WHEN WOMEN HELD THE DRAGON’S TONGUE and other essays in Historical Anthropology

©2007

Hermann Rebel Table of Contents

Preface i

1. What People without History? A Case for Historical Anthropology as a Narrative-Critical Science 1

Part 1: Myths

2. Figurations in Historical Anthropology: Two Kinds of Narrative about the Long Duration Provenances of the Holocaust [from Kalb and Tak, eds., Critical Junctions, 2004] 94

3. Cultural Hegemony and Class Experience [American Ethnologist,1989] 117

4. Eric Wolf’s Historical Anthropology [ Focaal, 2001] 170

5. Reimagining the oikos: Austrian Cameralism in its Social Formation [from O’Brien and Roseberry, eds., Gold en Ages. Dark Ages, 1991] 176

Part 2: Fairy Tales

6. Hessian Peasant Women, their Families and the Draft: A Social-Historical Interpretation of Four Tales from the Grimm Collection [with Peter K. Taylor, Journal of Family History, 1981] 216

7. Why Not “Old Marie” . . . or Someone Very Much Like Her? A Reassessment of the Question about the Grimms’ Contributors [Social History, 1988] 264

8. When Women Held the Dragon’s Tongue 303

Part 3: Histories

9. Peasants Against the State in the Body of Anna Maria Wagner: An Austrian Infanticide in 1832 [Journal of Historical Sociology, 1993] 372

10. What do the Peasants Want Now? Realists and Fundamentalists in Swiss and South German Rural Politics, 1650-1750 [Central European History, 2003] 383

11. After the Next Genocide: Reactionary Modernism and the Postmodern Challenge to Analytical Ethics. In Recollection of Bill Roseberry 445 Preface

One noteworthy feature of the ongoing dialogue between Anthropology and History has been an occasional practice of misrepresenting and even suppressing approaches that are threatening to or more promising than one’s own possibly shaky proposals. For example, in a recent collection of her essays Sherry Ortner engages in “tinkering” with something she wants to call “practice theory” which, she claims, has come along to offer an alternative to the perceived weaknesses of what she calls Geertzian meaning theory, Wolfian exploitation studies and French structuralism. “Practice theory,” in her perception, put forward “genuine resolutions of problems that had been plaguing the field [of Anthropology] . . . It ‘grounded’ cultural processes . . . in the social relations of people ‘on the ground’.” It is one thing for her to indulge in a logical circularity of “grounding” and to appear thereby to give content to an equally circular pseudo-profundity that “history makes people, but people make history.” (Anthropology and Social Theory, Duke, 2006, 2-3) It is another thing, however, when she takes particular aim at Eric Wolf, whom she writes off as a mere political economy “objectivist” (without explaining what that means to her) and as one of several engaged in alleged “cultural thinning,” i.e., in practicing a “Sixties style materialism . . . opposed to giving culture any sort of active role in the social and historical process.” (52-3) This is where the suppressing and misrepresenting come in. Her summary judgment on Wolf is that in his Europe and the People without History (California, 1982) he “devotes a scant five pages at the end of the book to the question of culture, largely in order to dismiss it.” (51) This can only be a calculated misrepresentation, a kind of spin-doctoring of Wolf’s postscript to the book by which he in fact re-gathers the social-cultural threads that have been running throughout his narrative about how people experienced the asymmetrical re-articulations of kin- ordered, tributary and capitalist modes of production in their actual and long-duration global histories. In addition, Wolf’s concluding pages seek to frame a new synthesis drawn from his several long-duration and conjunctural narratives to take us beyond any lingering base/superstructure, structure/agency and other unsatisfying dualisms by means of an experimental projection of specific figural (i.e., “cultural”) formations of

i membership, justice and valuation that appear historically to quicken, permeate, and make possible, narratable, figurally livable, the various and historically articulating modes of the social reproduction of labor. Ortner’s misrepresenting and dismissive judgment also offends in a second sense in that she suppresses Wolf’s Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis (California, 1999), where the latter seeks to confront cultural-historical issues of violence and power well beyond the limited sense of contingencies one finds in the historicist, “template” approaches to cultural analysis re-initiated by Geertz, and followed by Rosaldo, Scheper-Hughes, and a stampede of others, including Ortner herself. She in effect denies the known and long trajectory by which Wolf’s culture concept evolved from his childhood experiences in Nazi Austria and Germany and his unique education in exile to find scholarly expression finally in publications dating back to the early 1950s (see his autobiographically annotated Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World, California, 2001 which also finds no mention by Ortner). Trivializing and reading out of the record in an offhand and intellectually insulting manner this diverse array of treatments of “culture,” as Ortner does, is to reveal, with all due respect, a deep ignorance and is on its face scientifically unacceptable, notably despite its appearance in a peer-reviewed academic press publication. It is worth to bring, briefly, the differences between Ortner’s and Wolf’s culture concepts to a critical point around the issue of “culture’s” connections to “power,” a featured relationship in both their works. In her effort to restore analytical balance between “agency” and “structure” Ortner follows, among others, Anthony Giddens’ reasoning whereby power is agents’ “transformative capacity” that can also operate as “domination.” To which one can say immediately that this is yet another circularity because synonyms are neither an explanation, nor a clarification, nor a deepening conceptualization. From a perception of power as residing in “dualities of structure mediated by resources” she then opts for Bill Sewell’s neo-Leibnizian view that “agency is access to resources and nobody is without such access however unequally.” In this optimistic view of power we are all “empowered subjects” in a world where, in Ortner’s words, “agency is a kind of property of social subjects” that is “culturally shaped by way of the characteristics that are foregrounded as ‘agentic’.” (2006: 137-8, 151-2) It is to go ii around in circles to argue that agents have (or are given, by means of “foregrounding”) “agentic” characteristics that then “empower” them. By contrast, and in an anticipatory reply to this mounting pile of scholasticisms about the world of the culturally agentic, Wolf developed the following alternative approach to how analyses of power can be distilled from analyses of culture: What comes to be called ‘culture’ covers a vast stock of material inventories, behavioral repertoires, and mental representations, put in motion by many kinds of social actors, who are diversified into genders, generations, occupations and ritual memberships. Not only do these actors differ in the positions from which they act and speak, but the positions they occupy are likely themselves to be fraught with ambiguity and contradictions . . . Given this differentiation, neither a language-using community nor a body of culture bearers can share all of their language or culture . . . Any coherence that [culture] may possess must be the outcome of social processes through which people are organized into convergent action or into which they organize themselves . . . The processes of organization cannot be understood apart from considerations of power . . . To think of power as an all- embracing, unitary entelchy would merely reproduce the reified view of society and culture as apriori totalities. It will be more productive to think of power relationally . . . Power is brought into play differently in the relational worlds of families, communities, regions, activity systems, institutions, nations and across national boundaries . . . (Envisioning Power, 66-7)

For Wolf, power is not an entelechy realizing itself as a “transformative capacity” or a “property” of the “agentic” but is instead brought into very existence in interactive, social-relational moments of greater or lesser complexity and is guided by a manifold of often ineffably duplicitous, allegedly “empowering” scripts that trap people in relations that can on occasion end for one or another party in a given relations-complex in death or other lesser forms of “elimination” by hidden transcripts disclosed only in that relationship’s dialectical unfolding. This is to say that the model of cultural power as some kind of “property” that some “have” and others do not offers very little toward understanding the place of possibly concealed or deniable force and violence in social relations that are couched in terms of the “normal practice” of culture. Wolf’s case studies in Envisioning Power demonstrate that one of the underlying modalities of cultural power is in those relational complexes that authorize and execute the murderous sacrifices that can emerge to become the overriding imperatives of specific

iii historical-cultural articulations. Ortner remains in effect speechless before the violences that take place inside certain repressive and metonymic spaces of ostensibly necessary cultural, and therefore empowered, social relational “practice.” She is required to content her readers with the formula that “death happens” – see the concluding essay in the present volume– whereas for Wolf what matters is “how death happens” and how it is (and can be) culturally, that is to say tropologically, figured in historical- anthropological narratives that disclose the processes that empower. Possibly a third oversight in Ortner’s giving of short shrift to the wide range of Wolf’s contributions to the study of culture is that Wolf’s initiatives have not been without fruition. It is not surprising, for example, that those who explore the implications of Wolf’s experimental formulations for their own areas of research tend to come to “cultural-historical” conclusions. (Cf. e.g., J. Schneider and R. Rapp, eds., Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the Influence of Eric R. Wolf , California, 1995) What is even more remarkable is that in all these cases of attraction to Wolf’s historical-anthropological experiment– and one could add others such as Peter Taylor’s unique Indentured to Liberty: Peasant Life and the Hessian Military State, 1688-1815 (Cornell, 1994) – the sheer diversity and the creative multi-directionality of these widely different analytical works attest to the “universal” qualities of Wolf’s culture conceptualizations. These explorations are free of any single “master-plan” and instead demonstrate the “individuating” capacities of Wolf’s sense of “culture” for illuminating, for any location in historically evolved “world systems” made up of interactive modes of production, the linkages between and among chains of social and linguistic and “behavioral,” that is to say altogether figural formations. Their intent is not to empower (either instrumentally or ethically) crude and destructive engines of cultural or “identity” manipulations, as is often the case with much current culturalist work, but rather to strengthen analytical and “local” resistances against the power-serving circularities of purported understandings of the “cultural” in any given “culture.” Wolf and those writing in the terms of his research program – among whom I count myself, to be sure – are seeking to gain a new appreciation of and a better empathic sense for the cultural dimensions of power and do so for the recognition- and resistance-empowerment of those whose relationships are saturated not with the little iv power that they allegedly “have” but with a power that has them, forcing on them disempowering social relations that yet require and favor the ineffable exercise of power to the point of self-destructive violences and sacrifices in “privately” experienced social and psychological spaces. Such work resists how those who allegedly simply have “less” power can be served up analytically as thoroughly culturalized, that is as manipulable by the “empowered,” for, say, the scrutiny of prospective investors and developers. Wolf’s talk about “people without history” was precisely a reference to the analytically disempowered who are figured by some of the current culturalists as having no history but the one supplied by alleged “thick concepts,” the latter a historicist ethical formula that exonerates those who are – in Ortner’s memorable figure – on “the ship” from having any historical responsibility for what happens to those on “the shore.” In the concluding chapter of this book we return to the ethical questions raised by this “thick concept” approach in post-Geertzian “practice theory.” Part one below takes up, among other matters and in greater detail, some of Eric Wolf’s themes to help us develop several critical tools for doing better cultural analysis in a historical anthropology framework. This book as a whole, however, especially in parts two and three, tries to make several methodological and conceptual departures that not only build on but can encompass and also move beyond Wolf’s surprisingly postmodern initiatives on culture and power. In the introductory essay that follows I build an argument for a historical-anthropological social science whose job is only secondarily to construct coherent narratives about the human past that can claim to appear adequate to our present understanding of how the world has been working so far. My purpose is rather to propose historical anthropology as a social science whose primary task is ethical in that it seeks, following a train of thought initiated by Gerald Edelman, to disrupt what claim to be coherent narrative constructions, particularly those plausible stories that conceal and defend things and actions whose scale of injury and collateral damage places them at the outer limits of, or demonstrably beyond, the defensible. The task of such a science is to break apart narrative and figural symmetries and to find its way into the places where such purportedly scientific historical or anthropological coherences as may be put forward do not in fact work, or where alternative, possibly suppressed or figured-for-denial, that is to say metonymic v coherences may be in play, often with destructive but culturally “deniable” consequences. To view historical anthropology as a narrative-critical science is to intend readings that disclose historical and other social scientific narratives’ variously conscious, pre- and unconscious concealments and self-contradictions, not only as these occur by means of invocations or repressions of “evidence” but also as these latter appear necessary to accommodate narrators’ prior, possibly not fully recognized figural and emplotment choices. In other words, such readings are not only about testing the evidentiary and logical but also the narratively falsifiable moments of scientific historical and anthropological constructions. Even in the actuality of their “original” occurrences, historical-anthropological scientific objects exist in narrative complexions, both during their own and in subsequent times. They have to exist in narratable dimensions and not in some unrecoverable foundational event claimed to be a concretion that is somehow in a pure space of its own existence beyond both contemporary and later human reconstruction capacities. “Objectivity,” in the proposed narrative-critical approach, remains an essential scientific attitude for such a project, functioning not as an ultimately unachievable ideal but as a kind of conceptual Swiss army knife offering several options for gaining multiple perspectives on any historical-cultural object-in-question. It becomes an objectivity not of the moral qualities of the researcher but of the given scientific object itself as it necessarily remains open-ended in terms of the narratives in which it is made to appear and of which of its qualities as an object are brought into service for any particular narrative. From this perspective “objectivity” takes on another quality altogether in that the “common sense” – or, for that matter, the hegemonically agreed upon – appearances of scientifically identified objects come themselves under primary narrative-critical scrutiny and the tacitly repressed dimensions and qualities of scientific objects (including necessarily the consciously “objectivist” researchers’ distancing techniques themselves) can be acquired in sharper focus. While scientific objectivity is still also about “facts” because these in all cases seek to empower or disempower coherent narratives, we need to recognize that it is such empowerments and disempowerments themselves, however, that are as “factual” in their operations as any documentable “fact-thing” and that it is they that demand an as equally penetrating vi narrative-critical scrutiny as purportedly “hard” facts. From this perspective, evidentiary facts themselves acquire and display multiple, unpredictable facets and cease to be one- dimensional objects; this makes, in turn, “objectivity” itself much more interesting and contestable than the pathetic control-rictus that it often continues to be. The subject for debate is rather the qualities and the options for scientific narrative that any particular historical-anthropological object-in-question can offer or deny. This collection of essays perceives its organizing principle under the headings Myths, Fairy Tales and Histories not only as “types” of narrative but as the basis for attitudes toward and pragmatic expectations for particular kinds of historical- anthropological narrative. What do myths actually do? That is to say, what are myths when they are “in action?” Whom and what do they empower in what historical experience of human relationships? What does it mean when historical story tellers resort to fairy tales in order to speak analytically, conceptually, to a general audience of listeners or readers about something becoming apparent in presently shared experiences with, say, power relations? Why must we question histories for the ethical qualities of their re-narrations of historical peoples’ reasonings and stories which themselves may or may not have been free of acts of power or ethically defensible? The essays in this volume, both those previously published and the new introductory, closing and title essays, altogether propose some new departures for an interdisciplinary historical- anthropological project focusing on a narrative-critical and empathic appreciation of the social and linguistic figurations by which people live their, in all cases, historical lives. The opening essay introduces the foundational concepts and “grounds” the book in a synthetic experiment of select conceptualizations from several adjacent sciences, including a current theory of memory as proposed by the neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, a social-cultural anthropology in the vein of Eric Wolf and Bill Roseberry, a historical memory project focusing on Saul Friedländer’s, Christopher Browning’s and others’ narrative refiguring of the Nazi holocaust, a return to a Collingwoodian “empathy” project and a move beyond it via William Dray, Jonathan Gorman, David Carr and, finally, a testing of Marshall Sahlins’ historical “mytho-practical” construction by means of the narrative-critical perspective opened by Gananath Obeyesekere and followed, in turn, by an “empathic” (i.e., “rationality”-reconstructing) reading derived vii from several alternative historical readings. Among the three organizing narrative forms that are the structure of this book, histories are not placed, as tends to be the usual practice, in traditionally “objectivist” juxtaposition to the other two but are perceived in productive contiguity with kinds of narrative which are usually understood as “not objective.” If I do have a favored alignment, it is that of fairy tales and histories allied in deconstructive rebellion against myths. On the other hand and to be sure, one can also observe how the latter, in turn, perpetually seduce histories into alliance with a philosophical anthropology of eternal dualities and apparently inevitable human hierarchies; myths and histories often constitute themselves in a somewhat tense and therefore necessarily tacit partnership that discounts and excludes from serious consideration the apparent whimsies of fairy tales while all the while also jockeying for ever higher ground against each other. While elements of all three narrative forms appear for analytical disentanglement in all sections of the book we also still need to think about them as separate “genres” capable of different narrative disguises and performance tasks in their various partnerships and under different hegemonic and discursive conditions.

viii What People without History? A Case for Historical Anthropology as a Narrative-Critical Science

“. . . for every historian, as I now happen to be one, is a kind of speaking ghost from the time before [aus der Vorzeit].” – E.T.A. Hoffmann1

“The Principle of Indeterminacy states that there are circumstances under which the physicist cannot put himself in possession of all relevant information: if he chooses to observe one event, he must relinquish the possibility of observing another. In our present state of knowledge, certain events therefore appear to be unpredictable. It does not follow that these events are free or capricious. . .It does not follow that human behavior is free, but only that it may be beyond the range of a predictive and controlling science. Most students of behavior, however, would be willing to settle for the degree of prediction and control achieved by the physical sciences in spite of this limitation.” – B.F. Skinner2

“ . . . bad history is not harmless history. It is dangerous. The sentences typed on apparently innocuous keyboards may be sentences of death.” – Eric Hobsbawm3

To claim a place among the so-called “hard-nosed” sciences,4 the sciences that can offer purportedly effective techniques to predict and control things, many historians and anthropologists felt pressure, during the second half of the twentieth century, to affirm

1 Doge und Dogaresse, Stuttgart: Reclam 1965 [1818], 5.

2 Science and Human Behavior, New York: Macmillan 1953, 16. [CHECK]

3 “The Historian Between the Quest for the Universal and the Quest for Identity” in F. Bédarida, ed., The Social Responsibility of the Historian, Providence/Oxford: Berghahn, 1994, 63.

4 G. Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press,1984, 178. 1 their own search for what they saw as, in Eric Wolf’s account of this moment, “the common blueprint of the human animal.”5 They adopted neologisms about action systems and encodings of human experience by which “behaviors” or “performances” or simply “actions” in structures were to be observed, collected, collated, arranged on grids and in taxonomies of dualistic tensions and all dressed up as guides toward an understanding that would make social, economic and political life more manageable if not “better.” In these behavioral-scientific comprehensions, remembering, i.e., the perception of experiences in different time-scapes, played no role in the analysis of meaning. They forgot (!) that there are many ways other than brute sequentiality or “contemporaneity” to figure the “time before,” the Vorzeit in the Hoffmann epigraph that historians inhabit. Experiences in and with time were, and are still, perceived in such behavioral approaches as merely the product of the logical unfoldings of design and performance complexes (in or out of experimental settings), or of complementary homeostatic movements and counter-movements within dynamic systems of “culture” or “identity,” or as restabilizations of order after disruptive chance “shocks,” “stimuli,” etc. It is a historian’s privilege to raise the objection that to have no place for the often unpredictable interplay of layers of different temporalities, for the qualities and manifestations of various forms of times remembered in the actual experience of any given moment, no place for the unavoidable intertwinings of memories with moment-to- moment actions and experiences – and this includes experiences inside any purportedly objective-because-controlled social scientific experiment itself – is to put forward a scientistic pathos, an impossible “human blueprint” that deprives any human experience of the synthetic memory capacities that it requires to be what it is. Such purely behavioral social sciences deny us, individually and as a species, the very capacities of mind that are not reducible to extensional, “action” determinations – capacities of mind without whose intensional synthetic qualities human experience remains unthinkable. It is a dangerous philosophical anthropology that, on the pretext of an ontological

5 E. Wolf, Anthropology, New York: Norton 1974, 33; cf. 67- 73 and passim. 2 inability ever to know what is going on in the “black boxes” that are the minds of “others,” takes an excessively limited responsibility only for “behavioral” outcomes that, when judged to be “positive,” in turn automatically redeem and remove from discussion whatever price has been paid intensionally by the subjects of interventions that were “good” for them. It is a dangerous social science that presumes to be done with what it necessarily excludes into the socially and politically discounted and submerged realms of individuals’ memory experiences, a science that presumes that such repressively individualized remembering can be no match for deeply embedded and always manipulable and in themselves trans-temporal, if not outright timeless, cultural designs, encodings and repeated-when-necessary stimulus packages offered by allegedly shared culture. The obvious substantive paradox of “the human” is that it is an insubstantial, cross-temporally evolving memory complex, an embodied historical awareness that can never come to rest in or depend on any fully determined objective presence in a single moment of time. It is our common human evolution that has both empowered and condemned our species to be, in Nietzsche’s phrase from The Genealogy of Morals, the “animal that promises.” As a consequence we are, as a species, perpetually bound to keeping complicated and intertwined personal and collective “accounts” from moment to moment and across variable past and future times in order simply to be able to live in a human environment that is perforce, in its “humanity,” saturated with promises, contracts, expectations, prefigurations and fulfilments or, for that matter, failed fulfilments, “broken” promises. These accountings of promises include and often depend on historical accounts guarded, in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s terms, by variously trained and professional speaking ghosts whose reports from their visitations to “times before” register and analyze the fulfilments and, when the latter fail, the proxy-fulfilments (including those that are pathological and even fatal) of promises once made. There is no human blueprint possible that does not include such capacities for remembering pro- and introjected promisings or the necessary subsequent accountings they perforce bring to life. Understanding the complexions of multiple temporalities in human awareness is to a considerable extent the philosophical ground for this book’s sense of historical

3 anthropology.6 Hoffmann’s narrator’s phrase “aus der Vorzeit” could also, however, be translated as “out of the before-time” and his double entendre points to a scientistic temptation haunting historians as well, one by which they may imagine that in being free to move across and through all the times brought by means of memory-texts into experimentally summarizing accounts, they may gain glimpses of or even bring to bear an untimely awareness of the human animal before a fall into what is, by current understanding, historical time. Some claim to speak with the authority of such a supposed before-time about the qualities of an originary “human nature” before history, indeed of a people without history. In the light of the subject of this book which is the still evolving human species-capacity for living through, while simultaneously textualizing and narrating, the multiple dimensions of “times before” in order to achieve a critical, that is to say disruptive, readings of any account of historical experiences, this claim to understanding a human nature outside of time is also a paradoxical pathos, a historicism that, in order to get “what historians do” to rank among the proper “sciences,” represses the conditions of its own possibility. Finally, a further temptation that both historians and anthropologists share is that they might see themselves as coming at their scientific-analytical objects from the other end, from the present as that after-time where all the proliferating, overlapping and intertwining human cultural species, deposited in countless burial sites, lost cities, still-untouched archives and in “still living” but “surpassed” cultures can be made to appear as a vast cultural-historical Burgess shale, a nearly infinite archive for us alone and good for nothing other than to be brought into the presently edifying and scientifically-pragmatic discourses taking place in academic or other corporate havens perched far above and apparently safely away from the edge of the abyss. The appeal of such a present after-time, this posthistoire, seems limited and takes us out of historical

6 I was struck by Isaiah Berlin’s invocation of this phrase: “No one has stronger claims than Vico to be considered as the begetter of historical anthropology . . . Vico was indeed the . . . first and in some ways the most formidable opponent of unhistorical doctrines of natural law, of timeless authority. . .” The Crooked Timber of Humanity, New York: Vintage, 1992, 62-3 4 and into theological anthropology where we, in humble deference to the great inscrutability, accept our lot as but another ephemeral species whose development of mind matters, from this perspective, no more than, say, the evolution of gluteal display colorations in baboons. Reduced to higher forms of antiquarianism and puzzle solving, historical anthropology, in such understanding, loses its relevance in an ethical environment of absolute efficiencies-in-the-moment and of meta-narrative control for the aftermaths serving in turn such corporate power formations as are currently surviving. From this pseudo-aristocratic vantage point, the comings and goings of those in the “time before” have no progeny or meaning other than what serves our transcendent awareness of their inevitable failures and consequent disappearances before this after- time, this neo-liberal posthistoire of self-assured ontological presence allowing detached contemplation of all the tragi-comic inevitabilities that the historical and ethnographic records of “times before” expose for us. Remembered time becomes identified, in both disciplines’ seduction into yearnings for time-transcendent Being, with a fossilized, musealized, archived mass of data, records of events in stratified remnants of past Lost Worlds deemed wholly “other” from “our” pragmatically liberated world of a perpetual present refigured as an “end-time.” Throughout the chapters that follow I identify all such temporally passive epistemological approaches to remembering, by both historians and anthropologists, as anthropological history. We ought also to be aware here at the outset that this latter social scientific pose of disengaged passivity for the sake of ostensibly dispassionate and merely edifying academic colloquy, for the “great conversation,” does not prevent members of the also ever-present ruling groups from finding here the “scientific” ground for their efforts to manipulate and exploit select constituencies and/or victims. Practitioners of such anthropological histories, vying to claim time-transcendent blueprints and fully operational technical menus for manipulating human cultural stimuli, compete to serve up on request the requisite individual and mass mobilization techniques and spin practices. It is in this light that B.F. Skinner’s express desire, in the epigraph above, to achieve a physicist’s “control” over others by means of “behavioral science” must be subject to critical and finally rejecting scrutiny. As canonist of this approach Skinner 5 perceived, for example, workers’ wages and students’ grades as matters requiring “control” on the same level as those required by psychological, military and police institutions that “care for those to whom the conditions of the nursery remain necessary in later life.”7 While a Skinnerian sense of positive reinforcement is, no doubt, preferable to the negative reinforcement “practices” that do not seem to be able to go away, this does not alter the fact that his position is grounded in a regression to what I identify in below and throughout as “reactionary modernism,” i.e., an attempt at a re-confinement, at a re-closure of an achieved modernist opening in our understanding of the human world. Skinner’s argument in the epigraph above is instructive in this regard: even as he, perforce, admits to the operations of a universal “principle of indeterminacy” he immediately relocates that principle away from its intrinsicality to all phenomena and excludes it from “achieved” knowledge by a sleight-of-hand pointing to a comfortable closure of the “range” of things we do appear to be able predict and control in the physical universe (with more implied, no doubt for even more enlightened times yet to come) and for which any behavioral social scientist would apparently be happy to “settle” in the experiential universe. He and those many, including historians and anthropologists, who follow in one way or another the behaviorist model thereby turn away from and ignore the actual complexities of human experience, of remembered human times, to focus instead on “our ability to demonstrate the lawfulness in the behavior of the organism as a whole.” 8As if the “principle of indeterminacy” played no role in that lawfulness.

I

One of the key aspects of human evolution that calls into question such an organismic-behavioral framework for a scientific historical anthropology is that memory, as a time-perceptive, temporality-manipulative and hermeneutical capacity of minds, enabling overlapping and intertwining, individualized as well as collectivized

7 Skinner, Science, 22

8 Ibid., 16 6 time-referent constructions and behaviors whose manifold and indeterminate interactions elude all “lawfulness,” is actually an evolutionary decision from our distant, pre-human and ontogenetic past, from long before any human species emerged, with non-human minds equipped with variously recursive memory concepts, going beyond memories of “events” as such, and directly active in intuitions themselves. There can be no “originary” human nature without such time- and memory-sense formations because these latter – here I follow throughout Gerald Edelman’s materialist construction of mind capacities – are central to pre-human mental evolution itself.9 Bees, elephants, birds and humans are only a few of the species whose very evolutionary success has depended not only on genetically heritable neuronal capacities for time-space mappings but also, and more remarkably, on species-specific performances of “textual” behaviors between and among individuals and groupings of these species to communicate and read such mappings. It is on the basis of this pre-human evolutionary ground that we should expect to grasp, for example, how the earliest human apperceptions of terrains can include such memory-text technologies (writings) as paths, cultic markings, petroglyphs, solstice- and stellar-horizon referents, coded stelae, etc. pointing to and variously “textualizing” water boundaries, sites for spirit sightings, oracular caves, migratory birds’ nesting trees, the stations of the astronomical-liturgical year or the cycles of passing caravans. Memory-textual evolution is the common outcome of those myriad, “self”-updating and re-conceptualizing synthetic a priori formations by means of which minds, individually and in combinations, engage their worlds to attain experiences.10 Edelman’s succinct summary of this evolutionary process of memory capacities as it moves from hereditary (DNA) to immune system (lymphocite), reflex (neuronal) and recategorical (“neuronal group selection in reentrant brain maps”)

9 G. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind, New York: Basic, 1992

10 I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Translation by Kemp Smith [1929], New York: St. Martin’s, 1965, 48-51 and passim. Anglo-American philosophers seem able only to think the synthetic a priori in “after the fact” terms (cf. J Bennet, Kant’s Analytic, Cambridge, 1966) when it is actually and exactly the opposite. 7 formations is that “structures evolved that permit significant correlations between current ongoing dynamic patterns and those imposed by past patterns.”11 This is, in short, Edelman’s late=twentieth century re-grounding for the Kantian intuition of a synthetic apriori. Such a perception of ceaselessly interactive and imprecisely boundaried neuronal mappings and recursive syntheses that, altogether, are our minds-in-action contains an original and inspiring memory concept that may help us formulate a notion of historical anthropology as a critical science for analyses of narrative figures and of “mimetic” reality representations, a science not reduced to conceding that it is a different, by implication lesser, science (i.e.,“verstehend,” “quasi-experimental” etc. ) from the physical sciences; instead it may, recursively, find resonances among those active in all sciences who are capable of rethinking the narratives of what they are doing. The presentation, quality and complexity of Gerald Edelman’s arguments as well as his caveats about the heuristic and even hypothetical dimensions of his proposals altogether pose a daunting task to any kind of précis formulation, especially when, as in this case, the writer of the latter is only an enthusiast on very foreign turf who thinks he has found something.12 But the risk, nevertheless, seems worth taking if it will help us develop insights into how “memories” might be rethought as manifold and perpetually replayed (Edelman: “re-entrant”) conceptualizations; that in turn might open a rethinking of the qualities of the scientific object-constructions historians and anthropologists have been accustomed to deploy to engage things perceived as in or from “the past.” At the core of Edelman’s memory exposition is a recognition that evolution itself

11Bright Air, 204-5; Edelman’s elegant mind concept is free of any need for a hegemonikon; indeed he shows the latter to be an evolutionary non-starter. See in particular part one and chapter nine.

12 Nor does it help that among the actively competing “mind” theorists of the present, particularly among the so-called “mysterians” (Dennet, Chalmers et. al.), Edelman’s concepts find a reductivist and distorting reception that is then popularized in flip and inadequate scientific journalism. J. Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, London: Little Brown, 1996, 165-72 and passim. 8 is not thinkable without what he calls “symmetry-breaking” events. Universal material symmetries, conserving energies by maintaining, by “law,” equilibrium states (Edelman: “Mass-energy, momentum and spin are each governed by conservation laws requiring that each is neither created or destroyed within the whole context of a physical description”),13 are disturbed by movements – aperiodic, unpredictable, possibly but not necessarily violent and, before even the earliest stages of “life,” chemical – that may disrupt various local symmetries. These breaks in symmetry prompt adjustments in adjacent or broader contextual symmetries and initiate an always ongoing process of material-molecular evolution that, for “us,” has reached a moment of morphologically engineered complex brain structures where vast groupings of neuron populations, numbering in the millions of billions (!) and capable of collective and layered concept formations, perform a hyperastronomical (Edelman’s word) number of more or less coordinated transactions, all without needing a single or final controlling entity (i.e., no hegemonikon, no transcendent hierarchy of homunculi) and yet capable of “self”- recognition and of sustained self-expression. It is the dependence of this process, at every moment, not only on a maintained “order” but also on repeated, random symmetry disruptions (which altogether become synaptic changes that become, in turn, counter-entropic formations, selective recognition systems, conceptual learning and so on) that causes Edelman to juxtapose memory to symmetry. In this view, embodied minds are paradox-solving engines in perpetual motion guiding the “internal” systems of enclosed integral bodies while also maintaining the latter’s necessary life-sustaining relationships with changing environments. This is to say that mind-body co-evolution makes possible closed systems whose evolutionary success depends on their ability to stay open. Above all, the evolved system of “brains” that is our “brain” performs complicated feats of coordinating the multiple time and space experiences we are capable of having, and must have, to be what we are. Most simply expressed, the limbic system, working on the ranges of settings, tolerances, homeostases, etc. (Edelman: “values”) of the body, has relatively slow time-frames for response and adjustment while the cortical-thalamic systems of the brain, working with

13 Bright Air, 200 9 the sensory and conceptual neuronal populations that connect the body’s systems with each other and the world, operate at micro-second speeds. One might say that one of the mind’s primary “memory” functions is to manage, by means of re-entrant loops in the “circuitry” linking the various brain structures – particularly in the hippocampus, through which adaptive neuronal concept-formations are perpetually driven – all the multiple, interlocking and changeable time-frames in terms of which our brain allows and indeed requires us to operate as self-aware biological and social persons.14 In its morphologically shaped formations, “memory” does not capture and duplicate event objects as “data” but is rather what Edelman calls a neuronal “system property” capable of recognitions in different but interlocking time-frames not of “objects” but of comparable, stochastically variable and in their synergistic relations unpredictable and multi-dimensional mappings-of-objects. These latter are not “stored” but are active in the “remembered present” (to borrow a title phrase from another of his books)15 as transformative, selective, duplexity-testing recognitions, converging in symmetry breaking perceptual-intuitive capacities for refiguring, from moment to moment, world and self in terms of the shifting somatic “values,” environment-seeking needs and conscious intentions of the experienced and social-relationally active self.16 The social-scientific implications of this neuro-biological unmooring of human memory-capacities from “data bank,” “storage,” “retrieval” etc. figurations are enormous. Edelman puts it this way: “. . . the mind is not a mirror of nature. Thought is not the manipulation of abstract symbols whose semantics are justified by unambiguous reference to things in the world. Classical categories do not serve in most cases of conceptual categorization and they do not satisfactorily account for the factual assignment of categories by human beings. There is no unambiguous mapping between the world and our categorization of it. Objectivism fails.”17 It is precisely because the

14 Bright Air, 90-81, 101-110 and passim.

15 G. Edelman, The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness, New York: Basic Books, 1988.

16 Bright Air, 102.

17 Bright Air, 237. 10 subject of the behavioral and social sciences, human consciousness, is by its naturally evolved structures historical, i.e., potentially infinitely selective in its time frames and remembering the world before and during and after its intuitions, that no single “object mapping” in those sciences can ever exhaust any object. To assume a science of human behavior management without a place for a manifold capacity for experience seems procrustean and misguided, destined to fail in all but the most inhuman objectives. Which is not to say that one can not therefore present objects scientifically, experimentally. Memory object mappings, a central preoccupation for historical anthropology, are by their very nature both narrative and experimental. Edelman finds one ground for such a science in Jerome Bruner’s sense that our very consciousness itself is composed of tentative and intertwining narratives in social action, where we narrate both objects as well as ourselves and understand, variably, the narrations of others. In that sense our scientific objects are re-mappable in two directions. They are, on one hand, the search for the primary appearances, qualities and the intertwinings, through different timescapes, of the narratives that both sustain and emerge from human interactions and, on the other, the re-narrations of such apperceptions in also temporally located analytical texts and performances which then in turn, even as objects of “scientific intent,” can reappear as objects of the prior sort; in other words, it is the fate of all secondary sources to become at some point another historian’s primary source.18 Narratives can be more than “just-so-stories” when they reproduce “in consciousness” the recursive, re-entrant processes, and the symmetry-disruptions that are the foundational condition of our mental evolution, of our species-history with memory formations. In that sense they too are “Darwinian” and counteract the transparently Lamarckian tendency of such “ scientific” constructions as strive for continuity and for recognitions that purport to possess singular elegance, harmony, symmetry and that seek to derive their effectiveness from such symmetry. Edelman perceives instead that when it comes to analyzing “relational and symbolic matters” there is no possibility of ever being in a position to claim a master memory narrative,

18 Bright Air, 111-12, 175-76. 11 unless it be very temporary: “The potentially limitless recursive modes of reasoning – induction, analogy and formal logic . . . [–] . . . would not serve to exhaust explanation in historical matters.”19 There can be no finally “unified field” for historical anthropology because its objective is not some complete but unavoidably self-contradictory and therefore finally self-destructive blue-print or algorithm for the human species. That can not be the point or the analytical ethics of a historical social science whose contribution is always to a less pragmatic and more open present, to the evolving intuition-capacities of the human species, to our capacities to read actions and texts and reactions and counter-texts across time, across multiple and contiguously as well as adjacently and sequentially timed experiences, between simultaneous but not always, or necessarily, intertwining micro- and macro-times.20

II

A significant group of historians rejects the idea that history has anything to do with memory; for them memory is, indeed, the enemy of objective, scientific history because of its alleged inaccuracies, emotional attachments, wish-fulfilling and self- deceptive reality denials and other human frailties.21 On the other hand, Holocaust historian James E. Young takes a position in opposition to such a limited “objective” historical-scientific pose whereby one, in effect, engages a subject by demonstrating that one is not engaged with it. It is a point echoing Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life and for Young has a point of departure in Saul Friedländer’s challenge to any such objectivist disengagement as one that authorizes historians to diminish, for example, the historical value of Holocaust survivors’

19 Ibid. 176.

20 Cf. D. Handelman, “Microhistorical Anthropology: Toward a Prospective Perspective” and in D. Kalb and H. Tak, eds., Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn, New York: Berghahn, 2004.

21 Cf. the introduction to my, “On Separating History from Memory etc.” Focaal [ ] 12 recollections of their experiences. Young brings forward a rather different historical project where “once we take into account the eye witnesses’ voices, their apprehension or misapprehension of events, their reflexive interpretations of experience, we understand more deeply why and how the victims responded to unfolding events as they did.”22 If we translate Ranke’s “wie es eigentlich gewesen” not as “how it really was” but rather “how it was, actually,” meaning “what it was actually like,” – a hermeneutic acceptable to anyone familiar with German idiom, e.g. as in “Wie war das eigentlich?”23 – then the remembered experiences, however factually “mistaken,” of those present in particular locations “in the past” become indispensable. For historians to discount, for example, as “inaccurate” and therefore scientifically “worthless” the memories of a woman who was present and saw four chimneys explode when the Auschwitz Sonderkommando rebelled in 1943, because “in fact” the latter blew up only one chimney, is to make a mistake: it is a scientistic denial of the heightened quality of the shock of an experienced and actual break in symmetry, of a breach in the enclosure of a victim’s expectation that such a rebellion could not occur, constituting altogether a quality of a moment of experience that is also a “fact” in the event, one that can not be ignored or declared irrelevant by a discounting of its factual “inaccuracy” in retrospect.24 What Holocaust survivors bring to the table for a historical-anthropological reading of the Holocaust is precisely that “before the fact” dimension that informs remembered experiences, the simultaneous clarity and blindness that beset every moment of their (and anyone’s) “actually” living through specific times and places in, for example, an unprecedented civilizational collapse, witnessing from different proximities moments of dispossession, depopulation and of mass murder at the absolute limits of body disposal, the most thorough (and “functioning,” for twelve years!) criminalization of politics and civil life possible in their time, events that only later, “after the fact,” would

22 J. Young, “Between History and Memory: the Uncanny Voices of Historian and Survivor” in G. Arad, ed., Passing into History: Nazism and the Holocaust Beyond Memory, special issue of History and Memory, 9:1/2 (1997), 51.

23 How was that, actually?

24 Young, “Between”, 54-5. 13 be known in their entirety, and be arguably diminished, by language about “the Holocaust.” What the memories of survivors do for historical anthropology is to permit the historical analyst to gain precisely those symmetry breaks with the official, “scientifically” corralled narrative. They are memory’s symmetry breaks that are the means to, in Friedländer’s words, “disrupt[ing] the facile linear progression of the narration. . .[and to]. . . withstand the need for closure.”25 One can only admire, for example, precisely such a historical anthropology in Christopher Browning’s work, particularly in his use of personal narratives by both perpetrators and survivors.26 What he does is valuable in its implicit resistance to those who continue to try to place the Holocaust beyond explanation, outside of history – and therefore reducible to iconic representations of the symmetrical metaphysics of good and evil, respectively refigured in the persons of victims and perpetrators. Without being the first attempt to do so, Browning’s narrative disruption of this dualistic reduction is less forced and more phenomenological, it looks at what is there and what is there breaks down each side of the dualism by means of accounts of remembered experiences, accounts of what it was actually like, into yet further complexions and contradictions. We learn from stories that reveal, even “explain,” how, for example, Jewish prisoners at Starachowice, still living in the familial-communal histories, differences, and conflicts of their “ordinary,” pre-camp existence entered the deadly labor environment of the camp where the prior power relationships within the Jewish population changed and acquired new political and economic dimensions but where also bridges had to be built to the “perpetrator” population who, in the eyes of at least some of the victims, acquired perceptibly differentiated qualities as different types of “business” partners for effective, if often grisly transactions. The similarly nuanced and enlightening stories Browning draws from testimonies by death squad, Einsatzgruppen, shooters reveal worlds of motivation

25 Cited in Young, “Between History”, 51.

26 C. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000; especially chapters four and six. 14 and “reasoning” that also serve to disrupt excessively simple, symmetry-serving and reader-manipulating “identity” formulas about “willing executioners” and the like. It may, again, be argued that such remembered stories remain unverifiable and are therefore not “reliable” evidence sufficient for scientific histories. Browning, however, offers an interesting postscript that disrupts even that exclusionary scientistic pretext. He tells us that in the German Federal Republic’s war crimes trials of the 1960s “the very density” of the narrative evidence from the Starachowice survivors prevented, with one or two exceptions, criminal convictions: “for every specific crime investigated, there were conflicting memories about the individual perpetrators from which each defense counsel could successfully plead reasonable doubt.”27 Although this writer is not a particular fan of irony, I note at this point with some glee that under a judicial- objective standard of admissible narrative evidence requiring a proven singular narrative (something that social “scientific” and objectivist fundamentalists also claim to strive for) the perpetrators of the Holocaust would all but disappear! Arguably, by scientific standards, there were no perpetrators. The irony is compounded when we add that not only do we know this latter circumstance not to be “true” historically, objectively, but that we can recognize it as an “after the fact,” tendentious and criminally collaborative negation – and not a disruption – of an undisputable and primary foundational symmetry between actual perpetrators and victims. In this instance, the survivors’ memories disrupt what amounts to an effectually ritualized repression of historical memory by a legal apparatus whose prosecutorial-narrative powers are demonstrably inadequate to the demands that a higher level of now increasingly recurrent civilizational crimes places on the dispensation of justice. In other words, the “scientific” separation of history from memory shares the failure of objectivism detected by Edelman in the construction of mind and memory in that it straight-jackets the very power of an interactive and mutual narrative symmetry- disruption whose experimental deployment is the principal donation any science can make to human intelligence. This allows us to consider that “historical anthropology,” as the examples in the essays collected in this book develop it, is not some kind of

27 Browning, Nazi Policy, 114-15 15 amalgam of anthropology and history into a “new” academic field; rather it is a conceptualizing attitude where a narrative-critical reading of texts, of both primary and secondary “sources” in their narrative and contextual intermingling, moves to the foreground of what remains at all times still recognizable as primarily historical or anthropological analysis. As will be evident in the essays that follow, I am writing, for example, from an academic historian’s perspective, one who was, however, fortunate to receive some good formal and informal instruction in anthropology (by May Diaz and Jack Potter at Berkeley, Eric Wolf and Bill Roseberry and several others later) but with no specifically anthropological research seminar or fieldwork training.28 If there is a “method” being proposed here it is one that is not syncretic in any sense nor, conversely, freely eclectic but one that focuses rather on bringing to bear a quality of reading both scientific-analytical as well as “primary” narratives in a way that challenges both sciences’ constructs in areas where they touch and overlap and carry out different narrative object-mappings of ostensibly the “same” analytical objects – such as, say, peasant economies, trade networks, class formations, state-building, colonial exploitations, genocides, “cultures., or, as we will explore in a moment, the murder of Captain Cook. Both anthropologists and historians encounter primary source texts – archived-

28 To twist a Geertzianism, I studied “out from” and not only “in” a village. In the late sixties and early seventies and again in the nineties I lived in Austrian workers’ settlements(Wagram and Traun near Linz) and in the eighties I lived from one summer through to the next in the Auszughaus (dating from the sixteenth century) of a farm near Grammastetten, a village cluster in the Mühlviertel foothills above Linz. Especially during the latter time, I attended my share of car- blessings, danced with the witches, sang at pearcider pressings and fund-raisers for the Greens’“Linzer Luft” initiatives, had tense late-night colloquies with “peasant heritage” associations of dubious political affiliation, stalked fungi during mushroom season, ate the Martini goose, stood look-out for illegal slivovitz distilling and participated in other kinds of “local knowledge.” My historical studies themselves were formally framed by five-days-a-week rural Postbus rides(pre-dawn and post-sunset, crowded in with ribald and garlicky old women, cheeky school kids and dozing workers) taking me down and up the mountain, to and from various archive reading rooms in the city. 16 in-the living or still alive in archives – whose multiform and ostensibly polysemic “facts” they may celebrate, in most cases naively, as “thick description” but whose actual intermingling of “factual” with narrative and figural dimensions and complexities they leave in most cases if not untouched then inadequately disclosed or illuminated. It is for this reason that on occasion one finds, for example, satisfying works that come close to what may be termed “historical anthropology” written by investigators who are neither historians nor anthropologists but who understand by their scientific training in, say, American literature, the qualities of historical “fact-object” mappings and of the latter’s narrative re-figurations as they interact in experiences and memories across time.29 This is to say that historical anthropology’s scientific intent can not abandon the search for and evaluation of historical “facts” as they occur in variously linked memory texts. The source of the undisputed primacy of “facts” is that they can authorize, qualify, disallow and shape narratives; i.e., they can permit, change, redirect, forestall, suggest, confirm, repress and do a great many other things to and with narrative moves. To get at narratives that facts may be capable of releasing both anthropologists and historians need to develop some skill with and capacity for discrimination, and this only re- emphasizes what Hayden White and others have been saying, among the kinds of narrative-critical concepts available in the studies of “literature.” Most significant is that historical anthropology’s fact-objects (and their contingent productions and readings) include figural and ideational objects moving between intensional as well as extensional memory spaces. Of course it is understood that even such fact-objects, before they can be the stuff of experimental narrative linkages (or, conversely, of narrative disarticulations), must remain subject to the critical standards of “falsifiability” operating in any science. Such a standard requires, as a fundamental criterion of object-mapping, that the latter must offer in its construction an opportunity for contradiction, for being tested against other mappings that disagree. “Falsifiability” serves, if anything, as an indispensable symmetry-breaking device in itself, one that need not take us back into a fixation on“objective reality,” given that the

29 Cf. For example, S. Weisenburger, Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South, New York: Hill and Wang, 1998. 17 “fact” in question may well be the appropriateness or other qualities of the assignment of a narrative figure to yet other (arguably agreed-upon-in-principle) facts – as in the case of the Auschwitz survivor whose narrative’s “objectively falsified” factualilty yet authorized a narrative insight into the actual experience of the Sonderkommando uprising that gives the latter a possibly new historical-factual weight independent of how many smokestacks were actually brought down. The exploration of such a memory experiment, even in the face of an objectivist resistance that nevertheless insists that the Sonderkommando action remains in a historical narrative enclosure as a “failure,” survives in a narrative-critical scientific frame to constitute yet a further conceptual- narrative development of the “Holocaust map” in a broader sense and moves a valuation of that uprising into a historical-experiential area other than mere “failure.” An at least equally serious issue for a narrative-critical social science concerns the qualities and paradigms of conceptual languages available for such investigations. If we return to Edelman for one last look we note that he can still help us in this regard even though, as we noted above, he denies that we can ever give a sufficient account of “the potentially limitless use of recursive modes of reasoning” that he identifies as “induction, analogy and formal logic.”30 We find him, in effect, retaining still a nostalgia for closure that unfairly limits our capacity for mental operations. He nevertheless opens a creative direction for further work when he assumes a rhetorician’s stance and points specifically to our capacities for duplexitous concept formations that are then the main condition for Objectivity’s failure: “Metaphor is the referral of the properties of one thing to those of another in a different domain. Metonymy allows a part or an aspect of a thing to stand for the whole thing. Both are incompatible with the objectivist view.” Leaving aside his finally limited grammarian’s perception of these in every respect rhetorical figures and his consequently limited understanding of their implications,31 we

30 Bright Air, 176; see note 14 above.

31 Bright Air, 237; it is surprising that Edelman accepts metaphor and metonymy (247-49) in the excessively spatializing direction put forward by Lakoff, whose “cognitive” grammar has, predictably, no account for the transformative temporal-narrative and rhetorical dimensions of experience that Edelman himself made central to the investigation of Mind. 18 can nevertheless imagine from this a narrative-critical historical anthropology that deploys such and other figural-narrative, that is to say narrative-conceptual, formulations of the duplexities of human experiences in order to re-map, critically and continuously, our present memory-objective recognition and action capacities. Simply to think of historical-anthropological projects in such limited, albeit classically determined, categorical objectifications as Aristotelean tragedy or other such “emplotments,” or as “root metaphors” yielding “world hypotheses,” (Pepper) or as a specifiable number of “types of ambiguity,” (Empson) – all of which are categories one ignores at one’s peril, to be sure – is not what is meant here. Nor is the organization of this book around three “types” of narrative about figures of times past – myths, fairy tales and histories – meant to initiate yet one more or alternative paradigm of memory narrative constructions. One can easily think of other “types” of narratives that could be added because they too can contribute to historical-anthropological awareness with unique figural capacities: e.g., memoirs and autobiographies, epic songs, slave narratives, films, pardoners’ tales,32 etc. Instead, the essays brought together here are, or at least contain, critical as well as synthetic readings of anthropologists’ and historians’ representations of these three conceptual-narrative forms and do so in particular with a view toward not only disturbing the perceived “natural” antagonisms among the three that current scientific views in both disciplines take for granted but toward also making more visible and significant these narrative forms’ historically conditioned appearances and conjunctures both in past moments and locations as well as in current understandings. In the remainder of this introductory essay I want first to focus on a particular philosophical view of an Anglo-American (actually and more properly, Anglo-Canadian) historical philosophy as basis for a different approach to historical-anthropological social science, one that moves a narrative, a synthetic a priori, view of historical understanding to the foreground. I will follow up with an exploration, in this light, of some aspects of the often mis-recognized antagonisms among myths, fairy tales and histories perceived as narrative forms to

32 N. Davis, Fiction in the Archives, [ ] is a classic of historical anthropology and proof that this attitude is not new, only unrecognized as such. 19 assess the “critical value” that each of them might bring to a possible social science that incorporates different layerings of memory-narratives into its analytical mappings of both “world-” and “experience”-objects in their mutual interactions. There is on this last point one more clarification to make at the outset. It applies to this book as a whole and is intended to forestall any misunderstanding that the conceptual framework put forward here is “idealist” or “relativist.” It will be recalled that it was in Edelman’s materialist perception of a necessary paradox in the simultaneously open and closed quality of evolved and embodied minds that temporal management powers, the ability to conceptualize, manipulate and coordinate the multiple speeds and temporal layerings and intersections of intensional and extensional experiences, in short memory capacities, were themselves evolved and “essential” to the success of the whole. My focus on three forms of memory-narratives is in this sense not a matter of their being “pure” ideational texts but perceives them rather as texts that try do work toward figuring, i.e., object-mapping, the world in ways with which we can actually engage the latter and intend to make it – above all the social world – possible, bearable, livable, enjoyable, civil and, in short, free and open-ended. As Joseph Margolis, a thoughtful psychologist-critic of Anglo-American cognitivism concludes after his rejection of that “bifurcation thesis” that has long divided the natural from the human sciences: “. . . it is the demonstrated weaknesses of the principal theories of cognitive psychology that have driven us to conclude that the human sciences – psychology and the social and cultural disciplines – may well be significantly different from the physical sciences.” Against such a misguided and undertheorized dualism, which he finds recognizable not only in Chomsky but in Dilthey and which is often imputed, as we will explore in a moment, to Collingwood, Margolis proposes, in language compatible with Edelman’s critique of objectivism, “the thesis that the emerging forms of human consciousness are ineliminably praxical [emphasis in original], that is, causally grounded in and reflecting the historically changing and evolving activities of socially organized labor. . .[and that] . . . it is reasonably clear both that social praxis need not take an exclusively Marxist form and that it is itself a

20 decidedly problematic concept.”33 While I have learned to be suspicious of the term “praxis” as an attempt to say something difficult without doing any work and can not, moreover, find stimulation in Margolis’ choice of alternatives to Marx (Heidegger and Dewey!), he nevertheless has a point in his recognition that the labors of minds take place in relation to other labors of all kinds in specific historical times and places. Producing and perpetually reworking the “narration” complexes by which our “closed” and boundaried selves manageto remain, simultaneously, open enough to connect with the world is itself in fact doing work; just so the singers and actors-out of myths, the village story tellers and the historians, scurrying in the dark of the memory hole, according to Peter Novick’s wonderful metaphor,34 are all laboring in specific “world system” locations where any and all kinds of work are historically and socially and textually organized – often to produce and sustain and, indeed, exacerbate disproportionate symmetries of economic and “power”- relational, that is to say of class, relationships that, at their most extreme, continue to require in their very operations the destruction of very large numbers of people. It was a concern with this latter problematic that brought me to and kept me involved with a narrative perception of historical anthropology in the first place.35 To sustain my own sense of this “decidedly problematic concept” of the materialist recognition of ideational work (and doing so without Margolis’ still too limited perception of minds’ “causal” grounding in or “reflection” of material conditions) I have preferred to stay if not with “Marxism” then with a particular post-Marxist approach. Among the numerous narrative experiments (by Althusser and Balibar,

33 J. Margolis, Philosophy of Psychology, Englewood cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1984, 89-90.

34 P. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, New York: Harper, 1999, 1.

35 H. Rebel, Peasant Classes: The Bureaucratization of Property and Family Relations under Early Habsburg Absolutism, 1511-1636, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983; idem, “Dark Events and Lynching Scenes: A Dispossession Narrative about Austria’s Descent into Holocaust” in J. Scott and N. Bhatt, eds., Agrarian Studies, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. 21 Poulantzas, Thompson, Williams, Elster, Godelier, Wallerstein and many others) that have contributed to this latter direction, I have found, in company with a number of other researchers in history and anthropology,36 Eric R. Wolf’s open-ended conceptualizations of temporally and spatially permutable “articulations” (not successive “transitions”) among historically and conceptually refigured modes of production especially attractive and useful as a foundational perspective for historical anthropology. I explore aspects of Wolf’s conceptual framework, especially in chapters two and four below, and only wish to make clear here that in his move beyond an idealist-materialist divide Wolf has found a synthetic position that is worth guarding critically and exploring further. Specifically, his recognition throughout is that the objectivist-structuralist tendency to turn names into things by which we “create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls” is inadequate and he offers instead a conception of modes of production as they intertwine, dis- and re-articulate in analytically traceable historical formations. What makes his approach to these latter convincing is that he perceives them not as so-called “concrete” reality – that ugly and overused adjective that also does no work and identifies “reality,” in neo-Stoic simplemindedness, only with hardness and pain – but rather as “constructs with which to envisage certain strategic relationships that shape the terms under which human lives are conducted.”37 From this perspective “classes” and “modes of production” are not simply labels for aggregates of people in variously organized material environments but rather conceptualizations of a narrative-critical sort and in that sense they are scientific formations that permit us to intuit with greater respect and understanding the complexity and qualities of experience under which people, both past and present (and including “us analysts” as well) live and work. They are conceptualizations that do not intend to encompass and exhaust the world by means of a controlling algorithm and its instrumental apparatus but seek

36 J. Schneider and R. Rapp, eds., Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the Influence of Eric R. Wolf, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

37 E. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, 6, 100. 22 rather to enlarge the scope of our capacities to live in and experience the world and to disrupt the narratives sustaining the mandates of competition among the pathologically greedy and power hungry and their ceaseless interferences with life’s enjoyment by those not thus cursed.

III

It is of considerable interest that there has been a long-standing development along the lines of a narrative-critical science, by now in its third or fourth generation, in the history of the philosophy of history, one that has, however, had little impact on thinking outside the historical profession nor, indeed, on how even the majority of professional historians have learned to think about their works as figuring a “scientific” position for a historical social science. Peter Novick, for example, portrays R.G. Collingwood and Wm. Dray, two recognized practitioners of this direction we are about to explore, as champions on that side in the just mentioned “bifurcation” view of the sciences that seeks merely history’s autonomy from the “hard” natural sciences. This latter he identifies in particular with Dray’s attack on Hempel’s attempt to require of historians a “covering law” model of scientific understanding. However, the quality of Novick’s own understanding of “objectivity” remains conventional, if not downright naive, and serves him merely as a set-up for seeing the Collingwood/Dray approach as drifting in a “relativizing” direction, and as such it drops from his view.38

38 P. Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.[page] Collingwood appeared as a mere “presentist,” in L. Gottschalk’s, Understanding History, New York: Knopf, 1950, 272-3. He was still viewed somewhat positively as an advocate of doing more than standing “outside” of objectified historical “reality,” in J. Higham, et. al. History, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965, 142-44. By the 1970s we find that neither Collingwood nor Dray appear in any of the articles collected in F. Gilbert and S. Graubard’s Historical Studies Today, New York: Norton 1972; and in The New Cultural History, ed. by L. Hunt, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, Collingwood is ignored by the historians in the group and finds brief mention only in anthropologist A. 23 What is of greater interest is that when we look into what was going on in the mind of the archeologist and Oxford metaphysician R. G. Collingwood at the time he was developing his particular historical-philosophical modernization we discover there a more focused rejection of objectivist realism and its perceptible links with what was then, to Collingwood’s mind, English fascist politics. He concluded his 1939 autobiography by pointing to The events of 1938. . . : aggression by a Fascist state, rendered successful by support from the British government under cover of a war- scare engineered by that government itself among the British people . . . [and] . . . officially launched by the simultaneous issue of gas masks and of the prime minister’s emotional broadcast, two days before his flight to Munich, and the carefully staged hysterical scene in parliament on the following night . . .I am not writing an account of recent political events in England: I am writing a description of the way in which those events impinged on myself and broke up my pose of a detached professional thinker. I now know that the minute philosophers of my youth [Thomas Case, John Cook Williams, H.A. Prichard, H.W.B. Joseph, et. al.], for all their profession of a purely scientific detachment from practical affairs, were the propagandists of the coming Fascism.39 What makes Collingwood’s perceived linkage between objectivist realism and “the coming Fascism” a resonance across time that can itself be understood as a historical- anthropological recognition is the present circumstance of doing social scientific work in the midst of an unending “war on terror” that is driven politically by scientifically ascertained, purportedly objective and mass-mobilizing “thick concepts” – see the concluding essay in this collection – that may be identified and refined for political application by philosophers and social scientists who yet need take no ethical responsibility for how these “concepts” are deployed as long as they, humbly objective scientific academics that they profess to be, remain within their assured realms of “virtue” or of the “virtues of truth .”40

Biersack’s “Local Knowledge, Local History: Geertz and Beyond.”

39 R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939, 164-67; on the “minute philosophers” see the Autobiography’s chap.4.

40 P. Moser and J. Trout, eds., Contemporary Materialism, New York: Routledge, 1995, especially part four; B. Williams, 24 Collingwood perceived what he described as a “vulgar error” in the realists’ sense that the objects and entities of the world were universals whose natures different philosophers simply addressed differently, perhaps more or less “correctly.”41 We can recognize that latter as a circular position that, amazingly, has not left us. Contemporary philosophers continue to insist on “an ‘absolute conception’ [emphasis added] of the world, involving a representation of the world that is maximally independent of the peculiarities of our perspective. The absolute conception of the world signifies the world as it is independently of human experience.”42 Kant would have had a good laugh at that circularity because such language leaves one, literally, speechless about human experience. In this view the impossible purpose of the social sciences is to have perspectives on things such that we can know them as they are without any perspectives, something not even achieved by our capacity to split atoms. It is the same position that searches for a “blueprint” of the human animal without attributing to that animal a memory capacity ceaselessly at work inside the human condition itself. In the next section I will explore some implications of the “behavioral anthropology” version of this self-annihilating circularity, especially its “thick concept” reduction of myth and its “ship and shore” dualism between “natives” and “us” whereby only intro- and projective encounters can occur between what are in effect separate and essentially closed cultural species with no capacities for mutual transformation nor with conceivable moral responsibilities toward each other. Collingwood rebelled against such a gross enclosure of historical world-objects by positing an in effect dialectical historical science43 that examines what continuous and

Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

41 Autobiography, 60-61

42 Moser and Trout, “General Introduction” to their Contemporary Materialism, 28; their reference is to B. Williams’ “The Scientific and the Ethical” in the same volume. I discuss this in the last chapter below.

0 This position is developed in L. Mink’s informative and indispensable Mind, History and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1969. 25 discontinuous “indispensable survivals” constitute the physical as well as institutional, ideational, moral etc. objects of any “present” world and what processes connect and disconnect them. (A position that prefigures by analogue Edelman’s description of memory processes). He posits a scientific task whereby, out of all the infinite world relationships and phenomena there are, one selects (cf. Mink: “selective attention,” 98; also an Edelman analogue) what one wants to know, formulates appropriate experimental questions and their answers in narratives about what the questions were about and what any possible answers can do both for and beyond those question- constructions.44 Collingwood not only opposed the kind of propositional “if. . . then” logic on which the dominant science paradigm was predicated (as in Hempel’s attempt to modernize history as a science) but his experiences in academic colloquies also taught him that such propositional methods, aiming to create universal constructs as the fundamental stuff of the historical world, repress the implicit questions, the options for narrative re-formulations residing in question complexes as these can be perceived to have arrived historically, through different formulations, figurations and agencies, for a “present” interrogation.45 The “if” in Hempel’s formula has in all cases a history, if only it is the history of its moments of utterance. It was his teaching experience in “testing epistemological theories”46 that gave Collingwood a sense that historians must “rethink” what people thought they were trying to do when they were doing what they did “in history.” This has been developed by others in ways I will explore in a moment as an “empathy” position and that word, when itself re-narratized, can indeed have a scientific edge. Collingwood never actually used “empathy” and he certainly did not pursue the kind of vulgar and pathetic show of “concern” for “the other” that we have come to expect as when, for example, a rich president of a very rich country, standing atop the stairs leading into Air Force One and just before turning to the comforts and menu options awaiting him inside, can still wave

44 Autobiography, 32-3, 39.

45 Autobiography, 54-5.

46 Autobiography, 28. 26 and tell the world’s poor “I feel your pain.” Rather, given that there are no scientific objects that have no histories, the task of “getting inside other people’s heads” becomes “an attempt to discover what the people of that time believe about the world’s general nature . . . [and] . . . to discover the corresponding presuppositions of other peoples and other times and to follow the historical process by which one set of presumptions has turned into another.” Historians’ scientific objects are, for Collingwood, the belief systems in action of historical people perceived in variably discerned contexts, in all their material and ideal and dialectically intertwined and experienced “realities.”47 Putting it another way, one might say that by following a Collingwoodian take on “science” as the narrative mapping of “scientific objects” by historical peoples as well as by “us,” all modern sciences become themselves narrated conceptual constructs producing questions and solutions with experimentally identified and mapped historical “objects.” Collingwood assigned one particular task (not the only one, to be sure) to historians and that is to develop what are in effect experimental-narrative reconstructions of historical peoples’ world understanding perceivable in their integrations of multiple “rationalities” (a task Max Weber may also be said to have pioneered), in their sense of relationships between past and present and in their synthetic realizations in actions and performances in identifiable, locatable “events.” This is also, evidently, shared ground between histories and anthropologies. For the historical social sciences generally, this signifies that all expressions, all figurations, of thought and of rationales-in-action, of what both “past” and “present” people think and say about what they are doing and actually do, about what was done and thought, all these narratives are — even though always subject to various kinds of critical “trials” — equally valuable and can be perpetually subject to intro- and projective, transferential and counter-transferential testing and re-reading. For example, in chapter nine below, I attempt to develop such an analysis in terms of exploring various narrative framings surrounding the “events” that make up an obscure case of infanticide in a small Austrian village in the 1830s seen, in turn, against the social counter-maneuverings of a peasantry

47 Autobiography, 66-68, 83-88. 27 sheltering its assets from the state’s tribute-extracting moves. Even though my larger project had long suggested to me how specific and unavoidably violent constructions of inheritance and disinheritance were accompanied by a domino-effect of often concealed and destructive social adjustments, I was surprised nevertheless by the degree to which the various protagonists’ court testimonies in this particular infanticide case were saturated with both overtly and covertly violent reasonings couched in varied narrative and figural constructions. These obscure “private-life” and often metonymic narratives were apposite to the “contextual” reframings and changing constructions that were the legal, institutional and economic dimensions of my main scientific object which has been, for the past three decades,48 a specific history of inheritance and disinheritance in the Austrian state as it was repetitiously acted out in concealed, deniable and yet on occasion fully visible violences. The very obscurity of these narrative and figural data is what makes them valuable as they reveal openings for gaining access to those past rationalities that are, for the Collingwoodian research program of testing epistemologies, not only about past (and present) “thinkers” but about the thoughts and actions of everyone else who was “there.”49 Need it be said that such testing is only in part (and never in terms of “false consciousness”) about the right- and wrongness of historical persons’ thoughts-in-action but is more about the manifold qualities and accounts of historically figured experiences that allow us continually to re-open and break apart such destructive and misrecognizing narrative closures as we find at work both in ostensibly significant historical events themselves and in their subsequent

48 H. Rebel, “Peasant Stem Families in Early Modern Austria: Life Plans, Status Tactics and the Grid of Inheritance” Social Science History, 2:3 (1978), 255-291

49 I am fortunate to have in close proximity to my field of study another historian of (German) rural history who, albeit focused on questions different from mine, has produced a model study in historical anthropology revealing how many such “small narratives” by and about relatively obscure historical persons can yet mesh with the larger “event” narratives to produce a radically altered perception of the historical experiences that characterized early modern German society. David Sabean, Power in the Blood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. 28 historical and memorial renderings. Collingwood, in other words, retained for a narrative-critical historical social science the symmetry-breaking mandate of memory work that Edelman and others have identified as central to the evolution of mind and as requisite for species survival itself. There remains, at the same time, a problem with Collingwood’s rejection of propositional logic as one foundation for a historical social science and, by extension, with Dray’s rejection of Hempel’s requirement of a science of covering laws founded on provable causal or “determining” conditions. In a position that is not particularly an advance over Dilthey, Collingwood and Dray, their own several differences aside, still leave historical science in its own separate box, as simply a “different kind of science.” Their approach is a corrective, no doubt, in that it shifts the analytical focus toward “interiority,” toward the intensional side of experience; that is, toward participants’ experiences of actions and events that have been historically identified as the, in many ways, “out of control” interplays of “free” markets, power political moves, culturalized adjustments, the manifestations of structured poverty and other such conjunctures – a complete comprehension of which latter no-one living either in or after the fact could possibly possess but can only “experience” in their respective locations in time and with their respective synthetic mental preparations at the moment of experience. It is the experimental re-knowing and rethinking of such intertwining experiences that at all times remains historians’ unique scientific province – and burden – and it is above all historians’ narrative grasp on such conjunctures that becomes the basis of an experimental comparative science in which the “reality narratives” arising from and imputed to historical persons’ experiences acquire resonances within the conceptual and linguistic formations historians can bring to them. As Patrick Gardner, in a critical appreciation of Collingwood’s break-out, puts it: “. . . it has been suggested . . . that a closer examination of what is referred to as ‘the historian’s judgment in the particular case’ is required – though how exactly such judgment be exercised in the absence of any reference to general laws or uniformities has not always been made as clear as might be

29 wished.”50 He is right, and this is to say that historians must perforce approach the experiences of historical persons with their own synthetic sense of what was there to be experienced in historical actions and events by more or less reflexive or at least observant participants and bystanders and, indeed, by those whom we know to have been “present” as subaltern and ordinary people allegedly ignoring what is going on beyond their immediate horizons, finding only enough time to concentrate on endless daily necessities and tasks – and to do that they had, recursively, to address what was going on at several levels of posssible experience. What conceptual tools can we discover them using to comprehend and “succeed” in their limited and power-saturated “lifeworlds.” When this experiential dimension of historical understanding moves to the foreground, the after-the-fact objects of experience themselves become perpetually open questions as the facticity of such objects continually changes its shape, as well as its contextual placement and resonance in relation to shifting perceptions and rationalities in its own and subsequent times. And it needs to be said again that an appreciation of such manifold percepts and locations is not to reach for a position of ethical relativism but merely for an understanding of the complexity of “how it actually was.” As in Leibniz’ time, the dead end of the “pure” scientific position in the social sciences is in any need to formulate closed scientific objects fitting into closed law-giving syllogisms whose most significant characteristic is their (whenever possible, quantifiable) testability. For historians and anthropologists of all kinds it is both the “events” being experienced and historical persons’ qualities of experience that are perpetually in danger of such closures, of becoming the “out there” that realists require to anchor their sense of science. “Objective conditions” or “religious belief systems” or “market corrections” or “globalization,” etc. may then be held up in contrast to historical subjects’ necessarily limited capacities for experience according to either their “false consciousness” or “thick concepts” or “irrational exuberance,” etc. By implication, historians’ “empathy” objectives, while not entirely ruled out of the game, become in this

50 P. Gardiner,”Historical Understanding and the Empiricist Tradition” in B. Williams and A. Montefiore, eds., British Analytical Philosophy, New York: The Humanities Press, 1966, 282- 83. 30 light merely an interesting sideshow to what goes on in the social scientific center ring where we find corporatively funded behavioral science and social engineering schools producing earnest constructions of objective, provable linkages among social- psychological realities and events and the, possibly programmable, “popular” responses to authoritative representations of such historically present contingencies. But leaving aside this disregard for history by social-engineering sciences limited by their need for closed scientific objects, Gardiner’s point about historians yet still having to operate with “general laws or uniformities” remains common sense and deserves an answer, more especially so since it presents, in fact, an opportunity for a democracy-restoring rapprochement between the “empathy” and “covering law” parties. The most direct thing to do perhaps is to construct an example of a plausible Hempelian proposition and, for experimental purposes, treat it as a “covering law” in historical anthropology before then also having to go on to thinking about this “law’s” implications for a social science that, because its scientific objects are human beings, has to worry about an ethics of social and civil relations, a science that understands that one of its several tasks is to point at and offer strategies for the disruption of humanly unlivable, unacceptable, but nevertheless social-scientifically guarded, legal-political formulations and formations.51 In what is obviously its most serious limitation, Hempel’s rule lacks such a sense of an ethical duty but that does not invalidate its underlying value. It is simply intended to produce social scientific statements that would be the equivalent of the physicist’s “If friction, then heat.”52 A synopsis of his “covering

51 Collingwood records, in The Idea of History, 146-47, the human sciences’ turn away from ethics at the very moment in 1893 when T.H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics pointed to this second duty of science, the duty to help us not remain merely intelligent brutes. It is this turning away that, later, accounts for the inadequacy of what is for Collingwood, Dilthey’s naturalistically psychologized history project that reduces us to study experiences ascribable to “personality types” instead of to historical subjects bringing various qualities of intelligence to bear on what they perceive to be confronting them, 172-3.

52 C. Hempel and P. Oppenheim, “Studies in the Logic of Explanation” in B. Brody, ed., Readings in the Philosophy of Science, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970, 14. The 31 law” argument can thus read: whenever there is an event of kind C then there is an event of kind E; the occurring event X is an event of kind C; therefore , there is an occurring event of kind E.53 Arguably, it is in the quality of the construction of historical questions for a Hempelian answer that we recover the ethical dimension. If we were to turn such historical-scientific questioning toward an ethical puzzle of our time that interests this writer in particular, viz., those interrelated rounds of genocidal perpetrations that we find throughout the histories of North Atlantic and continental European nations’ relations with select domestic and “external” colonized populations, especially from the Victorian period forward, we might propose, if only for experimental testing, an appropriate historical-anthropological covering law that asserts the following: when acts of primary accumulation, then genocide. Violent expropriations and resettlements for real estate development are acts of primary accumulation; they must then be genocides. However, even supposing this were to test out as a valid historical “covering law,” what could we do with it? Were we serious about ending or even preventing genocides we would be required, from an ethical obligation, to legislate against and oppose such acts of primary accumulation, while yet all the while recognizing that we already have such legislation in most civil codes guaranteeing to defend human rights and freedoms from more or less violent expropriatory molestations. And all the while recognizing, also, that those codes are under constant and very successful pressures, coming from a range of municipal, state and national authorities and extending all the way to the World Trade Organization and other entities of the so-called international community, to create populations to whom such civil and human rights do not apply, populations who,

actual text: “[A]ll that a causal law asserts is that any event of a specified kind, i.e., any event having specified characteristics, is accompanied by another event which in turn has certain specified characteristics; for example, that in any event involving friction, heat is developed.”

53 I have borrowed this from J. Gorman’s penetrating discussion of Hempel’s analytic in Understanding History: An Introduction to Analytical Philosophy of History, Ottawa: The University of Ottawa Press, 1992, 50. 32 for the most specious of reasonings backing up acts of legal-military violence, may be expropriated, their savings eroded, their titles and use rights annulled, who may individually and collectively be selected for removal, transportation – or “marching” – to “collection centers,” “refugee” camps, ending often in extermination zones where state- organized or funded armed forces in cooperation with privateering death squads are put into action for human destruction freed from all constraints. We are driven to the recognition that genocidal primary accumulations are not negations of law but are fully accommodated within law. We are reduced to observing all these things both in historical “documentaries” or in daily news to the point of numb recognition, with no bridge to any sort of reasonable, effective, even relevant response, let alone resistance. A scientific-historical, Hempelian recognition of the “causes” of such genocidal acts makes not one iota of difference in our abilities or willingness to do anything about them. If anything, it sets up a social ethics by which we are required to find genocide as regrettable but as necessary and acceptable to “economic development.” This is to recognize that an enormous gathering in historical texts of overlapping, decades-long and daily genocidal events is in fact forcing on us a regression to living merely as intelligent brutes. Hempel’s narrow propositional reduction of historical science can tell us nothing new or worthwhile about such causalities. Historians have long been intuitively following Hempel’s program long before he made up his formalist version of their practice and they have long ago learned that while “causality” may be one indispensable narrative strand it is never a sufficient discourse for historical explanation nor for historically sensible action. In other words, Hempel’s version of a historical science is not only no alternative to what historians have long been doing anyway but it is too limited to satisfy the requirement of the full spectrum of our social scientific obligations which include putting forward scientific constructions that enlarge and deepen our rational capacities for an ethical civil life. If there is a difference between physics, say, and historical anthropology as sciences then it is not in their different investigative logics as such – the bicameralism distinction – but in their political-nomothetic power, in the difficult conversion of their “law-like” discoveries into “legislation,” into technologies for human action. Which is not to say that there have not been, mostly pathetic if not outright tragic, social- 33 scientific engineering experimentations in all nations that claim some form of historical “modernity.” However, while physics may, for example, move relatively naturally in response to flight-management or defense necessities from an understanding of electromagnetic impulses to “legislating” radar, there has been, contrary to post- Holocaust “never again” protestations and some darkly theatrical and, given the scale of crime, pathetic “tribunals” aside, no comparable movement from historical-scientific understanding toward an effective legal interdiction of genocides. This has not been because we have not, especially since the Holocaust, studied genocidal events in historical-scientific frameworks and have no arsenal of answers for questions about what “causes” such “events” both in general and in specific instances; it is rather because we have not narrated the Holocaust adequately as a scientific object that we can call “genocide” when we have not sufficiently understood the latter’s scope nor what it is capable of, what it can do for people instead of only what it does to people – in short, what it is that is actually called into being and what is being negotiated in the “international community” when specific, historically located genocides become domestic- and global-financial necessities or, for that matter, mere advantages for elections or investment decisions in capitals far distant from the designated, by international agreement boundaried genocidal killing zones. This is to say we have not sufficiently appreciated the scientific object, genocide, and what its historical as well as present “necessary” and “rational” qualities are, nor how alternative narratives-in-action are able to absorb genocides both in “their” and “our” times’ scientific and political constructions of the distribution of civilizational costs and benefits.54

54 It is in such a context that purported historical science is easily drawn into compromised and trivializing casuistries by which, for example, the “Indian Removal Act” of 1830, authorizing the violent and murderous herding by the state and its military of native American populations out of all lands east of the Mississippi, may be scientifically represented as “a necessary function of life in the wilderness” and in fact as even preventing direct-action genocide by citizens and settlers, which latter is presumably worse because it is not covered by the state’s legal immunities. The historical-narrative option that such direct-action genocides might have been suppressed by state agencies and that a modus vivendi might have been negotiated with 34 One might even say that we have not sufficiently explored the narrative capacity of Hempel’s “if . . . then . . .” form as would be required for scientific historical work that is itself adequate to exposing those dimensions of genocidal events, or for that matter of any historical events, that are either still simply hidden or, in one way or another, misrecognized and repressed. For example, even though aspects of expropriatory and violent real estate development may be found in both survivors’ and scientific historians’ accounts of the Holocaust, such dimensions and their role in the broader criminal- and business-political rationalities active in this and analogous events has not been – with some rare exceptions that are widely ignored by the professional-scientific community of historians – 55 a central problem or assigned causal weight in purportedly scientific historical narratives. If anything, the often questionable massagings of evidence and the accompanying argumentative contortions that occupy center stage in the scientific “conversation” on the Nazi period, dominated since the 1980s by generations of scholastic realists, do their best to repress, trivialize or challenge with specious or fraudulent falsifications such narrative options.56 While Hempel’s propositional requirement for a science of history seems reasonable on its face, it runs into trouble “in the laboratory” when the experiment requires filling in the object-blanks with messy conceptual and historical objects whose manifold qualities persist despite all narrowing “objectification” constructions because they remain burdened with multiple memory resonances – “If primary accumulation, then genocide,” for example. That does not however mean that the obstacle posed by this difficulty with Hempel’s criterion is

the cooperation of accomodationists of good will on all sides never arises in R. Remini, Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars, New York: Viking 2001. If the option did not exist, then why not? becomes a further “empathic-historical question.

55 C. Simpson, Splendid Blond Beast [ ]

56 In my personal professional memory the absurd and embarrassing witchhunt staged by H.A. Turner, Gerald Feldman and others against D. Abraham’s The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981 stands out as a case in point. Cf. P. Novick, That Noble Dream, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 612-21. 35 insurmountable. Rather, to enhance our abilities to refine objects for historical- anthropological analysis that can be effectually narrated to work for the kind of recognition Hempel (naively) urged us to strive for seems a worthwhile challenge. To continue this argument in terms of the Holocaust’s vast literature would explode the already-stretched framework of an introductory essay to this book and instead I will turn briefly to a specific, interesting and little known historical- philosophical exploration by Jonathan Gorman concerning the American historical experience with slavery,57 an experience whose traumatic place in American self- understanding is, arguably, analogous to the experience of the Holocaust in Jewish and German histories. Writing directly out of the analytical-epistemological turn initiated by Gallie, Walsh and Dray, Gorman takes up that acrimonious and still difficult to overcome disagreement among American historians that began with Conrad’s and Meyer’s first proposal in 1958 and Fogel’s and Engerman’s subsequent elaborations of a so-called cliometric analysis of the North American slave economy before the Civil War. By this latter quantitative-statistical approach, slavery – understood as profitable in an “accountant’s” sense but as less so in a broader opportunity-cost and competitive market sense – appeared as a contextually “rational” choice whose denial only branded as racists those “traditionalist” historians who rejected the cliometric position and thereby, it was alleged, denied black slaves the dignity of their labor in a productive and relatively well-functioning economy.58 Gorman guides us past this dead end of incommensurable economic and ethical arguments and continues along an alternative and synthetic path that began with Kenneth Stampp’s assertion that the argument is about a narrative assumption about slavery’s – not necessarily only black slaves’ – inherent economic inefficiency compounding American slavery’s prior, in effect “analytic,” civil- and ethical-historical unacceptability in a state where civil rights were declared to be inalienable. Without the distraction of possible but questionable accusations of racism, there then remains the cliometric point that the American slave economy’s relative efficiencies and the different markets in which these latter played a

57 Understanding History.

58 Ibid., 8-9 36 role were demonstrably analytic “facts.” They were “cases” (Gorman) that in turn constitute a further departure whose premise is that even an unambiguously positive answer to the question “was slavery profitable?” can still only provide a partial grasp on “slavery” as a scientifically narratable object. In other words, such an answer merely begs further questions about the qualities and conditions of profitability as well as about the qualities of these conditions’ appearances in the conceptual, values-rational, will- formation and action capacities of everyone directly or indirectly involved in the slave economy. One of Gorman’s lessons is that any one particular epistemology, including so- called cliometrics, can never elevate its necessarily limited ability to achieve such analytic and always revisable “truths” as it can achieve in order to stake a claim on having control of any scientific object’s entire ontological narrative, especially as long as this latter, in this case American slavery, remains obviously open-ended, unfinished and still unfolding in the present. Even though slavery “ended” as a formal institution in the Civil War Americans’ historical experience with slavery is far from over. Because they are memory dependent, all historical-anthropological scientific objects necessarily are of this quality. Gorman’s insistence that a historical science can continue to and must indeed be a way to gain “knowledge about reality” helps us recover Hempel’s statement

(if events C12, C , . . .Cn, then event E) as itself an ultimately open-ended and revisable complex of narrative colligations (Cn . . .) that is in fact commensurable with the concept of historical-analytical narrative as Walsh and Dray themselves conceived it. Moreover, and to return to the Collingwoodian problem of empathy, Gorman also explores and deepens the ethical question lurking in cliometricians’ and “traditionalists’” empathic “rethinking” of the slave-owners’ and slaves’ rationales within the Southern slavery world. He notes that the extraordinary acrimony unleashed in the quarrel between the cliometricians and what he calls the traditionalists occurred between clashing analytical perspectives questioning, finally, each other’s (mutually misrecognized!) ethical commitments. However, as the entirety of his Understanding History can be read to show, the two parties’ positions were not as incommensurable as one might think. Time on the Cross is a study, by no means “definitive,” of some of the market and institutional contingencies in which American slavery operated and, as Peter 37 Novick has pointed out, it is this that flew in the face of what was at the time of its publication still a recent breakthrough in the narrative about slavery that had opposed an earlier position ascribing actual Holocaust conditions to the slave experience by positing, instead, a slave population with its own separate economy and in control over “a fully autonomous slave culture.”59 Considering that economies are ecologically interactive and putting aside the obvious political investment in the culturalist absolutism and potential for abuse of the conditional term “fully autonomous,” one has to wonder what the problem was. By mutual implication, the two positions contain aspects of a “truth” without being able to claim it absolutely. No doubt slave owners and slaves reasoned out the economy in which they operated from opposite ends, as it were, from “opposing” perspectives that yet were readings of a spectrum of inter-connected options, contingencies and limitations (both relative and absolute) depending on where one was in the system or, adopting language from Max Weber, what one’s variously perceivable “market position” was in the overlapping and interlocutory moments that were the operations among the various markets that constituted the nineteenth century Southern slave economy. Ascribing separate and autonomous “cultures” to the opposing classes in that economy’s social organization has to be recognized as an untenable narrative closure, an implicitly reactionary modernization of the story about Southern slave society, a formulation that short-circuits and simplifies an appreciation of the qualities of mind and the rationales operating at different levels and in often multiple locations and conjunctures.60 If there is an ethical issue in this that commands our attention then it is, as chapter eleven below seeks to explore further, in the closed or

59 Novick, Noble Dream, 487. Novick’s reading throughout of Fogel and Engerman is worse than uncharitable. It is a gross and tendentious exaggeration to say, for example, that they portray slaves as “Teflon slaves,” “thoroughly embracing a bourgeois work ethic.”

60 This would be my extrapolation from Herbert Simon’s several distinctions between what he calls “optimizing” and “adaptive” behaviors. “Some Strategic Considerations in the Construction of Social Science Models” in P. Lazarsfeld, ed., Mathematical Thinking in the Social Sciences, Free Press, 1954, 388-415 38 open-ended qualities of any narrative modernization in historical analysis and the power formation such “modernization” possibly seeks to install and command. It is wrong for Novick, for example, simply to relegate the cliometricians to the centrifugal forces in the current trajectory of professional-academic historical thinking61 when in fact they can offer experimental analytic models for synthetic understandings of all kinds and in turn teach us much about how to gauge for current scientific-historical narratives the outcomes of various kinds of readings by historical persons (including historians) of these models. Gorman, although he skirts objectivist realism when he suggests that to prevent a narrative from becoming “incontinent” it must have “a complement in reality,”62 he nevertheless helps us reach a new point of understanding about the perceptions of such “reality” by taking apart, through a complex of arguments that are not in every case agreeable to this reader, the relationship between preferences and choices where he finds that choices are “net preferences” caught in webs of actual (and variously perceivable) contingencies forcing constraints on all choices so that particular primary preferences may have to be (or have been) rejected as unreachable before a possibly lesser preference emerges as the historically apparent choice. This is to disagree with Collingwood’s notion63 that only the specific preference that appears to emerge in a chosen action is the one historians need be concerned with. This latter is finally, and paradoxically in the light of his empathy intention, an ascription of a black- box quality to historical persons’ mental processes, one that disallows any consideration of conflicted or alternative or differently synthetized thoughts that may all be differently realized in what appear superficially to be the same or a similar actions. One of the several flaws in the Collingwoodian concept of historical “empathy,” one to which we

61 Noble Dream, 588-9

62 Understanding History, 64-5; I would have gone with Barthes and said “impertinent.” Gorman’s notion of an unchecked “running on” still requires “reality” to do the checking while Barthes’ criterion of “pertinence” is the product of continuously demanding conceptual and discursive competitions, a process which includes debatable reality claims.

63 Collingwood, Idea, 216 39 will return in a moment, is that it restricts itself only, by means of an individualizing closure in the action itself, to the thought in the action, at the expense of repressing individual and collective agents’ internally divided and mutually interactive rationalities which are not only often not acted upon nor are accessible for every individual separately but which we can discern by what rationales are being discussed and are variously available and communicated, for individual judgment. Looking from the perspective of this problem-complex at the question about the profitability of slavery, we can see that once “accounted for” in the Constitution’s civil definitions and realized as a viable and profitable economic and social formation, American slavery became a systemic trap for all its participants, one that would not enable anyone commited to the system to afford the opportunity costs required to transform their social formation into a free labor economy,64 a transformation that a broad spectrum of economic, civil constitutional and ethical reasonings – all available for consideration by the slave holders and, no doubt in perhaps different forms, by the slaves – was pointing to as a preferable alternative whose choice would raise the overall competitiveness of the Southern economy as a whole and solve the moral self- contradiction of having slaves laboring in the midst of a constitutionally liberal civil society. Without the work of the cliometricians, this point of empathic understanding of an unresolvable rational tension at the heart of “thinking slavery” in the United States would not be available for an experimental re-narration of this conjunctural moment in both U.S. history and, indeed, in the global histories of slavery as such. Gorman’s considerable advance of the empathy argument has at least two consequences for theorizing a narrative-critical scientific attitude for historical anthropology. First, by seeking a narrative reconstruction of the slave owners’ terms and qualities of motivating reasonings, he has clarified the cliometricians’ contribution to “empathic” historical narration. While it may well and justifiably be said that once again the slaves are left out, this is not to say that the same practice of empathic understanding, availing itself of, among other evidence, available cliometric understandings of the often desperate (even when “profitable”) alternatives for those

64 Gorman, Understanding History, 85-92 40 literally slaving in the system, could not be turned to a better understanding of the slave experience and its implications for America’s historical trajectory. Gorman’s approach implies a very considerable contribution to the empathy argument in that it releases the latter from accusations of “idealism.” His synthesis leaves room for, and indeed requires, analyses of the surviving economic, social, demographic etc., etc. “data” by the most sophisticated models and methods possible as “our,” always-contestable, structural narrative against which to read the options perceived and exercised by historical persons, experiencing in some form what “our” narratives are able to tell us – or what they may be failing tell us – about “their” contingent world. It would be a mistake to read Gorman’s work as an exoneration of a manifestly and destructively violent and oppressive racial class formation whose damaging unfolding in American historical experience is far from over.65 It is, instead, an expansion of a new narrative analytic that constantly tests and interferes with apparently common sense presumptions and projections about motives and experiences in that or any system. For example, Gorman disrupts, without any intention or effect of necessarily displacing, Kenneth Stampp’s version of the slave system’s brutality by reading the 1845 Narrative by Frederick Douglass against Stampp’s use of the latter’s 1855 My Bondage to get at a more fully empathic understanding of that class of “slave breakers” who existed in the system, by Stampp’s account, to relieve those who were “too squeamish to undertake the rugged [!] task of humbling [!] a refractory bondsman.” Gorman shows, however, that Douglass, in the earlier version of his experience with such a “breaker,” asks us to consider the latter’s historical presence and self-advertisement as such a “breaker” as aspects of an economically profitable form of labor-disciplining, the latter outsourced to a class of tenants competing for labor at even lower levels of profitability than those of the plantation owners.66 The empathy question is begged by Stampp’s state-of-mind ascriptions (“squeamish,” “rugged,” “humbling,” “refractory”) when there is textual-narrative evidence by someone experienced in the dominated sector of the system pointing at alternative rationalities, not covered by

65 Understanding History, 71

66 Understanding History, 66-7, 72-3 41 Stampp’s figural language, being also at work. Moreover, Gorman’s narrative-critical disruption of Stampp’s projectively “empathic” presumptions is particularly apposite, and indeed symmetry-breaking in terms of the argument advanced in this essay, in that it reveals an economic-rational judgment of the slavers’ operative considerations “empathically” active in the slave’s (i.e., Douglass’) intuition. Need one add that Douglass’ economic-rational judgments appear as a clearly synthetic narrative long before any cliometric analysis. In the discussion of Fairy tales in Part Two below, we will take up other analytical options for this kind of empathic understanding across class- cultural divides occurring within historical formations and actions themselves. There follows from this a second consequence of Gorman’s recasting of how to think through the rationalities of historical persons and, for that matter, of their historians as well. By arguing against any conflation of preferences and choices without some form of analytic understanding of what the possible (and possibly conflicting) referents presenting themselves to such choices were, he exposes not only the tensions within and among such preferences and choices but, by implication, within the historical persons doing the choosing. He has taken us up to the threshold of the socially divided self, conflicted even as it acts, recognizing how, in acting for itself it may well also be acting against itself.67 The slave owners knew they were opting for inferior advantages in a system that was uncompetitive and yet they were socially and economically sufficiently bound to forego any kind of exit option. To understand this complicated and evolving and occasionally mortally threatening juggling act between contending imperatives is arguably near the core, if that is possible in such a composite thing, of historical anthropology. Not only does Gorman’s presentation of an empathic approach to acquiring knowledge about “historical reality” break up the symmetry of opposing autonomous class cultures or, for that matter, of culture and counter-culture, but he also broaches the tricky subject of several rationalities and narrative figurations contending within the same mind or, from another perspective, within those several minds experiencing

67 This is also a theme in that classic work of historical anthropology, Norbert Elias’ The Court Society [ ]. 42 specific larger historical conjunctures (the Revolution, the Great Depression, the Cold War or, for that matter and as we will see below, the Death of Lono) with a more or less shared and yet also itself divided and contingent complement of conceptual-figural and narrative languages that are themselves subject to different power pressures and class positions. Arguably it is any historical anthropology’s more interesting task to discover and explore such interactive tensions and to read the various qualities of their narrative resolutions (or failures at such resolutions) as these appear, “finally,” in historical actions and texts, in event-documents. We will return to this after the following brief critical consideration of where the progress of an empathy position has left us up to this point. One of the curious aspects of this post-Collingwood, narrative-colligation and empathy approach is that it too can shy away from its own insights into the break-down of the symmetries that sustain apparently and even necessarily closed historical objects and selves. Such a retreat is worth a look since it illustrates the persistence of a possible reactionary-modernist formation in the current academic hegemony, scrambling to re- corral the modernist narrative experiments that have been set loose. I already noted a moment ago the flaw in Collingwood’s implicit closure of the historical subject whose thought the historian must seek to “re-enact.” Collingwood is, on the one hand, fully cognizant of a post- modern condition that overrides the residual theology of an Enlightenment “science of human nature” that is unable to think how the scientific disclosure of previously unknown or misrecognized aspects of such “nature” alters it and leaves it perpetually unfinished,68 yet he is still only able, on the other hand, to do an empathic “rethinking” of historical subjects’ “rational” thoughts. The “irrational” – which he associates with the body’s(!) “blind forces”– remains outside of historical consideration as mere feelings and appetites and not yet conception and will.69 Although

68 Idea, 84-5

69 Idea, 217ff, 230-1. Little wonder then that Collingwood can only offer a caricature of Kant, and that Nietzsche, despite at least two powerful works in historical philosophy, appears only on a windy alp, 296, and that Freud, pioneer historian of the “self,” appears not at all. 43 Collingwood, in company with Hume and Locke, leaves far behind Descartes’ idea that history belongs merely in a curio cabinet, he nevertheless retains the symmetry of the Cartesian self and, indeed, of the structure of the world and diminishes the capacity of his empathy concept by painting history into the corner of being a science only of the “rational” mind. In his own re-thinking of Collingwood’s “re-thinking,” and drawing on Collingwood’s successor at Oxford, Gilbert Ryle, who substituted, classically and regressively, “retrospection” for “introspection,” Wm. Dray reinforced such dualistic and exclusionary aspects. His version of what we may perceive to be a kind of historical “thought-act” theory is also finally not interested in the intensional thought processes and conflicted options dividing historical subjects’ minds and experiences – both extensionally acted out and not – but wants only to “certify” that the connections between “the agent’s ‘considerations’ and his action” were “seen to have been rationally necessary.”70 This is not to say that such a criterion of “rational necessity” is not capable of prodigious feats of empathic understanding once we understand that that “necessity” may itself be refigured and renarrated in unpredictable ways. However, while Dray carries forward the open-endedness of Collingwood’s original perception – i.e., that no “re-thinking” is ever complete and definitive and can dispose of any closed historical object (e.g., Gorman: the profitability of slavery) “once and for all”–71 he yet at the same time reduces what he recognizes as the “stream of consciousness” of historical subjects to mere “internal monologues and private screenings.” With that he traps himself in Ryle’s (and Quine’s) pre-Kantian position of narrating the intensional as a singularity, an ontologically separable entity whose “covert activities” are not to be perceived as

70 Wm. Dray, “Historical Understanding as Re-Thinking” [1958] in B. Brody,ed., Readings in the Philosophy of Science, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970, 176-7.

71 On this, I like Dray’s formulation very much: “The fact that the original thought may not have been thought propositionally would therefore be no barrier to its being rethought propositionally.” in “Historical Understanding,” 176. In personal retrospect it appears that it is something I have been doing and that it is a foundational percept for the essays in this collection. 44 “thinking” and are therefore ruled out of the historically, i.e., extensionally, visible unity of the self-in-action.72 There is no sense possible here that considerations pointing to actions not taken persist in memory even in the moment of the action taken or that the tension of conflicting considerations and impulses before the action may in fact deepen in the action, especially once certain and possibly feared but suppressed implications of the road to be taken become more visible once the road is actually taken, and so on. The price he pays for having to exclude the intensional as the realm of mere “private imaginings and recitations” that are not properly considered as “thought” until they become the extensional action of a, to all appearance, unitary self is that that self is then reduced to having no memory-sense of its possibly conflicted self-narratives that are undeniably and always in play before, during and after any action. From an “empathy” perspective one can only agree with Dray’s insightful conclusion that “a person may sometimes not know what he thinks” and that therefore historians may “re-think[. . .] thoughts which may not have been fully articulated or explicitly recognized by the agent himself.”(emphasis added) 73 This is, however, not to forget that one of the problems with this line of historical-narrative experimentation is that it opens the door to possibly unacceptable kinds of projective and presumptuous attempts to “speak for” historical peoples, or, even more tempting, to speak for “peoples without history.” This is a matter that we revisit in the next section of this essay and in several of the essays that follow. A second problem resides in Dray’s fall-back on an“agent himself” figure. This unexamined reunification of “the agent” or “actor” leaves us with a greatly diminished sense of the complexity of the self and urges instead that we distinguish between historical persons’ mere “movements” and what may be certifiably thought of as their “actions.”74 Not only does such a turn open vast new vistas for pedantries about classifications and taxonomies of what are and are not “actions” or “movements” it also drops by the analytical wayside the contradictory qualities and the often mutual incommensurablities of those thoughts and motivations that divide “the

72 “Historical Understanding” 170.

73 “Historical Understanding” 174-5.

