IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE CODA

Coda: Edward Said, Jane Austen, and Mansfield Park

As I indicated earlier, I have decided not to discuss Edward Said's great book, Orientalism, both because I think there is only limited demand for an extension of this "bourse" and because my command of those materials is, to put it generously, limited. But I would like to offer one additional example of ideological critique by devoting a relatively brief coda to Said's discussion of Jane Austen's novel, Mansfield Park. Ed Said, whom I had the good fortune to know slightly during the time that we were both at Columbia, is one of the really important public intellectuals of the past half century, and it is fitting that a lengthy discussion of ideological critique include at least some mention of his work. These remarks, incidentally, are derived from a talk I gave to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute program in Washington, D. C., at the invitation of my sister, Dr. Barbara Searle, who has for many years taught courses there on evolutionary biology and related topics. This coda will, as I indicated in my opening remarks, be something of a multi-media affair, because it was prompted by, and will make reference to, the 1999 movie of Mansfield Park directed by the Canadian film director Patricia Rozema.

Said's discussion of the novel can be found in Chapter Two of his last book, Culture and Imperialism, published in the final year of his life. Those who know Said only as the impassioned champion of Palestinian liberation and the caustic critic of Sir Bernard Lewis and other influential Orientalists need to recall that he was, for his entire professional career, an eminent professor of literature at Columbia and an enormously sophisticated student of the nineteenth century European novel. I mention this last fact because it is a great mistake to imagine that Said's treatment of Austen, or indeed of the other great nineteenth century novelists, is in any way reductive or formulaic or overshadowed by his deep moral and political concerns. Like all great critics, Said loved the novels he subjected to analysis, and never lost the ability to be delighted by their charms.

Mansfield Park was the third of Austen's major novels, appearing in 1814, two years after Sense and Sensibility and only a year after Pride and Prejudice. [Austen, who lived to the age of forty-two, was thirty-nine when the novel appeared.] I would imagine that most of the readers of this blog have read one or several of Austen's novels, but Mansfield Park is hardly the best known or most loved of her works, and a brief summary of the story may be in order.

Three sisters in the lower reaches of the turn-of-the-century English country upper classes marry. One marries extremely well, and becomes the wife of Sir Thomas Bertram, the master of a handsome and extensive estate called Mansfield Park. Sir Thomas and his wife have four children: Tom, the oldest, and eventual heir to Mansfield Park, Edmund, Maria, and Julia. A second sister marries a clergyman who is installed in the Manfield Park parsonage. The third sister marries badly -- a Lieutenant of Marine named Price -- and in rapid succession has nine children. She and her husband live in the naval port city of Portsmouth, where they are hard pressed to provide for the large family. As the novel opens, the second oldest of the nine children, Fanny, who is now ten years old, is sent to live at Mansfield Park with her wealthy uncle, aunt, and cousins, as a way of relieving her parents of a small measure of the cost of raising their children. Fanny Price is the heroine of Mansfield Park.

The novel -- some four hundred pages in my edition -- is a simple domestic tale about the succession of events and crises that lead at long last, and to the very great relief of the reader, to Fanny marrying the second son, Edmund. [They are first cousins, of course, but that seems not to have troubled Austen or her readers.] Austen introduces two plot devices to stir things up and generate some narrative movement. The first is that early on, Sir Thomas departs from Mansfield Park for two years to look after his investments elsewhere, leaving the young people, now in their twenties and late teens, to get into all manner of assorted mischief. At one point in this two year period, eldest son Tom is called away to join his father. During Sir Bertram's absence, as Fanny is turning eighteen [nothing much has happened in the eight intervening years, save that Fanny has developed a crush on Edmund, who is mostly oblivious of this fact], a young, wealthy, attractive, socially well-placed but morally questionable brother and sister, Mary and Henry Crawford, show up and wreak havoc in the quiet, staid Bertram household. The depravity of the Crawfords is shown not only by Henry's seduction and ruin of one of the sisters, but by the fact that the Crawfords persuade the young people to take part in an amateur theatrical performance, at Mansfield Park, of a play then all the rage in London.

I confess that when I read the novel, I had trouble figuring out what, from Austen's point of view, was so bad about amateur theatricals. I think it may be the fact that when one participates in such an undertaking, one must speak lines, as a character, to another person whose character in the play is one's paramour. One is thus put in the unacceptable position of saying things one ought never to say to someone to whom one ought never to say them, unless the two of you are in real life to be married. At any rate, Sir Thomas gets back from overseas just in time to put an end to such shenanigans.

And that is pretty much it. Three hundred and fifty pages after the Crawfords arrive, Maria and Julia are ruined, Tom has nearly died of brain fever [nursed back to health by Fanny, who is called back from Portsmouth by Tom's illness], and Edmund finally realizes that he loves Fanny -- a consummation for which Fanny has been devoutly wishing for many pages and many years.

