pre-modernism

Angelita Manzano angiemanzano at yahoo.com
Fri Jan 25 09:57:24 PST 2002



>
> i think bodley takes time and trouble to establish
> and justify to what
> extent he makes such a claim as the above, along
> with showing that the
> claim is not absolute. even in the small section i
> quoted, he uses
> examples of tribal peoples who have co-existed with
> "civilization".

It didn't sound like he was saying that cultures were co-existing . . more like they were bumping up against each other.

I'm reacting not specifically to the quotes from Bodley, but the whole anti-modern perspective, which I think stems from oversimplification or misunderstanding of non-Western & pre-modern societies.

Here's a piece of a lecture by Micaela di Leonardo from: http://nt2.ec.man.ac.uk/sa/Man99PolAnthPapers/Micaela%20di%20Leonardo.htm

"Contemporary American ethnological antimodernism has been in the making since the 1960s, and bears the marks of four major political arenas of our era--American racism at home and imperialism abroad; the environmental crisis; women's status and aspirations; and the American "crisis of meaning," including the role of religion and irrational experience in a secular, rationalist state, and concern over social inequality. "Primitives," whether "there" or "here," appear in these arguments (but rarely all at once) as our innocent victims who themselves are nonviolent and cooperative; who live in harmony with nature, the "original ecologists;" as practitioners of sexual equality or even female rule; and as custodians of ancient religions that "work" and that include a role for ecstatic (and possibly drug-enhanced) experience.

Within this vision, our role as modern Westerners, then, is to let primitives teach us their "tribal wisdom"-- and incidentally to stop killing them off and destroying their homelands, as that will cut off our supplies (and latterly--because it will destroy the global environment). Anthropologists are the go-betweens in this process, the time travellers who return from pilgrimage with comparative ratings of quality ethnological commodities so that we can buy our salvation as informed consumers. While few contemporary practitioners self-consciously subscribe to all of the Technician of the Sacred construct's elements--David Maybury-Lewis, for example, both warns against and practices Noble Savage framing in his book and television series Millennium--many of us find ourselves at times inadvertent fellow travellers through the old logic that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

But the Noble Other frame, whether adopted in transparent sincerity or political expediency, is inevitably hoist by its own petard. Collapsing wildly differing societies in one mushy "tribal" image is the least of the intellectual confusions of the Technicians of the Sacred construct. Whether it encompasses all "primitives" or simply one population, it presumes that contemporary human beings are literally living in the past, that cultural anthropologists correctly "provide temporal distance," as Johannes Fabian put it in his classic book. But whether described by others in 1928 or 1954 or the 1990s, "primitives" have all lived as many years in the stream of history as have "civilized" populations. They may have low levels of technology, and they may have very small populations. Those factors do not imply, however, "simpler" societies or "more direct" lives "more in touch with nature." They certainly do not prove higher levels of spirituality (negative interpretation:superstition) or lower levels of rationality (positive interpretation:non-linear thinking) than among "us." The one provable fact about "primitives" across many populations is precisely the point that the assertion of their temporal distance from us disallows: that they have been, and are, entangled on the losing ends of the varying institutions of international political economy. Whether individuals or groups are dealing with states, NGOs, or corporations, with national court systems or international tourists, with anthropologists, art dealers, or New Age types eager to cash in on Primitive Wisdom, they simply have less power and fewer resources than their interlocutors--and often because of their interlocutors' ancestors' depredations. Anthropological assertions of the moral worth, the charisma of these groups may help, in some cases, to ameliorate current exploitation or expropriation; in others, to enhance their abilities to sell themselves and their wares.

Such assertions do not, however, help us to raise awareness of or to protest against the larger world system that expands the gulf between haves and have-nots with each passing year. Since they hinge on notions of "primitive authenticity," as well, they also function to delegitimate further the human rights and innate interest of the vast mass of the globe's population, which is spread across despoiled countrysides, shantytowns, and inner cities. The Noble Savage is a character in the drama of the Fall, and while "we" strut on that stage as post-Adamic seekers, we can find our redemption through antimodernist engagement with the not-yet-fallen. There is no role, save that of the Devil, for the desperate, "inauthentic" world's poor caught as pawns in the internationalization of capital and labor."

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