Anthropology, Primitivism, Myth

Jeremy MacClancy

The protagonist is worried. His friend’s leg isgangrenous and they are high in the Andes. They rideslowly in the direction of a distant hospital. Within twohours they meet, by chance, an English doctor who isalso, by chance, an anthropologist. After amputating theleg he talks:

‘Savage societies are simply civilized societieswith the lid off. We can learn to understand themfairly easily. And when we’ve learnt to understandsavages, we’ve learnt, as we discover, to understandthe civilized. And that’s not all. Savages areusually hostile and suspicious. The anthropologisthas got to learn to overcome that hostility andsuspicion. And when he’s learnt that, he’s learntthe whole secret of politics.’

‘Which is. . .?’‘That if you treat other people well, they’ll

treat you well.’‘You’re a bit optimistic, aren’t you?’‘No. In the long run,’ said (the now one-legged)

Mark impatiently, ‘we shall all be dead. What aboutthe short run?’

‘You’ve got to take a risk.’‘But Europeans aren’t like your Sunday-school

savages. It’ll be an enormous risk.’‘Possibly. But always smaller than the risk you

run by treating people badly and goading them into awar. Besides, they’re not worse than savages.They’ve just been badly handled--need a bit ofanthropology, that’s all.’

Most of our themes are already here: the value of cross-cultural comparison, to illluminate our understanding ofWestern ways; the potential of the subject to help healthe ills of Western society; the anthropologist asitinerant intellectual, able to straddle worlds and bring

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back reports from the other side. All that is missing isthe capacity of anthropology to expand our sense ofcultural diversity.

By the 1930s anthropology had become an acceptedpart of life for broad sections of the British public, arelatively common topic for gay conversation by thelighthearted and a source for rumination by the moreseriously-inclined. For Huxley (the quote is from Eyeless inGaza), it was quite plausible that his isolatedprotagonist might meet a thinking doctor spouting hisown, idiosyncratic version of the discipline. His readerswould not be disoriented rather, entertained; maybe eveneducated a little.

In this chapter I wish to explore how and why, inthe last decades of the nineteenth century and the firstones of the twentieth, anthropology rose from almostnothing to this level of widespread popularity. I wishalso to examine the diversity of ways anthropologicalideas, exempla, models and approaches were appropriatedand exploited by modernist novelists and painters duringthis period. The ways they used this material werestrikingly diverse, for not all were as optimistic asHuxley about the therapeutic value of the discipline.Only some had so kindly a vision of other ways of life.

Anthropologists

In Britain an anthropology recognizable as such to modernpractitioners arose in the mid-nineteenth century as abelated consequence of the anti-slavery movement. Fromthe beginning, its supporters were keen to promote theirsubject broadly. The Ethnological Society of London,founded in 1844, made its sole object the promotion anddiffusion of ethnological knowledge. It held both specialmeetings, where 'popular' topics were discussed, andordinary meetings, at which 'scientific' subjects weredebated in more technical terms. The Society amalgamatedwith another learned body in 1869 to form theAnthropological Institute. Its leaders came from

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dissenting middle-class families, upheld liberal,humanitarian, and utilitarian ideals, and maintained theutopian belief that the sustained efforts of education andscience would result in a better society. Evolutionistsavant la lettre, they were happy to espouse Darwinianism whenThe Origin of the Species was later published. All the members ofthis fledgling Institute were however gentlemen amateursor professionals engaged in other areas of scholarly orscientific activity. None of them regarded themselvesexclusively as 'anthropologists' but as intellectuals whooccasionally studied anthropological themes. Those whom wemay regard as the first true anthropological professionalsonly emerged in the last decades of the century, from thesmall group of full-time paid curators entrusted with thecare of ethnographic collections.

Some anthropologists of this general period, from themid-Victorian to the close of the Edwardian eras,classified their work as either 'technical' or 'popular',but the distinction between these categories was usuallynegligible. Though some of their writings might assumemore knowledge on the readers' part than others, almosteverything they wrote could be understood by any informedperson of their time. Several anthropologists of thisperiod were particularly skilful at spreading the word,mainly because they wrote well, wrote and reviewed for avariety of major periodicals, produced popular books, andlectured widely. They were virtually obliged to do allthis if they wished to keep the subject alive as thegovernment, despite repeated appeals, refused to fundanthropological endeavours.

These successful anthropologists were able to sell somany books and to fill lecture-halls so easily because,above all, they contributed to one of the great publicdebates of their time: the status and practicalconsequences of evolutionary theory. For instance EdwardTylor, who held a personal chair at Oxford and was praisedfor his ‘convincing method of exposition’ and the clarityof his writing, propounded that social difference was notdue to biology (i.e. ‘race’) but to culture, and that allsocieties on earth were progressing, albeit at differentrates, through the same general processes of evolutionarydevelopment. Australian Aboriginals were usually placed at

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the bottom of this evolutionary ladder; northwesternEuropeans were always at its top. Tylor proclaimedanthropology a 'reformer's science' which could beemployed, among other ways, to identify illiberalsurvivals fit only for elimination. Though his immediateinfluence was so great that some even called anthropology‘Mr Tylor’s science’, his subsequent reputation has sincebeen completely overshadowed by that of his illustrioussuccessor, Sir James G. Frazer.