How on earth can Ed Said possibly extract an historical, ideological, literary-political lesson from this unpromising text?

The general theme of Culture and Imperialism is nicely captured by two brief passages relatively early in the book. Here they are:

"[T]he extraordinary formal and ideological dependence of the great French and English realistic novels on the facts of empire has ... never been studied from a general theoretical standpoint." [p. 35]

"I am not trying to say that the novel -- or the culture in the broad sense -- 'caused' imperialism, but that the novel, as a cultural artifact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other. Of all the major literary forms, the novel is the most recent, its emergence the most datable, its occurrence the most Western, its normative pattern of social authority the most structured; imperialism and the novel fortified each other to such a degree that it is impossible, I would argue, to read one without in some way dealing with the other."

Fair enough, in general. That is certainly a plausible claim about the nineteenth century novel as a genre, but Austen? Surely, of all the great novelists, she is most distanced from considerations of empire. Where in the pages of Mansfield Park, or in the facts of Austen's sheltered life, can we find actual texts and facts to support such a reading? Tomorrow, we shall see the answer.

IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE PART THIRTEEN

Let me interpolate an anecdote garnered from the third time I taught "Ideological Critique" as a graduate seminar at The University of Massachusetts. One of the students in the course was originally from the West African nation of Sierra Leone. One day, in a nearby village, several graduate student ethnographers from the University of California at Berkeley showed up. Their professor, whose field was native African folklore, had formulated the hypothesis that native peoples with the sort of kinship structure exhibited by the people in this village would tend to generate children's stories having certain thematic elements. He had sent several of his doctoral students into the bush to test the hypothesis. My student, who was fluent both in the local language and in English, was hired to serve as an interpreter. This was a great boon to him, as he was trying to put together enough money to pursue his own graduate studies in the United States. The Berkeley graduate students laid out their professor's hypothesis, and sent him to quiz the locals. He dutifully explained to the folks in the village what the Americans were looking for, but they stared at him blankly and said they had never heard any stories, for children or otherwise, that sounded at all like that. This was an enormous disappointment to my student, who saw his chances for an American doctorate crumbling before his eyes, so he begged the village elders to come up with something, anything, that he could translate for the Americans. Well, they were eager to see a local boy make good, so they set about inventing a raft of stories, which it took a long, lucrative time to translate. The Berkeley grad students went home happy, loaded with evidence to confirm their professor's hypothesis, and my student earned enough money to come to UMass.

To continue: the Zhu do not send emissaries to Nairobi, or Cairo, or Cape Town, dressed in traditional Zhu garb, to study the ways of the Kenyans or Egyptians or South Africans, bringing with them choice bits of Gemsbok as gifts to persuade the natives to serve as informants. Merely to put such a notion into words is enough to capture its absurdity, and thus to express the asymmetrical relationship between the ethnographers and their subjects. Ethnographers understand this perfectly well, of course, and they worry about it a good deal. But the asymmetry is built into the fundamental structure of their enterprise. No amount of phony "going native" can change the facts [any more than a professor can bracket the asymmetrical relationship to students by using her first name, bringing cookies to class, agreeing to arrange chairs in a circle, or even - perhaps the most heroic effort of all -- by shutting up and letting the students talk.]

In my judgment, Wilmsen manages to overcome this asymmetry to an extent that Lee et al. do not. [You may disagree, of course. Like all potentially interesting comments, what follows rests on a strong premise, and hence is open to attack at two levels. This is an unavoidable structural feature of any theoretical analysis that has a hope of being worthwhile.] I have asked myself how, or why, his discourse succeeds in overcoming the asymmetry, and the answer, so far as I can see, is this: he conceives the Zhu as a modern people fully equipped with a politics and a class structure, and therefore as equal interlocuters. The Zhu, as he represents them, live in the twentieth century in a space that is not ontologically underprivileged, if I may put it that way. They are very poor, to be sure -- a fact he insists upon. But they are poor in much the same way that an urban underclass is poor, or that a rural proletariat is poor. They are not, in his conception of them, atavistic survivals frozen in a time that is long past. Significantly, his account is not framed by a narrative of a voyage to a distant land.

This is a good place to say just a word about the concept of the primitive, which continues to dog ethnography, despite the best efforts of many anthropologists to be quits with it. The term, which of courses derives from the Latin for "first," appears originally to have been applied, in English, to the early Christian Church -- hence, with a mixture of positive and negative connotations, depending on the user. In the eighteenth century, it shows up as referring to peoples lacking cultural sophistication or modern technology. There is always an implication that what is primitive is early in time, simple in structure, lower in some order of evolution, development, or evaluative hierarchy -- and also, possibly, pure, pristine, uncorrupted by civilization, closer to nature, closer to true human nature, hence perhaps also closer to God, etc etc.