74 “Historical Understanding” 173 45 agent himself” in the interactive flows of his or her own different, often temporally overlapping or mnemonically contiguous, actions. Gorman, despite having taken the empathy approach considerably further by bringing into sharper focus some largely untheorized aspects of the historical experiences of split and tension-filled selves committing thought-actions in a specific and historically contingent and self-contradictory “system” of slavery, he too finds his way back to a closure of the self. Rather than keep open for further exploration the interactions of the multiple rationalities that contend for and remain operative, even when repressed, in the acting self, he ends by adopting, against what he sees as Hume’s “atomistic empiricism,” Quine’s “holistic empiricism.” According to this we make choices about accepting something as truthful only when our entire “body” of experience is able to adjust to such an addition. What is interesting about this reclosure and “holistic” refiguration of the self is not only that it appears as yet another closed, black- box unity whose intensional adjustments are purportedly not visible except in action but that what Gorman saw earlier as tensions and existential conflicts splitting the self (about, say, remaining or not remaining a slaver) now appear in a greatly reduced form as “unexpected experiences or unsolved puzzles” requiring a mere “revision” in anyone’s “system of beliefs.” Possible (and probably certain) mortal conflicts have miraculously been refigured as mere puzzles or the unforseen in a trans-substantiation that flies in the face of the available historical-analytical narratives. Quine figures his version of the exclusion of the intensional in terms of its irrelevance for assessing any pragmatic (i.e., extensional) outcome, particularly when this latter will always favor what he claims, in pathetic fallacy, is a, by its nature allegedly less costly, conservative course.75 Gorman explicitly shares this projective attitude in his sense that revision in what he now calls a “system of beliefs” is finally a matter of “pragmatic convenience” governed by a sense of net preferences that places “value” on a par with “fact” and seeks thereby to achieve “equilibrium in moral judgment and factual judgment.” The conflicted profitability calculations and the conflicted

75 See the discussion in Margolis, Psychology, 22-24. Sometimes (often) the conservative course can obviously be very costly. 46 choices accompanying them that the cliometricians revealed at the heart of American slavery have ceased to be historically re-figurable; they now appear merely as an improvement in “what we now believe” about slavery. Slavery becomes, in this expressly synoptic and therefore not synthetic view, something that is simply “not unambiguously identifiable.” Well certainly. But perceived social, economic and ideational conflicts and tensions (dare one add: in systems of power and violence where conflicting pragmatics have to be realized) have been transformed into mere epistemological ambiguities. He adds: “[M]oreover, there is more than one way of making an improvement, and pragmatic convenience is the sole constraint upon it.”76 This reduces “the self” to a “pragmatic” self, a closed self whose interiority remains in a black box, purportedly becoming visible only in the actions of an extensional-historical self, functioning and performing its self-specific role complex well enough, pragmatically enough, to survive and possibly flourish in its given environment.77 There is no explanation possible in such an “improved” understanding of historical experience for the violent passions animating the historians’ quarrel with which Gorman began his philosophical investigation. That they might have been continuations, if only in displaced forms, of the passions, angers, hatreds and fears that were intrinsic both to the emotions that tore at people actually having to live and act out the slave system itself, as well as at those who perceived themselves to be living in the later outcomes of that system, ceases to be an issue when it comes to what is, for Gorman, clearly an attempt to dispel such passions by ruling their historical significance out of order in favor of a search for the pragmatic unity of merely “acting” historical selves. A much-cited work about the narrated dimensions of experience, David Carr’s

76 Gorman, Understanding History, 111-12.

77 For an appreciation of the intellectual-historical context for this “stream” of American academic ideology, see the excellent overview of the emergence of American pragmatism from a post-Civil War politique and post-Darwinist intellectual and scientific climate, in Menand, The Metaphysical Club New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. 47 Time, Narrative and History, 78 seeks to kick the empathy argument up yet another notch by linking Collingwood’s initiatives to the phenomenological-existential approaches of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and others. Carr brings us closer to formulating historical anthropology as a narrative-critical science when he synthesizes several insights into the multiple temporalities that we experience, remember, tell about and manipulate. It is disappointing, however, that he too, after his initial and valuable exploration of what are arguably “post-modern” perspectives on the interactions of “time and narrative,” succumbs, in the second half of the book, to a re-tasking of historical work that takes as its objective the regressive closures of methodological individualism fitted to a search for what he repeatedly calls “genuine community.” (146) Without moving on with him to the social engineering implicit in his talk about narrating socialization and “group” identity formations, there is nevertheless much we can take away from the early parts of Carr’s argument. On one hand, he retains a mind-body split, privileges “the future” over the past and present in actions and still also accepts a separation between history and science by which the latter seeks “reality” while the former can only grasp “manifest”

78 Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1991; cf. also A. Munslow, The New History, Harlow, England: Pearson-Longman, 2003. Munslow’s narrativism is not a useful departure for where I want to go. He maintains that “historical explanation is not scientific” and in effect abandons the empathy problematic.(79) His focus on what historians do loses the historical subject entirely in favor of an “epistemological skepticism” that is directed toward historians’ and not historical subjects’ narrative constructs. He repeatedly misreads (as realism!) Collingwood’s distinction between history and fiction (18, 146; but cf. Collingwood, Idea: “. . . such a conception is in one way seriously at fault: it overlooks the no less important part played by criticism.”(242, emphasis added) My own approach in the essays in this collection focuses not on the closed circle of historians’ narrative self-consumption but on historians’ ability to read simultaneously several narratives, each others’ as well as those by historical subjects, and to do so critically (not just skeptically) and to develop the tools to deploy such narrative-critical readings universally, i.e., scientifically. 48 appearances.79 His is a curiously split research program because, contrary to such persistently regressive re-closures, he does also recognize, citing for example Barbara Hardy’s perception that narrative is a “primary act of mind,”80 that the same objects of historical investigation – he calls them “elements” – can be construed differently, ambiguously, “viewed by different persons, at the same time, as parts of very different stories.” Of course, the next step would have been to say that even one person could view the same “elements” at any particular moment of experience as parts of different stories. He goes on to assert that “ [b]efore we dismember [such ambiguous figures] analytically, and even before we revise them retrospectively, our experiences and our actions constitute narratives for us . . . lived through as organized by a grasp which spans time, is retrospective and prospective, and which thus seeks to escape from the very temporal perspective of the now which makes it possible.”81 [emphasis in the original] In other words, experience itself, in the action as well as in observance of action, is necessarily historical narrative. To this one could add that we experience in terms of multiple temporalities and, by way of contradiction, that we do so not necessarily to escape from the now. The point may well be that we can only find the “now” when we learn and have the presence of mind to figure and narrate it in different times. To this we can add the further thought that when the intensional, left in its black box by Quine, Gorman and Carr, appears in extensional “actions,” we can understand such actions, which necessarily include various forms of self-revelation and self-narration, not just as

79 Carr, Time, 38-39, 66

80 B. Hardy, Tellers and Listeners: The Narrative Imagination, London: Athlone 1975 cited in Carr, Time, 69

81 Time, 68-9; Carr invokes at this point the Gestalt theorists’“spatial phenomena” in the form of Jastrow’s illusion of “duck or rabbit?” as illustration of a forced narrative escape from ambiguity. To my mind, a better analytical analog is the “impossible object” school (M. C. Escher, Jos de Mey, Sandro del Prete et. al.) where the temporally dependent emergence of the impossible dimension during the act of viewing destroys “once and for all” the innocent narrative singularity of the moment of initial intuition and forces a perpetually transformative re- narration, not a binary decision or oscillation, at every subsequent moment of intuition. 49 pragmatic resolutions of but rather as analytically valuable openings into the tensions, divisions and self-disruptions of historical subjects – and, indeed, of “us historians” as well, whose scientific-critical narratives about such historical experiences are then themselves readable as our historical self-revelations. Containing such a narrative-scientific advance by means of an overriding “pragmatic” construction of empathy, as Gorman and Carr pursue, loses the advantage of a perception that sees historical persons trying to live in a world already organized in terms of narrative manifolds and by means of narratives they perceive as comprehensible, as narratives they can own or control or need in order to resist or initiate change or do any number of things, and as disruptions of those narrative symmetries that they need to disrupt in order to save themselves historically. Not only does the pragmatically exclusive “motivation-for-action” containment make actions appear possible only if they are conflict-free (or at least conflict-transcendent) but the pragmatic moment itself may be over-appreciated as a kind of natural optimum despite the possibility that the persons engaging in what appear to be existentially unified “acts” may bring still-unresolved conflicts into the act itself. It is here where serious and possibly productive historical-anthropological analysis begins. Such active ambiguity inside apparently unified acts may be the product of, and reveal to analysts, historical self-narratives occurring in multiple time- and power-frames and it may result in actions that appear as lies, bet-hedgings, (self- and other-) betrayals, pathological compulsions and any number of other metaphoric, metonymic or allegorical forms of acting-out, among other things, the unspeakable.82 Although one can only agree with Carr that projecting, inhabiting and remembering experiences requires constant (mostly unconscious) efforts of producing interactive and somehow commensurable stories, we have to turn away from his approach when he chooses not to focus on this “narrative” problematic as such and prematurely diverts attention toward what the moral qualities of both the producers of

82 In this connection see the discussion of the pertinent work by James C. Scott in chapter ten below. 50 and the social environments for narratives are and could be.83 Given his pragmatic commitments84 it is no surprise to find Carr making too much of what he calls “narrative coherence” as it appears, for him, in a double register of the coherence of “normal,” that is to say “everyday” experience, and, secondly, of the search for a higher order coherence that is required when “normal” narratives break down and threaten to collapse into disorder – as if everyday order was not at all times intertwined with and indeed dependent on various kinds of perpetual and fractally distributed and narratively concealed disorders. He expressly naturalizes such efforts at narrative coherence (“we aim for it, try to produce it, and try to restore it when it goes missing” [goes missing?]) and this eventually leads him, by way of Heidegger, to the pathos of a closed, coherent and authentic self taking responsibility for its narrative “choices,” in moments where only “practical imagination . . . is involved.”85 (emphasis in the original) Not only does he drop from this model altogether both the memory aspects and the perceivably compelled and possibly violent and repressive environments surrounding all choices, but it is also his mistake to assume that narrative work means, by natural inclination, a search for “coherence.” It is a potentially fatal limitation to search only for narratives that serve the integration of an “authentic” self and of “true community” because that represses the perception, reinforced now by Edelman’s insights into the vital antagonism between symmetry and memory, that we (i.e., any of us) may want (and need) to do narrative work going in the opposite direction; namely, to break apart narrative coherences and symmetries whose purportedly cultural and/or scientific, that is to say hegemonic and often specious, constructions oppress, stultify and disable us. The irony is that Carr’s naive project about good choices for the good community undermines history writing as the production of, literally, recollection narratives and as

83 Carr, Time, 90-1

84 Louis Menand’s precise dissection of early American pragmatism leaves no doubt about the reactionary modernism inherent in this philosophical hegemony as it is revealed, e.g., in Charles Peirce’s re-enclosure of Kant in philosophical realism. Metaphysical Club, 227-30

85 Carr, Time, 91, 92-4. 51 memory work. Lost as well are the primarily narrative and figurative problematics of capturing an empathic understanding of historical persons’ often conflicted and contradictory reasonings as these remain unresolved even in action and in the aftermaths of actions (as Gorman has shown by example, if not by his understanding). The neo-Thomist undercurrent that always threatens to surface in pragmatism86 asserts itself and, although he invokes Collingwood, Carr returns us to the formulas of that objectivist realism Collingwood had rejected from the outset. He thereby misses the actually very pragmatic dimensions of our capacity for what he calls “temporal configuration”87 that have made the many different kinds of memory-texts that there are a universal evolutionary sine qua non. All the ground Carr helps us gain toward thinking about the absolute centrality of multiple narratives both in experience “itself” and in historical-anthropological texts about experience he loses in the last pages where he makes the astonishing claims that “Genuinely non-narrative history does exist and existed long before Braudel and the Annales school” and that “narrative and non- narrative history . . . [are] . . . perfectly compatible and complementary approaches to the past.”88 Not only are his examples of non-narrative histories unconvincing – (Pirenne? when Mohammed and Charlemagne contains the tension of the narrative in its very title) – but the formulations this leads him to reveal his lack of understanding of his own best message. It is not enough to concede, as Carr does by way of Ricoeur, that Braudel’s structures of longue durée might contain narrative elements. He nevertheless thinks to neutralize these latter by language about atemporal “settings” and “circumstances” that somehow interacted with “people and communities.” Not only does this move bring us completely back to an unacceptable substantivist realism but one has also to object to his misrepresentation of the Annales project and to the implicit suppression of its valuable contribution to a narrative-critical historical anthropology. The Annales

86 Menand, Metaphysical Club, 243-53 and passim.

87 Time, 47, 49, 57 and passim.

88 Time, 175-6 52 historians’ model of intertwining temporalities of long-duration, conjuncture and event is above all and necessarily a model of intertwining narratives that are perpetually and interactively “present” in forms of structures, conjunctures and events to be thought, consciously and unconsciously, in both historical persons’ actions and in historians’ empathic “rethinking” of those actions. That variously long durations are never absent in the play of conjuctures nor in events and that the latter can in turn reveal, explode into and alter both the former and that all of these relationships, perceivable before, during and after “the fact,” are subject to different analytical understanding by means of greatly variable narrative-scientific constructions is a key insight, an indelible contribution of the Annales.89 I will return to this point in a moment to think about the fit of this approach with the symmetry-breaking aspects of historical narrative and about the narrative-critical opportunities this contribution suggests. A second difficulty that Carr’s existentialist pragmatics leads him into is in the further conclusions he draws from the undeniable fact that “historians, looking back on a course of action, will tell a story about it which differs from that told by those who performed it.” It is a specious truth that not only misrecognizes the living of, i.e., the feeling of and personal engagement with an action, as merely a “performance” but it also means that he makes this observation in the context of what is on closer examination an only partly acceptable proposition; namely, that there are aspects of the past that we can know about but that persons in that past could not have known; he recites things like “long-term trends in population, climate, prices.” That this apparently also obvious truth remains insufficient however, for an empathic, narrative-analytical approach becomes apparent when we consider that while historical people could not have known such “trends” the way our hindsight vantage permits they nevertheless experienced and acted in some fashion that was relevant to these and other broadly “environmental” contingencies in ways not necessarily perceivable by “us.” But this does not suggest such experiences remain closed to us because it is possible to say that historical peoples did narrate their experiences of “trends” in climate, prices, etc. somehow, somewhere, if

89 Cf. G. Duby, History Continues, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994, 91-2 53 only indirectly or by figural speech, perhaps none of it yet “discovered.” The historian’s task is not merely to develop what Carr sees as a “superior” understanding not possible for those experiencing what becomes “known” in the “after the fact” understanding of historical moments but it is rather to discover such recognizable complexions in historical persons’ narrative figurations and to make them part of his or her own stories. Which is then not to say that the historians’ stories replace “historical agents’” stories with “better”ones, as Carr believes.90 Better for whom or what? Better because they can claim to be “science?” Carr’s ascription of an alleged inferiority to past people’s narratives and, even worse, his perception of an alleged absence of a historical self-narrative that is up to what he would recognize as such leads him eventually, perhaps predictably, to talk about “peoples without history.” Where for Kant and Hegel people only become genuinely “historical” when they begin to tackle the always difficult dialectics of realizing a desire for freedom – arguably but not necessarily a narrative privileging of the “Western” historical experience, – for Carr it is the far simpler and ethically more questionable task of making an absence of “our” kind of historical narrative the mark of ahistorical peoples whose “time has somehow not yet become fully human.”(!) Not only would one like to have seen his identified examples of such a people but the statement is astonishingly analogous to Kipling’s “lesser breeds without the law.” It is an amazing assertion, one that points at the heart of a failed ethics of historical anthropology. Is “our” narrative construction of “time” the only one that renders members of the biological species “human?” He goes on to share the even more astonishing and revealing conclusion, which he ascribes to “Ricoeur, Olafson and others,” that “One is saved from excluding such peoples altogether from humanity by permitting them [!] the possibility of becoming human.”91 (emphases in the originals throughout) With that he shares in that notable pathos exhibited by many current academics who make it their task to “permit” historicity or “grant agency” to presumably sub-historical peoples. Although apparently not fully comfortable with this proposition, Carr never

90 Time, 176-7

91 Time, 181-2 54 disowns it and instead offers it as simply an expression of “our” (now exclusively “human”) sense of time. We are heroes in and of our own time. “Our” kind of remembering is, for him, “our way . . . bravely to face up to time, shaping and fashioning it rather than fleeing from it into timelessness.” This heroism becomes in turn “our” way of sharing “a genuinely human trait: the struggle against temporal chaos, the fear of sequential dispersion and dissolution. . .”92 It is the delusional hubris of pragmatists to think that the only thing that holds us, our societies, our minds, together against “chaos” is conscious control of ourselves and of “time.” This is recognizable as one of the Vorzeit positions with which I began this essay. Not only does it deny what Edelman shows, namely that time has not ever been chaotic for us, given the full range of interactive multiple temporalities by which our evolved mind-bodies carry on, mostly without conscious awareness, the management of the interactive timings that enable the full complement of both our biological, psychological and social arrangements, but Carr’s formulation is also a way of establishing a claim on power over those bodies, minds and societies whom he thinks incapable of “our” particular “taming” of allegedly chaotic time. He chooses to ascribe to those presumably identifiable as “people without history” a flight from time into timelessness and converts that into an exclusionary empathy argument (!) based on an ascription of an absence of a rational temporality, i.e., of History. His perspective can only mean to offer a rationale for a set of criteria with which to approach those whom we want to dehumanize and whose time we want to exploit.93 In other words, by clinging to such demonstrably insufficient concepts of objectively closed selves and communities all governed (or not) by self-conscious histories in “our” sense, Carr can keep alive a crude notion of “people without history.” He in effect sacrifices to this reactionary closure his earlier insights toward thinking about cross- temporal memory-narratives as a universal condition of human experience, as an opening for an empathic historical anthropology that listens to everyone’s sense of

92 Time, 184

93 This is one kind of critical point that Eric Wolf’s original departure into historical anthropology put forward. Europe and the People without History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. 55 immersion in not only consciously historical but also other kinds of narratable time constructions to think about “what happened” not only in illo tempore, once upon a time, but also in the now.

IV

What guides the organization of this collection of essays is a recognition of the idea that myths, fairy tales, and histories can be understood as three kinds of narrative options by which human beings have inserted and figured themselves and others in perceivable time devolutions that move at different speeds and with variable action- and self-directing force in any given instances of thought-in-action. This perception of an unpredictable human narrative capacity, exercised both individually and collectively, for living in multiple temporalities arising out of the active articulations of various narrative forms associated with such time-frames aligns itself with Edelman’s perception that the value of memory-narrative formations in mental activity is in their disruptions of any symmetric closures, particularly ones that threaten to render unlivable our ongoing, viable relationships to ourselves, to each other and to the world. I selected the essays in this volume because I find they help me explore the proposition that all three narrative forms can be (and this without excluding others not explored here) in play at all times in human experiences and in explanations of experiences, and that their different “utilities” are not primarily in the creation of order-in-chaos but, on the contrary, in the disruptive effects they can have as they ally with and contradict each other from moment to moment. The argument is that myths, fairy tales and histories are in this sense not simply motive-comprehending analytical tools for “understanding” different kinds of people’s narratives at different levels of cultural “development” or, as Carr would have, at different stages of “becoming human,” but that they are always in play for all of “us,” analysts and analysands alike, producers and readers of texts together, and for that reason deserve to be scientific objects of a historical anthropology whose objective is an empathic understanding of what historical people are telling themselves and us about what they think they are doing and why they might think that way – and why we might read them and re-narrate them the way we do and reveal 56 thereby to ourselves what we think we are doing. The intent of such a narrative-critical “scientizing” of historical anthropology is not to establish some absolutely objective veracity and the unchanging narrative “thusness” of objects composed of intertwined events, persons, ideations and circumstances in the perceivable past. This would be to share the claim of some who, in seeing themselves as “people with history,” claim superiority over those who allegedly live only by uncertain, “unverifiable” myths and fairy tales. It is rather to explore the qualitative dimensions and articulations of historical objects as they appear in various forms in the narratives available to and circulating among historical peoples during specific historical “events,” in the narratives about the latter and about perceived or less directly experienced contexts (price trends, institutional structures, class relations, “cross-cultural” contacts etc.) and, as a third moment, in the revealing construals of the “original” narratives in subsequent, after-the-fact ones, themselves having multiple temporal articulations both “then” and “now.” The remainder of this introduction means to illustrate such a narrative-critical scientific investigation by looking at various accounts of a specific historical “event-object,” viz., the killing of Captain Cook on an island beach in the Pacific ocean. I recall that, when Marshall Sahlins presented, around 1980, “the apotheosis of Captain Cook,”94 there was something very right and even perversely funny in his representation and hermeneutical reading of that famous colonizer-scout’s transformation, upon his first arrival among the then newly named “Sandwich Islands,” into the god Lono. It was an almost homiletic narrative about how this happy first arrival set up a tragic reversal when the explorer re-appeared unexpectedly, as Captain Cook, a week later in February 1779 to repair a damaged ship, only to arrive just in time

94 “L’apothéose du captaine Cook,” in M. Izard and P. Smith, eds., La fonction symbolique, Paris: Gallimard 1979; idem, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1981. Sahlins’ subsequent Islands of History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, sought to elevate this initial analytical narrative to an exercise in symbolic actionist code breaking and exegesis. There are noteworthy differences between this and Sahlins’ earlier versions as I note below. 57 to be murdered, as Lono, at an arguably appropriate moment in the ritual logic of what appears to have been a mythic cycle widely known in the Pacific island world. By an empathic-historical act of understanding of “the natives’” perspective on Cook, anthropologist Sahlins could claim to have achieved a lasting disruption of that accepted historical narrative symmetry – if only accepted, by the 1980s, among the most antediluvian – by which the civilized, ingenuous Cook had fallen victim to the capricious and inexplicable savagery of a primitive people. As I was to learn subsequently from anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere’s narrative-critical assessment of Sahlins’ version of the Hawaiians’ experience with Cook, there was, however, also a matter of the story about Cook’s alleged deification-for- sacrifice having been transmitted by and prefigured in tendentious accounts of Western missionaries and colonizers, beginning in the 1820s and taken up by later biographers, whose interest it was both to accentuate with ascriptions of irrational“meaning” the apparently superstitious practices of the Islanders and to elevate Cook to the status of civilizational martyr.95 We will consider in a moment a follow-up to Obeyesekere’s plausible suggestion that this Cook/Lono narrative was actually a more significant mythic construct for the historical self-understanding of the colonizers and that Sahlins is in fact himself a mytho-poetic functionary in this tradition, a role that undermines the scientific value of his historical anthropology project. From the perspective of the present volume, the problem with Sahlins’ narrative experiment remains that his reading of Lono’s tumultuous end, itself creditable for providing an opening into unanalyzed aspects of the rationalities in play for all the participants in this historical event also shuts this opening down immediately and, arguably, still finally leaves the Hawaiians as a people without history. Unless of course, one absorbs, as Sahlins does, “our” kind of history into “deeper” mythic patterns, a kind of bravely ironic and anti- historical flourish which makes the Hawaiians the ones who have and us those who do not have history. Much rides on this and we will return to it in a moment. Which is not to say that Sahlins’ rewriting of the ritual murder of Cook does not

0 G. Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, 51-2. 58 in fact make a serious attempt to move beyond the static symmetries of structuralist analysis and to historicise and thereby re-narratize the Islanders’ ritual actings out, which he comes to call their “mytho-praxis.” At its best, his argument makes a contribution toward carrying forward an empathic approach to historical understanding, especially in his early recognition that Cook’s arrival appears to have had, for the Hawaiian elites, the quality of a deus ex machina intervention with strong pragmatic implications, a visitation they could read in the light of a perhaps prior divine dispensation, one that now allowed them to revitalize their foundational social arrangements: “When Captain Cook was killed . . . this victory became a novel source of legitimacy of Hawaiian kings for decades afterwards. Through the appropriation of Cook’s bones, the mana of the Hawaiian kingship itself became British . . . Cook’s divinity was no sequitur to the actual force he exerted. More important was the fact that Hawaiians had killed him.”96 A consequence of this attribution of “native” understanding of the event as an opportunity for revitalization leads Sahlins to devote much of the initial (1981) volume to exploring the period after Cook’s killing, when Kamehameha emerged – his presence already visible as a “modernizer” in the actions leading up to Cook’s death – not only as a royal pupil of European astronomy and cooking but, more importantly, as the most skilled diplomatic steersman among the Hawaiian chiefs in turning those several crises occasioned for the Islanders by the European sea-going nations’ growing interest and presence in the Pacific into solutions for the chiefs’ own genealogical-political, social and religious conflicts. Sahlins summarizes for us from an anthropologist’s perspective some of the history that reveals Kamehameha’s not inconsiderable capacities for understanding and updating the Islands’ location in a necessarily expansile and accelerating re-visioning of the world, his skilled diplomacy and imperialistic military leadership in re-figuring inter-Island alliances and lineages and his creative and pragmatic manipulating of gendered and food tabu prohibitions to achieve openings for trade while yet retaining control of the metaphysical conceptions underpinning the hegemonic negotiations and consensus that were, altogether, his royal power.

96 Sahlins, Historical Metaphors, 7 (emphasis in original). 59 This is, at the same time, dangerous ground for Sahlins’ master narrative about an alleged instance of a repetitious, history-absorbing Hawaiian “structure of the conjuncture” in which even these new departures were allegedly fully contained and explicable in both the conscious actions and the unconscious “deep play” of the so-called mytho-praxis. To this end he underplays Kamehameha’s own mytho-poetic role in renewed mobilization of the much-argued about “pan-Polynesian” Makahiki festival – in an enactment of which Sahlins claims that Cook was killed as ritual sacrifice – by relegating that important part of Kamehameha’s actual achievement to footnotes in which the latter’s role is never mentioned and in which Cook’s fate does not in fact ever figure explicitly.97 Moreover, Kamehameha virtually disappears in the 1985 version of Sahlins’ analysis. There the latter commits himself to a strictly symbolic actionist account in which Kamehameha appears only briefly and when he does it is as songwriter, as himself an iconic time-marker for “the people,” as “symbolic” conqueror of lineages and as manipulator of tabu.98 In his extended response, finally, to Obeyesekere’s critique of his prior two volumes, Sahlins has to concede that the evidence shows that “Kamehameha used the Makahiki to sustain his conquest kingdom, politically and economically. He introduced his own gods of order and tribute into the Lono procession and transformed the occasion into a centralized payment of taxes.” These admitted renovations are not featured in what Sahlins identifies as later and “archaizing” accounts whose interest may indeed be focused on the Cook/Lono experience. However, it is from these that he surmises that the “Makahiki practices depicted in the Hawaiian ethnographic texts are paralleled in incidents of Cook’s visit of 1778-9."99 Ironically, his is a narrative misrecognition that remains completely within the grasp of a narrative-critical, empathic historical anthropology in the sense that one could expect that this is how some, perhaps even some important or significant Hawaiians thought about the whole matter and we can add such conceptions to an

97 Historical Metaphors, 74 n. 8; idem, Islands, 73 n.1.

98 Islands, passim.

99 M. Sahlins, How “Natives” Think, About Captain Cook For Example, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 219 60 understanding of what “rationalities” were and still are in play in Hawaiians’ multi- layered and socially dispersed historical experiences. On the other hand, this can clearly not be the exclusively significant story. It weakens Sahlins’ formulations to recognize that Kamehameha’s complicated and multilayered experience of the Cook/Lono moment needed to disappear from a historical-analytic narrative meant to serve a contest of proofs in an analytical project that is satisfied with a mere decoding, as for example: “what appears in the account books and letters of Boston merchants in Hawaii . . . are politically contextual intimations of Polynesian divinity. The market was an irreducible condition of material praxis, where prices were set according to inescapable conceptions of Polynesian mana.”100 This conversion of market indicators into mere expressions of persistent, myth-driven symbolic actions labors a pseudo-profundity and is at best, from an empathic perspective on social science, only partially right. Some prices were set, no doubt, by a demand for the mana-bestowing qualities of certain commodities while other prices, operating in the narrative-rational frameworks of other Hawaiian intelligences, those who thought like Kamehameha perhaps, were not. Questions about when or even whether mana-driven demand gained or lost the upper hand in the price- setting mechanisms over “non-mythic” kinds of demand considerations might be refined into an inetersting research question. When we find, however, terms like “irreducible condition” and “inescapable conceptions” applied to contextualized human rationalities in an after all somewhat open-ended market – the Islanders’ own subversion of their chiefs’ market controls attest to that – then we need to be particularly wary. How those stated but never demonstrated closures are narrated, both “then” and “now,” by both colonizers and colonized in both “internal” and interactive dialogues, has to become a matter for investigation. They can not be simply put forward and then “proven” by tendentious and partial narratives and forced, projective readings that admit to analysis only what can be read in terms of “indigenous schemes of cosmological proportions” appearing as “the true organization of historical practice.”101

100 Islands, 155-56.

101 Islands, 76. 61 What is not acceptable is the elevation of such one-dimensional hermeneutics over an allegedly “misplaced concreteness” of other kinds of historical narratives that are not interested in what Sahlins perceives as “the truth of this larger dialogue [between sense and reference],” a “truth” that for him then consists of merely another array of objective closures, “the indissoluble [?] synthesis of such as past and present, system and event, structure and history.”102 These are suspect scholastic and substantivist dualisms designed to achieve the appearance of a “higher ground” for an all- encompassing master narrative whose purpose can only be to produce reactionary representations of human experience couched in terms of such failed but evidently still serviceable Realist terminologies and circularities as Frege’s “sense and reference.” A perhaps more serious point is that this one-dimensional reading of myth- narratives as all-encompassing systems where the things people actually think and do are mere expressions of their interpellations into the “process” – another word that, like praxis, often only pretends to be saying something103 – where there are, in what purports to be a final analysis, no singularities or resistances or, for that matter, “sacrifices” that can not be reabsorbed and neutralized as mere illusions of motion inside the unmoved whole, “a world system of generation and re-generation.”104 This leaves those who find themselves thus “interpellated” with no choice but to be sacrificed or be agents of sacrifice and all in face of a system that remains indifferent to that choice because any outcome of any interpellation contributes to the system’s projected survival as it necessarily has to risk itself in a world it can not control in its entirety. One wonders if he is aware that it is his organic model’s desire for survival and not his ethnographic- historical materials that lead him to this conception of history- (and people-) swallowing transcendence. Sahlins exhibits a kind of systemic bravado by which every internal effort or external impulse toward change can only feed the system until it collapses in face of

102 Islands, 156

103 Unless of course it refers to the open-ended and interactively contested devolution of historical figurations (e.g., the court society as a “process” figure) that Norbert Elias sought to contribute to social scientific object creation.

104 Islands, 77 62 other more powerful systems. From that perspective one has to be sympathetic to Obeyesekere’s somewhat outraged and incisive reading of Sahlins’ scholasticisms as the latter avoid the power- driven and intertwined duplexities in both the Europeans’ and the Islanders’ “systems” pushing their way through and past Sahlins’ mythopractical efforts at containment. What is repressed in Sahlins’ version of the Cook/Lono narrative are not only the several significant violences on the day of Cook’s alleged “ritual” murder but also the contextual violence, consciously concealed and then unconsciously but visibly acted out in actual encounters, that resides inside Cook’s very presence among the Islanders. Most telling is that, having been instructed by the president of the Royal Society in the legal niceties about respecting “the Natives’” rights to life and property, Cook was also under, in Obeyesekere’s words, “the secret instructions of the Admiralty that require the alien lands to be appropriated on behalf of the crown, thereby dispossessing the rights of native people.” Cook, like many of his contemporary fellow mappers of possible empires, is trapped in a conflicted, self-contradictory performance that Obeyesekere calls “a dark side” in imperialism, a “paradox of civilization” in which the civilizational thief, the primary accumulator, has also to retain face before himself as the benefactor in the larger (i.e., mythic) scheme of things.105 Mythic constructions that claim to override all the other possible narratives appear precisely, both “then” and “now,” as figural obstacles to suppress recognition of the necessary violences that live in such unequally recognized historical duplexities. Sahlins obliges this point by furnishing an exact example of what Obeyesekere is talking about when he touches briefly on a recognition that Cook might have played the role of a “bourgeois Lono,” or, following Bernard Smith,106 of “Adam Smith’s global agent,” a mythic creation of a “spirit incarnate of the peaceful ‘penetration’ of the marketplace: of a commercial expansion promising to bring civilization to the benighted

105 Obeyesekere, Apotheosis, 13

106 B. Smith, “Cook’s Posthumous Reputation” in R. Fisher and H. Johnston, eds., Captain James Cook and his Times, Seattle: University of Washington Press; see Obeyesekere’s rather different reading of Smith in Apotheosis, 131-2 and ff. 63 and riches to the entire earth.” The stumbling block has to be the “peaceful” attribution to this almost Yankee vision of Cook as the harbinger of the free market (which is only violent in its unavoidable price-setting Reality?) that throughout transfigures Sahlins’ story. He cites as evidence Cook’s “concern to secure [‘ye Natives”] friendship, to keep the use of force to a minimum, to trade honestly (if advantageously) . . .” and he sees the upshot in how “Europeans and Hawaiians alike and respectively were to idolize [Cook] as martyr to their own prosperity.”107 Following that, Sahlins quickly moves on to bring Cook back into his story about the Hawaiians’ mytho-praxis by suggesting that Cook’s character and his Island experience made him an acceptable divinity in both worlds but indeed one who “would have died . . . a truly Polynesian death.”108 There is, however, something suspect about these characterizations and when we turn to the considerable fund of narratives available about Cook’s commercial and diplomatic/military interactions with Hawaiians we find alternatives that were excluded by Sahlins, alternatives that permit myth-constructions, if indeed such is to be a dimension of historical anthropology, to be bent in several other directions. One of Obeyesekere’s most telling critiques examines a key incident that precedes Cook’s killing. It is a particular moment out of the many available in stories of Cook’s historical transit that has special significance by offering an emblematic doubt about Cook’s allegedly fair and honest trading style by revealing, both to the actual experience of the Hawaiian chiefs engaged in this transaction and to “us,” what Cook was about. It is a moment that not only does not conform to the apotheosis narrative by either Europeans or Hawaiians but also reveals one of the less attractive features of the free trade to come, which is, in the light of Obeyesekere’s “paradox of civilization,” that despite its not always being “free” it still has to be characterized as that in all cases. Before Cook arrived in Hawaii there had already been indications that he was not always an honest dealer and that when he did not get his way he was, unpredictably and sporadically, capable of throwing manic tantrums in which he dished out, either personally or by his men, unreasonable retaliations in the form of destructions of

107 Sahlins, Islands, 131

108 Islands, 134 64 Islanders’ houses and boats, royal hostage takings, public floggings, mutilations and killings, acts for which some Tongans, for example, had felt justified in plotting his murder.109 This “trail of violence” (Obeyesekere) not only prefigures Cook’s death but indeed surfaces about ten days before that death at an incident involving a temple to the god Kã, the very temple in which, shortly after his arrival on January 17, 1779, Cook had prostrated himself, at the urging of the chief priests, before the deity. A couple of days before his departure on February 4 Cook had ordered the wood (often referred to as “the palings”) from that temple, including effigies of deities, to be dismantled and taken aboard his ship for fire-wood and it was this act for which, according to some Islanders who spoke to Vancouver in 1793, Cook was killed. Obeyesekere rejects the rational normalization of this action by Cook’s loyal eyewitnesses, according to whom all was done with the permission of the priest which in turn sets up the mytho-practical explanation Sahlins attaches to this act according to which the dismantling was in fact part of the Hawaiians’ ritual expectations, something that both the “permission” and the 1793 “native” version can be read to confirm.110 To discount these explanations, Obeyesekere draws on an eyewitness account by John Ledyard, an American marine corporal in Cook’s entourage, in which the story emerges that Cook offered two hatchets for “the wood” – actually a fence surrounding effigies that were part of a sacred burial site – and was refused by the high priest, who was “astonished . . . at the proposal” while “dreading [Cook’s] displeasure which [the priests] saw approaching.” When the priest stood his ground and refused even the addition of a third hatchet, “Cook told them to take it or nothing . . . [and] . . . thrust them into [the priest’s] garment that was folded around him, and left immediately to hasten the execution of his orders. As for Kikinny [the priest Keli’ikea] he turned to some of his menials and made them take the hatchets

109 Obeyesekere, Apotheosis, 29, 34-39; Cf. also the accounts in L. Withey, Voyages of Discovery: Captain Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, 119, 124, 130-131, 328-30 and passim.

110 Apotheosis, 114; Sahlins, Historical Metaphors, 21-2. 65 out of his garment, not touching them himself.”111 To argue about whether this taking of the palings and the refused bargain of the axes were or were not a sacrilege for which Cook was killed, or whether this was or was not the tropical ricorso around which the myth had to turn to initiate the necessary murder on February 14, three days after Cook’s symmetry-disrupting return, or, for that matter, whether this was Cook’s acting out some kind of regret over prostrating himself, all distracts from what Ledyard observed; namely, a forced trade, a forced transaction that involved the destruction of a temple site without permission,112 a destruction from which the Hawaiians could only successfully negotiate finally the return of the effigy of Kã. One of the striking recognitions that emerges from Lynne Withey’s many-layered history of Cook’s voyages113 concerns the rapid learning, by all parties, about value and bargaining as Cooke and his executive officers, resident scientists and crew all engaged in provisioning and even speculative commodity transactions with “the Indians,” whether in Polynesia or the Pacific Northwest. The latter were rapidly became more savvy about prices with every encounter and it is this that transforms this recorded incident into yet another kind of narrative. The “palings” episode can be and has been spun as part of the “‘peaceful’ penetration of the marketplace” story but what “actually happened” before at least one eyewitness can also rather be characterized as a violent motion, an overthrow, in fact, of the market. Ledyard’s memory narrative of this “event” shows the Hawaiians having a lesson, probably not the first, in colonial (and not “free” market) dealing, this one perhaps more serious because it involved “goods” that were,

111 J. Ledyard, Journal, J. Munford, ed., 1963 cited in Obeyesekere, Apotheosis, 116-17

112 Ledyard’s record on this issue has at least as much weight as those accounts cited by Sahlins where various kinds and degrees of permission and even cooperation are recorded. Not only are these other accounts inherent to the kind of “face-saving” line taken by Cook himself in the action that Ledyard observed but arguably even the priests and chiefs also had an interest in not revealing to anyone in their own lower ranks that in effect they had given in to a power move.

113 Withey, Voyages. 66 ostensibly, not even for sale at any price but that were nevertheless appropriated and taken anyway for a token compensation, a kind of bribe forced on the priest, an act of power imposing subordination that is, in turn, conceivably experienced, by any imagination, as defiling. To deny to the Hawaiian priests and chiefs who were present this insight into what was going on because they were allegedly monadically enclosed in their mytho-practical orb is a patently projective and diminishing analytic presumption. I will return in a moment to the Islanders’ capacities for grasping experiences in terms of overlapping and multi-temporal narrative recognitions. Predictably, Sahlins places Ledyard among those who “cannot be trusted” and dismisses his record as “aberrant” from other accounts, especially Lieutenant King’s114 – which latter I personally find fudging and “troubled” to say the least – and therefore only useful to Obeyesekere’s argument, which is that “Cook’s sacrilege was part of a complex pattern of motivation that, in greater or lesser measure, influenced the death of Cook.”115 An empathy project in historical anthropology has to prefer the notion of “a complex pattern of motivation” over a reduction to mytho-practical role-play. To construe this event only or predominantly as significant in narratives that conform to a mythic containment strategy is to push aside other motivations, other rationalities of historical-anthropological interest. At the same time, to leave things as open-ended as Obeyesekere does, particularly with his resorting to language about “social action [being] overdetermined,” is not altogether satisfying either.116 Without becoming further embroiled in the often labyrinthine, probably themselves “overdetermined,” arguments in the Sahlins/Obeyesekere exchange one has to say in defense of a preference for Ledyard’s account that not only does none of the narratives about this

114 Sahlins, ‘Natives’, 174, 268

115 Obeyesekere, Apotheosis, 114

116 Ibid.; in its most productive sense,“overdetermined” refers to the repetition of historical-foundational contradictions and power relationships in any social formation as these are fractally reproduced and experienced in social transactions at all levels and instances. Cf. L. Althusser, ”Contradiction and Overdetermination” in his For Marx, London: Verso 1990, 87-128. 67 event agree with any other – which weakens any perceptions about consensus and “aberration” – but also that it is Ledyard’s narrative that, its own reference to sacrilege aside, brings a recognition, repressed in Sahlins, of coercion, of a conflict of wills in which the Hawaiians were in effect overrun even as they were also brought to a realization of what the direction of the emerging power relationships between Islanders and Europeans was to be. It is in this sense that the several mania, posturings, hostage takings, ill-conceived retaliatory and controlling violences and killings on part of the Europeans, and of Cook in particular, and the animosity, if not rage, and counter- violence by the Islanders that altogether mark the day of Cook’s murder are fulfillments of a number of prefigurations whose sources are not in mythic recognitions but in prior experiences of Europeans’ deployments of force backed by violence. Moreover, the Hawaiians present at the “palings” episode were experiencing not just any force but a selectively blind force, one that revealed in action the Europeans’ capacities for self- deception sufficient to cast doubt on the world to come that the Europeans were simultaneously promising. It should also be noted that this was an action of leave-taking in which the return for repairs was not anticipated; it was in Cook’s mind a moment of final parting, an opportunity for a dropping of pretenses. Sahlins’ unconvincing discounting of the Ledyard narrative is one instance where not only his mytho-practical reading of the Hawaiians’ experience fails us but where we can also begin to gain some insight into what his own narrative intentions are. For Sahlins’ reading to work, the initial appearance of Cook’s sails, of “these extraordinary beings who had broken through the sky beyond the horizon” had to be an interruption, a surprise.117 However, to Islander navigators the “beyond the horizon,” was not only no particular mystery,118 but it is not even at all certain just how one should tell the story of

117 Sahlins, Islands, 137.

118 See the enlightening and occasionally astonishing fieldwork on Islanders’ “world awareness” in T. Gladwin, East is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll,Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970. This analysis would, one presumes, be central to any historical-anthropological account of the Islanders’ experience yet it appears in none of the works I examine here. 68 when the Islanders’ education in the form of “contacts” with a larger world began. There are archeological-historical accounts119 which suggest not only that there were sporadic European encounters, if only, possibly, through circulating stories, since the sixteenth century but also, and more significantly, that the very actions by which the extraordinarily consistent Oceanian “culture,” spanning island groups invisible to each other over an area two thousand miles in latitude and several hundred miles in longitude, had come into being through exploration and conquest, still ongoing when Cook arrived and even after him, among the Islanders themselves. This suggests that the sight of strange sails and what they might portend was part of the latter’s memory- narrative capacities before and after Cook’s transit. And indeed, Sahlins furnishes us with an excellent example of precisely this kind of learning in one story told about King Kamehameha’s clever way of divesting himself of Vancouver’s missionary molestations. His royal highness challenged Vancouver to leap together from the top of Mauna Loa to see whose god would do the saving. Needless to say Vancouver declined the test and allegedly curbed his zeal for conversions thereafter. Sahlins’ reading of this begins on a productive tack: “Hawaiian history often repeats itself, since only the second time is it an event. The first time it is myth.” He draws the suggestive inference that this is Kamehameha’s version of a legendary Paao “who had come, like Vancouver, from invisible lands beyond the horizon to . . . install along with his religion a new line of ruling chiefs, from whom Kamehameha traced his own descent.”120 Without going into the details of the myth -- as Sahlins does, revealing that Kamehameha’s version was, if anything, a more creative adaptation than Sahlins’ somewhat labored and one-dimensional sense of narrative continuity would allow – we can agree with the implication that this myth of genealogical “origins” has historical roots in prior “sails on the horizon” experiences for which it may in part be a mnemonic,

119 e.g. E. Wolf, “Facing Power – Old Insights, New Questions” in his Pathways of Power, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, 396-97, cites works by Earle, Kirch and Spriggs, all absent from Sahlins’ several accounts; cf. also Withey, Voyages, 132-3, 291-2.

120 Historical Metaphors, 9-10 69 compressing historical recognition inside genealogical-mythic narratives to allow for responses to such remembered events when they or events like them happen again. If we accept, for the sake of argument, that the story of Paao was in Kamehameha’s mind – and it should be noted that from the evidence there is no direct sign of this connection which, as far as we can “really” tell, is only in Sahlins’ educated sensorium – then it is a somewhat amusing episode in which we see Kamehameha in polite refusal mode and deploying a rhetorical figure, a metalepsis to be precise, to tell Vancouver that the latter was dealing with someone familiar with the implications of religious conversion and to back off. That is to say he was telling Vancouver that he was not to be approached as a person “without history.” There is yet another dimension of the Hawaiians’ historical experience, their “complex of motivations,” that is largely lost in a mytho-practical “culturalist” mis- reading of the power play acted out in the “palings” episode. That particular moment of forced trade can be read against a much larger narrative about the respective strengths and weaknesses inside both of the two “systems” locked now in irrevocable historical encounter. A significant recognition that emerges from the extended debates about evidence and construals between Sahlins and Obeyesekere is that they make it clear that both “civilizations” were in crisis at that moment, crises to which the encounter itself brought further complications as well as clarifications. Looking at these events from a mode of production perspective we follow Eric Wolf’s sense, which goes beyond Sahlins’ language about systems merely “risking themselves” in action, that “the arrangements of a society become most visible when they are challenged by crisis” and that when “one mode enters into conflict with another it also challenges the fundamental categories that empower its dynamic. Power will then be invoked to assault rival categorical claims.”121 As when the Islanders were forced into complicity with the re-categorization of effigies of their gods as firewood. Arguably, since Cook was the aggressor in this instance, it is his system’s crisis that is best on display. He eventually fell victim to a counterpunch in a power play that he had initiated and his motives for the somewhat strange appropriation of this wood from a temple site and not some other wood to supply his ships are not

121 Wolf, “Facing Power”, 196. 70 clear without a better sense of what his critical pressures were and how his acts in turn were read by members of Hawaiian ruling groups who were themselves, perforce, in crisis-management mode. To get at that we can take up in Lynne Withey’s account of Cook’s odyssey one interesting story line concerning the sociological-ethnographic “analyses” of the Islanders’ social and political arrangements by variously qualified and politically inclined “academic” passengers. The German liberal botanist Forster began with a vision of democratic warriors but, with further observation, had to concede that the Islanders, from New Zealand to Easter Island, had, in the closest European analogue, a feudal system with what was to him a degenerate aristocracy whose downfall would be hastened by European influence; others saw Polish lords and peasants, Greeks and even Vikings, but there too the perception was of a social stratification in which a sacral- genealogical aristocracy ruled over property owners and unpropertied commoners in what were forms recognizable to Europeans from their own history as corporatively organized tribute formations articulating with kin formations and the whole mediated through political-religious institutions and practices.122 The Europeans and the Islanders in return recognized and could engage in a kind of mutually intelligible hermeneutics123 of social and political relations in which their commercial engagement – in “markets” that appeared the instant and wherever the ships anchored – was obviously supported by the acquisition of marketable goods by Hawaiian tribute chiefs with the proper genealogical-sacred markers, pressing to step up their subalterns’ tribute production and pre-emptively controlling access to ad hoc appearances of “the market” just as Cook and his executive staff sought to limit categories of marketable goods and access to trade on their side. The “crisis” on the Islanders’ side was a social formational one insofar as the crisis inherent in the operations of the articulations of kin and tribute with their attendant conflicts between chiefs in rival family lines and operating from different

122 Withey, Voyages, 178-6, 218, 229-31, 251-2, 271.

123 Ibid. and 266-68. 71 power bases and under variable economic limitations124 were managed “mytho- practically” by the constitutional structures in the Makihiki ritual and its various localized and evolving analogs. It is this more-or-less fragile and annually reaffirmed power symmetry that Cook’s arrival, and similar contacts with Spanish, French, American and other “sails on the horizon,” upset in several ways. Not only did the rival parties try to absorb the new arrivals as allies in their internecine and inter-island competitions but in order to do so they had to push tribute production and appropriations to new levels to advance their new interests by having more to trade and to underwrite alliances. One of the themes that runs through Withey’s account is that the needs of Cook’s crew and entourage in almost all instances ran into the limits of local tribute arrangements and prompted changes which in turn placed stress on subaltern Hawaiians and on the arrangements among different kin groups, strata and alliances.125 Kamehameha’s eventual “modernization” of the Makihiki as well as his somewhat pathetic later attempts at acquiring a navy from the Europeans speaks to this restructuring and, in effect, modal re-articulation crisis, a thematic that Sahlins, focused throughout not on relations of production but of commerce in the new “free market” coming to Hawaii, all but ignores.126 Even more interesting and altogether kept from view by Sahlins is the modal crisis that the British generally and Cook in particular were facing. How do we develop an empathy perspective on Cook’s increasingly short-tempered and almost vindictive impulses to express authority which in his last days led him on wild goose chases to recover stolen goods, tramping about and drawn on by Islanders’ disinformation,

124 E. Wolf, Europe,99-9; relevant also is Wolf’s characterization of “civilizations” as “cultural interaction zones pivoted upon a hegemonic tributary society central to each zone. . . [etc]” 82ff. and passim.

125 Withey, Voyages, 119-20, 158-63, 228, 272, 277, 328, 337 and passim.

126 Sahlins, like everyone else who can not think a tribute mode, transfigures tributes into “taxes” which then disappear into what he calls “thesaurized levies.” How “Natives” Think, 217-19. 72 obviously not capable of the equanimity and immobility expected of chiefs or of a god and appearing more and more like a buffoon? What was on his mind when he peremptorily appropriated, take it or leave it, the palings and effigies of a sacred site for a profane purpose and, in return, forced a token and in any case unacceptable payment on the “owners?” The “they will see us as gods” gambit, a pathetic projection by the Europeans from the outset127 and played to with enthusiasm by Cook whenever the chance presented itself, was, contrary to Sahlins, clearly not working and perhaps the rough affect Cook displays in the palings episode is a personal moment of giving up, one that points to an even larger kind of giving up that can, in turn, account for what appears to be a growing breakdown in Cook’s state of mind already some time in the making before coming to pass in his final desperate hours on the beach of Kealakekua Bay. Withey’s nuanced historical account again helps us out in her focus on the “wild goose chase” aspect of Cook’s several “continent hunting”128 expeditions which had only finally shown that there was no Northwest passage and that, almost beyond doubt, there was no new continent left to be found between Melanesia and the Americas, only scatterings of islands, many of them literally tiny deserts in the ocean, whose resources and populations’ productive capacities promised very little of substance to bail out an English imperial social formation whose own complexes of kin and tribute articulations had been creatively challenged and restructured around the emergence of what Schumpeter would come to call the “tax state.” This latter’s appearance in anti-absolutist revolutions between the late seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries had initiated a process of competitive modal restructuring in the Anglo-American world. By Cook’s time this had become a restructuring in which the revolutionary unfolding of an expansive capitalism in the vast continental empire of newly independent North America, threatened to achieve a dynamic modal accommodation with its own modernizing kin and corporatist tribute forms against which European, particularly British, capitalism’s efforts to articulate with a complex array of historically entrenched

127 In Withey, Voyages, 66

128 Voyages, 307, cf chap. 7 and passim; the phrase is by one of Cook’s executive officers, James Clerk, in 1775. 73 and entwined kin and tribute modalities of its own had little chance of competing. Cook may be seen as a representative of a once-successful corporate-mercantile model, parasitic on kin-tribute formations world wide, as it experienced now its “limits to growth” in the empty expanse of the Pacific Ocean, settled by “Indians” living in a condition of, by European standards of the time, irredeemable poverty and nonage. There is no question that the several seafaring scouts – including, besides Cook, Banks, Bligh, Vancouver and others– deployed by the British admiralty and by various corporate sponsors were all aware of what was at stake, of what disappointing, slim pickings they had found. Their celebrated and talked about accounts of exotic voyages concealed a deeper failure, one that, judging by Cook’s behavior seemed to make superfluous any continuing pretense at living a fiction of genuine engagement with “Natives.” There are substantive elements to such a modal articulation narrative that a mytho-practical reading of the “same” events can not begin to approach. At the same time and to be sure, such a narrative about the internal instabilities and crises of the several participants in this global encounter does not necessarily mean to replace the mytho-practical culturalist narrative. On the contrary, the latter is clearly in play in the events and in the aftermath, probably in many ways exactly as Sahlins has it, but it was not in play for everyone, least of all for everyone who counted as an active and “aware” participant. There are, from an empathy perspective, great differences in the way people re-narrate to themselves and to others (and can thereby transform) their respective “interpellations,” can challenge the grammars and logics of what the articulating systems in whose conjunctures and events they have to live demand of them. To reply that the sum of everyone’s experiences in this regard can be captured in an overriding mytho-practical analytic closure where a sense of history is a mere illusion of remembering a past that is also always the future raises the suspicion that this is nothing more than an attempt at claiming a privileged vantage point outside of history, a social- scientific “before time” fulcrum for “achieving a degree of prediction and control” (recalling the Skinner epigraph above) by understanding and manipulating the unconscious syntax moving through the times of “the natives,” which latter can of course, depending on perspective, include all of us. 74 As the Cook/Lono experience clearly demonstrates, events are narrative manifolds in the action itself that can not be fully captured by single-minded master narratives, by after-the-fact recognitions of “process” or of “structures of the conjuncture.” They are manifolds that demand to be recognized in the action even as they are retold and illuminated by differently synthesized memory and conceptual accounts to which even “mythic” narratives can be accommodated in the form, not of closures but of possible openings. In this regard one has to agree with Obeyesekere’s perception that “there is no need to deny ‘mythopoetic thought,’ but to affirm that the world of myth is not closed.”129 It is so simple a step really and one that is fully visible in the history of myth itself. At the distant early end of our “own” civilizational timescape we have a moment in the fifth century BCE when “Historiography took the Greeks by surprise,”130 when it offered a way out of the collapsing duplexities, mis-recognitions and self-contradictions of mytho-practical living;131 while at the near end, we have Derrida reading Lévi-Strauss to tell us that “The discourse on the acentric structure that myth itself is cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center.”132 The paradox is that in paying attention to the mythic formations, figures and languages of historical peoples we may only be imagining that we are decoding the paradigms of the latter’s most fundamental (and by implication always manipulable) motivations when in fact we are encountering people’s duplexities, their “bicephalic” capacities for “constructing a dialogue between cohesion and its opposition within the same mythic structure.”133

129 Apotheosis, 175.

130 A. Momigliano, The Development of Greek Biography, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993, 41

131 M. Detienne, The Creation of Mythology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986, 45-48 and passim. This extraordinary book deserves separate discussion in far greater detail than I could hope to give it here.

132 “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in his Writing and Difference, London: Routlege, 1978, 286

133 Detienne, Mythology, 122. “More than ever the Greek holds his two heads high as the sign of his obvious superiority over 75 From this perspective Cook’s death may not have figured the Makihiki at all but rather the collapse, after an accumulation of symmetry breaks, of this constitutional ritual’s capacities to manage the system’s mounting crises. The point, from this book’s perspective, is that myths, to manage a homeostastic unfolding of order and resistance can not avoid releasing variants, counter-myths, revitalizations and refigurations even into the present. Myths perpetually, even now, demand that actions and the ideations in their name be read against historical and other mnemonic formulations. For example I object below, in chapter eleven, to an analytical projection of the Medea myth onto ethnographic materials in ways that I consider to be a mis-recognizing imposition of a politically tendentious, that is to say a pseudo- empathic and yet also individually isolating and thereby system-exonerating reading of that myth – which, one notes, is not even in the narrative universe of these particular historical-anthropological subjects! Worse, it is a debased, that is to say diminished version of the Medea corpus that can not stand up to, and in fact obscures, the conflicting emplotments and figural qualities of the several “classical” variants or, for that matter, of those modern re-narrations that retain the fully rebellious duplexities that the Medea-construct arguably has as its main reason for being told or acted out, that is to say, as its ingress into historical experience in the first place.134

V

Sahlins deploys a vast erudition to demonstrate, often awkwardly, that a historically manifest but esoterically guarded and therefore also invisible mythic rule explains why Cook died when he did and what his death as the god Lono “really” meant for the Hawaiians. Several of his ethnographic code-breakings of manifestations of gendering, sexuality, tabus, food etiquette, etc. are all enlightening, if occasionally

the monocephalous crowd.” Ibid.

134Of C. Wolf, Medea: A Modern Retelling, New York: Doubleday, 1998; the ethnography is by N. Scheper-Hughes’ Death Without Weeping, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992 76 forced and hard to credit. However when he has to subsume, push aside, discount or ignore outright even his own (and Obeyesekere’s and Ledyard’s and others’) anomalous “small narratives” – my conscious adaptation (see also chapter eleven) of Lyotard’s idea of petits récits135 – that do not directly work for him, then he runs afoul of a narrative- critical conception of historical anthropology. To begin with, he evidently can not avoid his own need for narratives that are less than “myth” to clarify the Hawaiians’ capacity to link the historical “metaphors” with the mythical “realities.” For example, to explain Kamehameha’s response to Vancouver’s proselytizing, Sahlins refers to the former’s “legendary allusion” to Paao. It turns out that Sahlins needs to invoke Hawaiians’ “folklore” for his mytho-practical model to work. After the passings of the gods, of the demi-gods, the lizards, the beast gods and “the miraculous little people” come the heroes, the transcendentally connected direct ancestors of the living ruling lineages whose entry into historical times is in “legends” and “epic tales” that are the remembered and transmitted entitlements to lineage and class memberships among the living.136 At what point “myths” end and “legends” begin in “Hawaiian lore” (i.e., in Hawaiian teachings – his choice of language for yet other narratives) he leaves unclear but no matter since the important point is that even by his own account, mytho-praxis is in all cases dependent on and subject to the dialectics of a poesis of lesser narratives, petits récits, whose dialectics grow out of not just myths but of varieties of “lore,” of experimental (or not) projections, epistemologies open to narrative re-inventions (Kalakaua’s song to the “royal liquid”!)137 that speak, in some

135 J.-F. Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1984, 60ff. These “small narratives” are not to be perceived as mere inventions (still contained in systems) but as paralogy, as “illogically logical” disruptions of still-systematized and “permitted” bricolage. See also the interesting remarks by D. Maybury-Lewis, “Science or Bricolage?” in E.N. and T. Hayes eds., Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970, 162-3.

136 Sahlins, Historical Metaphors, 15-17.

137 Sahlins, Islands, 11-12. 77 configurations, only to those identified by genealogical and social class markers, and in other configurations they do not speak at all, or if they do then in critical rhetorical subversions. Nor would one expect them to speak the same way in any given environment since different social formations require different timings, different mnemonic and experiential narratives that move at different and yet confluent, interactive (or not) speeds. One problem that the elevation of a science of narrative- devouring mytho-praxis creates is that we lose sight of the various “lesser” narratives, including histories, and thereby lose touch with the narrative-poetic capacities that those who are presumably below the ruling strata of cultural hegemons deploy for their creative engagements with the worlds they experience. Much of the present book examines in terms of several historical cases this problem of a narrative class division between hegemons controlling myths and the subaltern having only mere “stories” (Darnton: “peasants tell tales”), between so-called high and low cultures. Having opened the door to a recognition that mytho-practical enactments are dependent on linear genealogical succession narratives whose collective arrival in the present requires transitions from mythic to other narrative forms in order to address different speeds and conjunctures of temporal devolutions, Sahlins closes that opening immediately. Adapting Pocock’s “The larger coordination subsumes the less,” he perceives (or draws, rather) a dividing line within Islander “culture” between those, on one hand, who effectively “have” historical-narrative forms to underwrite their membership in the mytho-practical institutions and, on the other, those without. Some among the subaltern still cling to the ledges of historical presence by telling their personal narratives in the time frames of the doings of kings, but “at the extreme, the people verge on ‘historylessness.’ . . . Having lost control of their own social reproduction . . . the people are left without an historical appreciation of the main cultural categories . . . For them, the culture is mostly lived – in practice and in habitus . . . an unconscious mastery of the system . . . together with the homespun concepts of the good [!] that allow them to improvise daily activities . . .”138 And so on. This so-called habitus, allowing “them” the illusion of freedom in “homespun”

138 Sahlins, Islands, 51 78 values for “improvisation,” is a patronizing Romanticism and a mis-recognition that ascribes to the discourses of the subaltern a kind of cozy “talk story” level of narrative inconsequentiality lived in a safe space of “ordinariness” that is somehow immune against recognizing, indeed experiencing, the daily violences of systemic and historical, and not just personal or communal, self-contradictions and -betrayals. It presumes there is in the life of the subaltern the luxury of an “unconscious mastery” that is somehow unpressured when in fact any subaltern “mastery” has to include coming to terms with the duplexity of precisely such an aristocratic projection into circumstances that are never clear of the daily discomforts of relative poverty and of the conscious pain of always being only free to choose a lesser evil. Nor can this negative empowerment ever be such that we could presume to talk of mastery, even when pragmatic skills and competence are in evidence, because all is scheduled to be consumed by the instrumental means underwritten by the master narratives that are “the larger coordination.” Here it begs the question whether the “main cultural categories” are ever absent from the allegedly “spontaneous” social self-reproductions by those being forced actually to live in the absurd condition an “intentionless invention of regulated improvisation.” (Bourdieu cited by Sahlins) It seems unthinkable that people’s actual capacities to narrate to themselves how they are able to live with their recognitions and experiences of such brutal solecisms should not themselves be a subject for analysis and should not figure among the “main cultural categories.” The idea that the “level of the pragmatic and matter-of-fact” in the daily experience of “ordinary” Hawaiians was somehow exempt from cultural-historical remembering because it did not figure in that narrowly defined spectrum of myth/legend narratives to which present analysts like Sahlins limit the “higher” mnemonic capacities is obviously flawed. It is predicated on an overestimation of the intellectual qualities of such myth- and legend-bound histories – among whose functions we find, in Eric Wolf’s understanding of the mythic dimensions of culture,139 the creation of spaces for “necessary” violence that yet also need to take place beneath and invisible to intellectual or other recognition. The persistent narrative-modal class division between Great and Little Traditions carries

139 See the following chapter. 79 forward, first, an inadequate conceptualization of the burdens that systems of surplus extraction and class relations place on“ordinary life” (a burdening in fact distributed through and recognizable in experiences at all social levels), and secondly, an inadequate appreciation of the means at various people’s disposal to update, re-figure narratively and re-strategize their location in and their experience of the articulations that make up their social formation, especially as the latter unfolds in time and in available memory narratives of different kinds, different speeds and time-frames, moving in turn through infinitely interactive circulations and transformations that defy any scientistic taxonomies of pairings of “differences,” of Propp’s thirty-one functions distributed in seven spheres of action, of mythemes, and of other such logicalist substantivisms. To be sure, there is also a “people’s code” in Sahlins’ version of anthropological history’s dualistic, high and low, Great and Little Tradition culture constructions. He sees two separate narrative classes corresponding to a dualistic, rulers and ruled, model of society in which “the people’s” concerns are also about family and kin-community events. However, their narratives are figured as “talk story,” as a kind of locally significant, never-ending gossip about present or recent family re-configurations with dualities of its own but never reaching beyond “the recitation of the quotidian and mundane.” In such a construction of subaltern epistemology there is no need for an analytical awareness and such discourses as there are among the subaltern become a kind of empty medium whose message is simply the illusion of continuity as captured by daily acts of self-“recitation.” What he calls “the people’s gossip” only apes mytho- practice when it “often retails enchanted happenings as fabulous as those of myth” but these amount to nothing more than a kind of “myth of everyday life” embellishment to “the practical activities and current annals of the people.”140 One would have liked to have an example or two of such “annals” or indeed of moments of such “retailing” (odd word choices both) but the point is clear enough in this projective ascription of “how ‘natives’ think.” The thoughts of the subaltern among

140 Sahlins, Islands, 52; or “the short and simple annals of the poor,” 49. 80 “the natives” are not relevant to the analytics of a ruling mytho-praxis. And even that could be a tolerable, if unsavory, analytical position were it not then for the further implication that this model extends then to a fundamental conceptualization of what Sahlins chooses to call “historical anthropology” which has nothing to do either with an empathic reconstruction of historical persons’ experiences nor with the complexity of available narrative strategies that are evidently themselves never containable in just “a culture” alone; it aims instead at understanding how a substantivist illusion like “culture” can anthropomorphically “order” (?) events and conversely, “how, in that process[?] culture is reordered.” This takes us back to a realm of specious circularities, to an empty enclosure built on a premise that itself runs afoul of Russell’s paradox when it claims that the suffering of human experience arises from our having “to act at once in relationship to each other and in a world that has its own relationships.”141 This is an unacceptably disingenuous, even sly formulation that elevates to primary concern a presumption of a kind of theologically relevant universal “suffering” arising from a generalized lack of world control. How are human relationships not part of the world’s “own” relationships that allegedly stand separate from and in opposition to the human? And why would one assume that the “folk narrative” qualities of everyday discourse would not find ways to address the pains and contradictions not of an “intractable” world as such but specifically of having to live in and negotiate one’s passage through “realized” and hierarchizing master-narrative systems saturating historically present social relations and purporting to be able to absorb and contain unequal relationships, dispossession, ineffable duplexities, selective silencings, overt and covert violences, expulsions, sacrifices, forced participations in crimes, forced loans, forced sex, repugnant collaborations of all kinds, and much else besides. Where is the Romantics’ unpressured subaltern world of experience? The reassuring distinction Sahlins draws is that only elites are in control of the overriding, ruling myths, that the “cultural consciousness objectified in historical genres among the elite” is for the subaltern’s “unreflected mastery of . . . precepts” merely an

141 Sahlins, Historical Metaphors, vii. 81 “inscription in habitus, as opposed to its objectification as mythopoetics.”142 He means to encourage a move by historians to be less interested in what actually happened and turn toward “indigenous schemes of cosmological importance.”143 The persistent, implicitly substantivist and, again, anthropomorphizing idea that ”cultures risk themselves” in elite action alone and are duly rewritten by elites in an essentially homeostatic “process” and that that constitutes something called “cultural change” and that that in turn should be the primary focus for anthropological history seems an altogether arid pursuit and begs the “qui bono” question. From an empathic, narrative- critical perspective, a mindfulness for myths-in-operation is a significant preoccupation but to elevate that task to some kind of primacy of an “anthropology of history” that is to be “a structural, historical anthropology,” where a study of “symbolic action” becomes “the situational sociology of cultural categories,”144 can only be read as itself a reaching for mytho-poetic investiture (or investment) in a controlling science that claims to have cut through the confusions of distracting narrative complexities and understood “the being of structure in history and as history.”145 For anyone to claim to have searched for and found the “being of” anything raises some warning flags; it is recognizable, after Quine, as an academic-courtier move, a promise of controls in a world view where to be is to be a variable, an option for manipulation. This drawing of a line between qualitatively and therefore analytically unequal narrative genres operating at different social levels not only pushes a lot of memory- narratives out of contention for historical significance but, something to take note of, it also sets up a mistaken sense of an absence of “ little narrative” capacities at the upper end of the social scale which clearly, by Sahlins’ own evidence noted above in Kamehameha’s “legendary allusion,” is not the case. It is moreover a selection principle that means to diminish the significance of historians’ deployments of all sorts of “little

142 Islands, 52, 53.

143 Islands, 76.

144 Islands, 72, 152.

145 Islands, 145. 82 narratives” that fill and are to a considerable extent the very stuff of historical narratives; in this sense, histories themselves are nothing more than “little historical narratives” whose objects never just “are” or hold still and maintain their shapes long enough ever to be captured in any moments that allow anyone, Sahlins included, to make a claim of understanding their “being.” We have already perceived, in the difference between his and Obeyesekere’s readings of the “palings” episode, Sahlins’ dependence on a forced consensus among some narratives by which he means to exclude other narratives from the anthropological-historical record that counts. Moreover, it is evident from such comprehensive professional histories as Withey’s tracing of Cook’s voyages, that the best historical narratives are many-dimensional and built throughout on many “little narrative” constructs, from genealogies to legends, to namings and identity assumptions, to epistolary reports, to mutual (i.e., Islanders’ and Europeans’) “intelligence” assessments, to comparative ethnographic accountings, etc. etc. , among which, and this is the fun of writing histories, one gets, after an assessment of evidentiary qualities and contingencies, to choose and weigh narrative genres, figures, emplotments, to tell the story one thinks ought to be tested against other possible stories or, more formally, other histories – including the ones from which one lifted these “little narratives” in the first place. In the case of Withey’s history, one can only note with agreement her decision to place emphasis on the multiplicity of narratives unleashed by Cook’s voyages, to let them tell their versions of an enterprise whose disappointing, chilling tenor becomes only more visible then in Withey’s creative advancing of a less visible narrative counterpoint, a worrisome undertone coming from these stories, that adds a different and sobering foreshadowing to the European age of democratic revolution at that conjunctural moment of its world-systemic self-recognition. Her synthesis constitutes a possible, if never the only, master narrative in a complex weave of “little narratives” which latter could even be said to be the point of Cook’s voyages themselves. From the efforts by the admiralty to confiscate and classify the accounts of the Forsters and the others who kept diaries and notes146 to the several competitions for

146 Withey, Voyages, 313 83 primacy in publication, for credibility and distribution, for freedom from censorship, Withey pays close attention to all of it and it is these battles “in the fact” for narrative “control” and “freedom” that then constitutes the contexts in which the Cook/Lono apotheosis narratives can be projected back into the historically evolving affairs between Islanders and Europeans where they live on to become talking points for mutual recognitions and diplomatic engagement, however unequal and disingenuous these latter may have been – and still are.147 It is the deployment of a contextually “overdetermined” manifold of “little narratives” to gain this, until Withey’s account, unrecognized master narrative about the experience of the limits of growth by, actually, both empires, the Europeans’ and the Polynesians’, in the very acts of their mutual discovery – a narrative that by the way can absorb Sahlins’ story without any harm to either – that altogether makes what Withey has to tell us about the world that contains, and indeed “explains,” Cook’s murder more satisfying, which is to say more open-ended, something that Sahlins’ erudite display of a mythic object fitted for a scholastic, anthropological-historical science of “being” is not. Can Withey’s history be bent into one of Hayden White’s emplotments? Into satire perhaps, insofar as Cook was sacrificed to “both worlds,” to both mythic constructs. It is a somewhat edifying and useful perspective but one that is also unfair since her history also carries forward several “transcultural,” one is tempted to say universal, recognitions by means of many “little narratives” that can by no means be exhausted in any master employment.The scientific contribution of a narrative-critical historical anthropology is precisely to disturb and deny the symmetries of an imaginative structuration of extant mythic materials that claims some final understanding. The intention is to gain a greater appreciation for narrative social equality by sharpening one’s capacities to recognize and illuminate the logical, structural and figural strategies, what Lyotard calls the paralogical strategies, of all the narratives in play at any moment in which“times before” are recollected and claim recognition; and to come to some recognition, in turn, of these narratives’ implications for our collective

0 Withey, Voyages, 448-58; my reference here is to the, once again, failure of native Hawaiians to gain, in the spring of 2006, full legal recognition by the U.S. Congress. 84 and individual understandings of and further thoughts about what we was going on and what historical people thought they were doing. It was my sense following from this why one has to set forth “fairy tales” as a heading for this collection of essays. I do not mean “folk tales,” a designation I try to avoid more or less successfully because of the class assignment it automatically makes and because of some other (Volk-related) undertones besides. I mean to draw on exactly what the term “fairy tales” says: “little narrative” fantasies about a past time (or a future time, a once upon a time – any time but not now) in which powers, violences, betrayals, ironies, exclusions, good and ill will, abductions, unequal bargains, abandoned children, etc. etc. abound and are interwoven with the conceptual and pragmatic efficiencies of magic, and all told by special, almost invisible, “little people.” That such little people exist at all social levels (and not just as chambermaids and cooks)148 and that their narratives circulate through the social and cultural gaps and contest the hegemony of mytho-practical performances needs to be made clearer. We have already heard Sahlins speaking for a venerable model of Great and Little Traditions within “cultures,” distinguishing between elite mytho-praxis and commoners’ unreflexive and mechanical “spontaneities” in the habitus. To assume that the latter requires, merely for the sake of dressing up humdrum quotidinneté, the commercial reproduction (“retailing”?) of “enchanted happenings” is itself a shortfall of the imagination, a failure to recognize that everyone, high and low, suffers under the burdens of compelled social performances in the everyday, and that it is the analytical, inventive and resistant capacities of little narratives, the daily “symmetry breaks” they provide that make it all bearable (up to a point – an aspect to keep in mind) or that increasingly expose what is, by a possibly incremental and narratively construed consensus, unlivable and requiring of action. The “little narratives” of “enchanted happenings” are of interest to an empathic historical project because, as is obvious to anyone who has read them in venues other than

148 See part 2 below, passim; that “fairy tales” are also told in other than “peasant” or “folk” settings is evident in Withey’s Voyages, passim, where fantastic projections about the “giants of Patagonia,” say, or the various political, ethnic and racial fantasies about the Islanders by serious scientific observers provide intriguing examples. 85 “children’s” editions, they can be very close to the edge of what historical peoples at different locations in their social formation are experiencing, close to the edge of their effective imaginations, the latter often pushed to the limit in environments of various degrees of disempowerment, of physical and psychological violences, and of evident human and environmental destruction. There has been during the last three decades or so an increasingly visible interest among historians of the Annales school, the German and Austrian explorers of Alltagsgeschichte, and numerous others, in the vast collections, still ongoing, of popular oral and literary stories, songs and games and “fairy tales.” Some of these I take up in Part Two below but it seems fitting to conclude here by pointing briefly to a particular feature of this growing body of work, where one finds a troubling effort at narrative containment that threatens to forestall a genuinely fruitful consideration of what such tales, and indeed what a narrative-critical approach to them, might offer. If we look at one of the significant contributions, Maria Tatar’s The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales149 we find a kind of short-circuiting of exactly what it is that “little narratives” (fairy tales included) can do. She pays due regard to what she thinks the Grimms’ (and others’) tales can contribute to a sort of general description of “the hard facts” of life among the “German” and other “folk” but there is never any but the most cursory nod to actual historical social circumstances and the tales are simply detached from whatever historically, and not just time-environmentally, specific “hard facts” they may have been speaking to at the time and place of their recording. She has a more universalistic perception of where “the hard facts” reside and what fairy tales can tell us about how, in this case, subaltern historical Germans experienced them. Even though she claims in her preface Robert Darnton as her historical mentor who taught her to see fairy tales as historical documents (a position I obviously share and explore in this book) her search is not to investigate the possible historical conjunctures and experiences to which any particular telling of a tale might speak but is rather to separate out the “realistic” from the fantastic and to reduce the social content of the tales to a kind of timeless historical

149 Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989 86 time where we find “the social stratification of a feudal society”150 which may then be, in turn, represented by her unacceptably simple notions about such peasant practices as inheritance and barter. Her treatment is very reminiscent, in fact, of the several “feudal” fantasies by which Cook’s learned entourage conceptualized “the folk” of the Pacific islands. If there is a historical moment in her narrative then it is in her interest in understanding what it means that the tales were transcribed by the Grimms to satisfy the “tastes of the German audience.” This points to a historical narrative option about the Grimms’ unintentional, i.e., dialectical, implication in German cultural history, an option which Tatar hints at but does not take up. Simply stated, she occasionally perceives that the fairy tales were active in the imaginations of adults as much as of children and played some role in a larger cultural-historical framework. What made them transcribable to an audience of children in the first place was the effectual similarity, from an “adult” or elevated social position, of social nonage that the latter shared with the “folk” who had, it was assumed then and now, been the “original” carriers of and audience for “the tradition.” The transformation of themes of victimization and revenge into – through the Grimms’ and others’ editing – stories of transgression and punishment, wilfulness and obedience, childish innocence and parental wisdom may be said to have contributed, in the course of the nineteenth century, to an effectual infantilization of parts of the German middle class that became the primary consumer of the Grimms’ collection.151 She does not carry through on this and, one notes in passing, that even though she is sure to caution against a “national character” reading of her work it does have that effect, nevertheless, when she de- historicizes German culture even as it is repeatedly identified as “German.”152 She wants to claim history even as she buries it in a particular, psycho-biological ground of culture. Tatar is concerned with “cultural codes and rules of conduct [rather] than with

150 Ibid.

151 Tatar, Hard Facts,191-2

152 Hard Facts, 63, 190 and passim 87 social and economic realities.”153 – as if the two were not connected. It is a reductive capturing of “fairy tales” as cultural and not historical objects whose analytical harvest, following a strategy also recognizable in Sahlins’ mytho-poetic containment of history inside anthropology, is less than impressive. She begins by asserting that “Any attempt to unearth the hidden meaning [?] of fairy tales is bound to fail unless [!] it is preceded by a rigorous, if not exhaustive analysis of a tale type and its variants.”154 Her “tale type” reference is to the so-called Finnish school’s (Stith Thompson’a and Anti Aarne’s) massive fairy tale motif index, growing since the early twentieth century, where one gains, as she indicates, the kind of feelings of possessing authoritative scientific controls that only a taxonomic-paradigmatic construct can provide. Even though it has become a kind of site of genuflection, the Aarne-Thompson “index of tale types” is difficult to describe and its utility, beyond offering cross-referencing and some kinds of scanning mechanism, is limited because the namings of and assigments to type are arguable in most cases, to say the least; it seems a circular, self-referential and hierarchizing enterprise that sets up distinctions between examples of its invented “types” and their “variants” and “corrupt texts” and so forth. To argue about where tales “belong” on the index or to distinguish “essentials from random embellishments,” as Tatar wants to do155 in fact misses the whole point of the creative historical moment of each tale’s tellings, re- tellings, refigurations, variances-in-situ etc. I develop a more extensive discussion of this interesting development in “folklore” studies in the title essay in part two below. Tatar goes on to admit that “even with the assistance of archetypal forms” she still finds difficult the task she has set for herself, which is “to determine which aspects of a fairy tale are culture bound and which elements function as part of its universal timeless structure.”156 It seems a scholastic errand to make these kinds of determinations, especially

153 Hard Facts, 48

154 Hard Facts, 43

155 Ibid.

156 Hard Facts, 47 88 when, between the “culture bound” (always exonerative) and the “universal timeless structure” (ditto), there is no longer a space for the skeptical disruptions and accusations of historical or, for that matter, of fairy tale narratives. Instead, the Grimms’ tales are further de-historicized as they become merely the German version of universal experiences of children learning as they become “acculturated” to steer between impotence and omnipotence and to figure these in terms of transgression and punishment. Tatar converts what appear as social facts in the tales to universal psychic facts and her ambition is “to move from the folklore of the fairy tales to the folklore of the human mind.”157 She draws on Ruth Benedict’s ethnographic recognition that there may be tales about child abandonment in societies that have no child abandonment; she does this however to make the logically unwarranted claim that fairy tales do not speak to actual social institutions but to, among other things, a universal experience of child resentments arising from impotence under parental authority.158 Missing from that of course is the narrative-critical and empathic move that the present book advocates which would be to examine the possibility that such an apparent disjuncture between social and narrative realities does not automatically point to a fairy tale figuration of a universal bio-social or familial “abandonment” as one might “naturally” figure it, but that it could instead require us to look into the possibility of experiences of social- formational and effectively, metonymically, figured abandonments that are not immediately, “objectively,” visible as “child abandonment.” It is significant that in her depictions throughout of family conflicts in the tales there are no class conflicts, only naturalized conflicts among family members, generations, the naturally or culturally favored and disfavored etc. It is no surprise then when she moves to the structuralizations of Jakobson and Propp whose iconic representations worked out from the historically naive premise that fairy tales were the limited, figuratively and symbolically restricted early “stages” of more highly evolved and individualized modern fictional forms. In this view fairy tales are an indelible mark of narrative nonage, of in effect having no histories, of having only

157 Hard Facts, 57

158 Hard Facts, 60 89 a few (Propp: only one) fundamental emplotments to attain purely psychological satisfactions. This argument – that the tellers of fairy tales were allegedly not free to invent and were bound to please the simple expectations (the habitus, undoubtedly) of their audiences – permits reductionist “typing” simplifications that in turn authorize further structuralist pretensions (Tatar cites Greimas). In other words, the tellers produce variants from a very limited emplotment menu because they are bound to satisfying audiences of childlike, “low culture” adults, who are presumed to be, like children, still wrestling with impotence and resentment. Tatar shares this projective “high culture” attitude – which I would think is a mistake when held against ethnographic observations of actual moments of telling – 159 in which Propp’s notion of a polygenesis of universal emplotments and motifs in fairy tales assists in a further “collectivizing” structuralization of “folk art” as “the socialized sections of mental culture” (Jakobson). One can call what Tatar is doing “mythism,” a Lévi-Straussian term pointing at an extension of the decoding of the “mythic” to the analysis of all narrative forms as, in the words of one cultural engineering enthusiast, the means to access “the very mechanism of tradition.”160 Her reading of the Grimms’ tales links certain fairy tale motifs, all duly arranged in such “structuralist” dualisms as impotence-omnipotence, child-parent, legitimate-illegitimate, transgression- punishment, authority-obedience, etc., with what are in effect presumed to be the universal and, one is tempted to say, the predominantly bio-social dimensions of experiencing family life. Having thus separated out “the universal” she is then free to reintroduce the “culture bound” peculiarities expressed in the fairy tales as the “national” tradition, for which it is then in turn easier to draw up a blueprint to render the culturalist decoding of the tales as they operate in a conception-explanation of “socialization,” of having identified for access the socialized sections, the “mechanism,”

159 See my discussion of Linda Degh in Part Two.

160 F. Da Silva, Metamorphosis: The Dynamics of Symbolism in European Fairy Tales, New York: Peter Lang, 2002, 5 90 of mental culture.161 There are a number of problems with such a return of the petits récits of fairy tales to “mythicist” enclosure, to what Tatar celebrates as the “classic balance and symmetry” in the “movement from victimization to retaliation.” (!) Fairy tales that were included by the Grimms, for their reasons, in a collection of what they called “Märchen” (little stories), but that yet do not, indeed can not, conform to the requirements of Tatar’s version of bio-social “mythism,” those she simply writes out of the picture by calling them something else, like “a vision of burlesque anarchy,” or degrading them to being in “the realm of the comic folk tale rather than the classic fairy tale.”162 Suddenly it is only the “classic” fairy tales that concern her. Rather than confront the possibilities that not only were the story tellers free to tell stories that were not just confined to the narrow patterns allegedly demanded by simple “folk” audiences, but that they were also in fact capable of mnemonic narratives that were meant to be symmetry breaks, told against easy and obvious “redemption” or revenge narratives that might, in the minds of specific tellers and their transcribers and under specific historical circumstances, not have been appropriate or illuminating, Tatar instead resorts to an evasive “subset” or “genre” reshuffling strategy where obvious references to irrational violences and desperate deaths become mere “slapstick,” seeking only then to elicit laughter and requiring no further thought. Like Sahlins, Tatar rules unruly “little narratives,” the historically present tellings that yet can not fit, out of order and therefore of no concern. As is often the case with culturalists, their stories end when they should begin and that is because the analytical object is always a vision of some before-time, operating outside of history, seeking always to be above or beyond history, where the latter is somehow reducible to only serving as the descriptive, primitively contextual medium or vehicle for

161 Even though Propp’s “victim” and “seeker” heroes seem to appear in both Russian and German tales, Tatar does make a point of saying that “it is easy to show, on a statistical basis, that the Grimms’ collection has a disproportionately large number of oppressed heroes, while Russian collections tend to favor dragon slayers.” and “German fairy tales . . . repeatedly show us heroes in the role of victim.” Hard Facts, 63, 182

162 Hard Facts, 182-3 91 an, always necessarily projected and possibly pathological, anamnesis. Such a position is simply not satisfying to a narrative-critical historical anthropology. Aristotle was completely wrong to elevate the poet-philosopher above the historian because the latter allegedly only “relates what has happened,” the “facts,” while the former is concerned with “what could happen,” “universals.”163 From a narrative- critical perspective such a putting of historians in an inferior place is tendentiously false since it ignores that the universal does not cease to be present, once something has happened, in every account of what that latter was; historians have to be concerned above all with “what could have happened,” a question that incorporates the problems of what could happen. From this one has to assume – as I warm up ever more to the possibility for critique released by Russell’s paradox – that historians, if nothing else, would have to be included then among those poet-philosophers practicing philosophical anthropology. This means they then also have to carry an ethical burden of challenging anyone’s claim to be relating the past with a spectrum of alternative counter-narratives that demonstrate that something else could as plausibly have happened, something that can even include and absorb what was previously thought to have happened – and they do so not to “relativize” for its own sake but to challenge the inevitable claims to power that follow on, as the name implies, master narratives. To grasp and engage historical experiences empathically requires above all a degree of sophistication in understanding and gauging the qualities of the historically available memory narratives by which people construe and experience their lives and their social relations while also observing the lives and relations of others. It does not serve to approach such narratives with prejudicial notions of what to expect from forms (myths, fairy tales, histories) already deemed classified and typified and “understood” and placed in hierarchical, classical, high and low, mytho-practical or other spurious typologies, taxonomies, categorizations and orders of significance. Memory-narrative mental powers, if we recall Edelman, are pre-human, universal and textual, i.e., timed experiences are an evolutionary universal, reinscribed in ever new synthetic

163 The Poetics, Transl. By P. Epps, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1942, 18 92 combinations, and in this sense there can not be, by definition, people without history. All people have multi-level and multiply-figured memory texts capable of both reinforcing and disturbing the ostensibly inherited “cultural” order. Rather than marking the bounds of “history” as a unique kind of memory narrative, one that claims to rely only on “facts” and that is therefore required to separate itself from the “enchanted happenings” of both myths and fairy tales, historians would perhaps do better to consider joining a more interdisciplinary enterprise, a historical anthropology capable of apprehending manifold historical “objects” by means of variable narrative constructions about both extensional and intensional “factualities,” none of which can exhaust such objects’ historicity because none controls the different temporal dimensions through which historical objects move in their specific narrative appearances. It has long been a tradition among historians to “dispel myths” and it is in this latter regard that scientific histories’ capacities are, ideally and perhaps ironically, better aligned with the paralogical powers of “little narratives” – of which fairy tales, in their historical moments as possible anti-mythic myth fragments, are only one example. All of the little narrative forms (including, from our perspective, actual historical realizations of myths) are capable of refiguring the synthetic (or not) relationships among different time durations, capable of breaking yet other narratives out of their mythic enclosures, out of legends, epics, metahistories, theologies, world systems theories, ideologies, criminal cover-ups, managerial and developmental evangelisms, etc., and their best use is to help us break free of the determinations and coercions of hegemonic formations that claim the high ground of science and, therefore, of an ethically “best knowledge” for action. To elaborate such a historical social science requires recognizing the intrinsic worth of a broadly inclusive spectrum of narrative forms and figures, their qualities and implications, including their limitations and failures as well as their insightful and paralogical capacities, their capacities to deploy and realize figures, at perceptible conjunctural-historical moments, that properly destabilize the logically and grammatically permissible constructs that are yet somehow also unlivable and therefore unspeakable, except in terms of some some fiction of once upon a time.

93 PART 1: MYTHS

2.Figurations in Historical Anthropology: Two Kinds of Narrative about the Long Duration Provenances of the Holocaust

I presented an earlier version of this essay at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Francisco in 1996. It is a sequel to my contribution to the special issue of the journal Focaal (26/27:1996) on Historical Anthropology: The Unwaged Debate in which I consider the relative analytical values of two fundamentally different kinds of relationships possible between Anthropology and History. An edited and in places altered version of that essay appears under the title "Dark Events and Lynching Scenes in the Collective Memory etc." in J. Scott and N. Bhatt, eds., Agrarian Studies, New Haven, Yale University Press 2001. In it I framed an alternative Holocaust "provenance narrative" in terms of a sense of interdisciplinarity whose premise was that, like all of the social and cultural " sciences," both History and Anthropology are internally divided between opposing "interdisciplinary" camps. On one hand I describe there what I term "anthropological historians," i.e., logician-grammarians, going for code-breaking and culture- controlling symbolic actionist paradigms operating in essentially closed models where competent actors simply perform their cultures; on the other hand I envision and feel drawn to approaches by "historical anthropologists," analytical rhetoricians working to undermine any desire for fixed and stable determinations of meaning and of paradigmatic ascription by means of their more resistant, vigilant and ultimately interminable exposure of the ambiguities of meaning possible in always open-ended and mutually articulating culture systems where the class, gender and other locations of ostensibly competent performers add a second, sometimes unconscious, layer of destabilizing and counter-performative, i.e., power-challenging, readings. It is this latter perspective that, by expanding our understanding to include dimensions of duplexity, displacement, repression and annihilation in cultural performances, adds considerably to my sense of what constitutes satisfying analysis. It is this added analytical faculty of apprehending metonymic displacements in the historical-cultural 94 process that informs my proposed long duration narrative in the 1996 essay of the role that the operations of inheritance and dispossession play in the eventual descent of Austro-German society into Holocaust. In this sequel, I seek to clarify further the differences between the approaches of anthropological history and historical anthropology by drawing Norbert Elias’ and others’ versions of a “figuration” concept into the debate and by finding moments where the two approaches may be able to overcome their inherent antagonism.

The danger of transforming consequences into their own causes dogs any attempted history, but particularly one whose objects of study are as overwhelming as the orgies of murder that took place in East-Central Europe during the 1940s, altogether constituting those experiences and memories of insane horrors that we have come to call the Holocaust.1 This has become a more acute logical problem as the historical field where we are currently “free” to look for the Holocaust’s provenances has steadily narrowed, even as it appears, however coincidentally, that the very global corporate and financial entities on which we all depend daily have long been, and still are, fully complicit in perpetrations of holocaust forms. From this perspective, we might recall Daniel Goldhagen’s cramped and circular German anti-Semitism argument of a few years ago. It seemed at odds with and yet, from another perspective, also obviously helped place under erasure the simultaneous revelations about the genocidal banking operations by which the so-called international community, through its Swiss accounts, once held Nazi Germany to making at least some of its debt payments with, among other things, Auschwitz gold. It is an irony that Ranke might have appreciated had he seen how, in an effort to

1 The account of how we came to this usage advanced by N. Finkelstein, “Reflections on the Goldhagen Phenomenon” in idem and R. Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth, New York: Holt 1998, pp,87-100, is only partially “true” and should not, in any case, dissuade us from acknowledging the unique qualities of concept and scale that compel us to recognize this vast civilizational collapse in our collective historical experience as “the Holocaust.” 95 construct repressively displacing, i.e., metonymic, histories (where “outcomes” perpetually swallow all of their “causes,” even the holocausts) we have, largely unwittingly, rewritten the Holocaust as Comedy, as but one more of a series of conflictual, even traumatic, but always finally completed and resolved episodes in our bumbling advance toward finding security at last in achieved, civilized humanity.2 The ceaseless proliferations of holocaust-forms in the present eruptions of genocidal predations on a global scale, combine, however, to reveal the bad faith in any of the current Comedic resolutions for the Nazi Holocaust, including Goldhagen’s.3 When we read, by contrast, the work of a survivor like JiÍi Weil, who had the courage actually to write the Holocaust directly as Comedy, we can only watch the narrative intention falter as it cannot but turn toward an emplotment that fits none of the classic categories Hayden White’s metahistorical schematics determine for us. Weil’s tale has given up on a resolution long before it collapses into an ending that has to tell in unredeemable, bleak detail the torture-murder of two resistant children.4 I If the task of constructing a Holocaust narrative stretches Hayden White’s

2 And watching the human spectacle from our loges in the clouds of the posthistoire. For Rankean Comedic emplotment I am following H. White’s stimulating Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1973 pp.166-9, 176-78 and passim; for perspectives on the “posthistoire” see M. Roth, “The Nostalgic Nest at the End of History” in his The Ironist’s Cage, New York: Columbia University Press 1995; also L. Niethammer's satisfying Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End?, London: Verso 1992.

3 D.J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York: Knopf 1996, p.582 n.38; see also note 44 below.

4 J. Weil, Mendelssohn is on the Roof, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux 1991; another recent attempt at a Comedic Holocaust emplotment is Roberto Benigni’s controversial and award-winning film It's a Beautiful Life.

96 possible narrative models past their breaking point, his discussion of Ranke’s intellectual relationship to his teacher Wilhelm von Humboldt5 nevertheless offers an opening for such histories that elude his classic emplotments but that yet have to be told. While we certainly have to pass through some aspects of the historian's task as White sees it - as when “the historian confronts the historical field in much the same way that the grammarian might confront a new language” - we ought not stay overly long in this mode, particularly when he takes us then into a somewhat less than adequate reading of Metonymy in which the author denies (in effect, displaces!) the displacing qualities of metonymic linkages and overplays the integrative (as opposed to the revelatory, differentiating) qualities of Synecdoche.6 It may well be that it is for this specific misrecognition acting as parameter inside White's arguments, that he tries to stuff Humboldt back into the Comedic frame next to Ranke by emphasizing the high theory of Humboldt's Idealist utopianism combined with his Aristotelean-aesthetic metahistory by which ideas endlessly struggle with brute matter to be realized.7 White previously seemed aware, nevertheless, that Humboldt's breakout from the Comedic, and indeed from all of the classic emplotments, occurs in the method by which he follows this ideal-material dialectic as it assumes, consumes and discards historical forms. His paraphrase of Humboldt: we never grasp the successes and failures of these actualizations in any single form that we can discern but rather by “the imposition of provisional, middle-range, formal coherencies” strung together in synecdochal linkages capable of representing, of revealing the “form of events’ and the 'inner structure' of the whole set of events contained in a narrative…in which all events are conceived to bear a relationship to the whole which is that of microcosm to macrocosm.” Achieving a representation of this relationship is a creative act of the historian, with the actual mimetic reproduction not that of a copy but of a “figuring of its ‘inner form’...[providing]

5 Op.cit., pp.178-187.

6 Ibid., pp.34-6 and passim.

7 Ibid., pp.182-185

97 a model of the proportion and symmetry of it.”8 “Figuration” in this sense is the historian’s creative apperception of correspondences in the contents of archival materials, an imposition of a finally recognized “figure” that is intrinsic to and yet also more than, and in that sense also outside of any actual historical moments to which these materials speak. What one might call a “figural narrative” derives from readings of historical evidentiary materials and is always an instrument of the historian's intent to disclose as yet untold linkages and crossings in the historical processes from which these materials derive. Figurations simultaneously sustain and undermine, i.e., move across and between the displacing separations and boundaries that sustain the narrow range of options for recognition that grammarians (like White) would claim are all our historical labors have to work with. Norbert Elias’ historical sociology of a “Court Society” figure9 takes apart archival materials relevant to the actual court-life of Louis XIV only then to transcend this particular historical object even as it discloses the latter by examining the multiple, often conflicting, on occasion even necessarily self-destructive roles that the various “actors” have to assume when they need to act out a historically constructed court society to realize, daily, the risks and rewards of their hegemonic projects. This is also to perceive and analyze figurations as historical processes of language formation and these not simply in the sense of naming actions - a figure least often appears as “itself” – but rather in the sense of perceiving what actings-out are related to “what the word figures.”10 In the Holocaust-narrative proposed in the Focaal essay I followed different

8 Ibid., p.180 emphasis in original.

9 The Court Society New York: Pantheon 1983, pp.17-24, chap.4 and passim; see E. Wolf, “Encounter with Norbert Elias” in P. Gleichman, J. Goudsblom and H. Korte, eds., Human Figurations: Essays for Norbert Elias, Amsterdam: Amsterdam Sociologisch Tijdschrift 1977, pp.28-35.

10 T. McLaughlin, “Figurative Language” in idem and F. Lentricchia, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1990, p. 86.

98 moments of disposession and their historical forms and intertwining trajectories as these actualized a repeated but never fully acknowledged, yet in all instances arguably necessary, “dispossession figure” that one can call up from the sources. Recognizable figurations contain considerable powers of connectivity, of hermeneutical convertibility, of trans- and, indeed, of multiple temporalities, to none of which any central or classically limited emplotment motif can stick for long. This need not prevent us from accepting at least that part of the Rankean historical project - including particularly its Comedic strategy -that wants to convert inscrutable, simultaneously disclosing and denying Metonymics into the recognizing, transformative strings of Synecdoche; then, possibly, a turn toward the relative freedom of the middle range precincts of archivally derived figural narratives can open a different kind of Holocaust history, one that is not bound to the conflicted, twisted postures historians at this time seem compelled to assume as their agendas require them to write (occasionally obscene)11 comedies while wearing tragic faces.12 II There have been previous attempts by practitioners of anthropological history to formulate explanations linking Nazi forms with structural features that appear to recur in the long duration of German history. To distinguish the kind of historical

11 This is my reading of Goldhagen's "comparative" assessment of human destructions. op.cit., p.386 and passim. Has anyone, moreover, appreciated the quality of his complicity when, throughout, he discards, on the II evidence" of the self- exonerative stories of their commanders, the testimonies of the lower-echelon perpetrators? What does this say about how we are to think about the different classes of perpetrators operating inside the current manifestations ofholocaust-forms? And is "willing" ever as encapsulated and deracinated in an individually sealed moral space as this neo-Stoic provincial judge seems to presume?

12 That we cannot, to escape the currently fashionable “baroque melancholia,” get around some form of Comedic emplotment for the Holocaust is made clear in the very sharp-edged formulations by G. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law; Philosophy and Representation, New York: Cambridge University Press 1996 pp.69-72.