Frazer remains today the most famous, and certainlythe most financially successful, of all Britishanthropologists ever. His books are still in print and hisinfluence astonishingly widespread. His ideas have madethemselves felt in almost every area of the humanities andthe social sciences as well as within literature. IndeedLionel Trilling once claimed that ‘perhaps no book has hadso decisive an effect upon modern literature as Frazer’s’.By the 1920s it had become essential reading for anyonewith claims to an education or a critical attitude tolife; hundreds wrote to its author thanking him foropening their eyes and changing their lives. Even by 1910R.R.Marrett, an Oxford anthropologist, was able tocomplain how fashionable Frazer and his peers had made thesubject:

To show that Anthropology is becoming popular is,perhaps, superfluous. The fact is almost painfullyborne in upon anyone who has allowed hisanthropological leanings to become known to theworld. Every headmaster would nowadays have you downto lecture to his boys. A provincial town will musterin hundreds to hear you discourse on totems andtaboos. At the most old-fashioned of our Universitiesthe youth of the nation delight in comparing thehabits of primitive man with their own. In short,Anthropology is the latest form of eveningentertainment.1

Part of the reason for Frazer's remarkable successwas his ability to convey his views, without distortingthem, in a language free of technical jargon and obscureexpression. Preferring eloquent elegy to clumsily-

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formulated dogma, he did not present his arguments in adoctrinaire manner, but skilfully blended modesty ofstatement with a grand literary style, one sprung withBiblical and Latinate rhythms. The weighty result heleavened with irony, humour, and an artful, sustained useof concrete imagery. Frazer, in other words, was nottrying to batter his readers with the power of bald logic,but to persuade them with the appeal of his rhetoric. Asthe record of his sales shows, if he did not always manageto win over his enormous audience, at the very least theywere prepared to read his words. In the 1910s alone over35,000 copies were printed of each of the twelve volumesof the third edition.

The custom which initially stung his interest was onefrom classical antiquity, from the temple of Ariciasoutheast of Rome. There, in a sacred grove dedicated toDiana, a man could only assume its priesthood by firstplucking the ‘golden bough’ and then killing theincumbent. Of course, once the deed was done, the slayerhad to live with the knowledge he would in turn and timebe slain by his own successor. He laid bare his plan forthe book in a letter to his publisher:

By an application of the Comparative Method I believeI can make it probable that the priest representedthe god of the grove and that his slaughter wasregarded as the death of the god. This raises thequestion of a wide-spread custom of killing men andanimals regarded as divine. I have collected manyexamples of this custom and proposed a newexplanation of it. The Golden Bough, I believe I canshow, was the mistletoe, and the whole legend can, Ithink be brought into connexion, on the one hand withthe Druidical reverence for the mistletoe, and on theother with the Norse legend of the Balder. Of theexact way in which I connect the Golden Bough withthe Priest of Aricia I shall only say that inexplaining it I am led to propose a new explanationof the meaning of totemism. This is the bare outlineof the book which, whatever may be thought of itstheories, will be found to contain a very large storeof very curious customs, many of which may be new

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even to professed anthropologists. The resemblance ofthe savage customs and ideas to the fundamentaldoctrines of Christianity is striking. But I make noreference to this parallelism, leaving my readers todraw their own conclusions, one way or the other.2

Frazer has here summarized many of his main aims andmethods: the concerns with divine kingship; re-birththrough slaughter; vegetative symbolism; the extremelydelicate handling of otherwise disturbing parallels; theexplanation of one rite, symbol or myth by comparativeanalogy with a similar cultural facet from anywhere on theglobe; a keen awareness of his need to win, and keep, apublic. Magic and religion, no matter how seemingly‘primitive’, were to be seen as logical in process, thoughbased on faulty reasoning. His comparativism heunderpinned with a thoroughgoing intellectualism: heimputed the reasoning of indigenes when performing anykind of rite or custom and tried to persuade readers ofhis explanations by their inherent plausibility. Evans-Pritchard, the great British anthropologist of the 1950sand ‘60s, termed this intellectualist manner of imputationand overstress on the role of deliberate reasoning as an‘If-I-were-a-horse’ style of explanation.

Frazer’s accomplishment was a complex one, for hissprawling yet ultimately unified work, achieves multipleaims. First and foremost, The Golden Bough is anastonishingly broad compendium of both ethnographic andfolkloric data, held together by his version of thecomparative method. Secondly, his trawl through this datais presented as a voyage of discovery, the sprawling textframed by a narrative of travel and exploration. Thirdly,in a highly indirect manner, The Golden Bough addressed manyof the central issues of its time: questions about thestatus of religion, the value of empire and industry, therole of the classical past, as well as the nature of thedomestic and the sexual, the rural and the urban.Fourthly, by an encyclopaedic display of supposedlyprimitive customs, Frazer demonstrated how far civilizedhumans had come. Yet, by providing much harsh evidence ofcontemporary barbarity both abroad and at home, he at thesame time tempered any blind faith in progress.

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Frazer at times worked together with his academiccontemporaries in what was known as the ‘ritualist school’of anthropologically informed classicists, led by JaneHarrison, F.M.Cornford and Gilbert Murray. To Frazer,following Tylor, myths were post hoc rationalizations,used to explain rituals whose original meaning had beenlong forgotten. Harrison extended this idea by applyingevolutionist approaches to classical material. She arguedthat myth arose out of rite, and not vice versa; that it was‘the spoken correlative of the acted rite’; that it wasnot anything else or of any other origin. She underpinnedthese ideas with her developmental conception of ritesdying out while myths continued in religion, literatureand art. As an ancient rite over time became ever moremisunderstood, the associated myth, freed from its origin,could become attached to historical events or people, orcome to be used as a scientific or aetiologicalexplanation of nature. Over the course of the 1910s sheand her colleagues extended the application of these ideasto all branches of the arts in the classical world.