The notion of an historical evolution from the simple = primitive to the higher = more complex = better appears already in Tylor's Primitive Culture, in reference to the evolution of higher forms of religion. Anthropologists have long recognized that the kinship systems of many of the peoples they study are a great deal more complex than those of any contemporary industrial society. They also understand that the languages of the peoples they study are neither more nor less complex, by any reasonable measure, than those spoken by people in industrial societies [anything that can be said in one language can, with suitable coinings of terms not already available, be said in any other language. All languages, in that sense, are equally complex]. Once we set aside the Christian biases of Tylor, we can see that the religious systems of the peoples studied by anthropologists are as complex, as rich in symbolism, as theologically complex [and, of course, as absurd] as the "higher" religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. So, what makes a people "primitive"?

The obvious answer is: a less powerful technology than is currently possessed by the society from which the anthropologist comes. That is a natural first answer, but it has certain drawbacks. The technology of a medieval castle or of the Greeks of Homeric times may not, on examination, appear notably more advanced and powerful than the technology of peoples termed "primitive." And yet, it strikes us as odd to speak of Homeric Greeks or medieval Burgundians as primitive. A lot turns on not wearing much in the way of clothes, of course [I mean this only half facetiously], but the really powerful answer, theoretically, is the claim that the peoples labeled "primitive" lack an internal class structure and hence a recognizable politics and history. Once ethnographers like Wilmsen debunk that myth, the category of the primitive seems to evaporate. The policy implications of this are, of course, enormous .:One negotiates with people who have a politics, one does not [with any degree of self-conscious justification] oversee their affairs in a paternal manner.

One final response to Wilmsen's book before I leave the subject. This is a thesis that I have in the past advanced with regard to the literature and popular culture of enslaved African-Americans and their descendants, in the talk I gave at Stonehill College and elsewhere, but it comes up fleetingly in Land Filled With Flies and is worth a comment. At several points during his reports of his conversations with Zhu, Wilmsen represents them as speaking ironically. For example, in discussing whether the Zhu were at an earlier time cattle herders [and hence not archaic hunter-gatherers], he recounts the following exchange with a Zhu man named Halengisi.

"Halengisi insists that the past was better than the present -- he once said to me, with a wave of his hands at the herds around us, 'Gumisi ka kwarra kwinki': 'There are no cattle here now.' He made this remark while we were standing together near the CaeCae wells surrounded by about a third of the more than six hundred cattle kept there; we were, in fact, leaning against his magnificent bull, in which he took justifiable pride. He was, of course, speaking rhetorically ..." [p. 251.]

Irony is a mode of discourse that presupposes a double audience for a speech with two meanings -- the apparent, or superficial meaning, and the real or deeper meaning. The speech seems to be addressed by the speaker to the first audience, which mistakenly thinks of itself as the persons for whom the speech is intended and understands only the superficial meaning, which they take for the real meaning. The speech is really addressed to the second audience, which understands both meanings, and is aware of the first audience's misunderstanding. The speech is thus, in a sense, a private joke between the speaker and the real audience at the expense of the superficial audience. The most famous example in philosophy is Socrates' statement to a self-important visiting Sophist [Gorgias, for example] that he, Socrates, is ignorant of the subject on which the Sophist claims expertise and that he hopes the Sophist will enlighten him. All of you, I am sure, are familiar with those passages.

In order to speak ironically, one must have a fully developed self-understanding and the confidence to judge an apparently powerful and important person as being in fact clueless. Throughout the folklore, and later the formal literature, of African-Americans, one finds examples of this sort of speech. Such speech is really a mocking ironic send-up of the slave masters for the amusement of the fellow slaves, but is taken literally and superficially by the slave masters, who cannot imagine that their slaves are capable of laughing at them.

The epistemological stance of the ethnographer vis-a-vis the subjects of an ethnographic study [if I may speak pretentiously] precludes the recognition that their subjects might speak ironically to them, sharing a private joke with other fellow subjects at their expense, for if their subjects are capable of such ironic speech, then it is they, not the subjects, who are being studied. For all their love of the !Kung, despite their idealization of them, Lee and his associates really cannot actually bring themselves to see the !Kung [or Zhu] as their conversational equals, for to do so would call into question Ethnography itself. In the end, what makes Wilmsen's work superior to theirs is that he eschews ethnography for history, politics, and economics. In other words, he understands the Zhu to be, not subjects, but people.

CORRIGENDUM

My son, Professor Tobias Barrington Wolff, ever vigilant, informs me that it was the death of Genghis Khan's son Ogedai, not the death of Genghis himself, that resulted in the Mongol armies turning back from the gates of Vienna to return for the Great Kuraltai to select a new Khan. mea culpa.

IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE PART TWELVE

This is as far as I wish to go with my discussion of Wilmsen. Now, let me back off a bit and talk about what I see as some of the interesting philosophical issues of our experience of space, time, and causation that are raised by Wilmsen's book. What follows goes beyond Wilmsen, though I have at least some reason to think he would be sympathetic to the drift of my remarks. One of the things I want to try to do at this point is to connect up my discussion of Wilmsen with Mannheim's treatment of the various utopian orientations toward time itself. In conjunction with these remarks, I strongly recommend that you take a look at my paper, "Narrative Time: The Inherently Perspectival Structure of the Human World," which is available on box.net.

Narratives of voyages of discovery and ethnographical accounts exhibit certain literary conventions of form and content into which, I suggest, are encoded certain very fundamental conceptions of space, time, and causality. These conventions powerfully shape the way we think about the people who are the object of the narratives. By bringing these conventions to self-consciousness, we can begin the job of examining them and subjecting them to ideological critique.

Let me start with certain representations of such voyages in popular culture. Reflect, if you have ever seen any of them in movies or on television, on the literary conventions of the typical romantic account of explorations to the Dark Continent, or to the center of the earth, or to the New World, or to the South Sea Islands. I have in mind King Solomon's Mines [the earlier version with Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger], or the television dramatization of the search by Speke and Burton for the headwaters of the Nile, or even the movie version of Jules Verne's Voyage to the Center of the Earth, with James Mason. [I know, I know. None of you has ever seen or heard of any of these. There are limits to my capacity to conjure up bits of popular culture!]

Typically, the voyage begins in safe, comfortable, familiar surroundings -- a well-appointed sitting-room in an upper middle class Victorian London home, or a centuries-old university building at Edinburgh University, or the Court of Elizabeth the First. The adventurers plan a voyage to a remote place, far from civilization -- perhaps not even locatable on any available map. They seek diamonds, or the rumored headwaters of the Nile, or some notional geographic position such as The North Pole.

The earliest stages of the voyage are physically easy, and proceed quickly: a ride in a Hansom Cab to the docks, a long sea voyage on a regularly scheduled ocean liner, perhaps a train ride. The farther from their starting point the travelers go, the harder their voyage becomes. Encoded into this literary convention is the notion that space is not isotropic -- that there is a privileged position [London, say] where the laws of nature make movement easy and comfortable. The farther one gets from that privileged point, the more effort is required to keep going. The travelers endure all manner of hardship -- shipwreck, train derailments, the decampment of native bearers [who, it should be noted, somehow manage, even in the hardest stages of the voyage, to walk the same distance as our heroes and heroines while also carrying fifty or seventy-five pound burdens.]

Eventually, when their energy is almost exhausted, their health almost ruined, their endurance tested to the limit, they manage to stumble upon the North Pole, the headwaters of the Nile, or King Solomon's Mines. This voyage is represented, literarily, as a movement outward in space and -- when the goal is some primitive tribe -- backwards in time. [Recall one curious variation on this genre, the travel to an island where dinosaurs still live, or, for that matter, a giant ape.]

Frequently, on the trip back, the voyagers take with them a native whom they have come upon at the end of their travels. As they return to their starting point, the valences are reversed. The voyage is difficult at first, and gets easier. They are, so to speak, going downhill now. And [this is a crucial point] the native who accompanies them experiences the trip in exactly the same way. That is to say, he or she does not find the going easy at first, despite the fact that they are in his or her home territory. He or she experiences the early stages of the return voyage as hard, and subsequent stages as easier and easier, thereby showing -- in the terms of this literary convention -- that the world is objectively structured anisotropically. For the native, as well as for the travelers, London is a central place and the jungle or the desert is a peripheral place.

[In Greystoke: Tarzan of the Apes, a brilliant remaking of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan story, this convention is actually violated. Tarzan finds England a difficult place to live and when he returns to the jungle, he experiences a liberation. Things become suddenly easier for him again. The impact of this reversal signals, in a negative fashion, the hold the convention has on our way of thinking. In the original book, by the way, in one of the most marvelously wacky scenes in any popular fiction, the young ape-man learns to speak English by looking at reading primers in the ruined hut where his mother and father died years before! As a titled English Lord, he has upper class English in his blood. The movie invents a more plausible explanation for his acquisition of language.]

