Sir James Frazer - The Golden Bough - "Sympathetic Magic"

Hello all! I've decided to jumpstart this blog with a small abstract about The Golden Bough. Forgive me if I don't cite any sources, as most of the information is pretty easy to find in countless analyses. (If you'd like your own copy, I found an electronic one on Project Gutenberg. I'm sure I'll be visiting this site in the future!) Prior to my receipt of the 2007 Irvine proseminar syllabus, I never heard of Sir James George Frazer or any of his work, yet after reading him over I've realized it has permeated into my consciousness through countless media over the last century. I'll go into detail about that later.

First, we should get to know the man behind the text. Frazer (b. 1854, d. 1941) was a Scottish social anthropologist and paramount member of the classical cultural evolution tradition during the Victorian era, which hegemonized the field of anthropology at the time. Like Edward Burnett Tylor, considered by some as the "father" of British anthropology, Frazer was interested in the mental progression of religion, from primitive magic to organized religion to science. Also like Tylor, Frazer relied heavily on an armchair approach to anthropology, rarely ever traveling outside of Cambridge. His most famous work, The Golden Bough, was a broad multi-volume analysis of myths, folklore and literature from various regions, understood in conjunction with more modern-day religions such as Christianity. Despite the heavily criticism over the proposition that Christianity had primitive origins as well as the lack of substantial field work to support Frazer's claims, The Golden Bough made a major impression on many schools of thought, even though its influence is probably more apparent in the literary field rather than the social sciences.

What exactly is "sympathetic magic," you might ask? Simply put, it is a form of magic based on imitation and correspondence. To describe sympathetic magic in detail, Frazer provides several examples from around the globe, although his interpretations are somewhat suspect. He mentions the Hindu practice of fashioning a figure out of clay or wax and promptly destroying it to incur harm upon another person. Sympathetic magic can also be used for more amiable purposes, such as the Chippeway practice of pricking the heart of an image of their object of desire. Other comparable examples of sympathetic magic in modern religion still exist in virtually every culture and religion, although the rationale behind the effort has probably changed dramatically. The practice of Vodou in West Africa and parts of the Caribbean offers an obvious one in the use of vodou dolls. The Roman Catholic practice of Communion, for example, where wine and wafers represent the "blood" and "body" of Jesus Christ, embodies more of a symbolic gesture today rather than the literal notion of consuming the anatomy of a prophet.

While many of Frazer's theories have been refuted by anthropologists past and present, his work on defining "sympathetic magic" still remains relevant today. The Golden Bough has also influenced countless Modernist literature, cited often by notable authors of the period such as T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Ernest Hemingway. One could even argue that this work has had more impact on our understanding of the imaginary landscape rather than the actual world, but I'm not quite ready to make such a bold accusation. Or am I?

In today's practice of anthropology, is it possible to execute a project in the same mode as that of The Golden Bough? Many critics accuse Frazer of overinterpretation in order to meet the field's standards as an academic text. He also never travelled to many of the places he discussed, relying mostly on artifacts and secondary information brought to him. Can anyone cite any other attempts at armchair anthropology that have had some significance in the field in recent memory? Is it even possible that the armchair is more common than I think?

If I have left anything out, fellow contributors, please add to this entry.

George Marcus: "The End(s) of Ethnography: Social/Cultural Anthropology's Signature Form of Producing Knowledge in Transition"

I just wanted to call everyone's attention to Prof. Marcus's article in the latest Cultural Anthropology (23:1, pp. 1-14) for those who haven't read it already. It ties in well, actually, with the comment thread on the George Stocking post. It is a conversation between Marcus and Marcelo Pisarro, the editor of the Argentine journal Potlach, from February 2006 wherein they discuss the "rupture" in anthropology in the wake of Writing Culture's publication in 1986. There is some fascinating background about the minds behind the so-called rupture, as a reaction by graduate students in the 1970s to the introduction of Foucault, Barthes, Habermas, and Althusser, among others into the discourse of the social sciences. Marcus explains how the Writing Culture critique was a critique of form in anthropology, especially in relation to what constitutes fieldwork, with the traditional four-field approach to anthropology waning in favor of an interdisciplinary approach based on developments in the humanities, especially in literary theory.

Ethnographic methods were central to this critique, especially the idea of ethnography becoming collaborative, rather than a sort of apprenticeship. As Marcus puts it, "As fieldwork has become multisited and mobile in nature, subjects are more 'counterpart' than 'other.'" (pg. 7). The debate that began over the Writing Culture critique gets us back to the question of whether anthropology should be thought of and practiced as its own discipline with a specific set of almost canonical methods, or whether a more interdisciplinary approach is possible, and indeed more appropriate for the type of social research being done today. What I've heard called the "solipsistic turn" in anthropology in the 1980s, that is, the "overuse" of reflexivity on the part of the researcher so much so that the stated subject of research is at times lost, drew a lot of criticism and continues to today. Marcus believes that the question of how to do ethnography is the most important question that we should be discussing today. In particular, he cites the interdisciplinary work between anthropology and technoscience (which naturally excited me on a personal level) as a possible site for the development of new ethnographies.