By the 1920s however all this kind of anthropologywas rapidly becoming obsolete within academia;evolutionism, though still popular, was coming underincreasing attack. Frazer was gaining critics as well asfans. One anthropologist described his technique of‘chopping up’ cultures, taking bits from a variety ofethnographic sources and then putting them together in theliterary form of a workable, living whole asFrankensteinian in nature. A key catalyst of this changewas a Polish expatriate, Bronislaw Malinowski, who in 1918had returned to London after several years living on anisland off Papua New Guinea. A tireless and skilledpromoter of both himself and the discipline, Malinowskisoon persuaded his students of the value of a self-definedmodern form of exclusively social anthropology, one markedoff from historically related endeavours. His keyinnovation was the necessity of ‘fieldwork’, of intensive‘participant-observation’ for a prolonged period living

1 Marrett, R.R. 1910 ‘The present state of anthropology’, The Athenaeum4298, March 12, pp. 299—3002 Letter 11 viii 1889, to George Macmillan, in the Macmillan Archive,British Museum; quoted in Stocking 1996: 138—39

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with the people being studied. From now on, no self-respecting or respected anthropologist could leavecollection of data to others, whether learned missionaryor perspicacious colonial officer, nor could they ‘cut andpaste’ information culled from many different societies.Instead they had to concentrate on studying cultures oneby one, as unities in themselves. In the processMalinowski helped engender the successful image of ‘theanthropologist as hero’, as plucky intellectual not scaredof going into the bush for the sake of coming home withthe data. This attractive image of bold anthropologistsgoing where no highbrows had pussyfoot before helpedsecure the popularity of the discipline for newgenerations of the educated public.

Malinowski also helped change the dominant literarystyle of anthropology. Frazer and his peers had tried intheir writings to establish a closeness between themselvesand their readers. In contrast, Malinowski and hisstudents wished to bracket off their ethnography as aprofessionally distinct form of intellectual exercise. Byusing their experience of fieldwork as a legitimatingdevice, they created simultaneously a distance betweenthemselves and their readers, and a closeness betweenthemselves and the societies they studied. Tylor, Frazerand others of their general period spoke as though fromtheir armchairs, to people who were in a similar position.Malinowski and his colleagues spoke as though from thevillage hut, to people who had never been in a similarposition. Yet the number of anthropologists was still solow that those of the interwar generation, like theirpredecessors, had to write their books with both academicand non-academic audiences in mind. To that extent thefunctionalist ethnographies of the 1920s and ‘30s may beregarded as works of 'popular' (i.e. relatively non-technical) anthropology.

On his return from his Trobriand Island fieldwork,the then unknown anthropologist had tried to establish hisreputation--and make a little money--by writing a readablebook acceptable to a commercial publisher. Malinowskitoyed with calling it ‘Kula: South Sea Enterprise andAdventure’ or ‘Kula: a South Sea Adventure’, beforedeciding on the far more catchy and marketable Argonauts of

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the Western Pacific. Despite his avowed concern to write a newkind of ethnography, the continuities with Frazer (whosupplied its foreword) are still plain: the classicalallusion in the title, the framing of the work as a voyageof discovery, his concern to describe local life with‘vividness and colour’. Soon afterwards, Malinowskiattempted to revise Freud, by using the evidence of hisTrobriand material to question the supposed universalityof the Oedipus complex. Though orthodox Freudianssummarily rebuffed his challenge to their position, hiscontroversial endeavour ensured his views would becomeslogans of progressive morality and education. Thanks tosuch tactics Malinowski helped enable a vision ofanthropology as an integral part of the British interwaravant-garde.

Primitivisms, Myths

Both these terms are so very usefully vague that I leaveto others the usually sterile task of defining either.Instead I wish to sketch the ways key modernist writershave used anthropological writings for ends whichcommentators have marked as ‘primitivist’ or ‘mythopoeic’.

To start, let us look at long-held images of ‘theprimitive’ (here referring to non-Western, pre-industrialpeoples and their ways of life). It seems that from theearliest explorations of Africa and the Americas, tales ofindigenous customs and attitudes excited a complexreaction in Westerners: on the one hand, fear and horrorat their supposed licentiousness, heathenism and violence;on the other, interest blending into admiration for theircommunal life and apparent ability to live in harmony withnature. These mirror images of the ‘ignoble’ and ‘noblesavage’ are of course primarily Western constructionswhich tell us far, far more about contemporary Westernconcerns than about the ways indigenes actually led theirlives. For those keen to denounce the ignoble, deploymentof the ‘primitive’ was primarily a way to underline, laudand legitimate their conception of civilization.Fundamentalist preachers, missionaries and colonial

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apologists were among the more common exploiters of thisstrategy. In contrast, for those happy to praise contentedindigenes lounging in Arcadia, contemplation of the‘primitive’ was a lever for questioning the dominantWestern values of the day. These eulogists soughtinspiration, or confirmation of the need for social,political and personal transformation in the strikingimage of indigenes who seemed to have found their ownparadise on earth.

The key modernist writers on whom I wish toconcentrate would have rejected this simple-mindeddichotomy. They did not denigrate indigenous difference inan ignorant fashion but nor did they succumb to seductivevisions of an Eden elsewhere on earth. Some of them,deeply unhappy with the decadent state of Europeancivilization at the turn of the century, propounded whatwe might call a savage, a darker primitivism: destruction,or at least the necessarily radical revitalization of theWest and the extolling of a complex primitivism.