99 anthropology narrative I outlined in the Focaal essay from this anthropological history approach we need, first, to be clear about the often unwitting figural complicities and implications of the latter in the “logical” relationships among the paradigmatic forms that it means to analyze and, secondly, to contemplate what we might retain from this approach, and what we might as a result do in analytical practice to bridge the two sides in the so-far unwageable debate. Since to wage a debate means to take sides, I want to begin a process of possible reconciliation of the two approaches by first rejecting certain powerful and pervasive constructions - represented here by the anthropological histories of Victor Turner and Marshall Sahlins -concerning the relationships between historical “events” and “structures” and the allegedly illusory temporality arising from our experiences of what Turner, in particular, perceives as merely our “personal” passions and strivings that on occasion reach historicity by triggering rituals of reintegration.13 We can agree with Turner's phenomenology of time which marks history as “human cultural time”; however, for Turner such time is created only in special moments of “social drama” which, paradoxically, are a kind of anti-time when the rhythmic repetitions of ritual arrest the flow, suspend the incessant succession of events taking place in what he sees as historically empty everyday life, and reconjure a sense of the timelessness of the before-time that underlies and renders trivial the human tribulations that have produced the present crisis.14 Sahlins’ version of this is that changes can finally only feed

13 “Ritual was at once a process of plural reflexivity ...at the social level it was an endeavor to purify relationships of envy, jealousy, hate, undue possessiveness, grudges.” Elsewhere: “the stage of Crisis, conflicts between individuals, sections and factions follow the original breach, revealing hidden clashes of character [!], interest and ambition...” in V. Turner, On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience, Tucson: The University of Arizona Press 1985 pp.232, 292. And never a word about the structured and “necessary” and even ritual qualities of the personal and collective breakdowns that constitute the historical (i.e. remembered and, in turn, denied) unfolding of everyday life.

14 ibid. pp.227-28 and passim.

100 structures and his deceptively simple formula for a synthetic breakthrough designed to tame and absorb history for anthropology is that “event is the empirical form of a system." It is on this ground that he feels he can propose “that Maitland’s famous dictum should be reversed: that history will be anthropology, or it will be nothing."15 Without belaboring the logical and emplotment flaws in such conceptualizations, one can point out, first, that for Sahlins’ synthesis to work he has to slide back into philosophical realism by deftly transposing event into a “happening” that is “under the burden of ‘reality’: the forces that have real effects, if always in the terms of some cultural scheme." Second, need we point to Turner’s chosen grounding in Durkheim’s metonymic historicities that even at the best of times always teeter on the brink of absurd self-parody by which “law needs crime, religion needs sin, to be fully dynamic systems.”16 As was suggested at the beginning of this essay, our present concerns require us to reject categorically any metonymic constructions in that Comedic emplotment that redeems the violence of crime with the positively integrating forces it presumes to

15 M. Sahlins, Islands of History Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1985 pp.153ff; cf. also idem., Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press 1981 p.8.

16 Turner, op.cit., p.292; cf. also White, op.cit., pp. 166-67 and the previous discussion in this essay concerning Ranke’s repudiation of the Metonymic mode with its predictably mechanistic reversals that are empty of time and hence also of narrative, as witness Sahlins’ banal last words that “the historical process unfolds as a continuous and reciprocal movement between the practice of the structure and the structure of the practice.” Metaphors p.72; translator Ann Smock comments on Blanchot's statement “Let us not believe we have said anything at all with these reversals” by pointing out that “Such expressions have a motionless instability. They reverse, turn back, re-turn without cease, but as though it were ceaselessly that they reached a point of no return” in her “Translator's remarks” to M. Blanchot, Writing the Disaster Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1986 pp.viii-ix; and finally,”He gave also their increase unto the caterpillar, and their labor unto the locust” Psalms 78:46.

101 release in return.17 Instead, they require us to turn to the dangers of these processual and mechanistic neutralizations of our everyday experiences of historical time by testing them against the demands of writing a cultural history of the Nazi Holocaust that understands the Holocaust itself as a form of melancholia, an unredeemed, unspoken and interminable sorrow that only knows to resist closure by flight into repetition, “an unspeakability that organizes the field of the speakable.”18 There are any number of historians who have taken to the Turnerian model and it is no surprise that they have had their greatest successes with histories of ritual and performance.19 However, the uncomfortable place that the Holocaust occupies in modern history as the still most visible and undeniable, rationally intended and yet thoroughly insane instance of official, state-organized violence that, for all its “legality”

17 To do otherwise leads to the confusions that mar A. Finkielkraut's Remembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes against Humanity New York: Columbia University Press, 1992 pp.26-30 and passim. At the outset of this essay I pointed to a current usage of historical discourses about the Holocaust that places present holocaust-forms “under erasure.” Examining the Comedic employments that serve such history-tellings, we see a passing recognition of past state-organized mass murders as occurred, say, in Pinochet's Chile, segue quickly into framing narratives about redemptive economic and political “success.” [The Lehrer Newshour, PBS, Apri117, 1998] But if such displacing “success stories” constitute the endlessly metonymic reminders of the holocaust forms they eternally “redeem” they also close off, permanently, any option for moving beyond mourning, for ever questioning the “necessities” that authorize and projectively redeem past as well as present and indeed the next holocausts.

0J. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997, p.186; G. Rose, op.cit.

19 Some examples of this approach by historians may be found in S. Wilentz, ed., Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1985; a historical “school” along these lines announced itself with L. Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History, Berkeley: University of California Press 1989.

102 strove to remove its operations from plain view and to retain, for all its manifest terrorist presence, a design for deniability, presents a tougher challenge to what we have called, for the purpose of the present debate, anthropological history.20 To illustrate this we note, first, that there are materials and even prior anthropological histories at hand

20 From within either discipline, making the choice between “anthropological history” or “historical anthropology” may appear to be difficult because either choice grants only one discipline the presumed privilege of being the noun, the main thing, and not merely the modifier. For a historian to throw in his lot – as I do even as I attempt to bridge the two – with “historical anthropology” may then appear as a turning away from my “own” profession and as a willingness to accept a subordinate role in an interdisciplinary annexation. But the matter is not that simple. While the facts are that for my historical research program I found very few allies among historians and that the opportunities to clear a conceptual ground for it in print were given me by anthropologists, this accounts only in part for my participation in the present collective attempt to conceptualize a historical anthropology. More important is my growing sense that at the present time neither historical nor ethnographic work is generally and sufficiently grounded in the complexities of the different “philosophical anthropology” traditions (cf. J. Habermas, "Anthropologie" in A. Diemer and I. Frenzel, eds., Philosophie Frankfurt: Fischer 1958) and my predilections may be explained by the fact that I occasionally find such a philosophically serious outlook among the anthropologists but not among the historians. I am thinking of E. Wolf, Anthropology New York: Nelson 1974, pp.29-33, 47-49, 61, 84 and passim, who develops a specifically historical project that is grounded in Julian Steward’s “multilineal evolution” (cf. also Stephen Gould’s Full House, 1996) and upholds the creative over the “coded” dimensions of human experience by searching for the historicities of human designs. Finally, as far as the putative subordination of the adjectivized discipline is concerned, I can point to diplomatic historian A.J.P. Taylor’s trenchant observation that “weaker” partners tend to control alliances since they can always threaten to collapse. This in turn leads to a resolution of the opposing statements by Maitland and Sahlins, mentioned a moment ago in the text, one that I can live with because, for an alliance between history and anthropology to work, we continue to require a separate historical discipline as a necessary condition. This is to say that anthropology will be historical or it will be nothing.

103 that readily lend themselves to a symbolic actionist construction of the Holocaust and it is instructive to see where these lead us and what kinds of satisfactions they can provide. III In the course of teaching surveys of German history, my attention has been drawn to work by Arnold Price concerning what he calls “warrior club (Weihebund) settlements” emerging from the Marcomanni wars of the second century, developing during the centuries of so-called Völkerwanderungen, of the migrations-of-peoples, and segueing, finally, into the institutions of the Burgundian-Frankish state during the sixth and seventh centuries from where the form was exported by Anglo-Saxon migrants to England.21 Some aspects of Price's marshaling of facts seem forced, unnecessarily awkward and strain the bounds of inference, but there are aspects of his central story, based on etymological and archeological evidence too complicated to present here, that I find sufficiently convincing to explore as a possible basis for an experimental anthropological history and, barring that, as one narrative thread in a historical anthropology, i.e., in a genealogical, “figural” reconstruction of the provenances of the Holocaust. Price proposes to model specific two-tiered Germanic societies in which the empowered, inheritance-transmitting communities of recognized tribes and clans, of the comitatus, hive off communities of dispossessed males who, if they do not organize

21 Price summarizes his early work and proposes a larger framework in “Early Places Ending in –heim as Warrior Club Settlements and the Role of Soc in the Germanic Administration of Justice” in Central European History 1982 pp.187 -199; among his earlier work we find “The Role of the Germanic Warrior Club in the Historical Process: A Methodological Exposition” in Miscellanea Mediaevalia 12:2(1980); “Die Nibelungen als kriegerischer Weihebund," Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte [VSWG] 61(1974); “Differentiated Germanic Social Structures,” VSWG, 55:4(1969); and, “The Germanic Forest Taboo and Economic Growth,” VSWG 52:3(1965); I find the approach taken in L. Hedeager, Iron Age Societies: From Tribe to State In Northern Europe, 5OOBC to 7OOAD Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 pp.35,46 and passim offers some support for and further contextualizes Price’s argument in a useful way.

104 themselves to join the armed gangs and armies of migrants, remain to form "suburban" communities attached to the main communities and enter into simultaneously conflicted and cooperative relations with the communities of heirs. At the core of these separated-out but still attached communities of the dispossessed were military associations bound into membership through sacral oaths and initiation ritual, who “ate together” (with the assistance of the main communities' contributions) but who also developed marginal agricultural settlements and family life by (presumably ritualized) raiding of and abducting (probably marked) women from the central clan communities. Members of these associations bore the burden of numerous signs of exclusion and inferiority in return for their effectual attachment to the communities of heirs. The pay- off for the latter came in the form of a resident and armed boundary police of the dispossessed simultaneously guarding against invasions by foreign migrants while also empowered with officially unrecognized obligations to engage in specific acts of policing of the main communities themselves. Price’s contribution to a possible anthropological history of German holocaust forms lies in this apparently possible identification of a recurrently persistent form of religious-organizational practice that empowered dispossessed-but-attached offspring to organize in oath-bound military formations and to engage in extra-judicial “visitations” of violence, even to the point of death, against both intruding “foreigners” or identifiable but otherwise legally immune “transgressors” within. For Price, the warrior clubs as such disappeared into the posse comitatus of the Frankish state and he refrains from speculating about the subsequent, “long-duration” historical life of such and similar kinds of “warrior” associations. His very suggestive idea remains a fragile historical construct and he is right not to overburden it. Nor do I want to do that with the experimental construction I am about to put on it by not only linking it to a narrative I will try to discount and avoid but then also by drawing it, if only by implication, into a different (i.e. my) story about the long-term provenance of the Nazi Holocaust. Carlo Ginzburg, in one of his best and most eye-opening essays, warns us that “in some quarters research into extended cultural continuities is...inherently unacceptable because it has been controlled for so long...by scholars more or less tied to the culture of

105 the right.”22 His particular focus is on the appearance in 1939 - out of the classicist and pre-Cold War anti- totalitarian milieu surrounding Marcel Mauss’ College de Sociologie - of Georges Dumézil’s epochal Mythes et Dieux des Germains. Dumézil saw a living mythology-practice throughout German history culminating in the Nazis’ youth and paramilitary brigades, a practice that reached into the mythological-scholarly grab-bag to construct, periodically, formations of sacral warrior bands, modeled on variously imagined pre-historic forms, whose release of berserker rage restored order so that a good king could redistribute wealth away from an evil, usurious king. This does, at first sight, appear to have some family resemblance to Price’s historical sociology of what he calls warrior clubs, whom he too identifies with cultic rage and with forms of collective property holding (escheat). It alerts us to determine more precisely whether or not there is something more to his version than what the intellectually exhausted and politically compromised narratives by Dumézil and his forerunners can offer. Dumézil’s envisioned historical process of consciously reinvented mythic forms was built on the classicist Nazi ideologue Otto Höfler’s and on his student's Lily Weiser- Aall’s structural-functionalist readings of Germanic men’s and youth societies as entities that were, periodically and consciously, brought to life to be harnessed for communal revitalization.23 Although Price avoids any direct formulation of a long duration relationship between what he sees as warrior clubs and their possible Nazi recreations, his work does owe something to works written under that sign. While Höfler has only one footnote, Weiser-Aall appears far more frequently and in one instance Price indeed

22 “Germanic Mythology and Nazism: Thoughts on an Old Book by Georges Dumézil” in his Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1989 p.126.

23 Höfler apparently himself experienced the “proof” of his functionalist thesis when, in 1936, his work went out of favor with the post-SA Nazi party as the latter downplayed its “berserker” posture. Ibid,p.140; in this connection see the view developed in N. Elias, The Germans New York: Columbia University press 1996 pp.227-28.

106 identifies the groups he perceives as “warrior clubs” with the groups discussed by her.24 Moreover, his direct use of motifs from the Nibelungenlied suggests that he might see, however unclearly, the warrior clubs bearing, in later medieval versions, a nearly identical resemblance to their “originary” or “basic” characteristics. His is a sociology that might easily serve the kinds of structuralist anthropological histories we encountered above. Periodic reinventions and ambiguous empowerments of the Germanic warrior clubs acting out before, during and after the Holocaust structurally programmed versions of communal, simultaneously internal and external boundary policing and of the attendant, violent “ritual” forms are all as if tailored to Turner’s enclosure of historical time into the “ritual dances” of cultures. The members of these organizations are identified, by their physical and social spaces, as what Turner calls “liminal personae”, as “threshold people,” living a kind of social death “as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers...” They are a counter-structure, a communitas attached to structure and, inside their aura of “lowliness and sacredness,” they constitute “an unstructured...and relatively undifferentiated comitatus” under “the general authority of the ritual elders.”25 To derive intellectual satisfaction from this metonymic conversion of the ineffable, abetted-as-long-as-unrecognizable violence (which could conceivably, in its “intentional” construction, include Auschwitz) of perpetually reenacted warrior club forms into the “regenerative abyss of communitas” is objectionable because it invites the historian into complicity not only with a dated, vitalist theology of redemption26 but also with intellectual genealogies that furnish, in the past as well as in the present, the

24 “Warrior Club Settlements” p.190.

25 V. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1977 pp.95-97.

26 Turner, Ritual p.139; idem, Bush p.246; in this connection see perhaps also H. Strohm, Die Gnosis und der Nationalsozialismus Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1998.

107 exonerative constructions that simultaneously authorize and deny mass murder.27 The flaw in a de-moralizing anthropological history that can, when it chooses, rewrite holocausts as necessary, Comedic collapses into the regenerative violence of communitas is that the historical motor driving this structure, more precisely the apparently necessary dispossession that forces some into liminality, remains an untheorized, misrecognized act of expulsion - in itself a violent motion redeemable only in the dispossessed’s allowing themselves to be recruited for violently defensive or punitive acts construed as rituals of reintegration. It remains a central, life-threatening experience of exclusion that is inherent in everyday life and yet is, for that very reason in the Turnerian conception, outside of time, outside of and below historical experience. It is here that we can recover aspects of Price’s work to illuminate the experienced and remembered violences that reside within and speak to the Violence and to turn them, perhaps, toward a second kind of “structural narrative” aiming at a figural-historical anthropology of the Holocaust. In an article that takes up Richard Koebner’s hypothesis that Germanic forest taboos might have retarded the clearing of woods and the expansion of arable lands, Price departs from Justus Möser’s “realist” understanding of medieval royal forests as traceable continuations of pagan forest restrictions to make the point that when the medieval records “refer to such royal forests. ..they do not mean woodlands as such, but rather a special system of restrictions that can be instituted upon an area and that also may apply to nonwooded areas.”28 Without using the word, Price has a sense of the sacral “German Forest” not as a physical reality but as an abstract “figure”; moreover, his is a figure that does not simply represent itself, i.e., the forest that is out of bounds,

27 It would be a relatively simple matter to implicate Turner’s formulations (cf. Bush pp.244-245 and compare to Niethammer, op.cit., pp.46-9) in the always popular kind of modernist anti- modernism (pioneered by Rousseau) which would see the Holocaust as a typically “modernist” manifestation, i.e. merely as a technologically and mass-culturally hyperextended distortion of formerly balanced processes of cultural life and death.

28 "Forest Taboo" p.377.

108 but “figures” something else,29 in this case an as yet not analyzed pagan taboo. Of the various explanations he ventures, the most promising would appear to be his recognition that forest taboos figured separations, exclusions, boundaries between tribal entities and that they might be conceived as the figural ground for Germanic migrations driven by a search for culturally arable land.30 With regard to the warrior clubs, Price seems less willing to depart from the realist, symbolic-actionist constructions by which they have maintained a historical presence, but his evidence enables a figural reading - it always being the historian's choice (and risk) of what to call “figure” - by which the warrior clubs figured instead the specific management, by means of a contract authorizing “masked” and, therefore, deniable, unofficial violence, of the conflicts inherent in inheritance and dispossession in a particular historical location. The contract between “the dispossessed and then asymmetrically re-connected”31 and the “heirs” is revealed by, among other things, differences in funerary forms, by the main communities’ subsidizing of the warrior clubs’ common table (a metonymic collective inheritance portion that avoids individual accounting), by the warrior clubs’ adherence to inheritance-negating escheat and by their practice of terminating the membership of one who came into an inheritance. In the light of these specific, differentiating perceptions we can draw a distinction between those forms of organized violence that we might or might not perceive as historical refigurations of the warrior clubs. We can exclude the consciously retained and invoked memories of Germanic warrior associations that we find in the languages surrounding German mercenary gangs (Landsknechte), police agents (Schergen), executioners’ associations (Henker),

29 McLaughlin, op. cit; see note 13 above.

0 "Forest Taboo" pp.373-4; interesting along these lines is the conclusion to D. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev, Berkeley: University of California Press 1998.

31 E. Wolf, correspondence Jan. 18, 1997.

109 paramilitary organizations (including the SA)32 etc. - all of whom are, after all, “official” perpetrators of violence - and focus instead on the unofficial and yet ritualized (that is to say misrecognized, unconscious) forms that have their own historical life and that surface in the changing historicities of world-turned-upside-down rituals of late medieval and early modern urban and village life, to the village-political “houserunnings” and “deroofings” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.33 Most interesting, of course, are the reinventions of these forms in the twentieth century where we not only find echoes of them in such resistance youth groups as the Edelweisspiraten who had no difficulty converting their anti-Nazi activities during the Third Reich into resistances against the foreign occupation authorities after the war.34 Finally, it is most remarkable that after the “great turn” of 1989/90 we see yet another upsurge of such forms involving also youth gangs, tacitly abetted vigilante groups connected to neo-Nazi organizations and, with significant influence on the national political process, gangs of

32Ibid. Eric Wolf raises a question in his letter about how to demonstrate the “use” of such groups (this presumably in connection with his then-forthcoming Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Domination and Crisis Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). I can not do justice in this note to the complexity of his questioning as he moves through references to works by Schurz, Lowie, Mühlmann, Wikander, Much, Von Schrader et. al. which he perceives as grounded in the eighteenth and nineteenth century creation of “a cumulative ‘imaginary’” by “politicized literati” of the likes of Justus Möser and Felix Dahn.

33A. Suter, 'Troublen' im Fürstbistum Basel, 1726-1740, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 1985; P. Blickle ed., Landgemeinde und Stadtgemeinde in Mitteleuropa Munich: Oldenbourg 1991; cf. also G. Sider, Culture and Class in Anthropology and Histoy: A Newfoundland Illustration Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986 pp.75-80 and passim; and N.Z. Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975.

34 A. Kenkmann, "Die wilde Jugend in den Städten" Die Zeit April 26, 1996 p. 7.

110 incendiarists and terror bombers targeting asylum seekers and immigrants, for whom the murders at Mölln and Solingen have become an indelible sign.35 We have to recall that these were not acts by isolated fanatics but were committed under the eyes of a passive police and were in effect (tacitly and therefore “deniably”) orchestrated by communal, youth, apprentice, athletic and other groups which were in turn clandestinely connected with and funded by official political party and media organizations.36 IV To draw these distinctions, we have to be careful not to equate “figuration” with “template,”37 i.e. with a definable form that is consciously imposed by historical actors to shape and give meaning to their actions. David Hunt’s critical appreciation of Eric Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century alerts us to this danger in his discussion of the distinction Wolf draws, without fully realizing it in his analysis, between perceiving social and political formations in terms of either a “template” or an “engram.” The latter, adapted from physiology and psychology, Wolf understood, in Hunt’s words, as“not just a memory, but a term of process, an alteration of neural tissue occasioning the return of a buried image from the past.” However, in his search for a prefiguration of peasant movements during the Vietnam War, Wolf, also in Hunt's view, “misses a treatment of plasticity in peasant thinking” as his text “switches from a language of movement (‘engrams’) to a static representation. . .(‘templates).”38 In this light, the

35 A good and less well-known case in point appears in the court proceedings that disclosed and produced guilty verdicts for the secret activities in 1992 of the town council of Dolgenbrodt when the latter funded several unemployed apprentices’ firebombing of a migrant asylum.

36 Der Spiege1 47:27(1993) pp.78-81.

37 E. Wolf, Correspondence. Jan. 18, 1997.

38 D. Hunt, “Prefigurations of the Vietnamese Revolution” in Schneider and Rapp, op.cit., pp.110-111.

111 themes Price explores create an opening that is absent from the anthropological histories of Dumézil et.al. and illustrate the difference between structural-grammatical and figural-rhetorical narratives. In the latter the warrior clubs are not always- already- present “templates” for repeated enactments of redemptive violence but are only one form (“engram”) in a larger complex of such forms (memory) that orchestrate the, for many, deadly serious “social dance” surrounding the daily experiences and representations of inheritance and dispossession. Nietzsche’s perception about the historian’s inevitable curiosity about where the remembered was while it was forgotten is reflected in Carlo Ginzburg’s residual perplexity about “the unconscious continuity between Germanic myths and aspects of Nazi Germany...as a phenomenon related neither to race nor to the collective unconscious.”39 To solve the problem we can perceive figurations as the mechanisms of a social (i.e., not “collective”) unconscious, with the warrior clubs appearing as only one form in which dispossession is simultaneously remembered and repressed, i.e., in motion through occasionally touching timescapes between both sequential “real” time and contiguous memories-in-time. Elias' modelling of this figural process as a social dance is not, as with Turner, one of overriding structuration but rather of multiple and, in terms of time and scale, open-ended and often overlapping and interacting microhistorical moments that allow us to model and compare specific, including individual, strategies capable of specific evolution. His is also a multi-linear evolution model40 by which the “variability of human connections” and their respective evolutions may be viewed as repetitions of figuration efforts (as in “court” formations or in formations for and of “dispossession”)

39 Op.cit., p. 145.

40 See note 46 above; also the discussion in H. Rebel, “Peasantries under the Austrian Empire, 1300-1800” in T. Scott, ed., The Peasantries of Europe from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, London and New York: Longman 1998 p.199

112 enacted in their historical uniqueness with differential results and implications.41 This allows us to point in passing to some earlier themes of this essay and to enrol the multi- linear evolutions of figurations in an analytical project for “infiltrating the defenses of rightful meaning.” By exposing and undermining the hegemonic presence in figured social actions, whose forms have been “worn smooth, made invisible,”42 such a project aligns itself well with the resistances rhetoric offers against both the naturalizing logics of metaphor and the grammars of metonymic displacements. It thereby helps us carry out that step in historical scientific analysis by which metonymic denial and distancing can be converted into and revealed as linked proxies, as Synecdoche. Norbert Elias’ notion of a “figuration” perceives “cycles of violence” not as a temporary descent into the abyss of communitas but rather as a possible devolution, also a “descent,” into “reciprocal,” perpetual and terminal destructions among partners in a social relationship.43 This perception of foundational social contracts and their catastrophic historical unfolding opens a further space for a historical narrative about the experience - without any outright or necessary objectification - of an “originary” historical-experiential figuration of social relationships which I have sought to theorize elsewhere in terms of a “trauma of primary accumulation.”44 Observing the dis- and re- articulations of figures that simultaneously perform and deny dispossession mechanisms and their auxiliary constructs allows us to override current good opinion

41The Court Society New York: Pantheon 1983 pp.3, 9); cf. also K. Newmark, “Editor's Preface” to Phantom Proxies: Symbolism and the Rhetoric of History (Yale French Studies 74) New Haven: Yale University Press 1988.

42 McLaughlin, op.cit., pp.85-86.

43 S. Mennell, Norbert Elias. Civilization and the Human Self- Image Oxford: Blackwell 1989 pp.88-89.

44 H. Rebel, “Cultural Hegemony and Class Experience: A Critical Reading of Recent Ethnological-Historical Approaches. (Part Two)” American Ethnologist 16:2(1989) p.364 and passim.

113 holding that there is never a “moment of origin” and theorize instead a possible Holocaust history in terms of the undetermined structural play of the unfolding displacements of murderous practices of dispossession in Austro-German historical culture playing out what began as the “determined form of the originary discrimination”45 with experiences of “origins” which may or may not then be constructed as such in History. The figural narratives about the dispossession (outlined in the Focaal/Agrarian Studies essay and here) replayed in historical repetitions of the warrior club forms are grounded in such experienced origins, appearing as the violently conducted modal rearticulations between kin and tribute forms (in sixteenth and seventeenth century Austria, for example) by which tribute-producing family firms managed, among other things, their inheritance strategies in such a way that a small minority of heirs could participate in what I call elsewhere the franchise-bidding and labor-hoarding markets of the empire46 by accumulating and managing a surplus at the expense of a growing population of effectually dispossessed siblings and children and in conflict with a “modernizing,” predatory tribute empire. With a view toward opening a new field of provenances for the Holocaust, it is possible to trace, in turn, the figures of the social dance surrounding this “structurally necessary” dispossession through different spaces and discourses, that is to say through the historically intertwined levels of the social and institutional hierarchies of the Austrian empire as it devolved from a military, multi- ethnic construction to a police province in a larger German fascist empire. We encounter in this narrative endless metonymies, i.e.,language displacements of and repressive, silencing allusions to fatal-but-necessary processes of dispossession. These constituted ironic, pathetic emplotments in which languages of membership, care and welfare signified their opposites as they singled out and became attached to

45 S. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England Berkeley: University of California Press 1988 p.7; cf. V. Farias, Heidegger and Nazism Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1989 pp.344-45.

46 “German Peasants under the Austrian Empire” Ms. in progress.

114 dispossessed persons who were on their way toward administered deaths. We find a concealed duplexity inside publicly structured, even “ritualized,” processes by which certain figurations of language did double duty in simultaneously identifying and concealing those structurally necessary but dangerous and unspeakable performances that were purportedly necessary for the life the structure. This forces on us a more difficult project. Viewing the pre-history of the Holocaust from the anthropological history perspective one could only ever claim to find merely a single line of structuration moving from historically empty everyday life through increasingly “virulent” historical crises of collapse and reintegration. We have to agree with Baudrillard that this threatens to fetishize the Holocaust as a simulation-object that merely conceals a single, originary, deeper trauma.47 Even if, to a degree, it does on occasion do exactly that, such a view closes us in a circle where historical action becomes merely emblematic, a self- redeeming parable. Writing the Holocaust as historical anthropology, on the other hand, perceived in terms of a duplexity of inheritance and dispossession figures requires a recognition of a structuration dependent on multiple, interwoven microhistories in everyday life where “systemic” (i.e., systematically figured) collapses and reintegrations occur all the time, at any given and, most often, privately and historically concealed moment. It is there that we will find certain “historically,” i.e., simultaneously mnemonically and obliviously lived figurations pointing toward organized forms of terminal exclusion and organized disposal. We can also, however, expect to find there attempts, no matter whether “successful” or not, to break out, if only discursively, of such repetitious enactments of organized, known-but-concealed, endlessly absorbed crimes, to resist the compulsions coming out of the modal-historical, moment-to- moment articulations of the hegemonic bloc as this latter's negotiators and architects select and call into action “ordinary people,”48 i.e., people “without” history, to act as

47 J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994, pp.44-45; also, Rose, op.cit.

48 One historical instance of many being Police Battalion 101 “in action” in Bilgoraj, Poland, in July of 1942. C. Browning, 115 the visible, accusable, perpetrators of those widely perceived but staunchly misrecognized genocides that are among the defining moments of the past century as well as of this present age. A counter-hegemonic historical anthropology requires a perpetual disclosure of those necessarily absurd and criminally written political economies that put forward hegemonic consensus figures to claim the ground of significant discourse, requiring the unquestioned absorption of necessary sacrifices within “unhistorical” everyday social life and, when that threatens to collapse on a large scale, finding new life in culturally managed genocidal visitations on selected peoples.

Ordinary Men, New York: Harper 1982.

116 3. Cultural Hegemony and Class Experience: a Critical Reading of Recent Ethnological-Historical Approaches (1989)

The Historian in the radical tradition has sometimes had most to fear from the friends, fighting with blunt instruments and bandaged eyes, at his own side. There have been the sentimentalists with their vapid portrait of the all-holy-common people...the Marxists of various tendencies who have so often handled historical problems as if they were settled theorems for which proof only was required ...and some of whom have handled the essential historical concepts of class in such a bald and hectoring way that they can only be rehabilitated ... by the utmost precision as to context, and the utmost delicacy before the creative vitality - and the contradictoriness - of culture. E. P. Thompson, 1967

History, like power, writes Montrose, and also, I would like to add, like context, is in danger of hypostatization ... I am not convinced by the new historicist's easy acknowledgement that the critic's work is as historically embedded as the text he or she is studying, for that acknowledgement rarely goes beyond a facile gesture. Until the critic puts his own pressures into play, as concretely and precisely as those he is uncovering in the past, acknowledgement remains purely rhetorical. Even if those pressures were foregrounded, I am not sure that that, in itself, would provide any clearer sense of history. In short, history as such is the contested field. A. Leigh DeNeef, 1987

I One of the strongest tendencies in recent work by both anthropologists and historians has been to downplay the degradation and terror experienced by victims of exploitation and persecution. The new tone is one that stresses such extant aspects as the discovery and wielding of power even from weakness, the development of "cultures" of resistance, the achievement of some sense of social identity and belonging as a benefit derived from participating in even the most debased circumstances, and so on. There is a new delight in creating imaginative analytical "narratives" made possible by an embracing of "historicism" in its naively positive sense of affirming the multiplicity and the ineffably self-determining character of cultures. Perhaps the kind of aware, creative self-censorship that invents limited but sti11 truth-telling fictions about culture and history to conceal "the horror" of life uncovered by research and experienced as a 117 threatening disintegration of the self (Clifford 1986) constitutes a step forward over the repressively unself-conscious construction of mere "realist" explanations. Nevertheless, the unquestioning acceptance of the necessity of self-censorship by advocates of this new spirit of inquiry must be troublesome to anyone who cannot remain content with leaving any lived experience of "horror" outside historical-cultural accounting, who wants to trace the horrors behind the horror as far as one can and who sees the historicist dismissal of any moral questioning of historic victimization (Geertz 1983:153-154) as a failing. Such experiences do not constitute a shadow history of "main" histories (however these are "fictionalized") but are "ingredient" to any and a11 historical processes (cf. Eagleton 1985:9-10). It is the intent of this essay to explore these questions and to make a contribution toward formulating an analytical language for such work by linking and sharpening the concepts surrounding the terms cultural hegemony and class experience. culture and class This century's several holocausts deny the easy premise still held by neoclassical social science (North 1986:251-252) that there is an obvious choice between having a state and having anarchy. The paradox is that the conceptual separations and decisions required by such a "choice" make possible theoretically and practically defined classes of victims who experience economic, social, and even physical annihilations as their assigned role in planned enterprises, which themselves mean to be perceived as essential to the cultural fight against anarchy and to the continuation of the state order - to the ongoing possibility of a choice of culture over barbarism. When corporate or state- organized forms of action ranging from social destabilization to terrorism and mass death can appear as the right rational choices, we have to call into question any such enabling distinctions between culture and barbarism. Any social scientist who wants to use the languages of culture and class (even if only to reject them) measures his or her work against these questions; that is to say that extreme cases of culturally necessary victimizations seem invariably grounded in languages derived from far less extreme, "normal," and even playful forms of historical- cultural and social analysis. In that regard, I am addressing in particular those practitioners, myself included, who find great stimulation in the recent arguments about 118 such matters as the contextuality of texts and the critical deconstruction of the histories of institutions and of the self. The attractiveness of the many kinds of hermeneutical approaches to grapple with the "undecidable" self-contradictions one finds at the heart of cultural reproduction is undeniable. At the same time, undeniable, too, is the necessity of positing some Archimedean fulcrum for this kind of work, some core around which it may be bent, because merely discovering the finally undecidable textual moment, so central to this approach, cannot by itself translate into the many necessary decisions one has to make to be able to act and to write in an academic or other "cultural" posting that is under pressure to prepare the ideological ground for imminent, culturally requisite victimizations (cf. Horwitz 1967; Nagel 1979). Some historians of class have begun to question historians of culture about their assertions that the organized destruction of people has to be an acceptable cost of order and cultural progress (Zinn 1980:14-17). Closer to my own area of interest, it seems that the last shot has not yet been fired in the most recent German "historians' quarrel" about the allegedly "tragic" relationship between the victims of Auschwitz and the "necessary" defense of "Germany's eastern cultural area" against communistic "Asiatic events” (Hildebrandt 1987; Hillgruber 1986; Piper 1987; Wehler 1988). That debate has been particularly disturbing, not only because those who argue for such a "relativization" of what they see as the contextually "normal" character of German history seem to be growing in numbers and in license and are joined by enthusiasts from across the entire political spectrum on both sides of the Atlantic, but also because such "academic" arguments about the culturally necessary creation of unavoidable and therefore "tragic" classes of victims connect so readily with fashionable currents in politics and the courts arguing for relativizing and eliminating "inefficient" civil rights, deregulating nuclear power, cutting back transportation and workplace safety, permitting greater environmental destruction, and other aspects of so-called risk management (cf. Beck 1986; Calabresi and Bobbit 1978; Noble and Pfundt 1980). To begin to think more clearly about such arguments, social philosophy needs to reexamine the apparently self-evident juxtapositions of culture and barbarism. The yet-to-be-encountered difficulties of a sustained critical effort in that direction are apparent in the experience of Theodor Adorno, a witness to the holocausts 119 of the first half of this century, who was among the first to declare that all culture after Auschwitz was garbage but who was also unable to expel completely from his writing the very notions of culture he was arguing against. At his analytical and hopeful best, Adorno was able to point to the central failures of particular cultural constructs that promise but do not in their operations allow the participants a detailed and transparent view of how the individual is structured and measured against the common good (1976:26-27). On the other hand, however, his own historical experience of a "damaged life" seems to have confirmed for him the idea that culture in some universal sense is itself the source of barbarism: his impression that people are "even now [1944) better than their culture" (1978[1951):46, 65) betrays a cultural pessimism in which people are good despite their culture and their humanity lies somehow outside their culture. One wonders why he could not ask whether people can be better than their culture because of their culture. An even more universalist (and for our purpose more important) perspective on culture occurs in Adorno's commentary in 1966 on Kogon's observation that the worst tormentors among the concentration camp guards were the younger sons of peasants, from which Adorno concluded that one contingent condition of the holocaust was the great cultural-historical gap between town and country. A noteworthy qualification to this cultural evolutionism and to his subsequent educational recommendations about the "debarbarization of the countryside," is that to understand rural barbarism we need to understand both the conscious and unconscious aspects of rural people's circumstances (1971:93-94). In an earlier discussion of the same point by Kogon, Adorno had actually illuminated what he means by the conscious and unconscious elements in rural barbarism from a perspective that helps set the theme for this essay; here he was not thinking about rural backwardness in any absolute, evolutionary sense, but as a key dimension of a particular historical relationship between town and country itself. His insight into the social-cultural context of Kogon's guards was that "the general situation of the country, which is the model of shelteredness, pushes disinherited sons into barbarousness." He speaks here to the destructive cultural lies produced when the need for "shelteredness," felt by an urban class of employees threatened with unemployment, is realized by "authentic" rural social formations that dispossess and 120 expel children from shelteredness in order to achieve the stability in rural social appearance required by the dominant cultural projections (1973:19-27,34). Adorno's historical sociology about "younger sons" needs refinement and his idealism shines through his perspective that it was the urban proletarians' need for psychological security that required the creation of a class of rural victims; nevertheless, he has pointed to the possibility of a social historical exposition of the holocaust that not only grounds it in part in a specific antecedent history of barbarism-necessary-for-culture but also draws specifically on the intertwined histories of urban cores and rural peripheries and focuses on the appearance of a class of necessarily dispossessed "children," whose brutalized historical experience terminated, for reasons Adorno only intuits, in the camps, in their exercise of the most pathologically debased and yet officially authorized forms of power. With that Adorno shows how a concern not only for the contradictions but also for the mutual affinities between culture and class can give us a research direction to begin to unravel the historical puzzle of barbarism and culture. It would seem to be in full agreement with Adorno's reading of dispossessed peasant sons that this direction should focus not simply on class and culture, nor even tarry over long with class consciousness and enculturation, but move on to writing histories of class experience and cultural hegemony as these occur within and between urban and rural people. What seems to be called for is an extended cross-disciplinary debate among any and all interested in these questions. Short of that, the two disciplines that are most immediately concerned with the paradigmatic experience of Adorno's dispossessed peasant sons and that stand in great need of establishing a working partnership, one that transcends the basic antagonism between their leading conceptual traditions, are social history and cultural anthropology. While it is promising that some historians' concern for the problem about culturally necessary victims has its counterpart among anthropologists (for example, Wolf 1974:66-67,92), there remains a host of questions about the choices of language and concepts that such a difficult interdisciplinary project requires. experience and hegemony If the agreement to do effective interdisciplinary work is not simply a process of 121 finding and trading what is useful for each participating discipline to achieve some form of rejuvenation, but occurs rather around “[the disciplines’] intersection at the level of an object which traditionally proceeds from neither of them” (Barthes 1986:56), then it is possible to propose problems connected with the relationship between cultural hegemony and class experience as one such meeting ground between anthropology and history. Of course, in some parts of the world, for a number of reasons, academic entry and advancement is virtually denied to analysts of class, and there the chances of an encounter on these terms are altogether closed. Significantly, the result has often been a poor choice of interdisciplinary ground. A case in point is the assembly of currently the most significant European historical-ethnological research “group,” first around the journal Saeculum (1974) and now at the Institut für Historische Anthropologie at Freiburg in the Breisgau in the Federal Republic of Germany. In one of the group’s founding programmatic statements, the historian Thomas Nipperdey aligns himself with and sees the task of cultural anthropology in Arnold Gehlen’s call for the design and execution of “an empirically secured theory of man as acting being,” which, for Nipperdey, means a search for a typology of structural variants in which anthropology’s alleged concerns with the personal (“personenbezogen”) and with the structured institutional contingencies of actions and behaviors assist in discovering what creates and integrates historical ”personalities,” what stabilizes self-control and supports or endangers status awareness (1976:34-37, 51-53). His is primarily a historical point that draws on an antimodernist reading of Weber (pp. 56-57) and gives off the sounds of academic arguments about necessary victimization in its focus on “the acting and suffering of human beings in the social constructs they have created insofar as that action and suffering produce change in those constructs” (p. 37). Of which one might well ask whose and what kind of suffering (that of injustice or of agon? or can they be the same thing?) and why not consider suffering that does not “produce change?” Most curious about this research program are the “anthropological” framework and language for which Nipperdey finally settles; namely, the “American” notion of the “modal person” as well as all the related concerns with attitudes, socialization, conflict regulation, impulses (“Antriebe”), deviance from social stratum, all ending finally in a 122 study of historically conditioned “emotions” and their “system theoretical” manipulation (pp. 51-53, 57). This is a view of cultural analysis that sees cultures only as a shaping and regulating element so that any expressed sense of cultural experience (about which more in a moment) is dropped as an area of investigation in favor of a study of what is done to a person by the enculturating agents of family, education, communal, and other institutions (pp. 47-49, 57). The specific research themes suggested by Nipperdey and elaborated in the formal program of the Freiburg Institut (Martin 1982:378-380) is a somewhat dated program in its invocations of Turner, Riesman, Parsons. It completely ignores the important anthropological work that not only developed the culture and personality approach to begin with but in the end also abandoned the concept of the modal personality because individual behavior and experience coincided only minimally with the model’s expectations and too many uncontrolled variables interfered with both the sampling and interpretation of the research data (Kaplan 1954; Kardiner 1939; Wallace 1952; cf. also Murphy 1981; for a good survey for non-anthropologists see de Waal Malefijt 1974). Despite the occasionally excellent historical-ethnological contributions of members of this group (for example, Mitterauer 1983) and others, associated with the conceptually analogous family-reconstitution and demographic research of the Cambridge Group and of Alan Macfarane (cf. Plakans 1984:140-142), the value of this approach for an extended collaboration between anthropologists and historians trying to disentangle the historical threads of class and culture seems limited to contributions of comparative description, "thick" or otherwise. Its conceptual concerns for normatively governed and goal-directed action by an integrated and centered self, for the study of national or ethnic character in cultural evolution, for social relations consisting of individuals acting in and reacting to group phenomena contained in hierarchical systems that are striving, in turn, to maintain both individual and group equilibrium, all of these do not hold out much promise for the study of the less-than-conscious aspects of culture and of those double-binding, pathogenic moments when social actors are required by “necessity” to act and to work against themselves, knowing that the culture has different reasons to punish them for doing so or not doing so. What can Linton's analysis of Tanala childless widows and dispossessed younger sons whose insanity he 123 perceives as fully contained by the terms of that culture and by its system rationality (1956:126-32} possibly say to the question about the historically realized insanity of Adorno's class of dispossessed sons as something capable of but not containable by culture? The irony of this approach is that it seeks to connect with anthropology on a traditional and “safe” ground whose analytic value has now all but eroded away. Again, Barthes: interdisciplinary activity, today so highly valued in research, cannot be achieved by the simple confrontation of specialized branches of knowledge; the interdisciplinary is not a comfortable affair: it begins effectively [and not by the simple utterance of a pious hope] when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down - perhaps even violently, through the shocks of fashion - to the advantage of the new object, a new language [1986:56; emphasis in original].

The breakdown of modern history's "solidarity" is easy to spot. It is manifest in the writings of mainstream historians who, while they claim to perceive a "crisis" in the current practice of history, refuse to engage with some of the less-than-prominent conceptual searches that would allow a sharper identification and analysis of the profession's crisis (cf. Megill's critique 1988:94-106). Others simply try to push aside and belittle the achievements of the past 20 rears or so in structural, social analytical, and quantitative history (because these allegedly failed to solve the great problems of history - as if a "solution" were the criterion} in favor of a “new narrative” which seems at first glance open to a rejuvenating infusion of specific kinds of cultural (that is, Geertzian} anthropology but this approach ends up by applauding so-called antiquarian empiricists, who allegedly remove "any sense of ideology or idealism" from historical analysis and reasserts that the "central subject matter of history" is dependent on "prior philosophical assumptions about the role of human free will in its interactions with the forces of nature" (Stone 1987). With anthropology, the breakdown of "solidarity" is more difficult to evaluate. While many in the historical profession return to the conservative structural-functional languages of crisis and crisis management and of culture and personality, anthropologists seem to have displaced the cultural arguments of those traditions whose concept of change was historically unsatisfying and whose sense of integral cultural

124 utility could not address contradictory elements in culture. This has not led to the clear emergence of a new mainstream tradition to which a historian, looking both for innovative outside help and for some degree of conceptual clarity in an insecurely known other field, could connect; instead, the fragmentation of the field into conflicts about culture requires historians to participate in the anthropologists' fray not merely by identifying with one or another party nor by acting, however laudably, as eclectic, ecumenical, conciliatory outsider (Medick 1984), but instead by risking critical engagement with and contributing as directly as possible to these debates. Out of the loss of anthropology's general solidarity (cf. Hymes 1972} there have appeared two directions which seem particularly noteworthy from this essay's perspective and deserve closer consideration. The first, which I call the "hermeneutical," is associated with Geertz, Clifford, Rabinow, and many others (see Clifford and Marcus 1986) and needs to be discussed at some length because at first sight it means to historicize anthropology and to speak to exploitive social relations, and has, consequently, commanded considerable attention in some historians' quarters. The second is grounded in Julian Steward's concept of "cultural ecology" (as was some of Geertz' early work) but its chief initiators, Mintz and Wolf, moved toward what they originally called "cultural history" (Steward et al. 1956). This has since grown to involve a considerable number of anthropologists in a loose confederation of conceptual interests gathered under the umbrella of "political economy" (Roseberry 1988; Wolf 1972:257). This second group, which will concern us later in this essay, has not attracted as much attention from historians as the first even though it, too, is interested in the historical and exploitive dimensions of those processes that created the colonialized populations that were the most frequent objects of ethnographic fieldwork. The hermeneutical approach calls into question and undermines our confidence in commonsensical interpretive approaches to our own and others' presentations - in speech, texts, rituals, and so on - of living experiences. Secure in the knowledge that no one is able to return to an original "text" of reality, the hermeneuticists' enterprise is essentially subversive, pointing out the self-contradiction and incompleteness of ostensibly integrated and authoritative histories of literature, of history or of the self (Lentriccia 1980:167; Jameson 1981; Spence 1982; White 1973). In opposition to a single 125 "historical truth," hermeneutics posits what Spence calls "narrative truth," that is, different narrative reconstructions of the objects of cultural study to produce not a final most plausible story about geographically and/or temporally alien "cultures," but to draw out interrelated meanings, to translate them into our culture's norms, and with that to disclose the mutually translatable and untranslatable dimensions of both cultures. The hermeneutical approach has become at the very least an attitude, if not an outright method, toward the "text" and "signs" produced by historical or present cultural life, one that seems now almost indispensable because it is potentially so destabilizing to the conventional platitudes of both the humanities and the social sciences and promises to connect in a tighter fit the mental and material operations of living. When Lawrence Stone hails Clifford Geertz' version as the "archetypal model" for historians to follow (1987:86), he is doing so advisedly because Geertz shares his unease about the "disequilibriating implications" of the hermeneutical approach for the social sciences and humanities and for their customary moral responsibilities to speak out about “what goes on in the world” (Geertz 1983:34-35}. Geertz' apparent intent to advance a measure of order to forestall the potential disorder of the hermeneutic project bears close examination because it gives his formulations a taxonomic, epistemological, behaviorist and functionalist thrust that seems almost antithetic to the intent of that project as it was conceived by Dilthey, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, and others. My intent in what follows is not to engage in "Geertz bashing" but rather to assess his conceptual proposals in terms of the questions raised at the outset. The impact of Geertz' writing has been considerable because he writes implicitly, tacitly, from the strength of the democratic and self-deterministic trope in the historicist tradition. He eloquently pursues the theme that the experience of historical processes by an "other," in this case colonialized, people has equal validity to "our" experience (often of the same processes) and that both kinds of experience are embedded in mutually alien but equally dignified conceptual and expressive languages. The chief difficulty with his approach is in his presentation of experience and of the experiencing "self," and that will occupy us in a moment, but his sense of historicism, itself not unrelated to his sense of the experiencing self, needs examination first. The historical self-consciousness of Geertz' historicism - and this applies to "new historicist" literary critics as well (for 126 example, DeNeef 1987; Howard 1986)-seems underdeveloped. What is missing is at least some show of awareness of the nativist-conservative roots of historicism (Burke, Möser), of its linguistic-nationalist idealism (Herder, Ranke), and, finally, of its romanticism voiced in pessimism and regressive desiring, conceding defeat in advance before the projected and not yet encountered final intractability of all phenomena, and settling in the end for an aesthetically pleasing and "meaningful" record of the heroic analyst-poet's ironic struggle (Fish 1974; Harbison 1980). For Geertz there is a clear choice, given our inability to present an a priori unclear picture any more clearly than it is, for attempting an impressionist (Turner) rather than a more realist (Constable)- but always romantic - rendering of the analyzed object (Geertz 1983:215). The reason Geertz can concede an ultimate ineffability to observed cultural phenomena is that he counts himself among the "symbolic action theorists," a small "but hardy" band for whom "thinking is a matter of intentional manipulation of cultural forms" by knowing insiders ("natives") who must remain exotics to us. He adds the historicist proviso that "we are all natives now, and everybody else not immediately one of us is an exotic" (Geertz 1983:151). While it is clear that working on "translations" of cultures to reveal both the micro- and macro- levels of their self-understanding is something that is here to stay, it is not clear what the extreme separations in Geertz' relativism can hope to achieve. The questions that arise concern the less-than- intentional manipulations, where we draw the lines to distinguish who is "immediately one of us," and why we cannot be exotics to ourselves. Elsewhere he suggests that the truth of the doctrine of cultural [or historical - it is the same thing] relativism is that we can never apprehend other people's or another period's imagination neatly as though it were our own. The falsity of it is that we can therefore never apprehend it at all. We can apprehend it well enough, at least as well as we apprehend anything that is not properly ours [1983:44]. Again, what exactly is "properly ours" and what does it say about his sense of history and culture if we can point out that neither "we" nor "others" can agree among or between ourselves where these lines of "us" and "ours" are or ought "properly" to be drawn? We are exactly back with the inadequacies of the culture and personality approach. By stressing alterity, cultural relativism places in the path of analysis an obstructive sense of internal cultural homogeneity (La Capra 1985:139-140) that not

127 only fails to examine those points where cultures engage each other out of separate histories but also, secondly, forecloses on the question of the depth to which analysis can go in understanding experience and of the precise ways by which experience enters historical-cultural processes. To approach the second and far more difficult point, that to embrace historical relativism is to turn away from the question of a historically "experiencing" self, we must first make a distinction between Geertz' sense of a final mutual ineffability of cultures and the more advanced deconstructionist notion of the "undecidability" of a text. Cultures are not merely ineffable to each other but are so internally, to their own participants, in the sense that to the various players in the social cultural theaters the performance of texts does not in itself offer satisfaction, healing, or catharses that depend on the quality of and external circumstances surrounding the performance alone, but does so rather by presenting in its limitations an opportunity for insight that goes beyond the overt content of the performance or reading (Basso 1987; Fish 1974:12- 13). Role players are also always role readers who experience the conflict between dominating and being dominated by their roles, the "battle of wills and willing between texts and reader" (Atkins 1983:9). Cultures are not merely performed but every performer is potentially a deconstructive reader capable through experienced readings to locate "the moment in the text which harbors...the sleight of hand at the limit of a text which cannot be dismissed simply as a contradiction" (Gayatri Spivak, cited in Atkins 1983:9-10). It is from such experienced encounters by the "others" with the limits of their own culture that Geeertz' approach shies away. For him they are a problem about the inner life of peoples and about the buried "patterned desperation" and "cultural strain" in people's lives which, when they erupt into emotion-laden political violence, remain inscrutable and largely outside our abilities to translate. The violence itself may, in any case, speak to nothing more than unconscious addiction to "inner catastrophe" (Geertz 1973:203-207,210-211,219,323-326). We get only marginally closer to the question of how to approach cultural experience with the postmodern ethnographers who are most interested in reading their own experiences in the field and in their universities as they gather and transform their informants' texts into ethnography. Their posing of the central question of anthropology - "humanity encountered as Other" - 128 concedes that that Other also reads and is disturbed by the limits of her or his culture but that such reading only happens after an encounter with the ethnographer's questions brings about a new self-consciousness about matter "taken largely for granted" {Rabinow 1977:151-153). In Renato Rosaldo's Ilongot Headhunting (1980), the internal history and historical sense of a "pre-historic" people is painstakingly and brilliantly reconstructed for ethnographic translation. We understand that what Rosaldo considers the biologically and life-cycle based rhythms of social concentration and dispersal and of murder and covenant celebrations in feuding work because of the Ilongot's practical historical consciousness of their culture's developmental cycles. But even here one retains a sense that we have approached only the historical appearances and forms, the "conduct" of experiences and not that elusive point where the Ilongot experience the "sleight of hand at the limit of a text" and attempt changes beyond their culture and its alleged natural and historical contingencies. While we learn a great deal about the ritual and other events surrounding headhunting raids, about male "anger" and "envy," about the extremely complex and intertwined unfoldings of social alliances, marriage, demographics, status, and the generational conflicts within the male life cycle, that all govern the occasions of raiding and headhunting, there is little that takes us through and beyond some of the genuinely puzzling aspects of those histories, aspects that must give some of the participants enough pause to consider creating and enacting countertexts. Rosaldo does not think it necessary, for example, to probe the sources of the young men's culturally assigned anger and envy, of their drive to prove their manhood and marriageability by a beheading, which in turn forces breaches of even the most sacred convenants. An even more intriguing problem is to be found in the interplay of hospitality and beheading: on the one hand, peace-restoring, alliance-forming covenants are secured with mutual guesting and hosting while on the other, the descent into the killing phase of the feud is often marked by guests beheading their hosts or by hosts setting up their guests to be beheaded by a third party. The terror of the culturally and, suddenly, historically identified victim who, knowing the guests that she admits to her house during a time of deteriorating convenants may cut off her head during the night but who must, nevertheless, let them in for fear of giving offense, signifies not a mere 129 contradiction but rather a limit in the text {cf. Rosaldo 1980:74-75). Her expressed experience of physical terror at having to enact a social play of hosting possibly as a prelude to becoming the first victim of a collapse of alliance and trust relations receives no analytical attention, when it might actually have been attached to another story about some women who, at a time when they were unprotected and in danger, struggled so successfully against their possible victimization that their experience led to a genuinely "historical" cultural change in that they continued "male" activities even after their men returned. The suspicion that here are ethnographically ignored, if not suppressed, class experiences struggling to become alternative texts also surfaces in stories about threats of beheading among affines or within primary domestic groups, indicating a structurally governed and culturally necessary collapse of equally necessary trust as well as the creation of victims in even the most intimate social relations (Rosaldo 1980:71- 73,268,279). Although Rosaldo makes the internal historical consciousness of this "people without history" much clearer, he has not moved to a fully historicized telling of their experience in which we may discover how the fearful incongruities that occur when, in effect, everyone has become everyone else's potential victim, point to and beyond the limits of the dominant cultural text. He takes us to the point where historical-ethnological writing is open to "experience" as an active element in cultural change (pp. 25-26) but his remains a historicist telling that notes but does not take into account such moments at the edge, where the subtexts of culturally necessary betrayals result in social abandonment and exclusion from family and from other forms of social membership and in the possibility of creative innovative practice. Finally, what is also lost in the relativist-historicist approach is the way the historical articulations between the culture under study and the rest of the world enter the historical processes within that culture. To be sure, Rosaldo recounts how the Ilongot encounter the Spanish and American worlds by way of new settlements and demographic pressures, new technologies, laws forbidding the central practices of Ilongot culture (which the Ilongot, by informing on enemies, turned to cultural use in the feud) and of Christianity; whether this last may or may not provide the language for a historical break with the incongruities of the feud is a question that Rosaldo points to but declines to analyze (pp. 286-289). All of the points of encounter between cultures 130 that appear in his study do not produce any sense of a synthetically structured and socially experienced articulation. The pioneering historical study of the Bengali famine of 1943 by Paul Greenough (1982), who is most explicit in his commitment to cultural- historical relativism, presents a somewhat analogous case study where the problematical relations between colonizers and the colonized are more readily apparent and allow us further to refine our critical sense of the historicist-hermeneutical conceptualization of the experiencing self embedded in articulated social formations reproducing historically specific articulations of cultural hegemony. This, in turn, takes us toward the analytical solutions the political economy approach offers. The Bengali famine of 1943 took an estimated 1.5 million victims, the great majority of them women and children from among the rural laboring population. Greenough's sense of the historical background makes it a Malthusian famine; he points to a decline in agricultural productivity, rapid population growth, and to Bengal's shift from food self-sufficiency to net food importing some time in the 1930s. For the short term it appears that in 1942-43 several factors combined ("the war," curtailment of imports after the fall of Burma, locally severe flood and storm damage) to produce an estimated 10 percent shortage of rice in 1943. This was, as Greenough readily concedes, "hardly a major shortage" (1980:212); the catastrophe that struck the rural population was rather a market as well as a political phenomenon in which wartime inflation of grain prices, the apparently primary need to feed urban workers and civil servants, transport and other state employees, pressure by the British authorities to draw the rice out of the countryside by "free market" policies, all combined to remove all trade restrictions, price controls, and dealer-licensing limitations during the spring of 1943. How much grain was actually siphoned out of the countryside as a result remains unclear from Greenough's account (cf. 1980:213-214,221; 1982: 118-119) but the upshot was that "rice which ordinarily flowed in non-commercial exchanges between cultivators and their dependents began to veer into the commercial channel, and a much larger proportion than usual of the stored rice supply fell into the hands of outsiders" (1980:212). The result of that commercialization was that labor wages in kind ceased, prices outstripped cash wages and a vast number of people could not work enough to feed their families, let alone to live a human life. The few oral histories Greenough cites 131 give barely a taste of the victims' moments of recognition that they had been socially betrayed and abandoned to starve in the midst of massive grain accumulations (1980:213- 215). Greenough's chief concern was not to explore the still obscure articulations of British imperial and Bengali economic and social formations but "to argue that the pattern of famine mortality in 1943 was more than an expression of underlying physiological tendencies within the Bengali population, and that it was partly the consequence of deliberated conduct intended to assure the survival not of the fittest but of the worthiest" (1982:239), the leading males whose seed exclusively carries the name of the race, who alone are presumed capable of moral conduct and whose personal survival they identify with historical-cultural survival itself (1980:225-226). Greenough argues that the meaning of the Bengali famine lies in "no-fault tragedies in a context of disorder" (1980:235) which a cultural-historical relativism explicitly modeled on that of E. P. Thompson forces us to accept on its own terms. The victims themselves appear to have been willing to pay the allegedly necessary costs: "acts of detachment...appear to be acquiesced in even by the victims themselves, signifying their acceptance of the common value systems which determined their exclusion" (1980:208; emphasis in original). There is evidence in the very accounts he cites, however, that what he calls the "active fatalism" of the starving whose cries and wails he depersonalizes, theatricalizes, as mere culturally expected show to arouse sympathy (1982:271) was in fact a far deeper anguish grounded in a surmise by an indeterminate number of people that this was no ordinary famine and that their families' deaths were not necessary to preserve the race and its culture but to allow certain privileged kin and role-kin to become wealthy serving the British war effort (1982:147-182; 1980:228,230-231). It is this dimension of the cultural "reading" of the historical experience, where cultural and conjunctural texts do not fit, that Greenough's hermeneutical-historicist account misses completely; in effect, he severs the global, regional, and social articulations behind the famine from its cultural rationale and this in turn from the trauma suffered by both the victims and, to a lesser extent, by some of the most immediately involved victimizers. Greenough's study denies "fault" when in fact there clearly was such fault - however complicated the interwoven complicities may have been - and such a denial is 132 immoral in the sense that it takes the victimizers' explanation at face value and trivializes an experience of mass death whose necessity can not be convincingly fitted into an acceptable Bengali cultural text. The bizarre insult to the victims in such a history is that their silence is represented as willing complicity and their agony cheerfully redeemed by "the survival of cherished institutions and valued roles" as well as by a new "diversity of ideal prosperities [thatl became available to a society which had hitherto embraced only the one" (1982:239). In the final analysis, Greenough contributes to keeping silent the "silent clash" between what he calls the "tropes" of Bengali prosperity and misery by authorizing the metonymic qualities of the former and reducing the unlivable oxymoronic ("parental abandonment") character of the latter to merely symbolic significance in the "struggle to salvage order from chaos" through processes by which Bengali society "chooses to distribute the social costs" (1982:274-75; cf. White cited in Lieberson 1988:281). The inability of the current hermeneuticists like Geertz, Rosaldo, Greenough and others to analyze social and cultural articulations (and agency for that matter - do "societies" choose to distribute costs?) is rooted in their phenomenological language about the psychology of the self. While they are capable of acknowledging a split self, they remain incapable of seeing that self in historical action (Rabinow 1977:57-58). Just as phenomenology does not perceive the structural in the historical present because it can only perceive the structural in the cultural present, so it cannot perceive the historical dimensions of the culturally divided self struggling to create a livable life in the midst of contingencies. It sees instead only a situationally divided self grasping for and "using" (not reproducing) cultural materials to achieve and maintain an integrated, authoritative appearance of responsible autonomy. The real question for hermeneutical analysis concerns the additional splitting by and social penetration of an inherently split self required to perform, in life-and-death historical time - which includes theatrical time - incomplete and irreconcilably split texts. To clarify these propositions and to suggest how the "political economy" anthropologists may be better positioned to pursue them, we must begin by noting that the Geertzian and 50- called postmodern hermeneutical approaches are not the only kind of hermeneutical analysis and that their philosophical commitments blind them to 133 the complexity of the hermeneutical project, which, at one time, sought to find out what the past or culture meant to those who "experienced" them and to understand the historical subject better than it understood itself: "a proposition which is the necessary consequence of the doctrine of unconscious creation" {Dilthey 1976: 116; cf. also Hexter 1963). The original project was confident that we could understand aspects of the historical subject's experience because we could learn of things in its world that were an intrinsic part of its experience but consciously unknown. The original historical sense was also not one in which the historical subject was “experience near” to and we are “experience distant” from the past or present cultures (Geertz 1983:57); rather, we all live in each other’s joined historical processes, experienced through both memory and projection (Dilthey 1976:115; 1962:102-103). Recalling Goethe and influenced by Hegel, hermeneutics’ concern was with the inner dimensions of the self encountering an Other (Dilthey 1976:105), which requires not merely some intellectually curious attempt to collect taxonomies of “others’ and to “understand” them but is rather intent on reading and understanding the forms and expressions arising from that deadly internal struggle in which the self we have to be with a particular Other forces us to overthrow and in effect “enslave” the other selves which we also are (Hegel 1967:229-240). This unceasing necessary experience of inner conflict is how we connect with others, how we learn to live with the complexities of Desire as it is both realized and checked by Labor, and how we discover creative power in the midst of the fear we experience at discovering we are an Other’s mere laboring instrument (Hegel 1967:236-239; cf. Rose 1981:129- 130). The experiences of the struggle between mastery and slavery as they are mutually and simultaneously reproduced within the self and its Others provides a point of entry for hermeneutical analysis different from phenomenological behaviorism’s interpretations of performance-of-texts and its “code breaking” operations. As we live social relations not in terms of “logic of being” but in terms of an “other as ‘reflection- into-self’” (Rose 1981:197; Tymieniecka 1962:105-110; Adorno 1984:3), we have to read, reproduce, remember, forget, discover the limits of, and invent texts in ways that will allow us to seek to realize precisely those promises that drew us into both necessary and voluntary relations with others in the first place. It is the historicity of these interwoven textual productions and experiences that command our attention (Roseberry 1982). It is 134 also in these inner social conflicts and in the reproduction and struggles of the texts that try to “express,” direct, contain, evade, elude, or transcend them that we come upon a more refined and analytically useful concept of cultural hegemony. This is not the place to explore in depth the extensive intellectual antecedents of Geertzian and “postmodern” hermeneutics, but even a brief survey of its complex make- up (cf. Geertz 1983:33,77) reveals that none of its ancestral contributors can take us toward the culturally and historically determined inner and outer, conscious and unconscious, dimensions of experience. Rooted in Brentano's psychology of unexaminable but evident intent, which formed the basis of Husserl’s psychology of intentional meaning (Husserl 1937:699-701; cf. Rose 1981:22-24) and rooted also in the Kojevian reading of Hegel’s master-slave relationship with its exteriorization and hypostatization of the Other (Kojeve 1980:41-42) and with its strong influence on French existential phenomenology’s rejection of the unconscious and affirmation of an integrated “authentic” self overcoming the internal divisions of “bad faith,” and “evil” that renders us “fallible” (Hughes 1969: cha. 5; Ricoeur 1967), the Geertzian hermeneutic also affirms a complete exteriority of the self, in which interiority ceases to be a topic for investigation or even discussion (1973:12, 110, 135, and passim). Most significant in this regard appears to be the behaviorist Gilbert Ryle’s related formulation of “thick description,” which, in essence, reduces mental events to tendencies toward behaviors (including, presumably, “speech behaviors”) that we may read through various cultural screens (thick descriptions) to discover clues concerning the intent (the originating act) behind these behaviors. This steers Geertz toward the expressive and what he sees as the playful elements in social life, toward Wittgenstein’s language and Goffman’s expression games (Geertz 1973:6-7 and passim; 1983:23-25), which may be divorced, in terms of Kenneth Burke’s “symbolic action,” from an experiencing selves. The experience of social life is buried under “meaningfully” stylized actions in which performance success or failure are strictly matters of individual responsibility (Ryle cited in Shotter 1980:48-49) and therefore historically and culturally irrelevant: only “reiterated form, staged and acted by its own audience...makes theory fact” (Geertz 1983:29-30). For Geertzian hermeneuticism the self is either in or out of its culture and to fall away (to fail) is a matter of personal fate and of no cultural-historical significance. 135 Here I can only point to the neostoic and neoclassical (Leibnizian) presumptions at work, according to which self-management is an innate capacity with which we are all differently endowed to be socially ranked according to our displays of culturally appropriate self-control; and those who are "out-of-control" are justifiably expellable from social relations (Oestreich 1982; cf. Rebel 1988). The philosophically most fundamental critique of the phenomenological- behaviorist sense of the experiencing self - for Geertz the canonical "Western" self (1983:59; cf. Freccero, Greenblatt, and Davis in Heller et al. 1986) - by which individual experience is absolutely disconnected from cultural history, is to be found in Adorno's questioning of Husserl's "apparently insignificant postulate" that "meaning itself and thus the quality of the act should vary according to whether a universal or an individual is meant"; to which Adorno answers that "just as no lived experience is 'singular' but rather interlaced with the totality of individual consciousness, and thus necessarily points beyond itself, so there are no such things as absolute senses or references [Bedeutungen]" (1984:91-93). A critique from a slightly different direction, and one that is more apropos to our concern with the determined experiences of the divided self, asserts that Ryle's culturally directed, always intentional, experience is too limited a view of our capacity to "see" and contemplate (that is, experience) an object without "observing" it in terms of categories that allow us practical and intellectual control of it. Experiencing is an inner process in which there is an interplay between pre-categorical (as well as deliberately or unconsciously de-categorical) "seeing" and culturally directed "observing" (Polanyi 1964:98-100; cf. Adorno 1984:93), so that while there is no doubt that cultural materials are "ingredient" and not merely accessory to thinking (Geertz 1973:76-77), they are not the entire experience. In the phenomenological view there is no weight given to an active unconscious nor to a historical conjuncture in which the discrepancy between the available internalized cultural ingredients and the demands of what is experienced becomes too great and cultural order becomes pathology (Janik and Toulmin 1973:272-273). A case in point significant for this essay's argument is Geertz' misreading and trivialization as "rule confusion" (1983:26) of Bateson's concept of the double bind, in which a person has to perform according to two mutually negating injunctions under a third injunction 136 that forbids any escape. Bateson's idea actually reveals the obverse, dark side of "symbolic action" when he points out that "pathology enters when the victim [of a double bind] either does not know that his responses are metaphorical or cannot say so. To recognize that he was speaking metaphorically, he would need to be aware that he was defending himself against the situation he is in and therefore was afraid of the other person. To him such an awareness would be an indictment of the other person and therefore provoke disaster" (1972:210; emphasis added). Bateson implicitly presents the double bind as more than an ego-functional communication disorder because it is in all cases socially situated, especially through the keystone no-escape injunction, which is binding because it is socially compelled in family or other social relations (pp. 195,205- 206,208). Understanding Bateson's double bind as simultaneously a communication and social disorder, as a collapse of meaning and action for socially identified and historically selected victims in which texts and symbols try to engage structured experiences that cannot but overwhelm them, allows two propositions. First, it is both the outward act and the silenced and inwardly desperate (and not always futile) search for an alternative that result from this breach that we may identify as the potentially pathogenic social experience of cultural hegemony (cf. Lears 1985 :585). In other words, cultural hegemony does not occur (as the phenomenological approach would have it) when the ensemble of cultural techniques of a ruling social alliance or "hegemonic bloc" generates and orchestrates, in an "overdetermined" manner, the public appearance in action of spontaneous consent sufficient to sustain the existing dominion; it occurs, rather, internally and in determined social roles, when socially engaged selves, already inherently split and de-centered in the Hegelian and Freudian-Lacanian sense, in addition have to act in order to hold together within themselves a "society" that has split and turned against itself in irreconcilable and mutually inconstruable social relations. Rosaldo's informant, the terrified woman who had to admit to her house culturally significant guests who might or might not murder her in the night, depending on their reading of the historical-cultural moment, was experiencing cultural hegemony's double bind at the heart of her outward performance of spontaneous consent. Her experience included and indeed was dominated by the terror of the unspoken, unspeakable (and 137 therefore socially repressed and unconscious) self-victimizing text she authorized by outwardly accepting and performing the role of host. The experience of cultural hegemony enters history by pointing to another, now absent, historical moment that made her present terrible moment possible. That other moment is not merely one contained by the historically contingent cultural cycles Rosaldo or Greenough recount, but lies outside them and indeed brought them into being in, one suspects, gender- and class-specific and historically submerged acts of primary accumulation recreated and played out in texts of male envy and/or anger, patronage and abandonment, whose inherently pathogenic qualities threaten, and occasionally achieve, complete social col1apse extending to "private" social worlds of kin and family. From this last we may see a second point that a socially focused reading of Bateson's double bind opens up. It is that cultural hegemony's inner, privately experienced dimension calls into question the phenomenological positing of naturally “autonomous” or oxymoronically semi-autonomous "life-worlds" where resistant and counterhegemonic cultural formation can occur (Habermas' "communication ...free from coercion" and "colonization of lifeworlds" [1985:109, 1981]; cf. Kocka 1984:399). The double bind appears in determined, inescapable social relationships and is therefore not merely a confusion between symbolic and direct speech but is blocked speech in which two mutually opposed symbolic texts have to be read and performed simultaneously by the victimized person, whose social connectedness is destroyed in the process. To theorize hegemonized social experience we need to theorize not only "experience" as such but, in addition, the textual limits of determined social relationships. There may well be autonomous social worlds where freer and easier, even historically informed, cultural creation is, if not naturally given, then at least possible because Bateson's third injunction (Hirschman's exit option), even if exercised, would not necessarily destroy social relationships (I can only think of friendship as such a possibility); at the same time, it appears certain that such autonomy is a measure (however skewed and poorly developed) of the marginality of such relations to the necessary reproduction of the social relations of production (Williams 1982:190). We can-not assume such apparently socially separate and, by their nature, more or less (or 138 semi-) autonomous, lifeworlds as the family or some other kind of "communal" collectives such as churches, unions, or neighborhoods that make the task of counterhegemony merely one of manipulating these toward resistance. The irony is that such a priori positing of autonomous lifeworlds - for that matter, its opposite, the a priori positing of no possibility for autonomy at all (cf. Lears on Althusser 1985:592- 593) - causes us to lose a sense of precisely where and when cultural hegemony is experienced and by whom and where counterhegemony may appear historically - in noncapitalist as well as capitalist formations - where the "fissures in the dominant 'system' create areas in which resistance can manifest itself" (La Capra 1985:78, also 64), where there are "other kinds of initiative and contribution which are irreducible to the terms of the original or the adaptive hegemony" (Williams 1977:114), and where "the presence of kinsmen may also be cloying and charged negatively with the endless demands, the unfulfilled and unfulfillable exigencies, of kinship" while mechanically achieved and feigned ritual catharses' reconcile the clashing, historically contingent demands of "culture" and "civilization" within the self (Wolf 1974:84-86). In contrast to the phenomenological-hermeneutical program we can see that something more is required for the analysis of hegemony and experience than translations and understanding of essentially desubjectivized textual performances. The interdisciplinary ground for alternative historical-ethnological studies might rather be found in the initiatives made in the area of “political economy” toward analyses of structured, determined social relations – in short, class relations – as they are experienced in terms of both everyday and canonical texts by producers and reproducers of the hegemonized transactions of the ruling bloc’s socially extended and pervasive alliance systems with all of the latter’s split loyalties, public and private feuds and betrayals, their contractual friendships, marriages and families and their ambivalent awards of social success or failure. In contrast to the phenomenological approach, there are as yet no widely known paradigmatic texts on the order of Geertz’ “Cockfighting” (1977) or E.P. Thompson’s “Eighteenth Century English Society” (1978) for the political economy approach to a hermeneutical reading project. Of the hundred or so anthropologists Roseberry has pulled together in his timely overview of political economy (1988), there is only, to my knowledge, Eric Wolf – whose Europe and the 139 People Without History (1982) will be a central text for some time to come – who has begun to formulate a broadly conceived theoretical approach to bring together analyses of cultural hegemony and social formation. One other piece of work, proceeding from neither anthropology nor history, deserves brief mention here as a model text before we turn our attention to Wolf and political economy, and that is Richard Sennett’s and Jonathan Cobb’s The Hidden Injuries of Class (1973; cf. also Dreitzel 1980). While their theorizing of social formation may not satisfy most political economists, they do show how “working class life is not a ritual” (p. 128). They have also grasped a central theme of the many double-binding, immobilizing aspects of culturally hegemonized class experience; namely, how historical moments of structurally necessary and personally experienced social failure pose a danger to hegemony, one that is averted by he most insidious texts aimed at the self to assure that the failure of the promise of social participation is absorbed by subaltern people, who accept the blame for failure by diminishing further their sense of self-worth or by seeking dignity in self-defeating ways. Sennett and Cobb’s many spirit-rending stories and the logic of their investigations into working-class “pseudo-mutual relationships” (p. 126; cf. Wolf on Orlove’s 1976 “unequal reciprocity” [1986:327]) provide entry points for hermeneutical readings of determined social experience, especially insofar as their themes of social membership and disconnection, of the reading of the terms of justice and of the valuation and devaluation of people (all of which are lived out in intimate, private acts of betrayal or false redemption) are also the themes that emerge from Wolf’s new departure. “Postmodern” anthropologists’ claims to the contrary, the political economy approach has not, with experience, been given to “the typically Marxist relegation of culture to an epiphenomenal structure” (Marcus and Fischer 1986 cited in Roseberry 1988:139) and it has not, for that matter, ever been entirely under the spell of Marx. One need only think about Wolf’s discussion of ceremonial funds and of Weber’s concept of ethical rationalization in Peasants (1966:77,105) or about his lasting early impressions of cultural sociologist Norbert Elias (1977:30-31; cf. Rehberg 1982). And indeed, why should political economy accept such a characterization when, with its derivation from idealism it can cleave much closer to the hermeneutical projects envisaged by the likes of Hegel, Marx, Dilthey, Weber, Freud, and even Nietzsche than 140 the current phenomenological approaches, with all their ill-concealed pre-Kantian metaphysical baggage, could ever manage. The joke seems to be on the self-style Moderns who are turning out to be the modern Ancients. In any case, Roseberry’s summation of the intellectual history and present state of political economy (1988) charts the shift toward a recently increasing concern for developing a much greater place for hermeneutical readings without at the same time abandoning rigorous analyses of material aspects of social formations (cf. also Roseberry 1988:138-140). The problems and possibilities of this political economic hermeneutical turn that concern us here are (1) the difficulties encountered when political economists try to adapt phenomenological language and concepts to their needs; and (2) Eric Wolf's significant reconceptualization of the historical character and articulations of modes of production reproduced in and by overarching mode-specific thematic and conceptual fabrications. One of the political economists' strongest perceptions has been of people who experience in themselves the intersecting articulations of modes of production and are split internally by the double or triple lives they must lead (for example, Taussig 1980:92; Roseberry 1978; 1988:167 -169, 171-172; Rebel 1983:225 and passim); it is a split that requires their simultaneous performances of the contradictory texts of the conquerors and of the conquered all reproduced and concealed (Taussig: fetishized) in cultural action. To read the culturally hegemonized social experiences of such people in their historical appearances requires a hermeneutic reading that can grasp the cultural articulation of modes but never forgets to ask what these modes are, what the historically precise, internal and articulating structural features of these cultural entities, engaged in unequal and determined struggle within their historical reproducers, are. There has been a tendency, however, to place mode-of-production analysis into a secondary role and to extol everydav life as autonomous ritual and in the end to fetishize fetishism (Taussig 1980). Against this tendency, Barthes: "every reading occurs within a structure (however multiple, however open), and not in the allegedly free space of an alleged spontaneity: there is no 'natural,' 'wild' reading: reading does not overflow structure; it is always subject to it: it needs structure, it respects structure; but reading perverts structure (emphasis in original)." And: "reading, in short, is the permanent hemorrhage by which structure - patiently and usefully described by 141 Structural Analysis - collapses, opens, is lost...reading is the site where structure is made hysterical" (1986:36,43). Exactly: the structure and not the reader. In this regard, to look for even more influence by E. P. Thompson on political economy (Roseberry 1988: 171) poses a danger in that when Thompson calls for a study of both structure and agency is seems clear that he favors the latter and that his analysis of social formation postulates cultural categories derived only and directly from the language of the historical actors themselves, or, if in "our" language, from the surface appearances of social aggregations and actions. This is a phenomenological approach that posits an a priori (and therefore ahistorical and without internal determinations) autonomy of a "plebian culture" released historically in 18th-century England only by the "weakness of the spiritual authority of the Church" and by the “gentry's jealousy of the state." His purported attempt at "experience" analysis allows no interiority; here class is only "discernible in how people have behaved" and he rejects on specious anti- aggregative, anti-statistical grounds historically precise mode-of-production analysis with the epithet "vulgar" (Thompson 1978: 145-147). There is still much to be learned from Thompson, to be sure, and on occasion he has created significant conceptual openings toward new approaches to a comparative study of the structural aspects of historical cultures (1976; cf. Rebel 1978); but the limitations of such conceptualizations of class experience as only a matter of "discovering" one's "class consciousness" by identifying "points of antagonistic interest" with other "people" (1978: 149) as well as the vacuity of positing a class cultural dialectic in "gentry-crowd reciprocity" steer us away from the internal, unconscious as well as conscious dimensions of social experience and toward readings of theatrical performances in a Malthusian moral economy by people who are depersonalized, decoded, and robbed of anti-hegemonic intuition and personal insight and creativity - "experience or opportunity is grabbed as occasion arises with little thought of the consequences" by unreflectively spontaneous actors launched into action without foresight and guided only by cultural tradition (1978:157-158). Such projective prejudices perhaps help explain why Thompson's version of thick description (1966) remains, despite a dazzling surface richness reminiscent of the work of G. M. Young, one-dimensional and focused on instrumentalized, rationalized, purely external hegemonic struggles. The difficulties that arise when such phenomenological 142 hermeneutics inform political economy are not only that the splitting of the self by class relations in articulated modes of production is lost as a field for historical analysis and an autonomous, de-hegemonized and “authentic” class culture is authorized instead, but also that the philosophical high ground in a critique of political economy can always be claimed by critics who have only committed to "culture" and feel no constraints to analyze social formations, remaining content merely to wave their hand in that general direction (cf. Marcus' 1986 critique of Willis). Political economy is philosophically too well positioned to accept such phenomenological borrowing to develop an alternative hermeneutics. Eric Wolf's achievement in Europe and the People Without History - why do some still insist on insulting everyone's intelligence by reading this title literally?- is that he has not only broken through to a new and comprehensive theory of both noncapitalist and capitalist historical modes of production and of their articulations to constitute broad and historically specific social formations; he has also ventured to propose how the assembly and disassembly of symbolic materials activated hegemonic experience within these modes. Wolf's project clearly profited from Althusser's unmooring of a canonical-economistic mode-of-production concept as well as from the subsequent explosion, especially in France, of new mode-of-production conceptualizations (African, lineage, peasant, and so on; Kahn and Llobera 1981:275- 283 and passim). His focus is not only on the strictly "economic" aspects of these modes but above all on the "social" in social relations of production, which requires asking not only what precisely can be known about historically structured social formations but what social-cultural languages and social relational fields can we risk positing and testing as deducible cultural hegemonies peculiar to specific modes prior to and during empirical research. Here the quest for experienced cultural hegemony does not begin with what people say or what theatrics we can observe them perform but with the deducible structured irreconcilables of their social relations that they have to speak about somehow. Wolf's work observes in great detail both the coalescing and disarticulation of lived social relations organized according to what he terms the kin, tribute and capitalist modes, and he makes an effort toward cultural reading, matching these modes to their specific cultural hegemonies by postulating (1) kin-ordered modes 143 speaking symbolic languages of membership and race, which are experienced historically in cycles of dispossession and orphanage; (2) languages of justice and injustice, of right and wrong action in payment and extortion, for the tributary mode; and (3) the uneasily rationalized giving up to the mechanical workings of the market the valuation and devaluation of the producers' virtues in capitalism (1982:385-391). Wolf's book clearly does not mean to nail down or define irrevocably any sort of modal cultural hegemony; rather. the cultural traces that he perceives for each mode, even though they at first sight appear simple, constitute a challenging and largely untested research project whose vision is actually intimidating once we begin to see its anti-teleological implications and the potential complexity of historically intertwining and articulating social-cultural formations - to say nothing of the added complication of their interaction with and between local and global economic cycles.

notes

[1 This in criticism of the often cloying healing trope in "postmodern" ethnology (for example, Tyler and Fischer in Clifford and Marcus 1986), which deserves a brief essay if its own. For a suggestive critique of phenomenological psychology's healing practice, see Mitchell 1975:227-292 and passim.]

II

While Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History has been noted, reviewed, praised and condemned, assigned to both anthropology and history students and so on, it has not so far found many takers among researchers. Other political economists, even when they are in basic agreement with Wolf's approach, continue, when culture has to be discussed, to fall back on the Geertzian phenomenological approach and on notions of "semi-autonomy" and avoid the divided-determined self implicit in Wolf's proposal, Cases in point may be found in work by some members of the loosely affiliated social and cultural history group that has gathered around the Max Planck Institut for History in Göttingen (cf. Medick and Sabean 1984). Hans Medick's 144 well known "Missionaries in a Rowboat" essay (1984) appears committed to the political economy position of combining analyses of socia1 formation with analyses of culture, even mentions (but does not engage) Wolf's book but in the end falls back on the phenomenological-hermeneutical languages of Bourdieu and Geertz (pp. 316 n. 70, 317- 319). David Sabean, in his latest book (1984) - for all its self-indulgence and disorganization a very important and as yet insufficiently discussed contribution - also wants to see culture in its production. He appears warier of Geertz (pp. 94-95,208, 220 n. 84) and even goes so far as to speculate briefly on a suggestion by Wolf concerning the way symbolic languages of the kin mode enter the broader legal and social processes of state formation, but he dissipates the point in an unfocused discussion of "friend and foe" (pp. 137-138). In the end, his book has no systematic discussion of structured social relations, which is all the more curious since his materials cry out for a discussion of the cultural articulations of relations of kin and tribute. A third associate of the Göttingen group, the anthropologist Gerald Sider, has published a book combining a history and ethnography of Newfoundland fishers that by its title alone, Culture and Class in Anthropology and History (1986), announces its commitment to the political economy approach. His expressed emphasis on a practical historical-ethnological interweaving of questions of class and culture, and especially of agency and hegemony, makes this a special and unique monograph, a new departure in the political economy approach. At the outset, Sider presents an interesting critique of E. P. Thompson's sense of "agency" that differs significantly from Bill Sewell’s recent discussion of the same point. Sewell's well-taken accusation is that Thompson mystifies the relationship between self and structure but Sewell's "demystification" through an adoption of Giddens' Goffmanesque game-theory formulation of "reflexive monitoring" (1986:19), remains squarely within Thompson's (and Geertz') overall phenomenological sense of an integrated, intending self. He ends by advocating that "experience" be dropped as a significant category in favor of analyses of more or less autonomous discourses in historical conjunctures (pp. 27-28). Sider offers an important alternative. Pointing to the excessive concern with self-consciousness and intention, he wants to hold out for a theory of experience in culture that finds a place for the less-than- conscious, for the self-contradictory and the misunderstood constructions of culture. 145 What makes his book so interesting and worth an extended critique is that he wants to look to "the points where a culture does not form a functionally integrated whole...to discover how...disjunctions and contradictions are continually restructured within culture.... For people to act in terms of what they cannot understand, or understand in radically different ways, and in terms of relationships they cannot form, or sustain, or leave" (1986:9-10). From this it would appear that Sider's work means to carry out the political economy project in terms of experiences of double-bound, structurally (that is, class) determined and psyche-splitting role performances as they appear and are recreated historically in culturally hegemonic symbols and languages. There are, however, weaknesses to his approach – his quick dismissal of "marxist studies" for their allegedly excessive concentration on "system contradictions" and his avoidance of a mode-of- production analysis in favor of a study of the "social system" (p. 8-9) to name only two - that result in phenomenologically conceptualized conclusions to his main cultural theses. Most significantly, the fisher families that were actively condemned by both their merchants and their communities to starvation (a historically indeterminable number of culturally necessary victims) play an important role in Sider's story but no role at all in his culture and class analysis. The opportunity to observe how their "failures" enter the cultural-historical process is missed. An extended critical reading of Sider's book offers two things toward a clearer formulation of an interdisciplinary ethnological-historical project in a political economy framework: (1) it helps reveal the internal contraditions of an analysis of social formations couched in terms of an uncritically received phenomenological-hermeneutical culture analysis; and (2) it allows for a deeper exploration of Wolf's concepts and terms of social formation and culture for future analysis by providing an opportunity to illustrate how an alternative reading from a Wolfian perspective of specific historical and ethnological materials might provide a more complex comprehension of the ethnographic subjects’ historical, cultural, and political experiences. The critique that follows means to take nothing away from the special courage and the excellent qualities inherent in Sider's pioneering book; the intent is not only to determine where and how political economists tend to resort to a cultural analysis of social formation in terms of phenomenological language but also to 146 discover ways by which we can better realize a shared interest, which is to link class formation and class experience without mystification and without displacing the internal, less-than-conscious dimensions of experience from the cultural-historical process. cultural hegemony in social formation: fishing for merchant capital Analysis of cultural hegemony has to begin with a precise analysis of social formation; and this, according to Wolf's prescription (1982:266), has to begin at those historical moments when people enter processes of primary accumulation, when the definitions, negotiations, structurally determined applications of terms of ownership, property rights, and appropriation change. This is where modes of production are born and die, where they begin and terminate their articulations, where cultural hegemonies struggle for dominance and where they collapse and reform. Sider's historical account gives us some of this but does not make theoretical-empirical questions about accumulation and social formation a central issue, with the result that his focus on the fishers' social relations as they are determined by "merchant capital" provides a poor beginning for subsequent considerations of hegemony and counterhegemony. The earliest types of Newfoundland fishing enterprises Sider portrays lasted from the late 17th century to the 1820s and appear to have been proto-capitalist in the sense that production was organized by English entrepreneurs who hired boat captains and furnished the means of catching and curing the fish to contractually hired "servant" laborers, also from England. The latter returned to England after the season to take up other labor (or be drafted into the naval service). The "servants" enjoyed considerable power in their relationship with their employers because English naval and civilian authorities upheld their prior property rights to the catch as a lien against the payment of their wages and their passage home. With the courts' denial of this right sometime between 1820 and 1840, the labor regime drifted away from servant employees (who, presumably, now had less incentive) and toward immigrant fisher families who settled along the southern and eastern shores of Newfoundland and who bartered their processed catches through village "planter" merchants to English shipping merchants in return for the equipment and other staples necessary for the fishing season and for off- season survival. This so-called "truck" system of barter not only kept cash out of the 147 fishing communities, but gave merchants complete control over the value of the goods advanced on credit before the season, the value of the catch and the value of the goods granted for "winter supply." In other words, the merchants could measure the return to the fishers entirely by the priority of their own return even to the point where, if the latter was not sufficient to cover the survival needs of the producers, then the relationship with the least productive could be terminated. Sider's research leaves no doubt that those fishers would be knowingly written off to starve during the winter. It seems clear from his narrative that the 18th-century servant-fishers suffered a political defeat as a result of those changes in property rights that marked the early 19th- century phase of primary accumulation in English capitalism, and that the change to the truck system signified an abandonment of colonial fisheries by an instance of capitalism- in-production to a merchant capitalism. The merchant capitalists captured the product of the fisher families with the help of the state's enforcement of the new property rights and at no time entered directly into the productive social relations of the producers. Sider, however, makes the argument throughout that merchant capital here entered the production process and took on some of the character of a mode of production. He never takes the actual step of calling it that, but he does suggest that the fishers as a whole were "classlike" in relation to merchant capital (1986:181). Several years ago, Samir Amin recognized that we needed to develop and work with a theory and not simply histories of merchant capitalism (1980:83). The problem has been to combine the many and varied histories with a satisfying theory. Amin himself followed Immanuel Wallerstein and others and defined merchant capitalism as a dominant economic formation that grows alongside and within the "world empires" of tributary states, which can in turn differ in type along a spectrum from decentralized, possibly "peripheral" feudal to "central, complete" forms, with the degree of such centralization measured by the success of dominating ideologies (1980:69). What neither Wallerstein nor Amin give us is a clear theoretical statement about what merchant capital is and how it articulates with tributary and other formations. Both seem to agree that merchant capital differs from the tributary mode in that the latter is political and the former economic and "transitional" and apparently confined to a long historical period that stretches from the high middle ages to the end of the 18th century 148 (cf. Wallerstein 1979:160-161; Amin 1980:80-91; also Kriedtke 1983:131). But this still does not give us a theory of social relations under merchant capitalism - merely another periodization - and the result is still confusion. We can agree, in part, that: The debate about the feudal vs. the capitalist character of the mercantilist period gets us nowhere because the question is incorrectly posed. The real question is: What were the existing classes, how were their struggles and alliances organized, and how did the economic struggles of these classes, as well as their ideological expression and their effect on political power, interface? [Amin 1980:851]. But not worrying about the articulations of social relations of production cannot give us an analysis of classes, and indeed, Amin settles for a sociological stratification model of "class" that allows him to talk vaguely about such things as "the class alliance of imperialism with the local bourgeoisie" and to remain with a sociology of "group" and "subgroup" (1980:149-173, 87). As far as merchant capitalism is concerned, Amin's devaluation of modes as points of departure allows him to evade the theoretical question about merchant capital's historical place altogether: there are no laws of transition. Each transition involves the working out of a historical necessity...through the concrete interrelations of numerous specific contradictions within a social formation (and not a mode of production) [1980:86-87].

