeking to help it develop and to marry his beloved sweetheart, but is on the one hand thwarted by malevolent friars and corrupt merchants and on the other aided by dispossessed poor people and fallen illustrados. Al­ though he radicalizes slowly, he is hounded by the authorities for the tame reformism that he has in fact left behind, and in the end barely escapes with his life. Around this simple plot swirls a gothic melodrama, complete with madwomen, imprisoned maidens, devilish villains, elaborate tortures, and incredible coincidences. The tone of the text varies between gothicism, didacticism, parody, allegory, and—­occasionally—­straight narration. The book is extremely rich in local references (almost enough as to be unreadable for a nonlocal without notes), but also has a surprising number of  biblical al­ lusions, chief among them the Christlike character of the hero, which itself follows a long-­standing tradition of Philippine interest in Christ’s Passion. In the Fili, which is modeled more or less directly on Alexandre Du­ mas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, the Ibarra who fled at the end of the Noli re­ turns as a fabulously wealthy merchant determined to lure the Spanish co­ lonialists toward destruction by encouraging and exacerbating their evils. Inwardly corrupted by his own vengefulness, he foments hatred on both sides and plans a spectacular bombing to ignite a revolution. But the bombing is thwarted by one of his student acquaintances, who has retained the purity of

290

���� ���

soul that Ibarra has lost. Ibarra flees, is injured, and dies, reconciled to death by a retired and godly priest. The Fili is a more disciplined novel, shorter and less meandering than the Noli. Its tone is more consistent as well. Rizal’s purpose of social analysis is evident in the fact that in both books, nearly half the chapters serve not to advance the plot but to describe and analyze Philippine society. This is accomplished by two means. The first is by creating stock characters reminiscent of the fiction of Charles Dickens, characters whose sole purpose is to represent some group whose view of the situation is contrasted with that of Ibarra or some other character. Thus, the Noli features a “philosopher” Don Anastasio, who gives a detached phil­ osophical analysis of the events in the novel. There is also Elias, who, like his biblical namesake, is active in prophecy and revolutionary work, prepar­ ing the way for the messianic revolution (and saving Ibarra’s life at the cost of his own.) There is a quietly reformist deputy mayor and a sycophantic newspaperman. There are various impotent military figures. And there are, above all, a large gallery of evil clerics: some loud and assertive, some quiet and nefarious, some guilty and tortured, some cynical or defeated. With few exceptions, they and their illustrado allies and dependents are portrayed as systematic conspirators oppressing the Philippine people. Long chapters ana­t­ omize their evils in detail, in a broad variety of  voices: Father Dámaso’s ser­ mon in chapter 31 is a masterful mixture of description, parody, accusation, and a dozen other things. Alongside these figures, who represent the character and deliver the ideol­ ogy of their class or type, is a second type of social analysis, which is much more ethnographic. There are long chapters that describe in loving detail this or that Philippine village festival or procession or meeting. Often these are reported through the eyes of different types of onlookers such as women in religious sodalities, poor people, and illustrados. This device provides a balanced but individualized overall picture. Similarly the various negative ceremonies—­arrests, meetings, conspiracies—­are also characterized quite deliberately by similar onlooker types: Civil Guards, victims, and priests. The chapters on festivals and other spectacles are quite evidently the wistful remembrances of a Rizal lonely in Europe, and they have a warmth and a wealth of detail that are extremely persuasive. The chapters on oppressions are equally emotional and in a curious way equally European. What is missing analytically from the Noli is found in the Fili, which moves the action from the local town of San Diego (Rizal’s hometown of Calamba) to Manila. Here the focus is on the students whose dissatisfactions are the

���� �����

291

great hope of Ibarra (who has returned under the name Simoun; he is as­ sumed by the authorities to have died). In the Fili, long chapters pillory the educational system, while new stock characters walk the stage: the old and timid lawyer, the corrupt Chinese merchant, the ambitious liberal friar. But again even the major characters are simply voices for particular social po­ sitions. The transformation of the noble Ibarra into the vengeful huckster Simoun is never really motivated. The tortured minds of Father Salví and Father Dámaso—­the two principal villains—­are never examined. The stu­ dents are the most realistic people in either novel, as one would expect given Rizal’s own experience. But even they do not develop and change as charac­ ters. In both novels, then, the story is thus purely social, an allegory of social life, populated by social types. The women are particularly typologized. The elite girls are all rich and beautiful but each is an individual type—­one pampered, another faithful, one coquettish, another mercenary. The poor girls are less individualized, but uniformly noble and oppressed. The adult women are also types: the poor mother driven mad, the termagant wife of the brutal lieutenant, the ob­ noxious social climber, various types of excessively religious women. All the adult women are faintly or overtly ridiculous, and at one point in the Noli a chapter describing a literal cockfight is immediately followed by a chapter describing an exactly parallel fight between the termagant and the social climber just mentioned. Rizal understands the social position of  women only via extreme stereotype. All this tells us what is already automatic in the genre of fiction-­as­social-­analysis: Rizal’s novels are intensely positioned. Not only do they por­ tray the social process from only one point of view, their young and inexperi­ enced author has not the ability of a Bâ or a Tanizaki to see the complexities of others’ worlds. So the novels become almost explicit representations of their author’s immediate perceptions of the social process around him. They are thus doubly ethnographic—­first in their own would-­be ethnography of the Philippines of their day and second in their exposition of that ethnogra­ phy from so particular a point of view. But if  we locate these novels as analyses of  the world social history of their time, we see that Rizal has analyzed one of the many versions of agricultural commercialization characteristic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Landlordism spread worldwide in this period. It is a story we have often en­ countered in this cycle of readings—­in Fukutake on rural Japan, in Fei on village China, in da Cunha on the backlands of Brazil, in Flores Galindo on

292

���� ���

the Andean utopia, in Plaatje on South Africa. The process through which commercial agriculture replaced subsistence throughout most of the world took several human lifetimes and obliterated many lives. In the Philippines, the friar orders were among the chief landholders who emerged in this trans­ formation, and their tenants—­often illustrado families like the Mercados—­ bore the brunt of their attempts to maximize output as the Philippines moved away not only from subsistence, but also from local commercial agriculture, toward an export economy based on tobacco and sugar. Karl Marx and Adam Smith would both have thought that this worldwide process was in some sense grand and inevitable, although they would have differed on the reasons for the inevitability. But the great political and moral question is really less about the process’s inevitability than about whether it could have occurred in a way that would not have damaged or ruined tens of millions of human lives. By presenting his analysis of the capitalist trans­ formation of agriculture in a pair of allegorical novels, Rizal poses that ques­ tion much more effectively than can an abstract treatise. For whatever the abstract analyses may tell us, history is always experienced in a particular place and time, by particular people and groups. For Rizal, the most important force in this history is organized religion. Yet there is in his novels a profound ambivalence about this central phenom­ enon in human experience. Some of the most comic passages in the books concern the economies of salvation: the exact cost of a dispensation to pur­ chase eternal rest for a husband or parents (Noli, chap. 16) or the precise num­ ber of plenary indulgences required to free one’s husband from purgatory (Noli, chap. 18). And the friars are relentlessly portrayed as corrupt, worldly, lustful, and simply evil. Yet Ibarra in the Noli continually admires real faith, and the Simoun of the Fili has become corrupted in part because he has lost such a faith. Moreover, the Noli is organized around the Christlike Ibarra, and the Fili ends with a passionate exposition of God’s justice as understood by Catholic theology and with an explicit warning against daring to question God’s motives or acting as God oneself. Rizal surely had no illusions that this orthodox peroration would gainsay the incendiary quality of his books, so it is clear that he meant this as a personal statement—­perhaps a Hamlet-­ like confession of  his own Christ complex as mere vainglory. To be sure, one has only to say such a thing to know that millions of  peo­ ple will dispute it. For interpreting Rizal eventually became a way of talking about the nature of the Philippines. His near deification in the decades after his death eventually culminated in a law requiring that his books be taught

���� �����

293

in every high school in the nation. But that inevitably meant that widely dif­ fering views had to be accommodated within his writings. People do not for­ get their differences because of what they read, but rather transform what they read into a form that legitimates their differences. In this lies the danger of fiction as a mode of social analysis. On the one hand, fiction can present the real experience of individuals with a level of detail and a penetration of insight that can come only in the rarest ethnog­ raphies and microsociologies. Fiction takes us inside experience, giving us the emotions of the actors themselves—­their anger or amusement, joy or sadness. And this can be coupled with the separate judgments and emotions of an author who stands slightly apart. On the other hand, a reader cannot check the insights and data of the fiction writer, nor easily correct for her own biases as reader. Perhaps more important, the writing of fiction is itself a difficult art. Steering a complex narrative between the dangers of repeti­ tiveness and vagueness is a hard-­won perfection, as the more compact and stylized Fili shows. Yet in the end it is the Noli that persuades, with its exu­ berance, its flaws, its uncontrolled and even narcissistic passion.