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) is an exemplar of thisstyle. It is as much fin du globe as fin de siècle, with Kurtz asthe ivory-trader gone native to wildly destructive effect.To Conrad, Europe is a museum of moribund values, andAfrica horrific yet vital, a home of the primitive,providing a means of access to ‘the essential’. In aworldview which chimes with those of evolutionistanthropologists, Conrad portrays sailing up the Congo as avoyage into our own prehistory, with the jungle able toawake ‘forgotten and brutal instincts, . . .the memory ofgratified and monstrous passions’. Kurtz had had thecourage to voyage much further up that track than hisnarrator, the stolid unimaginative Marlow, would have everdared to go. By venturing so far Kurtz throws off themoral hollowness suffered by his European contemporariesand comes close to achieving a sort of moral emancipation,though dies before the process is complete. His final cryis critically ambivalent. Is ‘The horror!’ he shrieks adeathbed recognition of the evil going bush revealed, or afinal spit in the face of a degenerate self-styled‘civilization’? Conrad leaves the matter vague. He hasKurtz’s Russian disciple state that the trader hadexperienced ‘both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate

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of the mysteries (he) had penetrated’, while he leaves theotherwise upright Marlow on the verge of recognizing theheroic dimensions of Kurtz’s endeavours: the gains he hadmade, the costs he had paid by escaping into primitivistexcess.

D.H.Lawrence’s view of ‘the primitive’ sustains muchof the same ambivalences. This was especially so duringthe first years of the world war, when he was writing TheRainbow and Women in Love. To him, very different indigenousways of life both enchant and appal, both seduce andthreaten. Disgusted with the decay of the West, he turnsto Africa as one of the few remaining places wheresavagery retains its ancient life-taking, life-givingpower. An overdeveloped European civilization had, by itsnature, excluded its products from so much; it was only ona still dark continent, where the forces of disease anddeath were yet rampant, that people could continue to tapinto great sources of vitality. For this pessimisticLawrence the last hope for the West and the self lay in aliberating release achieved through a destructive re-birth grounded on savagery.

Many of Lawrence’s ideas about the ‘primitive’ andmyth were confirmed and boosted by his enthusiasticreadings of Frazer and the ritualists. As he wrote toBertrand Russell in December 1915:

I have been reading Frazer’s Golden Bough and Totemismand Exogamy. Now I am convinced of what I believedwhen I was about twenty—that there is another seat ofconsciousness than the brain and the nervoussystem. . .There is the blood-consciousness, with thesexual connection, holding the same relation as theeye, in seeing, holds to the mental consciousness.One lives, knows, and has one’s being in the blood,without any reference to nerves and brain. This isone half of life, belonging to the darkness. And thetragedy of this our life, and of your life, is thatthe mental and nerve consicousness exerts a tyrannyover the blood-consciousness, and that your will hasgone completely over to the mental consciousness, andis engaged in the destruction of your blood-being or

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blood-consciousness, the final liberating of the one,which is only death in result.3

This mode of blood-being, whose feelings were ‘alwaystrue’, was pre-eminent among indigenes. Michael Bell findsevidence of this primitive mode of feeling pervasive inThe Rainbow. At points throughout the book, he argues,Lawrence succeeds in portraying certain characters’intuitively animistic sensibility, their sense of unitywith the natural world. Lawrence’s main means of achievingthese effects are the slight extension of words’ meaning,so imparting a special aura to much of the text, and theinvesting of simple domestic scenes with ritualisticsignificance.

By the time he wrote The Plumed Serpent in the mid-‘20s,sex had become not the point but a means to an end: theboundary-dissolving participation in larger, cosmicunities, what Marianna Torgovnick, following Freud, calls‘the oceanic experience’. Once again ‘primitives’, thistime Pueblo Indians, hold the key to attainment of atranscendental state, of quiescence, beyond words. Thesenatives do not divide, partition off and judge the worldbut partake, in an unmediated manner, in an essential‘Being-ness’. However his desire for their collectiveineffable is undercut by a fear that nature, of which theyare a part, is vast, alive and all too able to swallow anindividuating presence such as his own. For Lawrence then,one could approach the primitive but not dive too farwithout paying the consequence.

Lawrence’s knowledge of the Indians was based onhearsay. By this stage his ‘primitive’ was almostexclusively a projection of his own concerns, relativelyunfettered by readings of the ritualists. The case ofT.S.Eliot is an almost complete contrast. Eliot was sowell-read in anthropology he would review key French textswithin a year of their appearance. He was able to cite,accurately, Lévy-Bruhl and Rivers, Durkheim and Harrison,Cailliet and Frazer. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was a particularinfluence with his ‘law of participation’: indigenes weresupposed to exhibit a ‘prelogical mentality’ because they

3 The Letters of D.H.Lawrence II edited by George V.Zytaruk and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 469

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were capable of not recognizing divisions between thephysical and the supernatural, the human and the non-human. According to Lévy-Bruhl, natives did not separatethe sacred from the profane but regarded the two as partsof a seamless whole. Though he was criticized by academiccontemporaries for the racist implications of‘prelogicality’ and though he himself later repudiated theidea, Eliot continued to use it, for his own purposes.