To which we may compare Sider's notion that: To claim, as do Marx and others, that merchant capital...remains within the sphere of circulation, and in no significant way alters prior or more autonomous modes of production [?], is to miss the whole dynamic of social and cultural differentiation and inequality - which is not specifically class based – in the formation of the modern world [1986:189]. He, along with the "world systems" theorists, sees a long historical period in which merchant capitalism was "the dominant socio-economic form" (1986: 190) to the point where mode of production and class analyses have to take a back seat to a study of purely merchant-capital determined economic and social relations, presumed to be as free of class relations, or "class-like" at best. To test the validity of such a significant shift in analytical focus we have to look more closely at Sider's concept of merchant capitalism, his application of it and its specific historical explanatory power. Sider does a creditable job in sketching the main characteristics of the merchants’ system and does well to point our attention to specific features of it such as the later 19th-century innovation called the "tal qal" system, by which the merchants abandoned

149 assessing the villagers' fish according to individually graded quality and paid for it according to one average price, thereby, in Sider's view, "tribalizing" the fishers (1986:86-88). Moreover, he qualifies the optimistic supposition that in order to avert starvation, the fishers could sell portions of their catch to merchants other than those with whom they had credit relations, by noting, in passing that such sales were prosecuted by the colonial authorities as smuggling (1986:19,69). A1together we learn a great deal, but several things are lacking in this detailed narrative that would clarify the relationships between class and culture under merchant capitalism. To begin with there is very little about the internal characteristics and divisions of the groups of people involved in the fisheries. Sider takes special note of the "individualism" of the fishers, but he tells us nothing about the general character of and the social relations within fisher families, nor very much about such important subjects as family economics, intergenerational and gender relations, inheritance, fictive kinship, and so on, all of which have some bearing on the historical-cultural experience of class in any society. The village merchants, with the exception of two or three individual examples, remain indistinct as a group (or as "class") and we get no clear sense of their family organization, internal differentiation, their cultural places and actions, nor of their precise relations with other forms and sources of capital. A second shortcoming of the story is that the transitions from the "servant" to the "truck" and finally to a "proletarian" labor regime - with some additional hints about tribal "analogs" as well - are not handled very clearly. This is true particularly with regard to the question of how the experiences from a previous form of productive relations carry over for both effectual and ineffectual labor strategies in the next (cf. Thompson 1996; Sewe11 1980, 1986:23-24). For example, when Sider tells us about the nature of the paternalism under which the early "servants" worked, he proposes somewhat cryptically that it was a "standard" paternalism with "situation-specific violence and custom-contextualized benevolence" (1986:54-55) -which would be very well if he had then connected it (or shown it to be irrelevant) to the transition to the "truck" system. Instead, the subject is simply dropped and the reader is left wondering what this was all about. Toward the other end of the time frame, when fishers appear to move away from the truck system and toward what appear to be proletarianized workers 150 in a fishing industry (sometime in the early 20th century), we get fragmentary hints about emotionally powerful but politically ineffective carry overs from the "folk culture" of the truck system, but the evidence is neither sufficient nor sufficiently explored to carry the burden of Sider’s somewhat fuzzy conclusions "that cultural contradictions may not only generate but also limit ideologies; both the ideologies that come from within, and that are imposed upon and confront, a culture" (1986:155-156, 181-184). Overall, Sider sees a "logic of merchant capital" according to which the tensions between the autonomous and isolated organization of production on one hand and the compulsions of producing a specialized single commodity for a distant and dominant world market on the other trap the producers' communities in essential and yet mutually contradictory institutions and actions. These densely written pages (pp. 34-38) present a well-reasoned model of merchant capital's sociocultural character that bears close reading because it focuses on what is probably the central problem: the historical appearance and significance of irreconcilable and yet apparently necessarily linked institutions, behaviors, values and experiences. Sider sees three fundamental areas of tension arising from the local and world market-articulating activities of merchant capital. Local labor leaders are free to organize themselves and their "communities" for a single form of production they do not control, thereby inflating their authority by means of a system that in turn controls them completely. Community production of the one commodity merchant capital wants steps up to the point where it crowds out subsistence production until, when prices in the favored commodity fail, famine threatens. The communal labor-intensification also intensifies social relations in connection with the favored commodity and enhances the appearance of "traditional" social alliances and hierarchies even as it undermines them by separating them from daily experience and by removing them to a transfigured history . All these general observations about tensions affecting a colonial culture, after merchant capital has discovered, captured, and inflated a particular product, are undeniable and fairly well known. Questions remain, however, whether an emphasis on merchant capital as the decisive agent of transformation has satisfactory explanatory power with regard to the Newfoundland fishers' social-institutional and economic history and to their "folk-cultural" actions. First, with regard to who experiences the 151 tensions between autonomy and constraint, the unit Sider settles on is the "community" of producers and, except for telling us that it is the fate of "heads of households and of kin groups, clan leaders, village elders or leaders" to be mocked as part of the hierarchy, he presents no structural analysis about how these communities constructed and maintained themselves, how they organized production internally, socially. Elsewhere he shows us that the fishers were reluctant to be "communal," that one of their great weaknesses was an almost perverse "individualism" that saw mutual assistance in a framework of betrayal and retribution (pp. 101-106), but, aside from some oral historical fragments, he never reveals how these individuals lived in family or other social groups, how they decided who would perform what work and get what rewards, what their concept of property and of its social devolution were, and so on. It is difficult to see how a discussion about simultaneous autonomy and constraint in social life can restrict itself to such vaguely formulated notions as "communities" and "individualism" and still claim that it is giving us an improved analysis. A second noteworthy aspect of Sider's version of merchant capital is that he perceives the areas of tension that he identifies in strictly functional terms: merchant capital effects functional changes in the organization of production that in turn are accompanied by functional changes and adjustments in the organization of culture. When he eventually turns to examining specific aspects of contemporary fisher culture in Newfoundland he does not carry out his earlier promise to probe its unconscious and irrational aspects but emphasizes its functional qualities, its integrative or resistant intentions and effects. These two features of his approach are related in the sense that without any analysis of middle-range social institutions and of social experiences somewhere between community and individual, he cannot hope to approach an account of historical experience as it is formulated and "reexperienced" in culture. How can we begin to determine what dimensions of variously conscious and unconscious experience the cultural actions he investigates speak to? What makes Eric Wolf's conceptual innovations concerning mode-of-production analysis so useful is that they allow us a far more accurate historical placement of merchant capitalism, better descriptions of both the economic and social articulations of one mode of production with another, and finally that they let us see the highly 152 differentiated cultural distortions experienced by the social classes within the dominated mode at specific juncture in its relationship with the dominant. Sider's premature conceptual universalizing of merchant capitalism precludes any historical description of how the 19th-century cod merchants were actually organized and what their relationships to existing modes of production were. It appears that they behaved much as Wolf (and Dobb and Marx before him) suggested - that they were articulators not just between geographic (that is, metropolis/periphery) areas but between and among the three variously related modes of production that created and recreated markets in their own image (Wolf 1982:84-87,189-194,298, 304-309). The west country merchants who ruled the Newfoundland fish trade may indeed have been participating in "capital- formation-at-a-distance" (Sider 1986:192) but that is certainly not all they were doing. One can make a fairly strong case that as far as Newfoundland was concerned, they were almost entirely embedded in tributary and not capitalist relations. For example, one of the arguments Sider makes is that merchant capital needs to penetrate production "to drive down costs" (p. 191)when this was clearly not the case with the cod merchants who distanced themselves as far as possible from production, and who did not, when all is said and done, enter even into what can be called "mercantile" relations with the fishers. The "truck" and "tal qal" systems backed by the naval police state, excluded the fishers from any market and were not forms of buying and selling, but of exacting tribute – and if a producer could not pay his "debts" in the system nor return a predetermined yield (cf Sider 1986:60,127), he was dropped from the supply system altogether and literally left to starve. It was not merchant capital as such that made abandonment and starvation the bottom line for the fishers, but the tributary organization of the empire within which the merchants served (cf. Wallerstein 1979:157- 158). The British state that saw the emergence of capitalism in the 18th century was primarily a tribute-extracting and circulating system (Mathias and O'Brien 1976) and the British Empire of the 19th century made adjustments between its tributary and independent capitalist features as its strategic, primarily tribute-extracting interests required (Gallagher and Robinson 1967). Newfoundland was an anomaly among British North American colonies in that its obvious strategic importance gave it what Robinson and Ga11lagher would have called an "Asian" tributary character even as such nearby 153 colonies as Nova Scotia acted within the "free trade" empire by moving toward long- term credit arrangements and internal development (Innis 1956:324-326; Gallagher and Robinson 1967:236, 248-250; Wolf 1982:246, 305-306). The repeated failures of Newfoundland self-government indicated by Sider may in part be ascribed to the extraction of tribute from the colony to the point where direct taxation for local government (and for welfare for those who had been cut out of the system) ran afoul of a tributary system in which the merchants participated on condition of becoming tax- privileged tribute collectors and agents in the imperial system of regressive indirect taxation (Gallagher and Robinson 1967:139; Innis 1940:496; Rothney 1964:20-22; Sider 1986:150-151; Waite 1962:168-169). Primary tribute collectors are almost never, in the North Atlantic ecumene, paid servants of the state and in the Newfoundland case the fishers did not engage the cod merchants as a "community of producers" would engage merchant buyers, but rather dealt with them in the latter's capacity as agents for a tribute-redistributing empire. At the same time, merchants invested in fixed capital goods in Newfoundland, in agriculture, timber and mining properties, hut did so not to put them into but rather to keep them out of production and confine the fishers to fishing, to producing the established tribute. There is no doubt that they were serving the state here and not acting on their own best economic (or capitalist) instincts. It was the state that had set the pattern when, in 1783, Britain ceded the west shor of Newfoundland to France in an agreement that excluded agricultural investment and settlement from one of Newfoundland’s most fertile regions, a provision that remained in force until the French gave up their coastal rights in 1904 (Innis 1956:322-325; Rothney 1964:18, 20; Waite 1962: 167). What the Newfoundland merchants' own articulations between the tributary and capitalist modes were is not clear from Sider's account and is not, in any case, as important as understanding more precisely the relationship between the kin-ordered organization of the fishers and the tribute collecting empire. For such an inquiry the centrality of merchant capitalism all but disappears. In order to understand the social character of the fishers we need to understand better both the class relations within the families that constituted the "community of producers" and the ways in which these relationships reproduced the domination by the tributary mode to give the appearance 154 of that fatalistic individualism Sider finds so noteworthy in the fishers' cultural life. The tendency Wolf has noted on the part of the "chiefs" in kin-ordered societies to attempt to become independent of the limitations and sanctions kinship imposes by finding external connections in tributary or capitalist modes (Wolf 1982:96) seems to support Sider's observations noted above about the double-binding local inflation of the labor leaders' power. By focusing on a division between such leaders and everyone else in the kin-ordered mode, both Wolf and Sider seem to forego a class analysis of that mode. It is a significant point. One of the lines of demarcation we have noted above between the phenomenological and the political economy approaches lies in their differing abilities to accept the possibility of divided and determined social relations cutting through families (and indeed, through the self). Kojeve's misreading of Hegel's Other was equaled by his then necessary misreading of Hegel's concept of the family. In Kojeve's reading, there can be no master-slave struggle, "no Fighting, no risk of life, within the Family" (1980:60-61); this about a powerful section of the Phenomenology in which Hegel grapples with the many splittings of the self by its irreconcilable simultaneous relationships with both family and "nation," and by the life-and-death encounters with an Other occurring first in the family (1967:468-475). The strong impact of phenomenology on both anthropologists and historians is evident in the universalization of families (Geertz 1973:40-42), in the ascription of stratification but not of class relations to "societies of the primitive order" that are "organized by kinship" {Sahlins 1969:239-241) or in the conflation of individual earnings into a "family wage" and in the domestic ideal of the heroic working-class family stripped of any internally exploitive character (Thompson 1966:334, 338, 414, 416). This is not the place to recount the French post-Althusserians' great reluctance and divisions over formulating surplus appropriation and class relations within families (Bloch 1975; Kahn 1981 ), but it is in these writings that the position taken by political economy on the essential class character of the kin-ordered mode ought to be grounded, no matter how submerged it may be under articulations with other dominant modes. Wolf, though he seems to exclude class analysis from kin-ordered relations of production (1982:99) also helps by pointing us toward a way of conceptualizing classes within kin arrangements. Given that certain ecological and historical constraints can vary the forms, he sees that most kin- 155 ordered modes distinguish "shareholders in social labor" by "filiation and marriage" in such a way that "transgenerational pedigrees, rea1 or fictitious...serve to include or exclude people who can claim rights to social labor on the basis of privileged membership" (1982:92). There is much more to Wolf's fine elucidation of the kin- ordered mode, but with that last statement he has given us sufficient means to develop a rudimentary concept of class in kin-ordered relations. Whether one approaches the idea by way of French ethnography (cf. Bloch 1975:209) or, as I did, through E. P. Thompson (1976) and Max Weber (Weber 1925:208), inheritance is the surplus in the kin-ordered mode and the membership or inclusion/exclusion motif Wolf perceives at the center of those productive relations acquires its class character in the practices and terms of the devolution of property through inheritance (Rebel 1978; 1983: Ch. 5 and passim). A definition of property as "the material crystallization of a set of social relationships" (Sider 1986:110) remains vague and virtually empty because it does not tell us very much about the forms and circulations of property and hence about its social character. The colonial regime recognized limited rights to property for Newfoundlanders as early as 1699 but this did not include rights of disposition by inheritance or sale, and other restrictions applied as well; full property rights, after the appearance of de facto "quiet possession" in the late 18th century, were restored by 1824 (Rothney 1964:16; Sider 1986:112-113). Sider is right to suggest that the 18th-century restrictions on property ownership prevented the fishers and other Newfoundland residents from developing a more diversified and freer economy. His contention, however, that in the 19th and early 20th centuries the fisher families used their property rights, particularly their savings accounts, which remained untouched even in times of threatening famine, to engage in what he calls "social-structurally based, rather than symbolic counterhegemonic strategies” seems a bit off the marik. Such outwardly directed, allegedly counterhegemonic action obscures the internal, class-related dimension of the fishers’ use of their properties, and says nothing about how the costs of such a "social" strategy were distributed within the "community of producers." It is not unlikely that more research would reveal, for example, that the fishers’ savings accounts represented, on however small a scale, a sizable and significant portion of their inheritable surplus. If that is the case, then the strategy by which these savings accounts 156 remained intact even at times of threatened or actual famine benefited the heirs and made manifest a deep class division (and not just "tension" [Sider 1986:84]) within families, a division that carried out in "private" social action the logic of the tribute takers’ decisions to drop inadequately productive family units from winter supply. Rather than seeing collective resistance and counterhegemony in the fishers’ exercising of their property rights we might discover instead the exact opposite; namely, that the fishers’ social relations were receptive to, replicated and carried out within the family the worst sanctions the dominant tributary mode could inflict. More historical and ethnographic work concerning, for example, the practices, institutions, and values governing the distribution of the potential or actual "terror and domination" (Sider 1986:70) within the producing families (cf. Greenough 1982) is needed to clarify these issues which cut deeper than Sider seems willing to go, despite his genuine and often illuminating concerns with tensions and contradictions. By affirming class analysis on the basis of Wolf’s conceptual innovations we can find firmer ground for appreciating Sider’s portrayal of Newfoundlanders’ often self- mocking and bitterly individualistic approaches to their social relations, especially as they recreated these in terms of what Sider clearly demonstrates to be ambiguous and historically malleable "traditions." The implication of class-divided family relations in the exploitation carried on by the dominant mode puts at the heart of the Newfoundland fishers’ social and cultural life the edge of both potential and actual "betrayals" that afflict common social relations but are always experienced most acutely by individual victims. The degree to which such experiences remained public ineffable (and we are likely to learn very little about when and how they were voiced in private) is also the degree to which the fishers’ culture had to do double work for both the conscious carrying on of daily self-reproduction and for the only partially conscious acquiescence in and resistance to their victimized and victimizing social world.

reading counterhegemony The main intent of Sider’s cultural argument appears to be precisely about the double-sidedness and the double-binding qualities of culture. In words reminiscent of Sennett and Cobb, he wants to direct us to "the whole strength and the whole tragedy of 157 folk culture: the marriage of dignity and hurt, ability and powerlessness, hope and history, and, bringing it all together, the extraordinary mixture of sociability and encapsulation" (1986:161). And yet, his ethnographic explorations of the Newfoundlanders' experience with partially self-conscious cultural pathos, however informative, remain unsatisfying largely because he does not investigate how individuals may be simultaneously placed in different class positions in specifically and historically intertwined modes of production, positions in which the cultural constructs and conceptual tools relevant to people in the colonialized mode for organizing their resistant and counterhegemonic actions are denied or subverted by the cultural constructions and destructions in the dominant mode of the social formation. Clarification of such cultural conflict requires clarifications of class relations of a kind that Sider considers unnecessary because the specific phenomena that interest him are, he claims, in the realm of "partial autonomy" and therefore beyond any reading according to objective class (cf. Kriedtke 1983:157; Sider 1986:153-154). Although Sider's study is replete with more-or-less well-assimilated anecdotes and other evidence concerning cultural actions and materials, he singles out three contemporary examples of the fishers' "traditional" cultural activities for some deserved special attention; these provide an opportunity to test his assertions about cultural experience. In Chapter 6, he introduces us to the ritual masquerades and visits called "mumming" and to the formal stealing and consuming of others' food called "the scoff." Somewhat later he tells us about the fishers' occasional creation and telling of false histories called "a cuffer." Of the three, the practice of "mumming," made interesting to the reader by three of Louis Chiaramonte's photographs from the 1960s, seems to be most significant to his argument. It is an ambiguous, simultaneously humorous and threatening celebration conducted during the twelve days of Christmas in which masked and disguised fishers invade the homes of others to "tease and prod, fondle and pinch...dance, jostle and prannk, turning up chairs, shaking the stove.... As they perform they are questioned with increasing bravery, and pinched and prodded back, until bit by bit, one by one, they become known" (1986:76-77). In the partying and further mumming that follows, invitations and reciproca1 exchanges of drink and food are put forward to be accepted or declined and the whole serves as "an opening" and a "triumph 158 over fear of the unknown...[to] reveal your guests...in a new light, with new possibilities for relationships" (p. 77). Sider throughout wants us to be fully aware that this apparently jolly party has its dark side: the mummers, many in drag, make a frightening entrance and the process and proper progression of guessing their identity and of the offering and acceptance of hospitality and the final unmasking are all fraught with dangers of misunderstanding, breaches of etiquette (possibly intentional), and the potential disruption and loss of social alliance and connection. Having opened for examination a specific example of the cultural "ambiguities" and "tensions" Sider emphatically sees as the proper central concern of his historical- ethnological synthesis, he does not, after all is said, take us very far into the not-so-easily accessible dimensions and metaphors of these cultural materials. There is a vast historical and anthropological literature recording and conceptualizing many instances of masked inversions of and irruptions into ordinary life, charivaries, feasts of innocents and feasts of women, carnivalesque truthtelling, politically motivated "houserunning" and related actions; Sider's mummers would have appeared much more clearly in relief against brief and controlled comparisons within that larger framework. Newfoundland mumming was a version and availed itself of the symbolic materials of the fishers' European ancestors who, when living close to the edge of social collapse, engaged in a ritualized "showing of the instruments" to indicate what real social anarchy would be like and what popular power could be once "the people" became as unprincipled and morally unrestrained as their exploiters (cf. Suter 1985). It would have been satisfying to have an interpretation of the Newfoundlanders' reworking of these old world cultural materials and of their failed moments and coopted histories. Is it not possible that the rape and incendiarism indicated in the mummers' play-acting are a way of "tracing," of both keeping alive memories of and forgetting the shore settlements' repeated devastation by colonial police actions and wars since the late 17th century? While Sider's contention that Newfoundland mumming "begins" with the advent of the truck system in the 1840s may or may not be true (his periodizations are fuzzy: pp. 83, 90-92), his evidence suggests that the termination by law in 1861 of the early and urban form of mumming, in which the poor threatened to invade the houses of the rich and direct class confrontation could take place, led to an exclusive outport village practice, isolated, 159 incapable of engaging the dominant mode and reduc ed to speaking to itself. Sider ascribes its final decline in the 1950s and 1960s to the rise of factory fishing but here too his conception of culture change within a historical timetable leaves something to be desired. The term "fish factory" implies a proletarianization of the fishers that would presumably render the production communities annually recreated by mumming functionally obsolete – but this contradicts some of Sider’s own historical evidence. Not only does factory fishing come about earlier in this century, but he also shows that it was standard procedure as late as the 1970s for the cod processors not to enter into wage agreements with their fishers but to make them "co-adventurers" (and therefore labor organizers?), buying back the fishers’ half of the catch (presumably at a uniform price) and running their own factory operations as a tax loss (Sider 1986:143). This resulted in the factory processing system bringing only modernizing shifts of technique and emphasis in Newfoundland’s long existing tributary-mercantile fishing system but no structural shift toward capitalism and proletarianization as far as the fishers were concerned. In this regard it is interesting to speculate to what extent the 20th-century mumming practices Sider gives us (drawn mostly, it appears, from fieldwork by Chiaramonte, Faris, Story, Wareham and others) are about the social culture of this modified tributary system and to what extent they differ from the mumming conducted in the context of the merchants’ truck and tal qal practices of the 19th century. If the later is the case, then the argument for the fishers’ retaining at least a sense of the objective (that is, tributary) social relations in both production and cultural action wold appear much stronger. By his reading of the details of such practices as mumming, Sider seems to align himself with a trend in the social sciences according to which class is largely reduced to an aspect of the collective or group action of individuals, class consciousness is redefined in relativistic, point-of-view terms, and much emphasis is placed on what are perceived as the "positive" aspects of and the "choices" that offer themselves in even the most exploited social positions (Elster 1986). In his treatment of mumming, Sider does indeed point to terror motifs and to the dangers of failed community formation but he does not linger with them very long before pushing on to consider how these "negative" dimensions are transmuted by flexible cultural traditions into an adjustment to and free 160 affirmation of things as they apparently have to be. Just as Sider interprets the fishers’ much-lamented "individual intentionality" not in terms of a social or even a cultural but "an intensely felt physical isolation" (1986:161, cf. 101-104), so does he "naturalize" the experience of mumming by emphasizing the victim/host’s "triumph over fear of the unknown" (1986:77), which only later becomes a social matter as the necessary precondition for defining social boundaries, "to coordinate and coadjust and adjust a multiplicity of emotions and interests, " and to develop a future-oriented "more-or-less collective intentionality" (1986:94, cf. 194). In other words, it is the annual reaffirmation of the promise, if not necessarily of the fact, of productive future social connectedness that, for Sider, makes mumming do double work, both reproducing exploitation by creating "communities of producers" and resisting exploitation by retaining the necessary illusions (!) of collective power and future action. The insufficiency of this analysis lies in its insistence that such cultural exertions do not reflect and are more or less autonomous of class relations; Sider consequently ignores certain details of procedural and verbal content that point to more negative and darker aspects of such practices and that force us to reconsider the real magnitude of the task of cultural resistance confronting the fishers. In this regard, some of Sider’s undigested evidence is most revealing. His analytical portrayal of mumming stops with the apparent movement from the individual-negative to the communal-positive by which "the unknown" became familiar and the invaded victim a host. But that is clearly not all that happens. The victim-become-host and the unmasked mummers have the option of masking up again to visit another house to celebrate how success in forming a "community" empowers some to invade the intimate territory of others - to invite them, or perhaps to exclude them, cut them off, to frighten and possibly punish them by withholding "community." Moreover, mumming helps create and regulate power not only in but between kin-ordered class relations. Sider tells us that among the mummers are several who are not allowed to unmask, but then does not give us a reading of that except to say that these individuals are thus designated in public as ones who will crew but will not be able to claim a share of the catch so that "the communitywide implications of changing statuses and alliances can be seen, acknowledged, and begun to be taken into account in one's own plans" (1986:91). This functional point about 161 community "accounts" obscures the far more interesting point that mumming seems to display, replicate, and participate in the dominant mode's penetration of the kin mode by requiring fathers to designate ahead of time and in public (and if only as a symbolic gloss) those of their children who not only would not share but who will presumably be the first victims of any merchants' decision to terminate winter supply. Sider seems to indicate that not being a11owed to unmask was a life-course matter, a generational hurdle in which a young person, by being allowed (or by assuming the right?) to unmask and accept hospitality, indicated his (or her?) coming of age; he does not give us a close enough investigation to allow us to determine who exactly was placed in this position, for how long, and whether or not everyone was eventually allowed to join the "community" by unmasking. It seems clear that if, as Eric Wolf argues, connectedness and claiming a share are the primary cultural concerns of class experience in a kin- ordered mode, then these subtexts to the communal mumming parties provided outport residents with an annual reminder and a grim celebration of the dominant mode's power to control the fishers' central values, of its power to isolate and "individualize," and of its historical success in turning the class relations that cut through families to its own use by sloughing off the terrible moral and emotional burdens of "selection" into the most intimate social relationships and cultural actions of the dominated mode's population. Such an alternative reading of cultural hegemony and counterhegemony suggests that before social analysts can proceed to investigate and celebrate the innately greater freedom and creativity that culture supposedly has over productive social relations (cf. Sahlins 1976:56-57, 152-153, 159, and passim), they have first to be much more determined to create precise historical-ethnological descriptions of class relations both within and between connected modes of production. Then it might be possible to understand how the cultural materials that inform both conscious and unconscious class experiences are not merely epiphenomenal or super-structural but can reflect, create, sustain, and, when possible, resist and destroy in historically ascertainable but indeterminate ways both class relations as well as relations between class relations. This means that as we (1) broaden the notions of "experience" and "agency" to include aspects of unconscious experience, of group formation within and between classes and of political ideologies that outlive their "original" class situations and are turned to use 162 in other later ones (sider 1986:103), and that as we (2) begin to set out into the mostly uncharted waters of writing histories and ethnographies of class-consciousness-without- class, we have also to be as clear as we can in all cases about the precise forms and the exact historical weight of all the possible relations of exploitation and of the movement of cultural materials within and between articulated modes of production that make these relations possible. One of the most difficult problems facing such work is the partially secret and often coded nature of popular culture materials. The keys to understanding the positive contributions so-called "folk culture" makes to allow people to endure and resist exploitation and double-binding contradictions are not something contained simply in their readily observable forms and actions. While Sider reproduces and examines a considerable body of oral evidence from everyday speech, he gives us virtually no analysis of exactly what is said (or sung) on those special occasions when the invasion of another's privacy, masked inversions of gender, ritual but substantial theft, and the deliberate "playful" overthrows of shared historical memories all offer opportunities to speak in extraordinary ways and to search, even if only for a brief moment, for solutions to present dilemmas in experimental combinations of personal and cultural knowledge and expression. What do those perpetrating a "party scoff," that is, those stealing openly, ritually, from another member of the outport fishing community, talk, sing and joke about while this is going on? Sider's contention that the scoff is a means of resistance against the unjust leveling of being paid off under the tal qal system (1986:87-88, 92) may be ideally correct, but the scoff might also, in some practice, be nothing more than a culturally rationalized crime, a form of more or less violent domination of and even possible exploitation of those most marginalized within the "community." In an earlier article he gives an account of a popular Newfoundland song called "Aunt Martha's Sheep," in which scoffers steal an old woman’s sheep, deceive the Mountie sent out after them into joining their meal, and in the end assert that even though they had taken the sheep the Mountie had eaten most of it (Sider 1984:438-439). This song seems to contradict his later assertion that the scoff is not aimed at the "morally marginal" (Sider 1986:78), and it also seems to support the negative and even despairing notion that the scoff is a ritualized act of involution against which the singled-out victims can hope for 163 no recourse except through that tax-biting common enemy, the state, whose agents are in any case perspicaciously gullible and ready to be coopted. This would contrast sharply with Sider’s possibly exonerating conclusion that the scoff teaches that "One person's well-being is another's loss, and the other - the victim - and the self are identical" (1986:85). Similar objections could be raised concerning Sider's conjectures about the cuffer. It is "on the surface...a lie about history" but one that he sees as having the opposite effect from a falsification of history, namely that cuffers "demand...a profoundly intimate knowledge of the audience, and of the history of the village as this history lives, increasingly hidden, within the present" (1986:162-163). To my mind there is much good sense in Sider's suggestion that "cuffers are one of the customs that introduce history, history as an ongoing process, into current village life by creating, in the here and now, a profound tension between what was and what is" (1986:163). This positive sense that the fishers have an independent technique for relating their present conditions to both the past and, by implication, to the future, one that maintains a constant testing and updating on "what people can, or are willing, to remember" (1986:164) represents a clear advance over the still all too common view that subaltern people have no (or only a scant and in no way useful) sense of history. At the same time, Sider does answer his own question about whether the cuffer is part "of the formation of a political culture: a culture capable of reincorporating experience into social structure in ways that create openings for change" except to point out that there appears to be a relationship between areas where the cuffer is most common and areas of union organizing (1986:164). I do not have James C. Faris' Cat Harbour (1972), Sider's main source on the cuffer, to hand and therefore cannot ascertain whether or not "the data are not yet available" {Sider 1986:163), but it would seem evident from the information he does give that the cuffer was a part of the fishers' teasing behavior that could, on occasion, escalate into fighting. This in turn raises questions about the appearance of "history" in the fishers' social culture that only additional ethnographic research concerning the choosing of victims, their relation to the storytellers, and about the content and progress of the cuffers themselves could give us. As things stand, Sider has shown us the locatoin of a possibly positive, resisting social-cultural nexus, but as long 164 as we do not understand the nature and outcome of the relationship between victim and victimizers on this (or on any) occasion where people have to struggle for their persona1 and collective identities based on a "right history" about their own lives, then the key question about the double work to be performed by social culture remains unanswered. To challenge another person's memory of him or herself, face-to-face, directly or indirectly, in a playful-shading-into-serious manner and in collaboration with others, is to inflict a form of psychological terror that can, when it "goes too far," destabilize and utterly isolate a rebellious individual or a troublesome political position. In the case of the Newfoundland fishers it remains undecided whether the cuffer provided a means for deeper hegemonic penetration or lay at the roots of slowly accumulating counterhegemonic cultural growth. Stories, songs, and jokes have composers, singers, and tellers and one of the things one misses most in Sider's account is that he does not allow the outport men (or women?) who engage in these activities to step forward to speak or sing. Two men appear whose words should have been heard: one, never identified, is shown pitching a fish into a barrel in a photograph with a caption that describes him as "a reader, borrowing books from relatives and the schoolteacher, and a man known in the community as someone who talks about history or to visit, as he works on the wharf, for interpretations of...the 'radio news.'" The second is a fisherman, an occasional mummer and organizer of hunting parties who also remains unidentified and without a voice. His toothy unmasked grin adorns the front of the book's dustjacket and he appears by all accounts to be a prodigious composer and singer of songs, not all of which he reveals to the folklorists who come to record him. The withholding of verses and texts seems to be a common rule for storytellers and, if anything, attests to the importance they ascribe to the content; but then why not use the content that they feel free to give us? Elsewhere, Sider paints a picture of intimate communication through song between people: "one man, for example, will hold another man's hand while he is singing a ballad at a social gathering" (1986:105, 186). But such concentration on the form and apparent emotion of what can only be seen as a "moment of authenticity" tells us so little. If such intimacy occurs after the mummers have unmasked, for example, does it merely perhaps soften the impact of the possibly exploitive relationships that have just been "negotiated" and 165 ritually and publicly agreed to, or is there resistance here in a public and ritual cementing of terms of mutual (however limited) assistance against the interlocking modes' compulsive, double-binding, and fatal rationalities, with the song an effort to combine cultural knowledge with knowledge of the moment, to assess this relationship as something greater and better, as a possible moment of change? How can we know (pace Wittgenstein) that what is possible of being said is being said if we are not told what is said? The singers and storytellers deserve far more attention in ethnological-historical analysis than they get because they have, and are expected to have, the conceptual means to transform experience into agency. This is not to say that the conversion of one quality of experience to another that results from their cultural work is necessarily profound or "right" or efficacious or that the listeners can directly ascribe the same meanings to the songs' metaphors and punchlines as the singers. Such a functional reading, whatever its uses, would be insufficient to what we want to learn about. What we need to know instead (and here Obeyesekere shows us a part of the way [1981:20-21, 178-179]) is how the singers and storytellers came to be what they are, how they see their learning, their "careers" and their productive and social selves from performance occasion to occasion, how they sing about success and failure, and how they intuit and talk about a need for change. However one responds to Obeyesekere's original Freudian readings, or his distinctions between the psychogenetic and the personal or, for that matter, his sense of "hypnomantic consciousness," his biographical fieldwork opens a different kind of conceptual-historical bridge between the private and public, the individual and the communal. By turning away from what the singers and storytellers have to say, both in and out of performance, Sider missed an opportunity to discover and contemplate what takes place at this nexus between class and culture, between the private and public experiences of his singers, and what happens as a result of "the struggle at the roots of the mind - not casting off an ideology, or learning phrases about it, but confronting a hegemony in the fibers of the self and in the hard practical substance of effective and continuing relationships" (Williams 1977:212). We finish Sider's study without knowing whether the fishers draw their will to go on from seeing themselves and the world with a sense of creative irony or merely by means of formulas 166 supporting a dogged and resigned cynicism: "we must live in hopes, supposing we die in despair" (1986:158, 161, 184). By his focus on merchant capitalism and therefore on the primacy of exchange over production, Sider joins a well-known group of analysts who align themselves, more-or-less tacitly, with marginal utilitarianism's theoretical downplaying of objective aspects of class and of social organization of production, its ahistorical notions of equilibrium and its belittling views about an essentially sedentary, easily satisfied, and conservative human nature that can only be mobilized effectively by disturbance from outside or by being tricked and manipulated into action (cf. Kinser's creditable critique of Braudel [1981:678]). Although he is clearly sympathetic to the fishers, Sider subtly faults their ensemble of cultural materials and forms for failing to overcome "individual intentionality" and thereby enter "modern" social relations in a smoother manner, one that is more profitable to themselves. There are occasional suggestions that perhaps the fishers' failure to modernize was at least partially intentional and it is possible to argue that this was not only because they were too committed to the comforts and routines of fishing for the merchants (as Sider seems to think) but perhaps because the analytical of their social experiences' recreation in cultural practices showed some of them at least that modernization was merely the exchange of one technique of exploitation for another within essentially unchanging economic and social frameworks. This certainly seems true of the last verse of the song about Aunt Martha's sheep and might also have been a part of the content of the storytellers' and singers' mental apparatus that, as we have already seen, Sider rejects as having less analytic value than "the contradictions of and between multiple cultural forms" (1986:193). It is precisely our probing, however, of all the dimensions, including above all the content of cultural work that goes on in specific historical class locations that has to be one of the central activities of anthropologists and historians engaged in the study of culturally necessary victimizations. We have to be alert to the astonishing abilities of practitioners of "folk culture" in maintaining a "mode of resistance" through the complicated historical transitions and across the interlocking relations of two or three modes of production. We must recognize that the specific singers and storytellers we encounter who are capable of such achievements, whether functionally effective or not, 167 are engaged in public performances that meditate on experiences with power and with the internal conflicts of making a living by participating in and thereby strengthening a system of one's own exploitation. Rather than categorically excluding what they say about that and hoping instead to instruct them with our "science," we ought perhaps to treat them more as colleagues - without, of course, falling into the trap of blindly accepting their "authenticity," or of assuming that their version of their experience is the best possible analysis. This essay's opening paragraphs about the need to focus on the permeation of everyday life by culturally necessary - and therefore not merely "scapegoating" - victimizations do not seem to be out of step with the central issues we find in some of the best recent attempts at writing both history and anthropology. The monographs by Rosaldo, Greenough, and Sider all contain texts by and about classes of people whose collective histories place them in hazard of becoming either the murdered guest or the murdering host, the betraying benefactor or the betrayed child cut adrift in a countryside suddenly without food, the parents clinging at all costs to their bank accounts or the sons and daughters available for labor but not allowed to unmask to become socially recognizable. To read such texts in order to decode their fatally interlocking tropes alone is to perform the last rites on these experiences, to recognize them but also to stifle them and lock them away as irrelevant to the social and historical processes that count. Such experiences, however, are not just part of the regrettable and best forgotten necessary costs of ongoing culture but are a discordant, self-destructive foil woven inextricably into the social relations and histories of success. The political economists' perspective is able to set its sights both on the reproductively determined and class aspects of social relationships and on the split selves required to live the split texts that run out of words at precisely those moments when victims become necessary to sustain what claims to be necessary culture. Rather than merely seeing how this or that culture has worked historically, we can begin to trace the cultural-historical reworkings of specific traumas of primary accumulation as these appear in hegemonic redefinitions of and proprietary claims to the surplus, and are all experienced, during "normal times," in the repetition compulsions of dispossession and enforced social failure. We may then be able to build new bridges between such histories and those of 168 other than normal times when social cultures collapse into great and small holocausts. To do so would undermine those theoretical and empirical paths that enable the current exonerative analyses to remove such events into extra-historical realms of cultural theater, where they appear merely as inevitable tragic-cathartic pageants both necessary for and yet, as is somehow presumed, not a part of the ongoing social progress and creative cultural reproduction they allow us to purchase. Endnote The Thompson quote in the epigraph to Part One was from his preface to Staughton Lynd's Class Conflict, Slavery and The United States Constitution. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967.

169 4. Eric Wolf’s Historical Anthropology (2001)

The title is Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Domination and Crisis1 and it points to the often unacknowledged centrality of matters of ideation in all of Eric Wolf's work. It is a fitting sequel to his Europe and the People Without History2 in that it constructs around the ideological themes with which that landmark synthesis ended an outline for a formidable and exciting research project in Historical Anthropology. In his new integrative rethinking of an array of theoretical possibilities and ethnographic- historical studies concerning the Kwakiutl in the nineteenth and early twentieth, the Aztecs in the fifteenth and sixteenth and Nazi Germany in the twentieth centuries, the focus throughout is on the ideational in social figurations, particularly on the texts and discourses that command and task people. Wolf pays special attention to the latter's intertwining with specific historical social formations and to the production and mobilization of ideological constructions that attempt to sustain these modal organizations of labor and surplus-taking through the various demographic, social and cosmological crises arising from the ways these formations encountered and found themselves within the articulations of world systems. Ideations are not, for Eric Wolf, some "superstructural" effects, secondary and obedient to some fiction of an economic "last instance," but are fully engaged in those coincident and mutually enabling material and ideational labors and appropriations that constitute modes of production. Ideational labors and surpluses are identifiably woven into the latter's historical appearances and are recognizably at work in the various moments and strategies of hierarchical dis- and rearticulation among modal formations. To theorize this most recent elaboration of his life-long project of comprehending the dialectics of social-cultural interdependencies (beginning with and still including those detention camp lectures given by Norbert Elias in WWII England) Wolf takes a full chapter to range far and wide through intellectual history to examine the possible contributions of what he calls "contested concepts." It is worth noting that he retains,

1

2 170 among many other things, a Bakhtinian sense of the struggle that takes place in everyday language, a Weberian sense of the steering capacity of ideas in purportedly material determinations, and a sense of the potential of a modified speech-act theory for appreciating culturally determined performance-labor. Taken altogether, this is a meditation on the place of hegemonic cultural processes in Historical Anthropology. Wolf's perception of "power" is firmly grounded in that social universal set out in Norbert Elias' recognition, in The Court Society3, by which both our values as well as our acts are links in the chains of compulsion contained in the interdependencies to which we commit ourselves when we act socially, when we participate, as we must, even if by default. In Wolf's model, power depends on our gendered, generational, occupational, class and otherwise figured social memberships and locations and our attendant capacities and willingness to mobilize culture, perceived by him as "a vast stock of material inventories, behavioral repertoires and mental representations, put in motion by many kinds of social actors , who. . .not only . . .differ in the positions from which they act and speak but [whose] positions. . .are likely themselves to be fraught with ambiguity and contradiction."4 One of the key questions this book's three historical ethnographies open up for improving our analyses of hegemonic formations concerns the problem about who is organizing cultural coherence for and against whom. Inside this concern lies Wolf's understanding (against certain Pragmatist and other currently favored perceptions) that coherence is not always rational but indeed requires and at the same time can trap itself in irrational ideations of absolute, foundational Necessity. In an important section at the very end of the book, Wolf points to the advantages of a foundational mythic history, an apparently irrational and cognitively dissonant order, founded on a primary cosmology whose ambiguous and open spaces offer grounds for permissible, operational self- contradiction, for hegemonic renegotiations concerning the updating of the terms of dire Necessity. These latter in turn find expression in new victim identifications, in new speed-ups and volume increases of allegedly necessary sacrifices. For example, in his

3

4 171 discussion of the Aztec elite's exclusive claim to engage in sacrificial performances, we find a curious textual turn in this aristocracy's pretension to the role of parents to the gods. This is an ambiguous reversal that reduces ancestral divinities to an infantilized condition of infinite, bottomless hunger that needed to be fed more the more the wealth and population of the Tenochca increased, by those empowered to feed these fictitious but, if only for the victims, nevertheless "real" creatures. Not only do we find here a metonymic displacement of the conflicted parental obligations in this society, as actual parents fed their hungry infants so that they could pay their tributes with children to be placed into sacrificial slavery, but we also see the ruling hegemons trapped in a text of a primary and divine infantile voracity driving their tribute system into bacchanals of human destruction that rendered it incapable of encountering creatively an expanding, trans-Atlantic articulation that in turn read the world through other foundational texts, other cosmologies of sacrificial necessity. The three case studies appear in terms of the modal formations developed in Europe and the People Without History. The Kwakiutl of the Fort Rupert area, brought into ethnographic recognition by Boas, Benedict and others, Wolf perceives as a predominantly kin-ordered formation, as a society without a state, where "kin" consists of sodalities containing lineage, non-lineage and other associational members, and where social membership is measured by the capacity to participate in ritual distributions of gifts. Their cosmological construction divided the year into a summer of ordinary time, of hunting and gathering what the gods had provided, and a winter of ritual time, of being hunted and gathered by the gods in turn. This construction entered a period of crisis, beginning in the early nineteenth century, when increased contacts with the Anglo-Canadian colonial state and its capitalist-tribute articulations drew the Kwakiutl population into competing labor and commercial relations and produced a demographic and sodality-maintenance crisis which became a crisis of the ritual system itself. Demographic decline forced the ruling groups to expand membership, to admit those formerly ineligible who could now purchase goods for gift-giving in great quantities to participate in what came to be called potlatch only in the late 19th century. In consequence, the Kwakiutl experienced by the second half of the 19th century -- coincidental with their moment of entry into the ethnographic present -- a cultural 172 crisis, an enormous ritual-material inflation and an effectual social-ethical collapse, as when (some few cases of punitive killings to the contrary) aspirants who had acquired potlatch wealth through the forced sexual labor of women were nevertheless elevated to both social and ritual memberships. Such and other practices brought on an intensification of state controls against which the stateless Kwakiutl were finally helpless. Wolf throughout speaks about these and analytically commensurate processes in the Valley of Mexico and in Nazi Germany in terms of Anthony Wallace's ideas about revitalization movements. The Aztec empire of the fifteenth century was a revitalization that promised the finally stable world-cosmology of the Fifth Sun, proposing that the balance due on a mounting cosmic debt could be eternally met with a flood of human sacrificial blood, extracted from those unfortunate to become caught in the constant so- called "flower wars," which Wolf, I think advisedly, identifies as a form of Low Intensity Warfare, one that produced victims for the calendrical compulsions driving the Aztecs' sacrificial-liturgical year. Whereas, in Wolf's modal analyses, membership conflicts characterize kin-ordered relations while balancing the receiving and giving of justice is the central directive of tribute-taking formations, the primary modal figuration at work in Capitalism involves the valuation of people. As in: those medical valuations that identified some life as "not worthy of living" and that thereby empowered private- corporate and Nazi state-organized murders on an unprecedented scale. In this sense, Eric's rendering of Nazism as a revitalization movement in a capitalist social formation is a brilliant advance toward getting at the deeper resonances, the constructions of unspeakable but always actionable substitutions that made such "logical" horrors as the Warsaw ghetto and the attendant Treblinka death camp possible. Anyone who has seen Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, will find it hard to disagree when Eric Wolf argues that "German National Socialism is better understood as a movement akin to cargo cults and ghost dances."5 The central cosmological construction that elevated the Nazis' insane but nevertheless hegemonic discourse to power was a socialism of national-racial

5 173 membership, a membership that was actually measurable by purportedly scientific means and whose primary necessities permitted the homicidal subjugation of other racial groups, particularly those that could be portrayed as immediately threatening to Germans or that could be identified as insufficiently human, fit only to be wasted in orgies of slave labor destruction to benefit German cartels. I can not hope to give an exegesis here of Eric's complex argument but can only note his positing of the possibility, following Franz Neumann, of a post-state society of capitalist chaos that empowers genocidal leaderships. Following this train of thought one can say that Hitler, or someone like him, with a unique capacity to gather enough Volk to form a German government and, for a time, a national budget, was a necessity, one that had to be, as the "appeasement" position at the time implied, free to extort from subject tribute formations, including "the Jews" and the projected "resettlement" areas in the East, the repayments of Germany's various debts both to its domestic bond-holders and to the so- called international community. It is in this light that the recent flurry of concern about so-called Auschwitz gold makes sense. Wolf's opening of world-system and historical anthropology perspectives on the Holocaust6 is a genuine innovation, one that allows us a more nuanced but also more integrated understanding of the current emergence of renewed and, it might be argued by some, necessary genocidal formations in the Balkans, Central Africa, South East Asia, Central America and elsewhere. Wolf points us toward carefully considering Nazi Germany's grounding in capitalism's articulations with tribute- and kin-ordered social formations. We can perform a thought experiment, for example, that perceives Germany's cartel formations, combining both public and private sector businesses since the Great Depression of the late nineteenth century, as an elaborate tribute-ordered formation attached in a dominant articulation to a capitalist mobilization of the labor required to produce mandated rates of return to corporate elites, at the price, as it turned out, of any necessary sacrifice of human lives. This possible perception of a reversal of what is often perceived to be tribute's relationship to capital -- with German tribute ruling a capitalist formation to produce a judicially and scientifically correct (i.e. justice-producing)

6 174 devaluation of people that in turn permitted the latter's genocidal expropriation and selective enslavement to feed the debt structures of tribute's wider articulations with capitalism -- is fully consistent with Wolf's upsetting throughout of the "normal" temporal-conceptual sequences of modal formations and articulations. In his formulation of a possible Historical Anthropology7, there is no longer an ethnographic present, nor are there cores or peripheries except that one is always to be found inside the other. Envisioning Power marks another milestone in Eric Wolf's singular intellectual journey, reaching back to his earliest engagements with the ideas of J.B.S. Haldane and Julian Huxley, and still seeking to sharpen our anti-teleological taste for appreciating particular historical evolutions, where the measure of our freedom is the extent to which we are able to move beyond the constructions of any alleged "last instance" that requires necessary murders and other kinds and levels of human sacrifice. With this great baseline book Eric Wolf has, once again, empowered us. ______* This article first appeared under the title "Approaches to the hegemonic in historical anthropology: a new text by Eric Wolf" in FOCAAL 33 1999, 149-152

Endnotes

7 175 5. Reimagining the Oikos: Austrian Cameralism in its Social Formation (1991)

DeMan's second psychological objection goes: Marxism does not take into account the power of tradition! Again, one wonders how he can say that. What is Otto Bauer's "petrified history" but an ideology from earlier epochs reaching across to grasp new social relationships. -- Paul Lazarsfeld, 1983[1927]

There are histories that Reality does not allow to happen, because Reality would be too exposed in them. And so, these histories have to be told. In doing so one might force Reality to confess: yes, I am that. -- Martin Walser, 1964

Exploring the relationship between ideas and the historical social worlds in which they live and speak has long been and remains one of the most difficult areas of social scientific work. The infinitely mutual reflexivity of texts and contexts, of lived projections and introjections, of unending alienations and (mis)appropriations, of disclosures and erasures all threaten, perpetually, to subvert and defeat in advance any search for a controlling analytical formula. A significant illustration of this difficulty may be found in one recent attempt at outlining the basic tenets of a "rational choice" Marxism according to which Marx's discussion of the base/superstructure relationship appears "trivially true...[but] is falsifiable and indeed false." That author, to make his point, leads us through an inconclusive discussion about aspects of "scientific" validity in our observing of the functional and dysfunctional roles ideas play in purely economic and technical contexts, and he ends with proposing a research project about a "theory of ideology" that remains unspecified except for a methodology involving a relativistic and individually focused cognitive psychology of so-called "belief formation and preference formation " (Elster 1986:112-116, 199) .Having substituted his own search for an unambiguous and scientifically and empirically "true" understanding of texts and their contexts for one he deems inferior (22-24, 190-193), he admits, however, to a prior defeat in the corollary areas (such as, of course, exploitation!) where combined realistic

176 and nominalistic analysis proves too complicated to be grasped by empirical- quantifiable means. For him such researches have to be abandoned or, if kept, demoted to mere description or heuristics (80-81,195-196). It is significant that Eister's "methodological individualism" (1986:194) appears to be grounded in the Leibnizian solution to the problem of grasping an infinity of relative determinations: any final understanding of the purported richness of individual experience, of an individual ideation, will always elude allegedly impoverished theory and will be experienced only by a metaphysical divinity outside of and yet central to that impenetrable harmony of determinations (Hamacher 1986:106-108; Bloch 1968:73-81; Kondylis 1987:13-16). This view enforces a self-censoring social science whose most important goal is to formulate "properly modified and restricted" forms of individual "self-realization" in order to safeguard "the exploitation of economics of scale" (Elster 1986:195). The revival in the 1980s of Leibniz's notions about the individual and totality and about texts and contexts - that were originally formulated, in part, for the sake of gaining a career as a culture-bureaucrat at the Habsburg court - is intriguing not only because it points to an interesting, historically specific contextual problem in itself but also because it replays here and now what William Johnston has astutely identified as ancien-régime Austria's most characteristic cultural move - namely, positing a revolutionary cultural critique that seeks to disclose the deep structures of self- contained, individual "systems" while at the same time refusing to subject one's own system(s) to such scrutiny on the pretext of a primary epistemological responsibility for cultural "custodianship" (Johnston 1981). One has to agree with Johnston that we are a long way from a satisfying history of such split enterprises, but what follows will perhaps bring us in closer range by exploring the possibility of an alternative route which this particular early modern "methodological individualism" took toward our own century's social debates. After an initial, necessary conceptual excursion, we will consider, in their social formational contexts, several constitutive texts of cameralism, which was both the Austrian ancien régime's theoretical-practical keystone and an early social science whose concepts and words continue to echo into the present.

177 Transference and Countertransference in Social Historical Time

Rather than divide the analysis of social and ideational interplay into high and low tasks - so defined by what we presumably can and cannot know "scientifically" - we might think about another approach altogether and begin by dismantling (or "deconstructing") the apparent fittedness of texts and contexts, by holding the sources, multiple authorships, and mutual constructions of texts both apart from and against the articulating social formations in and around which they find expression. The objective of such an apparent avoidance of making a definitive and positive statement of causal and contextual connectedness is not finally to end with a mere analysis of different juxtapositions but to continue to reproblematize separately certain "obviously" (temporally) related texts and contexts with an eye toward determining and rendering their relationships more intelligible in terms of historical experience which at all times surrounds the intense one-dimensionality of here-and-now experience with a less easily grasped but ever-present sense of multiple temporality. The vitality of phenomenology is that it appears to cleave closely to the problem of experience. It does so, however, only to sublate experiences in essences that in their turn offer nothing helpful to understanding the essential historicity of all experience. One of the reasons the phenomenological approach to the nature and apprehension of experience has proven so powerful in the social sciences and in psychology and criticism lies in its rediscovery and philosophical formulation of something that inquisitors, trial jurists, and readers of detective fiction have known for a long time; that is, to grasp "what happened" it is necessary to obtain and reconstruct repeated retellings of what happened, of what was experienced and continues to be experienced. The necessity of fiction at the heart of Husserl's notion of "reduction" (understood in a culinary sense) sanctions replacing our traditional search for historical truth with what may instead be called "narrative truth" (Spence 1982). To discover where the stories differ and falter for corrections, insertions, or deletions, for lapses or recovery of memory, for recognized contradictions, imputations, and so on is not to discover, finally, the truth in the sense of a fantasized universal-historical conclusion about what happened (as phenomenology would finally demand, thereby abandoning discarded "used-up" stories of experiences 178 and their experiencing selves)1 but to apprehend what was, is, and can be experienced from historical moment to moment as it is remembered, forgotten, reimagined, and reconstructed. The study of historical experience is to discover how experiences appear in, step out of, and reenter both parallel and divergent historical narratives about processes unfolding along different temporal strata and at different rates of flow. It is with a view of historical experience as a problem of experiencing multiple temporalities that we leave behind late-Scholastic "methodological individualism" and its view of the individual as a closed and more or less successful, self-reproducing "system" of events and relationships (Luhmann 1986: an autopoietic system) whose career-conceived in Augustinian-Petrarchan terms as a conflicted but resolved narrative of sin and conversion - and whose encounters with other "systems" all require "an idealized, narrative time" (Freccero 1986:17-21; Luhmann 1986:321-322). Chronicling, fixing the dates of events, of actions, and of the production of ideas - in short, understanding the timing, the before and after of the phenomena that appear along a continuous and homogeneous flow of "physical" time - will not become obsolete but merely a secondary, technical task once we refocus on the multiple times of remembrance and abandon the imperious bourgeois subject that requires (and enforces) such historical labors to produce that historical time in which it can embed the beginning, progress, and end of careers. Siegfried Kracauer's reflections on Proust's experiences with time and memory make part of our point by maintaining that "what does exist is a discontinuous, non- causal succession of situations, of worlds, or periods which, in Proust's own case must be thought of as projections or counterparts of the selves into which his being - but are we justified in assuming an identical being underneath? - successively transforms itself." For Kracauer, Proust's failure to do more than establish "temporal continuity in retrospect" is not merely the final epistemological aporia of the bourgeois biographical self (as one could argue) but is the aporia of all historical experience, which apparently "hinges on...retreat into the dimensions of art" while knowing at the same time that history has "[n]either an end nor is it amenable to esthetic redemption" (1966:76-77).

1 179 This dissection of Proust's impasse has several useful results. It posits, first, a clear critique of the phenomenologists' monadological conception of the self ("an identical being underneath?"), and with that Kracauer has a privileged last word in his disputation of Horkheimer's exclusively high-cultural and personally autonomous estheticization of historical experience (Jay 1988); second, and closer to the present essay's attempt at a different approach to the historical text and context problem is that Kracauer urges on us, presumably as a way "to face up to the last things before the last" (1966:78), the practical recognition that historical periods (and social formations, for that matter) produce and shape "times" of their own that, because of their apparent internal cohesion but also because of their occasional coalescing and intersection with other temporalities, give off illusions that are strong to the point of claiming the "reality," necessity, and primacy of a homogeneous historical time (Kracauer 1966:72- 74). His sense of an exploded unity of historical time to match an exploded unity of the self also explodes any "naturalized" temporal juxtaposition between texts and contexts (cf. also Rose 1984:3; LaCapra 1985:105). This leaves a general analytical problem that has, for historians, the special twist of calling in question all presumptions about a natural historical convergence of apparently temporally simultaneous phenomena. It is a historian's prerogative to demand "a clear awareness of the plurality of social time [as] indispensable to a common methodology of the social sciences" (Braudel 1972). At the same time, there persists a sense that it is the special burden of historians not to give up "the single white light that [we] must have," that to historians falls the special burden to do the impossible, which is to accept that "[e]ach social reality...secretes its own time" but that out of these times there has to be woven a "world-time" in the form of a master narrative (Braudel 1972:36-38). The step that has to be taken (and it is not really all that big a step) is to give up the need for a certain master narrative and to learn to live with a provisional (Kracauer 1966:78) but always morally serious (because we have to promise and act [Rose 1984:210-212]) narrative construction whose intent it is to help us remember and sublate the recurrent social- cultural deadlocks of thoroughly hegemonized historical experience, those moments, to which our historical sense continues to be irresistibly drawn, where we succumb to culturally permitted but unpredictably costly and always questionable victimizations. To 180 conclude Braudel's vision of a historical social science's special responsibility, one might say that it is meant to achieve and then defend an overriding sense of the provisional character of all master narratives against "culturally compelled" histories of the moment that demand to become necessary practice (Rebel 1989). To help stifle our present, historically produced, and therefore itself relative desire for an absolute master narrative with alternatively satisfying provisional master narratives, historians require no radically new approaches or techniques but need perhaps to learn some different ways of combining already invented moves. To dismantle the existing master narratives by breaking up the consensual unity and structure of historical time we need not only to learn to bring together different combinations of longer, shorter, and even mythic durations and to pay more attention to the narrative potential of "conjunctural" aspects (Rosenberg 1967; Wolf 1982:303-305, 311-313, passim), but need also to begin to experiment with tearing apart accepted and apparently "natural" simultaneities and other such conventional temporal connections around which almost all of our explanations of historical experience are constructed. One of the first steps in this direction is to accept the necessarily psychological, memory-dependent dimensions of experience and to historicize the unconscious and repressed aspects that necessarily move in a timescape different from but not unrelated to what is consciously acknowledged. The psychological language by which these related differences may be grasped analytically focuses on the notions of compulsively repeated transference and countertransference, by which we recognize, first, how moments in both past and present become intertwined in the historians' own projective relations to their objects of study - that is, how the problems that preoccupy our "time" find their "displaced analogues" (LaCapra 1985: 123, also 72- 73) in our purportedly objective yet always somehow desired historical master narratives. It is also how the construction of historical texts by historical subjects is itself grounded in imagined contexts that permeate the creation, interpretation, and implementation of their texts and may span and conflate several temporalities in creative interpolations of the "present" and the "historical" - and is therefore not just a directed, consciously selective and controlled project but also operates unconsciously, projectively, transferentially, transtemporally. This second sense of historical transference is of special significance because it opens a 181 way to close the transferential exchange across temporal boundaries with that countertransference by which historical subjects have an illusory, imagined relationship with their desired historians, with their own sense of historical place. To restrict oneself to transference without countertransference is to gain a false appreciation of the difficulties involved in this kind of analysis and to fall into the trap of seeing the historical recurrence of projectively "erased" phenomena, acts, and texts as having in itself a naturally "recuperative" and transformative power for a "carnivalized" dissolution of transferential blockages in a process that makes the passage (in a homogeneous metatime) of "history" itself and not the analytical and reflective dimensions of temporally mixed historical experience the overriding source of human "therapy" in the broadest sense {LaCapra 1985:106-108). It is not only not enough for historians to achieve and impart a conscious sense of transferential processes across multiple historical times; they also have to be aware that there have been essentially two schools of transference analysis and that only one of these - the one that gives countertransference its due - can serve toward a deeper restructuring of the historical text/context problem. When we turn to the counsel of those who formulated and have working experience with the transferential, we find that at the root of it lie the infantile and other traumas of separation, the shatterings of illusions of unity that remain an unassimilable, temporally suspended "reality" in our subsequently compulsive, desire-driven, and forever dissatisfying social relations, where we hope to recapture {transfer to a new object) an ideal lost unity {Lacan 1981:53-56). Far from being by itself a way of "working through," transference occurs as the strongest source of denial and resistance to change in social encounters and relationships - including the relationship with the analyst. By diminishing the degree and importance of "suffering" (cf. Lacan 1981:55-56) in the analytical relationship, by assuming that the repetition- avoidance of the trauma is less severe there than in the relationships outside it, neo-Freudian ego psychologists from Anna Freud through Franz Alexander to Leo Stone and Heinz Kohut have sought to focus on making therapeutic gains in strictly epistemological terms by which the analysand learns to recognize, to "bring into the realm of consciousness" in a "corrective emotional experience," the transference (seen merely as "the repetition of interpersonal 182 attitudes") in order to "grapple again with unresolved childhood events and emotions" but now at a time when "his adult strength helps him solve the emotional difficulties that as a child he found insurmountable" {Alexander and Selesnick 1966:199,322-323). One finds oneself agreeing with those practitioners who argue that by thus conventionalizing the analytical relationship and what finds expression there, one not only helps repress what it might be possible for the analysand (the historical subject) to say "unconventionally" (Malcolm 1982:75-78 and passim) but also sees, from a historian's perspective, that this is to impose a conventionally homogeneous historical time on the transferential process itself. By bracketing the analytical occasion as a factitiously benign and itself ahistorical encounter, the analyst (countertransferentially) keeps alive a reassuring sense of cumulative wholeness in "adult strength." The latter appears as a myth of intersubjective unity ascribed to the phenomenological-existential sense of a "therapeutic encounter" where transference allegedly finally breaks and recognizes itself against the "rationality" (another myth of unity) of the analyst (Alexander and Selesnick 1966:323-324,369). Such an analytical process can only come to an in itself repetitious recognition of the trauma and ends by confusing such learned recognition and its subsequent "integration" with historical remembering. When Lacan reminds us that even the appearance of the unveiled trauma may be a part of transferential denial (1981:55) - and how many compulsively repeated viewings of by now essentially familiar Holocaust documentaries will it take before we realize we are still not "remembering" any holocausts? - he makes the clear point that the dominant phenomenological-epistemological approach, satisfied with such an appearance, forestalls what should be the payoff of the analysis - namely, that the subject (and the analyst as well) stop acting out and start remembering. Only an analytical relationship in which the severity and complexity of the trauma's simultaneous revelation-concealment is not downplayed, a relationship in which it is primarily the analyst's recognition of and struggle with transference and countertransference, creates the possibility of breaking the cycles of endless repetitions; only in such practice can analysis claim its proper place as the only opportunity for "working through" (Malcolm 1982:100-103, 116). It is the always incomplete (and for the analyst genuinely tragic) termination of analysis in a painful memory-recognition 183 breakthrough directed not merely toward the absent "original" trauma but toward its many historical/present incarnations that offers, at its most ideal, an opportunity not just for psychological "learning" to enhance the unifying-controlling ego function but for creating a new capability for change. This means abandoning a negative, because recognizably futile, but narcissistically pleasurable search for lost unity and exercising a broader range of cultural-historical capacities from a special vantage point, one that is of great importance to historians because it is "where...continuity is giving place to contiguity" (Winnicott 1982: 101; emphasis in original). For the historian who wants to (has to?) approach historical experience in terms of the language of transference, this second approach points toward constructing provisional histories that redeem (Rose 1984:89) that negative desire which is eternally compelled into play and authorized by commonly held and ostensibly positive master narratives of historical achievement. Such alternative "negative" narratives are not recoverable by analyses of historical events and texts brought together and kept apart by homogeneously continuous time; they can only be approached according to the ways they appear contiguously {i.e., adjacently, "tropically"), along varying trajectories of social time. As a postscript to this argument, I have to say that such a vision of historical work should not be confused with that merely natural "fragmenting" of historical time and its subsequent narrative-aesthetic redemption which has been advocated by the followers of current "postmodern" fashions (cf. the critique by Polier and Roseberry 1989; also Kracauer 1966 and Epstein 1990 are suggestive here). Instead, what I have in mind means to put pressure on resistant master narratives and requires not only breaking apart their apparently "natural" and factitious historical continuities and contemporaneities (as I will try in the following) but also bringing together and reconstituting any contemporaneity that has not been acknowledged before; which is to say that a denial of or failure to recognize an obvious contemporaneity between texts and contexts is as analytically (transferentially) significant as insisting on factitious historical-temporal conjunctures (Taylor and Rebe1 1981; Rebel 1988).

Cameralism in its Social Formation: Canonical Incongruities Cameralism, in the standard economic and political histories, is the common 184 name given to that genre of prescriptive doctrines that appeared in Central Europe between the 1650s and the 1760s in the form of pamphlets, books of advice, scholarly theses, and so on, all focusing on the best management of a royal or other aristocratic dynasty's treasury properties, the so-called Kammergut. These writings were initially grounded in the late-Renaissance revival of a classical tradition of personal manuals of rulership and of household management (housefather literature), often modeled on Xenophon's Cyropaedia and Oeconomia respectively, and evolved to become the basis for academic subjects that were prerequisites in the training of both high- and lowborn, "public" and "private" administrators. The social formations with which cameralism is conventionally associated are German Central Europe's early modern, more or less absolutist, militarist, and economically and socially interventionist states headed by dynasties of variously titled and endowed autocrats who stood at the peaks of politically organized tribute-collecting pyramids consisting of territorial corporations of clergy, nobility, towns, and peasants. In this context, cameralism is generally perceived as a practical theory for better managing the production and distribution of goods within these institutional constraints in such a way that they continued to generate and even increase the predictable upward flow of tribute necessary for defense and for the just and orderly distribution of status and political power in the state. Discussions about cameralism no longer focus only on the historical relationships between an economic doctrine and the economic fate of the Central European absolutist states in their shared epoch. There is recognition by historians that the language and concepts of cameralism were pervasive and turned up in the founding doctrines of social and other institutions not immediately connected to the economic and tribute-collecting formations of the state (Stekl 1978:62). The historical place of cameralism in the larger master narrative of the West has been expanded in the specialist literature to include certain key elements of social and psychological history as well, and this has fixed even more closely the relationship between cameralist texts and the absolutist context. The pivotal work in this regard was the series of essays published by Gerhard Oestreich between 1953 and 1967 (in English, 1982) on the theme of a deeper ideology and a practice of absolutism that were grounded in the so-called "Netherlands movement" associated with Hugo Grotius and with the Belgian humanist and classical historian 185 Justus Lipsius (1547-1606), whose politique career was founded not on concepts of religious toleration but on obedience and who ended his days as a secure academic reconciled with Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Lipsius's recovery of Roman Stoicism's emphasis on self-discipline for state service, his modification of it in terms of what was needed for "persevering" through a state's crises and civil wars, the two- century-long reissuing of editions of his works, and the echoes of Lipsius's ideas among other humanists, especially in France and Austria, all indicate, for Oestreich, that he was the major figure who caught the true spirit of the forward-looking aspects of the early modern states as they sought to overcome decades of confessional turmoil and war. He sees Lipsius's "de-theologization" of public life leading not toward toleration but toward a "strong state" grounded in a civil service and army whose members are themselves highly disciplined and enforce in turn the broader social discipline required for civil order. In this conception it is discipline, subordination, and obedience that end religious civil war and are, by that token, "modern." In this statist definition of modernity (and who cannot detect here an "origin" of that compulsively repeated Western fiction that places the state outside of society?) it is the new disciplinary demands of "[b]ureaucracy, militarism and mercantilism...in [their] particular spheres" that are behind the shift "from corporative, regionally secured liberty to the modern political order"(1982:267- 268; passim). By emphasizing a perception of the historically unique conjuncture of cameralism with its contextual state formation at that precise historical point where Europe, in order to recover its progressive development, needed to recover "unity" after extremes of conflict and by perceiving this moment of state formation and its ideology as making an identical contribution (discipline) to a master narrative of evolving modernity, Oestreich commits himself to an exclusive welding together of text and context in what we may agree is an example of "over-contextualization...[which] occurs when one so immerses a text in the particularities of its own time and place that one impedes responsive understanding and excessively restricts the interaction between past and present" (LaCapra 1985:132). Ironically, such factitious accounts are often logically mistaken - revealing thereby their countertransferential, wishful relationship to their historical subject - and Oestreich's is no exception. Here cameralism is not only conflated with mercantilism and it is not only seen as 186 serving the state as the entry for notions of administrative and economic discipline into the top levels of state administration, but it is also alleged to have been an effective means to harness and direct (and in that sense "modernize") the dangerous and disorderly forces unleashed by industrialization. Although Oestreich's account, in its emphasis on texts about discipline, appears to be an idealist one, we can see that it conceals at its heart a rather crude and arguably unconscious base/superstructure analysis. Even if we leave aside the whole problem of seeing the early modern "strong state" exclusively as restorer of order and agree thereby to suppress questions about an ecological fallacy that would require investigations into the same state's role in creating and perpetuating disorder (cf. Naujoks 1958), we can see that Oestreich's argument depends on a primarily contextual motive force and that he does not theorize or analyze that context very well. In that regard his argument falls flat and undermines and confuses the general master narrative linking cameralism and absolutism to each other and to contextual modernity. Two brief illustrations will suffice. First, Oestreich determines that one of the impulses for a theoretically innovative and disciplining regime came from the plight of sixteenth-century German cities with their developing economies' allegedly increased demand for labor which they satisfied by drawing people from the countryside into an urban life for which these new workers had to be disciplined (1982:156-157). If we look, however, at what research reveals about the German cities' "modernization" in this period, a rather different picture emerges. From research on Augsburg and on the only initially impressive growth of its textile industry in the sixteenth century, it has become apparent that the real growth sector in the Augsburg economy was the patricians' newly acquired rural estates whose managers, in order to optimize their labor accounts in relation to the wider market in grains, depopulated and repopulated their rural labor forces as the market indicated. The city, very much under the patricians' control, served as a kind of labor bank for these rural enterprises, with the guild-organized (and tamed) textile industry serving not as a new industrial growth sector but as an increasingly underfunded and poorly marketed industrial make-work program whose primary purpose it was to absorb or give off labor to maintain the profitability of conservatively managed agricultural enterprises (Paas 1981). This is not a narrative about disciplining 187 for modernization; rather, it is a narrative about disciplining for rural-urban dislocation and for labor exploitation in yet another case of archaic latifundia agriculture. While it may be argued that Oestreich could not have known about the Augsburg work by Paas and others, the facts are nevertheless that it makes his sustained argument about cameralism as a necessary modernizing discipline for ordering processes of industrialization and economic expansion extremely doubtful (Oestreich 1982:196; cf. Pribram 1983:95-96). Second, his model fails when he argues for a transition from feudalism, which he associates with an ethos of status and loyalty, toward "the contractual thinking of modern times" in which "(r)elations based on command and obedience, conceived as deriving from contractual agreement, created clear functions of superiority and subordination, but...also presupposed a degree of discipline" (1982:266). To his own admission that the contractual contained significant elements of status, which we may see as incommensurable with "feudal" status, we can add that the feudal contained similarly incommensurable aspects of contractual discipline. A master narrative conceptualized in these terms misses completely, moreover, that the disciplining associated with texts on the early modern German state was conceived at least as part of the disciplining of traditionally rebellious aristocrats to regulate their families and dynastic properties better for the improved order and morality of the state (particularly to curb aristocratic borrowing for conspicuous consumption) and, not to be trivialized, to furnish unpaid service in the bureaucracy and at court (Kraemer 1974:41,74-75; Bruckmüller 1984:82-83; Fischer and Lundgreen 1975:518-519). These were forms of discipline that were both closer to feudal ethics and far from serving explicitly "modernizing" ends. The confusions we see in Oestreich are echoed in the literature where Oestreich's argument has come to serve as a social-psychological capstone to a preceding story about cameralism's primarily economic and political role in modernization. The long- standing textbook and broad interpretive agreement that Austrian cameralism sought "to work out and implement a coherent economic policy of economic growth" (Wangermann 1973:24) and that its chief representatives were early natural-law liberals who had a possibly privately conflicted but publicly harmonious relationship with 188 autocrats for reasons of a middle-class struggle against the nobility (Krieger 1972:72-76; cf. Rosenberg 1966:171-173 and passim) has now been strengthened by placing additional "psychological consequences alongside the economic ones" (Vierhaus 1988:28-30, 108), by perceiving a disciplining economic psychology to furnish the "values of a dynamic and enterprising culture" where the ability to obey was equated with reason (Raeff 1983:5, 27, 87 and passim; cf. Vierhaus 1988:114). In this neoclassical version of a lagging transition to modernity, the rate of German-Austrian modernization was so far behind that of the rest of Europe because of the alleged cost and diminishing returns of the large modernizing bureaucracy's inevitable inefficiencies (Raeff 1983:5,173-174 and passim; Bernard 1979:27) and not, as one has to argue, because of the immeasurable costs of "disciplined," sacrificial self-exploitation under a tribute- taking command economy. The former is a vision that tries to forge links from cameralism to the liberal currents of European development, seeing, for example, the Austrian cameralist Justi, to whom we shall turn at length in a moment, as a thwarted Smithian (Kann 1960:175; Walker 1971:164,167; cf. Vierhaus 1988:81-83) without recognizing the curious fact that the German "Smithians" who eventually replaced the cameralists in their university chairs did not develop as economic liberals in the English sense but remained fully immersed in the language and methods of cameralism (Epstein 1966:180-182; Pribram 1983:200-203). The tendency, moreover, of this view to conflate cameralism with mercantilism places cameralism on what is perceived as the modernizing trajectory of mercantilism, even to the point where cameralism is perceived as going through a shift from treasury- focused fiscalism to trade-political "imperial mercantilism" (Bog 1969) which is presumed to be analogous to a change in the English "version" from fiscalism to a balance-of-trade concept. There is no question that German cameralists became more interested in trade after their observation of the Dutch and English models (Kraemer 1974:70-71), but they never broke through to an import policy that considered the profitability of reexports. Moreover, cameralism remained wedded to a backward- looking, neo-Stoic "housefather" tradition with its insistence on spending within tributary means and its refusal to service a public debt, whereas in England there evolved a different attitude toward the management of a growing public debt, of 189 "indebtedness without insolvency," underwritten by both tribute and trade expansion (Braun 1975:295-296). That these two clearly antagonistic visions and conditions of political economy can still, in Braun's view, be classified as merely "two very contrasting stages of modernity" attests really both to the ideological strength of modernity as the master narrative and to the unresolvable (erased) incongruities it contains. [a reactionary modernity!] Whether even English mercantilism in its "later" stage was itself a part of a process of modernization is far from clear and is not really at issue here, but it is interesting to point out that it appears as "modern" from the point of view of a German liberal historical tradition that equates that stage with the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution (Hintze 1975:442-443), whereas it seems evident now that the change in English mercantilism comes much earlier and occurred probably in some connection with the business cycle (Frank 1978:78-81). While it is possible to argue that English mercantilism was the first European economic philosophy capable of responding to the market with a rational choice and was therefore "modern," we need also to remember that mercantilist England was corporatively organized and was the most regressively and highest taxing tribute-collecting empire of the European world (Mathias and O'Brien 1976). More to the point is that the notion of a disciplining cameralist-absolutist collaboration as a key stage in the progressive unfolding of modernity seems to lead to distorted histories in which cameralism bowed to "reality," concentrated on domestic trade because there was no foreign trade to be had, and (impossibly!) diverted "ample public funds to the individual peasant economy" (Bog 1969:168-169, 175). Others fantasize histories in which "seventeenth century ordinances presaged physiocratic attitudes" and led toward "the development of proto-industrial society" (Raeff 1983:93, 119), while in Prussia "mercantilist-cameralist" policies prepared the "transition to industrialization" (Vierhaus 1988:30). To anyone who has worked with the everyday phenomena on the social-historical end of these policies, such claims as well as those of Oestreich appear as cumulatively compounded errors that not only falsify the pedigrees of concepts and institutions but create forced connectednesses and temporal continuities that do not go far into or explore the historical range of either texts or contexts. 190 To begin to explode the "modernization" master narrative's allegedly natural contemporaneities with all its errors of misnaming and false continuities, we may take a stratagem from the storytellers' art and invent a different ending (cf. Celati 1986). One of the advantages of adopting a technique of "narrative" over "historical" truth is that we can argue that "historical" endings are never certain and are always multiple. In other words, distinct from a still dominant but clearly unworkable master narrative of cameralism and absolutism ending in modernity there appear other possible endings calling on misunderstood or hidden parts of the story that may not be as comforting but that have an effect contrary to the false congruities of the canonical story. We may find that, for the moment at least, it is easier to write unhappy endings to what claim to be happy master narratives. To bring to bear, in addition, the previous thoughts about the transferential aspects of the construction of histories on the question of an alternative ending to the history of cameralism in its social formation we can point to the most visible and yet most compulsively reneged memory of traumatized life in "modern" Central Europe, namely, the Holocaust. To read this last into its temporal contiguities, into related historical experiences, into those other moments in Central Europe's history when the veil was lifted from texts and social formations that promised unity and shelteredness but authorized annihilation, is to open a radically different perspective on the possibility of remembering not only the Holocaust but also a related early modern history for which historians may no longer have to misrepresent deliberate policies of economic stagnation as economic growth, disorder as order, or madness as harmony (incongruities already noticed by Walker 1971:151).

Reimagining the oikos Replacing modernity with the Holocaust as a provisional ending to a new master narrative urges on us a new reading, particularly of those elements of the narrative that were previously suppressed because they did not fit into the tight web of overcontextualized contemporaneity that characterized the (antimodernists') "modernist" narrative about cameralist texts and social formational contexts. Immediately we recognize that what has been missing from the latter was a clear grasp of the theorized and practiced fundamental social unit. While there is a shared sense 191 that "the family" and "household" were somehow at the heart of social relations, there appears a tacit agreement among historians - one clearly derived from the cameralist literature itself and therefore a case of countertransferential collaboration with the analysands' own transferential denial - not to examine the inner workings of the family. Once we had Otto Brunner's antimodern recollection of the neoclassical recollection of the oikos, the classical "good economy of the 'whole house,'" as the lowest unit of social and political authority, then what took place inside that entity ceased to be a matter for investigation (Brunner 1968; cf. Nicholas 1970). Historians have been able to follow this lead, in effect taking the view of the early modern bureaucrats, and reduce their discussions of the family to "life-style" questions, to where the state abandons the "wild" realm of the family to its own devices but interferes to curb appetites, moralize behavior, and eliminate perpetually troublesome "natural" conflicts over inheritance - in short, simply to rationalize and humanize a disorderly area of human affairs so that it could play its part in the state (Raeff 1983:85, 72-73, 76-77). The alternative approach we take here to the fate of the oikos conception both in its early modern cameralist and modern historical inventions is that it demonstrates a clear case of a (re)invention of a tradition and that such a process cannot simply be discussed in a positivistic and functionalistic way by which invented traditions serve only consciously to install or resist hegemonies. Although good work has recently been done toward recovering the complexity of such instances of tradition-fabricating (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, especially the essays by Cohn and Ranger; Sider 1986; for a neoclassical view of the historicity of "tradition " see Raeff 1983:103), it is still work in which the anachronistic elements of the "invented" tradition and the positing of an authentic original tradition all point toward a homogeneously conceptualized historical time ending in modernity. It is a conception in which the temporally "contiguous" and the transferential aspects of such histories of tradition (found in both their past and present historical reinventions) cannot come into play (cf. Roseberry and O'Brien's introduction to their Golden Ages. Dark Ages where this essay first appeared). In the case of the reinvented oikos it is clear that both the early modern conceptualizers and their modern historians were and are engaged in transferential readings of a conception of the family household that was already in its Greek classical 192 "origins" a contentious and transferentially invented tradition (Humphreys 1983:162- 163,179, and passim). The attribution of a single "whole house"/oikos concept that we find in modern neoclassicism represses, places under erasure, if one wills, that concept's Greek history. There were compelled repetitions and reinventions passing from a Homeric-aristocratic household entourage through Hesiod's more closed and competitive version suitable to the limited smallholder, learning to exclude even kin to secure the oikos, to, finally, Xenophon's decadent urban-conservative reformulation making the slave-managing farm the rural "private" antidote to urban "public" decay (Humphreys 1983:82-83, 133, 162-163). By investigating the oikos in terms of its posited and "erased" qualities as these appear particularly in its cameralist form, we can begin to lift it out of its overcontextualized neoclassical historical reading and recover its transtemporal qualities, its "traumas" of slave labor and of failed promises of justice that were held in abeyance but were also present and experienced at each of its contextual recollections. Within a Holocaust master narrative it becomes possible to argue that the saving fiction of a family "wholeness" that was somehow outside the market and below the historical process authorized historically specific traumas of social disconnection and physical annihilation. The social formation in which cameralism appeared is the military tribute- collecting absolute state of early modern Central Europe. This state appears in the historical literature largely in its own terms. Just as the family and household economy is undertheorized as the fundamental social unit of this state so the latter is also, in its larger construction, sociologically underanalyzed. Part of the problem has been that in the predominantly neoclassical approaches to the subject there is a dearth, partly a result of the transferential nature of those approaches, of social analytical concepts. Similarly, we see the romanticized exclusions of the family's "natural" economy from the vital processes of history by historians on the left, going from Engels through Luxemburg and Chayanov to Horkheimer and E. P. Thompson (cf. the critical essay by Roseberry 1988). A break with this tradition was made by French post-Althusserian anthropologists who explored various reformulations of the "mode of production " concept in terms of the family economy (Bloch 1975; Kahn 1981; for another approach cf. Rebe1 1983: chap. 5) with the result that the characteristics and processes of social 193 relations of the family may be construed in terms of what Eric Wolf calls the "kin- ordered" mode of production (1982:88-100,401, and passim) with all the analytical features (primary accumulation, surplus production, class, etc.) associated with a Marxist approach to social formation. Even readers on the left have found it difficult to follow Wolf's bold step of maintaining that his three modes of production (kin, tributary, and capitalist) are not "types" of society or cultural "stages" but social-historical conceptual "constructs" for imaginative analytical formulations of "certain strategic relationships" (100), including those within the family. Some of Wolf's friendliest critics find it difficult to let go of ideas of "autonomous" spheres (Worsley 1984a:174), and others assert that kinship links existed "prior to their function in (production]" and continue thereby to posit a prior "real presence" that forces analysis back into a single homogeneous flow of historical time ("the same story") between an absolutely separated past and present (Asad 1987:601-602). Moreover, in this critical view there is an insistence on a purity and completeness of modes of production that remains stuck in the far less useful language of transitions from one mode to another and that cannot see how Wolf’s reconceptualization accounts for the existence of, say, a strong tributary component to modern "capitalist" societies (Asad 1987:598). However, Wolf’s entire story throughout deals with the historical articulations of modes and demonstrates that pure modes of production without relations of dominance and dependence vis-a-vis other modes cannot be perceived historically and that it is the historical experience of these articulations that poses the key questions for social cultural analysis. In this sense, Wolf's rewriting of the analysis of social formation as focusing on the hegemonic- subaltern articulations among modes of production, each with cultural themes that are not merely epiphenomenal and superstructural but consist of linguistic and other formulations shared within and between modes and designed to grasp the ambivalent ways in which social relations simultaneously reveal and conceal themselves, also helps break the hold of a homogeneously conceived historical time. It is with the articulation of modal themes in the historical convergence and dissolution of social formations with different social temporalities and different articulations of imagined histories and of invented traditions that we can theorize a contextual analysis appropriate to a transferential analysis of texts. 194 The remainder of this essay must be seen as only a tentative attempt to open up the particular convergence of cameralism and absolutism by retheorizing them in the ways just outlined. Seen from the perspective of an articulation of kin and tributary relations, the early modern Austrian reformulation of the oikos can be explored on the basis of the similarities to and differences from the classical model it recalls. In what follows we will see agents of the Austrian state reimaging the oikos for a purported policy science of social order, but we will also see them do so in a framework of family and treasury practice in which the social strategies of the royal and aristocratic families mobilize for their own dynastic (i.e., kin-ordered) maintenance and occasional capitalist enterprises the tribute-producing capacities of peasants and workers in such a way that the latter find it difficult, and even impossible, to form and live in families of their own - but are yet held accountable to a family project whose formalized appearance is not portrayed as aristocratic-dynastic but as universally "natural." Rather than appearing as a rationalizing agent, cameralism's disciplining now can appear as the "solecism" it was (Walker 1971:151), as an attempt to force an order where that could only be done with traumatic social costs experienced as disorder under a terrorist judicial state. Rather than yielding a history of modernity, this counter-canonical reading yields a history of a progressive loss of rational treasury and public welfare objectives giving way to the authorities' progressive imposition of personally fantasized and increasingly inapposite objectives - of which perhaps none could be more indicative of far greater insanities yet to come than the emperor Joseph II's cathected psychological involvement in the paternity cases of domestic servants (Bernard 1979:30-35,41-42, 62-63).

The Austrian context: Articulations of Kin and Tribute By the late fifteenth century certain strategically placed aristocracies and princes in German-speaking Central Europe had to decide what to do with their growing peasant working class in the face of opportunities from an expanding market that included rural industries financed, supplied, and serviced both by domestic and, primarily, by external centers of mercantile investment and exchange. In the German-Czech provinces of the Habsburgs, aristocratic and ecclesiastical landowners had been experimenting with various combinations of incomes from direct production, services, dues, and rents since 195 the fourteenth century. Between 1500 and 1600 they followed two fundamental directions: a few of them had already, by 1500, gone far toward becoming rentier landlords, letting their peasants inherit, subdivide, and alienate their leaseholds freely (Zauner 1971; cf. Sabean 1972). Most, however, took a less risky and socially conservative course and merely expanded, through purchases, their claims to taxes, rents, tithes, and services and sought to reduce all of these to tribute payments in cash (Grüll 1955}. They converted tithes in kind to fixed cash payments, they terminated other dues and services with release fees and so on, and they burdened their peasants' houses and communes with administrative duties and labor services that could also be subject to release fees. This majority of landlords and estate managers did not favor a transition to collecting rents from increasingly parcelized and commercialized farms supported by a growing cottage industry but opted for the more certain incomes from larger, impartible, bureaucratically controlled and tribute-producing leaseholds engaged in agriculture with some industrial diversification. In the reign of Maximilian I of Habsburg (1493-1519), the royal administration of finance (Hofkammer) took a new course toward management of its estates and farms that favored the majority's course of development. One of the results was that the rural industrialization that occurred in these areas was severely limited by the curtailment of farm subdivision, of cottage construction, and of partible inheritance, and it lagged far behind rural industrialization in neighboring areas (Rebel 1983; Braun 1960; Schremmer 1972; Kellenbenz 1965). Maximilian I waged a costly war against Bayezed II, drove the Turks out of Styria in the 1490s, and involved his resources in the Burgundian-French wars, all with the result that under pressure from his creditors he had to reorganize the administration of the royal treasury. As a significant part of this reorganization he halted the erosion of those royal properties administered by the crown's aristocratic creditors, pursued the active upgrading of his estates and incomes - following the methods already being pursued by most of the secular and ecclesiastical nobilities - and began a policy of pawning royal property (Kammergut) on short-term (ca. seven-year) contracts to his creditors, thereby setting a course of public finance by public debt secured in great part by treasury property that Austria would follow for the next two centuries. Not only did Maximilian I's restructuring of his treasury incomes lay the foundation for a state 196 system of public finance that never managed to free itself completely from the private grasp of the royal house, but it also released a chain of far-reaching alterations in rural economic and social life. What had begun as a restructuring of royal estates and finances dovetailed with, overtook, and by 1600 dictated the widespread adoption of the more conservative of the two courses of aristocratic investment and estate management. At first, the aristocratic officials of the royal household brought their own estates' administrations in line with the royal model; then the creditors of the Crown, rather than have two kinds of estates to administer (i.e., their own and the treasury's), followed suit and restructured their own holdings according to treasury guidelines. Finally, the Habsburgs mandated across-the- board changes for all estate owners to follow in the governance of the subject peasants' leasehold and tenure arrangements. This created uniformly heritable and impartible leaseholds that functioned both as units of tribute collection and as units of family and community administration within the bureaucratic framework of public and private estates guided by royal mandate. The peasant houses' kin-organized production and administrative functions were connected to the royal and aristocratic tribute-taking state in the sense that a family's accession to and retention of tenure were subject to the head's performance in maintaining his holding's tribute-rendering capacity. The measure for this performance is of great importance for our story. At the death of a tenant or of his or her spouse, a state-regulated inventory of the farm was taken by bailiffs and other agents of the estate owner; and if the liens against the holding exceeded or came near to exceeding the value of its assets, then the administration of the holding could be declared bankrupt and the deceased tenant's family removed to make room for a new incumbent's administration (Rebel 1983). If we consider that these changes made the Austrian peasant house the primary unit of accounting in both the rural economy and in the system of public finance, then we see a sharp divergence in the Austrian social organization of production from such not-too-distant neighbors as the Zurich Oberland or from parts of Bavaria, where an early modern cottage-based system of mercantile textile production and distribution evolved during the eighteenth century. If we follow Rudolf Braun's and others' interpretation of the eventual direct and indirect emergence of factory production from early modern cottage industry not only as a more 197 efficiently centralized organization of the means of production but as merchant capital's answer to the inefficiencies of input-output accounting controls in the dispersed cottage industry, then we see a special problem for Austria's economic development in the persistent historical presence of house industries confined to a limited number of peasant or town houses whose primary purpose, in accounting terms, was to remain solvent as tribute-rendering units. Looking ahead for a moment, it is significant with regard to accounting that cameralist social science, for all its interests in census-taking and in measuring and comparing economic and social indicators, took no interest whatsoever in the composition of rural households and in the measurement of actual input and output at the level of primary units of production. Indicative in this regard is that the first general Austrian census of people whose occupation was employment in Hausindustrie was not taken until 1902 (Sombart 1923:191-193). The changes initiated by Maximilian I's fiscal reforms were solidly entrenched by 1650. While the foreground of the historical stage was seething with violent assassinations, mass murders, international religious and territorial wars, aristocratic frondes, peasant uprisings, millennial revolts, and the like, the Habsburgs's emerging absolute state had, behind the scenes, steadily competed with and slowly displaced rural industry as a focus for aristocratic investment and labor calculations. Throughout the Danubian states a new estate economy spread with this victory of state tribute over merchant capital which, we must add, did not represent a "feudal" victory over a "premature" transition to capitalism. Merchant industrial investments in Central Europe still functioned wholly within a number of competing tributary systems. Although the state's policies with regard to tenure had in effect frozen the aristocracies' traditional rent and labor-service incomes, the state encouraged the conversion of labor services to regular fees, legislated a number of new transaction fees (entry fees, death duties, etc.), and imposed a state tax system (the Kontribution) as well as ad hoc military subsidies (Rüstgeld, Garnisonsgeld, etc.), all of which passed through the estates' accounts and gave the estate owners annual cash flows and profits with which to participate in the European agricultural commodity trade and in the political and social life in the capital (Rebel 1983:126-137). The state's successful competition for the wealth of the aristocracy committed the 198 aristocrats' economy in a self-contradictory direction. Ironically, the estate owners and lien administrators were the only "capitalists" in this system, with cash flow from converted labor services allowing them to purchase labor directly for agricultural and industrial production. This was, however, a capitalism that was severely limited by its dependence on the flow of state-organized tribute and by the dominant form of labor appropriation (supported by state regulation after the 1590s) in which the heads of peasant households, acting as kin or pseudokin, administered their housecommunities' productive capacities. The second limitation on estate management meant that such rural industries as now evolved in Austria were contained by and accounted for within the relatively limited number of peasant houses. Although the aristocratic estates were thus limited in their capitalism, they invested in such enterprises as grain merchandising, viticulture, truck farming, brewing, and fishpond management (and in Bohemia, in textile production), all of which in time not only made Austrian rural estate management the most innovative sector in the Austrian economy until well into the nineteenth century but also supported a historically significant (and internally conflicted) aristocratic opposition to the expansion of the tribute-taking and bureaucratic power of the state in the century between 1750 and 1850 (Blum 1948). At the bottom of this system was the peasant "house" conceived of both as a tribute-rendering and order-maintaining firm, as the lowest rung on the administrative ladder. The incumbent tenant heads of houses administered, in effect, what amounted to a monopoly on the disposition not only of private labor and resources but, more importantly, of welfare and of civic and social attachment. Their positions, governed by the supervision of impartible tenure by means of postmortem inventories, forced them to redirect, again with the help of state regulations, the economic and social production of their kin, fictive kin (godparents, in-laws), and pseudokin (wards, orphans) to help meet the terms of tenure. In this context, the economic diversification of the peasant house through rural industry only served to maintain the tenure of the incumbent tenant and of his designated heir, this especially in periods of wildly fluctuating secular swings of the economy, and it did not amount to an "industrialization" of the countryside (Rebel 1983). From the perspective of social practice, there were at least two especially 199 noteworthy aspects of the historical emergence of this house- and estate-based tributary state. Such profits as the heads of houses produced were only in part reinvested to make their tenure more secure. The rest, a for now indeterminate amount, went in the form of loans to the owners and managers of estates or to other more highly placed subjects in return for the holding in lien of such rights and privileges as the latter could grant through the estates' judicial and economic institutions. The heads of houses, in other words, were not primarily interested in the economic improvement of "their" farms but rather in making a personal career that aimed at stepping up into the lower ranks of the estate and possibly state bureaucracies, a career in which they were judged by their ability to manage a house in such a way that they could meet their tribute obligations and, in addition, buy into the pawn and lien administration arrangements that were the other mainstay of this tribute-taking system (Rebel 1983:200-207, 249-257). The second socially significant result of these new institutions took place at the opposite pole of the family. The rigidly enforced impartibility of the deliberately limited number of tenant farms produced a vast class of effectually dispossessed children who were perpetually downwardly mobile, who served as the labor force that sustained the careers of the tenured who, in turn, were often not even members of the family but outsiders brought in to become "housefathers" exploiting legally defined pseudofamilies. Given the limited economic means and social objectives of tenant houses, their absorptive capacity for additional labor was also severely limited. It is when these limits were reached - in historical conjunctures of the structural features and the secular swings of the economy - that the system as a whole came under severe strain. The Austrian state, in particular the tribute-collecting and accounting royal treasury, lay concealed within the private household enterprises that were required to enroll in its service. This process began with the royal treasury's disinvestment in the actual management (but not regulation) of its own estates and the assumption of the costs and benefits of that management by private investors. These in turn developed a limited estate-capitalism and sought to connect their family treasuries to capitalist investment by capturing portions of the bureaucratically mandated and adjudicated increases in tribute, only parts of which they funneled to the state from the kin-ordered productive units at the bottom of the system. While research into Austria's later 200 economic underdevelopment has generally been concerned with the supply-side aspects of this limited capitalist mode embedded in a tributary mode of production, a study of the encounter and inherent conflicts between and within early modern Austria's tributary and kin-ordered modes of production also holds much promise. In virtually all cases the requirements of the tributary mode took precedence over the requirements of "kinship," and it is in the articulations between these modes as they encountered each other in the social relations of the Austrian peasant house that apparently insoluble conflicts arose, conflicts whose socially and psychologically painful burdens were shifted to the lowest laboring class, rural workers, servants, and children. Here we want to explore the conceptual apparatus that sought to grasp this system and to understand why the state's intellectuals, the cameralists, acting as both academic philosophers and bureaucrats, remained essentially speechless about this "context," about the obvious conflicts within these structured social relations and articulations.

The Historical Construction of Cameralist Texts

The modernizing, rationalistic-economic character that has been ascribed to cameralism seems confirmed by the cameralists' view of themselves. Even if we cannot see them as "scientists," they consciously saw themselves as such, challenging the rule of theological faculties (Fischer and Lundgreen 1975:546). "We raise systems, to raise the well-being of men," claimed the Halle professor of cameralism Johann Förster in 1782 (cited in Walker 1971:162). One might deny that this kind of self-conscious system- building had anything to do with "science" on the grounds that cameralism knew no scientific accumulation and communication of knowledge and "no such procedure...as a conscious resort to any fundamental theoretical code of principles which is conceived of as the basis of the whole movement" (Sommer 1930:160). This would seem to be too narrow a view, especially because it diminishes and distorts the importance of the cameralists in favor of the physiocrats as originators (Sommer [1930] cites Quesnay's Tableau économique) of modern policy and social sciences. If, for example, we look at both the intent and the attempted practice of J. H. G. von Justi's "police science," we see that he was ambitious about scientific communication, that his intent was to found

201 university departments to carry on research and teach the new science. The preface to the second (1758) edition of his Staatswirthschaft, published when Justi was professor of cameralism at Vienna's Theresianum, is filled with references to a new scientific education for state planners and bureaucrats, as well as for members of other professions, notably the legal. The objectives for these scientific researches were intended to transcend their immediate context because they were to be nothing less than a disclosure and implementing of the laws governing the relationships and interactions of all elements of the economic, social, and political life of states. Justi wanted to educate a new kind of man, whom he called the "Universal-cameralist," who would avoid the limitations of the previous, contextually determined kind of cameralist, called the "Particularcameralist," who had worked strictly within and for the limited interests of specific departments of specific states. "This latter individual will believe that he has made significant improvements in one part of the government [but] will in the end realize that he thereby caused another part of the state's great household a greater amount of harm because he did not have insight into the coherence of this great economy and into the influence that the concerns of common welfare have on each other" (Justi 1758:xxi). The source of Justi's sense of a cost-benefit-balancing, scientific univeralism has been ascribed to another sometime cameralist in the service of Hanover, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Pribram 1983:95; Glockner 1968), and we will in a moment have occasion to come back to the significance of his influence. To give it its full due, we must first recognize that at the basis of Austrian cameralism and reaching a kind of apotheosis in Justi's writings was not an economic theory but a metaphysics for a new psychology that had several important historical sources. Tracing this textual construction of cameralism reveals a rather different perspective on raising "the well-being of men." The same Maximilian I who initiated the momentous fiscal reforms described above was also hailed in his own time as "Germany's last knight." Married to a daughter of the House of Capet, he created an outpost of the Burgundian spirit in Vienna where, as common language for the courtly rites that were played out among his favorites, advisers, and scholars, the ideas of heroism found in the Arthurian legends were revived and reworked in a significant way. Now the enemies proper to the Estate of 202 nobility were no longer giants, wizards, or other knights, but rather accident, envy, hatred. The new battlegrounds for the courtier were in his inner moral spaces where, with the help of intelligentia, sensus, and ratio, his will and desire battled against the random disorders of fortune. The virtus of the Christian knight was to be measured now by the degree to which he was capable of inner conquest in order to do all that was necessary for justice in political morality on behalf of social (i.e., racial) inferiors who were incapable of sublime action (Müller 1982:232-233; cf. Huizinga 1934:323-324; Brunner 1949:142-166). In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there evolved among both professional and lay scholars in Central Europe generally and in Austria particularly an elaboration of these ideas which eventually amounted to a new official social psychology; that is, the new courtly heroism evolved to become a reconceptualization and empirical study of the individual's capacity for work, learning, and social participation, all grounded in self-discipline. By the mid-seventeenth century and particularly in the context of the Habsburg monarchy, there evolved a critique directed against restricting this new understanding only to the instruction manuals for princes and nobility. It is in this "democratization" that we find politique reformers like Lipsius advocating studied applications of these new measures of man to representatives of the state generally, to domestic magistrates, and to the lower classes. Their investigations led them to the conclusion that the lower one went into society, the less capable people were of self-discipline. Consequently the new cameralist sciences for estate managers, state employees, and peasants that these intellectuals urged on princes and aristocratic patrons by the end of the seventeenth century focused on the need for a psychological reeducation of the lower orders to assure the "just functioning" (and not the "growth") of the state's economy (Oestreich 1982:93- 94,269-270). It is in their texts that we recover cameralist versions of the oikos, the good economy of the "whole house." Toward the end of the seventeenth century there appeared in Austria within three years of each other two works concerned with separate but related spheres of social and economic philosophy: Philipp Wilhelm von Hörnigk's Österreich über alles, wann es nur will (Austria above all, if only it will) ([1684]; I use a modern edition, 1964) and Wolf Helmhard von Hohberg's Georgica Curiosa Aucta ([1687]; I use the 5th edition of 203 1715). Both books were widely read and distributed and epitomized the degree of sophistication that the neo-Stoic social ideal had reached as a source for cameralist social planning. They are, significantly, two vastly different works by two radically different kinds of authors; the Georgica was a guide for household management by a humanist country squire and military entrepreneur from Lower Austria (Brunner 1949), and the Hörnigk book was a macroeconomic tract by an intellectual careerist, petty entrepreneur, diplomat, and historian. What they had in common was a conception of the importance of the management of the rural house economy and of manipulating human psychology in the ordering of both the household and of the larger economy and society. Hohberg saw as his audience both aristocratic and lesser heads of rural households, whom he termed "housefathers," and he sought to address himself to the interrelations of the many parts of the oikos, the house economy, and to the responsibilities these relationships imposed on the head of a house. What makes his book special in the genre is that embedded in the advice about when to prune the vines and how best to churn butter are such other matters as how to manage inheritance, how to discipline servants, and how to meet welfare obligations - and all perceived in the context of a larger system that was not only the tribute-taking state as such. This greater governing concept was that of custodianship, of not owning one's house but simply of managing it as part of God's "Oeconomia" that has been entrusted to one's care. It is easy to see how such prescriptions could align themselves with the existing practices of lien administration and peasant tenure. The responsibilities of the housefathers included not only informing themselves about thc resources at their disposal and learning how to balance the accounts among these resources but also bringing their production processes into harmony with the needs and character of the dynastic overlords, of the larger society's and the state's needs for security (1715:10). What is not so easy to see is how this oikos worked for itself and with what results. In order to accomplish the subordination of the good economy of their house to the good economy of the state, Hohberg argued that housefathers were justified in subordinating the needs of their entire housecommunity, and especially of their children, laborers, and servants, to the needs of the head of the house. To this end he encouraged them to direct and 204 supervise (by means of interrogation, spying, and physical punishments if necessary) the moral character of the servant population; this included punishing them "when necessary and just," by the withholding of wages (1715:234-235). Hohberg was reinventing the oikos to discipline it for the head's service career in the state. The house that was managed best was one where work, justice, and love were properly distributed. In his preface, Hohberg invokes the classical history of the oikos and imagines Plutarch at dinner with the seven Greek sages to ask them what constituted a well-managed house. Of particular interest for us is the answer he puts in the mouth of Pittacus of Lesbos: it was a place where nothing necessary was lacking and where nothing unnecessary or superfluous was desired. This places the effectiveness of social practice not only on a minimal production of goods but also on the management of desire. It is on the basis of this particular rationale that Hohberg brings together the classic formulation of the good house economy with the courtly psychology of self- discipline. The economy of the oikos was reimagined in terms of a psychology of needs that could now be portrayed as a matter of discernment and of management and as measurable against and adjustable to the changing necessities of state. The classical notion of oikos, positively recalled and posited as a relevant model for both peasant and aristocratic household management, now contained concealed innovations with a logic of their own, one not entirely derived from their ostensibly kin-ordered modal character. In the broader context of Hörnigk's more macroeconomic cameralism, Hohberg's management of needs and desires in the house reappears to take on a more ominous quality. What particularly distinguished Hörnigk's (and later, to some extent, Justi's) cameralism from West European mercantilism was that it sought to establish a favorable balance of trade not by an increase in combined exports and reexports but strictly by a curtailment of imports. If all branches of the domestic economy were developed for self-sufficiency, Hörnigk argued, then Austria's dominance in foreign affairs was assured - if "only it will" (cf. Pribram 1983:92). The operative word in Hörnigk's title was, of course, Austria's "will," which he perceived as statewide compulsions that had to be exercised to achieve the necessary austerity. Hörnigk was aware that for a primarily agricultural state to supply its own needs in all things would impose hardships but also that these hardships would be an occasion to strengthen the 205 hands of all authorities in the state so that they could begin to exert the kinds of discipline that were necessary not only to bring the lower classes fully into the state's economy as the instruments of state policies but also to raise their moral quality. He theorized that the hardships of the new economic course were to be displaced downward for greater social integration (discipline) and the ultimate benefit of the whole. The image Hörnigk used to describe the new state was this: "One has to imagine the state as a rich man who keeps his wealth in many pockets. If he takes some out of one and puts them in another he doesn't become poorer...He is master of both" (1964:141, cf. 177). Mastery and not growth was the key to this cameralism that aimed at deliberately creating a zero-sum economy in which certain social groups were singled out to bear the costs of disinvestment in the mercantile sectors (1964: 132) while others in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors were to carry the costs of diminishing expectations and increased work discipline.