����

Joaquín Capelo

��� �� ��� ����� �������� �� ��������� �� ���� ���������� study of Lima by a disgruntled Peruvian engineer. The work’s size and un­ fashionable theories contributed to its long invisibility, but the real causes were that Sociología de Lima concerned a Latin American city and that it was written in Spanish, which for various reasons did not become one of the lan­ guages obligatory for metropolitan scholarship in the 20th century. So the book languished until the demographic and linguistic reconquista of North America after 2000. Knowing no Spanish, your reviewer has here followed the venerable schol­ arly practice of learning a language by translating a major work. It would have been easy enough to feed Capelo’s work into a machine translation sys­ tem. But languages are not simple variants of a single ideal form of commu­ nication. They are complexities that shape the thinking of their speakers. Translating Capelo in order to learn Spanish teaches one some things that machines cannot know. Joaquín Capelo was born in 1852. After secondary education at the Cole­ gio Nacionale de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, he entered the science fac­ ulty of the ancient University of San Marcos, where he wrote theses on heav­ enly bodies and on plant life, taking a doctoral degree in 1872. He joined the faculty immediately thereafter but continued to study civil engineer­ ing. After working on the fortification of  Lima during the War of the Pacific (1879–­83), he became the government’s chief of public works in 1883. He be­ gan a long congressional career in the same period. Throughout the 1880s Sociología de Lima. By Joaquín Capelo. Lima: Imprenta Masias, 1895–­1902 (vols. 1–­2, pp. 152 and 236, 1895; vol. 3, pp. 342, 1896; vol. 4, pp. 122, 1902).

������� ������

295

and early 1890s Capelo supervised road construction throughout Peru, with a particular emphasis on the areas east of the Andes. In 1896 he became the founding director of the Ministry of Development, and later the special com­ missioner for the huge and undeveloped northeastern department of Loreto. After a tumultuous election, he became in 1901 senator for the department of  Junín (1901–­19), as a member of the democratic party. Perpetually in op­ position, Capelo was active in indigenous affairs and also urged regulation of employment, opposing the exploitative contracts and predatory practices of the mining companies. He decried government corruption, election fraud, and military expansion. Usually unsuccessful in his legislative efforts, Ca­­ pelo finally achieved in 1916 a protective law for indigenous laborers. Capelo played a broad role in Peruvian intellectual life, supporting and at the same time criticizing the sociological positivism then general in Latin America. He helped found the Peruvian Association for Indigenous Peoples in 1909, and he published widely: works on algebra in 1875 and 1896, a philo­ sophical meditation on matter and spirit in 1894, a general work on Peru in 1895–­96, as well as the immense Sociología de Lima, here discussed. In 1912, he published a novel, Los menguados, which, like the fiction of  José Rizal, was in reality more a sociopolitical pamphlet than a genuine novel. Growing pessi­ mistic in later life, Capelo ultimately moved to Europe, dying in Paris in 1925. Sociología de Lima is a work of about 170,000 words in four volumes. The first three volumes appeared in 1895/96. Capelo’s ministerial obligations delayed the fourth volume for six years, during which time new views led him to publish a separate work on national public education. As a result, the fourth volume became a cursory summary. All the same, Sociología as com­ pleted was almost revolutionary. No comparably comprehensive commu­ nity study had yet been attempted in North America. Empirical sociology in the metropolis at the time consisted either of large-­scale classificatory data gathering (Herbert Spencer) or of detailed studies of neighborhoods (Charles Booth and his American followers) or individuals (followers of Frédéric Le­ Play). Systematic community theory was emerging from city planners like Patrick Geddes and Ebeneezer Howard, but the community study as such had not yet taken clear empirical form. But Sociología de Lima is not merely an empirical work. It is also a moralistic one. We are never unaware of Capelo’s admiration for hard work or of his dis­ like for “social parasites” like financiers, lazy workers, and the idle wealthy. His contempt for religion is also clear: “This Lima of the conquistadors and indentured Indians, the conquering and the conquered, the executioners and

296

���� ���

the victims, held many impure consciences to tranquilize, many tears to wipe out, and many iniquities to soften, . . . and this made indispensable an ex­ traordinary development of the religious spirit and consequent construction of churches and monasteries” (1:33–­34). Also condemned are the military and the colonizing Spaniards, who “established a system of thoughtless obedience for three centuries, as they did in all their colonies, to extinguish in the in­ dividual all initiative and all confidence in himself ” (1:39–­40). By contrast, Capelo’s proindigenous sentiment is strong. He speaks of the walls of Lima, “an immense cemetery, where lie buried, without question, the rights of thou­ sands of Indians put to forced labor, in the name of the general good, from which, in all times, they were excluded” (1:32). Like most pioneers, Capelo perforce used various and often unknown sources. The population data can be traced (much of it to an earlier work by José G. Clavero that is more gazetteer than systematic study), and some of the tables give official sources. In addition, Capelo’s official positions gave him access to much unpublished information. But his core calculations about Lima’s economic life rest on assumptions about typical occupational wages and on back-­of-­the-­envelope calculations (see 2:64, 83–­84, 151). Similarly, the long and detailed accounts of the typical lives of workers must come from Capelo’s vast personal and administrative experience, for there seem to be no interviews or other data intentionally collected for the writing of this particu­ lar book. The volumes are organized into an overarching theoretical scheme, which is given in the final section of the final chapter of the first volume. Capelo draws heavily on Herbert Spencer, taking from the English philosopher a comprehensive vision of an evolutionary (and hierarchical) chain of being that leads to the “superorganic” world of men. However, Capelo transforms Spencer’s three systems of “sustaining,” “distributing,” and “regulating” into “accumulation and renovation,” “creative action,” and “ordering.” For most of the work, these are known by the more earthy metaphors of “stomach,” “heart,” and “head.” Indeed, threesomes pervade Capelo’s thinking: stom­ ach, heart, and head become lower, middle, and upper class, for example, or, in another place, egoism, altruism, and idealism, or yet again commerce, association, and justice. Capelo draws on his own earlier philosophical work for other trichotomies: “The true trinity of God, the spirit, and the moral law” or “the trinity of modern times: causality, individuation, and depen­ dence” (1:144). But neither the theory nor the empirics is really the glory of this work.