For Eliot, an early modern ‘dissociation ofsensibility’ had caused artists to separate the aestheticfrom the practical, the poetic and mystical from thequotidian. Twentieth-century poets had to overcome thisdivision and to cultivate prelogicality. They needed tobe like ‘witch doctors’ or other indigenous performers,who used prelogical and ritualistic methods to elicitcommunal pleasures from those watching them. Poets had towork their word-magic on their audiences. They were at thebardic best as public entertainers, maintaining‘primitive’ forms of art and performance where they reliedon spontaneous interaction between actor and audience.Thus Eliot’s later shift from poet to verse dramatist maybe regarded as not so much a major change of literary moderather, a move into a more effective way of achieving thesame end: awakening prelogicality.

Eliot defined this ‘primitive’ prelogical instinctas:

The feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating farbelow the conscious levels of thought and feeling,invigorating every word: sinking to the mostprimitive and forgotten, returning to the origin andbringing something back, seeking the beginning andthe end. It works through meanings, certainly, or notwithout meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses theold and the obliterated and the trite, and thecurrent, and the new and surprising, the most ancientand civilized mentality.4

Poets bridged the primitive and the civilized by aninherently mystical process of banging syllable and rhythm

4 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1933, p.111

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together. This acoustic forging of poetry he saw instarkly primitivist, evolutionist terms: ‘Poetry begins, Idare say, with a savage beating a drum in a jungle, and itretains that essential of percussion and rhythm;hyperbolically one might say that the poet is older thanother human beings.’5 Eliot, stimulated by the work of theritualists, argued that the origin of drama was primitiveritual, and the essence of ritual was rhythm. Without thatrhythm a performer could work no magic on his audience. Anarrhythmic poet-shaman would have no clothes.

Poets, like primitives, relied on not just rhythm butmetaphor as well, for what was metaphor but a magicalprocess of making two unlikes like? According to MarcManganaro, Eliot was here relying on another idea of Lévy-Bruhl’s: that the word can hold a prelogical, mysticalpower. If this be the case, then wordsmiths—whether modernpoets or native magicians—wield considerable power. By thedeft arranging of words they can call on mystical forcesin order to effect change among humans. Given thisprelogic where words and spirituality are intrinsicallyconnected, the power to name becomes a key attribute ofboth shamans and poets, a literal source of theirauthority. Lévy-Bruhl’s emphasis on the power of the wordalso led him to stress indigenes’ reverence for thelanguage of rituals, where the meaning of what was saidwas of much, much lesser import than the efficacy ofuttering the words. And Eliot valued Lévy-Bruhl preciselybecause he did not try to explain rituals away butconcentrated on the study of mentality and the efficaciousprocesses of ritual performance instead. As Manganaroargues, Eliot’s poet was modelled on Lévy-Bruhl’smedicine-man: ‘a figure who unites social power andtranscendence. . .because his channelling of mysticalparticipations is instrumental to the social formationsand maintenance of the tribe’. On this vision poets usedprimitive means for civilized, but conservative ends. Asinfluential upholders of orthodoxy, they acted as powerfulparticipants in society. As self-elected spokespersons,one might say they pretended to constitute a government ofthe tongue.

5 Ibid., p. 148

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It was The Waste Land and its notes which first broughtThe Golden Bough to the attention of so many lovers ofliterature. But it seems it was Yeats who first realizedthe literary potential of Frazer’s vade mecum to myth.Yeats’s reading and use of Frazer became a key stimulusboth to much of his poetry and to his evolving vision ofhumans’ place in the world. In his own words, ‘The GoldenBough has made Christianity look modern and fragmentary.’To replace the creed in which he had been reared, Yeatsdrew on comparative mythology, theosophy, occultmysticism, and astrology. He wanted to ‘reconstruct’ (moreaccurately, invent) the supposedly common, age-old matrixof cosmological experiences which preceded Christianity.This matrix included visions, spiritual experiences, thepresence of the miraculous (i.e. the interruption ofsupernatural forces into ordinary life), and the evocationof collective memory through the power of symbolism.Within this scheme spirits still inhabited sacred placeswithin the landscape while the modern performance ofritual magic or the staging of seances held the promise ofreviving and reintegrating sections of his matrical world,a world where everything, ultimately, was stitchedtogether in a grand, cosmic unity.

Frazer’s compendia provided Yeats’s poetry andprojects with greater comparative scope and historicaldepth, and helped enable his more universalistgeneralizations. The profusion of examples he suppliedstrengthened Yeats’s conviction in the maintenance ofcontinuity amidst constant change over the course ofaeons. The Golden Bough also gave him a storehouse ofcompelling images (e.g. the scapegoat, the king, theprophet, the priest, the magician) and actions (e.g.sacrifice, initiation, incarnation) as well as narrativescapable of arousing powerful emotion. Furthermore, sinceYeats believed in the power of the word or the symbol toevoke an otherwise almost inaccessible reality then,according to John Vickery, The Golden Bough offered him‘another perspective on the magical power of language tocreate a world of concrete immediacy’. Following this lineof thought, poetry had the enchanting potency to revivethe forgotten, make the past present, and the unconsciousconscious.

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For Yeats however, Frazer was more a facilitator thanan innovator. The poet was already well versed infolklore before he encountered The Golden Bough and, unlikeFrazer, actually conducted fieldwork, whether collectingfolk beliefs in the West of Ireland or participating inSoho seances. Moreover Yeats’s approach was syncreticrather than comparative and he cleaved to a cyclical, nota linear, theory of history. Denying the myth of‘progress’, he strove for the revival of magic, whosevalidity would be scientifically confirmed, he believed,by spiritualism.