So, why have I wandered off on what appears to be an irrelevant tangent? Because these conventions, much revised, refined, and transformed, continue to shape ethnographic narratives written by sophisticated, self-conscious anthropologists, thereby carrying over into those
narratives the same fundamental assumptions about space, time, and causality that are so
amusingly obvious in popular culture. The anthropologists start out [as their narratives recount] in Cambridge, Massachusetts or Cambridge, England, or Paris, or Berkeley, or New York. They travel by plane, by train, by Land Rover, by foot to "their" tribe -- who are thus figured, by these conventions, as spatially far away and causally or physically inaccessible. [Note that the members of these "tribes" are, of course not at all inaccessible to one another! The local inhabitants live there, they were born and brought up there, they work, marry, have children, grow old, and die there, and however hard or easy their lives are, that space is, to them, home.] I venture to suggest that despite the extraordinary lengths to which the Lee group go in their ethnographic research, they never manage to overcome the sense that the !Dobe waterhole is not home - i.e. that the Zhu are living in an objectively marginal physical space.

Let us now look at some of the other ways in which the structure of the ethnographic research, and the narrative account of it, reproduce and reinforce .this anisotropic conception of the social space shared by the Zhu and the anthropologists, To begin with, of course Lee et al. have arrived to study the Zhu. They wear the clothes appropriate to their own culture -- or rather, to be more precise, the clothes their culture has decided are the appropriate garb for anthropologists living among a primitive people. They bring their material culture with them, which they use [as bribes, or payment] to persuade these people to serve as cultural informants.

Compare this situation with that of Marco Polo, say. Polo arrives at the court of Kublai Khan, and has to wait quite a while, as a very unimportant visitor, before being granted an audience. He represents himself, somewhat inaccurately, as authorized to negotiate agreements between European rulers [the Pope, etc.] and the Great Khan. Spatially and causally, his voyage is figured as a passage from one privileged place, Europe, through difficult intervening territory, to another privileged place, the empire of the Great Khan, centered in the capital of the Middle Kingdom. Despite the Eurocentric orientation of Polo, he manages quite well to communicate the fact that from the Khan's point of view -- a point of view buttressed by the world's largest and most powerful army -- the Europe from which Polo comes is a peripheral, impoverished, technologically inferior backwater. Indeed, as you may know, the European military of half a century earlier never succeeded in defeating the Mongol armies, who desisted from conquering Europe, which they could easily have done, because at a crucial moment, the first great Khan, Chingis [or Ghenghis], died, and all of his generals were recalled to a great Kuraltai on the banks of Lake Baikal to select a successor. They never returned, because Europe didn't seem valuable enough to them to be worth a campaign, as compared with China and Southeast Asia.

IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE PART ELEVEN

In support of his critique, Wilmsen presents three sorts of detailed evidence. The details are quite formidable, and show Wilmsen to be an accomplished practitioner of the discipline that Lee et al. are engaged in, for all that he has contempt for it. It would be impossible to do more than suggest some of that detail here, so once again I urge those of you who are really interested to read his book. Only by assessing the evidence can you decide which of the competing stories, if either, is correct. Let us look at each of Wilmsen's evidentiary supports in turn.

Historical Evidence: Wilmsen begins by looking at standard historical materials drawn from government archives in Botswana and other sources that deal with the events of the past two to three centuries in Southern Africa. He draws from this, and other written historical evidence, two important conclusions:

First, the region of the Kalahari in which the Zhu are found is not an Outback or backwater, but in fact has historically been intersected by trade routes linking the Kalahari with the Indian and Atlantic Oceans and beyond. Six or seven hundred years ago [hundred, not thousand], trade travelled from the western and southwestern coasts of Africa eastward across southern and central Africa, and thence to the Indian Ocean coast. At the same time, merchants travelled south from the Mediterranean to West Africa, as well as from the northwest coast of Africa inland. [Recall that there is a sizeable Muslim presence in Nigeria, for example.] The area now inhabited by the Zhu was not a marginal region untouched by world trade. It was a crossroads for that trade for many hundreds of years!

Second, the Zhu were until relatively recent times herders of cattle and farmers, so that it is unjustified to construe their present foraging as the continuation, unbroken, of pre-historic modes of survival. In the century before Europeans arrived in Southern Africa, a series of wars were fought among competing peoples. The Zhu who now live in the Kalahari and were the objects of Lee's investigations are in actual fact an underclass who were driven off their cattle posts and lands, deprived of their lucrative trade activities, and consigned to a meager, marginal existence at the bottom of the class hierarchy. They were forced to engage in what anthropologists call a "hunter-gatherer" form of economic activity because they were deprived of their traditional means of production. If I may put the point in a way complimentary to Lee, it is as though Lee were to come to New York, observe homeless men and women living on the streets and grubbing in garbage cans, and were to fail to notice that they are the underclass of a capitalist economy, construing them instead as traditional hunter-gatherers. This is grotesquely unfair to Lee, of course, but I am trying to convey to a non-anthropological audience just how ferocious an ideological critique Wilmsen has mounted against Lee. Wilmsen is angry at Lee. Indeed, he is angry at Ethnography in general, and his aim is to unmask it, expose it as fraudulent, humiliate it, not merely to offer scholarly a disagreement with some of Lee's conclusions.