������� ������

297

Its glory is its author: by turns visionary, passionate, obsessional, nation­ alist, technocratic, and reformist. The very prose itself has a variety that both de­­lights and exasperates. There are extended metaphors, extravagant diatribes, and witty sarcasms. But there are also sober preachings, formal anal­­ysis, and sentimental asides. The mixture makes for exciting but often erratic reading. In volume 1, page 48, we find the description of an elegant park from which memory “took across the seas the fame of the diminutive foot and proverbial grace and beauty of the Liman woman.” The next page starts a major section on Lima’s sewers. The four volumes, or books, of  Sociología embody Capelo’s Spencerian de­ sign. Book 1 introduces the city itself—­its physical setting and infrastruc­­ ture as well as its basic demographics (human beings are the “infrastruc­ ture” of society for Capelo.) Books 2–­4 are then meant to cover the three great systems: la vida nutritiva (the economic system or stomach), la vida relacional (public opinion, industrial governance, and social institutions—­ the heart), and la vida intellectual (schooling and expertise—­the head). As noted earlier, the last section outgrew the present work and achieved sepa­ rate publication. But even in the three main volumes, the overall approach changes steadily. Book 1 is largely data-­based and more or less factual. Book 2 comprises general sociological interpretation based on a mixture of solid data, inside knowledge, and eclectic theory. Book 3, although still con­ siderably informed by data, is mainly directed at contemporary national politics, which had just seen the transition to civilian rule. The work opens with a grand panorama of the physical setting of city, perched on a thin wedge of rising savannah only 60 kilometers wide, un­ der the shadow of the massive western cordillera of the Andes and watered by the Rimac River, which descends almost 5,000 meters in 160 kilometers. Just as the mountains confront the sea, so too the colonizers confront the colonized: Lima is founded by “a mix of two races, one too much humili­ ated to give account of its proper merits, the other too arrogant to recognize the values of others, both weak in spirit of initiative and little confident in the extent of individual power, one not well accustomed to give orders, the other not accustomed to obey, one the heir of moral cowardice, the other of a thousand crimes and evils” (1:22). The transition from the detailed water ve­ locity measurements of page 20 to this dramatic moral language on page 22 is characteristic of both the book and the man. (This review will include more than the usual share of such quotes, because Capelo’s language is one of his most striking characteristics.)

298

���� ���

After this grand opening, Capelo covers infrastructure of all kinds: not only the all-­important water, but also buildings, roads, lighting, telephones, trams, railroads, and cultivated lands (the last is simply another section on water, because cultivation is possible only through irrigation). He then paints a demographic portrait of the city by race, age, gender, and marital status. The numbers are not very trustworthy, as Capelo knows well. But book 1 closes with a detailed table, based on official data, of the 3,432 estab­ lishments in Lima in 1890, roughly one per twenty inhabitants of working age (1:127–­30). In four pages, we get an intimate portrait of the diverse life of a growing city. There are 137 types of shops (or in some cases individual occupations), including 554 corner shops selling groceries, fruits, and veg­ etables, 482 restaurants, cafes, and bars, 80 carpenter shops, 69 coal yards, 60 hatmakers, 42 drugstores, right down to the 9 basket makers, 6 photog­ raphers, 5 fireworks makers, 4 tinsmiths, 3 horse merchants, and 1 chemical laboratory. Suddenly, the city comes alive. Book 2 takes up the first of Capelo’s systems, Lima’s “stomach”—­in later terms, its system of production. Capelo here abandons trichotomies for a di­ chotomy reminiscent of Pierre-­Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx: the division between primary producers and those who live off the surplus of primary pro­ duction. Thus, there are agricultural, industrial, transport, commercial, and transient workers on the one hand, and there are services and professions, functionaries, soldiers, rentiers, and “parasites” on the other. Capelo then re­ makes this division within primary producers, since for him, contractors and large-­scale entrepreneurs are not really primary producers, but manipulators who expropriate not only working men but also the true experts who actually know how to undertake and manage a serious project (2:129–­34). All collective enterprise begins as a castle of cards, which the least move­ ment of the air blows to the ground. But if that movement does not take place in the first moments, the little family of spiders begins to spin its web and lit­ tle by little the house of cards gains solidity and assures its connections. . . . making its meal of the little flies that it finds on its way, and finishes by constituting a solid system capable of defying a hurricane. (2:135–­36)

He will later caricature those who create such houses of cards (3:66–­72), giv­ ing a wonderfully sarcastic description of a day in the life of a typical ma­ nipulator of public opinion.

������� ������

299

The main body of  book 2, however, is a comprehensive review of the occu­ pations of Lima. From the lowest to the highest, Capelo gives for each type of worker a rough count, an estimate of income, and a description of life condi­ tions, internal status, economic vulnerability, typical life course, and mobility prospects. Probably derived from Capelo’s own experience and files, these pas­ sages are rich in detail, giving the reader a lively (but quite idiosyncratic) sense of all types of work and life in the city, from the peons in the field through the rural aristocracy of workers (the carters) to the varieties of absentee land­ lords, the several kinds of gardeners, the seamstresses (mostly women fallen on hard times through loss of family support), the casual workers who wait on the street corner, and the strolling peddlers whose vicissitudes are chroni­ cled in almost romantic detail. The big merchants and capitalists are handled roughly, but it is small financiers like pawnbrokers who draw Capelo’s spe­ cial ire, for they suck savings and capital out of the lower classes. (Annual in­ terest rates are around 60%, and most pledges are eventually forfeited.) Throughout, Capelo espouses an ethic of self-­actualization through work: Lord and master of himself, [man] is only able to be happy when, contem­ plating himself in the height of moral perfection to which he has arrived, he knows that that perfection is his own work, his exclusive labor; . . . that substantial perfection which raises him to the contemplation of the Supreme Being, of that being who creates worlds not by making valleys of tears, but true workshops of incessant labor, where his creatures . . . try to come closer to him without ceasing and always by their own effort. (2:97)

This mixture of sympathy, puritanism, abstract religiosity, and work ethic constitutes Capelo’s ambivalent morality. He is genuinely sympathetic to the lower classes and genuinely antipathetic to exploitation, but he is also confident that the guidance of engineers will provide work and moral proj­ ects for all and that meaningful life lies only in that work. Because Capelo conducts his review by sectors rather than by statuses, each sectoral discussion crosses the full range of class possibilities. Even a group like the professions ranges from a handful of elite professionals (esti­ mated at 2,000 people) to the lowly and predatory papelistas. “Of all the so­ cial groups which Lima holds,” he tells us, “none is as harmful as those fifty evildoers, whose crimes are hidden behind the papers of  the law” (2:102). But as so often in Capelo, sympathy intervenes: “And yet some of  those wretches,

300

���� ���

under the influences of  other environments, could have become men of  good” (2:103). Among the public employees he similarly contrasts the well-­off and dishonorable functionaries with the poorer but honest public workers. Book 2 closes with Capelo’s diagnosis of the origins of Lima’s economic problems. He sums all the income totals given for occupations and claims (by implicit invocation of Say’s law) that the resulting total annual wage bill will estimate Lima’s total product. On this assumption, primary producer surplus over subsistence is relatively much greater than is secondary pro­ ducer surplus. Yet because consumption tastes are set by class divisions that cross the primary/secondary divide, middle-­and upper-­class members of the secondary producer group must inevitably siphon money out of the primary world, by “a thousand means, all immoral” (2:155). By rights, says Capelo, only hard work, investment, morality, and other middle-­class virtues deserve achievement and reward (2:160–­68). Curiously, although this seems a strongly positivist passage, Capelo eventually condemns positivism as fail­ ing to recognize the importance of God, the spirit, and the moral law (2:227). Book 3 turns from this examination of Lima’s nutritive (economic) life to its “relational life.” This is his true sociology of Lima and, beyond it, of Peru as a national society. Internally, this “heart” section is again subdivided into stomach, heart, and head. But Capelo begins with the heart’s head (public opinion) then turning to its stomach (industry), and finally to its own heart (social institutions). The very prescient analysis of (elite) public opinion regards it as a net or mesh loosely constraining what people can think. By later generations, this section would be read as a study of  the “culture” of  Peru: its values in religion, philosophy, and nationalism, its sentiments for liberty, truth, tolerance, and the like. But as an occasional positivist, Capelo is concerned here not with empirical culture, but with normative judgment, and he thinks such public opinion is a dubious moral guide for the heart of society, which should take its cue not from an internal guide, but from the “real head” of society—­la vida intellectual, that is, intellectual experts like Capelo himself. Indeed, experts are central throughout the work (e.g., 3:37). Capelo has no problem with a highly centralized, administrative state if that state is listening to the right advice. By contrast, there is almost nothing in the book on the stuff of democ­ racy—­legislation, legislative debate, and the like—­perhaps because Capelo’s own legislative experience had itself  been so unhappy. There follows a long section regarding the nutritive life of the heart of the community: the industrial policy problem. This analysis focuses strongly