Where Hohberg's vision of the good economy of the peasant house sought in some ways to stay close to classical conceptions of oikos, Hörnigk's reworking of the place of the household economy in the whole economy altered the imagined classical idyll subtly and significantly. He built on what was already in the classical Greek perception of the moral economy of the house a significant flaw. The term oikos designated the state's organization of family units consisting of people who ate together, and it postulated that all, servants included, had to be fed. When this was not possible, when the state's population exceeded what the oikoi could feed, the state designated the hierarchy of those who would have to be abandoned and stricken off the rolls (Lacey 1968:73; cf. Lloyd-Jones 1983:177-183; Humphreys 1983). To this awkward moment the Austrian cameralists added new institutional and psychological twists. To them these negative aspects of a state economy based on house administration were not merely invoked in times of emergency and shortage but became a permanent necessity in a state that deliberately chose a path of curtailed imports, self-sufficiency, shortage, and domestic disinvestments. Moreover, also unlike the Greek model, responsibility for the hardships suffered in this system would not be assumed by the state; such measures were to be distributed in the private sector by heads of houses. While the classical oikos had theoretically required a (concealed) designation of victims for moments of failure, 206 Austrian cameralism's updated version required it for the state's ongoing success. The Austrian oikos simultaneously, traumatically, had to produce and to deny that it produced victims. Justi's more advanced cameralism, developed a half-century later, sought to transcend the purely system-rational perspective of the earlier theoreticians but did not abandon their notions of social psychology and of the moral economy of the house; if anything, he gave to the latter transcendent legitimation by welding to them the universalism of Leibnizian metaphysics. While it may be argued that Leibniz's concept of the ego in a sense prefigured Hegelian dialectics (Röd 1974:23-24), there can be no question that his thought as a whole was antidialectical. In support of the Ptolemaic view of the world, Leibniz had developed a metaphysics of relativity in which bodies were neither at rest nor in motion, all depending on the infinite possibilities of points of view. The philosophical ground for this early attempt at formulating a theory of cognitive relativity was his synthesis of certain of the classic and neoclassic philosophers in which there was no negative, only more or less of the positive. Emptiness was merely minimal fullness. In this formulation there were no costs, only more or fewer benefits, and on the basis of such a theory of the universal distribution of the positive, Leibniz's cameralist disciple Justi could kill off, in his theoretical social economy, any vestiges of attempts at an economic-rational accounting for costs against benefits. Hörnigk had had a sense of cost-benefit analysis for at least specific details of the economy - holding Louis XIV's costs of maintaining streetlights in Paris against savings in crime or calculating the relative costs and benefits to the state of maintaining a beggar and a soldier (1964:126-127, 199-201). For Justi such costs as existed were seen only on what we would call the supply side of the economy; that is, he saw deficits and debts as temporary necessary costs that would be erased by future profit. When he focused on the still-central household economy, he was capable of the pettiest calculations in this regard, noting for example that the servant population's tendency to steal and cheat with regard to their weekly food rations (which he carefully, pathetically, spelled out) was a matter of great cost to householders, one that required increased strictness and controls (1758:I,546-547). For Justi too it was a zero-sum economy, and anyone who was in the system at all was benefiting from it; the only loss anyone could incur was to be required 207 to accept a smaller share - but if this led to the salvation or improvement of the system as a whole, then even this smaller share was a long-term benefit. It was in this denial of costs and in complicated calculations for a "just" distribution of often infinitely minute and interrelated benefits that Justi grounded both the moral and "scientific" claims for his policy science. The social science capable of calculating the interrelations and welfare of the whole that Justi envisioned was to be a matter of precisely mathematical aggregate accounting. We must not forget here that he was working in a system where the greatest part of such accounting was concealed in the inner unaccounted-for workings of household enterprises. The input-output calculations of a Quesnay, pointing at the neoclassical econometrics of Pareto, Walras, and Leontief, were not only impossible in but above all not significant to Justi's vision of just distribution. He placed the state's efficient collection of tribute (Abgaben) above everything subjects must bear; and he postulated special rewards for the subject who could best fulfill what was demanded of him by the state "according to the main characteristics of his public person" (1758: I, 108, 377-380; II, 22-24, 35-38, 53, 312). Justi's police science was not economic- quantitative but social-psychological: it was the science of testing and placing individuals according to their capacities to exercise the "will" and to subordinate and adjust their private lives to the demands of the state. Obtaining a just measure of material rewards in the system was the by-product of prior measurements of one's rank which theoretically indicated one's capacity for such self-management. In Justi's conceptualization, servants were incapable of such selflessness, peasant and urban householders had the opportunity to learn it to varying degrees, and the higher ranks, administering and serving the state, naturally embodied it. His was an infinitely complicated system of psychologically difficult commanding and obeying in which everyone had to participate both by acting and being acted upon. For example, Justi saw as the duty of the housefathers the encouragement of all talents of all the children in the house; the psychologically difficult obverse, however, was that the housefather also had to choose the talents that best placed the house in the service of the state and, in corollary acts, actively suppress all others. The ability to suppress and contain the psychological agony of such "choices" became the measure of a person's worth. 208 Real costs were beginning to accumulate in this system, visibly and unavoidably, right about the time Hohberg and Hörnigk published their treatises. By the mid- eighteenth century, when Justi flourished, the Austrian state faced its first serious social crisis since the early seventeenth century. Committed to a social science concerned with allocating deliberately limited benefits and incapable of calculating costs as these accumulated in the "good economy" of the house, the Austrian policymakers of the later eighteenth century still failed to alter their thinking or their system-building in any significant way. The actual experience of costs continued to be displaced into realms outside the accepted calculation of justice - that is, into the family and into the psyche. The Austrian reinvention of the oikos and of its tough, "erased" logic about inclusion and expulsion, made the virtue by which one was measured and rewarded - unchanged since the emergence of the system out of the wars of Reformation and Counter- Reformation - the extent to which one could absorb and endure privately the publicly inadmissible contradictions and costs that allowed the system to work (Rebel 1983:264- 269; cf. Dreitzel 1968).

The Austrian Police State: Mastering Irreconcilales with Discipline The early sixteenth century's economic and social revolution, arising from the rural population's assumption of the partibility and free disposability of their holdings and their greater control over their communities, was halted in the seventeenth century by the violently enforced reorganization of royal and state finances and was not resumed until the second half of the nineteenth century. The so-called "unburdening of the land" that followed the turmoil of 1848 led finally, by 1868, to the state's granting of permission to the peasants to break up their holdings for inheritance and sale. The intervening three hundred years had, however, altered the circumstances of peasant liberation to the point that were one to say that the "emancipation" after 1848 was too late, one would miss the point entirely. Put most simply, the long interval had seen the unchanging, grinding operations of a tribute-producing social machine, one of whose necessary by-products was a steadily growing, downwardly mobile class of dispossessed children and of their children's children. The reimagined oikos had denied their historical existence (and experience) and by the time nineteenth-century peasant 209 "emancipation" scrapped the old machine for a newer model, the social system of Austria had reached the point at which it could no longer cope with its dispossessed. When we compare the increase in the means for employment and subsistence in Austria between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries with the changes in the population during the same period, it is immediately noticeable that very little changed in the former to adjust to a steady growth in the latter. Using information from the province of Upper Austria we can point, for example, to the differences between the taxable hearth (i.e., house) censuses of 1526/27 and 1750 and note about a 30 percent growth in the number of new houses, going from 39,940 to 57,294 (Grüll 1957:317). This is a rough measure and does not address the question of improvements in census authority and practice (cf. Hoffmann 1952:243). Knowledge about population growth in this same period is also uncertain not only because the necessary aggregate work in Austrian historical demographics remains to be done but also because the detailed and interpretive work on specific parishes and villages that has been done by Michael Mitterauer and his colleagues at the University of Vienna's Institut für Wirtschafts und Sozialgeschichte shows a complicated regional and social distribution of demographic differences (cf. Mitterauer 1982). Nevertheless, on the basis of an estimated Upper Austrian population of 300,000 in 1600 we can note a 40 percent increase to the approximately 420,000 souls counted by Maria Theresa's censuses between 1754 and 1776 (Hoffmann 1952:243, 260). The rate of population growth was probably considerably greater than the official censuses show when we consider that it is unlikely that the house-based population figures for the eighteenth century included the beggars who lived in the interstices of this society. Thus, for example, Charles VI's special investigating commission of 1727 into the "beggar question" had turned up almost 26,000 destitute and homeless persons in Upper Austria alone - 5,742 men, 11,117 women, 7,247 children, and 1,238 cashiered veterans (Hoffmann 1952:248) - and if we add only this number to the later-eighteenth-century census figure, we get a population growth of about 48 percent. If we consider that the Austrian house in this period was more than a dwelling but was also the primary unit of production, employment, and welfare, then from the divergence between the increases in population and in houses we get a crude sense of 210 some interplay between cameralist prescriptions for curtailed growth and what was happening. The authorities' restrictions on house construcion and on the expansion of cottage-based industries not only followed the spirit of Hörnigk's recommendations for a limited, deliberately closed system but also signified an increasing downward displacement of the social and psychological pressures accumulating in the system. The number of people declared sufficiently competent to run a house was proportionately on the decrease. This was a double-bound system both in theory and in social fact: on the one hand the state pursued population growth as the highest of all social goods, while on the other hand it not only failed to assist in the expansion of places of employment but actively curtailed the foreign exchanges and trading that would have expanded the home-based forms of mercantile and industrial investment and would have created more opportunities for employment in the limited number of houses as well as a potential increase in tribute income. It is in this context that we have to understand the paradoxes the royal and estates' administrations faced when they had to deal on the one hand with complaints concerning apparent labor shortages and on the other with a surplus population of beggars making the public thoroughfares insecure (Hoffmann 1952:93-94, 246-249). There is some reason to suspect that the physical deprivations and psychological pressures of working and living in the Austrian peasant house were so bad for the lowest class of dispossessed children and laborers that these often preferred begging to working {Hoffmann 1952:246; Rebel 1983:143-145). There is also a sense that many seasonally unemployed, or those unemployed because of short-term secular swings in the market, were also among this socially borderline and growing mass of homeless beggars {Hoffmann 1952:246). At the same time the strategies for self- improvement open to the heads of peasant houses were severely limited even for the majority of those whose house economies were diversified and included some limited industrial production (Rebel 1983:107-113, 204-205 ). Their labor and employment calculations, including calculations about the relative costs and productivities of child and adult labor, were on such a marginal scale that they had to make constant decisions about the number and nature of the people employed in and living from their enterprises, decisions about whom to keep and whom to let go - and about how to reward and maintain those who remained (Berkner 1972; Rebel 1983). In a society 211 where, during the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a sizable population increase with a much smaller increase in the means of production, and where strong evidence suggests that there was a conjuncturally determined tendency for heads of houses to fail in managing their tenures adequately {Rebel 1983:241), we cannot be surprised to find the paradox of a highly uncertain labor market and of cyclically and geographically distributed labor shortages borne on a steadily swelling current of personally (historically) experienced social catastrophe taking the forms of chronic unemployment and begging. The measures taken by the state authorities reflect the cameralist vision of and prescriptions for the problem. The cameralists saw population growth primarily in terms of feeding the population and asserted that no problem would ever exist on that score (Justi 1758:I, 160-162). By concentrating on the relationship between population and food they evaded the social- psychological aspect of population growth that remains the major problem of the owners of "capital" to this day - namely, offering people something worthwhile to do. It is significant that the cameralists' reaction to unemployment, vagrancy, and begging was not to consider these problems in terms of the number of people involved; paradoxically, their answers to these questions reveal the predominantly social-psychological cast of their thought. One has only to listen to the language. Thus Justi: "All young strong beggars...must be immediately arrested and incarcerated in workhouses where they are to be exhorted (anhalten) to work. The old, infirm, and poor, in contrast, are to be cared for in hospitals and poor houses....If the strong beggars and vagrants know they will be incarcerated and made to work, then they will either leave altogether [!] or they will choose work and feed themselves honestly: because freedom is precious to everyone." This is a psychology that holds that only in extremis will people work at the jobs that are available and that the means to make them take these jobs is to put them into an extreme situation. He concludes: "They have to be released from the workhouse when one senses diligence and honesty in them and when they can find someone who will sponsor them and vouch for their resolve not to return to begging" (Justi 1758:I,323-324). It was, in other words, a policy for building workhouses and state-run factories which were designed not for general economic relief but to serve as places of temporary employment in a forced-labor regime designed to 212 reintegrate laborers into the household economy of housefathers who volunteered to take on the responsibility for the psychological resolve to participate socially of the persons thus assigned to them. By the 1750s the earlier draconian measures of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries (Hoffmann 1952:248-249), by which the single were forbidden to marry or have offspring, illegitimate children were forcibly legitimated and assigned to families, forced-labor measures were carried through, and so on, had already failed and may be behind the hysterical language about the "extermination" (Ausrottung) of beggars that we find both in Justi's writings and in Maria Theresa's decrees (Hoffmann 1952:499; Justi 1758:I, 324). During the later eighteenth century, under Josef II, there was some response to the obvious contradictions in this system, and attempts were made to expand the opportunities for employment, to allow the number of small houses and cottages to increase, and to expand investment in the industrial sector; but these measures proved insufficient to alter the divergent paths of rapid population growth and the deliberately much slower increase in opportunities for employment (Hoffmann 1952:499; Mitterauer, n.d.). The Austrian state continued to be trapped by its contradictions that forced it to continue to put its faith in the psychological notion that the individuals who acceded to the headship of a house or other office in the state did so by demonstrating their capacity to absorb and neutralize the growing conflicts within and among the domestic social relations, enterprises, and labor accounts of the oikoi in their care. Those who were dispossessed, expelled, and destitute and therefore defined as congenitally incapable of any such self-discipline were automatically, "traditionally," branded as unfit to participate and were marked for life as victims, as coerced and "naturally" expendable objects for the police apparatus. Their experience remains to be recognized historically.

The historical denouement of a system that had consciously and necessarily avoided economic growth and had displaced its costs downward for over three centuries, without ever acknowledging theoretically or practically that there even were costs, was on display in fin de siècle Vienna, a city that attracted most of Austria's displaced, dispossessed, and unemployed rural population. While there are abundant

213 elegant and insightful works on this Viennese preview of "the last days of mankind" as perceived by such bourgeois critics as Kraus, Schnitzler, Freud, and others (Janik and Toulmin 1977; Schorske 1980), these only tell us about bourgeois experience, which is significant and interesting but finally bears only indirectly on the experience of the dispossessed. William A. Jenks (1976) has briefly described that other side of early- twentieth-century Vienna with a sharp eye for detail. He shows us a city where workhouses, charitable shelters, flophouses, "warming rooms," public parks, soup kitchens, hospitals, and asylums were barely able to cope with the growing flood of people that continued to pour from the country into the city, increasing even during the "upswing" years of the early twentieth century. It is here that we find details that recall and stand as the final acts arising from the hiatus between cameralist texts and social- formational contexts, between historical experience and transferential denial in ancien- régime Austria. Rules about floor-space allocation per "tenant" of a public flophouse or the precisely measured and pitiful food rations all replicate the kinds of details one finds in cameralist writings, most notably in the "universal cameralism" of Justi, about the just allocation of economic and social goods. Most revealing are the pretensions of order and normalcy to be found even in the most debased and pathogenic circumstances. Furnishing perhaps the most telling example were those who organized accommodations for the down-and-out in the city's sewers, the final oikoi in this tradition. They styled themselves as "houseq1asters" (Jenks 1976:36), denying their social position with a psychological trick of language one could only find in a state where access to and control of a house had long been the coveted but, in any case, treacherous and illusory avenue toward social membership and power. Need one add that it is here that we finally find, drifting through, learning to speak the language and absorbing the bureaucratized "traditions" of the Viennese transients' daily grind of scavenging, enforced idleness, bargaining for minimum shelter and delousing, the young Adolf Hitler, a failed heir who had squandered most of his and the rest of his family's inheritance and for whose social imagination the still "disciplined" behavioral sink of fin de siècle Vienna provided the central institutional forms and rationales for what he would later identify, in yet another myth of lost unity, as the Final Solution? His historical experience works well in a provisional master narrative where an "original" 214 trauma of dispossession, of exclusion from the "whole house" and of "expulsion from shelteredness" (Adorno), both reappears and disappears in compulsively transferential acts of revenge and annihilation whose historical recycling through dispossessing texts and social formations remains, to this day, far from broken.

215 Part 2: Fairy Tales

6. Hessian Peasant Women, their Families and the Draft: a Social- Historical Interpretation of Four Tales from the Grimm Collection

(with Peter Taylor, 1981)

In a folklore that speaks to forgotten Guelph memories they are called“the blind Hessians” and, as with peoples who were visible but not of central importance in history, their homelands are invariably described as a crossroads. The picturesque but poorly endowed fields and mountainous woodlands that stretch north from Frankfurt-on-the- Main were indeed a historical crossroads of a particular sort. Trajan's limes traversed the southern reaches of this region to mark the borders of the secured Empire; the Chatti had stopped Varus’ legions at the confluence of rivers around present-day Kassel. "If their native state sinks into the sloth of peace and quiet," Cornelius Tacitus reported, "many noble youths seek those tribes which are waging some war..." (Church and Broadribb, 1868). This was Charlemagne's recruiting ground and staging area for his war against the Saxons. During the Middle Ages, Hessians were involved in the warfare of a succession of German emperors whose armies and opponents marched and counter- marched through these territories. The Saxon emperors' incursions into southern Germany, Henry III's war against the Bohemians, Henry IV's Saxon war, Barbarossa's crusades, the local wars concerning Rhenish tolls, and the 1504 succession to the Palatinate all involved Hessian armies. After the Peace of Westphalia ended the further drain of military men and resources occasioned by the religious and territorial wars of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Hessian princes almost immediately furnished more men and funds for the Rhenish League to prevent Habsburg and Bourbon armies from clashing in their principalities.

One result of the Rhenish states' struggles against Louis XIV was that the Hessian rulers, in particular Charles I of Hesse-Cassel, initiated fundamental military and fiscal reforms and took recruitment out of the hands of private and semi-private military entrepreneurs. They organized their state apparatus around standing armies, initially of 216 mercenaries and increasingly of draftees. These armies became, in turn, "auxiliaries" for sale to other states.1

Unlike the rulers of Prussia whose state supported a large military, the eighteenth-century rulers of Hesse made the inspired decision to let their army support the state. Beginning in the 1680s Hesse-Cassel's chief export consisted of trained and equipped regiments of foot-soldiers. Long before the English "subsidy" contract of 1776 which sent a total of 17,000 draftees to America, Hessians had fought in Denmark, in the eastern Mediterranean, along the Rhine, in Bavaria, Scotland, and the Netherlands. They saw their last service in the wars against the revolutionary forces of France; the Hessian system was finally discontinued by Napoleon.

Eighteenth-century Hesse-Cassel was a unique state, a model, and to some extent a proto-type of those small but relatively well-organized states of our day which also lease draftees to their "allies." It comes as some surprise that no one has so far looked at Hesse in order to discover what kind of society a state financed by the leasing of drafted mercenaries can produce. In recent years there have been a number of sophisticated demographic, economic, and social investigations into various aspects of early modern Hessian history which touch on the possible significance of the draft (Fox. 1976; Imhof, 1975). But there has been no study, for example, to compare with Otto Büsch's investigation into and interpretation of the Prussian military state and its almost complete absorption of the rural labor economy (Büsch, 1962). To uncover the complicated inter-relationships between the Hessian state's military entrepreneurship on one hand, and the rural society which fed men and resources into the system on the other, is a task we can not take on here. What this essay does attempt instead is to approach the problem "from below" to discover how the popular culture. the peasant mentalité, perceived and understood the impact of the draft system on rural social life. If

1 Beginning in the eighteenth century, international law distinguished drafted mercenaries whose services were objects of commercial transactions between states from individual or privately organized mercenaries by calling the former "auxiliaries."

217 nothing else, this kind of investigation should provide important clues to other related questions and subjects for a more comprehensive study of the Hessian social system.

The existing descriptions and explanations for the popular reception of the eighteenth-century Hessian draft are not satisfying, because they simply discuss whether the people were for or against their princes' military entrepreneurship. For example, one finds that the popular mood was generally one of acceptance or even indifference born of centuries of obedience (von Both and Vogel, 1973:lO2). Moreover, there is evidence from popular verses that refer to the 1776 "subsidy contract" to suggest that the people of Hesse welcomed the opportunity to fight overseas (von Ditfurth, 1871-72:5,7,9):

Wer will mit nach Amerika?

Die Hannoveraner sind schon da,

Die Hessen Werben mit Gewalt,

Kommen die Braunschweiger auch alsbald.

Wer will mit nach Amerika?

Alles was man wunscher ja,

Find't man in Amerika!

Kommt ihr dann nach Engeland

Allda sind wir wohlbekannt,

Sollt ihr sehen was es giebt,

Braten und gebackene Fisch;

Auch der allerbeste Wein

Soll zu euren Diensten Seyn;

Trinkt und lasst uns lustig seyn!2

2 Who wants to come along to America?/The Hanoverians are there already,/The Hessians are recruiting by force,/The 218 or this:

Frisch auf, ihr Brüder, ins Gewehr,

'S geht nach Amerika!

Versammelt ist schon unser Heer,

Vivat, Viktoria!

Das rothe Gold. das rothe Gold.

Das kommt man nur so hergerollt.

Da giebt's auch, da giebt's auch, da

giebt's auch bessern Sold!3

Recent research reveals that there was some truth to these songs; the pay was relatively good and the draftees could expect to send considerable sums home to their families (Fischer, 1979). While there were popular anti-war songs from the period (von Ditfurth, 1871-72:4), none expressing popular hatred for the Hessian system in particular seems to have survived. Instead, opposition came from more elevated social circles. "Enlightened" opinion and foreign policy interests brought together such strange bedfellows as Mirabeau, Frederick II of Prussia, and the former army surgeon Friedrich Schiller to condemn the system. They even joined in debate with those bureaucrats and

Brunswickers won't be far behind./Who wants to come along to America?/All you could ask for/You'll find in America. When you arrive in England/Where we're well known/You'll see what can be had/Roasts and fried fish/And the very best wine/Will be at your disposal/Drink and let's be merry!

3 Look alive, brothers, take up arms/It's off to America!/Our army's already gathered/Long live Victory!/Red gold, Red gold/Will come rolling in/And we'll have, and we'll have, and we'll have more pay!

219 moral economists who made careers defending the Hessian system in rudimentary cost/benefit terms which would be familiar to defense analysts of our own day (von Both and Vogel, 1973:102-4; Lowell, 1884: 21-26).

But there is little to be learned about the assimilation of the Hessian draft system into popular life by the study of expressions of passive acceptance or eager participation. Such enquiry does not help us understand how the system's effects on the rural population's daily experience were perceived. More specifically, it does not tell us in what terms or how deeply the peoples of Hesse thought about their state and its draft system in relation to fundamental aspects of popular social life, such as the relations between the sexes and family members, the devolution of rights and properties, social success and failure, and the like.

Happily, one available source allows us insight into popular intelligence on these matters. The countryside around Kassel at the turn of the nineteenth century was not only the annual gathering ground for military exercises and maneuvers; it was also where two young brothers barely out of law school began what would become the best known collection of German fairy tales. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Kinder-und Hausmärchen (1819) have produced an enormous outpouring of interpretive writings of a literary-critical, pedagogical, or psychological nature. Unfortunately, most of these writings treat the tales in falsely universalistic terns that see in them solutions to problems which afflict people, and especially the young, everywhere and at all times. One might even speak of a fairy tale industry which debases the tales for modern popular consumption. But even when the scholarly discussion of the tales turns historical, it is still only to invoke them as evidence for general phenomena from the past, such as the historical German character, rural social violence, feudal or patriarchal norms, rural poverty, and popular superstitions (Röhrich, 1976:11, 28). As an alternative approach, this essay proposes to treat four tales from the Grimm collection as historical sources whose applicability is limited to late eighteenth-century Hesse-Cassel, whose largely feminine origins make them especially relevant to the history of Hessian peasant women, and most importantly, whose contents reveal a relatively sophisticated social

220 intelligence capable of identifying the connections among the state system, the draft, the private family, and the larger society. They even analyze some of the difficulties and conflicts arising from these inter-connections.

Mentalité, Fairy Tales, and Historical Change

Recently there has been renewed interest in the value of recorded oral tradition for social historical purposes. For example, James Obelkevich's Religion and Rural Society (1976) includes much material collected by English folklorists. Similarly, there is the recent study by Stephen P. Dunn (1978) of the various Russian sources of folk literature for evidence of family relations and practices; his comparison of this evidence to what the Grimm brothers' tales reveal about similar relationships is useful. On the whole, however, historians so far have confined themselves to a straightforward cataloging of folk beliefs and have not attempted a careful treatment of the symbolic materials contained in folk and fairy tales, especially in relation to specific historical situations. What is needed is a treatment of this material in the manner of an intellectual historian but with more specific social and political historical objectives. The inquiry should not be directed toward making statements about, for example, general attitudes concerning "community" or "the family' (Dunn, 1978:170) .Historians need to investigate instead how and to what extent these expressions of the popular mind were related to specific changing institutions.

The first difficulty arising in such an enterprise is that modern historians of popular culture do not characterize a popular mentality that is useful for the analysis of mass institutions such as the family as it is presented in recorded folk literature. If one turns to the best recent survey, Peter Burke's Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978), one quickly sees that it is not actually a study of the world found in folk culture, but a taxonomy of folk expression and its relation to culture generally. Taking as his point of departure Robert Redfield's classic "great tradition/little tradition" distinction, Professor Burke argues an asymmetrical relationship between the two cultures: "the

221 elite participated in the little tradition, but the common people did not participate in the great tradition" (Burke, 1978:28). The great tradition required a formally taught language to which the great majority of the people had no access. In this view the little tradition is perceived as easily accessible, because it required no special learning and presented itself to everyone in public places.

Burke does not entirely share Redfield's distinction between the "reflective few" and "the unreflective many" (Redfield, 1960:31). Moreover, he shifts attention away from the content toward type differentiation, source taxonomy, social function, and occupational stratification. Although he does not deny reflectivity to popular culture, Burke studies it only in terms of popular culture's concern with images of various universal social and psychological types; he explicitly denies popular culture's capacity for self-reflectivity and considers it incapable of conceiving "alternative social worlds" (Burke, 1978:176). Condemned to their limited vision of society as a war of all against all, the people restricted to the little tradition of popular culture found outlets for their social frustrations only in mythologized relations with elites and in those festivals of ritualized reversals of fortune known as "the world upside down." Professor Burke concludes that the fortunate participants in high culture, for whom popular culture had at best been a form of play and at worst an increasingly dangerous irritation, finally and inevitably distanced themselves from such a limiting popular culture. This culture was doomed to extinction by the commercial and industrial revolution which nevertheless gave it its last golden age.

Although Professor Burke has greatly broadened historical interest in early modern European popular culture, his point of view is of limited use to social historical analysis of the period's mentalité. For the present purposes it would be more fruitful to see the Grimms as mediators between high and low culture at that crucial juncture when traditional popular culture gave way to a more secular and politicized mass culture. An intellectual elite made its contributions by recording and even "modernizing" key elements of these older popular cultural forms and messages that were disappearing. But this perspective is not enough. For one thing, to take this approach is to avoid

222 delving into the less obvious content of oral and printed folk literature and to restrict oneself to taxonomies of conspicuous motifs which give the tales' contents a static and universal character. This in turn leads to functional interpretations of popular narratives, viz., that folk tales served to pacify the lower orders and taught them social conformity and acceptable norms of behavior (Mandrou, 1964:45-47, 149; Burke, 1978:72). That in turn places popular culture in the service of social stability and the ideological interests of elites. In the final analysis, this approach fails to account for the folk's participation in popular culture and ignores those more subtle and complicated elements of popular culture which do not appear to serve "interests" (Geertz, 1973:201- 203). Such a path of investigation leads historians away from the evidence and the social relations they are trying to understand. For example, in his discussion of the social content of Russian fairy tales, Professor Dunn considers one of the institutions of interest to social historians, the peasant family, only to claim that families and family relationships in fairy tales say nothing about them. Rather, these accounts for Dunn are but metaphors expressing a timeless universal need for communal and social integration (Dunn, 1978:161-162).

Imp1icit in this ahistorical view of popu1ar oral narratives are modern psychological and therapeutic theories. Although he attributed the psychoanalytic interpretation of popular fairy tales and myths to other therapists, Freud later interpreted popular hero mythology and fairy tales as the creations of an individual psyche on its way to ego formation and as part of the super-ego (Freud, 1967:35-36; 1965:86-89; 1977:30-31; 1962:88-89). Similarly, for Jung fairy tales performed the vital historical function of complementing the human conquest of nature with a conquest of the spirit. For Jungian therapists, this has come to mean that materials from fairy tales express an individual psyche's struggles with animus and anima (Jung, 1954; von Franz, 1972:126-128). Most recently, Bruno Bettelheim has followed with a general theory concerning the psychological function of fairy tales which universalizes and makes them indispensable to the existential and social education of children. Thus, one of the Grimm brothers' tales discussed below, "Brother and Sister," appears here with "protagonists [who] represent the nature of id, ego and superego," so that "the main message is that

223 these must be integrated for human happiness." But Bettelheim's primary concern with therapy does not blind him to the other dimensions of fairy tales; for example, that they communicate a cultural heritage to children. Again using a tale discussed below, "The Seven Ravens," Bettelheim turns it into a moral tale about Western civilization in which seven brothers, representing banished paganism, are redeemed by their sister's Christian self-sacrifice (Bettelheim, 1977:78, 12-13). Consequently, not only does he together with Mandrou and Burke see oral narratives in popular culture as a tool to integrate the young (and the poor) peacefully into the traditions and norms of a culture, but along with Dunn he also denies that these tales explicitly about families have anything to do with historical family life.

A more fruitful approach to fairy tales is to see them in connection with actual social life and social institutions, as a popular (and not elite) ideological product focused on the inherently imperfect and conflicting workings of a given social order. This approach has its pitfalls as well, however, for it too can lead back to a functional view of fairy tales as a means of overcoming conflict to achieve popular social integration. While it may be correct to consider fairy tales as expressions of genuine discontent with poverty, oppression, inequality , and social failure, care must be taken not to see them as merely ineffectual social critiques whose impotence is revealed in pervasive world- upside-down motifs - and whose evolution may still coincide with a growing elite interest in shaping and controlling an emergent mass culture (Mandrou, 1964:163; Röhrich, 1976:22-28; cf. Davis, 1975:120-123, 131). Fairy tales are indeed ideological creations emerging from the folk and often do address themselves to the psychosocial strains in an historically evolving social system; the crucial difference in approach is not to see the tales and their contents as expressions of strain but as objective linguistic and conceptual materials - "symbolic templates" (Geertz, 1973: 213-218, 313) - by which members of a population fashioned for themselves analyses that continually interpreted, and reinvented their social politics.

In this way the social subjects of fairy tales (sibling or family relations, inheritance, marriage, and related themes) may be taken at face value and not translated

224 into symbols of other, more general, social institutions. Thus, the manifestly symbolic content of the tales (talking animals, glass mountains, sacred trees, magic shirts, etc.) may be understood as illuminations, descriptions, and interrogations of a real social context. Two things are accomplished by this shift in perspective: first. the fairy tales are "returned" to those who can only participate in popular culture, for whom it serves serious personal purposes, with or without reference to a high culture; second, the present task of analyzing the tales' functioning in a specific historical context becomes more rigorous and more productive in a total history which integrates popular mind with popular social experience.

Part of the problem with the histories of mentalité has been that when fairy tales and other popular forms are couched in apparently archaic and cryptic symbolic material - if they are not written off altogether as objects of popular delusion and superstition - they appear to modern analysts as simple-minded fragments of the national or racial memory, as incomprehensible to the eighteenth-century peasant as they are us. In order to restore the tales fully to the popular mind, historians need to render both the social and the symbolic content of the tales intelligible not merely for social scientific evaluation, but above all to the popular intelligence of the age that produced them. To do this yet another shift in the dominant perspective concerning the quality of popular intelligence is needed.

In recent years, the cultural anthropology of peasant society has sought to assign a consistently conservative set of values to peasant mentality which, it is claimed, prevents it from making decisions contingent on a realistic or purposive rational appraisal of the situation (Foster, 1965; Scott, 1976). Merely to claim that peasants are, on the contrary, efficient and rational economic actors (Popkin, 1979) is not, for the present purpose, as useful an argument as that which holds that peasants are rational actors in a world in which the flow of goods and information is largely out of their control and therefore uncertain (Qrtiz, 1971). If one is to ascribe intelligence to historical popular culture, then one must go beyond merely showing that peasant decisions were, in retrospect, economically "rational"; historians must discover what analytical tools

225 were present for popular intelligence to work with and what powers of analysis they held. This essay proposes fairy tales as just one such analytical tool.

Walter Benjamin has remarked that the modern concern with factual storytelling and the modern insistence on letting accurately reported facts be their own explanation, have destroyed the power and utility of storytelling (Benjamin, 1976:282). Information, even if recounted in proper chronological or other rational order, can not serve as explanation until it has been passed through some conceptual framework. The present article contends that the symbolic materials in the fairy tales recorded by the Grimm brothers served this kind of conceptual and analytical function in Hesse during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this view, the fairy tales are not entertaining stories about meaningless fantastic events; rather, they tie together conceptual events to provide individuals with an intellectual framework by which to interpret the stories they and others about them experienced in their everyday lives.

The facts that abstraction is a natural human capacity and that intelligence lies in controlled arrangements of mythic symbolic material have been long-standing contributions by structuralists to the study of the fantastic in culture (Levi-Strauss, 1967). The structuralist approach to myth, however, can not pinpoint the historically contingent character of the fairy tales' arrangements of symbolic materials, for it gives these materials a social power which they do not have (Diamond, 1974:316-317). Myth analysis insists that myths are the means by which the cosmos replicates itself socially; they are for the "folkmind," not for the individual. Fairy tales become, in this view, inferior, debased forms of little use to anyone, unintelligible in historical terms. Here the fact that the symbolic materials of folk tales remain the same cross-culturally, that they remain free from stylistic change "appeals to the romantic sense that the self is anonymous [i.e., outside history] deep down..." (Harbison, 1980:132). Fairy tales and their symbolic contents, however, are something contrary to myths altogether. They are accounts "of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest...The liberating magic which the fairy tale has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but points to its

226 complicity with liberated man" (Benjamin, 1976:294-295). Not only are the symbolic materials in fairy tales efficient and direct (Harbison, 1980:138), but as David Bynum has suggested, they also function "to make men adaptable in their minds" and may in the end be represented as nothing more than that. In this view, fabulous narratives are not necessarily related to other cultural reality at all but owe their cross-cultural similarities and survival to their inherent power, their inherent ideational value. Consequently, the symbolic contents of fairy tales become "multiforms" which illuminate a great variety of individual experiences in a great variety of cultural and historical contexts (Bynum, 1978:27-28, 326).

Although it is far from certain whether a scholar such as Professor Bynum, whose concern is to shift interest to the tales and their symbolic contents alone, would sanction the task of this paper, we shall attempt to discuss four tales from the Grimm collection in the general spirit of his approach. The primary concern is to understand how such popular institutions as the rural family and peasant 1nheritance practices changed along with the development of the Hessian military state; and it is toward this end that this essay enlists the Grimms' tales which were collected just after that state system had passed its peak. The Hessian storytellers and their audience also dealt in multiform narrative and symbolic materials in the only analytical language at these people's disposal; there is reason to think that nuances of popular perception and experience may be gleaned from their efforts.

The Storytellers

Professor Bynum draws a significant distinction between storytellers and their audiences. He remarks that a storytelling tradition does not depend on literary traditions or sources but is sustained by the continuation of the storytelling task by successive generations. Thus, the "uses of the material in the tradition may be everyman's. or levitical, or princely, or otherwise distributed and restricted in all manner of socially idiosyncratic ways, but the tradition itself belongs to that limited number

227 whose minds are actually its hosts" (Bynum, 1978:325). Before the Hessian peasantry's tales became the property of children and academicians, through the services of the Grimms and their successive publishers, they were almost entirely in the minds of village storytellers most of whom, it appears, were women. There is even some evidence to suggest that the tales were not only by but also for women, something not entirely unexpected in a region legendary for its powerful women (Frau Holle!) and historic seeresses (Demandt, 1959:767).

The best-known and most authentic sources for the Grimms' tales were two elderly rural women from the Cassel area. One was 'old Marie" Müller, born in 1747 into a village blacksmith's family at Ranschenberg near Kirchhaim. She had lost her husband, also a smith by trade, to the military during the American revolutionary war and was in her sixties when the Grimms met her working as a housekeeper for their neighbor, the apothecary Rudolf Wild. Before her death in 1826 Marie had contributed well over twenty tales to the co1lection (Schoof, 1959;60-61). Dorothea Viehmann also contributed over twenty tales. She lived in the village Niederzwehrn near Cassel with a large number of children and grandchildren, the daughter of a Huguenot innkeeper who had migrated to the area from Metz. She made a living as an itinerant vendor (Marktfrau is the classic German occupational designation; Bäuerin was the Grimms' word for her) selling eggs and cheese to the homes of the Cassel bourgeoisie, among them friends of the Grimms who persuaded her to make the long trek across town to tell her tales to the brothers directly (Michaelis-Jena, 1970:59-60; Schoof, 1959:62-64). In the portrait drawn by the artistic brother Ludwig Emil Grimm she had a deeply furrowed high brow, weary eyes, and only the hint of a smile. But an oft-quoted passage in Wilhelm Grimm's introduction to the second volume of tales reveals a side of her not apparent in this portrait: "She retains these old tales firmly in her mind, a gift, as she says, not possessed by everyone, as some cannot keep anything in their heads at all" (Michaelis-Jena, 1970:66). Intent as well on the accuracy of others retelling her stories, the Märchenfrau of Zwern clearly regarded her task intellectually demanding.

The rigor demanded by Dorothea Viehmann seems to have eluded Marie

228 Lehnhard, a nanny at the Savigny household in Frankfurt: she claimed to have forgotten the ending of a tale she had already told to Bettina Brentano while the latter was repeating it to make sure she had it right (Schoof, 1959:68). It is possible that this is not a question of the storyteller's forgetfulness but of her resistance to the written record. Frau Lehnhard does not seem to have wanted to share her stories with the Grimms or their circle of collectors. At one point Achim von Arnim bemoaned the fact that he was not miner enough to quarry "the secret treasure" held by the woman before he asked Bettina Brentano to interview her in his stead. Similarly, an old woman in a poorhouse at Marburg, who was well known for her stories, balked at dictating her tales to either Lotte Grimm or her brother Wilhelm. In Lotte's case she stalled for time and finally claimed forgetfulness; in Wilhelm's case she refused outright because she might "damage and ridicule her reputation." Indirectly, by a ruse involving the children of the poorhouse manager, Wilhelm finally obtained two tales from her. That storytelling peasant women did not particularly care to share their knowledge with enthusiastic and learned young men is reflected in a request that the Grimms made of their childhood friend, Paul Wigand. They asked him to have his wife obtain stories from a storywoman in the village Höxter, because it was more "confidential" (Schoof, 1959:69-71, 59). Before they became the Grimms' most prolific sources of stories, "old Marie" and Frau Viehmann had both originally told their tales exclusively to young girls and women, the former to the Wild daughters and the latter to the daughters of the Huguenot pastor in Cassel. It might not be too farfetched to speculate that when these peasant women told stories in nurseries, surrounded by an audience of bourgeois children - as Emil Ludwig Grimm’s classic and photo-like drawing of the Hassenpflug's nanny records (Michaelis- Jena, 1970: opposite 112) this is not the last gasp of an adult tradition, but from the storyteller's point of view the way the tradition was meant to be carried on. Under Marie's tutelage, for example, Dorothea Wild had become an accomplished storyteller in her own right by the time she was sixteen years old (Michaelis-Jena, 1970:49).

There can be no doubt about the self-assumed importance of the storytelling peasant women who supplied the Grimms. For them storytelling was a craft which involved remembering accurately, telling, and teaching what one knew repeatedly to

229 those who could learn it. The other non-peasant contributors to the Grimms' efforts, the country parsons' daughters, the wives of government officials, the small-town teachers, and civil servants did not communicate this tradition. Although many of their stories came from "folk" sources - with the exception perhaps of the Huguenot Frau Regierungspräsident Hassenpflug's stories derived from Perrault - they had already passed from oral to printed culture. Moreover, peasant women did not become the custodians of oral culture only as men became more and more involved with the printed word (Burke, 1978:50). Modern research into living peasant oral traditions in Yugoslavia and Rumania suggests, not only that oral and printed culture can coexist (and therefore cater to different needs), but that the craft of storytelling is not necessarily the domain of women in cultures where newspapers and magazines also carry a share of popular culture. Oral narratives are to this day performed in specific social settings, often at significant social or religious events, by both men and women. Their craft may be displaced by modern tastes and techniques of narrative, but it does not really compete with them because it involves more than simply telling a story (Lord, 1965; Degh, 1962; Benjamin, 1976:300).

Although the modern storytellers recorded by Lord and others insist, as did Frau Viehmann, on the need for tales to remain unchanged, changes did occur; there is a creative and evolutionary dimension to folk tales, a dimension that involves the listeners as well as the storytellers. The singers of heroic epics interviewed and recorded by Albert Lord, for example, not only recreated the songs they had learned with each performance; they also had to contend with audiences who carried on normal gossip and business, and commented critically before the singer was finished. Similarly, Linda Degh's observations of Rumanian village storytelling record occasions when members of the audience would interrupt the teller to comment on specific episodes, to ask for explanations, to respond to details, to relate personal experiences to elements in the tales, and finally, to encourage, discourage, or otherwise engage the teller or others present in personal reparté (Lord, 1965:36-37,52-57; Degh, 1962:119).

Folk tales are more than simple stories; they function as conceptual tools.

230 Storytellers, both men and women, view their role in an occupational sense. Consequently, the interactive and creative performance of storytelling in a village setting combines with these aspects to add one further dimension to the tales: the precise historical experiences of their tellers and audiences who recognize them and take them seriously. This presents the modern social analyst with a radically different task than the one posed by Burke and others, for whom the tales legitimized and explained easily perceived social "facts," such as wealth and poverty or weakness and power. To understand the fairy tales' relation to their social context, they must be taken seriously as analyses of complicated and changing social facts, continually recreated by the interaction of professional analysts and social actors. Martin Hollis sums up this approach most succinctly: "the [researcher] cannot use the facts to get at the beliefs: he can, at best, use the beliefs to get at the facts ..." (Hollis. 1970, cited in Fales, 1976:100). Historians may never be able to recapture the village storytelling of eighteenth-century Hesse, but vestiges of these occasions do remain to suggest a historically significant but forgotten social rationality.

For the purpose of analyzing family and inheritance relations among Hessian peasants at the end of the eighteenth century, this essay will analyze only four of the over two hundred Grimms' tales. Not only are these four precisely relevant to the subject matter; but coming from Frau Viehmann and "old Marie," they are also as close to authentic historical source materials as the modern analyst can get. The objection may be raised that the Grimm brothers themselves altered the tales; indeed, there is evidence that this was the case. They conflated texts to produce "a richer growth than occurred in nature" (Harbison. 1980:130); and Jacob Grimm subordinated the scientific interest in precise reproduction to an "appropriate conception" (treffliche Auffassung) of folk materials so that what he thought was the pure essence of the tales could emerge and be preserved (Ginschel, 1967:276-278). But the Grimms so completely misapprehended the folk intent and conceptual efficiency of the tales (Harbison, 1980:138-139), the changes they introduced are likely to be entirely random. There may well come a time when social researchers' experience with the tales may take better account of such changes. But for the time being, it would be wiser to consider this a problem and to study only

231 those tales that have been altered in relatively insignificant ways.

The Tales

Our tales are "The Twelve Brothers," told to the Grimms by Frau Viehmann and supplemented by another Hessian version; "Brother and Sister," a conflated tale of two versions told by "old Marie," in which the combination of narrative details produces a more complete story; "The Seven Ravens," another of Marie's tales with a different introduction (of Viennese origin), though it does not appreciably alter essential aspects of the tale; and "The Six Swans," another of Marie's tales passed on to the Grimms by Dorothea Wild in which they made some unspecified stylistic changes (Grimms, 1819, 3:24-26, 51-53, 87-91; Bolte and Polivka, 1913, 1:70-75, 79-96, 227-234, 427-434). The Grimms themselves and their later commentators, Johannes Bolte and Georg Polivka, noted that there were thematic and symbolic similarities among these tales. In that sense this essay follows their lead. On the other hand, as their many references to other similar national and ethnic storytelling traditions demonstrates, they did not think of these tales in a specifically Hessian context.

The first tale for analysis, "Brother and Sister," stands somewhat apart from the other three: the situations and details differ in several ways from those in the other tales, and the relationship between the tales' symbolic content and social narrative is not explicit. Although not a complicated tale, for historical analysis it is perhaps the most difficult; nevertheless, the present essay begins with a synopsis of this tale because its study helps to develop an analytical framework which works for the other three tales where the details of social and symbolic content are much richer and more clearly related. The story unfolds as follows:

A brother and sister received bad treatment from their new stepmother. They endured beatings and ate breadcrusts while her dog ate meat - and they decided to leave home. After a day's sad walk they entered a forest and sought shelter in a hollow tree. Their stepmother had crept 232 after them, "as witches creep," and, when the brother awoke the next day to a terrible thirst, she bewitched ail the springs in the forest. The sister, who understood the language of brooks, dissuaded her brother from drinking at the first two springs they found, because they would have transformed him into a tiger who would have torn her to pieces or into a wolf who would have devoured her. At the third stream he could no longer control his thirst and drank - and was changed into a roebuck. To prevent him from running away from her, the sister fashioned a collar from her golden garter and a leash of bullrushes and together they wandered in the forest until they came to an abandoned cottage where the sister made a home for them and where they lived in peace for a time.

But the forest was the place where the king held his "great hunt"; and the roebuck, when he heard the bugles and dogs, pleaded with his sister to let him go to the hunt. She agreed, provided he would return to her protection in the evening. The huntsmen soon wounded the buck and followed him to the cottage where the king tricked the sister into letting him in. Overcome by the girl's beauty, the king asked her to marry him. She accepted the proposal on the condition that the brother could come along and live under their care. The stepmother and her ugly one-eyed daughter heard of this good fortune and were jealous.

When the new queen gave birth to a son, the stepmother took advantage of the king's absence, suffocated the queen in her bath, and installed her own daughter in the royal bed. But during successive nights, a chambermaid saw an apparition of the queen enter the bedchamber to nurse the child and to feed the roebuck. When the king heard of this, he concealed himself in the bedchamber and observed the true queen for two nights. On the third night he stepped forth to claim her as his proper wife and she returned to life. The false queen was exiled into the forest where she was devoured by wild beasts and the stepmother was burned as a witch. "As soon as she was burned to ashes," the brother resumed his human form. Together, sister and brother lived happily ever after.

233 On the surface this is a simple tale about the battle between good and evil, about loyalty, love, and justice. The fact that there is more to the story when viewed in its social and storytelling context does not devalue its universality. Indeed, the difficulty in maintaining such values in the world of modern institutions is an important part of the present discussion. Beyond the immediate story there are noticeable interactive associations among three facets of "Brother and Sister": the unfolding of family relations, the actions of women, and the symbolic locations and materials which contain and characterize these. (In the other three stories these associations will repeat these patterns in more explicit and elaborate form.) The first social event in the tale is the disruptive entry of a new woman into the family. Although not stated explicitly, two women - the stepmother and her natural daughter - enter the family. The implication is that not mere evil but the advancement of the unfavored stepsister is uppermost in the stepmother's mind and causes her to act the way she does. In any event, the maltreatment that pushes the children out of the family is only the first act toward a more genuine fission of the family, toward a more complete dispossession and replacement of the children symbolically enacted through the bewitching of the springs and the brother's transformation into a roebuck. The fact that he becomes a buck and not a tiger or a wolf is of some symbolic interest. The tiger is a relatively obscure symbol, but the wolf is quite clear; the wolf is encountered in the same mythological and legal contexts as the raven, and this is of some consequence for the analysis of later tales. In Teutonic mythology both wolf and raven accompany Odin to the battle field where they functioned as messengers and scavengers (Grimm. 1882:47). In German Imperial law, to be declared Wolffrei or Vogelfrei was tantamount to being declared an outlaw. The roebuck, on the other hand, is an animal associated with holy and enchanted waters. It is the form in which gods and royalty hide (Wolf, 1857:421-426). Perhaps more important from a social metaphoric point of view, however, is that this animal can not harm the sister. She leads it on a leash, and she maintains a sibling relationship with it even in social exile. It is the sister's insistence on staying with her brother through their period in the forest that forms a significant second feature of the story, one that stands in direct opposition to the disruptive power of the stepmother and her daughter at the beginning.

234 Trees and forests turn up in all of the tales as elements of shelter and as locales where magical transformations take place. In "Brother and Sister" there is a hollow tree that shelters the children at the outset, and their enchanted hut in the forest offers them shelter. The forest, however, is in this, as in all the tales, a place where the royal hunt takes place, where one not only gets lost but is found. The person who does the finding in all but one of the stories is a king who fans in love with the daughter/sister and agrees to her conditions concerning her siblings whether directly or indirectly. The sister's entry into another man's house and her simultaneous insistence on maintaining a relationship with the enchanted brother triggers the second half of the story which concerns the resolution of the dispossession with which the story began.

Mere marriage to an outsider does not eliminate the danger in which the brother and the sister find themselves. The original fission of the family (of origin) is not overcome by a simple reintegration into another family (of procreation), but must be achieved through the overcoming of dangers, the completion of difficult tasks, and the defeat of someone who threatens (and is threatened by) this new integration. In the three tales where this applies, the process of complete reintegration centers on a struggle between women who possess magical powers and whose different ambitions and positions in the two families create conflict. In "Brother and Sister," the original disinheritance and family fission are, as already noted, ambiguous because there is never an active dispossession or renunciation of claims. Moreover, the tale's beginning is socially difficult to read because it says nothing about the entry of the stepmother into the family. Clearly it is her second marriage, and one wonders about the inclusion of her properties in the creation of a new marriage fund and the clash of patrimonial descents in which the brother and the sister might have threatened their stepsister's claims. The stepsister's jealous exclamation in the story that the marriage to the king should have been rightfully hers suggests a hidden conflict of "rights." The stepmother's intrusion into the sister's marriage was a fight for her own daughter's interests; what makes her an evil witch was her use of murder and trickery in this fight. It must not be assumed, however, that this and the other tales are mere arguments for consanguinity. Rather, they seem to be opposed to the intrusion of power and falsehood into social relations,

235 particularly into those that are beset by dangerous institutional and emotional difficulties.

Men, especially dispossessed brothers, do not participate in this power struggle over family attachments and patrimonies. For reasons that will become clearer later, the men are always in immediate danger. This is expressed by their magical transformations into vulnerable and unattached beings whose return to human shape can only be the result of their sisters' sacrifice and endurance. In "Brother and Sister," the stepmother's magic and trickery encounters the more powerful magic of the sister who not only understands the language of brooks, but who also suspends her own death and even returns from it. The strength that the sister draws initially from her attachment to her brother and later from her husband and child gives her the power to overcome her stepmother's interference and restore her brother to his human shape. Here, as in all the tales, the human fate of brothers rests in the hands and on the spiritual strength of their sisters. The return of brothers to human shape and the destruction of the evil women finally resolves the problem posed by the original family fission and dispossession. This is least clear in "Brother and Sister" where the sister never actually renounces the original patrimony (unless the departure with her brother is construed this way), an act essential to the brother's restoration in the other stories under discussion. The fact that the story ends with brother and sister living happily together "until their death" suggests that perhaps the brother also renounced the original patrimony and was completely incorporated into his sister’s new household.

In the story "The Seven Ravens," a similar pattern of social development appears: there is the disruptive entry of a female into the family, the dispossession of brothers followed by their exile and transformation into non-human form, and finally, their sister's courageous and powerful acts to return them to their human shape and to resolve the dispossession with which the story began. At the same time, there are significant differences in the unfolding of the plot, the symbolic content, and the ending of this tale which suggest considerably different insights into the problems of individual and familial strategies. Like another story to be discussed, this one begins with the birth

236 of a girl:

A father of seven boys had his most fervent wish fulfilled when his wife gave birth to a girl. In their eagerness to fetch water for their new sister's baptism the boys dropped the jug into the well. Afraid of their father, they did not dare to go home. The father meanwhile, fearful that the sickly newborn would die without baptism, cursed the boys by wishing them to turn into ravens; his last sight of his sons was of seven ravens flying away. The girl grew and became a beauty. She knew nothing of her brothers until she accidentally overheard people talking about how she had caused her brothers' misfortune. She confronted her parents who did not tell her the whole story, but tried to comfort her by telling her that the brothers' fate was "the will of Heaven." With a family keepsake ring, a loaf of bread, a jug of water, and a small chair, the sister set off to find her brothers and set them free. She journeyed to the ends of the earth, encountering a child-devouring sun in the south and a malicious cold moon in the north. Only the stars were kind, especially the morning star who made her a gift of a chicken's drumstick and told her it was the key to the door in the glass mountain where her brothers were.

When the girl reached the glass mountain and reached for the drumstick, she found "she had lost the good star's gift." Undaunted, the girl cut off one of her little fingers and unlocked the entrance to the glass mountain with it. Inside, she met a dwarf who told her to wait until the "lord ravens" returned. While she waited she tasted food from her brothers' plates and drank from their cups; she dropped the family ring in the last cup and hid behind a door. The ravens returned and when the youngest found the ring in his cup they knew their sister had come for them. She stepped forth and they resumed their human shape. They kissed and embraced her and "went joyfu11y home."

Several differences in plot appear between this story and "Brother and Sister." A more unequivocal entry of a female into the family is followed directly by a parental act dispossessing the sons. The departure of the sons in bird shape also takes them completely away from their family and their sister who grows up without knowing them. The sister's journey to find her brothers takes her not into a forest, but into a far vaster and more threatening universe where non-human entities both threaten and help her. 237 Moreover, there is neither a king to marry her nor a rival to frustrate the rescue of her brothers. Although she suffers to bring about the brothers' liberation, they are not reintegrated into another family, but return to the family of origin.

The symbolic materials of this tale are also at first sight considerably different from those in "Brother and Sister" and the other two tales. Yet these differences conceal important similarities which throw further light on dispossession and women's social actions in the popular mind. In "The Seven Ravens," the girl's entry by baptism into the family, the boys' loss of the baptismal vessel, and the father's misinterpretation of their delay make up the first symbolic complex of the story. A point could possibly be made that this constitutes a comment on the doubtful necessity for immediate baptism - a matter of conflict in the European popular mind since at least the Counter-Reformation (Bossy, 1970:57-58). But more likely, the narrative describes the nature of the social relations within this family where the boys were afraid to go home after an accident: the father's reaction was to think the worst of his sons and to expel them. It is this expulsion and the transformation of the sons into ravens that is of far more serious symbolic significance.

Through their association with Odin, as already noted, ravens were the scavenger birds of the battlefield, the messengers of war and death (Wolf, 1851:428). These associations are deepened by a broader avian symbolism connected with Ächtung (outlawry) in German Imperial law, the symbolism of direct dispossession. To be declared Vogelfrei (free as a bird) one was in essence declared socially dead: his wife became a widow, his children became orphans, and he lost inheritance, honor, and protection of the laws. It is a condition that the brother in the previous story avoided. These messages of war, outlawry, and dispossession are in turn complemented by the symbolism of the glass mountain where the ravens dwelled while the sister was growing up. In both German and Baltic folklore, the glass mountain is associated with distant realms, especially with the land of the dead, with magical flight and escape (Mackensen, 1934/40 2:621-627) to the realms of enchanted beings (Wolf, 1857:73-74). This symbolism, applied to the social realm, expands Bruno Bettelheim's notion about Snow

238 White's glass coffin as an invisible barrier to the formation of individual sexual relationships (Bettelheim, 1977:213). Rather, this story suggests that exile in the glass mountain is equivalent to imprisonment within the invisible social barriers between classes, or to complete social exclusion. In this exclusion the brothers-turned-ravens made a life for themselves. They depart for unspecified tasks and are cared for by a dwarf who calls them "lords." The military connotation of the raven is in line with the symbolism of the mountain dwarves who were invariably associated with both military service and weapon manufacture (Wolf, 1857:313-314).

The second important symbol complex in "Seven Ravens" is contained by the sister's journey and the successful reintegration of her brothers into the social life of the family. The articles she takes along, with one exception, are relatively unimportant. For example, the small chair also turns up in other stories as a place to rest on journeys to distant places for which one must leave the earth (Wolf, 1857:219). The ring, however, is clearly more than simply an aid to flight (Wolf, 1857:219), since it is expressly a family keepsake. At the end of the story, the ring signals to the brothers that their sister has returned and symbolically has given them back their patrimony. The ring in the cup announces a reversal of the original curse, rescues the brothers from social death, and returns them to the realm of human shape and family life. The sister's symbolic experiences on the way to this denouement are also of considerable significance and make her restoration of the patrimony to her brothers {and especially the youngest) far more explicit.

Driven back from the limits of human experience, the sister receives from the morning star a gift, a bone key, to unlock the glass mountain. Since classical and biblical times, the morning star {Venus) has been the messenger and bringer of love; in German folklore, a new bride received a "morning gift" from her husband and his family at the rising of the morning star (Vinogradoff, 1920:255; Radcliffe-Brown, 1953:44; Grimm, 1882:441). The loss of this gift {which would have reconnected the brothers to the new family) clearly signifies a loss or rejection of this mode of liberation. The patrimonial connotations of this loss are fully realized by the sister's next act which is to unlock the

239 glass mountain with a finger bone cut from her own hand. In traditional German law, inheritance and generational membership were calculated by using the joints of the human body {Huebner, 1918:718; Radcliffe-Brown, 1953:15). From the head as the common ancestor, each descending joint was a generation, with the youngest and inheriting generation represented by the joints of the fingers. By cutting the little finger from her hand, the sister symbolically released her (the last-born's) claims on the patrimony. It is significant that she returns the symbol of the patrimony itself to the youngest brother's cup. The sister's sacrifice is rewarded by the transformation of her brothers back to human form and their removal from a world of war and social death. They are reintegrated at last into the family of origin. This is the only story in which the sister gives up a claim to her patrimony without gaining access to another through marriage.

The last two tales under discussion bring together these themes of family fission, dispossession, exile, and reintegration with yet another complex of symbols. They concern the difficulties of the period of exile and transformation, the loss of the original patrimony, and the risks that the sister runs in restoring her brothers to the social world. A synopsis of the first, "The Twelve Brothers," follows:

A king with twelve sons announced to his queen: "If the thirteenth child which you are about to bring into the world is a girl, the twelve boys shall die in order that her possessions may be great, and that the kingdom may fall to her alone." The queen, in her despair, showed the youngest son, Benjamin, the twelve coffins the king had made to give credence to his wish. Together they devised a plan to save the brothers' lives. They were to go into the forest and watch the castle from the highest tree. If, on the day of the child's birth a white flag flew from the tower, they could return safely; if the flag was red, they would know a girl had been born and that they had to flee. On the twelfth day it was Benjamin who perched in a tree to watch, and he saw a "blood red flag." The brothers thereupon swore to kill all girls that crossed their path. They wandered deeper into a forest where they found an enchanted hut. For ten years Benjamin kept house there for his brothers who would leave during the day and return at night with the game and birds they had hunted.

240 The daughter who had caused the brothers' disinheritance meanwhile grew up. One day she found twelve shirts in the washing, and when she asked whose they were, she learned about her brothers. She went off into the forest to search for them and found the hut with Benjamin at home. The twelve shirts proved who she was. When the other brothers came home that night, Benjamin made them promise not to hurt the next girl they saw and then brought the sister out of hiding. After a happy reunion they resumed their life in the forest with both the sister and Benjamin at home to cook and keep house.

Wishing to please her brothers at their evening meal, the sister one day plucked a bouquet of twelve lilies that grew near the house - and instantly the enchanted house and garden vanished and the brothers, transformed into twelve ravens, flew away. In their place stood an old woman who told the girl that the twelve lilies had been her brothers and that to bring them back to human form she could not speak for seven years. The girl took up the challenge, climbed a high tree in the forest to spin, and waited in silence for the seven years to go by.

A king hunting in the forest found her thus, and charmed by her royal beauty, took her away to his home to marry her. Her persistent silence and sadness worked against her. The king's evil stepmother claimed that her silence meant she was a "beggar girl" who was hiding evil intentions and past crimes. So effective was this counsel that the king condemned her, reluctantly, to death by fire. The day of her execution was, however, also the last day of her silent seven years, and at the moment the flames touched her, twelve ravens flew into the castle yard and changed to human shape. After a joyous reunion, the queen could tell her husband a11 that had happened and "they all lived in great unity until their death." The stepmother suffered a witch's fate and died in a vat of boiling oil and poisonous serpents.

The social themes here - the birth of a female, the breach in family life, the explicit dispossession of the sons, the transformation by social exile, the sister's difficult task and renunciation of her patrimony, the elimination of a rival, and the final social reintegration - all are familiar by now. The symbolic materials that illuminate this pattern of social development deepen its resonances and complement the symbolic

241 materials of the other tales.

Acting both in normal and in extraordinary ways, women in this tale trigger changes in both the ordinary social world and in the symbolic world of power. Thus, the mother acts to save her sons by flying a red flag; the daughter finds her brothers to transform them magically twice; the "old woman" who appears in place of the enchanted hut provides the magic formula for releasing the brothers; the sister enters a magical world with her vow of silence and her manipulation of a spindle, a universally powerful symbol of women's work, the passage of time, and the spinning out of fate (Frazer, 1957:26-27; Eliade, 1975:211); and finally, the sister's powerful silence threatens her when another woman, using not the power of witchcraft but the ordinary power of persuasion, undermines her struggle to release her brothers from their magical state and to reconnect them to the ordinary social world. It is significant to note, because it reflects on the symbolism of the other tales as well, that both the sister and the stepmother, although they do not overtly use magic of any sort as far as the king is concerned, are sentenced to a witch's punishment. Witchcraft here is not symbolic of evil necessarily, but rather of the actions and the struggles for power among powerful women concerned with the flow of social goods and with the disruptive entry of a sister into established family relations. The sister, bound to silence if she is to reverse the disruptions she caused in her brothers' lives, is by her silence also giving up her claims to the family's patrimony. In this sense, her silence is a symbol of this act of self- dispossession. She denies her husband any knowledge of her identity and patrimony; consequently, she is classified as a "beggar" and earns her husband’s mistrust. By the time she is free to speak, sufficient time has elapsed for her no longer to be eligible to claim her original patrimony (Huebner, 1918:703).

The symbolism connected with the brothers is concerned explicitly with patrimonial considerations and war. Of all the four tales, only this one actually mentions someone's name. The youngest son, Benjamin, is clearly a leading actor and his importance is twofold: he acts as mediator between his mother and sister on one side and his brothers on the other; and secondly, he clearly represents fraternal claims to

242 inheritance. The "son of the right hand," the last-born of Rachel and Jacob (Genesis, chapters 30 and 48), Benjamin would in a system of ultimogeniture have been the son disinherited by the appearance of a younger sister. His crucial appearances in this tale single him out in precisely this way. He receives the mother's warning, he sees the red flag, and even in exile he keeps the house for his brothers. His acceptance of the sister as an equal in the hut is in effect his renunciation of any sibling rivalry for the original patrimony, and clears the field for the second part of the story concerning the establishment of another patrimony (one in which he appears as a much less significant actor). Below, the idea that Benjamin, the youngest brother in "The Seven Ravens," or the youngest brother in the next tale, "Six Swans," may be understood as symbols of the transmission of patrimony through ultimogeniture will be criticized.

The symbols connected with the brothers' period of exile are many-layered, but the themes of outlawry and war are clearly important. The red flag which marks the beginning of their period in the forest was also associated with the coming of battle (Grimms, 1822:24-25). Although the white shirts contribute to the unfolding of the plot and may even symbolize the military (as in the next tale), their possible symbolic significance here ought to be ignored, since they were one of the stylistic improvements introduced by the Grimms into the printed version of the tale. The life of the brothers in the forest hut is symbolized more significantly by their double existence as men and lilies. Li1ies were the biblical lotus flowers, pure and socially withdrawn, whose personifications neither toiled nor spun (Matthew, chapter 6, verse 28). The brothers' orderly imitation of family life (over which their earlier vow to kill the girls they encountered hangs like a cloud) is disrupted by their sister's arrival (with its reminder of patrimonial loss) and ends finally when she plucks the lilies and plunges the brothers into the world of war, the world of ravens.

Finally, the forest and tree symbolism which also appeared in "Brother and Sister" comes into its own in this and the next tale. Forests in these tales are clearly wilderness in the social sense, i.e., places where people have been disinherited and expelled from the normal social life of families. Forests are also the places where kings

243 hunt game which may be magically transformed people. Moreover, trees are related in folklore to the family, to the lineage or Stamm, to the arbor consanguinitatis of canon law; they have been explained by Propp and others as a means to distinguish between members and non-members of a lineage (Bynum, 1978:244-246). This certainly seems to apply to three of the four tales where the siblings are cut loose, dehumanized, and left to wander among the trunks in the social forest of families. Trees, however, carry other meanings as well, and these meanings may perhaps be even more significant in the tales as the means by which folk culture analyzes certain social problems. In "The Twelve Brothers," trees are of special significance in two instances: first, when the boys, on the threshold of exile and dispossession, climb a tree to watch for the signal from their mother; and again, when the sister climbs a tree determined to wait out her period of silence, only to be found there and taken away to a new home. Trees in these instances function as places between transformations, as spaces qualitatively different from the ordinary and even from the magical worlds (Bynum, 1978:261-265; cf. Fernandez, 1971:47-50).

The last of our tales, "The Six Swans," presents a familiar development of social events couched in a rich symbolic language which illuminates the various dimensions of social institutions. The beginning is somewhat different from all of the other tales, but the narrative falls quickly into the patterns of dispossession and reintegration:

A king, while hunting in a forest, lost his way. After a futile search for a way out, he met an old woman who promised to end his confusion if he would marry her beautiful daughter. He agreed in despair and took the old woman's daughter, who was beautiful, for a wife even though she filled him with "secret horror." Fearing that his new wife would not treat his daughter and six sons well, he took his children to live in a secret castle in the middle of the forest. It was a castle so hidden that even he had to use a ball of magical yarn which an old woman had given him and which, when thrown upon the ground, would unravel and roll along the secret path. The new queen. intrigued by her husband's frequent absence in the forest, bribed the servants to reveal the king's secret. With the witchcraft her mother had taught her, she made charmed white shirts and, alone, followed the magic ball of

244 yarn to the castle. When the brothers ran to meet her she threw the shirts over them, and they changed to swans and flew away. The queen did not know about the girl, and when the father came the next day, his daughter told him that she had seen her brothers fly away as swans.

The girl set off to free her brothers and after a journey of a night and a day she found them in a robbers' house in the forest where they could resume their human form for a short time each day. There they told her that they could only be released if she kept silent for six years and in that time sewed them six shirts of asters. Resolved to save her brothers, the girl gathered asters in the forest and installed herself in a tree and began her silent labors.

Another king's huntsmen found her thus and carried her off to their lord. Even though she would not respond to his questions, this king fell in love with her and married her. The king's mother did not like the fact that her new daughter-in-law would not speak and could not say who she was or where she was from. To turn her son against his wife, the mother stole the first child born to the couple, hid it, and smeared the mother's mouth with blood while she was asleep. Then she went to her son and accused the queen of being a man-eater. She did this two more times after the birth of each subsequent child until the queen, silently sewing shirts for her brothers and unable to defend herself, was sentenced to be burned at the stake like a witch. The day of her execution was, however, also the last day of her six years of silence. She went to the stake with the shirts over her arm; they were all done except for the last one which was missing its left sleeve. As the fire was lit, six swans swept down so that she could throw the shirts over each of them and each of them resumed his human shape. The youngest, whose shirt was unfinished, had a swan's wing instead of a left arm. When the king learned from his wife, whose silence was over, what had happened, he had his three children brought out of hiding and had his own mother bound to the stake and burned. He and his queen and her six brothers "lived many years in happiness and peace".

At the outset, this tale is closest to "Brother and Sister" in which a second wife is insinuated into the marriage through her mother's witchcraft; she in turn threatens the children of a previous marriage with witchcraft, despite the father's attempts to protect

245 them. But there are many more powerful women in this tale. Even though the father has the assistance of an enchantress who is well-disposed toward him and who gives him the means to keep in touch with his children, the magical world of women's struggles rule. The very strong symbolic content of this tale completely takes over the social narrative. The father's castle in the woods where he keeps his children already removes them from the ordinary world of social relations; they can only be reached by magic. Once they are in the world where power rules, it is not difficult for the patrimonial rival, the stepmother, to complete the disinheritance by turning the brothers into swans.

Here another, much clearer association appears between the avian forms (expressions of social disconnection) and military service (a consequence of such disconnection). The swan shirts are a symbolic multiform (Bynum, 1978:326) which turn up in other tales collected by the Grimms and others, They function to produce different occasions for swan transformations. Like the wolf and raven symbolism encountered in similar tales, the swans represent the transformation experienced by the Valkyries, the goddesses of the battlefield (Wolf, 1857:211). Jacob Grimm tells of a similar Westphalian nursery rhyme in which a former soldier turns into a swan (Grimm 1882:429). The related consequences of the military and outlawry appear in the tale when the sister finds her brothers ill the robbers' den; there they take off their swan shirts and become human for a brief time each day. Moreover, the sister climbs a high tree to weave a counter-spell against the swan shirts in the form of shirts made of asters, the "star" flowers whose name is derived from aster, the morning star of the ancient Greeks. Unlike the sister of the seven ravens, this sister does not lose the gift of Venus, and makes it the means by which her brothers will be released.

In her new marriage the sister maintains her silence and thereby joins her brothers in the loss of the original patrimony. As a result, and like the sister of the twelve brothers, she encounters yet another powerful woman who, suspicious of her lack of a past (and therefore of a patrimony) finds her unfit for her son. But the deceptions of the king's mother involving the three children and the accusations of cannibalism (i.e., of devouring the new lineage) backfire. This cannibalism closely resembles witchcraft, in

246 that it makes others edible and places the victims directly in the witch's power (Fernandez, 1972: 53). Thus, the king's mother's act is the ultimate projection of power over her victim; and her reward is, fittingly, a witch's death. At the end the only evidence that remains of these power struggles to bring the brothers back to human form is the crippled arm of the youngest son (to whom the original patrimony would have gone in a system of ultimogeniture). His swan wing is a reminder of the pain and loss he has experienced. Unlike the other tales, the happiness with which this one ends is not complete. Indeed, no claims are made that it lasted forever.

The idea that sexual exchange forms one basis of culture and social communication may be found in the writings of Marx, Engels, Freud, Lévi-Strauss, and Karl Polanyi, as well as in important recent contributions by Jack Goody (1962: 281- 283, passim), Mary Douglas (1966: passim), and F. G. Friedmann (1967). If it is true that the fairy tales represent a folk form of social analysis and commentary, then concepts of sexual and social exchange should also appear in some way relevant to actual social practice.

But before the acts and symbols of sexual exchange in the fairy tales can be discussed against the social world of eighteenth-century Hesse, the specific social and symbolic materials in the tales that deal with these themes ought to be considered. The symbolic multiforms in these tales juxtapose two worlds: on the one hand is the ordinary world of families and social life, and on the other is the world of magic and power. This latter world is one of social death where people become animals for the hunt or birds, "unstable male cosmogones" whose destiny it is to be socially disconnected (cf. Bynum, 1979:279-285). They wander or fly in the forest of family trees and trees which act as gateways to qualitatively different kinds of spaces, either of power or of ordinary social life. The difficulty arises in deciding which social events and institutions in the tales are to be taken at face value as part of the ordinary social world and which function in symbolic, i.e., analytical and conceptual ways as part of the world of magic.

For example, how are we to treat those witches who are wives or stepmothers in the normal social world but who at the same time are important actors in the symbolic 247 world of power? It would be completely wrong, of course, to take the witches in these tales at face value and treat them as evidence of the persistence of old superstitions or so-called "pre-Christian fertility cults" (Carsch, 1969:630). This latter approach denies the folk intelligence discussed earlier and only analyzes the tales in terms of the "interests" of elites. In this view the witches serve as "models for individual comparison of socializing agents in general and mothers in particular," and as "anthropomorphic representations of impersonal normative forces, as dramatic constructs serving in the cause of social control" (Carsch, 1969:642). Yet even when actual witch trials and executions still occurred in considerable numbers, there is evidence that elite European ti1ought about witches had taken a much different direction, with much more fruitful results: witches became a metaphor for users of inappropriate power (Thomas, 1971:523). A similar intelligence must be ascribed to the storytellers here, since that is precisely how witches appear in their stories. Moreover, there are those women who do not practice witchcraft but are identified and treated as witches in the stories. Therefore, the dual roles of witches and stepmothers and the dual situations of witchcraft and family suggest that when they represent evil, witches do so not in some general sense as foils for "good" women. Rather, they are specifically evil in the context of families. To discover precisely what the nature of their evil is one must look at two other sets of individua1s who act in both worlds: 1) the sisters who in two cases trigger social fission in families and who in all the stories act magically to reintegrate the brothers into family life, and 2) the youngest sons who mediate between brothers and sisters.

As already suggested, the youngest brother's situation recalls the practice of ultimogeniture by which the last born either inherits the entire estate or is heavily favored in a partible inheritance arrangement. In three of the stories, the youngest brother makes special appearances in the disinheritance/reintegration struggle. In "The Seven Ravens," for example, he receives the symbol that indicates the sister's release of her claim to the patrimony; and in "The Six Swans," the youngest son clearly bears the scars of disinheritance and exile at the end of the story. Both in stories where a younger sister's arrival dispossesses the brothers (implicit ultimogeniture) as well as in stories where another mother appears (possibly with a younger daughter), the youngest son is

248 disinherited through ultimogeniture. The appearance of this inheritance practice in the tales implies a "real" social institution, and one might suppose that they were about the problems of ultimogeniture in late eighteenth-century Hesse. But in light of the evidence about Hessian peasant inheritance practices (the subject of the next section of this essay), ultimogeniture was only one of the practices in Hesse, and was especially favored in cases where the youngest was a girl. There were other kinds of inheritance strategies more desirable for the expansion and consolidation of property. But because the youngest son plays an important role in each story during the magical period of exile in which he takes on a socially significant symbolic character, another avenue of interpretation opens up. Discussion of specific practices in patrimonial devolution such as ultimogeniture becomes less interesting than discussion of the flow of patrimonial and other social goods in a larger social context.

This approach is particularly evident in the sacrifical acts and power struggles that sisters engage in to liberate their brothers from the consequences of dispossession and social death. A mistaken interpretation of the tales focuses on the disequilibriating role played by mothers-in-law and stepmothers, and claims that female power disrupts patrimonial family structures and relations (Snyder, 1978:51). But this is not true. Not only do sisters make social goods flow in non-patrimonial channels to their brothers, but stepmothers and mothers-in-law apply their powers in defense of a strictly patrimonial flow of goods. In three of the stories, the most important action establishes new family ties without breaking sibling bonds; these new bonds return the brothers to human form precisely because the old patrimony is abandoned and a new non-patrimonial flow of social goods is established through in-laws. In the one exception to this development ("The Seven Ravens"), there appears not the attachment to a new family but the last- born sister's sacrifice of her inheritance in favor of a shared inheritance with her brothers. The flow of patrimonial goods through a narrow channel of prescribed inheritance institutions (symbolized here by ultimogeniture) is overthrown by the sister's preference for a broader flow of social goods. This theme is made more explicit by the father's dispossession of the brothers and the sister's rejection of her patrimony in "The Twelve Brothers."

249 The antagonists in these stories are punished not for disrupting the patrimonial equilibrium, but for defending a narrow flow of patrimonial goods through deception. They are punished for disrupting new non-patrimonial social ties. The stepmothers, stepsisters, and mothers-in-law are all punished for anticipating and acting to bring about (Goody, 1962:283) a narrow flow of inheritance goods. Above all, these women interfere with the establishment of a new non-patrimonial flow of goods ("Brother and Sister") or defend their family's lineage and patrimony against the possible weakening effects of the sister's attachment of her brothers to her new family ("The Twelve Brothers," "Six Swans"). The final punishment in all cases is not for attacking the patrimonial equilibrium, but for defending it against a possible threat. The implicit message is that the wider non-patrimonial channels for social goods are to be protected from narrow patrimonial considerations, especially when the former are the only means for reestablishing the social membership of dispossessed males.

An argument could be made that the strategies for sexual and social exchange outlined by these tales are merely echoes of ancient matriarchal arrangements, that they are the stories of women struggling against the confinement of patriarchal society. Thus, the solidarity of brother and sister against parents might be construed as a vestige of just such a value system (Aron, 1920:17). Similarly, the strategy for reattaching the dispossessed brothers to a new family through marriage could be construed as variant on the classic matriarchal theme of reattachment through the mother's brother (Aron, 1920: passim; Sabean, 1976:100-101). These traces may indeed, be of some importance for the study of myth. For the present purposes, however, these themes of sexual exchange must be tied to the changing social circumstances of inheritance. Here the tales portray strategies that contradict the conflicts over narrowly defined access to patrimony, whether matriarchal or patriarchal; they advocate (if indeed they advocate anything) strategies of inheritance that neither dispossess male siblings nor force them from the social framework of family life into a world of outlawry and military violence.

The Draft, Dispossession and Women's Action 250 The question that remains is whether all of this will stand up to what is known about Hessian society around 1800. What resemblances are there between the analysis suggested by the tales and that by modern social historical research? The remainder of this essay examines and briefly summarizes some aspects of recent work on early modern rural Hessian society and places it in the light of what the fairy tales appear to say about that society. There are significant congruencies between the two approaches to the same social facts. This confirmation of the stories not only validates them as a primary source for the historian, but also suggests that they are the self-conscious products of a "peasant intelligentsia," the storytellers whose analytical interests were qualitatively different from that of a modern social analyst. The point is not merely to compare and make judgments about the two kinds of analysis; rather, it is to see what further questions for investigation this comparison raises.

The initial task is to understand better the impact of the draft on Hessian rural social life. The idea of a military draft for Hesse first appeared in the writings of Maurice of Hesse-Cassel, whose attempts at military reform around 1600 followed the general concepts laid out by the innovative strategic manuals of John VI of Nassau-Dillenburg and his son John VII (Demandt, 1959:167-168, 310-311). This notion that an entire population could be drawn into the defense of a country and in effect "enlisted" in the army did not actually receive an institutional basis in Hesse until the 1680s when Landgrave Charles took the war tax (Kontribution) out of the Estates' hands and made it a perpetual and permanent institution. At the same time, he declared himself the military sovereign of every male subject of Hesse regardless of his legal standing vis-à- vis the state or any members of the nobility. He followed this by hiring an expert at military management, the Count von Lippe, and by expanding the "war council" under the management of a succession of capable "civilian" (but noble) managers to check von Lippe's powers. In 1684 Charles felt confident enough to offer 2,600 men to the Emperor, but could not carry through on the contract because he did not have the financial means at his disposal to furnish the force (Philippi, 1976:644-647). When Louvois organized the first conscript army for Louis XIV in 1688 (Colby, 1951:221), the Hessian landgraves renewed their efforts and joined the Great Alliance against France

251 with promises of a conscript army of their own. It is in the course of belonging to the Great Alliance that the Hessian princes gained experience in providing drafted mercenaries on a grand scale, writing contracts that could be met, and employing military agents in various European capitals to act on their behalf.

To meet their contractual obligations, the Hessian princes made further institutional reforms: in 1696 there was a general census for enlistment purposes (i.e., compulsory registration), followed in 1701 by a draft edict and in 1736 by another census, this one for tax purposes. "Housefathers," parish and community officials, as well as officials of the local and district state offices were all enrolled in a bureaucratic hierarchy whose task it was to maintain lists of eligible draftees, regulate army-civilian relations, supervise the collection and proper channeling of military treasury funds at the local level, and the like. The capstones of the system were, first, the adoption of a canton garrison system on the Prussian model in 1762-63 - regiments could then draft at the annual April turnout of eligible sixteen to thirty year olds only from their designated district (Both and Vogel, 1973:98-99; Fox, 1976:256-262). Secondly, the English subsidy contract of 1776 saw the system reach its peak in efficiency and profitability.

As mentioned at the outset, there were state ideologues who defended this unique and highly centralized military system against domestic and foreign critics by pointing to the benefits that accrued to the Hessian state as a whole. Modern historians have also suggested that the benefits from the increased flow of military pay to the villages must have benefited Hessian rural society to such an extent that the much maligned Soldatenhandel (the marketing of soldiers) could have meant little to the rural population (Fischer, 1979; Atwood, 1980:19-20). While a genuine cost/benefit analysis of this system remains to be done, some possible lines of counter argument are apparent not only in the work of some modern historians but also, as shall be argued, in the tales examined for this study. To begin with, there can be no doubt that the distribution of the direct financial benefits was heavily weighted toward the bureaucratic personnel of the state and especially toward the royal house. The monies from the soldier trade flowed to a separate subsidy treasury under direct royal control. Both the state's war treasury

252 (Kriegskasse) and the general treasury (Kammer) were in trouble throughout the eighteenth century, and it was only through "loans" from the royal subsidy treasury to the war treasury and from there to the Kammer that the state was kept from bankruptcy. The royal subsidy treasury allowed the two state treasuries to regulate evenly their commitments and tax collections by meeting their deficits one year and collecting interest payments in others. The net result was that the royal subsidy treasury at all times showed a surplus of considerable proportions (Both and Vogel, 1973:93-95). The Hessian Estates never developed a proper power of the purse under these circumstances, no more than could the state develop a system of civil public finance (Both and Vogel, 1973:93,95). The great bulk of the public tax monies went to the direct and indirect upkeep of a mercenary army whose profits remained completely under the control of the prince, of his chief bureaucrats, and of his bankers and investment managers in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and London (Both and Vogel, 1973:95-97).

When Frederick II of Hesse died in 1785 he left behind, in a state of only about 340,000 souls, a treasury surplus of 10 million Taler, a sum that his successor increased to 32 million. By comparison, Frederick II of Prussia died in 1786 with a state surplus of 51 million, but this was based on a much larger state of six million inhabitants. The division of the monies raised by the "American deal" shows how the Hessian princes operated to create their relatively larger surplus: of a total income of almost 23 million Taler only 8.24 million were paid in soldiers' and officers' wages (and exactly how these payments were made and through whose hands the monies flowed before they reached the draftee still needs to be researched). Another 1.12 million went to equipment and uniforms, and 1.3 million went to the state treasury in the form of a reduction of the Kontribution, leaving the royal treasury with a net profit of about 11 million (Both and Vogel. 1973:95).This system was manifestly corrupt at the very top, with privy councillors of the war treasury becoming venal moneylenders who refused to make loans from the subsidy treasury for under 1,000 Taler; they took a percentage of the loans they approved in the form of kickbacks (Both and Vogel, 1973:95-96).

At the bottom, in the villages, the system's negative effects are not as readily

253 visible. Recent research reveals, for example, that while the army's demand determined the market price in agricultural goods, the profits from this trade went to a very small elite of rural distributors and suppliers (Fox, 1976:343.121). These men also formed village oligarchies who controlled the various administrative offices - church elders, treasurers, pastors, mayors, jurors, draft officers, census takers, etc. - which the state had also enlisted in its service (Fox, 1976:377-381). Wherever there are draftboards they tend to consist of old wealthy men who send young poor men to war, and eighteenth- century Hesse was no exception to this. Although much more precise research needs to be done to show what kinds of village bribery and patronage channeled certain individuals into the army and kept others out of it, legitimate mechanisms for a locally controlled selection process existed, and certain rural and state family practices and institutions dovetailed with the administration of this draft system.4 Only in the workings of these latter aspects of the system, rather than the more obvious dimensions of local oligarchic rule, can be glimpsed the extent and nature of the damage that the Hessian princes inflicted on their rural population with the merchandising of soldiers.

Naturally, the Hessian draft laws sought young men for whom there was no social or economic room. Until the mid-eighteenth century - and even after, if Seume's account can be trusted (Lowell, 1884:38-4O) - when the recruiting process became more orderly in the garrison system, press gangs roamed the countryside hunting for unattached young men. As early as the draft law of 1688, those who were "under no authority" (Herrenlose) were automatically draftable (Philippi, 1976:649). This included young men who did not have "a living" (Auskommen) such as an inheritance or a learned skill. According to Seume, the landgrave's recruiters during the 1770s were not above destroying, especially in the case of non-Hessians passing through the land, any evidence which would have exempted an individual from service. The reforms of 1762 largely discontinued the violent recruitment methods of an earlier period and specified a number of exemptions for those young men between sixteen and thirty and over five feet

4 Much of this work has now been done. See P. Taylor, Indentured to Liberty: Peasant Life and the Hessian Military State, 1688-1815, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1994. 254 four inches tall who were eligible for the draft. Citizens of towns such as Cassel and Marburg could volunteer but were not required to serve. Rural property owners and tax payers as well as their servants, hands, and in the case of large farmers, their designated heirs were all free of the draft. Others could buy their or their sons' freedom by paying for the outfitting of another draftee. Master craftsmen, their apprentices, servants, as well as such special categories as miners and students were also exempt (Both and Vogel, 1973:99-100).

The thrust of the rules for eligibility were clear: the burden of the Hessian draft weighed on those who had been dispossessed, who could not attach themselves to a house as an heir, husband, apprentice, or servant, who could not find employment, who could not afford to study or pay for a substitute - in short, those who were not attached socially or economically. While a relationship between social disconnection and the draft is in itself not remarkable or unexpected, it is worth investigating how and why young Hessian men became socially detached and specifically what role the workings of their parents' inheritance strategies played in their becoming eligible for the draft.

Before a discussion of property devolution and its connection to the draft, we must, however, first conclude our point about the importance of social detachment. The act of joining the army could by no means be construed as social "reattachment." The civil and social status of Hessian soldiers remains uninvestigated, but one area in the inferior social rights of the draftees is clear: marriage. To begin with, those who married to evade the draft were punished. Once in the army, a single soldier could only marry after meeting certain criteria and by getting his superiors' permission. Since most draftees were already socially dispossessed, their chances of meeting the criteria for marriage were small; and the result was that, despite the death penalty for soldiers who engaged in adultery, common law marriage, or bigamy (Both and Vogel, 1964:67), soldiers still tried to find a family life, even if it was second-class, illegal, and dangerous. In eighteenth-century Hessian parish registers, soldiers account for a great portion of the rising rate of illegitimate births (Fox, 1975:1030; 1976:270). Here illegitimacy clearly does not signal a joyful event like a general eighteenth-century sexual revolution

255 (Shorter, 1977:80-119); rather it marks something much grimmer. In the Hessian draft state, illegitimacy resulted from a rise in the number of those who were declared ineligible to marry but who "married" anyway. Consequently, they fathered children who were like themselves, socially detached. Demographic data indicate as well, of course, that soldiers and veterans made up a considerable portion of those poor and dispossessed individuals who died without ever having married (Fox, 1976:311).

According to recent historical opinion, social detachment could not have been the experience of the soldiery because the records seem to indicate that the military was a normal and expected occupation for a young Hessian, that it was implicitly a pan of normal social life. An eighteenth-century aristocratic diarist noted, for example, that from early years Hessian boys were mentally prepared for the soldiers' life:

The farmer who bears arms tells the son his adventures, and the lad, eager to tread in the footsteps of the elder, trains his feeble arms early to the use of formidable weapons; so when he has reached the size necessary to take a place in the valiant ranks, he is quickly formed into a soldier (cited in Atwood, 1980:19-20).

This fantasy by an aristocratic social ideologue does not, however, prove that Hessians were by nature fit for war nor that they accepted the military state (Atwood, 1980:19) - nor does it clearly indicate that soldiering was an occupation signifying social membership. We may reasonably infer from this statement that the farming male parent often encouraged a son to think about a military career at an early age. The fact of the matter is, the Hessian draft regulations of the eighteenth century dovetailed with and reinforced certain rural practices of family formation, property devolution, and social mobility which required some sons' dispossession and social disconnection in order to function. They were an intrinsic part of the family "calculus" of peasant parents (Tilly, 1978:346-347).

Hesse was one of those areas of Germany where both partible and impartible inheritance were practiced; it does not fit readily into one or another inheritance "region" (Berkner, 1976:75). Moreover, there are no easy correlations among

256 landholding size, property devolution, family formation, structure, and size. Professor Fox's investigations into Hessian tax cadastres of the 1760s and 1780s demonstrate that partibility and impartibility were arranged not by region or family type but more according to criteria of wealth and economic success, state service and social status (Fox, 1976:366-386). The majority of Hessian peasant holdings were small farms of 10 acres or less composed on divisible and heritable lands (Erbland} burdened by State corvée and by tithes; there was a small amount of Lehnland held under a variety of private law tenures from landlords; and there were "closed farms" held under Landsiedelrecht which were made legally heritable and impartible (Anerberecht) during the first half of the eighteenth century. These latter farms tended to be much larger than the rest and were owned exclusively by wealthy landholders who often also held administrative positions such as village mayor, revenue official, church elder, and steward. The lower 70 percent of landowners held only partible Erbland, and the largest Erbland farms in the area studied by Fox were only as big as the smallest closed farms. It is particularly noteworthy that the largest landholders combined properties of all three kinds to achieve maximum flexibility in estate and economic planning; at the same time there was only a tiny minority of estate farms which had been in the same families' hands over many generations (Fox, 1976:731-736). In other words, Hessian farmers sought to create large farms by combinations of lands but did not achieve or seek "family farms."

From the evidence, Hessian landlords followed the system of "preferential partibility," the dominant practice in early modern Europe to overcome the tendency toward fragmentation inherent in partibility (Berkner and Mendels, 1978:217). Moreover, in Hesse the impulse to advantage an heir existed at all social levels. Small farmers needed to recombine their partible farms in order to create units of at least 17 acres (about 4 hectares), the minimum size for a subsistence farm. For wealthy farmers, on the other hand, the large impartible closed farms served as the basis for much of the heirs' economic and social success in commercial farming, office holding, and stem family status (Fox, 1976:373, 380-382; Schmid, 1975:698-699). Although more information and analysis are needed about other areas of Hesse, properties were not combined to form community property after marriage (Schmid, 1975:701). This

257 apparent fact, continued by the virtual absence of large "family" farms in Fox's area of investigation, makes the reconstitution of farms a perpetual generational necessity. Whether it took the form of dowry or inheritance, preferential partibility not only was a necessity for the Hessian peasants' economic and social life; it also produced a social mobility that was individual, as opposed to familial, one that had to be renewed from generation to generation.

Preferential partibility can not be assumed to work automatically to the advantage of a male heir (Berkner and Mendels, 1978:213-214). For example, as anthropological research into Greek peasant society suggests, if a potential son-in-law is particularly desirable, a peasant may inflate a daughter's dowry at the expense of the sons' inheritance portion to secure the match (Friedl, 1962:65-66). Mary Douglas adds to this the classic argument of sexual exchange by which men control women in order to control other men: there are societies in which the birth of a daughter holds out the prospect that in the future the father may control the services and possibly the properties of a son-in-law (Douglas, 1966:149). Some evidence suggests that daughters were the favored heir in Hessian peasant practice. In the economic and social circumstances, the size of the wife's dowry or inheritance portion was of crucial importance to the reconstitution of a unit sufficient for economic survival and profit. Beyond that, it was important for the achievement of a higher social status through the stem family and/or public office. To this very day, the rural bride of the "Schwalmerland" brings a large decorated rake to her wedding, each tine representing a piece of land or property in the dowry, in a public display of the union's economic power. Professor Fox has noted that especially among the elite peasant families where office and property went together, the power of wives who could bring new property and social status to their husbands was considerable (Fox, 1976:380-381). Despite a prevalent fragmentation of property, preferential inheritance in Heuchelheim favored daughters and sons-in-law (Schmid, 1975:691, 695-697). Thus, for a significant proportion of eighteenth-century Hessian peasant society, it was advantageous to transmit property to girls and to dispossess sons whose claims would interfere with the reconstitution of property. Those sons could be absorbed by the army where their

258 chances for claiming a normal social life of marriage and family no longer rested on their family or origin but depended entirely on their career in the military.

In this light, the fairy tale themes of disinheritance, sibling conflict, and particularly the advantaging of girls to the great detriment of their brothers make sense and suggest that indeed these tales were about important aspects of the rural Hessian population's actual social practice and experience. It would be a disservice, however, to "old Marie" and her colleagues to leave it at that. German "low culture" involved far more than some individuals who tried to talk about social institutions and experiences without a more specific focus in mind than simply to express their sense of the relations between high and low actors in the world carnival. The purpose of this essay, it will be remembered, was to see these fairy tales as "analysis." To do that we need not only to determine that their subjects for analysis were related to a social "reality," but also to see what kind of analysis it was and to make some judgment about its quality and possible purpose. More specifically, we need to explore whether this analysis can tell us anything about what social choices and questions actually and specifically confronted people in this unique historical society.

In the previous analysis of four specific tales from this society, the focus centered on the actions of women concerning a narrow or broad flow of patrimonial goods. The stepmothers and mothers-in-law in the stories acted in accord with a narrow flow of such goods within a system of preferential partibility and non-communal marriage property. As guardians of and rivals for patrimonies, they sought to advantage their own children or to deny "their" patrimonies to a daughter-in-law and her brothers who appear without a patrimony of their own. In short, these "evil" women were "system- rational." The sisters, on the other hand, were clearly not "rational" in this sense when they rejected their favored role as heir and followed their brothers into the wilderness of dispossession and social disconnectedness. And yet, in the tales they were clearly "good," their path of power and suffering approved, and their resolution of the problem of disinheritance and sibling conflict sanctioned.

For a better understanding of women's divided behavior in the stories - especially 259 the irrationality of the sisters - we can turn to recent demographic evidence where other aspects of the family-related behavior of eighteenth-century Hessian peasant women appears to be congruent with declining vital indicators (Imhof, 1975:225 passim; Fox, 1976:343). The evidence suggests that the stress the state's requisitions and inductions placed on the vital functions of the population weighed most heavily on the women. There was no eighteenth-century population explosion in Hesse; and even though mortality declined, there was a sharp decline in the net gain of population during the second half of the eighteenth century (Imhof, 1975:244; Fox, 1976:305). To account for this, demographers have pointed to the increasingly later ages of marriage for women, from 26.5 years at the beginning of the eighteenth century to 29.1 years by the 1760s (Fox, 1976:309). There were also fewer marriages, and the numbers of those who died unmarried at age fifty show a particularly sharp rise for women (Fox, 1976:311). There is evidence, finally, that the rural population was practicing birth control. There were long intervals between marriage and first births and, by Wrigley's standards, very long intervals between births (Imhof, 1975:475-484, 5Ol). All this may have been "normal" family planning in a society where partible inheritance encouraged families to have fewer children (Schmid, 1975:699) or where preferential partibility operated under economic restraints and thereby encouraged family size reduction (Berkner and Mendels, 1978:218, 223). While these explanations seem plausible in the light of Hessian conditions, however, another explanation must be considered, one that includes the demographic behavior of women as well as some additional behaviors which suggest a far more complicated interconnectedness among family choices, life events, economic and social circumstances, and the matter at which pure demographics balks, the demographic actors' perception, viz., evaluation, of these choices, events, and circumstances.

Rising illegitimacy rates, later marriages, increasing spinsterhood, and the practice of birth control were not necessarily experienced as straightforward rational choices; rather, they must have been accompanied by doubts, conflict, and social pain. This fact is attested to by two pieces of additional evidence. The first of these is difficult to evaluate, because it involves the body's psychosomatic responses, in this case, a

260 female stress reaction which expresses itself in the form of interrupted ovulation and the suppression of menstrual discharge. Amenorrhea was increasing among Hessian women during the eighteenth century (Imhof, 1975:255). Given present knowledge, one can not say for sure if this resulted from dietary deficiencies, which resulted in turn from a decline in the quality of affordable food in a market influenced by a military state acting as a wealthy consumer. But there was a general failure of improvement of adult health in this period, a failure that was related to high prices (Fox, 1976:343). Moreover. it is not inconceivable that, acting in concert with malnutrition, there were also psychological causes connected to pregnancy and birth. The increase in amenorrhea attests to an increase in birth related stress among the women of this population. This seems plausible in a society where inheritance requirements produced anxiety concerning the sex of each newborn and where the birth of someone of the "right" sex for the pursuit an advantageous inheritance strategy simultaneously sent a number of male children into social exile and possible death in the military.