Archeological Evidence: Materials drawn published reports and from his own archeological digs enables Wilmsen to show that cattle herding, farming, and large-scale trade flourished in the Kalahari for at least two thousand years prior to the arrival of Europeans. One of his loveliest bits of reasoning relies on meticulous counts of animal bones found at campsites or in areas that clearly were occupied for extended periods of time. Wilmsen [and others] can tell from the bones whether the animals that were slaughtered there were young or old. Now, ordinary farmers do not slaughter cattle for food until they are well past the age when they might be expected to reproduce. So a settlement site occupied by relatively poor cattle herders could be expected to show a very high proportion of bones from old cattle, and very few from young cattle or calves. But some of the settlement sites show exactly the opposite proportions. From this fact, Wilmsen infers that there were some very wealthy people who could afford to slaughter young [and tastier] cattle for their food. And from this fact, Wilmsen infers that there was a class structure in the society represented by those settlement sites. This reinforces the written historical evidence, and tells us a familiar story of a people with a class structure, a history, and a politics. In short, not immemorial Late Pleistiocene Hunter-Gatherers.

Direct Observation and Interpretation of Present-Day Zhu: Wilmsen begins his own direct on-site observation by reporting that the Zhu do in fact have a clearly defined class structure [and hence, a history -- that is the point of proving this], based principally upon property rights in available water sources. It is incorrect to understand their various practices, such as the nomadic movement from water hole to water hole, purely as a species adaptation to the environment, unmediated by differential class interests. A number of quite practical debates, even court cases, have occurred in Australia, Botswana, and elsewhere concerning this issue of property rights. Since this is an especially interesting matter, in my judgment, it is worth pausing for a bit to explain it.

Briefly, what happens over and over again, in Southern Africa, in Australia, and elsewhere, is that when a colonial power moves in, it lays claim to certain property [typically, to land], ignoring the rights of the indigenous peoples. Complaints are brought by the local inhabitants, or in their name, in the law courts of the colonial power, and the question is raised whether the indigenous peoples have a system of property that is recognizable by the colonial legal code -- there being, usually, some provision in the colonial law for acknowledging property claims made in systems of law other than itself. At this point, it becomes a matter of very considerable moment whether what we recognize as property rights are part of the culture of the indigenous peoples. Anthropologists from the colonial power's society step in to argue for the rights of the indigenous peoples. And so forth. As you will easily imagine, very tricky and interesting conceptual problems arise concerning what does and what does not count as an indigenous system of property rights. The problem is that a nineteenth or early twentieth century Colonial occupying power is very likely to conceive of Real Property rights or Land rights as consisting essentially in the right to exclude others from a certain continuous plot of land, delineable by a boundary fence of some sort. But nomadic peoples have very different sorts of Real Property rights, which often consist in rights of differential access to such things as water holes. In their society, these rights are recognized, not by dint of their having the right to exclude everyone else from the water hole, but rather as a right of privileged access to the water. In French or English or American law, if the supposed owner of a plot of land allows others to grow crops on it without protest, that claim of ownership is weakened or perhaps even negated. But in a nomadic society, the claim of privileged access to a water hole will be undiminished regardless of how many times others use the water hole when the needs of the "owner" have been satisfied. Wilmsen has edited a very interesting book entitled We Are Here: Politics of Aboriginal Land Tenure [U. Cal. Press, 1989] that deals with these questions.

Wilmsen also shows, by first-hand accounts of his own observations and interactions with the Zhu, that for the Zhu, kinship relations are not a mechanically enacted system of rigid rules, but are rather a flexible structure within which individuals find political advantages and disadvantages, for example by construing kinship relations so as to favor or disfavor marriages that will in turn advance or frustrate their economic interests. I have already commented, in reference to the work of Lewis Namier and other historians, on the way in which "modern" people treat kinship relations as a matrix within which individuals pursue political ends by manipulating kinship ties in flexible ways. Ethnographers, Wilmsen is suggesting, tend to construe the complex kinship structures of "their tribes" as rigid constraints within which "primitive people" more or less by rote make marriage choices and such. The effect is to represent the people of Rome or England as having a politics, but to deny that the people of "primitive tribes" do. In this way, as in other ways, the Zhu are figured as not like us - perhaps superior, perhaps inferior, but inescapably other. Wilmsen seeks to alter this conception.

Finally, I simply report what is perhaps the most devastating, flagrantly hostile, astonishing argument in Wilmsen's entire book [I hope no one is going to try to tell me that Wilmsen is not angry at Lee], namely his claim that Lee et al. have not even been able to describe the gross physical characteristics of the Zhu correctly! Wilmsen actually argues that they are not genetically small; they are just hungry! Give them a substantial diet and they grow a lot taller. I hope you can appreciate just how insulting this is to Lee. It is as though a dissident historian were to say to one of the most prominent students of medieval Europe, "Did you perhaps fail to notice that the documents on which you base your research were written in Latin, and not English as you appear to have thought?" It is scarcely any wonder that Lee has not been amused.

IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE PART TEN

Recall the two passages from Lee and an associate quoted at the beginning of this Part:

"One justification for studying the !Kung is that they are relatively pure hunter-gatherers living in an ancient territory, and they in many ways may be typical of South African hunter-gatherers in Paleolithic times." And: "[I]t seemed wise to plan a specific study of infancy as part of the long-range Harvard project. Like other aspects of the expedition, this study suggested itself with a certain amount of urgency. Hunter-gatherer life did not seem destined for a lengthy future, and with it would pass an important chapter in our knowledge of human infancy, especially of the evolution of human infancy. That is, its importance lay not mainly in its uniqueness as an ethnological variety, but in its position as representative of a group of societies resembling, in their basic subsistence ecology, the original human sociocultural form."

To study such peoples, one can easily imagine Lee et al. thinking, would be, in effect, to travel back in time, for if the practices of such peoples did not change from 100,000 years ago to 50,000 years ago, or from 50,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, why can it not be that they have also not changed from 10,000 years ago to the present? Once history begins, there is no going back, no gaining of direct access to Revolutionary France, to medieval England, to Imperial Rome, to Biblical Canaan, but perhaps if we pack up our gear and hurry to the Kalahari, we can actually see people indistinguishable from their unimaginably ancient ancestors. Perhaps we can learn their languages, capture them on film and tape, study their tools and techniques, and thus acquire, through direct observation and access, a firm foundation for a complete theory of human history, by ascertaining the condition of the human race before the march of history began.

This, more or less explicitly, is the motivation for the massive efforts by Lee and his associates to study the living daylights out of the people whom they call the Dobe !Kung before assimilation has completely wiped out the last traces of pre-history.

Before turning to Wilmsen's critique of their work, let me take a moment to say something in their defense. Lee and his associates were not fools, nor were they at all unimaginative. They were aware from the very first that the Zhu stood in rather extensive social, economic, and even political relationships with other peoples in their region, including the Herero, various European colonial powers, the South African government, and so forth. Indeed, it was this awareness that lent urgency to their work, for they could see these interactions -- which they conceived as outside influences -- almost daily diminishing the purity, and hence the significance to them, of the pristine hunter-gatherer mode of life among the Zhu.

To note just one example of the intelligence and imagination with which they proceeded, certain members of the team undertook to gather direct, observational evidence of the fashion in which the Zhu make and use their campsites. They then compared that direct observation with the evidence from archeological excavations of campsites dating back scores of thousands of years. The similarities led them to conclude that the modern-day Zhu whom they were observing were indeed reenacting, essentially unaltered, modes of life and of interaction with nature that prevailed in pre-historic times. That is a sophisticated and potentially highly significant sort of investigation.

We should also note that Lee et al. conceived themselves to be taking a politically progressive position with regard to the treatment of the Zhu by the governments of Botswana and South Africa. If I can set their work and their orientation in the context of American politics, they were in theory and in practice very far to the left. The dispute between Wilmsen and Lee is thus not a standard fight between left and right, by any means. Indeed, a UMass anthropologist with whom I discussed this entire matter told me that Lee is, if anything, farther to the left and more politically active than Wilmsen has been. I mention this by way of a warning not to read too simple-minded an interpretation into the dispute.

Now, let me talk about Wilmsen's critique of the work of Lee et al. Immediately, I have a problem. Wilmsen's critique is rich, very complex, brilliant, and deeply influenced by Marx, among other theorists. I cannot begin to summarize or reproduce even a fragment of what he has to say, and I am afraid I can also not count on anyone going to the text and reading in it extensively. This is one of the reasons why I have concluded that this effort at a "bourse" is a failure. Instead, I shall quote just a few passages to convey the flavor of Wilmsen's book, and then try to summarize the main points of his critique. Perhaps I will inspire one or two of you to go to the text itself and read.

I am going to begin with Wilmsen's lengthy and very rich discussion of the ways in which the people under discussion are referred to and named by European [and American] scholars. After a detailed linguistic discussion of the several languages from which such terms as "San" and "khoikhoi" and "Zhu" are drawn, Wilmsen summarizes his argument:

"Elphick (1977) identifies another acquired connotation of the native terms: 'This Bushman-Hottentot (or San-Khoikhoi) dichotomy has become one of those time-honored pairing mechanisms by which scholars automatically organize, but also distort, the complexities of historical reality.' To these have been added the forager/food producer and primitive/civilized dichotomies, anthropological analogues of those native terms.... All the terms have been reified in the agenda of anthropological practice, where they now serve as abstract signposts authenticating claims to knowledge about the society in which that practice takes place. In ethnographic discourse, they interpellate natives as ontological categories required by that agenda. These categories are designed to segregate historically, economically and politically the peoples they label and thus to isolate them socially -- and often racially -- from those who apply the terms.... In the indigenous classifications, these categories mark social distance; in the academic classifications, they mark supposed prehistoric persistence. ... Primitive, savage, hunter-gatherer, forager, Bushman, Basarwa, San; the names have changed, their predicates and the premises from which they are drawn retain their negation of historically constructed objects. An analytic discourse that unquestioningly accepted these homogenizing categories, appropriate only to the needs of its own moment, has left us nothing but a stereotype of its subjects."