������� ������

301

on the dynamics of internal and external investment, taxes, balance of pay­ ments, and other national issues and so drifts away from the earlier com­ munity study framework. Capelo combines a liberal position on domestic economy with an understanding of Peru’s new position in the international division of labor. What he cannot see is the coercive power of that interna­ tional division of labor, which alone possesses the capital necessary for major Peruvian development. Indeed, the book breathes a deeply committed na­ tionalism, particularly in this resentment of foreign capital. As it happened, the 1890s did briefly see independent development in Peru, when foreign capital fled because of the great governmental defaults of the preceding years. But by the early 1900s, the new homegrown elites were seduced by the easy export profits that could be achieved by again allowing foreign in­ vestment, which returned to Peru once the foreigners forgave the enormous foreign debt in exchange for ownership of the national railroads built at such cost in the 1870s. Capelo’s view of this exchange is withering. He notes that established industries crush all new local possibilities through govern­ ment connections, speaking of  “the infernal trinity of  monopoly, usury, and financialism” (3:155). Capelo then turns to a general review of societal institutions, continuing his national-­level analysis. He begins with religion and politics and then turns to social institutions proper (family, workshop, salon, association, club, social classes, and political parties). In his view, most Liman institutions re­ quire massive changes if they are to help develop the city and the nation. Religion is the worst. Petrified and wasteful, it immures productive people for life (convents are “tombs of living people”). It preaches church doctrine, when it should preach love of work, care for one’s neighbor, hatred of vice, and the evils of  laziness, envy, avarice, and egotism. In discussing political institutions, Capelo emphasizes expertise and plan­ning (3:173) as the best way to achieve liberty, security, and justice, his trinity of governmental functions (3:192). He sees the dangers of tyranny in a national guard, but also admires the safety of Peru under the (authoritar­ ian) Incas (3:187). Indeed, he argues that liberty and authority are correlative (3:193). Authority is the means to the end of  liberty, and in any case electoral power simply does not exist in Peru. The executive and the judiciary are the only means of  political efficacy. And when Capelo finally does argue that free­ dom should exist in Peru, the freedom he most espouses is freedom to work. Like any bureaucrat (and positivist), he wants laws to be planned and clear, using his own domain of roads as a long (and negative) example.

302

���� ���

Similarly, he dislikes the complexity, arbitrariness, and unplanned nature of the tax system. (Peru should increase taxes on the rich, since they won’t notice it, and should not crush industry and energy at the bottom of  society; 3:229). He is however skeptical about welfare systems, whose irrationality he illustrates by discussing the high price of death in Lima. Since burial fees (which equal about one-­third of a year’s subsistence income) include taxes that are designed to aid the poor, the people with the highest death rate (the poor) must borrow money to pay burial fees in order to contribute to a fund to support themselves (3:235–­40). A section on popular education (elite and expert education come in book 4) treats popular education as the moral equivalent of roads—­a kind of moral infrastructure “designed to conserve in the social mass the capital of enlightenment, habits, and good customs that constitute the patrimony acquired definitely for human society in modern times.” But in practice popular education is “badly administered, directed by many heads, all without spirit, without plan, without determined pol­ icy” (both quotes 3:242). A long final section on development (the ministry Capelo was soon to head) notes the long heritage of irrationality evident in the fact that different aspects of development had been located in different ministries. More broadly, Capelo objects to weak laws and the domination of contractors and sees a need for corporate housecleaning. He wants effective administrative tribunals to regulate commercial affairs and urges the pref­ erential hiring of Peruvians over foreigners. In short, he has a full positivist and nationalist program. From politics, Capelo turns to social institutions proper. These are the most fundamental of institutions because they are “most directly located in human nature . . . a record of past civilizations and vanished races” (3:254). Starting with the family and the individual (the first two concentric units of his society), he moves on to the workshop and the salon (the social settings of the “work” of the many and the elite), and then to the union and the club (the respective social settings of the associations of those two social classes). He then concludes with a general section on social classes and political parties. When speaking of the individual as a “social institution,” Capelo in ac­ tuality means national character. On the positive side, his portrayal of the “general qualities of the [Peruvian] race” includes “goodness, generosity, virility of men; sentiments of charity and compassion of women, and their beauty and grace; and [in the men] their enthusiasm for any large enterprise and every elevated sentiment, [in the women] their facility of intuitive per­ ception, [in both] their special love of art” (3:256). But the list of things they

������� ������

303

lack is also long: self-­confidence, consciousness of duty, determination to work, practical sentiment, pride in one’s own personality, habit of saving, sobriety of life, modesty, love of study, ideals of truth, justice, and goodness, conservation of health, and of liberty in action. None of these, we are told, is abundant in Lima (3:256–­57). Interestingly, apart from the sober Protestant qualities, this is the same picture of the Latin American character that we have already seen in José Vasconcelos, complete with a similar comparison to the United States (3:258; see chapter XXXII). Although he had treated the family with considerable kindness in book 2, Capelo is now more harsh. He rejects the complex Latin family with its de­ pendent aunts, uncles, and cousins. Those who rise should not be expected to aid their less successful relatives, and those who fall should be proud enough to rise again by their own hard work. Young people should not freeload; North American success reflects a willingness to throw children into the la­ bor market on their own. As for work, “The man of the people knows that he must go every day to work in his workplace, and the wealthy man knows with equal clarity of perception that daily he must do the honors of his salon” (3:264). In the middle class, Capelo tells us, the two alternate, while the two extreme classes suffer the loss of the one or the other: pleasant family life or real work. Yet both are necessary. The salon is the place that educates in values, morals, and grace, while the workshop gives material wealth. Although in many other places Capelo underscores the relative precariousness of the middle class (e.g., 3:279), here he emphasizes that middle-­class life is preferable, be­ cause it partakes of both family life and daily work. The two extreme classes also produce different kinds of associations: the union/guild and the club. The one grows out of the workshop as the other grows out of the salon. But neither is strong in Lima. Its collective life is “rudimentary.” As this analysis presages, Capelo is largely Spencerian about class itself. He first argues that social class happens through sedimentation, and he notes that public opinion, industry, and institutions (i.e., la vida relacional) are what resists external change, in class as in other things. Hence class tends to endure. But he then analogizes (Spencerian) homogeneity to de­ mocracy, and heterogeneity to aristocracy, accepting Spencer’s notion that homogeneity leads to heterogeneity via differentiation. He thus arrives at a fully Spencerian definition of (and admiration for) an aristocracy of proper merit. At the same time, he thinks merit is not opposed to democracy but is its major ally, for it leads to an aristocracy of  virtue, talent, valor, hard work,

