ENLIGHTENMENT? Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1999. 28:i–xxiii Copyright © 1999 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved WHAT IS ANTHROPOLOGICAL ENLIGHTENMENT? Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century Marshall Sahlins Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637; e-mail: [email protected] Key Words: modernity, indigenization, translocality, culture, development n Abstract A broad reflection on some of the major surprises to anthropological theory occasioned by the history, and in a number of instances the tenac- ity, of indigenous cultures in the twentieth century. We are not leaving the century with the same ideas that got us there. Contrary to the inherited notions of progressive development, whether of the political left or right, the surviving victims of imperial capitalism neither became all alike nor just like us. Contrary to the “despondency theory” of mid-century, the logical and historical precursor of dependency theory, surviving indigenous peoples aim to take cultural re- sponsibility for what has been done to them. Across large parts of northern North America, even hunters and gatherers live, largely by hunting and gather- ing. The Eskimo are still there, and they are still Eskimo. Around the world the peoples give the lie to received theoretical oppositions between tradition and change, indigenous culture and modernity, townsmen and tribesmen, and other clichés of the received anthropological wisdom. Reports of the death of indigenous cultures—as of the demise of anthropology—have been exaggerated. CONTENTS Introduction .................................................... ii What Is Not Too Enlightening ..................................... ii Up the Indigenous Culture ........................................ vi The Indigenization of Modernity ................................... ix Tradition and Change ............................................ xi Functional Determination by the Basis .............................. xii Money and Markets, Moralities and Mentalities ....................... xv Reversing Center and Periphery................................... xviii Culture Is Not Disappearing ....................................... xx 0084-6570/99/1115-000i$12.00 i ii SAHLINS INTRODUCTION Dare to know! But from what intellectual bondage would anthropology need to liberate itself in our times? No doubt from a lot of inherited ideas, including sex- ism, positivism, geneticism, utilitarianism, and many other such dogmas of the common average native Western folklore posing as universal understandings of the human condition. I do not presume to talk of all these things, but only of the civilizing theory which Kant responded to his famous question, what is Enlight- enment? (1983 [1784]). For him, the question became how, by the progressive use of our reason, can we escape from barbarism? But what kind of progressive anthropology was this? We are still struggling with what seemed like Enlightenment to the philosophers of the eighteenth century but turned out to be a parochial self-consciousness of European expansion and the mission civilisatrice. Indeed civilization was a word the philosophes invented—to refer to their own society, of course. Following on Condorcet, the perfectibility they thus celebrated became in the nineteenth century a progressive series of stages into which one could fit—or fix—the various non-Western peoples. Nor was the imperialism of the past two centuries, crowned by the recent global victory of capitalism, exactly designed to reduce the enlightened contrasts between the West and the rest. On the contrary, the ideologies of modernization and development that trailed in the wake of Western domination took basic prem- ises from the same old philosophical regime. Even the left-critical arguments of dependency and capitalist hegemony could come to equally dim views of the historical capacities of indigenous peoples and the vitalities of their cultures. In too many narratives of Western domination, the indigenous victims appear as neo- historyless peoples: their own agency disappears, more or less with their culture, the moment Europeans irrupt on the scene. WHAT IS NOT TOO ENLIGHTENING Certain illusions born of the Western self-consciousness of civilization have thus proved not too enlightening. Worked up into academic gazes of other peoples, they became main issues with which modern anthropology has contended, some- times to no avail. In the interest of examining the contention, I briefly examine this anthropological vision of the Other. First, the set of defects that make up the historyless character of indigenous cultures—in obvious contrast to progressiveness of the West. Indeed Margaret Jolly (1992) notes that when we change it’s called progress, but when they do—notably when they adopt some of our progressive things—it’s a kind of adul- teration, a loss of their culture. But then, before we came upon the inhabitants of the Americas, Asia, Australia, or the Pacific islands, they were pristine and abo- riginal. It is as if they had no historical relations with other societies, were never forced to adapt their existence, the one to the other. As if they had no experience constructing their own mode of existence out of their dependency on peoples—not to mention imperious forces of nature—over which they had no con- trol. Rather, until Europeans appeared, they were isolated—which just means that ANTHROPOLOGICAL ENLIGHTENMENT iii we weren’t there. They were remote and unknown—which means they were far from us, and we were unaware of them. (My lamented colleague Sharon Stephens used to introduce her lectures on Vico by noting that though it is often said that Vico lived an obscure life, I’m sure it didn’t look that way to him.) Hence, the history of these societies only began when Europeans showed up: an epiphanal moment, qualitatively different from anything that had gone before and culturally devastating. Supposedly the historical difference with everything pre-colonial was power. Exposed and subjected to Western domination, the less powerful peoples were destined to lose their cultural coherence—as well as the pristine inno- cence for which Europeans, incomplete and sinful progeny of Adam, so desired them. Of course, as Renato Rosaldo (1989) reminds us, the imperialists have no one to blame for their arcadian nostalgias but themselves. Nor should anything I say here be taken as a denial of the terror that Western imperialism has inflicted on so many peoples, or that so many have gone to the wall. Accordingly, a main academic consequence of the cultural shock and psycho- logical anomie inflicted by the West was the despondency theory that became popular in the mid-twentieth century. Despondency theory was the logical precursor of dependency theory. But as it turned out—when the surviving victims of imperialism began to seize their own modern history—despondency was another not terribly enlightening idea of the power of Western civilization. Here is a good example from AL Kroeber’s great 1948 textbook, Anthropology: With primitive tribes, the shock of culture contact is often sudden and se- vere. Their hunting lands or pastures may be taken away or broken under the plow, their immemorial customs of blood revenge, head-hunting, sacri- fice, marriage by purchase or polygamy be suppressed. Despondency set- tles over the tribes. Under the blocking-out of all old established ideals and prestiges, without provision for new values and opportunities to take their place, the resulting universal hopelessness will weigh doubly heavy be- cause it seems to reaffirm inescapable frustration in personal life also. (Kroeber 1948:437–38) 1 A corollary of despondency theory was that the others would now become just like us—if they survived. Of course the Enlightenment had already prepared this eventuality by insisting on the universality of human reason and progress: a 1 1Another characteristic example: A village that is inwardly alive is proof against a government policy as well as against natu- ral cataclysms, neither of which affects its spiritual energies; but it cannot withstand the dis- integrating forces of trade and commercial development, the steady invasion of money economy, the gradual weakening of its agricultural basis, of the tie that binds it to the soil—a tie which is but part of the bond that unites man with man, the contact with the rest of the world. For these latter are destructive forces that kill not only the physical element in the communal bases— agriculture to supply domestic needs—but also the two spiritual ele- ments which underlie the village community—religion and social unity—and with these kill the soul of the village. (Boeke 1942:19) iv SAHLINS course of development that would be good—in all senses of the term—for the human species as such and as a whole. The unilinear evolutionism of the nineteenth century was a logical anthropological sequitur to this enlightened sense of universal rationality. Everyone would have to go through the same sequence of development. In his Primitive Culture of 1870, EB Tylor showed what doom was in store for the appreciation of cultural diversity by endorsing, as an appropriate procedure for constructing the stages of cultural evolution, Dr. Johnson’s immor- tal observation that “one set of savages is like another” (Tylor 1903, 1:6). In any case, to get back to other peoples now confronted by Western civilization, Marx likewise supposed that the country that is more developed industrially only shows to the less developed

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