An integral part of many of Yeats’s projects weretheir potentially nationalist dimension and an integralpart of that dimension was its exploitation of folklore.For him, transcribing folk tales from locals was not justa rare remaining opportunity to record the traces, among aEuropean people, of primitive beliefs in spirits and theefficacy of magic. It was also of national culturalsignificance, as this material, appropriately deployed,could feed a nationalist myth. Through the hidden power ofsuch a myth, a cultural renewal could be brought about, soinvigorating a spiritual renaissance. On this reading,anthropology and cognate disciplines had essential rolesto play in one’s encounter with oneself, one’s nation, andeven the cosmos.

Perhaps the wildest of all the modernist interpretersof the anthropological message was Robert Graves, whosedeeply idiosyncratic approach can be seen to be as magicalin style as the material he discusses. A man so learned inthe subject he can justly be called an amateuranthropologist, Graves had read deeply in the work of theCambridge ritualists and of W.H.R.Rivers, ananthropologist and doctor who helped introduce Freud tothe English public and was a personal friend of the poet.Indeed the central tenets of Graves’s conception ofpoetry are essentially quasi-anthropological, though of arather peculiar bent. In The White Goddess he explicitlystated his belief in a universal primordial matriarchywhich was overturned by the agents of a patriarchalsystem. The goddess of passion and fertility was ousted bya god of reason. This change led humans to ignore theworld of nature and its seasonal rituals, and to emerge

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from prehistory and myth into historical time. To Graves,this loss is the predicament poets must overcome, bystriving to reconnect with the goddess, ‘the true Muse’,and with the original idiom of poetry, myth. Though theWhite Goddess is as dangerous as she is attractive, asable to kill as to vivify, it is the duty of a poet toworship her.

Graves thought the poetic impulse arose fromconflict, whether caused by psychic factors or externalones impinging on the self. He claimed that when a poetwas unable to resolve a conflict logically, he hypnotisedhimself as witch doctors, ‘his ancestors in poetry’, haddone. In this trance-like state, similar to that of a‘waking dream’, all inhibitions were lost, all defenceslowered, and words were able to exercise their fullmagical power. Committed poets had to cultivate this stateof self-hypnotism if they wished to produce ‘true poems’.By means such as these Graves wished to rediscover andexpose the magical principles underlying poetry, otherwiselost since the fall of the goddess. For him magic, likelove, was an essential component of the imaginative life,disbelief in either diminishing the quality of one’s lifeexperience.

Graves made an exceptionally detailed study of TheGolden Bough because it chimed so well with beliefs healready held, for instance in seeing the world of magicand fairies as identical with those of children and ofpoets. Frazer’s works both bolstered Graves’s ideas andhelped him extend them much further: for instance, themythic resonances of individuals’ actions; the use ofcomparative mythology to create metamyths; the futility ofreligious dogmatism, since Christianity was but atransformation of Judaism which was but a transformationof paganism, whose ghosts continued to harass and terrifyJews and Christians. Yet Graves’s theories were much moreelaborate than Frazer’s and thus, to a disbeliever, thatbit much more contrived. Also, the poet was no respectingstudent of the man, as he was quite prepared at times tosatirize Frazer’s approach, in comic poems about seeminglybizarre customs. Furthermore, he was very ready tocontradict the anthropologist on anthropological matters.Frazer is quite clear that the presence of matrilineality

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(the tracing of descent through female lines) does notimply matriarchy. In fact there is no ethnographicevidence whatsoever to support Graves’s fiction aboutuniversal (or even widespread) worship of a goddess,white, brown, purple or any other colour. But Graves’smind was soon set; for much of the time, he merely usedanthropology as an intellectual springboard on which tobounce his own ideas. In the 1950s when in Oxford asProfessor of Poetry, the leading British anthropologistsof the day tried to discuss the subject with him butquickly realized he was only interested in expounding, notlistening. Perhaps, as Vickery argues, Graves’s goddess,an archetypal figure, chameleonic in her variety of forms,a mistress of metamorphosis, is best viewed as ‘anextended metaphor for the vicissitudes and exaltation thatcome to man from the external world of nature and societyand from the internal world of his own metabolism andpsyche’. Because as anthropology, strictly understood,she’s a nonsense.

Given these comments it is ironic that in The LongWeekend, the social history of interwar Britain he wrotein 1939 with Alan Hodge, Graves, who knew he could be aprig at times, chose to act the severe schoolmasteradmonishing modern anthropologists, especially Malinowski,whose works include The Sexual Life of Savages:

Sometimes they were such poor scientists that theybecame very friendly with their subjects of study.The true scientist was not supposed to fraternisewith his guinea-pig, for fear that he might influenceits emotional behaviour. And sometimes they could notdisguise their bawdy relish in the sex habits ofprimitives, and their reports were published ratheras refined erotic reading than as stern works ofresearch.6

As the quote suggests, the more ethnographicallyfocused studies of Malinowski and his students had ratherdifferent effects to the works of earlier anthropologists.They might have stretched the cross-cultural horizons of

6 Graves, R. and Hodge, A. 1940 The Long Weekend. A Social History of Great Britain 1918—1939. London: Faber, p. 92

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their literary contemporaries but none, deliberately,provided a grand Frazer-like vision of past and presenthumanity. It is true that Huxley spent four pages of Eyelessin Gaza discussing the ideas of the American RuthBenedict’s bestselling Patterns of Culture. But this excursuson the congruence of certain kinds of culture and thepersonalities they produced is best viewed as yet anotherintellectual contribution to an already well-stocked novelof ideas. It is also true that section of Auden’s TheOrators rely on an understanding of the anthropologist JohnLayard’s elision of epilepsy and Melanesian shape-shifters. However this key but recondite reference wasunknown to most of Auden’s admirably perservering readers.It is because of examples such as these (I could go on)that, if we wish to seek evidence of the criticalinfluence of any post-Frazerian anthropology uponmodernism, we need to turn our attention to the Paris ofthe 1920s.