304

���� ���

character and “all that is noble and elevated” (3:276). Thus, real democracy is, for Capelo, a version of aristocracy. He does not mention any virtue of democracy itself as a practice. On party politics, Capelo leavens his own disenchantment with rational­ ist and positivist ideals. Experience had taught Capelo that party politics is always about the leader—­el caudillo. To be sure, there are always conser­ vatives and liberals, because some people want stability and others want change. And parties do have origins in principles and interests. But they mainly involve affect and personal relationship. Parties arise out of currents in society, but once such currents and parties have started, leading men will be found and will become dominant. Here Capelo is a realist, and as illustrations of his argument, he discusses three major changes in Peruvian politics—­in 1854, 1872, and 1895—­giving in this short section his basic judg­ ment of recent Peruvian history. In his peroration, Capelo is the passionate Spencerian and positivist, de­ scribing a great evolutionary chain from the smallest organism to the abstract superorganic world. But his ultimate verdict on Lima is negative: “Our institu­ tions are petrified, almost in totality. There is no life, because there is no spirit nor adequate organization. They are moved by acquired velocity, by virtue of their inertia” (3:311). The city should rid itself of all institutions founded on unpaid work—­“absurd monstrosities that service an imbecile people” (3:314). It should rid itself of all who are not skilled: professors who can’t teach, judges who can’t judge, political bodies without responsibilities, and other such groups. Performance must be rated by external actors, not cronies. After the passions of book 3, book 4 is an afterthought. Since the main body of Capelo’s educational views appears elsewhere, we need here note only the outlines of  his discussion. The book opens with a celebration of phi­ losophy and science, which together can transform and improve the world. This is Capelo’s credo of  positivism and technocracy. The book then sequen­ tially examines the means through which these movements (should) influ­ ence society: by example, by writing in periodicals and books, or by teaching in school and university. Book 4 continues familiar themes: the importance of moral rectitude, the centrality of good examples in the household and the workplace, the danger of striving for mere position and advancement rather than because of some kind of authentic calling to professional or intellectual achievement. Despite Capelo’s faith in education, this last fear suggests his deep (if implicit) belief in a relatively static and hierarchical society. He of­ ten speaks of living in one’s “correct position” (4:40), a locution that implies

������� ������

305

that social rise and fall will be gradual revelations of innate character, as in early Protestantism. Capelo finds the Liman schools uniformly disastrous. “The best years of a student’s life are wasted in torment. . . . They come out of that atmosphere unhealthy, knowing hardly even how to read poorly . . . but with a head full of many things of memory, which have never been un­ derstood and which will be forgotten quickly” (4:91). Colleges are much the same: full of bad professors and worse instruction. The curriculum has mis­ takenly retained (useless) classics and humanities while cutting science and practical instruction. (Capelo’s 1902 book on education had argued simi­ larly for vocational education within the framework of universal elementary education—­his positivism thus extended to education, as well.) The deep message of Capelo’s work lies in its resolute combination of science and reform. Throughout much of late 19th century Europe and its dependencies, a scientifically reformed society was the vision with which the middle class opposed the various traditionalisms of past elites and the radical reconstructions of the socialists. That “is” and “ought” could be com­ bined came naturally to many of the early social scientists. Indeed, social science was almost definitionally a reform project. Doing social science in­ evitably drove one toward reformist positions, and conversely reformism clearly required a scientific basis. This explains what is, for many a later reader, the almost obtrusive emotionality of Capelo’s writing. But social science was an emotional business for him. The answers to major “political” questions were in his view entirely derivable from evidence and logic, and he had no sympathy for those who could not see this “fact.” This attitude explains, too, the near absence of  what a later generation might expect in terms of political analysis, despite Capelo’s often clear vision of im­ mediate political realities. For men like Capelo, politics (as others understood the word) happened only because of scientific error or failure. It is perhaps only his long battle for the indigenous peoples that may have ultimately dis­ abused him of this faith. But one wonders what he thought of  Tupac Amaru II and the other ghosts of Flores Galindo’s Andean Utopia (see chapter XXX). But for us as latter-­day readers what matters is that Capelo’s emotional faith in his social science turns what might have been a dispassionate and uninteresting mass of data into an intensive ethnography of a real city and a real society, a real time and place, from the point of view of an intensely committed if  highly idiosyncratic observer. We see him, we see his city, and in the tension between them, Capelo and Lima both come alive, and with them a whole world of economies, peoples, ideologies, and daily experience.

�����

Raden Ajeng Kartini

��� ���� ���� �� ��� ������, �� ���� ��� ������� �� � ����� woman whose reflections on her life and country breathe hope of human renewal and growth. First partially published in 1911, Kartini’s letters brought her undying fame, both at home and abroad. Raden Ajeng Kartini was born in 1879, daughter by a secondary wife of Raden Mas Adipati Ario Sosroningrat, a noble who was regent of Japara on the north coast of Java, about 150 miles east of Batavia, the colonial capital of  what was then the Dutch East Indies. In office from 1880, Kartini’s father was one of 80 such native regents who held office through the Dutch colonial system, which in turn exercised effective power through Dutch assistant regents who “advised” the regents. Kartini’s grandfather had given his sons relatively liberal educations, and her father was himself  liberal on most matters. Kartini was therefore among the first Javanese women to receive training in a Dutch school, where she remained until she was 12, developing close relations with several Dutch playfellows. But long-­standing tradition held that noble girls must be confined to the household compound from menarche to marriage. (“Raden Ajeng” was simply the title of such an unmarried noble woman; Javanese did not use lineage names. “Kartini” is thus the full name of our author, but we follow the longstanding practice of referring to her by her formal unmarried title.) On this matter of confinement, Karti­ ni’s father proved at first inflexible. From 1891 to 1895, Kartini (along with a

Letters from Kartini. By Raden Ajeng Kartini. Translated by Joost Coté. Monash Asia Institute: Clayton, Victoria, Australia. 1992; On Feminism and Nationalism. By Raden Ajeng Kartini. Translated by Joost Coté. Monash Asia Institute: Clayton, Victoria, Australia. 1995.

����� ����� �������

307

varying number of sisters) remained in strict confinement in the household compound. Once she turned 16, her father became more liberal and allowed his daughters occasional trips outside the home compound to properly protected sites. Moreover, in the years 1894–­97, her father also allowed his daughters to have direct contact with the wife of his assistant resident (Kartini and her sisters went to the woman’s house in a closed carriage). Through this welcoming woman, through visitors to her own household, and above all through her knowledge of Dutch and her voracious reading, Kartini came into extensive contact with culture beyond her father’s compound and indeed beyond Java itself. As might be expected, her outside contacts were nearly all women, and, as it happened, many were active participants in the then rising Dutch feminist movement. Passionate and curious, Kartini was an assiduous correspondent. She wrote to many people, but her most important interlocutor was Rosa Abendanon-­ Mandri, the Spanish wife of J. H. Abendanon. (Kartini had met Abendanon-­ Mandri in the summer of 1900, when the latter visited Japara with her husband, one of the leaders of the new Dutch “ethical policy”—­a late effort to move a highly exploitative colony in a more socially enlightened direction.) In her letters to Abendanon-­Mandri and others, Kartini conducted a lengthy and emotional self-­examination, canvassing every possible aspect of who she was and who she could become. Although the meaning and sometimes even the content of her letters continue to be controversial, the overall trend is clear. The earliest letters evince a direct if sometimes superficial embrace of what were then considered radical Western ideas about the place of women. The letters then move steadily if erratically toward a more comprehensive engagement with both Western and Indonesian culture, retaining a strongly feminist position but embedding that allegiance within a profound appraisal of cultural difference and of the dignity and worth of  Javanese culture as Kartini knew it. Even as she explored her consciousness and cultures in letters, Kartini also began writing for some of the local Dutch-­language journals, gradually becoming a publicly visible figure in ways that her parents found uncomfortable. She agitated for women’s education and petitioned to go herself to Holland for further education. But although the petition was eventually allowed, she decided in January 1903 not to accept it, in part because Abendanon had argued strongly to her that going to Holland would make her so Dutch that her impact in the Indies would be lessened, because of the inevitable suspicion that would arise against her among conservatives.