The second piece of demographic evidence to suggest that the women's experience of and involvement with vital events entailed more than a mere calculation of "interest" concerns women's outmigration patterns. Again, the evidence is thin and distressingly inconclusive, but there is enough to hazard a hypothesis for further investigation in this area: the female outmigration evidence points to conflicts and choices in women's family strategy which correspond to those values, conflicts, and actions that women took in regard to inheritance which were found in the four tales examined earlier. Records of emigrations from Hessian rural areas begin toward the end of the seventeenth century and show that in areas of small rural hamlets there was a net migration loss beginning around 1700; in more populous and "urbanized" parts of the countryside, this net loss commenced after 1740 (Fox, 1976:314, 354). What is remarkable about these figures is the great number of women outmigrants. In a state whose chief export was armies of young men, one might expect that men would account for most of the population losses through "outmigration." As a result of the "American Deal" alone Hesse-Cassel lost over 9 percent of the male population (Fox 1976:355). This massive male "outmigration" through the draft, however, was not reflected in a relative

261 growth of the female population. The eighteenth-century sex ratios in this population not only do not show a growing imbalance between the sexes, they show just the opposite, viz., a slight trend toward a decreasing number of women relative to the number of men. During the first half of the eighteenth century there were about 114 women per 100 men, and at the end there were 110 in 1782 and 106 in 1795 (Fox, 1976:356).

Why were women leaving? One could properly argue that when there is a significant loss of young men, young women will naturally also emigrate to look for husbands elsewhere. This is probably what happened in eighteenth-century Hesse. At this point, however, no one knows where these women went and what they did when they got there. Broader interpretations about this female migration are possible. There was certainly a strong incentive for women to remain, especially when their brothers were emigrating in large numbers, many never to return, leaving behind them larger shares of the parental patrimonies for their sisters. In turn, the women could enlarge their dowries in the hope of finding similarly advantaged husbands. Thus, the choice rural Hessian women faced between leaving and staying was altogether difficult. To stay meant that one could inherit more, but this was at the cost of playing the role dictated by the parental inheritance strategy and of losing one's brothers to a distant war; to leave meant effective dispossession without any certainty of finding work or a husband with whom to begin a new family. The fact that both of these choices contained no-win prospects no doubt added to the double-bind stress women felt about having families and children, as noted a moment ago. This aside, it is remarkable and not at all easy to explain why as many women as did took the latter option, the clearly less "instrumentally" rational option, and left.

In Germany at the end of the eighteenth century, the nature of the separation between men's and women's work was changing. As women entered a new world of work outside the home they also experienced a new sense of time and space and of sex group solidarity, as well as a new sense of economics and of the disposition of family resources (Sabean, 1978). It could be argued that the Hessian female emigration

262 patterns are a part of these changes in consciousness, that they reflect a difficult value decision which involved the acceptance or rejection of those patrimonial strategies which the existing system offered. In the absence of concrete information about these migrations, the fairy tales suggest the reasons for the decision to leave. In all of the four tales examined, the sisters sought to bring their brothers back into the world of people, into the social world of families; and in all but one of the four, sisters had to reject the role of "advantaged heir" to accomplish this. In all but one of the tales - in which the simple act of renunciation suffices - reconnection is accomplished by emigrating with a husband through whose family the brothers reacquired their human social shape. If these tales have social validity, then some of the observed female outmigration represents the effort by an unknown number of Hessian women to marry outside the state in order to offer their brothers a place of refuge, a family to which they could attach themselves to escape the calculated and dehumanizing meshes of preferential partibility and the draft.

There have been other periods and places in the European past when women developed marriage and family strategies that subordinated immediate material gain for some form of broader social liberation (Coleman, 1973). If the actions of some rural Hessian women turn out to have had a similar effect, then surely the fairy tales provide us with a source that shows how that strategic awareness could evolve and be communicated in Hessian "low culture" around 1800. The tales were many things: no doubt they entertained both children and adults at public and private gatherings; but they were also symbolic analyses which held up to view the negative social consequences of the existing social and military systems. They were passionate and often violent polemics that not only expressed and took a stand against the dehumanizing and painful experiences arising from a narrow system of property devolution working in conjunction with a draft state; they also advocated alternative action for women. The tales demonstrate a relatively sophisticated but non-revolutionary social consciousness in their advocacy of the riskier path of emigration, one that consciously rejected a system where security and profit were gained at the cost of dispossession and of the destruction of family relations.

263 7. Why Not ‘Old Marie’. . . Or Someone Very Much Like Her? A Reassessment of the Question about the Grimms’ Contributors from a Social-Historical Perspective (1988)

The first impetus for this essay, published in Social History, 1988, came from Arthur Imhof who responded to the previous essay with a letter to tell Peter and me that, while he liked what we were trying to do, the problem was that the tales we were using to get at how popular intelligence might be comprehending the Hessian rural population’s experiences with the draft did not come from that rural population but from much higher social circles. It was a critique I would hear again and again, one that was informed by the literary historians’ and folklorists’ current research programs which I had thought were not particularly useful for the perceptions our reading of this material yielded. This essay is my response to some of the issues raised by such indirect attacks on our main argument about historically ascertainable and socially locatable story-tellers performing as intellectuals, as narrative-analytical conceptualizers (of any class), speaking to anyone “from above or below” their given system of social formations willing to listen. The essay that follows this one contains additional lines of thought, some of which had to be deleted from the original response for the sake of the brevity required for a journal article, and some of which have come into clearer focus for me since this was written.

Sometimes events of considerable importance take place in very quiet and all but invisible places. One such event occurred in 1980 as part of a reissuing of the 1857 edition of the Grimms' Kinder-und Hausmärchen, the last edition they had personally edited.1 In the scholarly appendix of this new edition, added by Heinz Rölleke, a prominent Germanist, there is a listing of the Grimms' many contributors, their so- called Gewährsleute, (itself an interesting etymology) and of the stories they contributed. Among the contributors we find a new name, Marie Hassenpflug, someone who had not, up to this point, been credited with any contributions to the collection. She heads a list of tales that had formerly been attributed to “Old Marie” Müller, the housekeeper of the apothecary Rudolf Wild who was both a friend of the Grimms and,

1 J. and W. Grimm, Kinder und Hausmärchen,Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980. 264 later, Willhelm's father-in-law.2 Old Marie has disappeared entirely from among the Grimms' contributors in Rölleke's new listing.

There have been, as far as this writer knows, no published negative comments on this change by reviewers or scholars in the field and it seems accepted that a long- overdue correction of a small detail in the back pages of the historical record has been made. Naturally, Rölleke did not think that he was making a minor change. He entitled the scholarly article by which he justified the elimination of Old Marie, 'The ‘originally Hessian’ tales of ‘Old Marie’. The end of a myth about the earliest notations of the Brothers Grimm for the Kinder-und Hausmärchen.”3 The overthrow of a “myth”' deserves recognition and scholarly appraisal, and this essay will try to assess the reasons for Old Marie's displacement as well as the broader implications we may attach to this change.

The Brothers Grimm as Collectors and Editors

A growing imperialistic civilization lets those it destroys live on as folklore. That is probably the best conclusion one may draw from Peter Burke's synthesis, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe,4 which catalogues some of the many cultural forms and expressions of Europe's lower classes in the period when Europe first extended its commercial and military reach for the globe. Europe's own rural population were among the first victims of this renewed expansion of power, their culture, as Burke demonstrates, doomed by that very commercial and industrial transformation that gave

2 Ibid., III, 563

3 H. Rölleke, “Die ‘stockhessischen Märchen’ der ‘alten Marie.’ Das Ende eines Mythos um die frühesten Kinder- und Hausmärchen Aufzeichnungen der Brüder Grimm” originally published in 1975 and reprinted several times. I am using the version in his Nebeninschriften, Wuppertal, 1981.

4 P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, New York: Harper, 1978. 265 it a last “golden age.”5 Among the actors in this process of destruction in early nineteenth-century German central Europe were urban middle-class intellectuals and state employees who perceived in the various materials of popular culture building stones for a new national aesthetic. Their goal was a new German and yet cosmopolitan culture that would allow them to transcend their own failed political revolutions by opening a world of education and spirit apart from politics and war, a separate realm where each of them could explore, develop and delight in a fleeting and therefore special individuality. As part of this process of withdrawal into their own genius, these new intellectual leaders not merely eschewed political programs and action; they accepted the emergent state system which had turned back their efforts at change as part of the natural world and with that abandoned the villages and rural people, whom they acknowledged as the custodians of a fragmented and ancient Germanic culture, to what they saw as lower forms of life.6

This is not to say that they did so without experiencing a sense of loss. Some of them, at least, understood that unique cultural forms were disappearing before their eyes7 and that, given the inevitability of such, to them, organic processes, they could at least record and preserve some of the best. The real problem for this group was deciding what was worth saving and what to do with the material they had rescued. Scattered throughout Germany's small states and provincial cities, the isolated Romantic intellectuals who took on these tasks fought, both within and among themselves, a

5 For a different perspective on this expansion and its effects on Europe’s inner and outer social relations, E. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, University of California Press, 1982.

6 H. Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, 1648-1840, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964, 345-54; cf. The interesting critical remarks by H. Bausinger, “Bürgerlichkeit und Kultur,” Göttingen, 1986, in J. Kocka, ed., Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, Göttingen, 1987, 22-3.

7 Thus the Grimms’ preface to the first volume of the 1812/15 edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen,[KHM] Frankfurt, 1962, 8. 266 constant see-saw battle between aesthetic expression and accurate philosophical observation, a battle in which the publication of folksongs and fairy tales was one critical area of conflict. In 1810, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm entered the fray when they sent their own collection of forty-eight tales to Clemens Brentano, a successful collector, reinterpreter and publisher of folksongs and their mentor Friedrich Karl von Savigny's brother-in-law. They drew on themselves both praise and scorn. Brentano, on Savigny's recommendation, had started the ball rolling when he turned in 1806 to the Sekretär in the Cassel war ministry, Jacob Grimm, with a request for songs and stories; but he was, in the end, dissatisfied with the outcome and even misplaced the manuscript, which did not turn up again among his papers until 1926. When the first volume of the Kinder-und Hausmärchen arrived in Brentano's mail in 1812 he was glad to have the book but found the tales too crude. He wrote to Arnim that “one could present a child's habit in all authenticity without showing one with buttons torn off, soiled, and the shirtsleeves hanging down outside the trousers.” With that judgement, Brentano anticipated the general reception of the tales among the Romantics. On the occasion of the publication of the second volume in 1815 August Wiihelm Schlegel lauded the Grimms' energetic collection of tales and yet summed their efforts up as follows: “But if we empty out the entire jumble bin of well-meaning silliness and demand respect for every bit of old junk (Trödel) in the name of ‘ancient lore’, then you're asking too much.”8

Under peer pressure, the Grimms caved in and abandoned their early resistance against the dominant trend of adapting folk materials to suit current tastes in poetry. In the 1812 preface they had rejected other, unnamed, authors' adulteration of collected tales and songs with “mannerisms that the poetry of the time offered.” They displayed then a perhaps already fading sense of alienation when they claimed that their preservationist spirit made their collection the first that did not “tear out of children's hands something that was theirs,” used it as “stuff” for something “greater” and “gave

8 H. Rölleke, “Zur Biographie der Grimmschen Märchen” in his Brüder Grimm. Kinder und Hausmärchen, Cologne, 1982, II, 538,566. 267 nothing in return.”9 While their originally uncompromising intent remained intact through the collection and publication of the second volume in 1815, their preface to that collection heralded a shifting of ground, a turning away from the original tellers of their tales. It is true that from this second preface we have the famous description of Dorothea Viehmann, one of the Grimms' rural collaborators, but the emphasis even in the description of Frau Viehmann is on the reliability of her memory to illustrate how much “stronger is the attachment to what is passed down with people who live the same unchanging life than we, who tend toward change, can understand.”10 The storytellers are here reduced to living conduits carrying the ancient traditions merely because they cling to the old ways; collectively they are portrayed as a kind of cultural bio-mass, the eternal “many-layered greenery” that grows in “the epic ground of folk poetry.”11 It is here that talk of the “authentically Hessian” (echt Hessisch) character of the tales and of an “ancient German mythology” (urdeutscher Mythos) first surfaces.

The Grimms were beginning to lose, by 1815, their earlier satisfaction with having concretized the oral tales and simply having made them available (1812: “jenes blose Dasein reicht hin”: [the tales’] simple existence is sufficient).12 Where they had once believed that the pedagogical use of the tales was inherent in and would develop out of the originals, by 1815 they conceded that material that was not suitable for children might be edited out and that it was not the tales' authenticity but the pleasure they brought that would allow them to function as a work of instruction (“als eigentliches Erziehungsbuch”).13 On the basis of these changes, both in their perception of the nature and purpose of the original tellers and in their shift toward a more self-conscious edifying instrumentalism, their subsequent editions of the tales suffered from changes

9 Preface to vol. 1 of KHM (1812/15), 13.

10 Preface to vol.2, KHM, 1812/15, 236.

11 Ibid.

12 “Such pure existence is sufficient . . .” preface to vol.1, KHM, 1812/15, 8.

13 Preface to vol.2, KHM, 1812/15, 237. 268 that often downplayed those very elements that were crucial to the original telling.14 For example, if we look at “Rapunzel” we notice that the word “pregnancy” and any pointed reference to that condition were eliminated from the 1819 and later editions - when it seems obvious, to this reader at least, that pregnancy was central to the intent of the original story.

In other words, editorial changes in later editions made by the Grimms themselves anticipated the present discounting, by scholars, of the importance and intellectual integrity of the original tellers and of the serious attention they paid to the details, to the narrative elements. If we compare, for example, the 1812 and 1819 versions of the tale “Godfather Death” it becomes clear that, as the Grimms moved further away from their early collecting days, they also moved further away from the original intent of the tales' tellings. It may well have been that they never fully appreciated that original purpose; or it may have been, and this seems more likely, that they made a decision about who their audience was going to be and felt justified in changing the intent of a tale to something that would have meaning for this new group. The point is that we do not have to continue to follow in their footsteps, especially if we are trying to learn about pre-literate people's ways of thinking. The problem is to find our way back, if we can, to what the tales were about at the time the Grimms and their helpers wrote them down.

In the 1812 version of the story “Godfather Death,” a poor man, desperate at the birth of his thirteenth child, seeks a godfather to sponsor his new son. He rejects God because “'you give to the rich and let the poor starve” and he turns instead to Death because he does not “draw distinctions.” The new godfather's gift to the child was an herb that could heal all illness; all that the godchild, grown to adulthood as a famous doctor, had to do was to observe the presence of Death at the bedside of someone who was ill. If Death stood at the head of the patient, he was to administer the potion; if at the feet, the patient was fated to die and the potion was to be withheld. The doctor gained such fame far and wide for his certain diagnoses and cures that when the king

14 Rölleke, “Biographie,” 573-6. 269 took ill he was summoned to the palace. Upon seeing Death at the king's feet, the doctor simply reversed the king's position, gave him the herb, and the king lived. When he did the same with the king's ailing daughter, Death in anger carried the doctor off to a great cave where countless candles, the soul-lights of the living, burned. Pointing to the doctor's own sputtering flame, Death said: beware.

For the 1819 edition, the Grimms expanded the tale but diminished its power. They sought to mitigate the father's rejection of God by adding: “Thus spoke the man because he did not know how wisely God distributes wealth and poverty.” They also diminished the dual nature of the father's choice by introducing the Devil as a third possible candidate for godfather - rejected because he seduces. Now Death is chosen not simply because he treats everyone the same but also because he can make people “rich and famous,” an effect of Death's friendship that was not hinted at in the 1812 tale, and one that does not necessarily follow. Later in the story, the Grimms add the doctor's thoughts before disobeying his godfather's injunction in the case of the king: “But the doctor thought that perhaps he could outwit Death; since he is your godfather he won't take it too hard.” In the end, the doctor-child suffers a psychologically painful death. For the Grimms, death ceased to be an inscrutable force that visits everyone and demands that we see our actions in terms of our own mortality, but became, instead, a punishment to deter the disobedient.

In the Grimms' editorial care the tale ceased to be a disturbing and open-ended meditation on the desperate choices of the poor, on the temptation to advance socially by serving the rich especially well and, finally, on the possibility that even the last source of equality may be subject to human intervention. It became rather a blend of middle- class anxieties about social mobility and privilege and of adults' imaginings about the workings of a child's mind in matters of obedience. Whatever the merits of the second tale may be as a source of insight into the mental world of early Biedermeier pedagogy, the first version, the one closer to the oral source, is a better story. It does not offer banal and homiletic conclusions but confronts us with paradoxes that demand reflection in its presentation of the difficulty of choosing a path of social equality. It might not be

270 pushing our interpretation too far to suggest that it is a tale about considering infanticide (if not actually performing the act) in the case of the birth of a child one cannot feed and which, were it to grow and flourish, would no doubt abandon the memory of its poor baptism and serve the rich, those oppressors already sufficiently served by their God. It is, in other words, a tale that provides, were we to consider it in its broadly perceived social setting, a powerful insight into the psychological agonies of those rural poor in late eighteenth-century Germany who actually confronted such desperate choices.

It is clear that we are dealing here with different tales, different versions of the same 'tale type' if one wills, whose differences in detail reveal the workings of different minds, of different mentalities. Where the second version of the tale shows the characteristics of a Kunstmärchen, a type of tale that draws on folk sources but is, essentially, the creation of an educated literary imagination, the first is clearly closer to a non-literary, an oral tradition. It is less refined in its presentation, is told in a more discontinuous prose, has fewer descriptive passages and occasionally speaks in a more brutal language - as in the case where Death warns the doctor that if he transgresses again his neck will be twisted, a punishment that is not, interestingly enough, carried out in the first version and then never appears in the second of 1819, where the doctor’s life-candle is merely allowed to go out.15 The only problem with the notion that the 1812 “Gevatter Tod” is an accurate reflection of the mentality of the poor in contrast to the later rendition is that the Grimms' original source was not poor. For this particular tale, instead of a nanny or a peasant wise woman, we have Wilhelmine von Schwertzell in Willingshausen, oldest daughter of Georg von Schwertzell and of his wife Luise, née Freiin von Bozenburg-Städtfeld. Wilhelmine's brother, chief administrator of the royal hunt in Electoral Hesse, had been the Grimms' school chum and had introduced them to

15 There is a significant discussion of this tale in E. LeRoy Ladurie’s Love, Death and Money in the Pays d’Oc, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984 in which the neck-wringing, when actually carried out, signifies proximity to the tale’s “typical” (AT 332!)and traditional vitality. 428-9 and passim.

271 the Schwertzell country house and salon where such minor celebrities as Karl Maria von Radowitz, the future Prussian minister of state, and Goethe's favourite Baltic painter, Gerhart von Reutern, circulated.16

An interesting question opens up. It is clear the Grimms' tales cannot, willy-nilly, be drawn into use as evidence for historical lower-class mentalité studies. A detailed history and evaluation of each tale so used has to come first, it almost goes without saying. The really interesting question in this regard occurs when we have a tale, as with “Godfather Death,” that speaks to lower-class social and psychological experience but comes from a socially more highly placed source. The question about whether or not to cite such a tale for analysis of lower-class intelligence begs yet another question. In the case of the tale just discussed we need to ask: why would an aristocratic woman tell a version of a classic tale that stressed the psychological dilemmas of poverty and inequality? To answer this we have to begin to dig much deeper into the social complexities surrounding the transmission of oral tales in Europe in the period around 1800 than much of the recent literature on the subject, including Rölleke's rejection of any lower-class authorship for the Grimms' collection, allows.

Authorship and the Consignment of Stories in an Oral Tradition

We shall have opportunity to return to the Schwertzell's salon and to what went on there. Before we can approach the specific problem about the apparent incompatibility between “Godfather Death's” contents in the original publication and its 1812 oral source's elevated social status, we need to tackle a more general problem about lower-class authorship and use of fairy tales generally, and of the Grimms' tales specifically. The reasons for doing so are two-fold. First, if we are ever going to use fairy

16 W. Schoof, Zur Enstehungsgeschichte der Grimmschen Märchen, Hamburg, 1959, 33, 91. Elsewhere I cite, as indicated, the 1931 edition of this study which retained more correspondence and other primary texts, Frankfurt, 1931. 272 tales consistently as a means to gain access to specific thoughts and feelings, to the experience of historical lower-class people (and of others who left this kind of record as well) then we need to be clearer than we are at present about what we can expect from the tales and what are their own and their author's limitations and strengths.

For example, in a recent particularly noteworthy attempt at fairy tale analysis, Robert Darnton has conceded that there was what he calls “a substratum of social realism” that “underlay the fantasies and escapist entertainment of folktales” but then he dismisses several recent ventures toward research into the social analytical dimensions of fairy tales by suggesting that “peasants could have learned that life was cruel without the help of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.”17 It is clear, however, that Darnton is expecting too little from the intelligence of folktales for, as anyone can readily see, the story about the little girl and the wolf is about much more than merely life's cruelties. Darnton earnestly informs us further that the early modern French tales were concerned to show that “Peasant families could not survive under the Old Regime unless everyone worked and worked together as an economic unit' and that therefore the tales even demanded the exploitation of child labour.”18 He does not seem to be aware that poverty is never the only or even the main cause of child labor but that the latter requires also a particular structuring of a labor market that idles adults in favor of children’s wages. The tale he cites to illustrate his point, “Les Trois Fileuses,” is not simply about a father's anger over a daughter who eats but will not work, but is rather about a father misrepresenting a superfluous child's capacity for prodigious work to a king and about the deformities suffered by the three women who grew up actually doing the work promised. Read or heard in conjunction with the analogous plots of the several versions of “Rumpelstiltzkin,” this tale might give rise to several interesting considerations about the changing use and experience of children's and women's labour in agriculture and

17 R. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History, New York: Basic Books, 1984, 38.

18 Massacre, 34-5. 273 rural industry.19

Darnton's one-dimensional readings underestimate the quality of mind demanded of both tellers and audiences, living in specific social and historical circumstances, by the nuances of plot and imagery in their own folktales. From his point of view, we can only expect to find out from such tales about the unconscious national character of, say, the French - which he sees as an amoral tricksterism20 - but nothing about the self-consciously reflective capacities of the French rural lower classes over time. For Darnton, the mass of Europe's population around 1800 was largely incapable of generating reflections about its conditions that were of a sufficient quality to produce effective action and change, individually or collectively; people were merely condemned to deriving, unendingly, “some satisfaction from outwitting the rich and powerful in their fantasies.” 21 In order to help dislodge historians of mentalité from such unnecessarily reductionist and self-confining positions vis-à-vis the materials at their disposal, it is essential to keep open and re-examine the question about the precise social origins and, hence, implications of recorded and printed fairy tales.

Perhaps part of the discomfort with ascribing intellectual seriousness to the tales lies not only in the possible upward valuation of the so-called “Little Tradition,” but more in its implication of a group of lower-class or other intellectuals, the storytellers, who stand completely outside the world of institutionalized learning and high culture.22

19 Cf. J. Schneider,”Rumpelstitskin Revisited; Some Affinities between Folk Culture and the Merchant Capitalist Intensification of Linen Manufacture in Early Modern Europe,” unpublished Manuscript, Department of Anthropology, The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, 1985; also A. Schau, “Arbeitswelt und Märchenkultur,” Universitas, 34(1984), 420-1.

20 Darnton, Massacre, 48-50, 54-5.

21 Massacre, 59

22 Robert Redfield, in his important 1955 article, “The social organization of tradition,” reprinted in J. Potter, M. Diaz and G. Foster, eds., Peasant Society: A Reader, Boston: 274 To examine the possibility of the existence of such a group and to determine, if possible, its character and weigh its historical influence are exciting intellectual challenges that provide a second reason for continuing research into the precise connection between printed tales and their oral origins. Although research by some anthropologists and folklorists (one thinks of Clifford Geertz, David Bynum and Albert Lord, for example)23 has long suggested that such intellectuals are not only theoretically possible but that both the concept and experience of culture require them, social and literary historians have been reluctant to take such a step in their analysis of popular culture. Again, we may cite Darnton: “Operating at ground level, ordinary people learn to be ‘street smart’ - and they can be intelligent in their fashion and philosophers. But instead of deriving

Little, Brown 1967, approaches, by means of V. Raghavan’s accounts of India’s teachers of Vedic Scripture, such a conception. He can not, however let go of the notion that such persons are merely mediating between “what is going on in the minds of the villagers” and”the minds of remote teachers, priests or philosophers whose thinking affects and perhaps is affected by the peasantry.” (26) Here all originality is ascribed finally to purveyors of the Great Tradition who respond to the village “mentality” only to improve the insertion of their presumably superior conceptions into the Little Tradition. Perhaps in time and with more research we will come to see the German lower class story tellers as drawing from a Great Tradition far more than we can at the moment ascertain, and we will come to see them as mere “mediators” in Redfield’s sense; however, perhaps by then we will also be able to shift our perspective sufficiently away from simple a consideration of the “sources” of their conceptualizations to understand that what determined their position as endemic and “independent” rural or lower class intellectuals was their creative reworking of those sources to suit their own analytical purposes. It may be a mystery why this should be such a difficult further step in our understanding, but perhaps not if we consider that even Gramsci, in his discussion of what he calls “organic intellectuals,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, New York, 1971, 5, 8-10, can also not ley go of a “higher sphere” of intellectual activity which “rural-type intellectuals,” defined as “priest, lawyer, notary, teacher, doctor, etc.,” conveyed to “the social mass of country people.”

23 C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, 1973; D. Bynum, The Daemon in the Woods, Cambridge, Mass: Center for the Study of Oral Culture, 1978; A. Lord, The Singer of Tales, Cambridge, Mass., 1960. 275 logical propositions, they think with things, or with anything else that their culture makes available to them, such as stories or ceremonies.”24 Stories are only things? To take up the argument that it would be completely inadequate to distinguish intellectuals from the rest of the population merely by their capacity for deriving “logical propositions” would take us into epistemological byways far beyond the limits of this paper.25 It is demonstrably clear, however, that in the case of certain of the Grimms' tales the tellers were not content with a mere passive cataloguing of universally miserable social conditions against which only stupid luck and crafty trickery provided relief; instead, they were capable of analyzing separate but related aspects of the social and state systems, of identifying and morally condemning those within their own class who sought advantage from the exploitative aspects of these interrelated systems and, finally, of devising a strategy (not mere trickery) for side-stepping such exploitation.26 Any beginnings toward this kind of an appreciation of the intellectual dimensions of the tales are lost if the mental qualities of the tellers are not acknowledged as significant elements in the history of the tales. That the storytellers' critiques of the logic of the systems in which they had to live did not generate revolutionary change is to impose an irrelevant criterion of intellectuality on them.27

We have in the works of Albert Lord, Linda Degh and others an excellent record

24 Darnton, Massacre, 4; by contrast, R. Harbison, Deliberate Regression, New York, 1980, e.g., 138; also, N. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975, 120-3,131.

25 Even in Darnton’s camp of idealist-behaviorist analysis it is possible to find more exciting visions of what constitutes intellectual activity; viz., M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, New York, 1964, 64-5, 397; for an alternative (and amusing) perception of the encounter between the intellectual and the unintellectual see K. Marx, Die deutsche Ideologie in Werke, Berlin 1981, III, 164 or, more seriously, “Thesen über Feuerbach,” Werke, III, 5-7.

26 See chapter 6 above.

27 Darnton, Massacre, 58; Burke, Popular Culture, 176. 276 of the creative importance and intellectual seriousness of the tellers in living oral traditions but, in ways and for reasons reminiscent of the Grimms' turning away from their sources, this kind of research appears in the recent historical literature as evidence to demonstrate that the tellers' personal versions and the occasions of storytelling were not actually very important and that “modifications of detail barely disturb the general configuration” of a tale. In this view, the path-breaking work of Albert Lord, about the great significance of authorship in oral traditions, especially at the moment of transcription, is reduced merely to confirm “conclusions that Vladimir Propp reached by a different mode of analysis, one that showed how variations of detail remain subordinate to stable structures in Russian folktales.”28 Such an emphasis on the song and not the singer remains problematical pending a critical re-examination of “tale typing” (discussed in the following essay) and of the problem of authorship in oral traditions.

The view that the tellers' authorship is not as important as the unchanging substance of the tales is also shared by Heinz Rölleke with regard to the Grimm collection. There, however, this idea has become part of a much more direct route towards denying the importance of lower-class origins of the tales; Rölleke's assertion is simply that the Grimms not only did not have direct access to lower-class sources but that one of the most important figures in the pantheon of their contributors, Old Marie, the housekeeper in the apothecary Wild's household, did not even exist.29 This startling and radical rejection of what has for so long been assumed as certain knowledge needs to be examined very closely before it can be accepted as the new conventional wisdom, as the new password that seems to meet present needs in the historical representation of German popular literature.30

28 Darnton, Massacre, 19; but cf. Lord, Singer, 99-102, 110, 177-235 and passim.

29 Rölleke, “Mythos.”

30 Cf., for example, I. Weber-Kellermann’s “Vorwort” to her Kinder und Hausmärchen gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm, Frankfurt, 1981; also L. Harig,”Als wollt’s die ganze Welt 277 Rölleke's best argument rests on the contradiction we noted a moment ago with “Godfather Death;” namely, that many tales that appear to have lower-class origins were actually told to the Grimms by apparently “well-read young ladies from among the educated bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürgertum) of Kassel ...[viz.] Friederike Mannel of Allendorf, a young, highly educated lady, ...[and] ...the altogether youthful and exquisitely educated (sehr feingebildete) brothers and sisters Hassenpflug, Wild and Ramus.” Gone from the picture are the “old Hessian peasant women, servant girls, nannies or war veterans” as tellers of tales. “Instead, the beginnings of the collection are thoroughly literary by nature.” Rölleke hastens to add that, of course, this view does not diminish the genius of the Grimms; it merely reveals it as residing in something other than what had hitherto been suspected. Rather than applauding their preservation of authentic stories, he suggests we ought to give credit to their “ingenious flair for discovering those texts that contained an ancient core (however disguised or transmitted) and were suitable for ever more complete [?] retellings.”31 Not only does this claimed revision echo the Grimms' change in their vision of the tales as they expressed it first in the 1815 preface - and is not, therefore, a particularly new departure - but it is also the basis for an entirely unwarranted dismissal of the historical importance of the German oral tradition as a source for historians, since now that tradition is not as accessible as the Grimms' collection seemed to have made it. For Rölleke, the tales, by the time the Grimms get them, are no longer a part of an oral tradition but are already Kunstmärchen, literary productions by allegedly “highly educated young ladies” whose efforts are then only refined further, mostly by Wilhelm it appears, for the later editions, with the second edition of 1819 standing out as the first “true product” of the brothers themselves.32

The primary victim of Rölleke's approach to the Grimms' helpers in the transition sattmachen,” Die Zeit. Feuilleton, 4 January, 1985, 29; for a tiresome and unproductive debunking pose see J. Ellis, One Fairy Story Too Many, Chicago, 1983.

31 Rölleke, “Biographie,” 531.

32 “Biographie,” 654. 278 from oral to print culture is, as we already noted, Old Marie, who has traditionally been credited with being one of the most prolific sources during the early days of the brothers' story collecting. Armed with Wilhelm Grimm's personally annotated first edition of the tales (which has become known, after Wilhelm's son, Hermann Grimm, as the Handexemplar) and with quotations from a narrow selection of the Grimms' extensive correspondence conducted in connection with their collecting activities, Rölleke sets out to correct what he sees as several errors in the assignments of authorship made by Hermann Grimm, Johannes Bolte and Wilhelm Schoof. He claims that when the Grimms themselves assigned authors to their tales (as Wilhelm did in the Handexemplar, for example) they had to rely on their memories since they had no personal notations to tell them.33 Calling into question the Grimms' own naming of sources, on which a number of later assignments by folklorists and scholars depended, is a bold but unacceptable step, unacceptable for the reason that no one knows what all of the Grimms' original and subsequent notations looked like nor what happened to them.34 From the Grimms' critical appraisal of Brentano's sloppy and insufficient transcriptions we might expect that their personal notations at the time of first transcription were more precise and detailed. Moreover, it appears from their correspondence that the actual writing down of stories was in many cases a unique, if minor, adventure and that they paid attention to the physical and social circumstances of a telling; it seems very unlikely that they would not have at some point told each other about the telling or made notations, whose subsequent fate remains unknown, that named the source of a tale. There is simply no evidence to the contrary to suggest that the brothers forgot, at any point, what tales any of their published contributors told. To suggest otherwise is, literally, to make something out of nothing.

Before I continue to examine the structure of the Rölleke argument, there is

33 “Mythos,” 3.

34 The so-called “Ölberger” manuscript, sent to and misplaced by Brentano, may or may not have been a collection of original “notations.” There is no way to tell if the Grimms made additional notations elsewhere about authorship of each tale. 279 something that has to be said at this point about the argument's flavor. There is a constant tendency to argue with only a part of what we know or can gather from the sources, and to present a narrowly conceived selection of information in order to build a case for an already foregone and desired conclusion. I personally find myself uncomfortable having to spill ink to refute one by one arguments that are closer to an attorney's pointed presentations in a court of law than to a scholarly illumination of historical and textual questions. There are subtle distortions throughout Rölleke's argument that are clearly meant to influence opinion, and to indict and discount unfairly other authors' earlier work on the fairy tales. For example, he questions Hermann Grimm's memory about Marie in part on the basis of an allegedly faulty assignment of authorship in Hermann's famous memoir in the Deutsche Rundschau of 1895. Hermann does seem to have got the authorship of “Godfather Death” wrong but his assignment of “Little Red Riding Hood” to Old Marie is not really the error that Rölleke claims. It is true that Jeanette Hassenptlug told the longer and better-known version of the story, but Hermann was not talking about her. He was talking about someone he thought of as “Old Marie” - who did, after all, contribute one of the two versions of “Little Red Riding Hood,” one that Rölleke only subsequently dismisses as an “insignificant variant” but one the Grimms kept through the editions of the collection they personally edited. Hermann Grimm merely lists a number of tales that he thinks Old Marie contributed and he finished his clearly partial list with the phrase “and others;” it is indicative of the lengths to which Rölleke is willing to go that he immediately claims that “actual dated and undated assignments [of tales] to Marie were simply passed over.” It is no pleasure to engage someone in scholarly debate who takes what amounts to really only one, understandable, mis-assignment of authorship as a reason to discount all of an author's work as something full of “errors and gaps.”35

In the matter of Old Marie it is important for Rölleke to throw doubt on the Grimms' recollections of their sources, because the first to report to us about her by that name was Hermann Grimm, the son of Wilhelm Grimm and Dorothea Wild. Rölleke

35 Rölleke, “Mythos,” 4-5. 280 points out that Hermann could only have heard about the old woman since, from circumstances of age, he could not have met her. Wilhelm Schoof, the author of the most complete, if perhaps also not perfect, study to date of the Grimms' collaborators, has remarked that Hermann Grimm's reports about his parents' friends and acquaintances are accurate and supported by the correspondence.36 It appears that Rölleke here implicitly calls into question Dorothea's and Wilhelm's memory rather than Hermann's. It may well be that the family had created a fictitious collective memory about an old storytelling housekeeper from whom Dortchen (Dorothea’s “family name”) had learned her own skills, but to ascribe thus something that must have been close to a collective pathology to the Grimms' private family life (i.e., a fictitious story-telling housekeeper) is beyond both our present knowledge about this family and our psycho-historical diagnostic capacities. But again a doubt has simply been raised for which there is no substance. There is no reason to believe Hermann Grimm invented Old Marie; she probably was, after all, his mother's childhood mentor.

In this connection, Rölleke further argues that the six story sources the Grimms recorded only by their first names must have been individuals familiar and close to the Grimms (why this would have to be so is unclear) and that therefore the “Marie” among them could not have been “Old” Marie.37 The reasoning seems flawed, especially in the light of what we know about the place of housekeeper-servants in the persistently patriarchal house-order of the central European middle-class household around 1800.38 Such women remained separate as members of a “lower” order but, at the same time, had to perform a multiplicity of functions, including child-care, cooking and serving meals, all of which brought them into intimate daily contact not only with members of the family but also with frequent visitors such as the husband-to-be (in this case Wilhelm) of one of their charges. They were “familiars” who were at the same time close

36 Schoof, Entstehungsgeschichte, 4.

37 Rölleke, “Mythos,” 10.

38 R. Engelsing, “Das häusliche Personal in der Epoche der Industrialisierung,” in his Zur Sozialgeschichte der dedutschen Mittel- und Unterschichten, Göttingen, 1973. 281 to the family and whose surrogate parenting made them many-sided and complicated role-players in the house. Their position was such that they could only be addressed by their first names. For Hermann Grimm to have called her “Old” Marie signifies a memory of special familial respect for a woman whose occupational status was, after 1850 when Hermann Grimm wrote about her, much lower than it was when she was still alive during the first quarter of the century.39

There is one additional point to be made in connection with the allegedly questionable place of Old Marie in the family memory of the Wild and Grimm households. There is a portrait by Emil Ludwig Grimm of a nanny (referred to as “die Ewig”) telling stories to the Hassenpflug children and Rölleke makes much of the fact that some enthusiastic romanticizers of the tradition mistakenly took this to be a portrait of Old Marie.40 Their mistake does not only not disprove the existence of Old Marie, as Rölleke implies, but it gives us a clear piece of evidence, a visual document, pointing to yet another nanny for whom there is no written record but who clearly existed and told tales within a family where the Grimms did some of their collecting. Emil Ludwig's drawing appeared in 1829 but echoes an earlier drawing for a title page for the tales that was never used. Even were the later date to preclude any assertion that she directly contributed to the enormous amount of material that flowed from the Hassenpflug household into the Grimms' collection, her recorded presence and storytelling activity in that household remain, nevertheless, a significant addition to the debate about the lower-class origins of the tales and their transmission to young bourgeois or even upper-class women.

One of the, at first sight, most telling arguments Rölleke makes against Old Marie's authorship involves the division of labour between the brothers and the timing of the collection process. It goes as follows: the Hassenpflugs' contributions were

39 “Personal,”225-6.

40 Cf. R. Michaelis-Jena, The Brothers Grimm, 1970, opposite 112; also, the exhibition catalogue, Kassel Museum Fredicianum, Ludwig Emil Grimm, 1790-1863, Kassel, 1985, 210. 282 collected by Jacob and the Wilds' by Wilhelm and therefore four of the tales attributed to Old Marie could not have been hers since they were collected by Jacob. Moreover, some of the tales attributed to Old Marie were collected on the same day as some of those from the Hassenpflugs and therefore the former could not be Old Marie's because the brothers would probably not have visited both houses on the same day.41 This is all, however, badly reasoned speculation that founders chiefly on our lack of specific knowledge about how the brothers operated. We do know, however, that the division of labour was not as cleanly apportioned as Rölleke would have it appear. Jacob did collect at the Wild house (as in the case of Dortchen Wild's “Allerlei Rauch”) and Wilhelm did the same at the Hassenpflug's (Jeanette's “Prinzessin Mäusehaut”).42 It is not impossible to imagine, moreover, Kriegssekretär Jacob Grimm, after spending an afternoon at the Hassenpflugs, catching a cab back across town to have dinner with Wilhelm at the Wilds and then staying on for another round of storytelling – for which Marie might have been called in from the kitchen.43 The point is that we simply do not know and can make no certain statements of the kind Rölleke permits himself. The fundamental questions about Old Marie's existence and contributions to the collection are not touched by such “evidence” and speculation.

The Grimms had a habit of listing geographical points of origin for many tales. How they arrived at this “locatin”' remains, typically, unclear. Several such locations were listed, for example, for the tales attributed to Old Marie and, for Rölleke, “this observation [that Marie was from Hesse and therefore could not know any tales from the Hanau area] withdraws from the fiction of ‘Old Marie’ as an important storyteller

41 “Mythos,” 10-11.

42 Schoof, Enstehungsgeschichte, 23.

43 That the Grimms missed no opportunity in obtaining stories, asking servant girls or visiting tailors, even accosting shepherds in the field, is revealed in Wilhelm’s letters to Jacob in the summer of 1813 which the former spent amid the family circle of the Haxthausens, cited in Schoof, Entstehungsgeschichte, 53 and in the 1931 edition, 36. 283 the remaining substance.”44 Such a finalizing conclusion is, as with everything else he brings forward, completely unwarranted. That the geographical references did not locate the teller but the tale is clear, but what that signifies is not. For example, the brothers recorded Frau Wild's tales as being “from Kassel” while the tales of the Wild daughters they listed as “from Hesse.” Two possible and not mutually exclusive explanations come to mind: by drawing a distinction between “from Hesse” and “from Kassel” for the tales from the Wild women, the brothers might have been separating the contexts in which these tales were originally told. By distinguishing the more “urban” stories such as Frau Wild knew, perhaps out of her circle of friends, from the more “rural” tales of the daughters, they may have been admitting indirectly that the girls' source was a rural person, probably Old Marie or someone like her. Further, it may well have been that the Grimms asked their sources to identify each tale's origin as far as the teller knew it, and then simply noted the reply. To assume that Old Marie would not know stories from a neighboring area like Hanau (just east of Frankfurt) is to display ignorance about the way the lower classes lived and the way an oral tradition travels. From living oral traditions we know that tellers are often traveling performers within a range of neighboring territories. In the early modern period, and indeed until the early decades of our century there was, moreover, a great deal of migration in search of employment, especially by people (of all ages) who worked in domestic service where employment tended to be on a fairly short-term basis and turnover was high. This search for work required a constant search for and exchange of information, a process that did not exclude the exchange of stories and songs.45 There is also, in this connection, interesting work in the literature on mentalité which suggests that there was a European lower- class oral tradition, dating at least to the sixteenth century, that drew on scholarly and near-scholarly printed works to develop a language of concepts that was all its own. Knowledge of these printed works had an astonishingly cosmopolitan circulation and was by no means confined only to the lower classes of the area or even country in which

44 “Mythos,” 11.

45 L. Degh, Folktales and Society, Bloomington, 1962, 119. 284 these books were written or published.46 In short, everything we are beginning to learn about both historical and living oral traditions contradicts the assumption that Old Marie could not have known stories that she could identify as coming from a source outside of, but not far from, Hesse.

There is, finally, the matter of Rölleke's candidate for the “Marie” cited by the Grimms as one of their authors. Ludwig Hassenpflug had a sister Marie, who was an acquaintance of the Grimms. Although Wilhelm had asked her, as he asked a lot of people, to be on the lookout for stories, there is no evidence of any kind to suggest that she ever made any effort to submit a contribution. Although she was clearly an early participant in the soirées of the Grimms, it seems also clear from what her brother Ludwig wrote about her that her introduction to the Grimms meant a radical departure from her conservative home environment to a new and exciting world of ideas, literature and philosophy, and that she was here introduced, among a great number of other things, to fairy tales and old German poetry. That not all the young women who frequented the Grimms' get-togethers knew stories is clear from one of Wilhelm's 1809 letters to Jacob, in which he recounts that in a recent conversation with one of the Engelhard girls (among the earliest members of the circle) the latter had nothing to contribute. When he goes on in the same letter to say that on the other hand “the Hassenpflugs” had conveyed through her several new stories, Rölleke immediately concludes that this could only be a reference to Marie or her sister Susanna. Although it is quite possible that the brothers did not actually meet Jeanette Hassenpflug until 1811, she could still have been the source for the tales transmitted by the Engelhard girl. At the same time one wonders why Rölleke thinks sister Amalie, aged nine, was too young to know any stories, or why, for that matter, these stories could not have come from Ludwig or even mother Hassenpflug.47

46 C. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, Baltimore, 1980; R. Engelsing, Analphabetentum und Lektüre, Stuttgart, 1973; Lord, Singer, 134-6.

47 Rölleke, “Mythos,” 12-13. 285 What recommends Marie Hassenpflug to Rölleke is that she would account for the alleged “anomalies” which, for him, speak against Old Marie; moreover, she was educated “wholly in the French spirit” and was a member of a family in whose household French would be spoken until 1880.48 That is the full extent of the argument for the new Marie – to which one can only reply that the anomalies were not, after all, that anomalous and the ability to speak French seems an odd qualification for participation in an oral tradition that was carried on in German. “Little Red Riding Hood” may have had a French ancestry (although there were Italian and Tyrolean relatives about as well), but the specific version the Grimms credited to “Marie” has nothing French about it. And in any case, versions and reformulations of Perrault’s tale by that title had been current in Germany since the second half of the eighteenth century.

There is one more step one can take with all of this. Although the arguments that have put Marie Hassenpflug in the place of Old Marie in Rölleke's universe are clearly without substance, we may yet suppose, as a kind of thought-experiment, that there had been no Old Marie and that the Grimms' tales were indeed Kunstmärchen imagined by Rölleke's “highly educated young ladies.” The commonly held assumption49 that these middle- and upper-class contributors, of whom there were a good number, were already members of a literary as opposed to an oral tradition is open to question. To help our thinking about this kind of revision there is the case, already broached earlier, of the tale “Godfather Death.” If we reconsider the contrast between the powerful simplicity of the first edition's version and the Grimms' somewhat irritating attempt at a Kunstmärchen in the second, and if we remember also that the high social status of the first version's teller, Wilhelmine von Schwertzell, stands in sharp contrast to her tale's subtle grasp of several psychologically painful aspects of rural poverty, then an interesting social and intellectual historical problem opens up concerning Rölleke's “young ladies’” exact relationship to the oral tradition of the poor.

48 “Mythos,” 13.

49 Rölleke, “Biographie,” 530-1. 286 Some time after receiving her copy of the Kinder-und Hausmärchen, Wilhelmine von Schwertzell reported to Wilhelm in a letter that “only just yesterday mother took extraordinary delight in ‘The Bremen Town Musicians’ but missed ‘Herr Korbes’ because she left too early.”50 In the letter she also informed Wilhelm that she wanted a telling by Jacob to observe his style, which she imagined to be different from Wilhelm's. It is clear from this that, in the Schwertzell house, tales were either read aloud or performed for an unspecified company, that the same took place at the Grimms, and that Wilhelmine saw herself as a judge, a connoisseur of the telling and of the performance “style” of a teller. From her correspondence it is clear that she was a participant in an oral tradition that took place in the drawing room among good company, one that was perhaps merely amusing to some, like her mother, but one that she took seriously as an art form. It was a seriousness that is echoed by Dorothea Viehmann's famous statement describing her ability to remember and tell stories as an intellectual gift that was not granted to everyone;51 this seriousness of mind was not naturally the product of, nor confined to, a higher social or more literate class of women but was part and product of an early education in the oral tradition itself.

The way in which young women in bourgeois and aristocratic households received their early imprinting and further education in the oral tradition was through the serving women and nannies who cared for them and who taught them in the ways the tradition was meant to be carried on. The drawing of the Hassenpflug's nanny Ewig mentioned previously does not just show children being entertained but also being instructed. Some of them are apparently bored and distracted while others are paying close attention to an old woman who presents, with her eyes half-closed and carrying on an inner dialogue as well as an outward narrative, a classic picture of a teacher. As Dorothea Viehmann noted, not everyone could learn the tradition and not all the young women in the Grimms' social circle had learned their nannies' skills or cared to carry

50 Schoof, Entstehungsgeschichte, 93; in the 1931 edition there is more of this letter.

51 Preface to vol. 2, KHM, 1812/15, 235. 287 them into adulthood. Lotte Grimm, for example, does not seem to have had the patience or respect required to become a collector or teller of stories. Wilhelm himself discounted, as we noted above, the Engelhard girls. Where Dorothea Wild, Wilhelm's wife, became a fully-fledged collector and storyteller at a very early age (presumably under the tutelage of Old Marie) and remained active in the tradition all her life, her sister Gretchen was lost to the tradition when, after her marriage, she turned all her attention to her husband and domestic matters.52 Among the Haxthausen sisters, noted by Rölleke in particular as a prolific source for the brothers, it was Anna von Haxthausen who appears to have been especially successful at collecting because, according to her sister Ludowine, she had a trustworthy appearance and people who had stories to tell preferred to tell them to her.53

From all of this it is apparent that the stories the Grimms received from these young women depended less on their good breeding, literary education and ability to converse in French and more on their ability to be conversant with and gain access to those people who knew the kinds of stories the Grimms found interesting. The rural pastor's daughter, Friederike Mannel, who contributed a number of tales to the collection, meets Rölleke's criteria for being one of the “highly educated young ladies” but it would be wrong to describe her as living in a literary environment or as having literary skills. Her letters to the brothers are very charming and one can quickly see what was appealing about her: she was open, natural and even artless to the point of awkwardness.54 It is instructive to compare Wilhelm's reaction to this unpretentious woman, whose father made ends meet by renting rooms to city people looking for bucolic retreats, on the one hand, to the more favoured but less attractive Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, a “precocious” person who “constantly wanted to sparkle and kept

52 According to Wilhelm, cited in Schoof, Entstehungsgeschichte, 32.

53 Enstehungsgeschichte, 98, 107-8.

54 E.G., letter to Wilhem, cited in Entstehungsgeschichte (1931 edition), 50. 288 changing the subject,” on the other.55 As far as the “literary” qualities of Friederike Mannel's home environment are concerned, we need only point to Wilhelm's letter from Allendorf to Jacob in which he complains that he was bored because there was nothing to read at the Mannel house except Tristram Shandy.56 It would be a mistake to suppose that someone like Friederike would automatically change the tales she collected from lower-class sources to something literate and artful in the process of transcription. The Grimms urged all their potential collaborators to copy what they heard as accurately as possible57 and there is no reason to believe that this advice was not followed, especially in the light of the fact that the Grimms tended to spot poetic invention (as with the early efforts of the theology student Ferdinand Siebert)58 and rejected what appeared to them from outside the oral tradition - as they did with Wilhelmine von Schwertzell's own clearly invented story about a rune stone and a buried treasure, a gift to Wilhelm on his birthday.59

To get tales from the oral tradition, especially during the early period, when they were particularly interested in “authenticity,” the brothers sought access as well through sources from outside the households of their friends and acquaintances. Their general failure in these efforts gives us not only a further sense of the limits of what we can expect from the tales but also an idea of how difficult it was to gain access to the oral

55 Entstehungsgeschichte, 53.

56 Entstehungsgeschichte,(1931 edition), 48.

57 Thus Jacob, in an 1809 letter urged his friend Paul Wigand, Prokurator for the Kassel criminal courts, to examine those accused who passed through his hands for their beliefs and for sayings, and to pay special attention to fishermen, charcoal burners and old women since they knew more than others.”Accustom your secretary to take down [the arrestees’] expression verbatim, and not to rob it of its natural charm with his stylizations and not to press too much for continuity.” Entstehungsgeschichte (1931), 12.

58 Entstehungsgeschichte, (1931), 59.

59 Entstehungsgeschichte, (1931), 67-8. 289 tradition and, more important, why it was so difficult. The cultural divisions that were in full process of formation at the time the Grimms embarked on their project worked against any preservation of tales from the very lowest social levels. For example, their efforts to draw on Paul Wigand's access to the vagabonds, thieves and other fringe groups that passed through the Kassel judicial system produced nothing. Wigand himself was a patriotic poet who had no interest in these urban lower classes, except to distance himself from them. His two efforts at contributing to the collection were rejected because one was from a printed source and the other was a composed tale.60

The Grimms, in their early years, were in a minority among the growing class of provincial and state officials, for the majority of whom literate culture was a liberation from oral culture,61 one that helped separate them from the, to them, dangerously increasing numbers of unemployed, vagrant and occasionally mad paupers their offices had to keep under surveillance and, when it seemed necessary, restrain.62 Thus when Wilhelm and Lotte Grimm tried to duplicate Brentano's successful collection of several tales from an old woman in the Marburg poorhouse they nearly failed to get anything out of her because of the old woman's institutionalized status. For Rölleke, this failure was “indicative” of the Grimms' general failure to obtain lower-class oral material and he contents himself with repeating Wilhelm's words in a letter to Brentano: “The oracle would not speak.”63 But, as we might expect, he gives us only the part of the story that suits his argument. Much more indicative of the nature of the brothers' mostly unsuccessful efforts at this very lowest social level are Wilhelm's wanderings through

60 Entstehungsgeschichte, (1931), 31.

61 J. Janota and K. Riha, “Aspekte mündlicher literarischer Tradition” in H. Brackert,et. al., eds., Literaturwissenschaft. Ein Grundkurs, Hamburg, 1981 II, 46-8.

62 In this connection see A. Lüdtke,”The role of state violence in the period of transition to industrial capitalism: the example of Prussia from 1815 to 1848," Social History, 4(1979).

63 Rölleke, “Biographie,” 531. 290 the maze of Marburg professors, city officials and their wives in his attempt even to find the woman: one of his contacted sources was not sure which woman he was talking about while another had to admit with some embarrassment that he thought Wilhelm's letter requesting an introduction to the officials of the poorhouse so that he could collect stories from an old woman there was some kind of joke.64 When he finally got through to her he encountered the same resistance as sister Lotte, with whom the old woman had feigned forgetfulness; Wilhelm reported to Jacob that she claimed she might damage her reputation by telling stories. What was entailed in this damaging of “reputation” becomes clearer in the letter Wilhelm sent to Brentano where there is more to the apparently epigrammatic sentence already quoted by Rölleke: “The oracle would not speak because the sisters in the poorhouse would interpret it amiss (es übel auslegten) if she went about telling stories.”65 In an institution where loquacious poverty and old age together were never far from producing a diagnosis of mental illness, the old woman was merely defending herself. A perhaps genuinely indicative finale to the whole episode is that the two or three tales that the Grimms obtained from the woman by means of a ruse involving the hospital director's children were lost in the end, possibly by Brentano's careless treatment of the tales the Grimms sent to him.66

Against this background of failure at the very lowest social levels, the importance of Dorothea Viehmann as a significant contributor to the collection, who was still outside the domestic world of housekeepers, nannies and bourgeois daughters, increases considerably. It is not surprising that Rölleke here too has tried to distort the picture to support his thesis. When he wrote about her first he disputed the Grimms' description of her as a “peasant woman” (Bäuerin) by calling her a “seamstress” (Schneiderin), an occupational category he seems to have derived from her husband, a tailor – and he then proceeded to use this alleged inaccuracy by the brothers to cast doubt on her participation in the collection altogether. By 1982, he had relented sufficiently to restore

64 Letters cited in Schoof, Entstehungsgeschichte, 70-1.

65 Entstehungsgeschichte, 30.

66 Entstehungsgeschichte, 29. 291 her to an undisputed place among the contributors, but he did so by fixating, this time, on her father's status as an innkeeper.67She now appears as “the innkeeper's daughter;” and in a world where village innkeepers were among the leaders of the rural notability68 and where, presumably, their daughters would share that status, this places her if not squarely among then at least in social proximity to the other “highly educated young ladies” so favoured by Rölleke. The trouble with this view is that when Frau Viehmann met the Grimms at the height of her abilities as a storyteller she was a poor woman, a Marktfrau, who had a lot of children and grandchildren and who had to walk to Kassel to sell produce door to door in order to live. The only innkeepers' children who personally retained that occupation's high social status were the heirs who took over the inn (and this could be a son or daughter - or even neither!); the disadvantaged or dispossessed children embarked, unless they were lucky enough to find a propertied spouse, upon a life of downward mobility, as Frau Viehmann's condition illustrates.69 It is not even altogether certain that the latter's position during the time of her dealings with the Grimms, on the outside of the domestic world of the bourgeoisie, made her so very different from Old Marie and the other old women who worked as housekeepers and nannies. It was not unusual for a life course such as Frau Viehmann's to end in poorly paid or even unpaid domestic service of this sort, which functioned as a kind of old-age security for those without property who had outlived their families or had been otherwise abandoned. The Marburg poorhouse was another possible final destination for a dispossessed woman of the time. It was a social fate that some of the Grimms' better placed sources, for example the Haxthausen girls or Wilhelmine von Schwertzell, the author of the 1812 “Godfather Death,” could observe from a distance and appreciate vicariously. Investigations by Heinz Reif into the changing family strategies of the Westphalian indigenous aristocracy between 1750 and 1860 leave no doubt that the

67 Rölleke, “Mythos,” 2, 9-10; idem, “Biographie,” 531-2.

68 H. Rebel, Peasant Classes: The Bureaucratization of Family and Property Relations under Early habsburg Absolutism, 1511-1636, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, 113-17.

69 Rebel, Classes, 194-8; Taylor and Rebel, “Women,” 194-8. 292 dispossessed children, especially the daughters, of the regional nobles experienced, and at an accelerating rate after 1800, processes of downward mobility analogous to (but arising from a different causal nexus and leading toward different results from) the fate of the dispossessed children of the peasantry and rural notability.70

There were other storytelling old women as well who, even if their tales were not to become a part of the Kinder-und Hausmärchen, contributed their knowledge and could appear here to call further into question Rölleke's untenable theses about the almost exclusively upper-class literary origins of the tales, but there is no need to summon them up.71 The purpose of this critique has not been merely to reclaim most of the Grimms' tales for the study of lower-class mentalité. It is sufficiently clear that the women who made up the lowest tier of what was to become the fairy tale industry cannot be eliminated from the record and that their tales, in their earliest recorded forms, can tell us much about lower-class perceptions of social structure and experience. In addition it appears that the precise social status of the original contributors to the collection is perhaps less important than their ability to tell stories from an existing oral tradition whose language and motifs are, until they identifiably evolve to become part or a new Kunstmärchen tradition in the course of the nineteenth century, grounded in the social experience of dispossessed and downwardly mobile children and adults in several German territories but focusing primarily on Hessen-Kassel and, to a lesser degree, Westphalia. Instead of dividing the storytellers socially, and claiming that one group or another is more “important” (or even to dismiss one or another of them altogether as non-existent), what are needed are prosopographies of the storytellers, historically dynamic group portraits of the carriers of regionally and temporally defined oral

70 H. Reif, “Zum Zusammenhang von Sozialstruktur, Familien- und Lebenszyklus im westfälischen Adel in der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts” in M. Mitterauer and R. Sieder, eds., Historische Familienforschung, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1982, 148, 151; idem., Westfälischer Adel, 1770-1860, Göttingen, 1979, 88-90,93- 5, 103-4 and passim.

71 Cf. “Old Frau Theiss” from Kassel, in Schoof, Entstehungsgeschiche, 198 or reference to a catholic wool- spinning woman from Eichsfeld, Entstehungsgeschichte (1931), 118. 293 traditions. Finally, we need to understand better what social relations existed among different classes of storytellers and how stories passed among them - and what changes took place in such stories consigned across specific social boundaries.

Only by exploring the range of the social and historical experiences of storytellers can we begin to approach the stories they told with any hope of ever finding out what they were talking about. In the context of such an analysis the literary tradition of the Kunstmärchen itself takes on additional dimensions and it is beginning to appear that the later Kunstmärchen developed away from the social and social-psychological themes of the fairy tales and leaned increasingly toward individual psychology.72 Wilhelm Grimm furnishes us with an excellent, perhaps even unconscious example, showing that these new developments were, as was the oral tradition out of which they came, dialectically related to everyday experience that was both observed by means of the plots and details of fantastic stories and illuminated them in return. In a letter to Jacob he concludes an account of Brentano's anguish about whether or not to divorce his wife, Auguste, with an image borrowed from a story. Watching the couple as they were departing from the Mannel house on a peasant wagon, he suddenly saw Brentano as the man in the story who rode away from his burning house, with the demon he meant to destroy by fire sitting beside him.73

Rescuing Storytellers from Folklore and Nativism

German politics since the first half of the 1980s have seen variously successful attempts to build regionally based and nationally organized grass roots movements aimed against destructive real estate development, industrial polluters, nuclear power, baroque proliferations of weapons systems and military installations and the like. In the course of the Sammlungspolitik (“coalition gathering”) that went into this effort,

72 See the suggestive analysis of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English Kunstmärchen by U. Knoepflmacher, “The balancing of child and adult: an approach to Victorian fantasies for children,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 37(1983).

73 Cited in Schoof, Entstehungsgeschichte (1931), 47. 294 politicians rediscovered the appeal to regional homelands and local patriotism, and sought to mobilize local pride and traditions as part of a “greening” of both right- and left-wing parties and lobbying groups.74 The historical profession, drafted into discovering the appropriate materials and public histories, faces some unresolved dilemmas in this regard because, while on the one hand there is clearly much to be gained in having people argue their positions in full awareness of their local histories and in having a better sense of the historicity of their own lives, there has also, on the other hand, been a strong tendency in this movement to trivialize and explain away historical conflicts, to shift popular participation toward more corporative conceptualizations combined with plebiscitary rhetoric and actions and to return to politics at the Stammtisch in local pubs or Vereine. Historians who have jumped on this bandwagon with various kinds of 'histories of everyday life' (Alltagsgeschichte) come in for deserved criticism not only because their work shows signs of a “romantically transfigured realism,”75 but also because they have shown a clear tendency to allow the neo-conservative agenda concerning Kulturgeschichte, native dress and songs, “folk group” irredentism, and barely disguised anti-communism, all dressed in the social “scientific” languages of moral economy, modernization, rational choice (Luhmann: preference codes), the naturalistic-biological determination of culture and so on, to dominate the debate. To engage in work gaining access to and using evidence from so- called “everyday life” or “popular culture” requires both methodological and conceptual clarity, not only about the perceived “authenticity” and intrinsic value of specific materials, but also about the moral, scientific and ideological qualities of the research that calls on them. We have to be able to determine whether the researcher is as true to the “source” and its contexts as he or she is able, and not merely using the material to

74 F.-D. Freiling, ed., Heimat. Begriffsempfindung heute, Königstein im Taunus, 1981, cited in W. Lipp, “Heimatbewegung, Regionalismus.Pfaded aus ser Moderne?” in F. Neidhart, et. Al., eds., Kultur und Gesellschaft. Sonderheft für René König. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 1986.

75 H.-U. Wehler, “Neoromantik und Pseudorealismus in der neuen ‘Alltagsgeschichte’” in his Preussen ist wider chic . . . Politik und Plemik, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1983. 295 construct and refine an ideological argument.76

The tendency toward absorption of historical, ethnological and literary “folklore” studies into Germany's resurgent nativism is not a new experience by any means. The very period in which the Grimms collected and subsequently published their several editions of the tales was one in which some circles of German intellectual life, caught on the horns of a somewhat different dilemma between a desired but foreign revolution and a necessary but conservative territorial patriotism, sought a broad social ideology that allowed both an “embourgeoisement” of German culture as a whole and at the same time a (however pathetic) closing of the ranks with the aristocracy against the lower classes. To accomplish this contradictory task, they turned to the services that a rejuvenated folklore held out.77

It is in the sweep of this historically shaped and hegemonic academic tradition of folklore studies, to which the Grimms contributed so much and in which they were eventually marginalized precisely for their relatively liberal politics,78 that we can observe the current academic infatuation with folklore more clearly and place Rölleke's contribution and its broader implications more precisely. In retrospect, Rölleke's enterprise is nothing to be welcomed or applauded. On the basis of the narrowest possible and often distorted presentations of evidence and of poorly developed arguments he has sought to deny the historical presence not only of one contributor, Old Marie, but also, by implication, of a significant group of storytellers whose tellings did find, with exceptions and variations that can be taken into account without throwing them all out, a permanent recording in the Kinder-und Hausmärchen, particularly in its

76 Lipp,”Heimatbewegung,” passim; see also the articles by Luhmann and Thurn in the same volume.

77 Bausinger, Bürgerlichkeit, 24; worth pondering in this connection is H. Schultz’ editor’s introduction to Der Briefwechsel Bettine von Arnims mit den Brüder Grimm, 1838-41, Frankfurt, 1985, 14.

78 “Agreements have been made to reject us everywhere.” Wilhelm to Bettine, 24 May, 1840 in Schultz, ed., Briefwechsel. 296 first edition of 1812/15. Rölleke intended to foreclose on questions that have not been answered fully and that, in some cases, have not yet even been formulated as successfully as they might be.

It is possible to agree, at least partially, with Hermann Bausinger that what we now call “German folk culture” was invented by bourgeois intellectuals in the early nineteenth century and became an abstraction that disfigured the “real culture of the people” by making it accessible only in its transformed character and by disconnecting it from the social milieu that produced it. An important corollary of this cultural expropriation and of the construct “folk culture” was that “whatever cultural activities and phenomena appeared outside of this construct were either ignored...or were excluded with the verdict: mass culture.”79 It is precisely in connection with this “traditional” and continuing effort to render all culture “bourgeois” and to exclude lower social groups from history that we have to see Rölleke's denial that the Grimms' tales give us any access to popular culture. It places him on a familiar academic path, and what is especially unattractive about Rölleke's self-proclaimed “demystification” is that it is yet another manifestation of an aspect of German (and perhaps, given the example of Darnton's views, not only German) academic life that achieves periodic popularity. One finds in this work the Bildungsbürger's need to silence and lord it over others who, by the nature of their social position and lack of education in schools, are defined as naturally inferior, culturally incompetent and consigned to perpetual nonage. These kinds of prejudices not only have no place in scholarly discourse and investigation but they also, we should note, have not been given good marks for their role in modern

79 Bürgerlichkeit, 22-3. Were the Grimms merely such “folk culture” deploying careerists or, as I am trying to argue here and in the next chapter, can one see them as understanding, as did Perrault before them, that their contributors’ uses and intentions for the tales were not theirs (i.e., the Grimms’) and that they therefore felt free to make the tales their own to see the world though the intelligence the tales could provide – which contributed , perhaps, to their strength to resist. 297 German history.80 They are, all too often, merely the other face of that academic coin that still pretends to seek ingenuous authenticity and beauty in a long deracinated and subverted rural world81 and they also take the great silence of the German lower classes between 1525 and 1812 as the natural condition of lower-class people who had, in any case, no historical contribution to make.82 There is no thought in such a view that the German lower classes might have been actively silenced by a concerted attack, carried on by clerics, academics and other officials since at least the sixteenth century, against a feared popular oral culture.83

The problem of finding what lower-class people have to say and understanding what it might mean is illuminated somewhat by the recent interest in so-called “oral history” where the task has become to record and collect verbatim, collate and interpret individuals' direct recollections from specific recent historical times and places. The hope is that by preserving such personal historical accounts we may gain a sense of what it felt like to be a certain kind of person and of what such a person thought about his or her experiences at the time.84 Without getting into any of the details of this research

80 H. Holborn, “Der deutsche Idealismus in sozialgeschichtlicher beleuchtung” in H.-U. Wehler, ed., Moderne deutsche Sozialgeschichte, Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1966.

81 T. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, Evanston, 1973.

82 H. Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, I, 251.

83 G. Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978; D. Sabean, Power in the Blood, Cambridge University Press, 1984, 108-12.

84 The genre was pioneered by Terkel and Blythe’s investigative writings. Cf. P. Thompson, Voices of the Past: Oral History, Oxford, 1978 was an early programmatic statement. Impressive use of oral history is in C. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers, ; see the growing collection of oral histories begun by M. Mitterauer at the Institut für Social- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte at the University of Vienna which includes M. Gremel. Mit neuen Jahren im Dienst: Mein Leben im Stübl und Bauernhof, 1900-1930 Vienna: Böhlau, 83; T. Weber, ed., 298 direction, we may note that there is very little room or interest in most of this work for fantastic stories, songs, jingles or riddles, and the result is that, while we get more or less realistic recollections, we get very little sense of how the contributors are imagining and reimagining their lives, how they comment on their “experience” with concepts and metaphors, how they are “figuring” their experiences.85 It is in contrast with the more direct perceptions and expressions of conventional oral histories that the singers' and storytellers' indirection and art, which require a special “hermeneutic procedure,”86 take on a particular desirability for the social analyst: one could even argue, with Henri Lefebvre, that we will never understand contemporary or historical everyday life without its philosophical productions, nor understand philosophical productions without their connectedness to everyday life.87 Rölleke's claim that because the Grimms' tales passed through the hands of bourgeois transcribers they cannot serve as a historical source to help us recapture the German lower classes' everyday life through their philosophical productions not only rests on extremely weak and projective readings of the evidence, but also ignores what happens at the moments when oral performances of songs or tales are converted to a fixed record. Albert Lord has shown us that while, on the one hand, recording interrupts the rhythms and reliance on formulas required by the speed of an actual performance and causes the composition to flow more haltingly, there is also a

Geschichte von Unten, Vienna: Böhlau, 1984, see especially the contributions by Mitterauer, Fischer, Ortmayr and Gruber; also G. Botz and J. Weidenholzer, eds., Mündliche Geschichte und Arbeiterbewegung, Vienna: Böhlau, 1984.

85 Among the Austrian contributions there are instances where metaphoric and other rhetorical figurations appear, e.g., Gremel, Dienst, 28-9; especially noteworthy are R. Sieder’s massive undertaking concerning the songs, games, riddles etc. of Viennese street children; see his programmatic statement “Geschichte erzählen und Wissenschaft treiben” in Botz and Weidenholzer, eds., Arbeiterbewegung.

86 Sieder, “Geschichte,” 212-15, would probably argue that the right hermeneutic procedure can transform any recorded oral evidence into a philosophical text that is conceptually readable.

87 H. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, New York, 1971, 14-15, 201-2. 299 gain and that is that the singers or tellers, released from the constraints of time, can produce texts that “are in a sense special; they are not those of normal performance, yet they are purely oral, and at their best they are finer than those of normal performance.”88 In other words, if we can get close to the telling of a tale as it was actually transcribed or learned from a lower-class storyteller (and this we can certainly do with the Grimms' first 18l2/15 edition) then we can be fairly certain we are getting not only a valid version of a popular oral tale from a particular teller's repertoire, but also one of especially high value. Lord also makes the point, useful against the views of Burke, Rölleke and Bausinger, that the transcription of such tales and their subsequent use in other social and cultural environments does not necessarily terminate an oral tradition89 and that historians can expect to find transcriptions of popular oral- philosophical reworkings of everyday life throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This interactive “parallelism” of textual and oral folk tale “traditions” is evident in Ladurie’s Love, Death and Money and in the collection of Little Red Riding Hood tales by Zipes, Delarue and others which will concern us again in the next chapter.

We need to continue to take seriously the fragments of evidence we have about the original storytellers of recorded oral traditions and about the earliest recorded versions of their tales. By carefully placing the storytellers historically and socially, and viewing their tales in the light of such analyses, we may open windows into historical worlds where the poor, or even the not so poor, continued to speak to each other in ways that not only subverted and transcended official efforts at replacing popular speech with the rote learning of catechisms and approved texts but that also made possible intelligent decisions about possible ways to live. We have to note here that there are, moreover, no easy or obvious alignments between the social position of the tellers and the contents of their tales; indeed, the cases of Wilhelmine von Schwertzell and Friederike Mannel suggest that the experience of even possible downward mobility and

88 Lord, Singer, 127-9.

89 Singer, 134-5; cf. also G. Sider, Culture and Class in Anthropology and History: A New foundland Illustrattion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 300 marginalization create a commonality of vision, a possibility of “class-consciousness- without-class,” in E.P. Thompson’s phrase, shared across ostensibly objective (although, I would argue, at this point still poorly understood) class divisions. The biggest flaw in Rölleke's argument is precisely that he does not care about and actively dismisses evidence revealing the social details surrounding the performance and transmission of the stories in their social-cultural settings. He is not interested in the tensions that exist during the recording of stories and other materials from an oral culture, in the philosophical and possibly counter-hegemonic contents of the story materials nor, finally, in the “moral qualities of the singers”90 who agree to a recording of their art.

Textbooks in historical demography have long told us that in pre-industrial Europe most social classes were capable of understanding, calculating, the rationality of exercising fertility controls (“preventive checks” on population growth) long before they reached the survival ceiling where so-called Malthusian or “positive checks” (i.e. mortality) forced a reduction in the size of the population. There is much talk of family and other social strategies that must have been exercised to produce the observed behaviours. In order to get at the intelligence required for these and similarly calculating operations which we can, so far, only perceive in their execution, we need to approach and, if possible, recapture, lost ways of gaining and articulating insights into the ways in which historically conditioned social, political and psychological processes worked and interacted with each other. To solve these questions we need to go far beyond a mere “measurement of values” (difficult as even this might be)91 and consider what concept- forming possibilities existed outside the official worlds of learning that allowed lower- class people to exercise a rationality that was uniquely their own. It is precisely in the many varieties of tellings, in the infinitely variable stringing together of the narrative elements of oral story traditions that we find one set of conceptual tools that allowed indeterminate numbers and combinations of people in historical populations to examine

90 Lord, Singer, 110.

91 D. Smith, “Notes on the measurement of values,” Journal of Economic History, 44(1985). 301 analytically and respond creatively (if not always “correctly”) to their experience of the increasingly complicated and dialectical intertwinings (Elias’ Verflechtungen) of the civilization process. In the case of the earliest stories collected by the Grimms, it would be folly, as the next chapter means to suggest, to allow an unnecessarily narrow vision and poorly argued denial of the bridges that existed between members of dominant and subaltern groups to deter us from such an enterprise.

302 8. When Women Held the Dragon’s Tongue

This essay concerns what I think are “disrespectful” readings of the many versions of Little Red Riding Hood. I find them disrespectful in the sense that they either pay little attention to the actual tellers of the historically identifiable versions they happen to be talking about or pay a projective, pre-emptive, appropriating kind of attention by fitting the tellers into “culturalizing” anthropological histories that try to return them (and indeed all popular narratives) back into debased agglomerations of what Lévi-Strauss called mythemes or into merely inferior repetitions of some mythic Great/Folk/National Tradition with which such disrespectful readings are then free to take any liberties they choose. The analytical tendency of pushing stories into questionable grids of antonomasic appellations appearing actually as pseudo- structural and figurationally disabling taxonomies of “ story types,” “motifs” and “traits” often associated with alleged regions, types of peoples, etc. is altogether a tendency to re-mythify the tales, to diminish and indeed distort and exclude the social and other dynamics of the historical locations from and to which they might have been (and, from an empathic-historical perspective, still are) speaking. The reactionary scientism inside such a move seems obvious: it refigures as a fragmentation, as a confused loss of touch with universals, precisely those modernizing breakthroughs made possible by generations of story tellers’ dissolution of “their” mythologies into figural pools from which to draw recombinant elements for experimental and possibly more “resistant” narratives beyond and disruptive of the grammars of the venerated myths. It is a move disrespectful not only of the narrative achievements of the story tellers, but also of their tales’ implicit and often explicit conceptual rejection of such a re-enclosure as we find in much of the academic literature organized according to a “decontextualizing” pseudo-objectivity, advisedly incapable of recognizing the complexities of its analytical objects. The second part of this essay was once a part of the “Old Marie” article that I agreed to cut for publication-length reasons. There have been a number of works dealing with related subjects since I wrote this – Marie Tatar’s and Ruth Bottigheimer’s contributions come immediately to mind, as do many others – but I decided against adding to this essay a critical engagement with these works. The questions that interest me here are not easily assimilable to the kinds of “representation” and “identity” matters (vaguely “historicized”) that continue to be the preferred approaches to these kinds of source materials. What prompts me to include this essay fragment is that I have had, over the years, a good number of requests for the manuscript of the original Old Marie essay for precisely this material – and it is my sense that it can still be read with profit against the hegemonic “disciplining” that drives the academic pacification/repression of “popular culture” during the last couple of decades.

303 “Forcing oral traditional literature . . . into the straight-jacket of

synchronic observation is to distort it beyond recognition.1

“[T]he fundamental difference [is] . . . tradition . . , utterly unlike

literature, had no original at all, perfect or otherwise, and derived its

authority from another kind of source . . . [E]ntirely unlike literary texts,

epics in an oral tradition are never, nor do they ever need to be, either

self-explanatory or wholly intelligible in and of themselves. In the tradition

that made them, they were never more than the flitting shadows of the

thought . . . 2

“It is also told that once when Rotkäppchen again brought her

grandmother some cakes. . .3

“Then the huntsman stood up, opened the seven jaws, and said, ‘Where are the seven tongues of the dragon?’

Upon hearing that, the marshall was so frightened that he turned pale and did not know what to reply. Finally, he said, ‘Dragons have no tongues.’

1 A. Lord, “Perspectives on recent work on the Oral Traditional Formula,” Oral Tradition, 1:3(1986), 468.

2 D. Bynum, “The Collection and Analysis of Oral Epic Tradition in South Slavic: An Instance.” Oral Tradition, 1:2(1986),309.

3 Opening sentence of the(subsequently suppressed)second version of “Little Red Riding Hood” in the Grimms’ several personally edited publications of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen.

304 ‘Liars should have no tongues,’ said the huntsman. ‘But the dragon’s tongues can prove who the real dragon-slayer is.’4

The first three of the epigraphs take a position, in their own ways, against the notion of a pure version of a tale, an “integral” version that sets a standard for its “type.” The fourth tries to make clear at the outset what narrative universe the title’s reference to a dragon’s tongue moves in. We will return to it below, as we will in regard to the third epigraph’s opening for an alternative version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” one that was preserved by the Grimms – out of who knows what loyalty – but then dropped by later hands. David Bynum, the author of the second epigraph, goes on to finish his thought on the momentary transience of any telling: “Every line of such poetry means what it meant in a hundred other places at other times in other men’s tellings; but shear it away from that potent system of resonance with its own past . . . its power to convey meaning is inevitably crippled.”5 Both Albert Lord and David Bynum propose we attend to what the latter calls the “potent system of resonance,” the historically multi-faceted and interactive figurational rhetorics carried forward in all tellings. They give some guidance toward resisting the strong trend in academic folk lore-related studies in the direction of focusing on synchronic, taxonomic type- and motif-indexing, on grammarian approaches to paradigmatic morphologies based on what Stith Thompson, one of the authors of the often referred to Aarne-Thompson (AT) tale type index, calls “a clear differentiation between type and motif” in which the former is perceived as having “an independent existence” while combining “motifs in a relatively fixed order and combination” and the latter as the”smallest element in a tale having the power to

4 J. and W. Grimm, “The Two Brothers” in The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, J. Zipes, transl. and ed., New York: Bantam, 1987, 243.

5 Bynum, “Collection,” 310.

305 persist in tradition.”6 How independent is independent and what is smallest and what weight can we ascribe to “elements” in schemes of types? Moreover, Russellian set- inclusion paradoxes abound in these kinds of endless assignments to types. Claiming to be writing in the anthropological tradition of Franz Boas, Thompson not only pushes the forms of tales and, more important, the non-geographic (i.e., social, power-relational) aspects of the “locations” and persons involved in actual tellings completely out of the picture in order to reduce the scholarly encounter with narratives to a taxonomic decision-complex involving an endless search for “variants” looking toward some sort of learned consensus about types that, at every turn hotly debated, number now in the thousands.

For their part, Lord and Bynum are coming from their in effect anthropological- linguistic study of still-living Greek, Balkan and other epic song and story traditions and I want to be clear that by associating the arguments I am about to make about fairy tales with what I perceive to be their conceptual attitude, I have no intention of blurring distinctions between renderings of “folk tales” and “epics” as they are perceived to occur.7 If anything, epics undoubtedly are, in their specific times and places, their own type – there are such things – of narrative solution to having to live under and against the grotesqueries and burdens of any empowered mythos.

Folk tales are not reducible to a, however changing, tradition of prescriptive templates, of mere instructions for living, of a universal, and so-called, socialization that puts and keeps us on some “civilizing” track. They are more than that because they reveal themselves to be not only difficult to cast into lists of types or motif clusters but then also continually collapse further into specific-in-the-utterance inventions,

6 S. Thompson, The Folktale, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1977 [1946], 415.

7 Nor does it mean that we necessarily need to join Albert Lord’s somewhat labored reasonings for insisting on a strict separability between oral and literary textual presentations. [ref]131-2.

306 deviations, what some need to call “contaminations,” responses, resonances from both audiences’ and tellers’ and, now, readers’ personal and collective experiences and memories awakened by textually more “solidified” renderings. The analog preferred for the kind of historical-anthropological approaches to “folk material” evidence envisioned here is not to see them as templates but as engrammatic activations: in the language of what has evolved to be the best current philosophical characterization of what it is that historians actually do, folk tales can be perceived as openings into another time’s and another social stratum’s narrative updatings, re- colligations of the myriad conceptual figurations available in “traditions” that have class-, region-, ethnicity-, gender-, identity- and other- transcending capabilities, re-colligations whose own task is analogous to the historian’s, to produce analytical narratives that offer ways of living around, through and beyond any given constellation of persons, structures and events, in particular those whose history has, or threatens to, become an oppression. In other words, one analytical utility of investigating such “folk tales” and related materials lies in the latter’s own narrative-analytical qualities and contextually reconstruable intentions; it is in these qualities of tales that we might pursue them as primary sources for possibly revealing historically locatable “rationalities” as they appear in any given logic-of-the- telling. The historical- anthropological presumption is that tales might be speaking by means of narrative figurations to a then-perceived set of life-problems and to considerations of solutions, however right or wrong. Actively to deny folk narratives such a possibly creative-for-their-moments dimension, to deny their present historical- analytical possibilities as a means to develop further an “empathy”-driven research program,8 has to appear from this view as a reactionary-modernist effort to corral anew narratives long loosened from myth (and indeed still in “dialectical” relationships with the comings and goings of historical mythic fixations) and long reinvented without containments by the latter. The massive academic effort to demonstrate taxonomic- scientific indexing control is clearly a kind of pathos of re-containment, of re-mythifying the long-escaped stories in ways that would result in their once again being tamed,

8 For an “empathy” oriented research program I am following Collingwood, Dray, Gorman and others. See chapter 1 above. 307 available merely to be trotted out as little mythemes assigned to their places at the required times by their scientific dompteurs.

Moreover, to re-figure tales in the language of types is to make them vulnerable to a kind of unspoken scholarly consensus, a tacit “naturally . . ,” that diminishes the parameter options governing how stories are permitted to be read by “serious” scholars. This latter, ironically in turn, opens the door to all sorts of collective projections and impositions that, while they shed light on the often questionable ratiocinations of the analysts, have little to do with what the story might have meant to its narrators and their audiences. Where does it actually say, for example that Little Red Riding Hood is about sex? And yet there is, as we will examine in more detail below, a current reading of the tale that seems to take that as a natural, self-evident assumption. Little Red Riding Hood threatens, in the tellings of present scholarship, to lose the narrative complexity it has come to display in a centuries-long history of adaptations, parodies, dialect renderings, different narrator attributes, etc. and become, in the hands of literary scholars and some historians a myth about how European “civilization” learned to cope with archetypal female sexuality. Not only is the rush to sexualize at every opportunity an embarrassing pathos but it also blocks the view of the events and historical surroundings of tellings to historical anthropologists who want to bring differently prepared phenomenological sensibilities and agendas to the analysis. Not only is it curious, from this perspective, why the devourings that actually take place in almost all of the versions of Little Red Riding Hood are not considered as devourings or, for that matter, as other experiences besides sex, that that might imply, even symbolically; it also suggests a question, not pursuable here, about what is driving this dominant academic hermeneutics so committed to the conversion of devouring into sexual rapine, and to helping to sustain thereby actual historical criminalities’ metonymic hiding places behind repetitious screenings of burlesque sexual tableaux and innuendos. This essay’s own titular innuendo, in the second half of the title, means merely to demonstrate that there are ways to imagine “eating” that even those who easily sexualize caricatured others to advance tiresome “social control” readings of historical experience have studiously avoided.

308 I

The innuendo of the first part of my title also does not point intentionally toward the erotic, even though that has consistently been a first response I’ve gotten from readers of prior drafts. Holding the dragon’s tongue, whether by a woman or a man, is a figure (not just a motif) known among folklorists as “the tongue proof.” I take it up here because it will allow me, in a moment, to illustrate by narrative means the theme for this essay concerning two ways of reading so-called folk tales, either as records of actual historical performances speaking to what was on people’s minds at the time of their recording or as “after-the-fact” collections of indexed narrative elements arranged according to “types” and respective “motifs” in preparation for a “scientific” decoding into universal-historical “meaning.”

The former approach, followed throughout this book, tries to get as close as possible to specific tellings and tellers; it understands “folk tales” and, occasionally, various kinds of “folklore” (proverbs, priests’ Sunday homilies, raps, stand-up comedy, the Swiss peasantry’s war clubs and parades of virgins noted elsewhere in this book, etc.) to have an active historical function beyond the merely entertaining or “symbolic” or even educative, and perceives them to have an analytical and decision-making utility in their own time of production for some not insignificant sectors of a population, even as other textual, visual, mechanically replicated and distributed forms possibly supersede and intertwine with them. The second type of approach says nothing about tellers, and little about historical circumstances beyond the punctlious scholarly identification of the waxings and wanings and interactions of oral and textual “versions” in regional or neighboring “literatures.” This is not to disparage the contributions made by such necessary labors. For example, in what has to be considered an important contribution to historical anthropology, E. Le Roy Ladurie’s Love, Death and Money in the Pays

309 d’Oc,9 we find an analytical decoding of what he calls, in a structuralizing association with Lévi-Straussian myth analysis, the “Occitan love triangle” as it appears in particular literary versions of a near-picaresque autobiographical tale by a dispossessed peasant known to everyone as “Jean-l’ont-pris.” It is a tale whose historical travels reach from at least the sixteenth through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries in different social-authorial contexts from the south of France into Switzerland and Germany with some off-shoots found in Catalonia, Quebec and elsewhere, a tale taking many forms as it shifts between and among recorded oral and variously composed textual versions, fragments and variants. By taking us, for example, into meditations prompted by the tale on inheritance, dowry and, above all, bridewealth strategies among the Occitans, Ladurie’s account of shifting historical-contextual dimensions provides a model opening for historical anthropologists trying to walk the divide between social and cultural history.

However, what dissipates some of the energy potential of this in several respects exemplary set-up for historical-anthropological analysis is Ladurie’s shift toward engaging and writing for an extra-historical criterion. He had set out initially to discover historical “village realism” only to discover that not only was there nobody in the tale who could be linked to actual historical persons, but also that the quality of detail was too general to be useful and that, worst of all, the “model” marriage strategy it taught was increasingly unworkable in the changing society in which it appears. Drawing his consequences, Ladurie takes a fork in the road that causes him to leave his original social historical intentions aside and, instead, he opts for a literary history that, about a quarter of the way into his analysis, requires him to ask “Is [the abbé’s tale] also a theme in folklore?” The remainder of the book becomes an unfocused, rambling and almost unreadable attempt to bring, by means of tables of oppositional relationships of details between various “versions,” replete with arrows, crossings-out, letter and number codes etc., the Occitan tale into the fold of the Aarne/Thompson folk tale type “Godfather Death” (referred to throughout as AT332) by means of which he claims to have “cracked

9 Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984.

310 the code” of the Occitan story.10 Recognizing that some key elements of this tale type are missing, he concedes throughout that the abbé Fabre’s delightful 1756 story is at best only a “homologue” of AT332. In this latter “typing” a poor father seeks a godfather for an illegitimate/superfluous child and ends up choosing Death (after rejecting others, most often God, Jesus or the Devil) for the role; the latter then allows the godchild, as adult, to make unerring diagnoses and administer sham medicines for outcomes of illness indicated by the position Death takes next to the sickbed; a conflict develops between godfather and godson when the latter desires a princess doomed by Death’s position and, by a trick, outwits the latter to get his heart’s desire – for which he is variously warned, punished and even killed (or none of these), depending on the version. Not only is Ladurie’s five-page conclusion (to a 500-page book) that this all leads to singularly empty and points to no deciphered encoding – unless it is in his invocation of George Foster’s “limited good” formula, a respectable and much-cited but inherently limited “closed” peasant community model in its time. In the end, a questionably effective effort to twist and bend his Occitan tale into some kind of legitimate location in global literary typologies (as AT 332) in effect removes it from its own history and from its author’s (and his intended audience’s) amusement and edification; and that, ironically, diminishes it as a primary source for rethinking the history (of the enlightened Counter-Enlightenment?) that the abbé, after all, appears to have been speaking to.

Ladurie is so absorbed in painstaking assemblies of grids of cross-referenced and compared motifs (for the reader, an experience that is mind-numbing and dubiously profitable for the time invested) that he loses sight of what makes the abbé’s story different, alive in its historical time and in its recognition of its time. He makes mention of but does not think through the non-magical quality of the tale’s taking us out of what he calls “the register of the supernatural to that of the merely strange,” (512). Indeed, we witness the pleasures of inheritance from a grandmother dead and buried “in the

10 E. Le Roy Ladurie, Love, Death and Money in the Pays d’Oc, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1984, 154.

311 Donkey’s Paradise,” and the arrangements of an exploitive marriage buy-out by a Mr. Cockroach, but there are no fées. The “merely strange,” however still suffices Ladurie as a distancing mechanism that keeps at bay the social and cultural challenges posed by this historical source. He gives up on “village realism” too soon with the result that there is no sense of this story as observing changes (often by means of on-target asides) in the very nature and experience of mid-eighteenth century rural deal-making, of the new mixes of social, economic and quasi-criminal “opportunities” and their hidden costs that the abbé puts up for examination. More than a mere secularization, the narrative setting of a road-trip conversation between aristocrat and peasant (how like Quixote and Sancho Panza from a distance – until they part ways) surrounding Jean’s autobiographical account and then the tales within that tale altogether offer an ensemble of recognizable social actors engaging in various sorts of shared recognitions, mutual manipulations and contestations across social lines for which not only the calculus of the “Occitan love square” fails, as Ladurie recognizes, but which also altogether require a new kind of calculating intelligence. One notes, for example, the ironic recognition by Jean that even his personal tactical decision (learned from observing his father’s mistakes!) to hold back from a marriage proposal, even though he had the requisite bridewealth to marry the desired Mlle. Babeau, backfires on him and that his very diffidence sets him up for the further exploitive machinations by his prospective father-in-law. But he also recognizes that his is not a complete lose-lose proposition and he endures, performs, takes his due and then is off on his way, cheerfully singing about his good luck, which is how the nobleman first finds him.

The abbé Fabre’s rethinking of peasant Jean’s story as autobiography is more than a reflection, finally, on the narratively frozen and no longer useful social options of “the Occitan love square.” If anything, it is itself a narrative rebellion, a rescue-by-fiction of a narrator who experiences “in reality” the failure of the master-narrative against which he is rebelling. Ladurie sides with the nobleman and perceives Jean as ending up in the same place as his father – except “without tragedy.” That last seems to be disputable given that as Jean finds an accomodation with injustices, misrecognitions, ironic reversals in himself his life becomes a gathering of an unidentified energy that

312 sustains his good cheer despite the tragic recognitions of failures (his, his father’s and others’) that abound in his experience. By retaining him to the end as the eternal peasant and then shifting to Godfather Death as “the key” to the story (512), Ladurie diminishes the possible recognition that this is perhaps a new kind of story teller looking at a new kind of peasant, one whose experiences lead him, at the end, just before he leaves the nobleman to his castle, to object to the vacuous moralité with which the nobleman passes finally negative judgment on a peasant’s life. When the nobleman admonishes Jean to “. . . change your ways and live as an honest man. Work, you were created for that . . . [otherwise] . . . you will be unhappy and eaten up by remorse . . . , the cry of conscience,” is it Jean or Fabre who responds with “Conscience, you say! Oh! my lord, the conscience of a peasant is hoarse . . . the conscience of peasants has caught such a cold that it can no longer show itself, and that, if it does speak, one cannot hear it.” (29) With that it is Jean who dismisses the baron, even as he invites the latter to share some vin de pays “to stir up your conscience.” It ends with the baron, laughing as he departs, still not hearing what he was being told. The historical anthropologist Ladurie duly recognizes Fabre’s tale as part of the “infraculture” of the Enlightenment, for which he projects the possibility of a “subterranean ethnography”11 but he does so without giving the tale its full due as part of a tradition of modernizing narrative experiments -- if pioneered by anyone then by Perrault and his circle – which offers a subtle but profound social critique of the prejudicially judgmental and superficial formulas of, in themselves “modern,” absolutist ethics by measuring the latter against the experiences of the threatened and abused lives of the – by dint of systemic selection – necessarily poor and weak.

One additional observation on Ladurie’s shying away from a deeper investigation of the historical implications of this and the several other “versions” of “Jean l’ont pris” returns us to the theme of the two types of analysis. As is often the case with those who perceive tales from their typological and motif properties, there is an understanding of the historically ascertainable changes in a “tale type’s” emplotments and details,

11 Love, 568n9.

313 disappearing and reappearing in different times and places, as evidence for the tale’s gaining or losing integrity and power. Thus Ladurie: “One should also note a certain loss of vitality in the tale [i.e. AT332] as collected in the 1810s, as compared with the vigorous German and French models collected between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.” He sees the Grimms’ versions lacking “an act of fornication that took place before marriage” and therefore, he decides, they “or their informants, even those from the countryside, have ceded . . . to the debilitating, prettifying tradition of the fairy tales of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” It seems an odd basis for measuring a tale’s “vitality” when illegitimacy is displaced by poverty as a key motivating element in the story. The fact that the same tale might be capable of focusing on two different concerns characteristic of different historical experiences seems a better, and analytically more interesting proposition than simply to assume that the Grimms were quasi-natural agents of narrative decay when they contributed to “an inevitable weakening of the old vitality . . . [and] . . . eliminated certain details thought to be too realistic or too crude, a sort of castration. . .”12 This appears rather as a failure of the historical imagination, trapped by a false sense of some absolute quality outside of the historical world that must finally always rule. It leaves no room for letting historically locatable folk tales (or the literary compositions that identify with them) speak to something as insignificant (because it is so common?) as poverty, tales whose contents are perhaps less significant only to some because masculinity and race and, above all, “sex” are not in the mix.

The differences among tales of allegedly the same type are often so significant that the assignment of a particular telling to a tale type, as for example with Ladurie’s assignment of “Jean l’ont pris” as “homologue” of AT 332, becomes, despite the paradigmatic charts and arrows, highly questionable as a significant source of explanation for what this or that telling are doing in these or those specific, historical, minds and voices. The structural-grammatical analysts of folk and related literary tales, simply put, render little or no respect to the tellers nor to the circumstances that both

12 Love, 427-428.

314 frame and interact with any given telling. Northrop Frye’s enunciation of that influential and paradigmatic attitude that dominated the second half of the twentieth century about how to create a “systematic” science of literatures, as exemplified by a critical study of myths as “archetypal forms,” can serve to illustrate this point: “The poet’s task is to deliver the poem in as uninjured a state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from his private memories and associations, his desire for self-expression, and all other navel-strings and feeding tubes of his ego. The critic takes over where the poet leaves off. . .” And the critic, we are to assume of course, has none of the failings of private associations nor ego problems, because the critic is engaged, after all, in creating a science of types, ruled by the “archetype” as a kind of “total form,” a science of “literary anthropology concerned with the way that literature is informed by pre-literary categories such as ritual, myth and folk tale.”13 Not only does Frye deliver a perfect example of the paradoxical pathos of the critic who deems himself exempt from the narrators’ frailties of “private associations,” “navel-strings,” ego-feeding “tubes” and the rest; worse, he also exemplifies the expropriatory, denigrating and somewhat repulsive imperiousness of the phenomenological capitalist for whom, in the case of folk tales, the story tellers perform their unconsciously compelled labors of narrative repetition, labors that remain implicitly meaningless until received by the globally informed scholar who, in turn, simply writes the producers of the stories out of the picture and into the historical dumpster. How can one not here reflect back on abbé Fabre’s peasant Jean and the latter’s observation on the silencing of the poor being carried out not by forbidding them to speak but rather by engaging them only to have one’s prejudices confirmed and therefore not hearing them (on a moral pretext spoken from a high horse) even as their voices grow hoarse and faint from their exertions to be heard?14

13 N. Frye, The Archetypes of Literature” in J. Miller, ed., Myth and Method: Modern Theories of Fiction, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1960, 149, 151.

14 On this point one can cite N. Davis’ recognition, in her foundational Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975, 240-41 and passim, of 315 Partly to suggest that this approach misses several manifest dimensions of folk tales (like their narrative turns and figural qualities!) that give them more intellectual weight in their individual rather than in any collectively “typed” appearances, and to suggest as well that the “rational,” i.e., conceptual, labor folk tales are capable of applies even to their self-understanding vis-à-vis mythology, we can turn to an existing tale complex that can be read as a kind of folk-cultural meditation on these issues. First among so-called “magic tales” in Aarne and Thompson’s typological index is no. 300, “The Dragon Killer” in which “the king’s daughter is saved.” This is followed by no. 301 “The Three Stolen Princesses” requiring also a dragon to be killed, and by no.303 “The twins or blood brothers” where again a dragon has to be slain to effect the rescue of a princess, and there is no. 305 “The dragon’s heart” where yet another dragon has to bite the dust to rescue a princess, this time with the heart of the dragon as proof of the act.15 It is not only not clear why four narratives about analogous emplotments and with overlapping groups of actors are assigned four separate “types” nor why the last of these makes “the dragon’s heart” a central motif when in fact the heart functioning as proof of the act is a rarity in so-called variants of these tales while the cutting out of the dragon’s tongue as proof occurs in many more instances – but is not awarded its own “type.” If one of the pivotal problems around which an approach from historical anthropology has

a “basic paradox in the learned collecting of popular speech and customs during the sixteenth century.” Because class boundaries were tightening in some areas as they were loosening in others, new professionals and writers were not only enrolling popular speech forms in their resistances against the clergy of both church and university but they had to find, simultaneously, ways to resist the blurring of boundaries “below,” even to the point of not recording, i.e., not hearing what was being said to them in response to their search for the authentic voice of “our people.”