What is this all about? To put it as simply as I can: When an historian or an economist or a political scientist undertakes to study, let us say, eighteenth century England, she begins with the expectation that she will find a complex society of men and women who have a history, a social structure, and some sort of division of the society into social and economic classes. Individuals in the society, she will assume, make their way in their social world, adapting the existing institutions to their purposes, joining cooperatively with some, struggling competitively against others. For example, as the historian Lewis Namier showed, 18th century English upper class society was organized around elaborate extended family relations. A young man might use his "connexion" with a wealthy, landed family to advance his career, appealing on the basis of even the slenderest kinship ties for preferment in securing a commission in the army or a living in the Church [as it was called.] Parents ambitious for their children would claim such kinship ties even when the evidence for them was at best sketchy. "Are you one of the Shropshire ffyfe-Joneses?", as a character in a novel might ask, was a way of attempting to identify filiations on which a good deal could turn. Thus something that we have learned to call the kinship structure of the society had, and was understood by everyone to have, economic and political dimensions. [Shakespeare's history plays, to cite an example from an earlier time, frequently turn on competing hereditary claims to the throne.]

But, Wilmsen argues, ethnographers like Lee, when they launch a study of a people whom they conceive as "primitive," construe family relationships as rigid timeless categories having no political or economic dimensions whatsoever. They cannot see a Zhu man or woman as manipulating extended family connections in just the way that an upwardly mobile eighteenth century provincial English tradesman might. They cannot see that the Zhu, like the French or the Russians or the Italians, have a history and a politics of which they are aware and which they use for their purposes.

At its broadest or most encompassing level, Wilmsen's critique invokes and adapts the notion of world systems advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein and others, mostly in the context of debates about Third World Underdevelopment. Wallerstein argued against the tendency among economists and historians to conceive of third world nations or regions [and, within anthropology, primitive peoples] as autarchic - as isolated, self-sufficient social systems whose principal characteristics could be, indeed had to be, explained by appeal to internal features. The interactions of these independent systems with advanced industrial capitalist nations [I am deliberately using the language in which these theses were advanced -- you must read my discourse ironically] were understood as secondary, externally imposed deformations, rather than as partially constitutive of the societies themselves. Wallerstein et al. argued, in effect, that it was no more reasonable to construe Latin America or Southeast Asia or Africa in this way than it would be to construe the working class of a capitalist economy and society as an independent social formation defined and determined independently of its relation to the capitalist class. Instead, they said, we must understand the entire world economy as a single system, in which, for example, the depressing of the prices of primary products relative to manufactured goods on the world market plays the same role as the depressing of wages within a market economy, and so forth. You can imagine without too much trouble the sorts of arguments they used.

This concept of a world economic system was buttressed by studies relying on Arabic and other non-European documentary evidence that showed that in the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, there was a flourishing Old World system of trade and exchange that included Sub-Saharan Africa. [See the work of Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, among other works. Eric Wolf notes that at one point in what we call the late Middle Ages, a taste for a certain kind of fine wool among West African rulers triggered a small economic boom in the north of England where sheep produced that sort of wool. The wool was sold in the periodic fairs of Burgundy, traded down to the Mediterranean, thence to North Africa, and then carried by Arab merchant caravans across the Sahara to West Africa. It was paid for with by gold dug from Nigerian mines, when then circulated around Western Europe.]

Adapting Wallerstein, Wilmsen argues that the Zhu can only be properly understood as thoroughly integrated into a larger economic system encompassing Southern Africa, Europe, Asia, Northern Africa, and the Western Hemisphere. They must be seen both as occupying a class position in that larger system, and as exhibiting an internal class structure based upon differential access to and control of land and water. If Wilmsen can make this case, then he has effectively refuted the theoretical classification of the Zhu as pre-historic hunter-gatherers.

Tomorrow, we shall look at some of the evidence Wilmsen advances for this devastating critique of Lee's hunter-gatherer conceptualization of the Zhu. I hope it is obvious that, as Mannheim shows us, this sort of critique is intended both to refute Lee's claims and to unmask him, discredit him, show him up as imposing a covert and unacknowledged agenda on the people of the Kalahari.