Marcus argues that while new theoretical sources are appearing in the anthropology curriculum, the pedagogical approach to fieldwork has not been as amenable to change. Even though he says that it is "a progressive, healthy, and productive stance to think of anthropology in long decline," he also admits that "interdisciplinarity seems visionary compared to disciplinary perspective, but most interdisciplinary perspectives have turned out the be just as myopic." (pg. 11) Clearly, there is still work to be done and the debate, even after 22 years, is still not over.

At least, that's my reading of it. If you have a membership with AAA, you can access it through AnthroSource. Also, here's a link to the Center for Ethnography at UC-Irvine.

Henry Maine 1861: "Primitive society and ancient law"

Why this reading, why now? Well, I doubt it's because we're supposed to take particularly seriously Henry Sumner Maine's conclusions about the origins of law in "primitive" society (that will be my one allotted "scare quote" for the word "primitive". This post will be far too cluttered, otherwise, and it's a bit of a mess as it is). In a 1950 article Robert Redfield picked over and in many cases rejected Maine's substantive arguments on that front.

(Amazingly, outside the discipline we can see Maine cited with approval for this purpose as recently as 1981--by legal stuntman and "human Pentium" Richard Posner in his book The Economics of Justice.)

And while Maine's accounts of changes in Roman law--he spends a great deal of time discussing the Patria Potestas, the principle of the "Power of the Father", and its changing purview with regards to both adult sons and wives--and the effects of these changes on subsequent European law are fascinating and may or may not represent an accurate reading of legal history (I'm way, way out of my depth on that one), I doubt that this is what we're looking for either.

All of which is to say that we probably shouldn't read Maine as "presentists", looking for present-day utility in his 150-year-old conclusions. Rather, we should follow Stocking's injunction and take a "historicist", affective and understanding approach in reading Maine.

Maine is concerned with the same sort of problem that has exercised anthropologists ever since: how to conceive of and explain the difference between our society and others. In Maine's case, he's interested in the difference between modern, "progressive" societies and "primitive" (and as Redfield points out Maine in many ways allows late and early Roman society to stand in for those two types of society, respectively).

Maine's key contribution to answering this question is contained in his concluding paragraphs: most succintly, with his famous assertion that "the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract". This shift is such that "from a condition of society in which all the relations of Persons are summed up in the relations of Family, we seem to have steadily moved towards a phase of social order in which all these relations arise from the free agreement of Individuals ".

This idea has had a lasting effect in social science. Redfield, for instance, still approved of this as a substantive point in 1950. To some degree Maine's point is mirrored in Tönnies' gemeinschaft/gesellschaft distinction, in Weber's "disenchantment" of the world and his concerns about the "iron cage" of rationalization, and in Durkheim's distinction between mechanic and organic solidarity. I think we can also see Maine's desire to posit a clear break between primitive and "progressive" societies echoed somewhat in contemporary work that depends on the notion of a postmodern "rupture" with the coming of post-industrial, post-Fordist capitalism. (I would put some of the Comaroffs' writings on South Africa--their "Occult Economies" article, for instance--in this category. I believe some of Appadurai's work on Modernity also fits here, as well as a lot of early 1990s work on globalization by Anthony Giddens, among others. Harri Englund and James Leach give a good summary--and critique--of this line of research in a 2000 article.)

Like the fascination with the primitive in general, then, the impulse to identify the characteristics that mark a given society as pre-modern, modern, or post-modern can be problematic. But if it's problematic it's because this type of model seems to have explanatory power, or else people wouldn't return to it again and again.

So thanks, Henry Sumner Maine. I think.

(I'm very open to correction about the genealogies I construct above. Get your sticks out--I fear I may have just hoisted up a plump piñata just waiting for a pummeling.)

More Links for Proseminar A readings

Here are a few more links to readings from the Proseminar A course taught last fall. As useful as it will be to read these, Tom Boellstorff did caution me that he would not be teaching the course this upcoming year (if I remember correctly, Kaushik is the only holdover from last year), so the syllabus will probably be different. At any rate, here they are:

Herbert Spencer: "Progress: Its law and cause"

Edward Burnett Tylor: Researches Into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization

Edward Burnett Tylor: Primitive Culture, vol. I: The Origins of Culture (as yet, link not found)

Sir James George Frazer: "Sympathetic Magic" and "Magic and Religion" in The Golden Bough

Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss: Primitive Classification

Emile Durkheim: “Sociology in France in the Nineteenth Century,” in Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society

Emile Durkheim: The Division of Labor in Society Book I: “Introduction” (pp.1-8); Chapter I (pp. 11–30); Chapter VI (pp. 126–148); Book III, Chapter I (pp. 291–309); Conclusion (pp. 329–341)

Marcel Mauss: The Gift

James Clifford, “On ethnographic surrealism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23(4), 1981, pp. 539–564 (you can find it on JSTOR if you have access)

That gets us through to Week 4. Since most of these links are to Google Books, there will probably be some pages missing from the free previews. Anyone want to take responsibility for summarizing any of these? I'll volunteer to do Durkheim's Division of Labor since it's sitting at the foot of my bed as I type this. Happy reading! It's a wild night here in Montgomery; tornadoes passing through and I just finished the Alan Moore/David Gibbons graphic novel Watchmen (which is awesome, by the way).