308

���� ���

In July 1903, Kartini was told by her father that she was to marry the resident of Rembang, Raden Adipati Djojo Adiningrat (a man with three living wives and six children, but who had recently lost his chief wife). She married in November of that year, and the letters became less frequent, for she was now the head of an important household, with many children to raise. (The chief wife [Raden Ayu] of a household raised all the children, biological motherhood irrespective.) On September 17, 1904, four days after delivering a baby boy, Kartini died of complications of childbirth. She was 25. Kartini’s story did not end with her death. In 1905, Abendanon retired from the Dutch civil service, returned to Holland, and became a full-­time advocate for change in colonial policy. He collected a group of 106 of Kartini’s letters to his wife and a few of her letters to others, abridged and edited them, and published the result in 1911 as Door duisternis tot licht (From Darkness to Light), preceded by his own introduction about Kartini and her dreams of education for Javanese women. The book was very popular. An English translation of 78 of those letters appeared in 1920 under the title Letters of a Javanese Princess. (It was reissued in 1964 with a new preface and introduction.) Translations from the original Dutch into Javanese, Sundanese, and Malay appeared in the 1920s. Kartini became a visible symbol in Indonesian politics, and in the 1960s her birthday, April 21, became a national holiday. She has been celebrated by some as a radical feminist and by others as a conservative nationalist. She also has detractors, who decry what they regard as a Kartini cult that obscures other figures, possibly more important in Indonesian (or women’s) history. As noted earlier, Abendanon carefully selected the letters for publication and removed much material he called “improper.” When the full letters were published in 1987, the removed material proved to have concerned personal and family affairs, which might have been a distraction to Abendanon’s practical aim of furthering education for girls within an existing colonial system. But that removed material was central to understanding Kartini’s very personal vision of social life. We therefore here read an English translation of the full correspondence with Abendanon-­Mandri (Letters from Kartini). A useful contrast to these letters to a settled older woman are Kartini’s letters to Estella (“Stella”) Zeehandelaar, a young Dutch feminist she found through an advertisement for pen pals in a Dutch feminist newspaper. So we also read On Feminism and Nationalism, which translates the complete texts of the 14 letters to Zeehandelaar that appeared in abridged form in Abendanon’s original collection in Dutch. Unfortunately Zeehandelaar did not release 11

����� ����� �������

309

other letters of the 25 she told Abendanon she had received. The series ends in 1903 and thus the missing letters may well include those concerning Kartini’s marriage, of which Zeehandelaar disapproved and which she assumed must have been unhappy. Among the letters that are included, the two longest gaps (seven months each) reflect crucial events that may have divided the young correspondents. The first gap includes Zeehandelaar’s own marriage in May 1900, a fact almost unmentioned in Kartini’s subsequent letters. The second covers Kartini’s decision in January 1903 not to go to Holland, thus turning down an opportunity largely created by Zeehandelaar’s efforts. (Kartini frankly acknowledges this “cowardly” and “unforgivable” delay.) In sum, we read two bodies of work: a small group of letters to Zeehandelaar can­vassing major issues broadly for a distant friend facing some of the same issues, and a large group of letters to Abendanon-­Mandri covering everyday life in extraordinary detail for an older woman outside the household who could give Kartini practical advice and quasi-­maternal support, but from a position uninfluenced by immediate family considerations. The Zeehandelaar correspondence is interesting particularly for its portrayal of the early Kartini: wide-­eyed and rebellious, but oddly happy. The great issues of her life are only distant potentialities, not onerous, pressing realities: Nothing can be done about it, one fine day it will happen, must happen, that I will follow along behind an unknown husband. Love is a fairytale in our Javanese world. How can husband and wife love each other if they only see each other for the first time when they are already well and truly bound in marriage? (On Feminism, p. 16)

Kartini sounds almost insouciant here, as if this cultural rule she finds so oppressive is distant and unreal. Yet even this was mere appearance. Discussions of novels in these same letters show that Kartini had by this time already moved beyond Paul and Victor Margueritte’s popular but highly romanticized feminist novel Femmes modernes (On Feminism, p. 43), whose dutiful gallery of struggling women cannot redeem a plot in which a wealthy heroine predictably discovers the right man after narrowly escaping a succession of the wrong men. From the beginning Kartini has known that no such possibility exists for her, even though her own life has much in common with that of the Marguerittes’ heroine: a wealthy and privileged French girl with a loving and much-­loved (but quite paternalist) father, conventional

310

���� ���

mother and aunts, feminist friends and acquaintances in both her own and her mother’s generation, and a surrounding gallery of predatory men. Within a year, Kartini had come to admire Marcel Prévost’s much bleaker (but commercially very successful) Femmes vierges (On Feminism, p. 64), with its unsparing and somewhat one-­sided portrayal of the internal contradictions and difficulties of the strong feminist program. (That both works had been translated almost immediately from French into Dutch shows the importance of feminist fiction—­even by men—­at this time.) Indeed, reality seized Kartini quickly. Within two years of the “fairytale” remark quoted above, she would be asked by her parents to convince her younger sister Kardinah—­ also a feminist—­to accept an arranged marriage for the sake of family and tradition (Letters from Kartini, p. 128; one suspects that Kartini’s parents involved her in order to break down her resistance to the eventuality of such a marriage for herself). In the later Zeehandelaar letters, Kartini seems to be preparing Stella—­and perhaps herself—­for the marriage she dreads. Kartini’s father and his precarious health loom larger; he would die in February 1905, but his illnesses—­like those of many in Kartini’s family—­seem strategic. He knows they will make her less willing to upset him. More pressing, too, is Kartini’s practical problem of  personal education and work, a problem by which, one suspects, she tried to hide from herself the larger and inevitable choice (as she saw it) between the tradition of arranged polygamous marriage and her own desire to work for her people in her own way. The final letter Zeehandelaar released—­the letter in which Kartini confesses the refusal of  the now authorized trip to Holland—­ closes on an ominous note: “It is just one year ago that I wrote you so joyously happy about the visit of Mr. van Kol [whom Stella had urged to help arrange the Holland visit]. And exactly a year later, you have to get this. Stella, love me a little still: out of loyalty for the great love you once had for me, I beg you. Love me just a little still.” (On Feminism, p. 116). She fears the Stella who would indeed later write to van Kol’s wife, another of Kartini’s correspondents, “Kartini gave the lie to her whole being. . . . Someone such as she who is one of ‘the chosen’ may not give up her life’s goal for the sake of one person.” (Quoted in On Feminism, p. x; Stella knew well that the one person for whom Kartini gave up her “life’s goal” was not her husband, but her father.) One sees in these letters, too, the way in which Zeehandelaar’s Europe is quite as exotic for Kartini as Kartini’s Java—­explained with such humor and insight in the first few letters—­is for Zeehandelaar. Europe is exotic modern, rather than exotic traditional, and it is perhaps partly for this reason that

����� ����� �������

311

Kartini devours feminist fiction from the West. Yet by December 1900 she was worried about her own “lost soul” in that exotic Dutch world—­her beloved brother Kartono, who had gone to Holland for education but wasted his time in “honors” and “celebrating” (not, Kartini noted happily, in drink, women, or gambling; Letters, p. 64). Kartini had steeled herself to marriage, if necessary, to give Kartono another chance by freeing up family resources (“My life for his life,” as she puts it; Letters, p. 60). But there is no hint of this intense decision in her letter only a few weeks later to Zeehandelaar, in which she gives a witty and insightful spoof of the exoticism of a visiting German professor: The professor imagined we were still half wild and discovered us to be just ordinary people; the only thing which was foreign was the color of our skin, our clothing, and the surroundings, and these gave a certain cachet to the ordinary. Do we not feel ourselves honoured if we see our own ideas reflected in the thoughts of others? And when the other is a stranger, someone of another race, from another part of the world, of different blood, colour, morals and customs, then this increases even more the fascination of the spiritual bond. I am convinced that not one quarter of the attention would have been paid to us if, instead of sarong and kabaya, we wore dresses; if, instead of Javanese names we had Dutch names; and European blood rather than Javanese blood flowed through our veins. (On Feminism, pp. 63–­64)