Surrealisms, Anthropologies

Famously, it was Picasso and his peers who made aesthetesrevalue the artistic accomplishments of supposed savages.Their use of indigenous figures for their own artisticends is all too well-known; Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignonis the exemplary icon of this revolutionary time, with itsimposition of African masks and ‘Oceanic’ colours on thefaces of three of the prostitutes. It is also commonknowledge that these founders of artistic modernism werecurious about native artefacts only to the extent theycould inspire or confirm their visual experiments.Ethnography held no interest for them. Once again it isPicasso who is the exemplar. His Olympian ignorance of theorigin of these objects is notorious.

Exceptions to this rule were very few, and the mostnoteworthy of these was the Russian exile WassilyKandinsky. A trained anthropologist who had done fieldworkin a remote corner of the Russian Empire, Kandinsky wantedto create a syncretic world-view as a way for faith toendure during the dark cataclysms of modern Western times.

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Ethnographic materials were to be exploited fortherapeutic purpose: cultural healing and regeneration. Tothat end, he made discriminating use in his paintings ofthe entire iconography of Arctic shamanic lore, fromLappland to Siberia. At the same time he came to see thefigure of the shaman himself as representing the artist onhis quest for a universal legend which could dovetail withmodernity. If the shamanic ideal was to restore socialharmony for his own group, Kandinsky would strive to dothe same, through ethnographico-artistic means, for thesake of Western culture.

Petrine Archer-Straw has written of the negrophiliccraze that enlivened Paris in the 1920s where the avant-garde’s fashion for ‘blackness’ furthered their desire tooutrage, their sense of a sterilizing Western over-development justifying their indulgence in the ‘spiritual’vitality of Africans. But whether in dance, dress, décor,music or other mode of cultural production, this was lessa misencounter with the ‘Other’ than the old racism inbright new garb, even when illuminated by ethnography.For our purposes, the most interesting group here is alsothe most curious and the most anthropologically educated:the loose band of wayward surrealists typified by GeorgesBataille and Michel Leiris.

These learned dissidents promoted a hardcoreprimitivism concerned with sexual deviance, fetishism,magic, and ritual violence. Sternly dedicated to épater lebourgeois these surrealists wished to critique ‘civilized’norms in a radical manner. Their key joint production wasthe journal Documents, which mixed articles on ethnographyand archaeology with commentary on contemporary art andmusic.. Bataille was editor and Leiris a frequentcontributor. Both had studied under the great Frenchanthropologist of those decades Marcel Mauss. Bataillecelebrated human baseness, regarding human orifices andbodily functions as far more significant than cerebralactivity. Inverting the usual cultural priorities he sawcannibalism and sadomasochism as means to validate thehuman condition. Bataille was also a leading member of thequasi-initiatory society Acephale, committed to theheadless commemoration of viscerality, and plannedsecretly to stage a voluntary human sacrifice in a Paris

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square. As Archer-Straw observes, the interests ofBataille and his cohort might be more aptly called‘“sousrealist”, a term that better situates theirdissident thinking in a sort of abstracted hell somewherebeneath mainstream surrealism’.

Bataille and Leiris kept the subversive edge ofDocuments sharp by deploying a cultural relativism meant toundercut bourgeois values and to replace them with non-European alternatives. They wanted to do away with the oldcertainties. Leiris, for instance, wanted to see theWestern duality of mind and body destroyed by whatevermeans of ‘mysticism, madness, adventure, poetry,eroticism’. Both wished their readers to cast away theirinhibitions and frolic in the sordid, the occult and thedarkly primitive. For them, black culture had a savagepotency worthy of nurture not denigration. Leiris’s mostextended early encounter with African ways was assecretary-archvist of the 1931 Mission Dakar-Dijbouti. Hisfamed L’Afrique fantôme, an open-ended ‘diary’ of hisimpressions on the expedition, details his eroticobsessions, his revelling in dirt and filth, the course ofhis bowel movements as well as of his dreams. Afieldworker much of his own making, he gives dada-likelists of data and describes an Ethiopian zâr sacrifice,performed for him, tasting the animal’s blood and havingits entrails coiled around his brow. Though Leiris was theonly surrealist to make a living from anthropology, hemaintained an ambiguous distance from both. André Breton’smovement, albeit revolutionary in tone, was tooconstricted for his tastes while, as a rigoroussubjectivist, it was easy for him to undercut the claimedobjectivism of orthodox ethnography. Compared toMalinowski’s ideal of the anthropologist as dedicatedwould-be scientist in the bush, Leiris preferred topresent himself as militant rogue tempted to go bush.

The surrealism imported to London was of a muchpoliter kind than that of Bataille or Leiris. The keygroup here was a band of British poets and artists, headedby Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, who joined forceswith a popularizing anthropologist, Tom Harrisson, to formMass-Observation. Its central aim was social therapy,which they hoped might help to bring about social change.