Next reading: Maine, Henry Sumner, "Primitive society and ancient law," Ancient Law, pp. 123-185

Here's an online version of the reading, under chapter 5:

http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/maine/anclaw/

If any of the contributors besides Stephen (who did a great job with the Stocking readings and probably wants a break) wants to take a crack at it, be my guest! If not, I'll post an abstract next week.

RSS Feeds Added! (Plus some work by Irvine's finest)

Dear All:

I've found a few anthropology RSS feeds to link up to this blog. If there are any other good ones out there, please let us know so that we can add them. I'd also like to add a link to a article by Profs. Tom Boellstorff and Bill Maurer in response to a pseudo-anthropologist's definitions of family and marriage. Enjoy!

George Stocking, Jr.: "On the Limits of 'Presentism' and 'Historicism' in the historiography of the Behavioral Sciences"

Hello all. I guess I have the distinct pleasure of offering up the first review/critique of the first pro-sem reading, that of George Stocking, Jr.'s. Obviously, the first question we have to ask is "why was this essay assigned reading?" The answer, I think, is to give us not only an introductory methodological analysis of the history of anthropology, a tool set if you will for viewing the early anthropological writings that we will be tackling, but also the historical biases that we, as anthropologists, bring to our research. In that regard, Stocking argues that there are two oppositional, and yet ultimately complementary, approaches to the history of the behavioral sciences (which I take to mean anthropology, sociology, cultural psychology, etc.): "presentism" and "historicism."

Stocking begins by telling us that history is an undisciplined discipline, without a clear consensus as to motive for research or methodology. Stocking's stated project in this essay, therefore, is to define these competing viewpoints, "presentism" and "historicism" and to argue their relative merits. Basically, Stocking divides historical inquiry into two perspectives: "to understand the past for the sake of the past" and "to understand the past for the sake of the future" (and primarily, the present). Stocking points out that what I would call the discourse of modernization or development seeks to view history through the lens of the present. In other words, history is simply a series of events that inevitably prefigured our present, and by analyzing this history we can make predictions about the future. Clearly, by using the present as a referent the past is interpreted only as to what contributions it made to the present. We have all heard the saying that history is written by the "winners," which is essentially what I think Stocking is saying here. Contemporary regimes of power use the past as validation for present public policies, and also as an explanation for why those policies are necessary. This is the discourse of development, summed up well in Modernization Theory, which is in my opinion a poor argument for the adoption of capitalism. The interpretive mode of this "presentism" as Stocking puts it, is based in "justice," not in "understanding." At Chicago, we called this perspective "Historical Narrative" and highlighted the emphasis in this approach in looking for historical agents of change rather than the historical processes that led to that change. Following from Butterfield, Stocking calls this "Whiggish history" or "presentism."

The alternative approach in Stocking's dualistic model is "historicism," which seems to be the study of historical events, people, and processes within their contemporary historical context. As Stocking elaborates, the historicist tries to understand history not from a position of present-day "reasonableness" but rather from a position that takes into account the contemporary "rationality" of historical context. In other words, rather than judging the past in terms of the present, one is analyzing the past in terms of the past. (Incidentally, this is the very reason that I love Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" simply because it presents an alternative "rationality" to my own, and in a way that reveals the logic and rigor (to shamelessly rob from Althusser) of that "reasonableness.") "Understanding," Stocking argues, is an attempt to get at the "reasonableness" of what might be considered "irrational" in the present.

How does this all fit into the history of the behavioral sciences? Well, Stocking says that a historian of the behavioral sciences will be "historicist" in her or his methodology, and "affective" in motivation. This is not to ignore the inherent bias that contemporary historians have when writing about history, but it is an ideal-type of methodology and motive to adopt. Behavioral scientists, on the other hand, are "presentist" in their approach, and their motives are "utilitarian." History, in other words, is useful for inspiring and guiding work in the present. Finally, there is a discussion of Thomas Kuhn (who, along with Hilary Putnam, is arguably one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century), and eventually the assertion that "presentism" has its usefulness as a measuring stick against which to judge the "historicist" approach, but on the other hand many "historicist" questions have yet to be answered by "presentists" (case in point: Ann Stoler's argument that we can't talk about "post-colonialism" until we understand truly what "colonialism" was). Well, that's my reading of it at least. Any objections, amplifications, or outright propositions to battle are all welcome!

Welcome!

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