15 A. Arne, “Verzeichnis der Märchentypen” FF Communications No.3, Helsinki, 1910, 11-12.

316 to turn is indeed the problem of scientific object creation,16 then one wonders why historians, not just Ladurie, have been so taken with such imperfectly perceived and conceptualized folk tale objects for whose failings they have to make do with evasions like “homologues.” It would seem that this effort to apply to historical tellings/versions a “universal” set of types and their identifying and elaborating motif-subsets fails on grounds of the several misrecognitions that, one suspects and recalling Frye, necessarily arise in all critical scholars’ “private associations” which, as one might also add, do not forestall anyone’s accepting, for the sake of affirming membership, any group’s consensus on what constitutes a scientific object.

The easiest general access to this narrative complex is by the Grimms’ tale number 60, “The Two Brothers,” one of the longest and most elaborate tales in the collection and clearly the result of many inputs and much editing. Our focus of the moment is on an early scholarly study17 of two of this mix of dragon-slaying and sibling narratives (AT 300,303) that take us deeper into the question of what “tale-typing” can do by way of specifying “scientific objects” and attendant evidence for an analytically productive historical-anthropological reading. For our purposes briefly told, these stories boil down to the adventures of a single hero or of two (or three) brothers going forth into the world to make their fortunes. After they’ve split up to go separate ways (leaving, in tales where no sibling betrayal is involved, tokens – swords or knives in a tree, pieces of cloth – as indicators of their states of well-being), the “hero” brother, after acquiring a mix of animal allies, talismans, the blessings of older women etc., finds a city draped in black and under siege by a dragon extracting human tributes (mostly in the form of females of royal lineage) to ward off predations by the dragon or to continue the dragon’s release of a necessary resource (usually water) or of the dividends on hoarded gold. Spurred by the king’s promise of the princess in marriage and with the help of his

16 See chapter 1 above.

17 K. Ranke, “Die zwei Brüder. Eine Studie zur Vergleichenden Märchenforschung” FF Communications, No.114, Helsinki,1934,3-390.

317 allies, he kills the dragon, cuts out the tongue, puts it in his pocket (a shade of Perseus’ wallet) and goes on his way, presumably for more exercises of power, and of course to give the second half of the tale the time to develop. The other brother (or brothers), coming on the dead dragon, decides to pretend to the killing and drags the corpse back to the King for the reward. On the eve of the wedding, the true dragon slayer arrives, makes various kinds of dramatic entrances to the palace and flourishes the tongue to prove his deed and claim the prize. In versions where the hero has no brothers or where his brothers remain loyal to him (and indeed rescue him from a betrayal after the killing), the impostor is usually the coachman who has been delivering maidens to the dragon and his fate is, most often, dismemberment. Indisputably, however, and in almost all cases, the narrative pivot of the tale is the “tongue proof:” instead of dragging the carcass of a mythical beast around to prove a lie and make a fraudulent claim to power, the true slayer travels light and overthrows, by means of the truth-telling power in the portable speaking organ, pretenders and liars to collect his due for unburdening the city from a terrorist parasite.

Kurt Ranke, in his exhaustive consideration of over a thousand “specimens” of tales with these typical emplotments, admits to a considerable perplexity about the separate integrity of the two tale types. He forges ahead nevertheless to determine, in a curious contradiction to his own choice of title, that of the two, often appearing in tandem in the same tale, it is the dragon slayer that is the “older” tale. He places the tale’s “origins” in areas of France and even provides us with a rough estimation of where and in what relative proportion the singular or combined tale types appeared most often in the various national aboriginal (Ur-) forms and in later “redactions,”18 his term. As useful for orienting our sense of historical location and temporal placement as his accounting of regional distributions of this tale are, one has to note that by too readily acquiescing in and retaining the typology still separating AT300 and AT303 he missed an opportunity, even by his own lights, to explore an aspect of both the dragon slayer as well as the combined tale of sibling rivalry and cooperation that leaps out of his overview

18 Ibid., 65-109, 307-86.

318 and yet finds no special notice; i.e., the ubiquity of the severed dragon’s tongue, what Stith Thompson called “the tongue proof.”19 Ranke, while conceding that this is a most Ur- dimension of the Ur-versions of the tale, does almost nothing with what he then reduces to a minor, less than secondary, element that gets 2-3 pages of discussion in the almost 400 pages of his text.20 In other words, and somehow appropriately, this part of the tale does not get to speak in his typological analysis of a tale complex about the severed speaking part of a mythological beast.21 With this he misses an important event that takes place in tales involving the tongue proof: a synecdochic part of the symbol that becomes, through the action of the narrative, a metonym, independent of its body of origin, speaking now to an event, able to identify “what actually happened,” to identify the “true” performance of the “historical” act.

This is not to say that one ought not rummage around in what industrious compilers of variant taxonomies have accumulated but, on the other hand, one also has to recognize that their arrangements retain a spurious quality that, however collectively assented to by those “in the field,” does not require that their assignments and identifications of what tales are supposedly about or where they properly belong should

19 S Thompson, Motif Index of Folk Literature, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 6th ed. 1958, VI, 226.

20 Ranke, “Die zwei,” 191-2, 227-8, 240.

21 Nor is he alone in this. The “one universal tale” camp of the symbolic typing school does the same. In its foundational proponent’s focus on the “Dragon Slayer” as the universal fairy tale there is no mention of the tongue proof at all. Cf. V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, Austin: Texas University Press 1968 [1927] 55, 62. More recently, a follower of Propp’s approach, Francisco Vaz da Silva, at least shows awareness of the motif but, since it does not figure in his effort to argue that the Dragon Slayer is Oedipus and that the story arises out of pre-mythic human experience, he does nothing with it. Metamorphosis: The Dynamism of Symbolism in European Fairy Tales, New York: Peter Lang, 2002, 169.

319 determine or limit a historian’s or anthropologist’s reading of any historically ascertainable telling of a tale. To read tales as they do, as assemblages of “symbolic material” whose “universal” paradigms and associations and movements through time and space can be traced during lifetimes spent collecting tales for close comparative scrutiny by erudite scholarship is a worthwhile commitment no doubt, but one that can also be seen to contribute to a reduction of the scope of the meanings that self- proclaimed “serious” scholarship will allow for a tale’s reading. This in turn reduces our possible appreciation of all tales’ capacities for giving apparently easily recognizable symbolic entities (like dragons and their tongues) yet broader, more unpredictable and less easily contained options and scope for action, for narrating complexions of relationships that are new or just perplexing in their dialectical unfolding; viz., for having the capacity to re-figure, to update, “modernize” by subjecting to narrative experimentation our predictable and ingrained responses and recognitions to “symbols.” It is not about how symbols trigger rote-learned, self-replicating and therefore manipulable narrative or social gestures but about what symbolic forms can figure, what variant and recombinant figurations they can (and have) put into motion in both historical and yet-to-come times.

Kurt Ranke’s erudite but, from a historical anthropology perspective, inadequate reading follows the consensus of the typologists’ classifications. In Aarne and Thompson’s type and motif indexes there is only a separate entry for the tongue-proof as a motif subtype (H105.5).22 While there are, undeniably, tale types about dragon slayers and siblings or servants who are or are not treacherous, the narrative hook of these stories is often in the surprising display of a proof of the slaying and of the treacheries and opportunities for loyalty surrounding such a slaying. In the Aarne/Thompson project this key narrative figuration never appears in its own right. For that matter, equally strange is that there are, despite their ubiquity, no tale or motif types called “The

22 Thompson, Motif Index, VI, 226; in L. Mackensen’s discusssion of dragon motifs in his Handwörterbuch des deutschen Märchens, Berlin/Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1930/33, II, 690-1 there is also no discussion of the tongue proof.

320 Dragon.”

Dragons do not appear, in the typological paradigm, as narrative actors but as symbols of primordial enmity and evil. They are revolting, monstrous entities whose emotion-arousing presence alone accounts for the narrated action. Jacob Grimm tell us that “Dragons are hated . . . Therefore heroes make war upon them.”23 What dragons actually do is perceived from this perspective as secondary, as the merely natural expression of their innately evil natures and it is this latter that matters. Dragon figures devolved from complex ancient and classical narrative appearances as both benevolent, assisting and guardian figures as well as predatory, earth scorching and sacrifice- extorting monstrosities to become a modern European conception, one that emerges out of a surge in high-medieval Christian piety that is grounded in part in the Johannine apocalyptic tradition as well as in a Christianized rewriting of the Perseus myth. Dragons, as satanic incarnations, were now slain in symbolic narratives by saintly knights defending, against the Chaos of a cosmos without grace, the islands of the saved. This simultaneous reduction in dragons’ variability and their exclusive identification with a primordial evil arrayed against the city of the king together make up a repressive move by which evil becomes a kind of mythic-theological naturalization of social actions. Thanks in part to the efforts of the typologists and comparativists, dragons’ historically ascertainable identifications with evil and pure enmity can be seen as moments of ideological regression, when evil acts are displaced, by means of a mythic beast-actor, into a “natural” universe untouched by divine scrutiny. This perspective shift screens out what are in fact worldly betrayals, crimes, extortions, enslavements, the careless and empowered cruelties that some inflict on others for the primacy of profit, which altogether offer, whether they occur in the intimacy of families or on a geographic scale, a taste of chaos, but one that is always of a socially and morally willed and not a natural variety.

23 J. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, New York: Dover 1966 [1888], 1493.

321 If we regard folk tale dragons through a historical researcher’s eyes in a manner that observes what appears to a reader’s “sense” as plainly evident as possible – that is, phenomenologically – then they are in no case reducible to a mere symbolic presence marked by catalogues of frightening attributes and dastardly demands. Forgetting for the moment that dragons have also never completely stopped lurking in the symbolic- narrative universe as protectors, soothsayers, guardians, teachers of language, multipliers of bridewealth and dowry gold, we can also assert that even in narratives that exclusively figure dragons as evil-projecting enemies, they are still not ever mere symbolic agents of Chaos. Dragons are rather, in almost all their appearances, purposefully rational agents, bargaining unilaterally from a position of great power to destroy. Putting it another way, they can be described as classically criminal tribute takers extorting protection insurance against the violence they can unleash. In Ludwig Bechstein’s mid-nineteenth century collection of German tales the word “tribute” actually appears to describe the dragon’s demands.24 In tandem with that course of action, dragons also appear as violent hoarders of wealth- and life-sustaining resources (treasure and water figure most often) , exchanging them dearly for human-sacrificial tributes while cloaking their predations inside pretexts of guardianship. Dragons play specific roles in folk tales, they converse and bargain with victims and heroes, have their own plans, in short, act in consequential ways that differ from story to story, from telling to telling. “The Dragon” is never just a symbol but is, rather, a figure, an active figuration, a trope around which specific actions turn and turn out very differently in different tellings. Far from being merely symbolic of evil or chaos, dragons rather threaten with chaos those who do not knuckle under their power. Current misrecognitions of them as just an evil presence point rather to a culturally refigured repression in the present of the folkloric recognition of such calculated, predatory exercises of power to withhold resources or to threaten with destruction unless demands are met. In the timeline of European dragon tales’ narrative transformations, this shift in consciousness mirrors very precisely the threats posed to the rural subject population

24 In the tale “Die drei Hunde,” reproduced in S. Früh, ed., Märchen von Drachen, Frankfurt: Fischer 1988, [1857] 77.

322 by regional and imperial aristocracies acting under evolved conditions of corporatist- princely absolutisms and marshalling their tribute resources for a state of perpetual war, for a perpetual terrorist ransoming of everyday life.25

A part of this historically evolving and still ongoing misrecognition of what dragons might figure historically is, as noted a moment ago, that the narrative turn surrounding the “tongue proof” is more or less pushed out of the picture by tale typologists and advocates of a single foundation for all tales. The fact that this motif survives and even flourishes without scholarly comment in the very folk tales both parties place at a foundational location in “the tradition,” encourages us to look more deeply into this curiously troubled reading (or the absence of a reading) of “dragon’s tongue” figurations.

The loss of figural complexity that we find in the medieval and subsequent representations of dragons as a merely satanic presence was most pronounced in the loss from sight of the dragon-serpent’s capacity for language. Elaine Pagels has shown us a prefiguration of that loss when she reveals how threatening the language of the Serpent-in-Paradise could be to early Christians who might be tempted by ophidian rhetorical powers to be “insubordinate . . . to the community ethics that the bishops sought to impose” or to question God’s anthropomorphic failings in his dealings with Adam and Eve, or, Augustine’s fear, to delude themselves that they were free.26 The tongue, the speaking organ of the dragon-serpent is a metonymic token of the

25 Relevant to this recognition is F. Redlich’s enlightening discussion of the early modern German war tributes called “Brandschatzungen,” i.e., literally, threats to burn down individual dwellings or entire villages if tributes, based on ad hoc “assessments” of the property to be destroyed, were not paid. These evolved into “normal” tributes called the “Contribution,” one of the foundational “taxes” for German absolutist regimes. F. Redlich, “ ”

26 E. Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent, New York: Random House, 68-70.

323 ambiguous rhetorical gifts of the creature, offering “resistant” responses, a frustration to all who sought certainty, immobile truths, ontological transcendence, power.

Dragons also offered a way out of the limits of just one language. Heroes who ate parts of dragons acquired a capacity for understanding the languages of birds and beasts.27 They thus knew what was being said in the languages of those everywhere- present, all-seeing creatures, unacknowledged and “unseen” spies who hear and see and talk, among or to themselves, about things outside of ordinary human senses. It is worth noting that while this capacity of dragon-serpents as helpers continually disappears in scripted mythologies and theologies, it is in the folk tale fragments and local legends28 told especially among those who bear the greater weight of the social edifice, that respect survives for the gifts that dragons (often appearing in such instances in “reduced” forms as a small white-silver or red-gold snake) can bestow. By contrast, scholars have noted that in the Beowulf epos the dragon never speaks.29 Moreover, there are tales where dragons’ oppression is marked by the silencing of the oppressed.30 Perhaps it is not surprising that especially the oral-narrative practitioners should retain dragons capable

27 J. Grimm, Mythology, 1494.

28 AT 670/672; J. and W. Grimm, “The White Snake” in the Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, J. Zipes, transl. and ed., New York: Bantam, 1992 [1857], 67-70; idem., “Seeburger See”,in Die deutschen Sagen, H. Schneider, ed., Berlin: Bong nd, [1891], I, 138-9; Z. Palko “The Red-Bellied Serpent” in L. Degh, ed.,Hungarian Folktales: The Art of Zsuzsanna Palko, Jackson, Miss.: University of Mississippi Press, 1995, 215-21.

29 Cf. the commentary on K. Sisam’s “Beowulf’s Fight with the Dragon,” Review of English Studies, 9(1958) by F. Wild, “Drachen in Beowulf und andere Drachen”, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-Historische Klasse. Sizungsberichte,238:5, Vienna:1962,18.

30 In the southern French tale “Henri and Henriette,” reproduced in S. Früh, Märchen, 80-85.

324 of teaching heros and heroines how to speak in multiple tongues. Nevertheless, we may note in addition that the respect for speaking across species boundaries and thereby attaining allies and helpers (making the serpents’ gift multi-dimensional, infinitely fungible) arises in this specific regard from the perhaps more necessary search for languages adequate to difficult, possibly no-win choices and tasks, to the testing of a realized desire, to an effective resistance against exploitive and abusive surroundings that remain officially unspeakable, to escapes from the institutionalized self- and other- destructive repetitions often mandated by mythic acting out. Arguably, it is dragon’s tongue tales that especially manifest popular stories’ rebellion against oppressive myths.

Moreover, it is frequently women who are the agents transmitting the dragon- capacity of speech to men, often with dire effects in the process of translation. We have already noted Elaine Pagels’ reconstruction of the dividing of minds among early Christians over the history of what transpired in Eden between Eve and the serpent and between Eve and Adam, to record the active repression mounted against Eve’s “rational” and potentially resistant gift.31 Long before, the earth serpent Python had spoken from deep in the caves below Delphi through the priestess Pythia, its ambiguous oracular words also resistant to obvious or “realist” readings as it confounded many into inadequate understandings and often disastrous misreadings with attendant failures. The Pythia appears again to speak to the mother of the Norse hero, Waldemar, the leader of the Danes’ Wild Hunt. Odin, himself riding the violent winds that are the Wild Hunt and known in his dual-serpent form as Ofnir and Svafnir, was also the inventor of songs and ritual-magical markings, of how to shape desire by means of language into realizable forms that he then taught to his daughter, the giantess Saga, his drinking gossip and confidante who became in turn the teacher of human singers and wordsmiths. And it is the shaping power of words in particular that we find among the

31 Pagels, Adam, 76-7; for a relevant perspective see the interesting study of church-political formations surrounding the Synod of Elvira (305-7) in Laeuchli, Sex and Power.

325 ominous capacities of the Norns.32

One could regard it as an aspect of the analytical realism of folk tales that that shaping power, the power of the tongue, is only rarely represented as effectively in the grasp of women as it appears to be in the myths. While there are, to be sure, tales where female dragons (Feen, fays) guard treasure, where they wreak revenge on their dragon brothers’ slayers. In one precious tale there is a reversal in the power relationship in the form of a princess who keeps a miniature dragon locked in a box to produce a dowry treasure that grows as the dragon grows until a suitor defeats him and claims both bride and treasure.33 There are women who induce their dragon husbands (waking them by plucking out golden feathers and getting them to speak in their half-sleep) to divulge healing secrets that are then passed on to the hero from the human world.34 Kurt Ranke reproduces a version of “Ivan Cowson” in which the tongue of a dragon-mother is first nailed down to hold her for the subsequent killing.35 But women do not produce the dragon’s tongue at the critical juncture where proof of the slaying triumphs over the false pretenders laboring with carcasses or tongueless, and therefore “empty,” dead dragons’ heads. The closest women come is in the not inconsiderable number of tales where it is the rescued princess – sometimes it is an old crone36 – that cuts out the tongue and, sometimes, wraps it in her kerchief or shawl before she gives it to the slayer who later produces not only the “speaking part” that proves his claim to the act but also

32 J. Grimm, Mythology, 97, 131-165, 310, 900-01, 910- 11,943, 1327, 1491.

33 Ibid., 690.

34 Früh, Drachen, 76-80.

35 Ranke, “Die zwei,” 9.

36 Ibid., 240n2.

326 simultaneously produces a proof of the victim-witness who was present.37 Standing somewhat aside, finally, from tongue proof figurations – and yet also echoing them in the figure of a speaking fragment nailed to a wall in a dark passage that the heroine must go through every day, a fragment speaking only to her – is the head of the magical horse Falada who consoles the bride-turned-goose girl, displaced by an impostor, with a daily reminder of the mother’s blessed ignorance of her daughter’s dire fate.38

In Heinz Rölleke’s curious reading of this latter tale, Falada’s head recalls Lower Saxon and Westphalian horses’ heads carved on gables to ward off demons and the girl’s experience becomes in his hands simply a kind of purgatory, a due punishment for her inability to curb her desires (for water!) earlier in the tale. 39 This seems worse than questionable when we note that carved gable horses warding off demons in Lower Saxony have no discernibly significant connection to this story’s unfolding, and their presence in a tale told by a Hessian village tailor’s wife (Dorothea Viehmann) is in any case problematic. We will have cause to examine more closely the victim-blaming and sexist trope about emotionally incontinent women in Rölleke’s (and others’) readings in the next section, but for the moment we suggest that his reading as a whole seems inadequate to what actually happens in the tale. Among a number of problems, we need only to point to Rölleke’s complete discounting of the fact that it is the declassée princess’ daily exchange of words with the horse’s head that informs the king’s investigation and becomes a proof in the overturning of the false bride’s reach for power and of her unsuccessful efforts to forestall by murder the speaking horse’s capacity to bear witness. In terms of the argument being advanced here, it is the betrayed bride’s active preserving of the still-talking head of the murdered horse early in her period of

37 Ibid., 226.

38 J. And W. Grimm, “The Goose Girl,” Complete, 322-27.

39 H. Rölleke, Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm – Quellen und Studien. Gesammelte Aufsätze, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2000, 193-5.

327 servitude that furnishes the “tongue proof” against the crime and restores equity.

I present this and the previous stories as a way to think about the war of conceptual styles that appears to be going on by means of tales told within and between different social formations at all social levels, even into its present, one-sided form in the guise of folklore studies. Alan Dundes’ introduction of the idea of multiple “folk groups” was on the mark, up to a point, when he argued that “Marxist theory erred in limiting folk to the lower classes, to the oppressed. According to strict Marxist theory, folklore is the weapon of class protest.” He is partially right to see this as “error,” but it is so not merely because “there is also rightwing folklore expressing the ideology of groups of a conservative political philosophy.”40 He in effect assents in the purportedly “Marxist” attribution of a protest function for folk tales told by and to “the oppressed” perceived as “the lower classes” and it is this latter that is the point that, from our perspective, needs to be disputed. The colligations, bricolages, stringings-together of many mythic-magical figurations and fragments in narratives exposing and speaking to the life of unseen actions and processes that altogether constitute so-called folk tales are obviously much more than mere “protest;” they are a rhetorical resistance, a taking on in terms of language and concept-construction the mythic force of arguments and narratives sustaining fraudulent and often violently abusive claims to power not only between but also within social classes. (See the previous chapter.) They are to some extent temporary, ad hoc assemblages, whose parts were long ago severed from the mythic corpus to become free figurations, metonyms capable of moving, dissolving out of and reassembling in focused allegorical articulations, across time, through successive (or contiguous) moments of critical recognition, working at the many levels and conjunctures of historical social formations. The authoritarian and frozen logics and grammars in the mythographies of “rulers” are thereby confronted with the active rhetorical duplexities and improbabilities of “fairy tales,” of “little stories,” with potent and independently speaking mythic fragments de-constructed and reconstrued in the

40 A. Dundes, “Who are the Folk?” in his Essays in Folkloristics, Meerut: Folklore Institute, 1978, 8.

328 hands of experienced and, at every social level, subaltern story tellers, capable of addressing more satisfactorily historical moments not in the reach of or even visible to the ruling, myth-laden discourses. Most of the remainder of this essay explores – by looking at only a few of the analytical treatments given to different tellings of the Little Red Riding Hood tale complex – how historians can reveal (or recognize) their own desired relationship to power through the kinds of narrative historicities and utilities they imagine for tales told by various kinds of “folk.”

It is in this light that the “tongue proof” is worth one more look. In itself it “proves” by its very appearances that folk tales are not reducible to paradigmatic arrangements of merely symbolic “elements.” Although it happens that in many narratives the moment when the tongue is held aloft is just a “moment of truth” when liars and pretenders to inheritance stand exposed, this does not mean the tongue is just one of several such symbols representing a naive notion of truth. Folk tales are rich with many tokens of “proof:” rings dropped into the bottom of a cup, ring-fingers that when hacked off bounce to the place where the horrified (girl-)witness is hiding, red-hot iron shoes or glass slippers that do or do not fit etc. A case in point may be found in the Grimms’ own version of the “Two Brothers /Dragon Slayer” tale complex where the tongue proof, as noted in our fourth epigraph at the top, appears in this fashion as one of numerous instances of different kinds of tokens of proof. The Grimms’ version of this tale is one of the longest texts in their entire collection and one might even consider it a “literary fairy tale,” a Kunstmärchen, because it is clearly their own construction, their narrative bricolage derived from many sources41 whose most persistent figure throughout is a display of many possible kinds of proof-tokens and of what they can prove. It is a tale in which they reveal their own education and interests and arguably fulfil, possibly as parody, the legal anthropology project of their mentor Savigny.

Dragon’s tongues are not, however, simply one more kind or type of “proof

41 See the Grimms’notations on this tale as well as those of H. Rölleke in the brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen, H. Rölleke, ed., Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980, Vol. 3,102-07, 468-9.

329 object” like rings, necklaces, kerchiefs, glass slippers, teeth and the like. “Liars should have no tongues,” says the Grimms’ huntsman and brings us to the point of recognizing different qualities of appearance that tongue proofs can make in different stories. They are not always symbolic of establishing truth. Sometimes the tongue proof, even though “present” and thereby held “in reserve” in the hero’s pocket, does not need to be produced when a witness, e.g., the princess, simply speaks the truth or asserts her love for the hero; sometimes when it is tendered as proof it is not believed.42 And sometimes, according to one rather cynical, bottom-line, twist in a tale collected by the nineteenth century Norwegian folklorist Jörgen Moe,43 which holds that even though it is the impostor who has the tongue, it is the hero who has the treasure and it is the treasure that works as the superior proof. In some tellings the hero does not even cut out the whole tongue when the tip of the tongue can serve.44 And frequently, when the impostor had the insight to sever the tongue, it is the hero’s previous foresight in cutting off the tip of the tongue that trumps the imposture at the critical juncture.45 A speaking part of the speaking part refuting the lie of the latter is a figural sophistication frequently found

42 K. Haiding, Österreichs Märchenschatz, Vienna: Pro Domo, 1953, 179, 166. On Karl Haiding, see O. Bockhorn, “The Battle for the ‘Ostmark’” in J. Dow and H. Lixfeld, eds., The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994,135-55.

43 “Minnikin” in A. Lang, ed., The Red Fairy Book, New York: Dover, 1966 [1890], 307-321.

44 Kurt Seidl, “Once In, Never Out Again,” a Styrian tale of the 1930s collected by Anton Dolleschall and reprinted in L., Bødker et. al., eds., European Folktales, Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1963, 92-7.

45 A. Schupfer, “Der Riesentöter,” another Styrian tale, with analogs found in the Salzburg and Upper Austrian regions, collected in the late nineteenth century and published and annotated in K. Haiding, Märchenschatz, 353-7, 466.

330 in a broad range of tellings of the dragon slayer/brothers complex of tales.46 Far from being a one-dimensional symbolic object, the dragon’s tongue, in its presences and absences and in its own occasional dissolution into fragments, can perform a number of different roles in different emplotments, can figure turns of narrative in which lying and truth-telling are intermingled and no outcome is automatically linked to a symbolic fixture of speech. The “tongue proof” can but does not necessarily speak to a “truth” in a tale; nor is it a part of a mere protest against imposture, injustice, and lying. Rather than protest, it resists by performing multiple roles for different kinds of contestations and in the hands of different kinds of “actors” and of different narrators.

Dundes was right to reject aligning “folk tales” with a “folk” that was automatically “the lower class” or, as Darnton would have it, “the peasants” who “tell tales” while “workers revolt.”47 Not only can tales be a kind of revolt but, as Dundes’ perception implies and as the previous chapter sought to show, certain kinds of tale or emplotments and figures are not automatically to be correlated sociologically and do not “represent” easily identified “identities.” Historical understanding is better served by looking at specifically “locatable” tales as a means to get at of what kinds of “social consciousness” prevailed at certain historical times and places and, in particular, of what kind of consciousness was capable of producing such counter-fictions to disturb, in their time, efforts to reabsorb tales by and into a perpetually self-renewing mythos- construction going on among would-be hegemons operating, to be sure, at all social levels. Rather than consign folk tales to a “lower” or “primitive” level of human experience and thereby discount their value both collectively and as individual tellings, the task is rather to regain an open-ended sense of the intellectual dimensions of all historical experience, including experiences among those who “tell tales,” not according to sociological or narrative sub-types but according to discursive formations capable of

46 Ranke, “Die zwei,” 240.

47 R. Darnton, “Peasants Tell Tales,” in his The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, New York: Basic 1984,9-72.

331 cutting across “types,” “classes,” “groups,” “cultures,” “mentalités.” This means to go beyond limiting lower class narrative expression to mere protest but crediting it with analytical and forensic capacities; it also means developing an “empathy” perspective beyond claiming merely a removal of folk tales from “low culture” or women’s hands into male-dominated and purportedly “high culture” efforts to manipulate the subaltern into behaviors acceptable to some sort of imprecisely conceptualized “bourgeois” modernity. If this latter effort was indeed part of the historical process (as it might well have been – for some) and is to be credited analytically, we can not proceed by grossly distorting historical dimensions of this possibly active but far from understood embourgeoisement. Moreover, by effectually returning tales to mythological-typological structurations, this approach threatens to re-bury the critical, counter-fictional possibilities of the genre in culture-and-personality and social control paradigms whose analytical failures and power-serving qualities are by now only too evident. Not only do we lose our ability to perceive the weight popular narrative might have carried as a critical-conceptual and communicative form inside historical processes, but we lose touch with specific historical story-telling traditions and with their tellers as members of dispersed and yet interrelated and evolving groups of “organic” intellectuals (in a sense Gramsci might not have accepted) with different, and in themselves changing, tasks for what appear to be the same or similar stories.

II

How “Petit Chaperon Rouge” or “Rotkäppchen” became, in general usage, “Little Red Riding Hood” is not clear and will not detain us here48 but the girl’s headgear presents an interesting problem. Can or should we ascribe socially differentiated meanings to the tale’s many versions if this “symbolic” object turns up in both French

48 In the currently standard translations of the Grimms’ tales by Margaret Hunt (1944) and Jack Zipes (1987) it is, properly, “Little Red Cap.”

332 and German tales between the late seventeenth and the late nineteenth centuries? Or does it simply speak to the primacy of the French versions and their migration to Germany through the civilizing influence French Huguenot emigrés allegedly had on German bourgeois “culture,” as it was the fashion to maintain in the 1980s and 90s? One finds a grab-bag of symbolic significations, stretching from the red cap as a sign of menstruation (Bettelheim) to some association with the red hats Jews were made to wear in the middle ages (Zipes). Of course, the red cap appears in only a few versions of the nineteenth and twentieth century tales brought together by Delarue, where even what he calls the “integral tale” makes no mention of any headgear at all and where we find also a “golden hat,” among other signifying objects, in the thirty-odd versions he identifies.49 In the Hessian area of Schwalm an unmarried peasant girl’s regional costume (Tracht) includes a small red pillbox on top of her head suggesting, perhaps, a second avenue of “symbolic meaning,” one that would in fact contradict the alleged “French import” aspect of the tale . . . but then whose significance would be what exactly? Unmarried and therefore sexually available? Perhaps, but in what historically specific kind of social and moral environment does such “availability” appear? In that light, would a tale about a red-capped girl – and her grandmother in a nightcap that is by itself destined to be immortalized as a lovingly illustrated disguise for the wolf – necessarily be about the girl’s sexuality or could it, possibly and conversely, be about the moral conditions that render unmarried girls and old widows vulnerable to a predation, whether of a sexual or other nature? Can one forget, for example, that it is a parent that puts the girl at risk by sending her through the woods alone50 dressed in an eye- catching costume? We will in a moment consider whether it was this, among other things, that

49 P. Delarue, Le Conte Populaire Français, Paris: Erasme 1957, I, 373-83.

146 In this regard R. Bottigheimer’s development, in Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987, 102-3, of Max Lüthi’s point about “isolation” in German tales, by which “the woods” is one of several spaces where socially isolated persons have mortal encounters, has considerable significance is worth returning to.

333 Perrault was also speaking to, but our main purpose remains to suggest that the answers to such questions depend in part on different tellers’ intellectual and analytical contributions to their particular tellings and in part also, as Linda Degh demonstrated long ago, on the associational and responsive powers of the audiences (i.e., of the “readers”) of many tales’ many performances.

To develop this last point we turn to the scholarly reading of the story about the red-capped girl, her grandmother and a wolf initiated by Jack Zipes in his edited collection of thirty-one versions of the story.51 His is an appropriation noteworthy for historians in the sense that he brings together different versions of the tale – all of which he rightly recognizes as constituting a unique source allowing us to match different tellings to “sociocultural context” – into a purported master narrative, into an account of what he sees as the evolution of “the tale” as it traces in turn the evolution of “the boundaries of our existence” as they expand beyond “male fantasy and sexual struggle for domination.”52 From our prespective, however, it is a historical project whose simplifying invocation of Norbert Elias’ conceptual framework about the “civilizing process” and whose language choices lead us away from a sharper focus on the story’s details as well as on the historical environments and possible motivations for its tellings. His is, in effect, a recapturing of many tales into a singularity, i.e., a re-mythification.

Zipes’ title, “The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood,” sets a tone one often finds in scholarly or historical literature about “fairy tales,” a slight jocularity that undermines a simultaneously advanced serious claim that this is about social-

51 “The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood,” in his ed., The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context, South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey,1983.; he repeats his arguments in a more worked-out conceptual frame in Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization, New York: Methuen 1988.

52 Trials, xi.

334 contextual realities. It suggests a patronizing, bird’s eye view about what one might naturally expect to be the relatively trivial experiences of little people, experiences that are however, to the tales’ protagonists, the existential action, even the trauma, of the tale as it is lived in various imaginary constellations that are also easily transposed to “real” experiential analogs of select victims that are made available to risk and danger, of invasions of personal information and spaces, of weak persons set up by disingenuous misguidances and warnings, of fatal trickeries, blood drinkings, devourings, escapes, punishments, in short, to an descending spiral of violent visitations that may exist simultaneously in both fantasy and lived experience, and may indeed be read against each other in the minds not only of victims and perpetrators but of variously “moral” observers, recorders and analytical narrators. To belittle such experiences as just “trials and tribulations” is to remove both historical and present accounts of violence into what appear, finally, as ontologically unreachable fantasy spaces. Such moves which threaten, in a priori fashion, the possible analytical weight one might be able to ascribe to popular tales for an empathic-historical narrative must be held up to critical scrutiny.

A trivializing attitude works as a kind of repression as when Robert Darnton, himself repeating the “trials and tribulations” formula, removes perpetrators and their victims from “peasant” narratives altogether by claiming the tales to be merely about what he calls “life’s cruelties.” This is obviously a naturalizing, de-socializing regression that allows him to re-figure academic discourse about a tale like “Little Red Cap” in such simple-minded, distancing and patronizing terms as these: “What is the moral of the story? For little girls clearly, stay away from wolves. For historians, it seems to be saying something about the mental world of the early modern peasantry. But what?” The callow jocular tone again. A silly wolves-will-be-wolves universalism appears and writes off “the little girls” who, one has to assume, are then also written out of that mysterious “mental world of . . . peasantry.” But if the latter is so inscrutable, how would we know “little girls” and “wolves” are not part of that “mental world” – if indeed there is such a “world” “of” a vaguely identified entity called “peasantry.” One of the foundational historical positions – rooted in behaviorist, stimulus-response psychologism – of the

335 symbolic actionist approach as represented by Darnton53 is that “they, then” are fully alien to “us, now,” just as we are presumably incapable of ever knowing what is in the minds of “others” beyond their manifest behaviors and the latter’s known and de- codable symbolic referents, including those of “tale types” and “motifs.” Earnestly proposing the pseudo-profundity that “other is other,” Darnton derives the further, more dangerous and potentially violent purpose that “we should set out with the idea of capturing otherness.”54 Like tapirs or butterflies? Where this quest for entrapment leads we can observe in his practice.

Darnton poses, in his introduction to J.-L. Ménétra’s Journal for example, precisely such an antinomy between an experience “from an almost inaccessible world” in the past and what he sees as a present naive belief in“our common humanity.”55 This then allows him to read his itinerant glazier-artisan’s, i.e., Ménétra’s mix of accounts of experiences cast in occasional folk-narrative emplotments and allusions, fantasies and joker-bravura as being full of “things we cannot fathom” such as “a world so saturated with violence and death that we can barely imagine it.”56 Indeed. There is something unsavory about this cult of the “irreducibly strange” whose residual presence can then authorize any reading, really, be it class rivalry, social mobility, or peer group solidarity or, as in Darnton’s view, “male bonding” by gang rape and the celebratory sharing of

53 His recommendations for the “future” of interdisciplinary cooperation between history and anthropology puts forward, among others of the ilk, the usual suspects: Geertz, Turner, Rosaldo. Cat Massacre, 284.

54 Darnton, “Introduction” to Cat Massacre, 4.

55 R. Darnton, “Foreword” to J.-L. Ménétra, Journal of My Life, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986 [1738, vii, xi- xii.

56 Ibid., xiii.

336 prostitutes.57 It may well be that “unimaginable” past violences and such lesser acts as Ménétra recounts are alien to the present “mental world” of someone who never reads a newspaper or, more likely, whose personal good conscience depends on simply pretending the world just beyond the shaded lawns does not have any meaningful bearing on an elevated contemplation of alterity. But from whence comes this presumed universal, “male bonding” notion, and how does the projection of such a questionable pseudo-anthropological neologism to a past state of human minds not violate the symbolic actionist postulate of an ontological alterity between a present “us” and a past “them?” His is a circular, set-paradoxical and therefore untenable distinction and does not offer us a historically meaningful contribution to understanding the much-vaunted “meaning” that is the alleged primary purpose of this kind of “cultural anthropology.” Moreover, by “capturing” Ménétra in some current psychobabble figure (“male bonding”) with no discernible scientific meaning or analytical value in the past or the present, Darnton subverts his position of exaggerated alterity, and particularly his claim of an impossibility of mutual recognition between a past that is by nature more violent than we, in “our” peaceful present, could understand. It seems a forced point whose distinctions seem primitive in conception. To make this larger point Darnton has to distort the evidence. He makes much of Ménétra’s allegedly unfathomable laughter, as in the case when the latter’s employer accidentally put his head through a pane of glass. What is so hard to fathom? Not only is the malicious Schadenfreude laughter he attributes to the artisan not confined to early eighteenth century lower class French experience (I know several such gleeful types in the present academy) but the attribution itself is only possible with Darnton’s editing of the text. If we go to the passage quoted (but actually not footnoted) we find, by reading the part that Darnton leaves out, that the laughter occurs while Ménétra was in fact extricating his employer from a dicey predicament.58 The full passage allows a glimpse into the glazier’s humanity. He was making light of a bad moment, helping out emotionally as well as physically; he was not the incomprehensible, dark-humored monstrosity Darnton’s cultural science requires

57 Ibid., xii.

58 Ménétra, Journal, 116. 337 and that this misrepresentation leads us to be believe he was.

It may to some be a laboring of a minor point but my sense is rather that it is with an accumulation of such points that the symbolic actionist position’s culturalist ill-will comes to light. Darnton has, indeed, “captured otherness” but merely to corral it in his styled pretension to being an “ethnographic historian” approaching what he perceives to be “the mental world of the unenlightened.” The irony is that he thereby effectively disconnects the latter from its own as well as from our capacities for understanding and leaves us adrift in a space without referents except those provided by him – and they clearly won’t do.

One of the problems with academics’ writings about what they presume to be the sexuality of “the unenlightened” is that we tend to learn more than we want to know about the sexuality of the writers than that of their ostensible historical-anthropological subjects. There is a kind of clenched, projective and cloying sound to Darnton’s follow up to the alleged “male-bonding” rape and prostitute-sharing: “Now, the male animal may not have abandoned bestiality [?!], but I doubt that he behaves like that today . . .” 59 This persistent ascription of alterity, particularly that separating a violent and sexually less civilized past from a more peaceful and civilized present, seems a motif shared among culturalist approaches. One hears a voice of desensualized security and superiority in the pity expressed for Ménétra’s apparently insatiable need for women, for his “working-class Casanova” performances resulting in a life without love where “the joke was on him.”60 Again, it is a projective and specious reading that largely ignores the actual complexity and occasional humanity of Ménétra’s relations with women that one can easily accumulate from an attentive reading of the text. There is a fundamental inadequacy to Darnton’s reductive, almost flip judgments about the glazier’s stories that, however, also diminish them even as he celebrates them with the usual allusions to Rabelais et. al. a narrative inadequacy that in fact creates obstacles to achieving a

59 Darnton, “Foreword,” xii; Ménétra, Journal, 141-2.

60 Darnton, “Foreword,” xi. 338 nuanced reading of this extraordinary testament of a mind capable of so much more than what is presumed to be, to “us moderns,” sexual pathos.

Returning to Jack Zipes’ introduction to a collection of thirty-one versions of the “trials and tribulations” of Little Red Riding Hood we find a similar voice, a similar metahistory of psychosexual-civilizational development. It is Zipes’ running with that ball that is worth considering since it diminishes, from the perspective of this essay, the narrative-analytical options that historically grounded fairy tales – i.e., tales whose circumstances of recording and transcription can be known – can offer. For Zipes the several tales about the girl and the wolf refract to a focal narrative point that brings together an alleged historical taming of “male fantasy and sexual struggle for domination” with metacultural speculations about young women’s collaboration, in fantasy, with seduction and rape. Closer examination reveals that these speculations are not only not warranted by any of the recorded oral or Kunstmärchen versions of the tale about Little Red Cap but that they also enclose the story in the straightjacket of a misrecognized conceptual narrative from which we stand in danger of losing vital qualities and dimensions of such stories’ value for historical understanding. As with Darnton, Zipes’“trials and tribulations” pose intends to support culturalist metacultural assertions but he pushes them to another level entirely. His further step about women’s or young girls’ collaboration in fantasy with seduction and rape does not find sufficient support in any of the recorded oral or early Kunstmärchen versions of “Little Red Riding Hood.”61 Zipes contends that the girl’s character is, in all

61 Several modern illustrations for the tale do suggest strong sexual dimensions and their effectual (and no doubt analyzable and explicable) addition to reprints of the tale may have prejudiced Zipes’ view. However, even among the twenty-eight black and while illustrations in his edited collection one finds only four (Trials, 27, 37, 41(?) and 57) that could be construed in this direction and only two (from 1905 and 1890)among the nine color illustrations. As he indicated during an illustrated presentation at Princeton, March 2, 1984, Zipes also sees alleged eye contact and body language signifying an exchange of sexual consent between girl and wolf in much of the illustrative materials that accompanied the tale through its many editions and invocations. It seemed to this observer that the illustrations, 339 cases, touched with “non-conformity and sexual promiscuity.” In the Perrault version he sees the author toeing a fine line between providing “naughty stories of seduction” to appeal to “the erotic and playful side of adult readers” while still also telling a so-called “warning tale” for children. For Zipes the red cap comes to signify the vanity of a “pretty, defenseless girl,” stigmatized for her association with “sin, sexuality and the devil” and for the fact that she “subconsciously contributed to her own rape.” Claiming, without even a nod to any evidence, that “obviously the Grimms found the Perrault ending too cruel and sexual,” Zipes sees the Grimms altering the tale to focus on how “her degradations and punishment set an example.” He claims that for them she is “tempted by the sensuous delights of the forest” and must therefore be “punished” for “her indulgence in sensuality and disobedience.” 62 It seems almost a bad bordel script. And yet in the Grimms’ two versions of the tale there is very little to suggest the girl’s self- indulging in “sensual pleasures.” Yes, she does pick forest flowers in the first version but does so with her grandmother in mind and in the second she ignores the wolf completely and goes directly to the grandmother’s house. As for her alleged sexual complicity in Perrault’s and others’ versions where she undresses and gets in bed with the wolf, we have to remember that she was deceived. The Little Red Riding Hood is arguably governed by a series of deceptions leading to an entrapment and devouring, of which sexuality may be one implicit and sometimes even explicit figure. Aarne and Thompson were, in this regard, clearly on to something when they arranged the tale under type 333, “The Glutton.”63 And, even though their ascription also illustrates that tale-typing catches only a part and loses the rest, they do encourage us to explore why it will not do simply to contain an act of devouring in language about sexual sublimation for a (misrecognized) Eliasian “civilization process.”

however they could be construed, were the illustrator’s new tellings “separate” from the text that was being, in many cases, merely reproduce; but Zipes’ presentation did not go that way.

62 Zipes, “Tribulations,” 1, 9-10, 16.

63 S. Thompson, The Folktale, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977, 483. 340 For Zipes there unfolds what he calls throughout the “Little Red Riding Hood syndrome,” his projection of a historically universal fear of things related to sex. He perceives “a dominant cultural pattern in Western societies” that “reflects men’s fear of women’s sexuality – and of their own as well.” Although the story’s allegedly “original” folk intent of being a “warning tale” has not changed, Perrault and the Grimms have, in Zipes’ view, captured the tale for themselves and for the men of their social world to help them cope with “the curbing and regulation of sex drives.” I find it difficult to follow him when his reading seeks to place a thoroughly masculinized burden of sexual self- control on a story whose “social purpose” he then characterizes as a “warning about the possibility of sexual molestation.”64 Leaving aside for the moment the violence such a reading does to Perrault, the Grimms, Delarue and others, we note that it overrides and diminishes the complexity of the narrative options open to tellers in the narrative figure of girl and wolf.

Indeed, even most of the tales in his own compilation do not conform to this allegedly “civilizational” story (or “neurotic male projection,” 42) encouraging men to learn to control themselves in encounters with weak and therefore seductive and therefore threatening girls. Tomi Ungerer’s clever refutation of the slandering of the wolf becomes simply “nonconformist” or Angela Carter’s astonishing blending and inversion of all the versions and all the themes, including “sexuality,” is reduced by Zipes to a story about where the “savagery of sex reveals its tender side.”65 Not only is this last

64 “Tribulations,” 56-8.

65 Tomi Ungerer, “Little Red Riding Hood” and Angela Carter, “In the Company of Wolves;” in Zipes, ed., Trials, 251-54, 271- 80; Zipes, “Tribulations,” 45; Ungerer’s and other versions find an interesting discussion in H. Ritz, Die Geschichte vom Rotkäppchen, Göttingen: Muriverlag 1992. By far my favorite writing along these lines is Iring Fetscher’s collection Der Nulltarif der Wichtelmänner; Märchen und andere Verwirrspiele, Frankfurt/Main, 1984. His bitingly witty and successful mockery of Little Red Riding Hood scholarship by means of an international congress where all the parties in the Cold War speak their versions of the tale is at first sight intimidating to anyone who still wants to write something about it. What 341 a more than odd non sequitur about sex, but it seems, whatever its meaning, inadequate to what this story is about. Carter begins with hunger, with the hunger-howls of carnivores “gray as famine” threatening those who enter the woods, with lycanthropic transformations as acts of rage and rejection of the ordinary social world; then, in an abrupt transition she takes the girl on her way to her granny’s house, through what she calls the “commonplaces of a rustic seduction,” reveals the grandmother’s last vision of sex with a beautiful young man to be a mistake as he devours her, and ends with the girl laughing because “she was nobody’s meat” and throwing in her lot with the wolves. If anything, Carter’s version implicitly contradicts Zipes’ persistent contention that “The eating . . . of Little Red Riding Hood is an obvious sexual act.” 66 In none of the stories, including Perrault’s and the Grimms’, is sex figured when what occurs is an annihilation.

There are many tales in his collection in which the girl is far from weak or a victim or where the motivation of the wolf is clearly in no way sexual. Where this happens, Zipes has contextual overdetermination arguments at the ready such that he can reduce such versions to national stereotypes (“Erotic play and seduction appear to capture the imagination of the French, whereas the Germans are more concerned with law and order.” Oh please.) or can claim that the tale has been taken over by twentieth century modernity expressing the “new woman” of feminism in “aesthetic experiments” and “radical adaptations”67 which do not, for him, diminish the centrality of a tale about a girl who makes “a pact with the devil” and is “fully to blame for her rape because she

helped me past that was that the upshot of Fetscher’s recognition is that the tale lends itself to multiple “political” readings – which is precisely my point about the fairy tales as narrative fragmentations/modernizations against mythic closures. Also, Fetscher crosses the boundaries of satire himself and allows “real” positions to appear (Delarue, Soriano et. al.) unanswered, which is to say he can not stop himself from joining in the narrative Verwirrspiel.

66 “Tribulations,” 55.

67 “Tribulations,” 24, 37-41 and passim. 342 has a non-conformist streak which must be eradicated.”68 The objection from a historical narrative-critical perspective is not that such readings are necessarily “wrong” or do not contain elements worth taking into account but rather that they diminish our full recognition of the empathic-rational qualities of these various tellings and of their historical locations in temporally both continuous as well as contiguous memory narratives.

A case in point relevant to our purpose of elucidating how fairy tales might be brought into a narrative-critical historical anthropology is apparent in what Zipes does with Ludwig Tieck’s famous dramatic dialogues between Wolf and Dog, Huntsman and Girl, and others. Tieck’s drama tells a tale that only at the end appears to conform to Zipes’ emplotment when the girl, not heeding warnings (“Don’t be too bold.” “In vain she’s told.”) gets killed and eaten by the wolf (“Pride has a fall!”).69 But the girl’s death is an incident in the narrative logic of a larger drama whose chief protagonist is, arguably, the wolf until he falls, in the end, to the huntsman’s rifle. “Let other wolves take warning by his fate:/Vengeance o’ertakes the wicked soon or late.”70 The “moral” of the tale is focused on the irony that it is the wolf’s own desire for vengeance that strikes back at him. Having to account for the fact that this is not primarily a story about the girl’s relationship to the wolf at all, Zipes follows the work of H.-W. Jäger, who makes a connection between Tieck’s and the Grimms’ versions in that both purportedly saw the “little red cap” in the light of Jacobinism and of the alleged double-edged benefits the French revolutionary occupation, experienced by Tieck and the Grimms, brought to Germany.71 This is a reading of some historical-narrative weight, if only for a better

68 “Tribulations,” 56.

69 Ludwig Tieck, “The Life and Death of Little Red Riding Hood. A Tragedy” [1800], in Zipes, ed., Trials, 109-10.

70 “Life and Death,” 115.

71 “Trägt Rotkäppchen eine Jakobiner-Mütze? Über mutmaßliche Konnotate bei Tieck und Grimm” in J. Bark, ed., Literatursoziologie, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1974, Vol. 2, 159-80; Zipes, Trials, 17f. 343 understanding of the “imaginary” out of which some members of the German intelligentsia could figure their experiences with revolutionary and imperialistic France. It is not, however, served by a too-simple “symbolic” decoding or by a poor linkage to context according to which the wolf perforce becomes, without even a hint in the text, “the French revolutionary who comes to liberate German youth and/or the French oppressor who comes to destroy the virtues of Germany.” 72 Nevertheless, with such specious formulas any problem posed by Tieck’s recounting – itself uncomfortably close in time and spirit to the Grimms’ two tellings – to Zipes’ story about rationalizing sexuality seems to disappear.

Notwithstanding Jäger’s earnest researches about the symbology of wolves as French invaders – and as what else? is this a game anyone can play? – , this reading fails to address Tieck’s narrative, whose explicit point (in the title) is about a tragic emplotment. It is there that an empathic recognitions contained in and available to a historical understanding of Tieck’s subtle drama lies. The tragedy is not in the death of the girl but rather in the life-story of the wolf and in the gross moral error, to Tieck’s ethical sensibilities, that is contained in his motivation for the girl’s murder and devouring. The wolf is not an invader at all but a local who has a known local history of involuntary downward social mobility, beginning as a farm dog who is abused and ending as an outcast hunted animal in the woods. Arguably, this is a dispossession figure.73 In his autobiographical dialogue with his old friend, the dog Pincher who continues to endure the humiliations of domestic service for the scraps from Red Cap’s father, the wolf reveals that the peasants once invaded his domestic space and killed his wife and lover, the she-wolf. Now his motive is revenge; he is driven by a desire for revenge worsened, in the mind of his friend Pincher, by the absence of any “feeling of remorse . . . faith in immortality.” The wolf counts Red Cap’s peasant father among the

72 Zipes, “Tribulations,” 17.

73 Cf. H. Rebel, “Dark Events and Lynching Scenes in the Collective Memory: A Dispossession Narrative about Austria’s Descent into Holocaust,” in J. Scott and N. Bhatt, eds, Agrarian Studies, New haven: Yale University Press, 2001. 344 murderers of his love: “His dear Red Ridinghood long time/ I’ve meant to eat – and will; that blow/Will reach her father, whom I owe/ Full many a grudge. Revenge is sweet!” After the huntsman, who had previously been rejected by the girl, kills the wolf, Tieck allows himself this moral summary: “Let other wolves take warning by his fate:/ Vengeance o’ertakes the wicked soon or late.” 74 If there is indeed a French Revolution dimension then it is not the wolf who wears the red cap of Jacobinism, that is worn by the daughter of a leading peasant, a young girl who has already taken on the commanding manners and sense of entitlement and immunity of her father’s newly empowered class. Tieck’s sense of the tragic is not universalistic but historical- contextual75 and his observation here would be that the coming of revolution has unleashed class violence against those at the bottom and has in return authorized a new class of enragées wolves, whose amoral sense of entitlement to revenge vents itself by killing the children of those tormentors beyond their reach. Their acts in turn merely authorize their being killed, also in vengeance, by agents of the state. In Tieck’s tragic emplotment, the life and death of the girl is a byproduct of a downward spiral of mutual revenge with which she has no direct connection. Her “innocence” is not at all sexual but lies rather in her innocent ignorance of a fatal implication in her father’s prior criminality that the wolf, himself a victim, construes and acts out by her annihilation.

To my mind this is a more satisfying because more apposite approach to the historical-empathic narrative potential in Tieck’s tale, one that respects the narrator more and it is this latter figure that is lost in Zipes’ banalities about revolutions eating their children and other one-dimensional pseudo-historicisms. In the latter we lose a sense that the narrators of fairy tales, whether they be Berlin intellectuals like Tieck, post-Sadeian feminists like Angela Carter or simply “Old Marie” – whose effectually feminist counter-fiction, occurring long before the “new woman” of the first half of the twentieth century, will occupy us in a moment – all have their reasons, their sense of

74 Tieck, “Life and Death,” 104, 115.

75 V. Klotz, Das europäische Kunstmärchen, Munich: dtv, 1985, 160-1. 345 fittedness to experiences in their worlds that remain invisible in the stultifying clichés that presently pass for historical context.

Zipes sees a historical trajectory for the tale that begins, long before Perrault, in medieval France, Northern Italy and the Tyrol with so-called “warning tales” or “scaring tales” (Schreckmärchen) about wolves and powerless children, tales which made their entry into the modern period on the backs of reports of legally prosecuted werewolves and witches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.76 Citing the work of Yvonne Verdier, Zipes also recognizes in the tale of the girl and wolf an “original” rite-of-passage aspect according to which “the folk tale celebrates the self-reliance of a young girl” who has learned her craft and has the “capacity for procreation.”77 Verdier’s vision of “the autonomy and power of women in regard to their own destiny in this traditional peasant society” is in part true in that many of the tales about wolf and girl are also about the triumph of the girl over the wolf; where her vision is not on the right track, and this, unfortunately is the track Zipes requires for his argument about a male usurpation of a female narrative tradition, is in this talk about a “traditional rural society.”

Verdier’s and Zipes’ specific arguments arise from a presumably known pre- Perrault story tradition in which women wielded power. There were such tales then as well as later, no doubt, but the specific narrative assertion here rests on an evidentiary presumption that is a mistake. Their readings depend on Paul Delarue’s collection of thirty-five French versions of Aarne and Thompson’s Tale Type 333, “the Glutton,” from which Delarue drew an “integral version” (told in 1885) which subsequent analysts like Verdier and Zipes have adopted as evidence, following Delarue’s own assertions, for a pre-Perrault “oral tradition” that enables in turn their respective historical narratives. In this “integral tale” the wolf, taking a “path of pins” to outrun the girl, dallying on a “path of needles,” devours the grandmother, tricks the girl into eating some of her

76 Zipes, “Tribulations,” 2-4, 6-7; some different themes are suggested by C. Ginsburg, Nightbattles, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983

77 Zipes, “Tribulations,” 8. 346 grandmother’s flesh and drinking her blood, but is in the end tricked himself by the girl who escapes on a pretext. Leaving aside Delarue’s echoing that persistent intent to “re- mythify” fairy tales by consolidating many differently emplotted and populated tales back into a singular “type,” one notes, above all, the unavoidable contextual fact that Delarue’s versions of AT333 were all told and collected between the 1860s and 1890s (with exceptions from 1915 and 1953), and all in the context of a then-renewed academic interest in gaining a scientifically authoritative grasp on the “conte populaire”.78 The presumption that because they were collected from ordinary people they therefore must be speaking to some lost oral “tradition” from the “time before” the time of intellectual- literary tales in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is completely unwarranted, unless one believes there is a subterranean repository of “collective mind” that only ever repeats the same things without any connections to or reflections on what is actually happening in the world at any given time. As Delarue indirectly acknowledges, his collection consists of stories that, given the pervasiveness at the time of the tellings of cheap, illustrated editions of both Perrault’s and the Grimms’ versions, are also arguably modernizations, new petits récits, that find resonances in new experiences with the “devouring” figure enacted by the wolf, experiences that require new plots and figural representations and languages even as they do or do not reference, if only indirectly, Perrault and the Grimms. When, for example, Darnton, also grounding himself in Delarue’s “integral tale,” echoes the latter by arguing that Perrault left out gruesome details of the folk “original” to spare his courtier audience 79 he draws a specious conclusion to which one can not subscribe. He thereby writes an equally plausible narrative line out of the “civilizational” narrative, a narrative which the horrors of Delarue’s “oral” versions may as easily have been later additions that speak to modern

78 Delarue, Conte Populaire, 375-381. Delarue is ambivalent; on one hand he sees the stories in his collection “ow(ing) their content to the oral tradition” but then claims the cruel elements could not have been missing in a period when the tales were “much more alive” than “at the moment of modern collection” and that Perrault must have eliminated these elements even as he retained the tales popular “accents” and freshness (383).

79 Darnton,”Peasants Tell,” 11. 347 cruelties and to modern victims’ creative responses or failures.

It is interesting to note for example, that while in the in the “integral” version, the girl escapes at the end – a key element pointing, for Zipes, to what he presumes had to be an “earlier” “tradition” when women controlled the tales – this is not in fact what happens in all of Delarue’s tales. One could make a case, for example, that Delarue’s version no. 26, told by a sabotier from the Haute-Loire in 1876 focuses on a social world completely different from that in which a little girl takes a gift of food from her mother to her grandmother living in a cottage in the woods. In this version a father is simply absent while the girl, unnamed, and her grandmother are eaten in their home by a wolf. The father returns and “sees the wolf in bed; he realizes the wolf has eaten the mother and the little girl and goes away sadly.”80 This is a different kind of devastating invasion by someone rapacious, powerful and violent of a different kind of family. Probably as important as the changes in social actors and action is the resigned, defeated psychological mood at the conclusion. There is nothing of the “warning” or “coming of age” dimension here, nor do we get a sense of the self-reliant girl defeating the wolf’s intentions for her.

There is however one aspect of the “integral tale” that does appear in this 1876 version and that is that the wolf tricks the girl into eating some of her grandmother. This detail that Perrault allegedly “left out” to spare his audience serves the Zipes/Verdier reading of a prior “women’s” version that was then appropriated by culture-shaping males but it is also a point of discomfort since it creates a complicity with the wolf that appears not to fit with the empowerment theme. It is not surprising that it is their sensibilities, not those of Perrault’s projected audience, that are offended by the violence of the allegedly “earlier” tale and they need to defuse the horror connected with the act of a complicit devouring by celebrating it as “the young girl symbolically replac[ing] the grandmother by eating her flesh and drinking her blood.” There is however no sense in the tale that this is any sort of benign action; indeed, it is a full participation in the wolf’s devouring of the grandmother since the girl eats the portions that the wolf saves

80 Conte Populaire, 379 348 for her. We will take up the devouring theme again but for the moment it suffices to say that at the time of the telling no distinction was made between a rapacious and a benevolent devouring in the eyes of the “integral” tales’s cat who witnessed the proceedings and exclaimed “Phooey! . . . A slut is she who eats the flesh and drinks the blood of her granny.”81

To illustrate first, however, one further point about reading the “symbolic” details of the tales in forced and arguably inappropriate ways to suit a larger historical narrative we take up the Verdier/Zipes interpretive view of Delarue’s “integral” version that juxtaposes the wolf, allegedly the representative of “nature,” taking the “path of pins,” (épingles) and the girl, representative of a women’s “culture” taking the path where she “gathers needles” (aiguilles), these latter figuring for Verdier and Zipes’ narrative reading the social transmission of skills and the girl’s coming of age. Of course one could dismiss it all, as Darnton does, following Delarue again, as “the nonsense about paths of pins and needles and the cannibalizing of grandmother”82 but that would be unfair to the tellers of fifteen tales (including the integral tale) of the thirty-five appearing in Delarue, tellers for whom it was a detail worth including and no doubt suggested a direction of signification. The Verdier reading has the flaw that it does not address the other choice, the one made by the wolf, for pins, a choice somehow difficult to attribue to the “nature” the wolf is said to represent. It is not a crucial hermeneutical problem for us what the meaning of the choice could be but the latter could as well speak to the anatagonism between (needle-)work and leisure, making the moral point, as in at least one of the tales that with pins “one can decorate (s’attifer) oneself” while with needles “one must work.”83 This not to say that in her interpretive departure Verdier was necessarily wrong (if perhaps one-dimensional and less than satisfying) or that another reading is “right” or, worse, that other versions without pins and needles references or

81 Delarue, Conte Populaire, 373; cf., Zipes, “Trials,” 5-7.

82 Darnton, “Peasants Tell,” 62.

83 Delarue, Conte Populaire, 378. 349 with paths of thorns and stones, represent a “contaminated” instance of a “pure type.”84 The point is rather that it is the details of this sort, the tropes intertwined with the emplotments of the tales which tellers – of either gender and any time – know or choose to weave together to tell this and not that story, that matter because the specific appearances of tellings are what gives interpretive direction and what makes possible our connecting a particular telling with the world in which it occurs.

By this measure, what is one to make of the historical fiction told by Zipes and others about how a once-upon-a-time world when women held the dragon’s tongue, that is when women controlled certain petits récits to manage their lives, was overtaken by a new elite of “civilizing” males who captured that narrative power for a masculinizing reorganization of sexual socialization – according to which “the girl is raped or punished because she is guilty of not controlling her natural inclinations”85 ? Can the actual figures and, for that matter, the provenances of Perrault’s version of the tale be so easily shoe-horned into a meta-narrative of a progressive but gendered “domination?” A key element in reading the figural dimensions of the story about the girl and wolf, captured in Aarne’s and Thompson’s characterization of “The Glutton,” is the fact that the grandmother and the girl are eaten, not raped – an act some present academic readers seem to need to represent as a punishment – by a beast who eats beyond appetite to excess, who eats for the sake of eating. To reduce this to sexual predation seems an impoverishment of the narrative and figural power of such stories’ characters and actions. Clearly there is some truth to Verdier’s move to perceive the eating as a key figure, a trope around which meaning turns. Since cannibalism between grandmothers and grandchildren does not appear to have been a widespread problem in France at any time, one can only attach a figural significance to the two kinds of devouring in Delarue’s collection from the late nineteenth century and the double devouring in Perrault’s version of the late seventeenth. In Perrault, the wolf eats all of the grandmother and

84 Darnton, “Peasants Tell,” 16, passim.

85 J. Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, New York: Methuen, 1983, 29. 350 then the girl. End of story. In the majority of Delarue’s collection the wolf saves some of the grandmother’s flesh and blood for the girl to eat before he sets about to eat her, a denouement she avoids on a pretext and with a trick. The girl’s unconscious collaboration in the devouring, the horror of the discovery of what she had done as she assembles in her awareness, and with her famous questions, the monstrous and predatory impostor she is “in bed” with are all story elements whose complexity exceeds Perrault’s simpler story. The fact that they derive from a lower, probably working class, social environment, arguably the environment of the dispossessed, of the late nineteenth century suggests moreover a social figuration rather different from that Perrault could have had in mind.

Once freed from a forced and projective “sexual control” narrative,86 one might read this devouring figure, common to both generations of tales, as an act of overpowering appropriation – which does not necessarily exclude rape but certainly would not see the latter as punishment. They are in both historical time frames narratives about the presence and experiences of exploitive acts of social, psychological and, possibly, physical annihilation, acts of final dispossession. Delarue’s collected tales present as social figure the relationship between two (sometimes three) family generations, most often between the young and the old, those at the opposing ends of life who are relatively isolated and weak. They appear in a world where the young can be maneuvered into “eating” the old by rapacious and powerful idlers who, in the end, want to devour all. There is nothing here to suggest a pre-Perrault experience. One might as

86 For the record, I am not alone in rejecting the sexual- civilizational narrative; cf. M. Tatar, “Editor’s note” to “Little Red Riding Hood” in her The Annotated Brothers Grimm, New York: Norton, 2004, 142. In an interesting contribution by J. McGlathery, Fairy Tale Romance: The Grimms, Basile and Perrault, Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 1991, 55- 56, the idea that this is about devouring comes up but then is lost in that embarrassingly projective reading, already familiar from Zipes, by which little girls “harbor erotically tinged fantasies about being eaten alive by wolves.” (57) To which one can only say,(beyond: oh?) that this seems a less than mainstream notion, even by little girls’ standards, of what is erotic. 351 easily transform this into a social figure, a violent dispossession figure common to late nineteenth century artisanal and peasant families. It is about the passing of one generation’s “substance” to another (Verdier was certainly on this track) and about the moment when a predatory agent87 (a trusted uncle, say, or solicitor or accountant) has interposed himself, appropriated the grandmother’s “substance” and doles out a small portion to the niece. Her quick-witted decision to cut her losses and get out is not necessarily a liberation or comedic victory but an act of decremental recognition, a concession of defeat – at its height in that palpable resignation that ends the sabotier’s tale already mentioned –, and she is literally chased by the wolf back to her parental home, the grandmother-portion (and life option) gone, devoured. Delarue’s tellers were casting into narrative form a possibly not uncommon tragic comedy, a pervasive experience of women’s social destruction taking place below the “normal” surface of family and social appearances in the France of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The events that are the drama of Perrault’s tale differ from those in the Delarue collection not because of a simple difference of time-line but because they speak, through Perrault’s pen, to a different social world. Perrault’s tale does not yet exhibit a resigned ethical mood but wants to put forward, as I will explore in a moment, a remedy that yet sees hope in changing parents’ sense of obligation to their daughters. At the same time, however, the devouring as the central narrative figure remains a constant in both time frames of tellings and suggests elements of a temporal contiguity of experience leading one to consider, in the light of my discussion of Delarue’s later versions, a similar social moment in Perrault’s awareness as he observes the operations

87 A notion at least equally strong in “modern” parlance as the idea that the wolf is a seducer of young and old women is that the wolf is a financial predator. When we see an editorial headline, “Wolves in Africa” in the Financial Times, Oct.25, 2006, we know, at the outset and from the context, that this can not be about either wildlife or inappropriate sex but is about financial and other forms of predation and expropriation, as indeed it is. 352 of a rapacious outlaw power, here disguised, first, as “old neighbor wolf,”88 also preying on old women and young girls at the fringes of society. The child, sent “through a wood” with gifts from the mother to the grandmother, “did not know that it is dangerous to stop and listen to a wolf.” It is this subtle difference from the Delarue versions concerning the girl’s lack of preparedness for the encounter with the wolf that opens a different line of historical-narrative appreciation of not just this but other stories by Perrault. The fact that in Perrault’s version the wolf does not offer nor the girl eat parts of her grandmother speaks to a different kind of relationship, to a different social- psychological and relational moment, and it helps us to consider that his is not a story primarily addressed to children or to the subaltern. It suggests moreover that the “sexualizing” of the tales by both contemporary and even more so by later readers in fact covers over this equally plausible reading of the tale as it points to alternative and at least equally dire and dark social historical narratives.

Natalie Davis’ cautious tone toward Marc Soriano’s assertions about the “pure” and “profoundly popular” character of Perrault’s tales is well taken.89 When we look more closely at the social, intellectual and political constellations surrounding this professional courtier who could reinvent stories he had heard– and present some of them with a straight face to sessions at the Academy – a more difficult sorting out of stories and tellings and prospective audiences as well as of personal boundaries, preferences and intentions emerges. Contrary to Soriano’s characterization of Perrault as Colbert’s éminence grise, Orest Ranum has more appropriately reversed the relationship and called Perrault Colbert’s “creature.”90 One has the sense that Perrault was someone who, though entrusted with important work, not the least of which was to

88 This plot figure of disguises and deceptions, caught in the first line of Anne Sexton’s version of Little Red Riding Hood (“Many are the deceivers: . . .”; in Zipes, ed., Trials, 226ff) is common to many tales and deserves to be taken on analytically.

89 Society and Culture, 252-3.

90 O. Ranum, Paris in the Age of Absolutism, New York: Wiley, 1968, 266. 353 take attendance at the Academy’s meetings and dole out stipends for historians’ projects, was never taken completely seriously even by his patrons and employers. 91 Perhaps because he served openly as Colbert’s man among those “artisans of glory” that were paid to write “histories” comparing favorably Louis XIV’s rule to the deeds of ancient great rulers, he was not ever one of them and rather got his way through cabal and by the back stair. Tested by Colbert before employment to see if he could even write (where others were not), he had to learn to live with the esteem granted at court to someone like Racine who reputedly “never lost his Greek” and, conversely, with the contempt accorded someone like himself who never had it.92 He no doubt relished implementing Colbert’s carrot and stick methods to obtain attendance at the Academy and to remind the academics that they were only civil servants. Moreover, he took a social position apart from the mainstream of courtly social competition by his express choice of a life separate from his official obligations, a life focused on domesticity and a

91 There is a Perrault literature that goes into great detail concerning the variously traced and disputed authorships of the tales and the latter’s ill fit with Perrault’s purported “career” ambitions, all to argue that the tales are either someone else’s or mark a period of fugue, if not of outright madness, in Perrault’s life. Thus M. Soriano, Le Dossier Charles Perrault, Paris: Hachette, 1972 and, in Soriano’s footsteps, G. Gélinas, Enquête sur les Contes de Perrault, Paris: Imago, 2004. Their irritating “judicial” premises (dossier, enquête) aside, both works rely heavily on lengthy quotes from Perrault and others but read them inadequately and both veer constantly into unwarranted presuppositions and, especially Gélinas, forced pedantries that encourage the reader’s indifference to what this is supposed to be about.

92 O. Ranum, Artisans of Glory: Writers and Historical Thought in Seventeenth Century France, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980, 228-9, 260-2, passim; Perrault’s self-effacing version of how he came to be a member of the Academy is revealing – even as Colbert’s nominee he was passed over, with Colbert’s agreement, several times – as is the fact that his focus throughout his memoirs is on his and his brothers’ public careers and he says virtually nothing about his private affairs, thoughts and writings. C. Perrault, Memoirs of My Life, J. Zarucchi, transl., Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1989, 83-4 and passim. 354 wide circle of friends for whom the Perrault house became a meeting place that included the heirs of an earlier précieux’ rebellion against sterile classicism and coquetterie, a kind of counter-salon for liberal lights like Fontenelle or the young Catherine Bernard, a place where young précieuses, like Perrault’s cousine Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, could find an audience for their views on new kinds of experimental mutualities and equalities in relationships between men and women.93 To get at the puzzle about the broader provenances and the contextual dimensions of Perrault’s tales and to discover their narrative direction we might profit from taking a closer look at the several ambiguities that came together in this near-insider who chose in his social experiences to embrace the position of outsider that his peers at court forced on him.

It is a one-dimensional and misleading historical narrative about Perrault that reduces him to a mere anti-feminist functionary in a “male dominated civilizing process.”94 The first golden age of French baroque feminism had been overcome, if not buried, by the new cultural order of the Sun King,95 yet Perrault nevertheless took on Boileau’s misogynist Satire X and his association with the précieuses places him among women who rejected the official culture.96 It comes as no surprise that it was through

93 The best summary of Perrault’s intellectual and social milieu I have found is in H. Kortum, Charles Perrault und Nicolas Boileau: der Antike-Streit im Zeitalter der klassischen französischen Literatur, Berlin: Rütten & Loening. 1966,52-71, passim; cf. also E. Mague, “De L’origine des Contes de Perrault” and J. Roche-Mazon, “Les Histoires du Temps Passé de Charles Perrault,” in Roche-Mazon, ed., Autour des Contes des Fées, Paris: Didier, 1968. 153-4, 160-8. Zipes’ assertion that Perrault “had a low opinion of women” (“Tribulations,” 8) seems far off the mark.

94 Zipes, “Tribulations,” 13.

95 I. MacLean, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature, 1610-1650, Oxford: Clarendon, 1977.

96 Cf., D. Stanton, “The Fiction of Préciosité and the Fear of Women” in C. Caudin, et.al., eds., Feminist Readings: French texts/American Contexts, Yale University Press: Yale French Studies, 1981; and Zipes’ Fairy Tales, 25-6, for a “separate spheres” view. 355 this group which included, besides L’Héritier, downwardly mobile gentlewomen and other declassés, that one can trace connections reaching from the stories told by lower class nursemaids and governesses to those told by more elevated salon women, which latter could, on occasion, as in the case of Madame Camus de Melsons, “translate” such stories for the court and, of course, for Perrault. It is difficult to conceive of Perrault in terms of a metahistorical narrative that requires him to betray his sources and the women of his circle for the sake of a career that, within limits, was secure and, in his own mind, obviously had nowhere left to go.

Perrault was not the literary thief who, for the sake of an alleged broad strategy of male domination, decapitated and misappropriated a complex, many-faceted and feminist (when it wanted to be) tradition. The women narrators did not disappear after, let alone because of, Perrault. The tales were evidently shared openly, even for separate publications, among the members of his circle, and every member was clearly free to develop his or her version of the “same” tale. The tale “Riquet à la houppe” found publication, for example and all within a short time, in collections by L’Héritier and Catherine Bernard as well in Perrault’s Contes. Similarly “Peau d’Ane,” “Cendrillon,” and “Les Fées” exist in different versions by Perrault and L’Héritier. The record of combined oral and printed traditions – which extends very far beyond what I mention here – included both men and women at several interactive as well as separate levels of society and went on within, around and even without Perrault. The question to ask does not concern the degree to which Perrault redirected a “prior” and “feminine” tradition into the cultural channels of an alleged fusion of “bourgeois” and “aristocratic” form of “civility” in a “male” civilization but rather what Perrault’s version of these tales meant to him; and here Zipes gets the narrative exactly wrong. Perrault was a critic and not an advocate of what appeared to him as the inadequate, if not outright victimizing and stultifying, preparation of young women for the world of courtly social relations that awaited them.

Even though he was a courtier to the end he was not bound by the classics, by a knowledge of the Greek and the other ancient mythologies that were the mark, and the

356 limitation, of the well-educated. Rather he took to the fairy tales’ spirit, to their almost infinite capacity to subvert and break apart the classical meta-narratives. He put to use these petits récits as contrary, insubodinate fragments broken out of the corpus of closed and known mythic constructs (as well as of attendant social figures) in the manner of any narrative modernizer whose intent is to register through these stories his discontents, his analytical-psychological perspective97 and his critique of certain social relations evident but not openly recognized nor spoken about in his time. Perhaps it was because he was a professional courtier that he remained at some distance from the mirrors and fanfares by which many of his peers measured themselves; he could not but help turn a sharply critical eye on his colleagues and masters and he did so with the only genre available that permitted one to say the ineffable, with that narrative lingua franca that circulated among his several social circles, viz., fairy tales. He drew a distinction between such stories as were told in his clique and the older mythological fables, subtly favoring the former because, as he asserts in his 1697 preface to the Contes, they reveal what happens in “inferior families;” i.e., in families that are “inferior” not because of their social position but because in such families children are inadequately prepared for life by parents telling stories that were, to his mind, devoid of reason.98 Whether he alluded here to a recognition of his own misdirection in childhood is open to question but it is clear that as an adult he turned to fairy tales to meditate as openly as one dared on the scandal of what was happening in private social life in the absolute state whose “modernity” he was paid to acclaim.

From this perspective one can challenge the often-repeated assertion that Perrault eliminated the presumed horrors of the what have come to be seen as the

97 Cf. Soriano, Dossier, 314, who makes the subtle and creditable point that what attracted Perrault to “naive” narratives was that they were “halfway between the deliberate and the unconscious” in those “obscure spaces where the time of each individual arranges itself [entre en composition] with the long duration (longue durêe] of history.”

98 Roche-Mazon,”Histoires,” 166; the dedication is cited with a rather different significance in Zipes, “Tribulations,” 10. 357 “earlier” versions in the Delarue collection to please allegedly refined tastes of an upper class audience. No doubt he had his own standards of propriety and aptness of language99 but, given the time line, there is no evidence possible that could show that the macabre details that appear in Delarue’s tales were excised by Perrault. Nor is there evidence that he chose language for these tales to please elevated sensibilities. It is not as if Perrault was averse to horror or the macabre. The details that appear in Delarue are simply from another world of experience that stimulated other kinds of devouring figures as well as other kinds of resolution. The horrors of the social and psychological violences that Perrault knew first hand and is not afraid to talk about are those of violent and even murderous husbands who rule their wives absolutely, to the death, and who tease them with prohibitions and temptations and then punish them when they succumb to curiosity . . . or, more likely, to a sense of self-preservation requiring the wife know as much about the person she is married to as possible. He has, moreover, no qualms in revealing the savagery of those who “devour” the children of the poor that cross their path and who are so blinded by their urgent greed that they even annihilate their own children once the little golden crowns by which they identify them have been removed. The inner worlds of the poor and of the naive and ill-prepared girl with the red cap were never as accessible to Perrault as that of the wolf, of Bluebeard, of Little Thumbling’s ogre, who were well known to him in his milieu and it is on the ground of this experience that he staked out his position. His stories were not “without reason” and he had more on his mind than simply to amuse, let alone to titillate, or to blame young and old women for their victimization as a sign of their insufficient self-control; his stories point rather to the ogres doing what they wanted with people behind the walls of their chateaus and to the apparently “civilized,” to the “falsely sweet” or “mealy mouthed” wolves (“ces loups doucereux”)100 who populated his social world. It was not only their sexual but as likely their material-financial predations against girls and old women that Perrault could observe or hear about in his circle of story tellers, many of

99 Roche-Mazon, “Les Histoires,” 166-70.

100 Zipes’“docile” wolves, Trials, 71, seems an odd translation choice. 358 whom were women.101 The contemporary and subsequent sexualizations of the tale – in feminist disguise! – collaborate with an erasure that in effect blocks from our gaze the “devouring,” the effectual annihilation figure that is the focus of the story.

What the versions of Little Red Riding Hood meant to the nursemaids, précieuses, and courtesans among whom they circulated before, around and after Perrault is something still largely outside of our historical understanding. Nor is it even remotely certain that for Perrault it was a tale about a girl who, because she was a natural coquette who was insufficiently inhibited to be considered civilized, contributes to her own sexual assault which may then be represented as a punishment, as Zipes and others would have it. Not only does this leave out granny’s fate but also one has to ask: where is the evidence for coquetterie? It seems an odd logic by which the latter is perceived as the feminist threat102 when Perrault’s point seems to be, if a point about coquettes is there to be made, a concern for the nurtured ignorance of the girl and her resulting illusion of being in control in the midst of a murderous deception. His fundamentally précieux position rejected what we now call a “separate spheres” feminism where women have power in “their sphere” separate from spheres of male power. That the spheres remain unequal and that the male sphere “surrounds” and still can manipulate and exploit the “separate” world of women’s power is a foundational perception in Perrault’s fairy tales and in many others told by both men and women. As his 1697 dedication would suggest, he was not interested in advocating repressed children but wanted children to be instructed in “reason,” children who, like Tom Thumb, were not blinded by mindlessly doting parental love to the appearance of danger and were clever enough to react and save themselves. In this sense, “Le Petit Poucet” is the exact opposite of “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge” and both are aimed at parents and at

101 Perrault’s female contemporaries and successors who carry the contes traditions on through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries are explicit that, both for women and men, it is male predators, often husbands or other “familial” associates, that are the tales’ focus. Klotz, Kunstmärchen, 79- 81.

102 Zipes, “Tribulations,” 13f. 359 that classical education – threatening to become the standard for the children of bourgeois strivers – whose goal it was to turn out young girls who were, in the words of the summarizing moralité, “pretty, well-finished and well-mannered.” By the time we get to Delarue’s story tellers, the little girls have learned Tom Thumb’s lesson but by then even an “escape” is only a lesser evil, marking these as indeed the “later” stories they are. Here are dimensions of the “civilizing process” both Perrault and Elias were aware of but that do not figure in Zipes’ functionalist narrative of that “process.”

Perrault’s quarrel with the ancient authorities was genuine and had more than one direction. He was intelligent enough to see as clearly as his great enemy in the famous querelle, Boileau, that from the state’s perspective, their argument served merely such propagandistic absurdities as the “modernist” proposal that Louis was Greater than Alexander.103 Perrault’s chief commitment to modernity focused rather on his personal writings, his private salon and family. He was among those who welcomed a sense of and concern for affectivity and equality in the domestic sphere which could not sustain the austerely hierarchical and aristocratic, neo-stoic notions of family current under early modern absolutism. This latter remodeling of the classical oikos, the “good economy” serving the head of house, was threatening to remain a dominant influence and, from Perrault’s perspective, posed a danger to a refiguring of domestic privacy as a space offering opportunity for more egalitarian and personal forms of expression between the sexes and the generations. Perrault seems to have feared the possibility of a hybrid form of the family in which the exploitive, classical-aristocratic attitudes might attach themselves to and conceal themselves behind a sham respect for domesticity and privacy. What is remarkable about those of his stories that reveal the workings of “inferior families” is that the acts of dismemberment and devouring take place in private, between familiars, behind closed doors – the repeated opening of the latch of grandma’s door or, better still, Bluebeard’s wife unlocking the forbidden door that concealed a space of terror inside an already enclosed domestic space. Privacy, Perrault understood, required more than itself; it required new efforts at social reason and

103 Ranum, Artisans, 296. 360 civility not new efforts at sexual repression.

It seems off the mark to reduce Perrault to a mere functionary serving in what remains a half-baked narrative about a “male dominated civilizing process” based on a misreading of Elias’ concept that can authorize this forced, self-revealing argument about purported efforts at “sexual control.” A contrary narrative would be that Perrault’s work is a consistent critique of a reactionary-modernist aristocratic vision of social and family relations which not only showed no signs of abating but was in fact drawing new strength from and spreading with the help of the very genuinely modernist ideas and sentiments about the meaning and opportunities of privacy that Perrault had adopted as his own and wrote to defend. He knew from his daily contacts there were no civilizing winds of social change blowing through the courtiers’ hedges and wigs. This was particularly true of the treatment of women that he could observe, women who had fallen into one or another category of the socially marginalized, of those marked down to be available for consumption. The hierarchical logic inside the gender values of medieval aristocracy, according to which women outside and below the corporate-familial order could be raped with impunity and without remorse,104 remained in operation unchallenged even beyond the time of Perrault’s quiet protests, these latter themselves marginalized and forgotten as such. The next serious attack on this persistent and successfully “privatized” vision (and practice) of socially elevated family life and sexual relations occurred in the 1780s with the Marquis de Sade’s arguably mad turning of his life into art to expose the hidden pathologies and terrors that were possible in the wealth-driven, highly privatized and “aristocratized” sexuality he grew up in. Not to be forgotten is that his 120 Days of Sodom is a parable about the escalating sexual savagery of successful war profiteers, free to pursue their “natures” inside their fortified retreats. Neither Perrault’s naive Little Red Cap nor Delarue’s variously quick-witted girls-who- escape can be recognized in the “new women” of the enlightenment, not in the new Héloise nor in Faust’s Gretchen, the latter, for Zipes, the archetypal seductee-who-is-

104 Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, New York: Ungar, 1957, 24. 361 punished.105 It is de Sade who is the intermediary between Perrault and Delarue and if we can recognize their different heroines anywhere it is in the instructively intertwined fates of De Sade’s Justine and Juliette. 106

This necessarily changes the sense by which Perrault’s and the many later versions of Little Red Riding Hood can be written into a historical narrative of that Eliasian civilizing process that Zipes invokes as his master-narrative. Elias’ sociology was in a radical Hegelian spirit in that this “process” was an open-ended “intertwining” (Verflechtung), one that was not mutually cooperative nor “controllable” by any mere coalition of classes. It was rather effectively out of control because it was sustained by the dialectics of mutual otherings and self-productions that in Hegel’s framework were, altogether, the unending contest between mastery and enslavement at all levels of social experience. Elias redirects us to look at the articulations between and among social and other classes as these needed to seek their advantages in both co-operations and conflicts with each other (as well as internally among themselves) in such institutional and “business” arrangements as were required by the several and historically specific absolutist-corporatist “court” formations that Elias has taught us to examine analytically.107 It is the dialectical encounters, the unpredictably interactive and ongoing “intertwinings,” the social and linguistic articulations among the participants in this court figure108 that are at the focus of Elias’ work. Arguably it is these that Perrault

105 Zipes, “Tribulations,” 55.

106 A. Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, New York: Harper, 1980; P. Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1983, II, 478-81.

107 N. Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1976. II, 387, passim.

108 Given Eric Wolf’s personal encounters with and acknowledged debt to Norbert Elias it seems evident that Wolf’s historical-narrative re-figuring of concepts about modes of production and about the relations among social formations expresses itself in an “articulation” concept that is analogous to what Elias understood as the participants’ intertwinings in a social figuration. Both are open-ended perceptions not bound by a 362 addresses, in a voice of critique and even dissent, with his stories. This is to say that his stories can at no time be used to represent what is claimed to be, but in fact could not be, a single most important product of the civilizing process, even if that latter is represented as the emergence of alleged civilité. Such a reductivist construction vulgarizes both Elias’ concept and the historical complexities of the French version of the process.

Zipes draws from Elias a perception of an emerging alliance between absolutist France’s aristocracy and bourgeoisie and in that framework he can figure Perrault as one who is “explicitly seeking to ‘colonize’ the internal and external development of children in the mutual interests of a bourgeois-aristocratic elite.”109 Not only Elias but the main body of French historiography would reject such a fusion of bourgeois and aristocrats into a single-minded elite, to say nothing about this elite’s ideologues’ alleged concern with the sexual repression of the young in order to unburden themselves of sexual temptation. Elias’ perspective brings us closer to an empathic understanding of what was indeed a Verflechtung (which is not the same as a self-conscious “growing together”) of the different and varied aristocratic and bourgeois classes, with all having, in the intertwined business and political worlds that focused on “the court,” to evolve their own new forms of “rationality” and new means to curb their accustomed or spontaneous reactions in order to gain the requisite freedom of movement and political advantage, most often against each other, that such new behavioral practices of “reserve,” taking the “long term view” and “civility” could offer. This runs counter to a narrative about a dominant aristocratic-bourgeois alliance where the agreement for sexual repression became the terms of the alliance.110 Perrault’s and other versions of the rigidly conceived “materialism” but are free to grasp and narrate manifold “experimental” realities and appearances; cf. chaps. 3,4 above.

109 Zipes, “Tribulations,” 11.

110 Elias, Zivilisation, II, 369-97; cf. A. Blok, “hinter Kulissen” in P. Gleichman, et. al., eds., Materialien zu Norbert Elias Zilisationstheorie, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1982, 170-91.

363 story rather serve to help probe and illuminate the self-reflexive intelligence and the rational considerations and possible intentions that informed the tellers in their different places in the conjunctures of social relations. Such stories assist an empathic historical analysis as we observe how they were being figured and re-figured in every encounter even as they were themselves contained by evolving and intertwined historical social formations.

We turn, finally, to the two stories that the brothers Grimm published under the title “Rotkäppchen.” There is evidence that Perrault’s tale entered the German literary world shortly after the first publication of the Contes. A Dutch edition, published a year after the first French edition, was found in the Hofbibliothek of Karlsruhe – which does not of course tell us when it got there. By the time of the German Enlightenment we find Gottsched and Herder commenting on Perrault and in 1770 there is a French/German edition out of Berlin, a German-only one also from Berlin in 1780 and then two more from Gotha and Weimar respectively in 1790.111 There is no need, as a particular cultural-political genuflection fashion of the last two decades seems to require, to invoke French nursemaids for German “households steeped in the French tradition” (Zipes) or a Huguenot bridge (Rölleke) between Perrault and the Grimms. Perrault’s stories circulated in his social world among different kinds and levels of tellers and audiences and the same seems to have been true of the subsequent tellings and there is simply no way to be sure of the various avenues the tale actually took to get to the two women who were then to become the contributors of the two versions the Grimms published – nor does it even seem all that important, given that our interest is not in the regional genealogies and timings of transmissions ( albeit not per se uninteresting areas of investigation) but in the specific narratives and figurations pointing to a projected historical location for every telling. Drawing up specious charts and diagrams and genealogies to demonstrate that the Grimms retold Perrault’s version seems not to serve when we know the former’s oral sources and can readily recognize that neither version is

111 H. Veiten, “The Influence of of Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l’oie on German Folklore,” Germanic Review, 5(1930), 4-5. 364 at all like Perrault’s.112 Rather it is by projecting the Grimms’ collected versions against the social worlds of their respective tellers that we can arrive at a much more satisfactory sense (than what an imposition of a functionalist refiguring of Elias’ civilization theory can achieve) of the tales’ historical qualities as the products of two different minds confronting analogous, even related, but for each still different historical circumstances.

The longer of the two Grimms’ versions of Little Red Riding Hood is the one that survived in editions that came after the Grimms’ several subsequent re-publications, which in all instances included both versions. It is probably significant that the second shorter “version,” perhaps too much of a satire on the first, should disappear from view once the Grimms no longer controlled the stories’ reproductions in print. The now standard longer version was contributed by Jeanette Hassenpflug, one of the well- educated young ladies of Kassel so admired by Heinz Rölleke in his discounting of the contribution made by non-bourgeois story tellers.113 Although it has the same title as Perrault’s version and, like the latter, does not contain the cannibalism familiar from Delarue’s tales there is very little to connect it with Perrault.114 The different ending of the Hassenpflug version in which a huntsman rescues the girl and her grandmother also occurs in several of the Delarue tales but, given the actual sequence of these tellings, it is just possible that these were French “folk” adaptations of the Grimms’ prior version.

112 Velten cited in Zipes, “Tribulations,” 14; cf. H. Rölleke,”Von Menschen, denen wir Grimms Märchen verdanken” in his Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm: Quellen und Studien, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2000, 28-9. Rölleke, not surprisingly, wants to establish a bloodline, a Stammtafel, argument for the tales’ provenances.

113 See chapter four above.

114 Which is not to say that the Grimms were unaware of an unredeemed devouring motif beyond that of Perrault. In their own notations to the tale they recount a Swedish popular song version in which the girl’s betrothed riding to her rescue arrives to find only the remains of an arm. J. and W. Grimm, “Anmerkungen zu den einzelnen Märchen” reproduced in H. Rölleke, ed., Brüder Grimm. Kinder und Hausmärchen, Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980, III,59. 365 The Hassenpflug story has a richness of detail not matched by any of the French tellings. It is however a richness with few resonances, one that decorates but adds little when we learn, for example, that the girl was taking cake and wine to her granny – which one could, if one wanted to, read as an indicator of bourgeois social status or conversely, given what we now know from Sidney Mintz why cake was the food of the poor115 and given that there is wine and there is wine, that it was indeed a gift of welfare. The girl’s picking flowers in the woods is a narrative device common to most versions of the tale at all our three periods of its reproduction in that it gives the wolf time to get to grandma’s house before the girl, and this action, with the possible exception of the ambiguous needles and pins tropes in Delarue, carries little weight in the narrative’s central figural direction which is about devouring. What singles out the Hassenpflug version is its didactic tone directed at children specifically, urging them to keep their promise of obedience; this is foreign to any of the French versions, including Perrault’s moralité. The one figure that does some work in her version, an element already present in Tieck and absent from Perrault and from Delarue’s “integral” version, is the rescue of the grandmother and child by the huntsman. The wolf’ s absolutely annihilating devouring in the French versions here becomes a mere “swallowing,” (verschlucken) , a kind of imprisonment in the wolf’s body the less terrible because it proves reversible once the wolf is killed. The rescue, when combined with the expressly pedagogic inflection, suggests that this may indeed have been a bourgeois Kunstmärchen of sorts even though it was presumably written down during an oral presentation. It has the feeling of a pre-Biedermeier vision of the good social order, a place where huntsmen, by this time the rural population’s links to the Obrigkeiten, to the state, represent not just the regulatory and ordering power of males (Zipes) but exercise, in the field, the authorities’ protection against freebooting “wolves” and outlaws. Gone is Tieck’s focus of just a couple of years before on the social tragedy of what it is that produces “wolves” and we are left with the Hassenpflug household’s early Biedermeier mood of comedic satisfaction in an instructive moral parable made possible by the rescue. At the end the huntsman walks off with the wolf’s pelt, the grandmother gets her wine and cake and the

115 Sweetness and Power [ ] 366 little girl returns to the safety of “home” and, enriched by the experience of a close call, reaffirms her obedience to – and re-enclosure in the separate sphere of – her mother’s commands, “for all her livelong days.”

There is a way to connect this telling, however, to the French versions that came before and after it when we think it in the context of a solution to the privatized exploitation figure that was the focus of the previous discussion of possible social frameworks for Perrault’s and Delarue’s versions. In the Hassenpflug story the state, in the guise of a Jäger, i.e., of a social triple entendre (hunter, gamekeeper, rifleman), is the only hope, at least in this narrative, for the defenseless against being swallowed up by agents who prey, behind closed doors, on those who leave ( or who live or are sent outside of) the security of their families. Disobedience (not sexual transgression) is punishable by abandonment to the wolf. Read in this light, the story is bound more closely to its teller if we consider that it comes from a young daughter (and sister) living in and facing possible dispossession by a family run by and for a patriarchal line of conservative office holders on the rise.116 In recognition that prospects of the state’s intervention on behalf of the weak were a thing of the past in Jerome Bonaparte’s Westphalian kingdom and in the face of worse things on the horizon for women of her class,117 Jeannette Hassenpflug’s liberating huntsman may already have been a nostalgia (Tieck’s dull witted suitor seems closer to the mark) but as wish-figure it resonates more closely with the teller’s social location and beggars a reading that sees the tale as a

116 T. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800-1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat, Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1983, 375.

117 Interesting takes on some specific contextual conditions in play are H. Reif, Westfälischer Adel, 1770-1860: Vom Herrschaftsstand zur regionalen Elite, Göttingen, 1979 and B. Wunder, “Rolle und Struktur staatlicher Bürokratie in Frankreich und Deutschland” in H. Berding, et. al., eds., Deutschland und Frankreich im Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1989; also A. Lüdtke, “Der starke Staat” in L. Niethammer, ed., Bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1990; foundational readings in Rosenberg, Kehr, Koselleck et. al. remain necessary. 367 socially disembodied francophobe cartoon.118

The second version of the tale the Grimms reproduced in all the editions they edited connects with but bears almost no similarity to Jeannette Hassenpflug’s story. Its one similarity is with the later Delarue tales in that the girl escapes by means of a trick; and there again, given the actual timings of the tellings and the, by contrast, despairing defeat in the later figuring of the escape, the questions about “influences” and contexts seems wide open. This second version119 begins as a response to the first (“It is also told . . .”) and it begins well enough with a girl who, being sent “another time” with “baked goods” (Gebackenes) to granny’s house, has learned her lesson and knows to ignore the wolf and to go straight to her destination. Here is where any similarity or connection ends and a completely different story, conceivably a counter-fiction, appears. This second telling goes a step further by suggesting that such laudable obedience may not be enough in a world of wolves that will not take no for an answer and where there is never a huntsman around when you need one. The wolf follows the girl to grandmother’s place and sits in siege on the roof to await her return home in the dark. There is, one needs to say, nothing sexual even vaguely implied in this story. Rather, the girl tells the grandmother that if the encounter had not happened in broad daylight she would have been “devoured” (“aufgefressen”). The narrative projected by the figure of a wolf couched on a darkening roof is one of plain terror and it is the grandmother who springs into action to allay their understandable fear. She has the girl fill a trough beside the house with the water in which she had boiled sausages the day before and the wolf, attracted by the smell, slides off the roof and drowns. His tumble is terror-turned-to- comedy: “old sausage water” is just funny by itself and baiting the trap with it to destroy the greedy, indiscriminating destroyer is not only a rare irony in the genre but verges on the sublime.