Yet even in the Zeehandelaar letters, filled as they are with the striking similarities of young women’s positions in the two societies, one senses the enormous cultural distance evident in Kartini’s complete immersion in her own culture: her love of the gamelan (On Feminism, p. 24), her respect for her own high position (and the obligations it entails, as in the long discussion of  Javanese administrators in the letter of  January 13, 1900), her immersion in Javanese craft culture, even the sheer intensity of her emotional life. To Zeehandelaar, it would ultimately seem that Kartini chose a merely personal allegiance over gender solidarity. After all, how could the woman who wrote “I will never, never be able to love” (On Feminism, p. 16) announce herself happy in an arranged marriage less than four years later? But the choice was not at all about personal allegiance. It was about the relation of self and culture, and it is her implicit analysis of  that relation that makes Kartini a social theorist worthy of our attention. That analysis is found in the much richer and more serious letters to Rosa Abendanon-­Mandri. (The Letters of Kartini collection includes not only

312

���� ���

the many letters from Kartini to Abendanon-­Mandri, but also a few from her younger sisters Roekmini and Kardinah, letters that sometimes reveal Kartini’s frame of mind in a way she herself does not.) The 151 letters included are loosely organized around four great events: Kartini’s first meeting with Abendanon-­Mandri in August 1900; the marriage of her younger sister Kardinah in January 1902; Kartini’s attempt to go to Holland for education and her ultimate decision not to do so; and the negotiations culminating in her own marriage on November 8, 1903. Three characteristics of the Abendanon-­Mandri letters should be understood. First, they are not formal analyses, laid out in a logical structure. They are a chronicle of discovery, not an exposition of abstractions. As such, they mix issues of daily life with profound spiritual, social, and philosophical questions. They are for the most part passionately analytic letters, combining intense introspection with an unsparing if at times curiously laconic analysis of family relations. (No one can read these letters without recognizing the overwhelming importance of the unsaid.) But they also contain news reports, extensive discussions of family illnesses, and, as time goes by, an increasing amount of business information. (Kartini became a broker of traditional craft goods for Abendanon-­Mandri and later for the craft organization Oost en West. She designed, measured, and commissioned all kinds of woodcarvings, which were made in workshops she helped organize as a charity.) It is this analysis of family life that Abendanon removed in his published edition of 1911. Yet from a theoretical point of view, it is precisely the family analysis that establishes the centrality of personal and social emotion that is one of Kartini’s most important insights as a social theorist. It is also here that Kartini shows exactly how the personal could be political, although she did not draw from that insight the same conclusion as did the later feminists who would establish that phrase as a slogan in the United States. Second, the letters are unified by having a single recipient, Rosa Abendanon-Mandri, whose character we see only through the adoring eyes of the young letter writer herself, and whom Kartini met personally only three times—­twice at the beginning of the relationship (in Japara in 1900 and in Batavia shortly thereafter) and once in early 1903 when J. H. Abendanon came to Japara to persuade Kartini not to go to Holland. The return letters are not present, so readers must either accept the analyses and speculations of the many Kartini scholars about Abendanon-­Mandri or, more productively, try to imagine for themselves the woman who could merit the extravagant love that pervades Kartini’s letters. (The few letters to Abendanon himself

����� ����� �������

313

are more formal and restrained.) The reader, that is, finds herself identified as the “you” of these letters. And the you of  these letters is Kartini’s mother—­ “dearest,” “my angel,” “moedertje,” “kindest friend,” “dearest Moeke.” Kartini already has two mothers, of course: her biological mother Ngasirah (“moeder,” in the translation), who bore Sosroningrat eight children over 20 years, and the (younger, but noble) female head of household, Raden Ayu Moerjam (“ma” or “mother” in the translation) who bore Sosroningrat three children over six years and who plays a key role in Kartini’s emotional and marital fortunes. Javanese kinship language routinely uses terms like mother, father, sister, and brother for whole classes of individuals that are generation-­and gender-­equivalent to the named nuclear family member, and the reader is thus presumed female and maternal and is trusted in an absolute way that is both very Javanese (i.e., Javanese elite-­at-­that-­moment, because the trust is so utter and complete and even at times submissive) but also very unusual (because the reader is presumed to be an outsider, and hence can be trusted with doubts and fears and hopes that cannot possibly be voiced to the actual mother[s]). As this presumption of “reader as mother” suggests, the third crucial fact of these letters is that they and their world are completely female. These are letters written by a woman, to a woman, from a household divided into men’s and women’s areas, about women’s place in the social world. Kartini and her two near-­age-­mate sisters Roekmini and Kardinah are closest friends and allies. Their mothers (and elder sister) are their nearest interlocutors, their fiercest disciplinarians, their greatest examples of how—­or how not—­to behave, to think, to emote. Their external supporters are all women (mostly of superior status): wives of Dutch civil servants plus Kartini’s young correspondent Stella Zeehandelaar. Men enter the sisters’ lives only as incidental figures. Their brothers appear only occasionally, as oppressors or supporters or incomprehending outsiders, and although the sisters follow their brothers’ vagaries with avid emotion, the vagaries most often followed are education (denied to women) or advancement in the noble civil service class in which the brothers serve (but the sisters cannot). The husbands of the sisters’ correspondents are often powerful Dutch men, but Kartini is for those distant men a pawn in their own games, a fact that she can see only dimly. The one exception to this separation of male and female is the intense relationship between Kartini and her father. It can be read in many ways, and one of the greatnesses of the work is precisely this multivalence. That makes it all the more important that we see the principal male character of the book only

314

���� ���

through the eyes of the daughter whose life he determined and whom he outlived by only a few months, which he must have spent knowing that the marriage he had arranged had in some sense killed his favorite daughter. In practical terms, the central issue of Letters is indeed indeed marriage. In Kartini’s society the one formal relation to a male that is permitted for a noble woman is marriage. (She notes unflinchingly that the only other truly independent role for a woman is that of courtesan.) Not only is that marriage unfounded on affection or even acquaintance, it is also typically polygamous, and the young raden ajeng who becomes the new raden ayu will find herself head of household over older wives as well as becoming the mother of their children. Men thus not only oppress women but also force them to oppress other women. Kardinah’s marriage in January 1902 is, in Kartini’s word, an execution. And the great puzzle of  Kartini—­canvassed in dozens of books and articles and conversations over the 150 years since her time—­ is why she herself chooses such an execution: “Roekmini will tell you everything, for me it has been forbidden. Our Gethsemane approaches. Moeder, pray for us” (Letters, p. 420). But rather than lose herself in the intensity of the marriage question, Kartini turns that very intensity toward the analysis of all the particularities that place her in this intolerable position. Her gender is of course always central in her consciousness. But her love and sympathy for her father force her to see the ways her father is under Dutch orders, and her male relatives’ experience teaches her the wanton irrationalities of bureaucratic colonialism. At the same time, she is well aware that the notion of women’s freedom comes to her more from the West than from her own tradition, and she has open admiration for much that is modern and Western. So she rapidly confronts the ambiguities of the colonialism that oppresses her people even as it has brought her the notions of freedom she employs. So too with her race and ethnicity, which were for her one thing, a combination of what would later be separated along the lines of culture and biology. For while on the one hand she can conceive of Javanese women so fully Europeanized that they could marry Dutch men, her experience with Dutch visitors teaches her quickly that most Dutch see her race as characterologically weak, devious, and labile. While her earlier letters treat “race” as meaningless and irrelevant, she moves quickly toward a deep consciousness of Javanese culture. Much of this consciousness derives from her gradual discovery—­particularly through her work brokering between woodcarvers and their elite Dutch clients—­that she and her family are from a tiny elite