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Its central method was the production of ethnography ofthe people by the people for the people. Through thecollation of ‘mass-reports’ by a mass of observers aboutkey and minor moments in the life of the country, theyhoped to perceive the leading ‘collective images’ ofsociety and to lay bare its social unconscious. Their mostsignificant publication was their first: May 12th, 1937. Anedited collection of reports taken on the day of GeorgeVI’s coronation, it revealed the diversity of publicresponses to the event, in the words of the participantsthemselves. Thus their’s was not just a democraticsurrealism, but a demotic one as well, giving voice to thepeople, in the people’s own tongue. Its editors, Madge andJennings, wished to underline the poetry of everydayspeech and, in their more inspired moments, to dissolvethe distinctions between poetry and science. They alsoprovided a diversity of indexes, so enabling theinterested to read the text in a plurality of ways andundercutting any authoritativeness attributed to theeditors’ ordering. Though Mass-Observation won greatliterary and public interest, the pragmatic andoverbearing Harrisson ensured that the work of Mass-Observation soon turned almost exclusively pop-anthropological. The promise of an ethnographic surrealismwas abandoned. Professional anthropologists, at first infavour of the movement, did not lament the demise of thispotentially destabilizing competitor.

There is however a final twist to this tale of themeetings between anthropology and surrealism. For theOxford anthropologist Rodney Needham has mischievouslysuggested that Claude Lévi-Strauss, participant in thewartime New York circle of exiled surrealists, should beregarded not as the famed proponent of structuralism butas the greatest surrealist of them all. Trying to accountfor Lévi-Strauss’s indisputable popular success, Needhamargues his work is best viewed as an essentiallysurrealist enterprise since it ‘can evoke a responseliberated from the confinements of exactitude, logic andscholarly responsibility’. The source of his appeal forthe public does not lie in his academic ability but

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Must be sought in the idiosyncracies of Lévi-Strausshimself: the ‘poetic’ quality in his writing; hisvery obscurities can be seen as enigmatic and henceprofound; there are intimations of great mysteries,refractions of perennial insights, echoes of oracularutterances. His vision is hermetical, and hiswritings have prospered because they promise toreveal what is hidden, the occult factors by whichhuman experience is shaped.7

***

Needham’s comment is a deft reminder that anthropology,for all the pretensions of some of its practitioners, canbe as much one of the humanities as of social studies, asmuch an art as a purported science. One of the points ofthis chapter has been to underline that there is nosingular anthropology, with its own tidy definition, but akaleidoscope of possible anthropologies, differentpatterns appearing with each turn. The same withprimitivism and the analysis of myth. It is not just thatthe work of anthropologists can be used in different waysby different factions or generations of writers, ratherthat anthropologists are always also writers and somewriters also anthropologists. Misleading then to score asharp divide between the two and trace the supposedinterconnections between them. Best to acknowledge theambiguities and the overlaps, and to tease out theirconsequences. For there will be new anthropologies, newprimitivisms, new myths.

7 ‘The birth of the meaningful’ (review of Le regard éloigné by C.Lévi-Strauss), Times Literary Supplement, 1984, April 13, p. 393

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Bibliography/Further Reading

Archer-Straw, Petrine 2000 Negrophilia. Avant-Garde Paris and BlackCulture in the 1920s. London: Thames and HudsonBarkan, E. and Bush, R. (eds.) 1995 Prehistories of the Future. ThePrimitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism. Stanford: StanfordUniversity PressBell, Michael 1972 Primitivism. London: Methuen------- 1997 Literature, Modernism and Myth. Belief and Responsibility inthe Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University PressFraser, Robert (ed.) Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination.London: MacmillanHarmon, William 1976 ‘T.S.Eliot, Anthropologist andPrimitive’, American Anthropologist 78 pp. 797—811Hyman, Stanley Edgar 1958 ‘The ritual view of myth and themythic’ in Myth: A symposium. Edited by T.A.Sebeok.Bloomington: Indiana University PressMacClancy, Jeremy 1986 ‘Unconventional Character andDisciplinary Convention. John Layard, Jungian andanthropologist’ in Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others. Essays inCulture and Personality. History of Anthropology 4, edited byG.W.Stocking, University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin,pp. 50—71------ 1995 ‘Brief Encounter: the meeting, in MassObservation, of British surrealism and popularanthropology’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1 (n.s.) pp.495—512------- 1996 ‘Popularizing Anthropology’ in PopularizingAnthropology, edited by J.MacClancy and C.McDonaugh. London:Routledge, pp. 1—57Manganaro, Marc 1986 ‘”Beating a Drum in the Jungle”.T.S.Eliot on the artist as “Primitive”’, Modern LanguagesQuarterly 47 pp. 393—421------ 1992 Myth, Rhetoric and the Voice of Authority. A Critique ofFrazer, Eliot, Frye and Campbell. New Haven: Yale University PressManganaro, Marc (ed.) 1990 Modernist Anthropology. From Fieldworkto Text. Princeton: Princeton University PressRuthven, K.K. 1968 ‘The Savage God: Conrad and Lawrence’,Critical Quarterly X, pp. 39—54Stocking, G.W. 1987 Victorian Anthropology. New York: FreePress

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------ 1996 After Tylor. British Social Anthropology 1888—1951.London: AthloneStreet, Bryan 1975 The Savage in Literature. London: Routledgeand Kegan PaulTorgovnick, Marianna 1990 Gone Primitive. Savage Intellects, ModernLives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press------- 1997 Primitive Passions. Men, Women, and the Quest forEcstasy. Chicago: University of Chicago PressVickery, John B. 1972 Robert Graves and the White Goddess.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press--------- 1972 The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough.Princeton: Princeton University PressWeiss, Peg 1995 Kandinsky and Old Russia. The Artist as Ethnographerand Shaman. New Haven: Yale University Press

Endnotes

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