����� ����� �������

315

class and that the people of  Java are not simply problems for her father to administrate or little people for him to protect and save, but also living humans with the same emotions and dreams as herself, but crushed by obligations and fatalities whose real origin she does not begin to understand. Her desperation also drives her towards deeper readings of religion: the strong Christianity of some of her correspondents, the Buddhism endemic throughout Java, and the Islam that is her official but largely (by her class) unpracticed religion. There, too, her progress is from an initially “everything is equal” position towards frank recognition that while different religions or races or classes or countries ought to be in some sense equal, one is oneself always from a particular religion and race and class and colonial status. And the intellectual recognition of equality pales before the difficulties of the practical reconciliation of such particular differences. She comes rapidly to an understanding of herself as truly Javanese. Indeed, this is the only possible interpretation of her decision not to go to Holland. She is choosing to remain what she “is.” Among other things, she has discovered that she “is” her tradition, that her very emotions, judgments, and desires stem in large part from the position she occupies. It is this discovery that underlies her rapid passage away from the simple feminism of the earliest letters. Like her first letters to Zeehandelaar, her early letters to Abendanon-­Mandri evince a straightforward liberal understanding of the emancipation of women: women should have choice of marriage partners, women should be allowed in all occupations, women should be allowed the interactional liberties customary for men, and so on. But from the start, the letters are themselves written in a way unthinkable for individuals who truly live such freedoms. For such individuals, there would have been no real decision to make. Father’s health and social reputation, Mother’s sense of tradition, Kartini’s own potential role as intercultural broker: all would pale before her necessity to live her own life as she saw fit. That said, Kartini does take some things about women for granted. Like most Western feminists then and for a long time afterward, she believes that women are characterologically different from men in some essential fashion. She is from the beginning committed to motherhood and the management of emotional life as a peculiar province for women, despite her repeated statement that her bond with her father is the central emotional pillar of her life. But she also sees from the start that such attitudes do arise in social structure. She notes several times that boys become egotistical men because they are taught to be so, in part by the female world itself. She quickly arrives

316

���� ���

at the point of pitying rather than despising them. This insight too is produced by family affection, for she is driven to this argument by Kartono’s defalcations in Holland. And one imagines, although she nowhere states it, that she drew the comparable conclusion that women’s commitments to motherhood and to emotional life derived from the same kinds of experiential sources. It is clear throughout the Abendanon-­Mandri letters that she suspects that the long-­term price of women’s having the liberty to prioritize personal values and rewards would eventually—­not within individual women’s life courses, but over the rapidly succeeding cohorts—­create among women the same self-­centered subjectivity long thought to be peculiarly male. This was a dangerous conclusion for her, for she herself had been accused of that quality of self-­centered subjectivity, an accusation that would continue long after her death. Indeed, she was one of her own first accusers, as these letters show again and again. Although the reader learns many things from Kartini, the reader can also see many things that she does not. At various ceremonies and visits, for example, Kartini encounters the senior Dutch administrator Piet Sijthoff, Resident of Semarang. Sijthoff is plainly captivated by the young woman. But although Abendanon-­Mandri must have read this attraction between the lines, Kartini herself has no clue of  it and indeed no idea that the Western liberation of women will inevitably produce men who are attracted to intelligent and challenging women. Or again, she never allows herself to suspect that any of the family illnesses might be weapons in the emotional battles that rage between mother and mother, mothers and daughters, father and mothers. But the reader sees that the rigidities of  Javanese etiquette force the family into a surrogate politics of health that is invisible to Kartini herself. We have throughout this series encountered many different forms of think­ing about society: ethnography (Donovan, Kenyatta, Srinivas, Fei); treatise (Saffioti, Mukerjee, Ghurye); epic (da Cunha, Sarmiento); fiction (Rizal, Bâ); meditation (Thoreau); poetry/criticism (Senghor); history (Flores Ga­ lindo, Plaatje, Noer); textual analysis (Husayn). With Kartini, we have letters, as we had fictional letters in Bâ. Of these many genres in which theory can be written, treatises are the most familiar and are often thought to be the most prestigious. But treatises are more rewarding to write than to read. Herbert Spencer was a great and profoundly learned man. But his work is unreadable. By contrast, one can read Letters of Kartini straight through and immediately start over from the beginning. The mixture of story and

����� ����� �������

317

insight, of passion and restraint, of fate, triumph, and tragedy are such that the work is instantly and repeatedly compelling. But Kartini’s correspondence is not simply attractive reading. For this presentation of life in letters—­a form of presentation that after all provided the original structure for the Western realist novel—­can accomplish theoretical moves impossible in other forms. These moves involve the interweaving of the particularities that are Kartini’s continual theme, especially as they relate over time: age (which changes steadily in one direction), biological sex (which changes never), ethnicity (which is ever changing in many directions), colonial status (which for these texts is entering a period of sudden change), class (which is similarly entering transition), and religion (which, as we saw in our reading of Deliar Noer, was about to see striking change in Indonesia). Because of their complex relations to the passage of time, there is no axiomatizing such a gallery of differences, no mathematical separation of their effects on life, no isolation of one from another. In that sense, no treatise can ever study their interaction. That interaction is visible only in the unfolding of a life, where it can be revealed to the reader by careful reflection. Kartini’s letters are compelling precisely because they let us see the interaction of these different kinds of particularities in her stepwise creation of her richly examined life. They “generalize,” but in a manner different from the treatise or the ethnography. They give every reader a chance to occupy the multiple positions of the family so carefully analyzed by this perceptive and loving daughter. There is no one meaning to the Kartini letters: there are, rather, a plethora of possible meanings from which readers can take new ways of imagining human life. In a sense, this plethora is both the pride and the curse of liberal society, a society which prolongs the stage of possibility throughout the whole of life, leaving only death as the ultimate unchangeable achievement. To begin life not knowing how it is going to unfold is a privilege indeed, but it is also a burden. It is freedom, to be sure, but freedom only to make oneself in a world of sudden changes and transformations, and in a world where what was once meaningful and important may become trivialized and irrelevant, leaving millions of  lives becalmed or depreciated. The price of such freedom has long been evident in the many “nervous” problems of  liberal bourgeois society and in the many chemicals used to assuage them. So also came a fear of new experience that by the early 21st century had become evident in the vast structures liberal societies created for the protection of their young people from

318

���� ���

even the most minor negative experiences: bad grades in school, difficult relationships with peers, hostile remarks in public settings, and so on. But Kartini sees that there is no avoiding experience. One must live life, even if it is hopeless and difficult. Better to become an actual person than to dream in idle potential, and better to confront difficulty head-­on than to avoid it altogether. Kartini made a reasoned decision to marry. We don’t know why and perhaps, in the last analysis, neither did she. But she made it with full knowledge of all its possible consequences and with the deepest knowledge of all the social forces that had gone into making both her and the situation she faced. Others may have seen her as a figure in a “larger” battle, as did Zeehandelaar. But in the event, it was Kartini who was the true liberal. For she lived her own life as she chose, in full knowledge of all the consequences. And paradoxically, she chose tradition. Surely no writer has captured more perfectly the sharp arbitrariness of dying tradition. Kartini’s elder sister married unthinkingly under the old regime, yet came eventually to sympathize with her juniors. By contrast, her youngest sisters were protected by their elders (who hid the knowledge of Kardinah’s sadness from them) and were to escape tradition almost completely. Only the three middle girls faced the full transition, and Kartini has captured not only their dilemma but also that of their parents, caught between their love for their children, their sense of tradition, their economic and political dependence on the Dutch, and their worries about public opinion, notoriety, and the censure of relatives. Like most historical crises—­a pogrom, a war, a takeover, an expropriation—­this one fell on a narrow generation, marking them with particular experiences and emotions they would carry to their graves. In Kartini’s writings—­as indeed in her life—­are visible all the varieties of particularism and universality. The youngest writer in our series, she has the unsparing clarity of those who are for the first time experiencing the change from possibility to actuality, from flux to focus. Her death deprived us of a lifetime of insight into such moments. But I cannot suggest what those insights might have been, for I too follow her, returning to the flux of eternity. The duty and the pleasure of continuing the inquiry fall now to the reader. . . .