It is not that women controlled tales in a time long past but they did so in the

118 Jäger, “Jakobinermütze”.

119 I am following and translating from Rölleke, Brüder Grimm, I, 159-60. 368 midst of an alleged decapitation of a women’s story culture by males. This second version is clearly a response to the first, to what is perceived by this teller as a version by another woman teller, one that already adhered to narrative conventions that were acquiring the repetitive qualities of a mythic enclosure. The second teller meant to break with what was clearly perceivable as an already iconic narrative devolution that was evidently incomplete, that did not speak to the relations between victims and predators as this teller perceived them. Not only did a clever woman and a girl for once defend themselves but the sense of where their payoff was is also different. In contrast to the rewards distributed at the end of the first tale, this telling simply ends with the girl, freed from the unwanted attentions of an urgent greed, going home in good cheer. There enters, however, this tragic undertone, analogous to that in Tieck and in anticipation of the tone of some of Delarue’s tales, in that the grandmother’s “solution” is that of someone old who, along with the young, has been written out of the civil community, someone who is thrown back on her own limited, sausage-water pathetic, resources for self-defense. This self-defense figure requires, one has to add moreover, a counter- annihilation, a counter-violence that itself is a desperate, by its very nature a self- damaging action.

This second modest telling has done with the “consumer” and maternal admonition affectations of the first and expresses itself in plain but evocative formulations: “[the wolf] wished her a good day but his eye was evil.” A different sensibility is evident as well in its break with the “typical” emplotment and in the victims’ rejection of the role normally assigned to them. Such a spirit of narrative resistance appears in other stories in the Grimms’ collection as well, particularly in stories where the protagonists and their actions look for ways to evade and subvert the logics of the exploitive and socially divisive systems of military, state and other kinds of power to which the lower class tellers of such tales had, along with everyone else, to adjust their lives.120 Compared to the pedagogical pretensions and excessive prettiness of the first version, the net effect of which is that it talks down to an imagined child, this

120 See the previous two chapters. 369 second story speaks about and to a lower class experience from the inside, its darker mood – despite the escape – characteristic of several tales in the Delarue collection as well.

And that brings us back to the teller whom the Grimms identified as that “Marie” that used to be known as “Old Marie,” the cook and housekeeper in the family that Wilhelm Grimm married into, whom Heinz Rölleke’s apparently successful campaign to get the academic community to eliminate any lower class provenances of the tales has now replaced with Marie Hassenpflug from the story-rich Hassenpflug household. In the previous chapter I outlined my reasons for my unwillingness to take this step not only because I found Rölleke’s evidence for the new Marie’s status as source to be circumstantial and very thin121 but also because it was my sense that Rölleke was engaged in a silencing, in an exclusion and dispossession of a lower class narrative intelligence, not the least of which could reside among women at lower end of their own social class who were perhaps aware of the meaning of downward social mobility even from having experienced childhood in a socially elevated or upwardly mobile family of origin. Typical of his attitude is that he hedges his assignment of authorship by dismissing this second version of the tale as in any case “insignificant,”122 which it

121 A source Rölleke likes to cite as evidence for the new Marie’s authorship is her younger brother Ludwig’s memoirs of this early period when Marie Hassenpflug was, according to Rölleke, contributing stories.(Märchen, 19, 34) A sleuthing reading however of what he remembers actually undercuts some of Rölleke’s narrative, especially the separation of the times and places when the stories could have been told. The new Marie was in her early twenties and the world of storytelling was new to her, according to her brother. She had found admission to the Grimms’ through the Engelhardt family and not her own, and had joined a little club (Kränzchen) that met regularly in the Grimms’ apartment next to the Wilds’ apothecary shop, that is with “old Marie” within easy hailing distance, to exchange views on elevated subjects and popular stories.

122 “Die ‘stockhessischen Märchen’ der ‘Alten Marie’” in his Märchen, 12; and interestingly he even forgets this second version exists when he implies that there would be no story if the girl had not strayed from the path and had gone straight to 370 certainly was not to the Grimms nor, one suspects, to the teller. There is no way to resolve the issue of who exactly contributed this tale with the sources presently available and perhaps both Maries contributed stories. Whichever of the two told this second tale, it was told by someone who had an empathic sense for the fear of socially powerless and unprotected women becoming the focus of a persistent predator; it was an empathy that looked more deeply and beyond the vanities and comforts that animate the first version and offers a counter-version to critique Jeannette’s more obviously “bourgeois” and state-trusting tale heralding that Biedermeier complacency with repression in which it would find its greatest resonance and, indeed, bury the second version under conditions of a growing mass audience. This Marie, if she was not the old Marie in Hermann Grimm’s memoir as I still think she was, had nevertheless learned, somehow, to read her own experience with social weakness into a story about the necessarily self-reliant and lonely defiance of a poor old woman defending her niece’s right to live against stupid and greedy predators.

grandmother’s house, Märchen, 287. 371 Part 3 Histories

9. Peasants Against the State in the Body of Anna Maria Wagner: An Austrian Infanticide in 1832 (1995)

Infanticide, as a historical issue, has been embedded in analytical narratives that marginalize the phenomenon in ways that resonate with the “original” narrative marginalizations at the moment of historical occurrence. By building on the 'social reproduction' model of demographic behaviour - following Viazzo and others - and by examining archival evidence from household inventories, court files and gynecological hospital records to focus on a particularly revealing Austrian infanticide case, we can argue that householders in post-1750 Austria, losing control over inheritance to an interventionist state, resorted to extreme measures, including infanticide, to balance their 'social reproduction' accounts and protect their patrimonies. In the process there emerged both private and public languages that suppressed a conscious awareness of these dire but 'necessary' acts. When we subject the sources to a narrative-critical reading and pay attention to the figurations in play in women’s experience, the oscillations in everyday life of ritual and non-ritual moments, to the ritual disguising of moments of necessary murder, of necessary destructions as these come up in the course of “normal” everyday life we can begin to develop an empathy perspective that has to reject any notion that everyday life is unpressured and free.

As an object for investigation, infanticide offers a good example of how the apparently marginal may be a gateway to the deeper puzzles of a culture. Historians' simultaneous attraction and repulsion in the face of evidence that points toward the murder of “innocents” has led them either toward vehement and elaborate denials of the phenomenon or toward embedding it in framing narratives that explain the murders epiphenomenally as tragic byproducts or mere symptoms of other, not directly related - and therefore not immediately accountable - processes in a given historical culture, Moreover, where infanticide was once merely a special problem in demographic anthropology or history, subsumed under questions of fertility and infant mortality, it has more recently emerged as part of the discussion in women's history. This is clearly a 372 further marginalizing move but it also constitutes, as so often with such moves, a creative detour. While good work toward disclosing and clarifying formerly hidden and repressed dimensions of infanticide is being done from this perspective, it remains a modification of an essentially modernist narrative that perceives women's progression from pre-modern to modern forms of infanticide in a marginal nexus of illegitimacy, shame, poverty, the compulsion to continue working, the dissolution of family 'controls' and, most recently, of growing “female criminallty.”1 The latter discussion sees infanticide as a byproduct of processes of state modernization, of a temporarily violent 'disciplining' of women's “lifeworld” that was itself only part of a broader and necessary discrimination against subaltern behaviors generally. To take a significant step back from this multiple analytical marginalization of infanticide requires us to reexamine in detail specific historical instances of infanticide and to recontextuallze this alleged “women's crime” closer to a forgotten location in the matrix of fertility and inheritance politics. In the materials under examination here, we find not only evidence that males were the driving force behind some acts of infanticide but also that the intertwined collusions and liabilities of the state and of the class of household heads in this crime constitute a story that has nothing to do with the pains of modernization but everything with the debt-driven reconstruction of the dynastic tribute institutions of eighteenth century Austria. With evidence about a specific peasant family milieu from 1830s Austria in which an infanticide occurred, and with certain relevant contextual information about attempts by the Austrian tribute state to intervene in the family arrangements and inheritance dispositions of the subject population, it is possible to demonstrate that, in the Austrian case, the still barely visible and repressively feminized history of infanticide can be turned inside-out to illuminate some of the central contradictions of this ill-fated historical culture.

The Wagner Case

It is a tradition of infanticide literature - to which I will adhere - to draw on court

1 Richard van Dülmen, Frauen vor Gericht: Kindsmord in der frühen Neuzeit, Frankfurt: Fischer, 1991. 373 records for individual cases of infanticide. One problem with this tradition is that it often results in analyses that first extract a few illustrative and particularly shocking or patl1etic details for narrative authenticity and then move quickly toward establishing what appear to be the quantifiable and therefore common features among several instances of these crimes. What is often lost thereby is a primary focus on the narrative logic unfolding within individual cases and, particularly, on the premeditative aspects of the necessarily long waiting period leading up to the murder itself. Among the infanticide prosecutions I have found for the Upper Austrian region in the period from about 1650 to 1850, one of the richest sources is the file concerning Anna Maria Wagner, 19 years old, an innkeeper's daughter who worked for her father and stepmother as a servant and who bore a child in her parents’ stables in the summer of 1832.2 She apparently immediately strangled the child and concealed it for later burial. Circumstances led to her arrest, followed by an inquisitorial investigation lasting four months and a conviction in a provincial court. Her final fate remains unknown but the last document in the case file is a pre-sentencing recommendation by a court physician that, since she was of slight build and weak, she could be disciplined with fasting and labor but not with beatings. There is indirect evidence that she was sentenced to hard labor in thee Vienna fortifications. Her father paid the court costs. In the proceedings she was questioned four times and the father of the child twice. In addition we have the transcripts of ten other interrogations including those of Anna Maria's father, stepmother and sister, of the father of the child's father, of a local wise woman, the midwife and several neighbors. The story that emerges from the various testimonies is, in outline, as follows: Anna Maria shared a bed with her twelve year old sister Resi in the cellar where Simon, the hired man, kept his belongings; she and Simon had sexual intercourse on a weekly basis there since Christmas 1831. From her inspection of the bedsheets, the stepmother noticed that Anna Maria had stopped menstruating and reported it to her husband. The latter summoned Anna Marla and got step-mother and daughter to agree on a specious -

2 Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv (OÖLA), Linz, Austria: Herrschaftsarchiv Freistadt, Vol. 11. 374 but linguistically intriguing - story about a scare having 'blocked her blood.’ Anna Maria then consulted a wise woman who gave her something 'to return her period.' When this failed she said nothing further to her father, who had, in her words, 'enough cross to bear.' Both the innkeeper and his wife, on separate occasions, offered her 'necessary' linen, in case she was pregnant, but she persistently denied her condition. When finally, late in the pregnancy, she broke her silence and spoke to Simon about it, he told her that he had discussed it with his father and that they both were willing to have her and the child move in with them. Anna Maria refused his offer and indicated that she would work things out with her parents. It seems a significant omission that the inquisitors did not inquire into her reasoning at this point. When her labor pains began, she excused herself from work to go to the stables, had the child there, killed it and hid it under the straw. In testimony that subtly undermines her alleged ignorance of the pregnancy, the stepmotl1er testified that Anna Maria was gone for five Our Fathers. She lost a lot of blood that day and the midwife had to be called. The latter was under obligation to report unusual bleeding to the local medical authorities and did so. After Simon had, advisedly, refused her request to get rid of the corpse, Anna Maria went back to the stables on the Sunday after the murder to bury the dead child. There she had a nervous breakdown, heard voices and, in terror, left it where it was. She returned to the house in time for the arrival of the medical authorities' summons to her father and this gave her occasion to break the silence. There was a touching forgiveness and reconciliation scene in which the father proclaimed that she should have told him sooner and that 'nothing would have happened to her.' It ended with the father going to the stables to retrieve the child and wrap it, in a posthumous gesture of legitimation, in finer linen.

Josefinian Inheritance Regulation and Peasant Countermoves

The small Biedermeier play with which the Wagner family entertained the inquisitors is remarkable not only because the latter were so easily seduced into playing their roles as collaborators in the silencing of motives but also because it reverses the conventional tropes connecting poverty, illegitimacy and infanticide. What could appear statistically as a matter of a poor, unmarried servant girl and an illegitimate child 375 appears narratively as a story about a propertied peasant's daughter murdering a child that was recognized by its father and, at different times, by both its grandfathers and was therefore de facto legitimate. The significance of this alternative impression gains force when we begin to explore some contextual perspectives to understand why Anna Maria refused Simon's offer and instead went to term with a manifest but silenced pregnancy that could only end in murder. It is the royal finance bureaucracy's further tightening of its hold on the internal affairs of families that provides such a context. There occurred a historically little-noticed revolution in the Habsburgs' regulation and taxation of inheritance between the mid-eighteenth century and the codification of the civil law in 1811.3 In hotly debated reforms, Maria Theresia and Josef II greatly expanded the number of eligible heirs beyond the, until then customary, circle of spouse and children. The new rulings legitimated inheritance claims by ascending and descending lines of blood relatives to the sixth degree and they not only recognized the claims of illegitimate children that were legitimized by a subsequent marriage but also claims on the mother's inheritance by even illegitimate children. Relatively distant blood relatives such as nephews or great-grandchildren could now step into the place of deceased heirs so that the complement of heirs was always filled. In the case or Anna Maria, for example, this meant that Simon's readiness to be 'father' opened a new path of inheritance that had until then stopped with Anna Maria, a path that could potentially put a Wagner inheritance portion in Simon's control through his parental administrative rights. In addition to opposing a clear danger of losing control over inheritance

3 OÖLL, Patentsammlung Krackowizer, passim: Franz Xavier J. F. Nippel, Erläuterung der gesetzlichen Bestimmung über den Pflichttheil etc., Linz: K.u.k. Kunst Musik und Buchhandlung, 1828; Josef Helfert, Versuch einer Darstellung der Jurisdictions- Normen etc., Vienna: Mösl, 1828; Wilhelm Funk, 'Erbsteuer (alte)' in Österreichisches Staatswörterbuch, Vienna: Hölder, 1905; for an overview see Heinrich Strakosch, Privatrechtskodifikation und Staatsbildung in Österreich (1753-1811) Munich: Oldenbourg, 1976 and, idem., 'Das Problem der ideologischen Ausrichtung des österreichischen aufgeklärten Absolutismus' in Walter Selb u. Herbert Hofmeister eds., Forschungsband Franz von Zeiller (1751- 1828), Vienna: Böhlaus Nachfolger 1980. 376 management, peasant householders objected to these innovations on the grounds that inheritance had become subject to state taxes. Moreover, the state increasingly required all subject-citizens' inheritance trust funds to be deposited in Estates-controlled savings and loans it1stitutions where they could be misappropriated and, as in 1811, often depreciated and became virtually worthless. The question arises about whether the peasants did anything besides complain about these innovations. I have been analyzing post-mortem peasant household inventories from the Upper Austrian estate Aistershaim and there I can find two kinds of evidence that point toward the peasants' practical resistance.4 Tables 1 and 2 examine, respectively, the appearance in the inventories of persons eligible to inherit and of the relative values of inheritance portions. In Table 1 we see statistical means for the appearance in the inventories between 1649 and 1802 of persons fitting various categories of residual heirs (in my larger narrative I designate them altogether as the 'dispossessed'). In column one we find a rise in the number of residual heirs settled with an inheritance portion before the middle of the eighteenth century and a very sharp decline in their appearance thereafter. Columns two and three confirm the mid-eighteenth century caesura for sons and daughters who received a settlement; the greater disadvantaging of dispossessed sons is particularly noteworthy for reasons that go beyond this paper. The fourth column also reveals a sharply accelerating disappearance from the inventories of persons who were eligible for inheritance but received no settlement. The last column documents an increase in the number of residual portions settled on siblings of the deceased after m1d- century but even this number declines sharply again in the last period. The increase of the number of sibling residual heirs in the third period is the exception that on closer inspection 'proves' the point - as the general exclusion of earlier generations of siblings catches up in the fourth period.

4 OÖLA. Herrschaft Aistershaim Inventurprotokolle, Vols. 93, 94, 95, 96, 106, 108, 110, 114, 117, 151, 155, 158, 163, 164, 167, 178. 377 Table 1

Aistershaim: Dispossessed per inventory/Means, 1649-1802

DisTot DisSons DisDau InhCla InhSib 1649-1669 (148)* 3.16 1.3 1.4 3.0 0.54 1710-1730 (157)* 3.54 1.17 1.33 2.87 0.85 1770-1785 (107)* 2.99 0.78 0.99 2.35 1.85 1790-1802 (62)* 2.52 0.46 1.06 1.53 1.04

* N of inventories/ DisTot: total dispossessed with residual portion/ DisSons: dispossessed sons with portions/ Dis Dau: dispossessed daughters with portions/ InhCla: dispossessed w/o portions/ InhSib: siblings of deceased w. portions

Table 2

Aistershaim: Inheritance Portions/ Means in Gulden, 1649-1802

a.Heirs b. Dispossessed b. as % of a. 1649-1669* 119 35 29% 1710-1730 207 (+74%) 59 (+69%) 29% 1770-1785 270 (+30%) 81 (+37%) 30% 1790-1802 410 (+52%) 158 (+96%) 39%

* same N’s as Table 1

All or these figures run contrary to what one might expect after legal reforms that expanded the number of eligible residual heirs and assured their orderly succession to other deceased residual heirs. Similarly, the information in Table 2 runs counter to expectation and instead of finding an increasing fragmentation and diminution in the size of the residual settlement portions we find instead a relative increase in size and a strong rate of growth for the latter. Together these figures suggest that the peasant

378 householders' actual inheritance practices not only demonstrate their understanding of what they had to do to limit the damage to their control of inheritance funds that were implied in the state's reforms, but that they did is so well that they actually diminished the number of residual heirs below the pre-1750 levels while increasing the size (and thereby the legal contollability) of residual settlements above the pre-1750 levels.

Silencing Infanticide in Private and in Public

The questions that suggest themselves are: 1. How did the peasant householders do it? 2. Who had to carry the burdens of their successful practical resistance against the state's invasion of their private inheritance management? and 3. What was the result? Infanticide was clearly one option to reduce the number of eligible heirs. This is not to say that infanticide was the only or even the main method for such reduction. Indeed, a much expanded discussion of these data is, in turn, only the first part of a book chapter that out1ines the stages of the lifecourse of the dispossessed and focuses on how the employment, migration and management of dispossessed laborers reinforced the peasant householders' inheritance strategies.5 Infanticidal practices remain central to any such discussion because they appear as the initiators of those processes of selection and destruction in families tl1al were demonstrably among the fundamental characteristics of the Austrian social system under the ancien regime. It is worth an excursus at this point to note that placing infanticide in a context of family and inheritance politics does not mean completely removing it from its usual context in demographic history where it has appeared as part of dlscussions about famine, Malthusian checks, infant mortality and illegitimacy. If anything, an inheritance context for infanticide can only add further nuances to the already ongoing deconstruction of the durable concept of the 'European marriage pattern' in demographic history, displacing the latter's sense of a naturally homeostatic nexus forming around patterns of late nuptiality, a high proportion of umnarried persons and high illegitimacy rates with less harmonious cultural variables, including inheritance

5 The manuscript in progress is entitled 'Descent Toward Holocaust: Family Formations, Disinheritance and the Progress of a Social Pathology in Provincial Austria, 1649-1945.' 379 and labor imperatives. The best summary of this new direction in demographic analysis, especially as it affects the Alpine and foothill regions of Central Europe, may be found in Pier Paulo Viazzo's historiographic and primary researches which take us a considerable distance away from a naturalized demography and toward a perception that converts the biological rationality of 'population control' into a more complex figure of 'social reproduction' in which the expected dependencies among the demographic variables do not always occur (and explanations remain outstanding) and in which social imperatives can conflict with and override the 'natural' determinants of demographic behavior.6 Building on work done by Mitterauer, Netting, Khera and others, Viazzo is able to assert that not only was illegitimacy not a dependent variable in relation to late nuptiality but that an alternative dependence on impartible inheritance was also questionable. Drawing on B.J. O'Neill's work on late nineteenth century rural Portugal, he posits the argument that a high illegitimacy rate could have a positive function in that it allowed for the reproduction of a plentiful labor force that would not threaten patrimonies and that it could appear in functional as well as 'dysfunctional' ways to sustain different kinds of inheritance and even to resolve various contradictions within social systems.7 While such a 'social reproduction' model of demographic variables is clearly a big step toward a more nuanced analysis of family history and clearly supports the approach toward infanticide being put forward here, some difficulties remain with putting this model into historical analytical practice. Viazzo himself seems finally only ready to place demographic analysis in the service of a functionalist-essentialist 'social science.' He appears satisfied with what he sees as a 'theoretical reorientation' toward 'a unified

6 Pier Paolo Viazzo, 'Illegitimacy and the European Marriage Pattern: Comparative Evidence from the Alpine Area', in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith and Keith Wrightson, eds., L. Basil Blackwell 1986; Pier Paolo Viazzo, Upland Communities: Environment, Population and Social Structure in the Alps since the Sixteenth Century, CUP 1989; cf. also Josef Ehmer, Heiratsverhalten, Sozialstruktur, ökonomischer Wandel, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht 1991, chap. 5 and passim.

7 Viazzo, 'Illegitimacy' pp, 120-121. 380 generative approach capable of accounting for the presence or absence of illegitimacy [or, presumably, of other demographic behaviors]...on the basis of a few structural principles and a limited number of permutations' and all with the intent of achieving 'a better understanding of the logic that governs the reproduction of social structure.'8 Here history only serves to furnish data for taxonomic-descriptive differentiations that are expected to reveal improved modeling calculations aiming toward ongoing systemic modernization. In such a formalistic construction certain 'variables' such as 'inheritance systems', 'agrarian revolution,' etc. easily become dehistoricized, hypostatized forms to be plugged into various models at appropriate moments: thus, impartible inheritance practices among the Austrian peasants now constitute a kind of retarding tradition or custom that sacrifices modernizing opportunity for conservative social-structural continuity.9 This view about an apparently flawed cultural choice made by the peasants completely ignores the prior historicity of impartibility in Austria and in no way acknowledges as significant the relevant family-historical imperatives emanating from the historical unfolding of the Habsburgs' tribute state since the sixteenth century.10 Not only does the modernization model that now informs the 'culturalized' post- Malthusian demographic histories of Austria and of neighboring Alpine regions run the danger of merely repeating, in however more sophisticated form, the historicist culture- and-personality tropes that have been part of the analysis for over a century,11 but in its excessive focus on the puzzle of a transition from tradition to modernity it also fails to get us closer to those specific historical experiences this essay is trying to approach. For Mitterauer and Viazzo, the long-known upsurge in Austrian illegitimacy during the first

8 Viazzo, 'Illegitimacy' p, 121.

9 Viazzo, Communities, pp. 190-192.

10 Hermann Rebel, Peasant Classes: The Bureaucratization of Property and Family Relations under Early Habsburg Absolutism, 1511-1636, Princeton UP 1983, chaps. 1, 5 and passim.

11 cf. Otto von Zwiedineck-Südenhorst, 'Die Illegitimität in Steiermark,' Statistische Monatsschrift, 21(1895), pp, 179-181, and Michael Mitterauer, Ledige Mütter, Munich: Beck 1983, pp, 36- 41. 381 half of the nineteenth century was a dimension of the communal labor supply policies accompanying what they presume to be the agrarian-industrial revolution taking place in the region; this brings us no closer to solving the problem of the possible relationship between infanticidal behavior and the disappearance from the inventories of residual heirs. Josef Ehmer's excellent comparative history of nineteenth century 'marriage behavior' patterns in England, Germany and Austria advances the debate by demonstrating that the Austrian experience with wage labor, marriage and family life was unique in that purportedly incompatible 'traditional' and capitalist forms joined in mutually agreeable arrangements; but he softens and even undermines the impact of the specific conjuncture of tradition and modernity he has proposed by concluding with an unconsciously self-contradictory sense of a hegemonic 'habitus' that once again 'traditionalizes' and naturalizes these conflicted experiences in a story of delayed moderization.12 The problems that remain involve not only unravelling the details of this traditional-modern conjuncture but also tracing how the accompanying (and constituting) experiences become part of the changing cultural memory, of 'history.' Infanticide appears nowhere as part of the experience in these revisionist demographic histories and, indeed, it may well be that it was an adiaphoric, marginal occurrence that could function in all demographic regimes and whose 'fit' with any of them has no bearing on the larger histories of 'development.' On the other hand, it may also well be that the new demographic histories contain flaws that, in turn, close those narrative possibilities that could accommodate infanticide as intrinsic to the story. As we saw, in the 'social reproduction' model, the upsurge of illegitimate children in the early nineteenth century acquires a 'natura1' appropriateness in conjunction with a contemporaneous rise in tl1e demand for labor. Moreover, for Viazzo, illegitimacy itself gained acceptability in the villages because it allowed for a growing labor force without posing a threat to the cohesion of patrimony. The data we have shown above concerning residual heirs and settlement portions can neither confirm nor challenge Viazzo's position: this changes when we draw into the

12 Ehmer, Heiratsverhalten, pp. 232-235. 382 explanation for this inheritance behaviour another significant actor not accounted for in Mitterauer's or Viazzo's versions of the population game: vlz. the state. Contrary to Viazzo's history that the illegitimate posed no threat to the patrimony, we have seen that in areas under Habsburg administrative control an evolving civil law practice culminated in the codification of 1811 by which the state supported expanding the inheritance claims of the illegitimate and thereby contested the exclusive control of inheritance historically acquired by peasant householders and community leaders. This additional perception of the management of 'social reproduction' distracts us from discourse about 'tradition' and 'modernity'. Alongside and intertwined with an early nineteenth century conjuncture of illegitimacy and agrarian-industrial revolution we can posit a conjuncture of growing illegitimacy and state support for the family claims of the illegitimate. This opens up a rather different demographic history in which the attempt by the state to intervene in family affairs becomes an additional variable in the management of 'social reproduction.' Infanticide can appear now as one essential dimension of such management, allowing a more balanced adjustment between labor needs and protection of the patrimony; through it we can also explore aspects of the historical experience of this struggle over patrimony between the peasant householders and their heirs, on one side, and the dispossessed and the state on the other. The historical interest, finally, does not lie simply in adding a 'factor' to the demographic typologies of 'social reproduction' but in observing how this central contest was conducted invisibly, at the margin of experience in the bodies and psyches of dispossessed women. Returning to the Wagner case once more, we see, from his own and others' testimony, that the compelling force to conceal the pregnancy came from Anna Maria's father. There are several places in the testimony where we can see that the long period of pregnancy necessarily had to produce a covert family discourse about an evident condition that could not be spoken about directly because it could not be allowed to exist. The ongoing 'cover-up' before the actual murder was initiated by the innkeeper's duplicitous solicitation and acceptance of the story about a scare that had allegedly 'blocked her blood' - a repeated theme in the testimony - which explained the absence of her period and subsequently required Anna Maria to deny her increasingly obvious 383 condition. Not only did her father use harsh language and beatings to silence her but he also rewarded her for staying the course. There were several conversations about 'necessary linens' that show how complicated these simultaneously positively and negatively 'coded' encounters were. The father had initiated the discourse on linen by telling Anna Maria that if she were pregnant she should see her stepmother about linens. Although she had denied the pregnancy, Anna Maria spoke to the stepmother and the latter offered her her own linen which Anna Maria refused by saying, again, that she was not pregnant and that if she were then she would have linens. On one occasion when her father asked her if she was pregnant and when she routinely denied it, he told her that she would find the necessary linens in her deceased mother's dowry chest, whereupon she took these linens and placed them in her own chest. From her point of view this was a conversation in which her father authorized inheritance passing from mother to daughter and, indirectly, confirmed her position as future residual heir. It is clear, moreover, that by permitting her to add her mother's linens to her own dowry her father permitted her to hope for a better match than poor Simon. This is one of several moments in the testimony where the pathogenic burden of the 'commanded' but ineffable infanticide becomes manifest. Positive speech about necessary linens which would normally precede a marriage and childbirth here becomes a permission to take all early maternal inheritance payoff in return for the murder 'promised' in the silence. In this sense, both Anna Maria and her child were victims of pathological speech that circulated not only in the Wagner family but drew in as well the surrounding 'community' that could not say to the innkeeper (or to the authorities) that Anna Maria was pregnant. Complicit as the community was in the Wagner family's shared discourse, the logic of this language pointed to a murder scene that Anna Maria would have to play completely alone. Her personal mental collapse came when she finally went to bury the child to fulfill what she calls in her testimony 'the concealment' (die Verschweigung); voices spoke to her and she could not carry through the final action of the contract. Instead she begins the closing act by going back to the house to admit the deed. One has to add, as a postscript, that her father could truthfully praise her to the inquisitors as a 'good, obedient daughter.' The stepmother's characterization of his sense of obedience was that the innkeeper commands 'sharply' enough so that he 384 doesn't have to beat his help for any disobedience. With this testimony the 'houseparents' addressed a significant facet of tile Habsburg state's reworked and ruling Cameralist formulations about the primacy of obedience in the 'good economy' of the 'whole house.' In effect, they offered the murder to the inquisitors as a measure, if not the price, of the disciplining of the servants that the state desired.13 Not only does the experience of Anna Maria point to other similarly silenced arrangements in other families where housefathers must have compelled infanticides to eliminate potentially disruptive heirs but it also, finally, gains wider resonance when we discover that a similar displacement of language about infanticide by positive speech about social membership was taking place in the public realm as well. In this regard, the earliest records of the Linz gynaecological hospital and foundling home from the 1790s yield some extraordinary information about the fate of the children that were born there and left behind by their mothers, who paid substantial fees for their children's institutionally organized 'care'.14

13 Cf. Hermann Rebel, 'Reimagining the oikos Austrian Cameralism in its Social Formation' in Jay O'Brien and William Roseberry, eds., Golden Ages, Dark Ages. Imagining the Past in Anthropology and History, Berkeley: U of California, 1991.

14 OÖLA, Landesfrauenklinik, Protokolle, Hs. 69; Franz Xaver Bohdanowicz, 'Die k.k. Gebähr - und Findelanstalt,' Jahrbuch der Stadt Linz. 14(1952); Hans Sturmberger 'Vom 'Hospital' zum 'Krankenhaus'. Zur Geschichte des Krankenhauswesens in Oberösterreich,' Mitteilungen des oberösterreichischen Landesarchius; the best current publications on the history of the hospital and care foundations and institutions of Linz are a series of thoroughly scholarly articles by Wi11ibald Katzinger that appeared in Historisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Linz between 1977 and 1982. 385 Table 3

Linz Women’s Clinic Protocols/ Infant Survival and Mortality

1795-6 1797 1798 1799 Totals Admissions 79 38 41 76* 234 Taken away** 26 (33%) 7 (18%) 9 (22%) 22 (29%) 64 (27%) Died at birth*** 3 (6%) 1 (3%) 4 (13%) 6 (11%) 14 (8%) Died in clinic*** 10 (19%) 3 (10%) 13 (41%) 36 (67%) 62 (36%) Put in care*** 40 27 (90%) 15 (47%) 12 (22%) 94 (55%) (75%) Died in care*** 30 (57%) 19 (63%) 11 (34%) 9 (17%) 69 (41%) % died in care**** 75% 70% 73% 75% 73% died in 43 (81%) 23 (74%) 28 (88%) 51 (94%) 145 (85%) institution***

* actual admissions 79; three left before giving birth/ ** +% of admissions/ ***+% of infants not taken away/ **** of those put in care

Table 3 summarizes what the protocols reveal about what happened to these children left 'in care' during the period 1795 to 1799. After that date the record keeping changed and we lose track of the children's fate. Looking at the aggregate figures (in the Totals column) we see that about a quarter of the children were removed from the institution immediately after their birth; this does not mean that they automatically lived. Of the remainder, 8% died at birth, 36% died in the clinic, 55% were put in care in foster homes and of these 73% died in turn. This means that 85% of the children who were born in the institution and were not removed from its care died there; in 1799 this figure even reached 94%. Compared to a contemporary first year infant death rate of 27% to 36% in the surrounding countryside,15 this institutional death rate seems

15 OÖLA. J. Heider, Tabellen zu den Kirchenmatriken Mühlviertler Pfarren, typescript. 386 sufficiently high to allow us to characterize it as the result of murder. In this connection, I regard exonerative arguments about greater risks of infection and reasonable institutional negligence as reminiscent of, if perhaps not equivalent to, arguments about the so-caIled 'Auschwitz lie.' We have arrived at the same place in the public realm that we discovered in the private experience of the Wagner family, What portion of these institutional infanticides served the peasant householders' inheritance strategies remains unknowable but there is information in the gynaecological institute's accounts that gives indirect evidence in this direction and it awaits further analysis; what is, in any case, of central interest at this point is that in both the private and public spheres of ancien regime Austria we find positive languages of social membership and caring concealing and displacing murderous acts of effective dispossession. A case study of infanticide. once removed from semiologically marginalizing contextual speech about poverty, gender and individual crime, here discloses a structural history of a specific play of erasure whose terrorizing ambiguity burdens primarily, but not exclusively, mothers of 'illegitimate' children. It reveals how a positive inscription of cardinal values may also be an obstacle construction16 by which practitioners of a particular historical culture, on the basis of the forced agency of marginalized women, simultaneously concealed and retained an arguably “culturally” necessary but unspeakable desire to select some of their children for murder.

16 Adam Phillips, 'Looking at Obstacles' Raritan, Summer 1991. 387 10. What Do the Peasants Want Now? Realists and Fundamentalists in Swiss and South German Rural Politics (2003)

A restored, corrected and briefly amended version of the article by the same title in Central European History 34:3(2001), 313-356

In Leibniz, in Whitehead, there are only events. What Leibniz calls predicate is nothing to do with an attribute, but an event, ‘crossing the Rubicon.’ So they have to completely recast the notion of a subject: what becomes of the subject, if predicates are events? It’s like a baroque emblem.(G. Deleuze) 1

The [Swiss] Confederacy presented a deep political ambiguity, a union of urban oligarchs and peasant producers, all of whom collectively ruled over yet other subjects, which mirrored the tension between the [South German] cities’ own oligarchical present and communal past. If there is indeed ‘an unbroken progressive line’ between the communal burghers of this age and the bourgeoisies of a later one, it runs through deep shadows of ambiguity and tension, which flowed from securing the liberties of some through the subjection of others. . . More and more, the bigger folk in the cities made their livings from the vast web of market relations. . . and made their peace with the early modern state.(T. Brady)2

The first epigraph suggests a line to take on that revival of a historical ontology, examined here, by which peasants and other subaltern “actors” become “historical” only when they engage in allegedly “threshold-crossing” events. The second gives us a historically precise opening figure for the critical questioning to which this essay subjects such limitations on social history. Tom Brady thus ends his pivotal study of the mid-sixteenth century abandonment by Central Europe’s urban elites of the double- edged ideal of “turning Swiss,” of becoming one’s own lord. He implicitly poses a tantalizing question about how the early modern peasantries, destined now to remain the mere subjects of corporations and to make up what he calls the “subsoil of the absolutist state,” could have made their peace, and this particularly in those regions of the German-Swiss borderlands where structurally (i.e., financially and militarily) but

1 G. Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, 160.

2 T. Brady, Turning Swiss: Cities and Empire, 1450-1550 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985, 229. 383 not intellectually defeated communal-democratic utopias long continued to make post- mortem appearances.

Two recent studies by Andreas Suter and David Martin Luebke3 concerning significant peasant wars in, respectively, mid-seventeenth century north-central Switzerland and the early eighteenth century Black Forest region of southern Germany, offer thought-provoking presentations of archival materials and open up additional perspectives on Brady’s perception of the “deep shadows of ambiguity and tension” residing in this region’s constructions of civic and civil modernity. Both authors provide us with much information about how these peasantries sought to invent and negotiate viable economic, social and political niches for themselves in a dynastic-corporative order of violently enforced protection and tribute contracts that required from everyone organizational solutions for finding shelter under one or another territorial, urban or Imperial lordship. Our interest in these issues is to discover the political means by which peasant householders sought to solve the difficult puzzle of how to secure themselves in a tribute order that effectively located them below the thresholds of civil standing, below those corporate memberships that could own property and exercise “sovereign” power at the territorial-diplomatic level.4 Luebke makes a conscious effort to connect to Brady’s argument while Suter, absorbed by a problematic of “threshold-crossing” events, unwittingly provides a great deal of evidence to make Brady’s point but, intent on assigning the very failure of the Swiss peasant war of 1653 an ironically positive place in what he sees as the finally happy outcome of Swiss liberal democracy, shows no interest in Brady’s story line at all. This is a particular pity, since his materials suggest that the occasion and motivations for this Swiss attempt at a peasant revolution (a term Suter

3 A. Suter, Der schweizerische Bauernkrieg von 1653: Politische Sozialgeschichte — Sozialgeschichte eines politischen Ereignisses Tübingen: bibliotheca academica 1997; D. M. Luebke, His Majesty’s Rebels: Communities, Factions and Rural Revolt in the Black Forest, 1725-1745 Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1997.

4 H. Maier, Die ältere deutsche Staats- und Verwaltungslehre, Munich: Beck 1980, 45-47. 384 concedes unwillingly, apologetically)5 illuminate well the tragic weaknesses of all the peasantries’ efforts to construct local systems of politics that could have given them a chance to connect more independently and profitably with the larger European and world economies. I

Similar conceptual predispositions inform both studies. Suter’s book about the outbreak, suppression, aftermath and possible meaning of the Swiss Peasant War of 1653 is a particularly self-conscious demonstration of a currently popular approach combining “symbolic-actionist” and performative anthropology, drawn by him primarily from Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas and others, with what he calls, in his repetitious and insecure subtitle, “political social history,” a term he coins in connection with the work of Reinhard Koselleck, among others.6 It is something of a misnomer because no social objects other than vaguely “structural” and specifically unanalyzed and therefore not particularly “social” phantom entities (such as the alleged general

5 Suter, 159-167.

6 For a revealing intellectual genealogy of this analytical direction toward a kind of “culturalized” Sozialgeschichte see W. Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 Munich: dtv 1993, 287-300 and passim. Here we find Koselleck arranged with those who acknowledge their historiographical continuity with what was termed “people’s history” (Volksgeschichte)in the Nazi academy. In Schulze’s own astonishing words this paradigm is, “as has in the meantime been shown in many other fields, certainly the consequence of the objectively proven modernizing function of National Socialism.” 300, (emphasis added). Such an affirmation of “objectively proven” fascist-genocidal “modernization” is, to say the least, open to many “objective” (including cost- benefit)questions as, indeed, the critical reception here of two further elaborations (however “unconscious” perhaps in Luebke”s case) of this historiographical continuity seeks to indicate. And one related aside: it is interesting to discover that one of the early associates of this approach, SS-Hauptsturmführer Günther Franz, advising, in 1942, the Six group in the Amt VII of the SD- Hauptamt in Berlin on “Jewish Questions,” was a stickler for grounding the Party’s intellectual rationales for actions against Jews in the most up-to-date archival and historical sciences, L. Hachmeister, Der Gegenforscher. Die Karriere des SS-Führers Franz Alfred Six, Munich: Beck, 1998, 226-7; Schulze, 205,298. 385 demographic-economic crisis of the seventeenth century, ostensible long-term and post- war price/debt conjunctures, alleged land fragmentation, etc.) appear in his analysis and because, having somehow reduced the social to the “structural”, he rejects the latter, after some awkward shadow-boxing with Ladurie and Braudel, in favor of what he calls a “return to the event in social history.”7 His is a historical vision that, in a move that, incidentally, echoes the dominant world view of the early modern corporative order itself, places the occurrences of everyday social life below historicity and grants only symbolically charged political “events”8 that cross “horizon-of-expectations” thresholds actual historical status. His stated intention is to counter any threatening structuralist hegemony in the profession by redirecting historians toward recognizable “events” with a renewed sensitivity toward the impact of these (and of presumably consequent and related corrective “learning” by the “actors”) on structures. By the latter he means not structures of law or contract but merely institutionally or otherwise scripted allegorical political performances remembered in historical myths and analogies and periodically re-scripted and acted out, revitalized symbolically, by performances in “real events.” By contrast, I find Georges Duby’s less metaphysical connections between scripts and actions more satisfying when he observes that “An event explodes. It sends shockwaves into the depths of society, and in the resultant echo we can look for signs of phenomena normally hidden. . .”9

While one can only applaud any intention to retain some communicable and comparative sense of hermeneutical convertibility between ostensible events and

7 Suter, 24-6, cf.35 and passim.

8 For a relevant and telling critique of any kind of histoire évenénementielle see L. Althusser, “The Errors of Classical Economics: Outline of a Concept of Historical Time” in his and E. Balibar’s Reading Capital London: Verso, 1979, 107-109; also of interest (but not altogether satisfying) is H. White, “The Modernist Event” in his Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

9 G. Duby, History Continues, Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1994, 91 386 structures, the particular boundaries and relationships between the two that Suter’s approach draws can only invite interminable scholastic squabbles about what qualifies as an “event,” about what crosses (“surprisingly”) the thresholds of whose “expectations” (formulated how and where and under what pressures? and who is surprised?). The implicit questions about where the public begins and the private ends, about what the designated properties and places of our presumably separable individual or collective experiences are, etc. all remain completely suppressed.10 Moreover, throughout he reduces, irritatingly, the peasants to historical “actors,”11 i.e., mere role players, consciously deploying “symbols” in highly charged and theatricalized, ritualized “events” occurring in unavoidably “real time” and constituting, in the case of the peasant war in question, nothing more than a predictable, presumably somehow collectively scripted, five-act drama of escalating political crisis, revolution and open military conflict ending in peasant defeat and the reassertion of an improved normal order. This altogether distracts from the complexity of the actual historical processes he has to narrate according to the evidence, where the intertwined individual and collective experiences and expressions and the seriousness of the phenomena discernible through even his tendentious narrative disarticulations simply overwhelm the aesthetics of a perceived dramatic devolution. Not only the obviously “public” but also many of the “private” actions preceding and following what he sees as the “crisis” of the Peasant War of 1653 were all (by his own evidence) historical events that took place in legally accountable and in memorably experienced time, and held moral and mortal, unconscious as well as conscious existential risks and consequences for those living (and not just “acting”) in locations that were both public and private, “real” and “symbolic” at the same time. Suter’s event and horizon-of-expectation conceptualizations aspire to a having-and- eating-of-the-cake as he appears to speak at several points sympathetically from the

10 This kind of analysis remains stuck in the purely epistemological, pre-Freudian vision of an “unconscious” that is already visible in Georg Simmel’s The Problems of the Philosophy of History New York: Free Press 1977 [1892] 51-56

11 Unless they are women. These, in their extremely rare appearances in this study, are called Akteurinnen (!), Bauernkrieg, 514. 387 peasants’ point of view, claiming to “rethink” what he perceives as their “risk calculi” (with no stated conceptualization of risk), while at the same time and in ways we will explore below, absolutely devaluing these latter as “delusional.” He actually represses key dimensions of the peasants’ calculations that point toward far more complex and disturbing conclusions than the all’s-well-that-ends-well comedic emplotment he puts forward in this “detailed” and weighty and yet also superficial and disappointing tome.

Reading both Suter and Luebke requires a constant awareness and clarification of one’s sense of the figural implications12 of horizon-of-expectations and symbolic- actionist approaches to history. I was reminded of being invited, some years ago, to join a panel of Turnerian anthropologists discussing “the liminal” at a national convention. My paper was not entirely off the topic and concerned an early nineteenth century rural Austrian innkeeper’s daughter who had been assigned the status of a laborer in her father’s house and who was drawn by various parental pressures into committing a “threshold-crossing” infanticide to gain a finally illusory readmission to the inheriting

12 Figural: what is being “figured?” I am increasingly convinced that it is the complex capacities of figural-critical languages that will allow us to bridge material/ideal gaps in our efforts to develop a theorized historical anthropology and to offer a new means to assess each other’s work critically. Most recently there is H. White, Figural Realism; besides White, I have found the writings of Auerbach, Elias, Wolf, S.C. Humphreys, Girard, Derrida and(yes)de Man, particularly absorbing; cf. H. Rebel, “Dark Events and Lynching Scenes in the Collective Memory: A Dispossession Narrative about Austria’s Descent into Holocaust” in J. Scott and N. Bhatt, eds., Agrarian Studies, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001, and “Figurations in Historical Anthropology: Two Kinds of Structural Narrative about the ‘Long Duration’ Provenances of the Holocaust”, 1998, in press, London: Berg. Also noteworthy are the collections by J. O’Brien and Wm. Roseberry, eds., Golden Ages. Dark Ages: Imagining the Past in Anthropology and History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991 and by J.Fernandez, ed., Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. 388 family circle.13 In the session’s discussion period, however, nothing was said about my pointing to the family’s and community’s covert complicities in the daily denial of the pregnancy and the consequently “necessary” infanticide and nothing about my sense of the broader significance of this small, simultaneously public and private but in every sense historical (i.e., remembered, recorded and retold) “event,” during which the participants casually, tensely, oscillated into and out of ritual performances in the “normal” processes of “everyday” social life. Instead, my presentation was perceived by my symbolic-actionist colleagues as concerned mainly with linens. I had indeed, in my discussion of the case files, mentioned linens in their multiple appearances as dowry treasure, infant swaddling and death shroud and one of my points had in fact been that the shifting symbology of linen permitted metonymic, i.e., displacing, references to the infanticide bargain between the patriarch and his daughter, allowing this contract to remain unspoken, unspeakable, simultaneously forgotten and remembered in the historical social unconscious both of the family and village where it had happened, and of the subsequent judicial proceedings and historical remembrances where it also “happened.”14 My point had not been to riff on the identity-ascriptive resonances of linen symbology as such, as my colleagues proceeded to do, but to appreciate the duplexities of such murderous, power-serving linguistics as they authorized or even compelled fatal patterns of hidden threshold-crossings within the private and then public performances of historical “actors” in ways that public discourses on these matters, both then and now, consequently did not have to acknowledge or even bring into consciousness.

My anthropological colleagues’ immediate turn to symbolic actionist agendas was in effect a collaboration with the social linguistics, the metonymic strategies, of the several participants in an “original” perpetration of a social-culturally significant murder

13 “Peasants against the State in the Body of Anna Maria Wagner: An Infanticide in Rural Austria in 1832" Journal of Historical Sociology 6:1(1993), 15-27.

14 A perfect illustration of Baudelaire’s “oublié sur la carte,” i.e.,a “forgetting on paper,” by which historians are reminded of the eternally displacing qualities of even their primary documentations. De Man, op.cit., xxiii-xxv. 389 that archival research had brought back into current historical memory. The anthropologists were in effect deploying a linen-symbology discourse of their own devising to avoid discussing the central objects of an analysis focused not only on the extortion of a murder as an “order-restoring” threshold-crossing act but also on the intertwinings of hierarchy and agency implicated in this crime and in its subsequent historical moments. In Suter’s and Luebke’s Collingwoodian efforts to rethink their historical subjects’ “rationality” there frequently comes to the fore a similarly one- dimensional and forced symbolist erudition whose historical, explanatory and connective powers appear actually to be engaged in fencing out and occasionally counteracting and repressing alternative historical readings.15

II

David Martin Luebke’s study of rural factions and of their local politics and civil war during the 1730s and 40s in Habsburg-controlled Outer Austria (Vorderösterreich)16 is aware, without taking a serious comparative look, of Suter’s earlier monograph on Basel peasant disturbances going on just across the Empire’s border at roughly the same time.17 He rejects Suter’s allegedly “mechanistic” argument about peasants uniting in rebellion to preserve communal self rule against intrusions by outsiders, even as he has to acknowledge that Suter has a sense of the divided and coerced nature of this unity.18 Unlike Suter, Luebke does not dwell at length on conceptual matters but introduces them somewhat casually, and without much exposition, as his argument seems to

15 For relevant observations concerning the severe limitations of the Collingwoodian unconscious-in-memory see L. Mink, Mind, History and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood Middletown,Conn.: Wesleyan University Press 1969, 98-99 and passim.

16 In the Black Forest area south of Freiburg-im-Breisgau.

17 A. Suter, ‘Troublen’ im Fürstbistum Basel (1726-1740), Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985.

18 Luebke, Rebels 7, 20-21, cf.230; he does not refer to the clarifications in Suter, Troublen, 124, 209 and elsewhere. 390 require. He focuses on what appear to be two fundamentally opposed forms of political rationality operating in specific German village communes under Habsburg absolutism and he pays specific attention to the conflicts between two ideological-pragmatic positions that could both bridge internal social differences among the rural subjects and still also divide politically what historians had once thought of as more or less culturally unified peasant “communities.” While his book makes numerous significant contributions in these factual-descriptive areas, it also on occasion moves into the kinds of symbolic and performative analyses one finds in Suter. Even more than the latter, Luebke explains divergent peasant motives in rebellious acts as the products, in the final analysis, of divergent political acculturation patterns among the peasants themselves, recalling and reinventing two different, long-term historical traditions of political responses to be deployed against the authorities’ actions and during ostensible crises.19

Luebke begins his ”chronicle” of what took place in the “county” of Hauenstein20 by outlining four parties to the political struggle: two factions of peasants (the Millers and the Salpeters), the abbatical landlords at St. Blasien and the Emperor, represented by chancellory, forest and treasury authorities. His focus is on the two peasant parties’ early eighteenth century conflicts “over the most effective defense against St. Blasien’s campaign to expand its age-old [?] powers of domination in the county” and he contextualizes their (both civil and external) war as merely another episodic event, “the latest in a long chain of anti-seigneurial conflicts that spanned several centuries and were carried out by various means, some violent, others not.”21 The conceptual ground

19 Luebke, Rebels, 22-23; also, idem, “Naive Monarchism and Marian Veneration in Early Modern Germany” Past and Present 154(1997) 106; Suter, Bauernkrieg, 442-49, 591-94 and passim.

20 Hauenstein was a Grafschaft (lit. earldom) and Luebke’s “county” seems inadequate, particularly since he gives us only a partial, itself inadequate legal-corporate description of the territory as a whole. This diminishes throughout the contextual effectiveness of his presentation of the various parties’ political positions.

21 Luebke, Rebels, 54-55. 391 for this narrative of a “long chain” of events is in the Blickle school’s perception of a quasi-democratic, communalist integration of the German peasantry into the early modern Empire, evident for Luebke most particularly in W. Schulze’s notion of a “juridification” of peasant social relations after 1525. Luebke twists this construction toward an even more conservative and ironical reading of the peasants’ experience in the following 200 years of purportedly juridified negotiations when he asserts — in a move that echoes the royal authorities’ reasons for finally curtailing the Hauensteiners’ democracy in 174622 — that the events he describes are the result of a “crisis of too many choices” which the German peasants could not handle. The peasant “community” split vertically into opposing factions of village oligarchs, heading similarly stratified parties made up of peasants, artisans and laborers, who aligned themselves with (and were manipulated by) different parties of authorities. The outcome of this latest set of political and rebellious actions was a pyrrhic victory for the conservative, “realist” Miller (müllerisch) faction who acceded to the loss of electoral democracy for the Hauenstein peasantry as a whole.23

The parties of peasant oligarchs (holding elected office as so-called Octovirs, representing the eight “cantons” of Hauenstein) emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century and embodied two different solutions to the problem of how to fit into the post-1648 corporatist-absolutist order. Both factions, perceived by Luebke as distinct communities of “acculturation,” claimed to represent the interests of “the whole county” and each accused the other of betraying those interests by making secret deals with the abbey of St. Blasien or, alternatively, with royal or “foreign” authorities. The pragmatic-realist position of the Miller faction emerged around 1700 when its leaders sent a delegation directly to the emperor in Vienna in an attempt to intervene in a long

22 Rebels, 85.

23 Rebels, 22, 228-31 and passim. He characterizes the process as a “transition from a system of rule with peasants to one of rule over them.” 56; cf. W. Schulze, “Die veränderte Bedeutung sozialer Konflikte im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert” in H.-U. Wehler, ed.,Der deutsche Bauernkrieg, 1524-1526, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht 1976, 277-302. 392 negotiation between the latter and St. Blasien concerning the abbey’s campaign to obtain a “lease”24 in perpetuity over some particular tenancies that owed homage to the royal house. When the emperor granted the lease in 1705 on terms unfavorable to the peasantry, this faction not only looked ineffectual but also could be represented, because of its apparent acceptance of ambiguous language about the contractual subject (Eigenschaft) status of the leaseholders, as selling out the freedoms of Hauenstein. The other faction, the Salpeters, had seen the negotiations as an opportunity to start getting rid of “servile” status (Leibeigenschaft) and, beginning in 1719, waged a successful campaign in which the Millers’ “failure to present themselves as lacking self-interest in their dealings with dominant powers outside the polity. . .”(p.64) cost the latter the election of 1725, which saw the rise of the veteran Octovir Salpeter Hans to a third term in office, where he died (imprisoned for illegal political acts) in 1727.

The Salpeters’ followed up their own failed missions to Vienna — rejected by Imperial authorities and, significantly, passed on to the royal/regional administrative government in Freiburg — with disruptive and effective takeovers of all but one of the eight counties. Their organization of an armed, in the end non-violent, stand-off in 1728 against Imperial troops that had come to force St. Blasien’s subjects to swear an oath to the new abbot caused the royal government not only to engage in some exemplary punishments but also to side with the Miller faction against both the abbot and the Salpeters. The Millers negotiated a restoration of electoral rights in 1730 and a

24 What was at stake was obviously a Pfandherrschaft (“lien” administration) which was not a “lease” but a public-debt repayment in the form of a contractually specified exploitation by the creditor of royal treasury property; Luebke’s failure to identify it as such affects the quality of the argument he can make. I am no particular friend of quotation marks around words but I find Luebke’s use of such English terms as “county”, “lease” and, in a moment, “serfdom” and “manumission” highly unsatisfactory in that it allows him to tell a specious story about peasants’ political behaviors and reasonings, one that suppresses some of the substantive, purposive- and values- rational contents and issues of early modern German rural and corporative politics specifically contained in the German terms these translations mean to represent. 393 “manumission” of the offensive Leibeigenschaft rights of St. Blasien in 1737-38. Dissatisfaction with significant provisions of this deal sparked salpeterisch resistance (significantly, a “paradoxical” and puzzling act for Luebke) and a new round of electoral success for this party. A standoff developed between the two factions when the royal Forest Steward refused to swear in the new Octovirs who then, in turn, organized what amounted to a tax revolt against payment of the manumission fees, and followed this up, in the spring of 1739, with a violent military campaign against the Millers. Austrian troops suppressed the rebellion, carried out punitive executions and returned Hauenstein to the status quo ante 1738. Reinstalled in leadership, the Millers found that they now were identified with smoothing the imposition of the enormous tax burden mandated by the War of the Austrian Succession. Moreover, the Salpeters, returned to power as war-tax resisters in some areas by the elections of 1744, could, at a time when French-Bavarian forces briefly occupied Outer Austria, represent themselves as a party of patriots, claiming to be a royally sanctioned partisan resistance against the invaders and, more importantly, against the latter’s alleged müllerisch allies. The Millers’ purported betrayal (by satisfying French war requisitions) exposed them to a wave of very extensive and violently conducted expropriations by armed salpeterisch gangs. The denouement of the whole affair in December of 1745 saw a reassertion of power by the Austrian authorities, reinforced with 800 müllerisch troops, against the Salpeters, followed by a wave of retaliatory, violent expropriations of the latter and by a restoration of the Millers to provincial leadership. Their own leadership imprisoned or deported to the Banat, the Salpeters were pacified in a new political contract imposed by the Habsburgs, who retained the office of Octovirs but eliminated elections and placed the pragmatic realists, the Millers, into permanent power as paid state officials while also recognizing and consulting with the ideological fundamentalists, the Salpeters, as a more or less permanent political opposition.

There is a specious quality to Luebke’s questions-and-answers approach about who won and who lost this peasant war.25 To come up with a good answer one would

25 Luebke, Rebels, 85ff. 394 have to know what was at stake in these conflicts beyond the kinds of inconclusive and even evasive pieces of information and readings of intentions and outcomes that he provides. Nowhere does he ever make it clear, for example, what the precise terms of the obviously pivotal “manumission” treaty of 1738 were. Nor, for that matter, are we ever certain that the return to the status quo ante 1738 did not also mean an abrogation (followed by possible renegotiations?) of the treaty.26 The reason such matters are important is that much of Luebke’s argument hinges on presenting the “fundamentalist” Salpeters’ understanding of and reactions to the treaty and to other political moments as less-than-rational, paranoically conspiratorial (“the serfdom plot”), and historically (i.e. mnemonically) delusional — and therefore effective for political mobilization but not for governing. His fudging on the play of “facts” inside the “events” diminishes our ability to judge the rational qualities of, among others, the Salpeters and rather encourages us to see them as ineffectual and self-contradicting and as historical contributors only in the unconscious ironies of their misunderstandings and self- neutralizing actions. After outlining Suter’s narrative, we will take a critical look at the characterizations of the “realities” of action and the ascriptions of motive and meaning in both Luebke’s and Suter’s analyses to determine if there is more to these peasant experiences than their being merely duels of historical dramaturgies, ending always with the least-worst victories of the “realists” and worth talking about now only for our post- historic aesthetic edification.

III

One of the most curious moves by both authors is their simultaneous disclosure and marginalization, indeed their reference to and immediate narrative silencing of the events that were the, in their view, “triggering” moments for these peasant wars. They do

26 We are never told the subsequent history of this treaty and its enforcement except that payment refusals were part of the 1740s conflicts that ended with the declaration of the status quo ante. All Luebke tells us is: “the 1738 manumission treaty emancipated all abbatical serfs; subsequent treaties would abolish serfdom entirely.” Rebels, 85. 395 not entertain the notion that these events-before-the-“event” were arguably already the actual collapse into disorder that then required (unavoidably divided and contested) responses from the peasants which in turn produced various kinds and degrees of disruptive acts. It is these latter, however, that are characterized in both cases as “the collapse” into disorder that in turn leads to the “learning” that allegedly restores order. It is difficult to see how we can arrive at a credible assessment of the rationality of the various “actors’” political positions, if the nature and qualities and, above all, the appearances to them of the “exogenous shock” that merely “triggered” what are represented here as particular subsequent “collapses” into rebellion, are not present for discussion. For Suter, such simply generic shocks need not be explained but only recorded and their passage tracked through the “endogenously given transmission mechanisms”27 that are the purported focus of his study. This is a too-clever-by-half way not only of blocking important contextual dimensions from a specific historical narrative but also of suppressing, in a larger cultural-analytical sense, the contents and meanings of whatever phenomena appear to fulfill the shock-function, reduced now to acting merely as trigger-mechanisms for discernible (and presumably scientifically predictable — otherwise why do the investigation?) devolutions-in-crisis of any given historical populations’ cultural repertoires, including those in the post-1989 world that Suter in particular refers to repeatedly.28 In the context of global banking in the 1990s, where such world-system shocks as insider-trading currency manipulations, debt restructurings, cartellist rearticulations, ethnic-cleansings-for-real-estate-development, etc. remain largely invisible behind the “political events” reported by global news networks, and where the effectual containment of genocides inside national-cultural boundaries is a barely speakable desideratum,29 such studies can certainly do their part

27 Suter, Bauernkrieg, 593.

28 Janet Malcolm lights on and captures as adroitly as only she can an analogous moment in Vaclav Havel’s Letters to Olga by perceiving a “narrative that omits the ‘fact’ on which the crisis is poised.” The Purloined Clinic, New York: Knopf 1992, 170.

29 J. Nolan, ed., Global Engagement: Cooperation and Security in the 21st Century, Washington D.C.:1994. Of particular interest 396 in the creation of “scientifically” ethical and legal languages for the requisite hegemonic- cultural projections and negotiations accompanying allegedly “necessary” and therefore “tragic” financial and other restructurings in the “global” economy.

That this last contextual linkage is not altogether far-fetched becomes evident when we look at Suter’s “exogenous shock.” Not unexpectedly, the “event”dissolves into events, specifically, secretly prepared and therefore insider-known devaluations of the currency (the Batzen) by 30-50 per cent, running through Bern, Solothurn, Friburg and Lucern in December, 1652, and ending with an official devaluation decree for the Swiss Confederacy as a whole on January 18, 1653. The initial wave of devaluations meant the effectual destruction of a substantial part of the wealth of the largely unprepared rural subject population. The peasants were caught with devalued stock to pay their debts while the Patriciates of the leading cities had had, with foreknowledge, the opportunity and time to adjust their credit and commercial portfolios to take maximum advantage. In the analytical Part II of his study, Suter strongly implies but does not dare to risk making a fully exonerative claim that the devaluations were a necessity, driven by a world-system crisis.

Even more than in Luebke’s case, the conceptual dimensions of Suter’s work are closely wound into details of narrative and this requires any critical reader to reconstruct his stories at some length and in detail. Moreover, his several narratives present reading and summarizing problems not found in Luebke. His accounts in Part I and again in an Appendix summary (and in another in English) of the peasants’ multiple and far-ranging responses to the devaluations are fragmentary, incomplete and constantly interrupted by lengthy pontifications about various subjects. Facts, persons, events etc. are arguably “present” but not where we should expect to find them. Having shuffled the “triggering” events off-stage early, he proceeds, throughout the various versions, to leave out key and possibly fractious narrative moments. These often surface

are the contributions by C.M. Kelleher, “Cooperative Security in Europe,” 322, and A. Rondos, “The Collapsing State and International Security,” 491-95. 397 in displacing contexts in the analytical portions of the book where they are immediately enveloped in Suter’s not particularly revealing readings of successive, dramatic devolutions of specific symbolic acts leading toward what he sees as the peasants’ “adjustments” that allegedly demonstrate their political “learning.” As we will see, some significant displaced narrative moments appear as part of his discounting, as irrational, the subjects’ leaders’ invocations of historical and/or ”mythical” documents and chartering agents. Such contextual manipulations greatly diminish the seriousness of the peasants’ legal and political actions and in effect align this work with the latter’s suppression by absolutist acts of obvious bad faith and force. The book ends with a sense that this peasant war was nothing more than pre-history for a Modernization of the Swiss Confederacy that begins finally when the peasantries “learned” not only to submit to force but also to trust patricians’ “paternal” benevolence — as displayed in an Appendix that purports to show, without commenting on the relative political and other significance of what was and was not agreed to, how high a percentage of peasant claims were “granted” during and after the war.30

The drama’s first Act, tracing a descent “From Political Everydayness to Unrest,” begins with the special meeting of the 40 jurors (Geschworene) of the Entlebuch district’s peasantry on December 28, 1652, ten days after their overlord, the incorporated Patriciate of Lucern, had, in its jurisdiction, devalued the Batzen by 50%. Suter’s choice of “everydayness” to suggest a normalcy prior to this specific meeting alerts the reader to his narrative duplicity by which not the authorities’ destructive, insider-advantaging devaluation but the peasants’ reaction make up the breach of normalcy, the first “threshold-crossing.” An Entlebucher embassy, January 8-10, 1653, failed to achieve a meeting with the Lucern city council and this was followed immediately by a highly visible and violent scourging of one of the city’s debt collectors by some “youths” whose actions were then officially disavowed by the peasant jurors. January, 1653, ended with the Lucern council threatening retaliations against Entlebuch, the Bern city council taking steps to strengthen its military and with some of

30 Suter, Bauernkrieg, 626-643. 398 the Lucern peasants organizing to make spiked war clubs and parading these symbols about in efforts to draw attention to the life and death importance of their resistance against what they perceived as the patricians’ economically and socially destructive absolutism. A comet, visible since December 1652 throughout the Confederacy, was recorded by Merian as a portend of conflict about to erupt.

Act Two, the “Transition from Unrest to Revolt,” opens with the peasants’ continuation of a kind of dual strategy during February, 1653, by which, on one hand, their jurors sought to engage the Lucern council in political conferences that had, for reasons of mutual mistrust, a hard time coming together, while, on the other hand, popular demonstrations reviving symbols of violent resistance and leading to performances of historically resonant ritual oaths to form “free” incorporations provided the political energy for the jurors’ various diplomatic efforts and for their collaborating with more radical “representatives of the common man” to move toward acts of open revolt. On February 10, the subjects of Entlebuch swore a collective oath of membership as an independent territorial commune (Landgemeinde) and elected three military leaders in case of sudden military action by Lucern.31 It is worth noting that Suter here, and throughout, claims to find (in a phrase that echoes language heard under the Nazis) what he calls ritual formations of “collectively fated communities of necessity.”32 On the basis of its illegal incorporation, a socially and politically defined Entlebuch peasantry, however unsuccessful its initial attempts at uniting all ten of the magisterial townships of Lucern, sought to bring its position before the city council. The latter initiated, on February 14-15, a threshold-crossing learning experience of its own by sending to the peasantry an unprecedented delegation. This mission failed as well after the Lucern ambassadors had to endure the peasants’ insults and rude hosting. Suter does not consider that the peasants’ behaviors were reactive, not escalating actions, and that, given that the ambassadors were not empowered to negotiate or sign any agreement, their mission was in fact, however cloaked in signals of benign paternalism, a

31 Bauernkrieg, 131-40, 146-7.

32 Bauernkrieg, 122, 127,137,606 and passim. 399 provocation by the intransigent patricians. It was, if anything, a threshold-crossing in its own right, one that was syntactically connected with the authorities’ initial threshold- crossing into the abyss of communitas (if we must use Victor Turner’s language)33 in the form of the currency devaluation, gone from Suter’s narrative even though it remains prominent in the peasants’ negotiation points. The powerless Lucern embassy was an assertion, a communication of the legal barrier by which subjects were not fit to negotiate as equals but could only expect to address their authorities within established rules of “submissive petitioning” (untertänige Bitte) in the city itself. The lines were drawn when the ambassadors closed the discussion by stating that they would not “create an opening for others to slip through” and the Entlebucher replied that that had to be their intent.34

Suter’s central Act Three follows these mutual escalations from “Revolt to Revolutionary Situation,” from Lucern’s decision, as early as February 15, to crush the uprising with military power to the first meeting, on April 23, of a peasant union claiming to represent all of the Confederation’s subjects but consisting mostly of the subjects of Lucern, Bern, Solothurn and Basel. Lucern tried, on February 22, to enlist other Catholic towns in its cause but these rejected the request and offered to mediate instead. All ten of the Lucern peasantry’s townships on the next day, the 23rd, rejected the city’s order to swear new oaths of loyalty. There is a noticeable fluster in Suter’s story when none of the book’s three (long, short and “Summary in English”) versions of these events gives any clue why suddenly all of the city’s rural townships, divided thus far between Entlebuch and one ally on one side and eight neutrals on the other, united against Lucern at this point and subsequently, on the 26th, swore an oath of union in the church at Wolhusen. Suter hastens the reader through these “events” in a very short

33 Most historians who reference Victor Turner equate his communitas with “community” and that always seems somehow to be a “good thing.” They are advised to consult his The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, where it’s a little more complicated than that.

34 Bauernkrieg, 147. 400 space without once mentioning a pivotal narrative ingredient, itself an event; viz., that the Entlebuch peasantry had finally obtained, precisely on February 22, against the assiduous resistance of the authorities, documentary evidence on which to stake a claim that Lucern’s lordship was entirely invalid. In Suter’s construction, this legal discovery only surfaces very briefly over two hundred and fifty pages later in Part II, outside of the narrative context altogether, where it is then immediately discounted and effectively suppressed as part of the “cultural analysis.”35 There are similar narrative moves throughout and they make this already physically unwieldy and visually unpleasant book an even worse chore to read because the reader, unable to trust the story at any given point, has constantly to search forwards and backwards in the text, only to find that the conclusions drawn at one point are undermined by facts found elsewhere. Indeed, not only is Suter’s presentation of the very complicated interweaving of “events” that constitute “the Event” very hard to follow through his forward and backward jumps in time and his constant interruptions of the story with corny ruminations on, among other things, a “decision calculus” of the peasants, ritual oath-taking and the “free rider” problem, and the various meanings of “revolution,” but we also continually run the danger, depending on whether we happen to be reading the long or short version, of missing pivotal moments necessary for an understanding of what is going on.

The events of March, 1653, provide a case in point. The Catholic towns began their mediation between Lucern and the peasants on February 28 and the subject districts of Bern, particularly in the Emmental, called together their assemblies (some with the authorities’ permission) in the first weeks of March to formulate and present grievances, following all due procedures of “submissive petition,” on March 16. Two days later, a Confederate assembly (Tagsatzung) met, according to the short version, for four days in Baden to produce printed orders forbidding rebellious acts, to threaten military action and to begin to lay secret plans for such action. At the appropriate conjuncture in the long version, which is presumably how the reader first encounters this story, this absolutely crucial meeting is completely absent and it is only mentioned a few pages

35 Bauernkrieg, 168, 171; cf., 424-25; almost needless to say, neither the document nor the episode appear in the index. 401 later, without explanation, in the context of the mediators’ offer of a settlement, and then only to record the Lucern representative’s branding of the peasants’ actions as a “pestilence,” signifying a rather less than positive reception by the city of the arbitration results.36

In the context of Bern’s alleged decision, on March 20, to declare war on their subjects, there is a footnote37 telling us to go to Part II, Chapter 4.2, where we actually find yet another account of these events, one that undermines the “spin” of Suter’s official narrative versions about peasants’ “threshold-crossings.” Here the Lucern authorities’ request for military assistance of March 14 triggered a flurry of mobilization orders by the Bernese on the 15th and 16th. The decision to gather forces was accompanied by an authoritative report, on the 16th, that, with a political alliance between the Entlebuch and Emmental peasants imminent, any concessions by the Catholic arbitrators would encourage similar demands by the Emmentaler.38 In other words, it was the threshold-crossing military mobilizations of the authorities, even as the peasants were still following procedures and engaged in arbitration, that was behind the hard line subsequently taken by the Confederate Tagsatzung. When the arbitrators came in on the 19th with significant economic concessions, it was the Bernese patricians that were prepared to declare war and did so immediately. While Suter’s short and long narratives make it appear that peasants were the escalating force, it is evident that they were in fact lagging behind the preparations and willingness of the authorities to be the first to plunge into military operations. Indeed, a majority of the subjects continued on a, from their perspective normal, political path. In an action that in effect broke the union of February 15, the eight moderate Lucern townships — at a time when the city was divided by civil war and when the peasants’ resistances were successful against a Basel intervention — voted to accept, on April 3, the arbitrators’ terms, even without concessions to the peasants’ demand for a more democratic state to govern urban-rural

36 Bauernkrieg, 608, 172-3,177.

37 Bauernkrieg, 173 n.44.

38 Bauernkrieg, 472-474. 402 market and other relations.

There is one more narrative dispersal of these events by Suter that we need to pull together before we return to what happened next. Suter is careful throughout to separate and downplay the economic relative to the political motivations of the subject peasantry. However, we learn from the Bernese report of March 16, mentioned above, that significant goals of the Entlebuch and Emmental peasantries’ political acts were tax, trade and market related. Moreover, displaced into the “analytical“ Part II of the book is an episode in the opening sparring of what would become the First Villemergen war between Lucern and Bern in 1656, in which the Bern authorities refused a Lucern request in October of 1653 to lift transit trade barriers. This interruption of a trade network by which the Central Catholic and the Northern Protestant peasantries had cooperated in exporting their cattle and dairy products blocked the most vital growth sector in the rural economy. The authorities’ revealing argument was that it was precisely their economic success that sustained the peasants’ political alliances and that to shut the market down was the means to defeat them.39 We will return to this episode below when we consider Suter’s insistent characterization of the authorities as “paternalistic.” For now we note that this imposition of an internal embargo, demonstrating a willingness by the authorities to forego the growth and tax benefits of export trade because these would make specific communities of producers and traders politically powerful, is an ongoing strand of the story that is also syntactically linked to the triggering currency devaluation and is narratively displaced by Suter even as it is, arguably, “covered.”

Worn out by endless cross-referencing only to discover unresolved or even unacknowledged narrative disjunctures, the reader finds himself increasingly at an impasse at producing a summary account of this peasant war. To do so would mean, given Suter’s disaggregating versions of the story, doing the work of narrative reintegration for him and that exceeds any reader’s obligation as well as the physical limits of an essay. Trusting that this set of critical points has been made in preparation

39 Bauernkrieg, 479-80. 403 for the discussion below, we can finish with a sketch ” of the rest of the “drama, if not of the“action.”

The remainder of Act III (from revolt to “revolutionary situation”): a Protestant arbitration commission for Bern, organized under the leadership of Zürich, met between March 23 and 26 but was not in time to halt a military confrontation that began, significantly, when some peasants objected to seeing their drafted sons among the troops mobilizing against them. On March 29, a sizeable gathering of Bernese, Basel and Solothurn subjects forced units of the Basel militia to retreat. The first half of April saw, with the collapse of the Lucern rural townships’ union as already noted, the temporary return of clear political divisions among the peasants. While the Entlebuch/Emmental radicals continued to move toward political union with other townships, the moderate majority accepted the Catholic and Protestant authorities’ mediation terms and even swore new oaths of subjection. However, a decisive moment occurred on April 10, when the Emmental peasants, at an assembly including representatives from Entlebuch, the Aargau and elsewhere, overturned, for reasons that are not clear, their own negotiators’ earlier acceptance of the terms of mediation. The radicals’ subsequent campaign caused the moderate townships, falling like dominoes, to do the same, ending with the eight moderate Lucern townships’ rejoining the radicals on April 16. This was followed by a meeting at Sumiswald in the Emmental of about 2000 subject representatives on the 23rd to form a war council and a peasant union on the Wolhus model to represent the entire territorial peasantry of the Confederation. It is a shame that a book of this size could not reproduce (beyond a few sound bites out of context) the debates of any of these processes. Four articles of union appear only sketchily in the long narrative: 1. mutual aid in overturning illegal innovations, 2. collective consideration of and agreement to arbitrate specific subjects’ grievances, 3. mutual military assistance and 4. no separate agreements.40 For the peasants, these terms were their understanding of the logic of Swiss territorial-corporate traditions while it was the authorities who perceived

40 Bauernkrieg, 202; we learn later, in a different context, that there was at least a sixth point stipulating punishments for “falling away” from the union, 231. 404 them, as early as April 19, as constituting a “revolution.”41 Whose horizon of expectations are we talking about? Whose thresholds? What is “the event?”

In Act IV, “From Revolutionary Situation to Peasant War,” we see the appearance of unity achieved at Sumiswald fall apart and the subjects’ surprisingly substantial forces not yet engaged with but on the brink of battle against a better organized and wealthier (but, as it turns out, not more “modern”) united Patriciate, hiding in its fortified places. The political dominoes began to fall the other way for a short time once the authorities began, between April 28 to May 9, to woo the moderates away from the revolutionaries. Suter makes much of the fact that it was the cities’ so-called “diversion” tactics consisting of visitations to rural townships to hear grievances, make promises and renew loyalty oaths, that defeated the peasants long before they were defeated militarily.42 He has to admit, however, that by and large the “diversions” failed and that the “hard” and “mild” peasant parties that emerged fluctuated in size and coherence according to the ups and downs of negotiations, to the visible re-configurations of power and to the proximity of specific, direct threats of reprisals and violence.43 The central and northern peasant alliances were solid but failed to grow and failed to penetrate the united front of patricians and “citizens” who were, under peasant pressure, apparently cooperating to

41 Bauernkrig, 160; it is astonishing to read the twists and turns of Suter’s logic-chopping, 160-66, passim, to deny the peasants anything other than an ironic place in Swiss liberalism, the latter ascribed by him completely to post-Republic developments. Cf. the argument in R. Blickle,“Die Tradition des Widerstandes im Ammergau. Anmerkungen zum Verhältnis von Konflikt- und Aufstandsbereitschaft” Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie 35(1987), 138-159.

42 Bauernkrieg, 217ff; these political “diversions” were part of a primarily military perspective, a part of the evolving residue of the Swiss cities’ military entrepreneur sector from the Thirty Years’ war. These latter elements had been pushing for a military solution since at least mid-April, 214.

43 Bauernkrieg, 225-32. 405 democratize their cities’ internal constitutions.44 Conversely, the Patriciates were united in their refusal to extend membership in Confederate-territorial sovereignty to inhabitants outside their corporations. After negotiations broke down on the 17th and 18th and when the Confederation, commanding three regional armies of about 20,000 troops altogether, declared war on the peasants on May 20, the peasants, in turn desperately mobilizing and arming a credible force of the Landsturm, were able to respond in kind with comparable numbers. Suter closes Act IV with peasant troops investing Bern and Lucern on May 21 and 23 respectively.

The dramaturgy falters when we find ourselves in Act V, “From Peasant War to Tyrannicide,” with the crisis still unresolved. The transit from high to low point for the peasant protagonists is only reached by the middle of the last Act before the resolution, the revelation of what this was all about, begins to unfold in a final devolution. The failure of the sieges and the overall successive collapses of the peasant forces, with scarcely a shot being fired, occupy so much of the reader’s attention in this final Act that it all but obscures the denouement, consisting of the peasants’ humiliating and brutal subjugation and a last desperate acting out of the Tell legend by three radical leaders. The final whimpers of this “war” receive the perfunctory and thoughtless treatment of one eager to normalize and refigure the absolutistic Confederacy’s reactionary bad faith at the moment of pacification as a harbinger of a benign, future-oriented paternalism.45

The extensive and artillery-resistant fortifications of Bern46 and the skills of the

44 Bauernkrieg, 225-42; this is where a comparison to Brady, op.cit., might have been apropos.

45 One really has to wonder why the somewhat disillusioning portrayal of this future in R. Braun, Das ausgehende Ancien régime in der Schweiz, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1984, plays no significant role in this book.

46 Evident in a contemporary copper etching by Plepp and Merian, whose text reminds us, incidentally, that 1653 was the tricentennial of Bern’s joining the Confederacy. My source is H. Höhn, Alte deutsche Städte in Ansichten aus drei Jahrhunderten, Königstein/Ts.: Langewiesche 1956, 10 406 Confederate armies’ experienced leadership in fortifying open terrain overcame the peasant armies’ resolve for action outside Bern on May 28 and in the Aargau on June 3 and the “war” ended swiftly with the peasants agreeing to peace terms invoking the earlier arbitration agreements. Why this sudden collapse into the moderate, “mild” position remains unclear. Suter speculates that the peasants did not have artillery and yet he also shows they could have gotten some.47 No doubt the financial means and full- time soldiers for multiple sieges were lacking and the crop and dairy cycles called, but we miss the texts that could tell us how the peasants recognized, while they were pushing things as far as they could reasonably push them, their outclassed, “bypassed” position. In any case, the dominoes fell yet again the other way, as the peasant leaderships made separate peace agreements with their authorities between June 4 and 6, foregoing all political demands and trusting in their lords’ promises, if not of amnesty then of limited punishments. While peace agreements were being concluded between the Lucern patricians and subjects (the Stans Peace), the Bernese authorities already repudiated their agreements on the 7th and set the course for the others by arresting suspects far in excess of the numbers the peace terms had stipulated, interrogating some with torture and punishing those convicted of rebellion with fines, confiscations, galley slavery and death. It astonishes when Suter characterizes this period as a return to “political everydayness” (der politische Alltag).48

With search and arrest units occupying villages and combing the countryside for fleeing rebels by mid-June, public executions under way by early July and the reversal of Lucern’s urban constitutional democratization on the 11th, widespread accusations of “tyranny” and breaches of contract came together in one final radicalization of the peasant resistance. On September 29, three of the outlawed Entlebuch leaders, in the by then common guise of the Three Tells, killed a leading Lucern official after the latter had refused to grant amnesty on a ritual occasion for renewing loyalty oaths. In early October, the Three Tells were betrayed, two killed in flight and the third betrayed again

47 Suter, Bauernkrieg, 264.

48 Bauernkrieg, 282. 407 and killed when he returned in June of 1654. The rebellion’s end is best marked perhaps by the Lucern authorities’ building of a police fortress at the center of one of the most rebellious Entlebuch towns during October, just in time for the beginning of hostilities with Bern. The residue of broken agreements, of brutality and force against reasonable political actions, and all to preserve a narrowly patrician-corporatist monopoly on state and fiscal sovereignty, is quickly forgotten in Suter’s concluding focus on the peasants’ tyrannicidal “threshold-crossing” into “treachery and brutality.”49 His projective, reductionist reading of the Three Tells’ performance as an “unambiguous symbolic act” (is such a thing possible?) to recall the Christian community to its conscience, misses the crucial difference in timing with the “original” Tell’s action standing at the beginning of the Swiss turn to “liberty” whereas here it is obviously perceived by the majority, even as many support it, as a suicidal last hurrah, a pathos at the moment of capitulation to superior, absolutistic force.

Significantly, not only did the “triggering” currency devaluation (whose effects are purportedly here being traced through cultural learning machineries that seek equilibrium) completely disappear long before the end of this story, but, even prior to that, the larger “triggering” context, the achievement of sovereignty by the Swiss Confederation in 1648, a context that much of what the peasants’ legal struggle sought to address, plays no role in the narrative whatsoever. In the second part of this essay, we will examine how Luebke’s treatment of the triggering event similarly keeps it completely off-stage. We will consider in greater detail how Suter and Luebke, in their haste to construct modernist symbolic action narratives, seeking to diminish the rational qualities of “fundamentalists” and to approve of the pragmatism of “realists,” had to repress a great deal about the many-layered and articulating worlds in which their subaltern “actors” lived, about the multiple rational qualities, beyond the “realism” of merely giving in to power, that were required of the latter. However the Swiss peasants may have been “outclassed,” the reasoning inside their capitulation remains obscure and untold; if anything, Suter has at least to admit that they did not cave in to a more

49 Bauernkrieg, 307. 408 rational, “modernized” military force.50 It is the refusal to address a fuller range of “historical actors’” experiences and, above all, their rational qualities that renders both of these narrative analyses less valuable than they could have been.

IV

Even though the scale and narrative complexity of the peasant wars Luebke and Suter examine differ greatly, both stories share not only adjacent temporal and geographic frames but also a historical commensurability, in that both authors reveal aspects of “what it was like” to challenge politically, economically and “from below,”the absolutist-corporatist order of German Central Europe in the century after 1648. Neither of them rises to the occasion because the analyses remain trapped in a behaviorist phenomenology, seeking to boil historical experiences down to essential (i.e., finally predictable) distillates of “actions” and “ choices” associated, in this case, with “peasant war” or, Luebke, “rural revolt.” But is “peasant war” what we need to talk about to gain a significantly sharper focus on the central questions affecting everyone, perhaps especially peasants, concerned with negotiating and battling for position in a re- polarizing, dynastic-corporatist world system experiencing an expanding “web of market relations” (Brady) that was brought “home” to the local worlds of peasants in the form of the lords’ searching for trans-regional financial opportunities and/or profitable defaults? Does the designation “peasant war” itself already impose a limitation on our perception of how deeply and extensively woven into larger designs such an “event” could possibly be? By not giving us a satisfying sense of the ”actors’” articulations with their respective world systems (perceivable differently both then and now), of how their actual social and economic and other relationships worked in terms of simultaneously local and trans-regional power, these authors give us no basis for judging the very things they had set out to illuminate; namely, the qualities of their “actors’” economic, political and social rationalities and the capacities of both emerging peasant parties for combining and effectively mobilizing pragmatic “realism” as well as ”fundamental” legal and democratic principles.

50 Bauernkrieg, 559. 409 For both Suter and Luebke, the narrative device of an external “shock” to trigger a collapse, only then to disappear from the subsequent “event,” represses not only the content-specific, continually ongoing and actively displaced presence of these shocks in the respective events they “triggered” but also points away from an even deeper layer of triggers within triggers. Hovering in the background but never part of the effective story, these last are, in both cases, nothing less than the far-reaching restructurings of the legal-constitutional environments in which peasants had to operate. In Suter’s story, this was the Swiss Confederacy’s assumption of international sovereignty according to the terms of the peace of Westphalia. Luebke’s peasants experienced the deeper “shock” of the Habsburgs’ unilateral exclusion, in the early eighteenth century, of some regions from Imperial status and protection. These constitutional rearrangements were accompanied, in turn, by both hegemonic and subaltern corporations’ testing of their new systems’ limits and capacities for redistributing individual and collective costs and advantages. Neither “system revolution” plays a narrative role in these monographs whose failure lies in the failure to recognize that, to a significant extent, this is what these “peasant wars” were about and what we have to judge the “rationality” of the various “actors” by.

It argues against Suter and Luebke to note that it was the aristocratic corporations who initiated the process of threshold-crossing escalations by asserting themselves unilaterally in their refigured economic-political arenas with aggressive demonstrations of sovereign power aimed at exploiting in the market the subaltern’s political and military weakenesses. Luebke’s Black Forest peasants saw themselves increasingly subject to deals from which they had been excluded without recourse and by which the negotiating authorities broke the existing social contract, as the peasants understood it. The ominous granting, in 1705, of a renewal “in perpetuity” of St. Blasien’s lien administration of the Habsburgs’ earnings from Hauenstein, by which the subjects were in effect “privatized” and expelled from royal treasury protection without being consulted, set up the re-gathering of rebellious peasant forces in 1719 in response to a failed legal challenge of this contract in which the Miller leadership, so the Salpeter accusation, had not taken the matter to the Imperial courts as they were entitled.

410 Whether or not this latter was the case is not at all clarified by Luebke, but the Millers’ “realistic” recognition of the de facto state of affairs was confirmed the next year with the Habsburgs’ Court Chancellory Ordinance which terminated the Hauensteiner’s legal appeals chain at the royal administrative courts of Innsbruck and excluded them from the Imperial processes in Vienna.51 Although completely absent from the narrative account, this is surely the key change for this peasantry at that specific moment at the level of Imperial-dynastic law. It is what is being tested in 1719/20 behind the several political-legal confrontations that were the opening actions for the larger, internally conflicted confrontation. As had Suter’s Entlebucher before them in response to an absolutist currency devaluation which had translated into an internal power play the Swiss Patriciate’s exclusive claims to external Confederate sovereignty, the Hauensteiner too mobilized because they were being legally “provincialized,” their legal position in the corporatively organized regional market eroded out from under them. Without this premise of the peasants’ obvious (albeit divided and differentially “rational”) understanding of the changes in the politics and rules that governed their markets, Suter and Luebke’s artificial separations of economic from political-cultural motives constitute an analytical blockage.

A case in point is Luebke’s discussion of Leibeigenschaft, an issue over which the Hauensteiner parties were divided for reasons Luebke admits he can not grasp. For him this term translates into “servile subjection”52 and he is trapped completely in the political-historical rhetorics surrounding that figure. By overplaying the “servility,” “serfdom” and “slavery” associations that persist as the historiographical conventions surrounding this term, he misses completely the intertwined legal-constitutional and economic, i.e., the actual “systemic” layers of meaning which made it the central issue it

51 Luebke, Rebels 64-65, commits a narrative disjuncture on the Suter model when the Ordinance of 1720, in effect silencing the Salpeters’ appeal to Imperial jurisdiction, appears in a descriptive portion of the book (28-29) but is forgotten as a possible motivator inside the peasants’ threshold-crossings at the proper moment in the narrative,.

52 Rebels, 151-2, passim. 411 was in its own time — and demonstrating thereby, incidentally, how the relentless, endless laboring of the obvious “content” that we find with symbolic actionist approaches blinds us (with power-serving, metonymic moves of taking the figure always only at its face value) to what the subaltern are actually doing. Thus, although Luebke cites Hannah Rabe’s reassessment of the Leibeigenschaft problem,53 he completely ignores her central argument; viz., that it was the communalist parties of peasants who opposed Leibeigenschaft because, rather than “servitude ” it actually offered those who agreed to this arrangement freedom from communal supervisions, restrictions, taxations, and obligations and it was, even worse, a freedom that empowered women because it made this, under certain conditions desirable status, inheritable through the mother.

The key to getting a mutual benefit in a leibeigen (“personal bondage”) contract was, for both lord and subject, the geographic separation between them and its effect on the competition between communal-local and central-distant sources of authority.54 It

53 H. Rabe, Das Problem Leibeigenschaft: Eine Untersuchung über die Anfänge einer Ideologisierung und des verfassungsrechtlichen Wandels von Freiheit und Eigentum im deutschen Bauernkrieg, Beiheft 64 of the Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1977.

54 Leibeigenschaft, 65-66 and passim; there are significant problems with Rabe’s sometimes awkwardly argued study (e.g., she does not sufficiently untangle, 90-99, the inheritance questions thrown up by this circumstantially “privileging” form as does D. Sabean, Landbesitz und Gesellschaft am Vorabend des Bauernkriegs, Stuttgart: Wolfgang Fischer 1972, 93-94) but her study has great merit and can not be ignored, as Luebke does. Suter’s discussion (Troublen, 304-5, 240, 242 and passim) of the so-called craichies, i.e., of those early eighteenth-century Basel subjects (Hintersassen) whose houses were symbolically, anonymously, marked with a yoke to designate their tenants’ individualized, de-communalized “subordination” to the episcopal lordship, contains much that would have enlightened Luebke. It is worth noting that one of the benefits of being a Hintersasse (a common eighteenth century South German and Swiss term for a subject under a personal bondage contract) was, by eighteenth century rules for military recruitment, protection against forced conscription, a benefit that gives the Miller position some 412 gave lords the means to have loyal leibeigen agents who were relatively independent of local politics in “distant” villages, while it gave the subjects who took on this status not only greater (!) mobility and agency than the normal, communalized, subject population had but also provided a bargaining tool for tenant-landlord transactions. In the Hauenstein case this necessary geographic distance was disappearing: the 1719 claim by St. Blasien to this form of landlordship over all Hauenstein tenants (now without appeal to Imperial arbitration) as well as the 1738 “manumission” arranged by the Miller party by which the territorial government would become “Leibherr” were both localizations, provincializations, that negated the bargaining advantage to the subjects and increased the controlling power of the local landlords, be they St. Blasien or the County government. Leibeigenschaft’s lower-court provisions would, for example, greatly augment the local landlords’ capacities for enforcing debt payments, a particular benefit to St. Blasien, the biggest lender in the area, already deriving the greatest single share of its incomes from debt servicing.55 The reason that Luebke advances for the peasants’ opposition to this “personal” contractual form is the taxation burden that allegedly accompanied it56 but, in the specific case of the death taxes that he cites, it is clear that these were already key to an old, fifteenth and sixteenth century battle the Austro- German peasantries had largely lost by 1600 and that it applied to subject populations’ tenure contracts generally.57

Moreover, if we follow Rabe’s argument, we have to recognize that the peasants’ internal conflict about Leibeigenschaft concerned the differential impacts this

rational significance; cf. P. Taylor, Indentured to Liberty: Peasant Life and the Hessian Military State, 1688-1815, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 66.

55 Luebke, Rebels, 40; by 1738, 69% of St. Blasien’s subjects were leibeigen, 43.

56 Rebels, 43-44.

57 Rebels, 42-3. 413 contractual form had on peasant property rights58 and, consequently, on the land market and on their management options and choices. To go with the “servility” discourse alone is to share Luebke’s puzzlement about why the Salpeters would oppose the 1738 “manumission” deal and it is also to miss an opportunity to grasp a moment of party differentiation that makes this latter more than simply two kinds of political habitus but actually sees it containing conflicted visions of how best to conduct family business and communal politics in the corporatist-absolutist future. From the perspective of those who saw in Leibeigenschaft’s post-1525 regulated constructions an opportunity to engage in a more complex set of “world system” relations for individual peasant family firms, a regression to a localized version was the worst of both worlds and had, for some, to end in a call for the abolition of Eigenschaft, of any kind of subject status, altogether. The Miller party’s move to eliminate the possible intrusion of a “foreign” Leibherr into the community by, in effect, acquiring that right for themselves represented a conservative, corporatist and, for peasants, a self-encapsulating path of economic and political development.59 The Salpeters’ alternative vision of a centrally adjudicated “state-subject” status (and hence their not so irrational-appearing efforts to find some way to continue to connect to the Viennese court by delegations or by negotiating alignments with the Imperial Marian cult) was, to a limited degree, forward looking since it anticipated precisely the kind of “revolutionary” changes that would come to be associated with Joseph II’s alleged abolition of “serfdom” later in the century. Evidently, once we understand what Leibeigenschaft was about as an issue, the respective positions dividing the parties were both “rational” and “realistic” parts of political programs that sought different solutions to the problem drawn from Tom Brady at the outset. It is, at the same time, not surprising that both Luebke and Suter perceive the pyrrhic victories of the conservative, corporatist-communalist parties as the triumph of a reasonable, realistic turn toward future progress and away from allegedly debilitating conflicts with what were, from their limited “political science” perspective, divisive fundamentalist

58 Leibeigenschaft, 99-103.

59 For a Swiss anti-Habsburg take on this, see Suter, Bauernkrieg, 419. 414 utopians.

Luebke’s underestimation of even the simplest complexion of issues surrounding Leibeigenschaft is an indicator, one that also applies to Suter, of the incapacity of a symbolic actionist approach to pay adequate analytical attention to the rational qualities demanded by the subaltern’s economic and social position in their world systems — or, for that matter, by their “symbolic systems.” Luebke, for instance, understands that the issues surrounding the terms of tenure, household debt, the right of “withdrawal” (one of the means available to families to adjust inheritance), etc. were related to a broad battle going on over the terms of the land market where, indeed, St. Blasien was trying to gain control. He is, however, not aware of the substantive economic-rational dimensions of this market struggle where the issue was not just who “controlled” the market, as he puts it, but where conflicts about the shared degrees of civil market rights, the freedom of the market itself and the legislation advanced by absolutist-corporatist representations actually to reduce the existing freedom of the market for peasants60 were issues that challenged the rational calculations of the managerial and other interests of peasant family firms and could reasonably divide peasant factions into two opposing parties advocating either accommodation with or resistance to these recognizably regressive moves. As it is, neither Luebke’s nor Suter’s grasp of these issues can determine for us who is “rational” in this conflict and what the substantive qualities of the opposing arguments are.

A key case in point for both studies concerns the partibility of inheritance, a desideratum for which peasantries in the Austrian empire had gone to war since at least the early sixteenth century and which, for reasons of militarily enforced tribute-state formation, had largely been decided in favor of impartibility (and of the downward

60 It is another narratively and therefore analytically excluded moment (see note 45 above) where the initiating shock of action comes from the St. Blasien authorities who, precisely in the fateful years 1719-20, curb the peasants’ “withdrawal” rights of adjusting inheritance and expand their own powers of managing peasant inheritance and succession. Luebke, Rebels, 130-31. 415 distribution of the latter’s social costs) by 1650.61 Nevertheless, in mid-seventeenth century Switzerland and in early eighteenth century Hauenstein peasants were still managing to subdivide property and distribute it differentially among their heirs, a practice that the authorities opposed mainly, as Luebke at least admits, because it interfered with keeping together farms as tribute-producing and accounting entities. It is a curious fact that neither Suter nor Luebke can think his way past the tribute- authorities’ standard argument on this issue which was that by the logic of partibility properties would become subdivided to the point where they could not sustain a farm family.62 This argument, however, can only prevail in a logic flawed by unrealistic, de- contextualized premises, operating where no land market is allowed to develop so that countervailing cycles of property division and reconstitution (precisely the kind of activities the Hauenstein and Swiss and indeed many other peasantries of German- speaking central Europe were seeking to engage in) could overcome the perceived “limits of partibility,” a concept of such hegemonic force in its time that historians in ours are still fully under its spell. The anti-partibility parties were simply helping to put into place the ideological components for those articulating systems of rural estate, urban and trans-regional tribute cartels, organized under variously sovereign dynastic- corporate, state and Imperial powers that were destined to be the dominant economic actors in Central Europe for three centuries after 1648.63

That there were those, like some in the Miller party, who were willing to accept whatever rewards the unbusinesslike and power-serving rigidity of impartible peasant

61 Cf. H. Rebel, Peasant Classes: The Bureaucratization of Property and Family Relations under Early Habsburg Absolutism, 1511-1636, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983 and idem, “Peasantries under the Austrian Empire” in T. Scott, ed., The Peasantries of Europe from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, London: Longman 1998, 191-225.

62 Luebke, Rebels, 124; he still refers, quaintly, 267, to “inheritance customs.”; Suter, Bauernkrieg, 348-9;

63 For a glimpse into the ideological construction of this new corporatist, in effect cartelist, vision and its impact on peasants’ economic calculations see Rebel, “Peasantries,” 220-21. 416 tenure could provide, does not make their position more “reasonable” or “realistic,” as the authors imply, but signifies rather that a fraudulent “reality claim” of economic necessity was and still is being advanced (by both some of the historical “actors” and their present historians) that in effect shields us from recognizing that a complex of interconnecting political choices about the relative freedom of markets and the distribution of surpluses and powers within the families and communities of the primary producers were being made — and that the radical parties were not the deluded voices in these transactions while the “realists” were those content simply to accept less. The latter were making economic, political, social and even moral choices that the former rejected, choices that required incumbent heads of houses to involute, to extort more out of their house-families, to dispossess children more absolutely, to de-securitize the inheritance portions of women, to abandon small trust funds to the “paternalistic” (and, by any standard, “criminal”) predations of patricians’ and courtiers’ banking corporations and so on. For historians to make this self-exploitive, income-sheltering “rationality” the ground for measuring any rural population’s advance toward modernist realism is to be fully complicit with and to share in the pathos of the stifling, arch- conservative provincialism that distinguishes these processes to this day.64

One other significant example of how both authors consistently misrecognize the political-economic aspects of peasant rationality concerns their representations of peasant debt. Both indicate, without laying out any specific chain of connections, that

64 Luebke asserts, on the basis of very little evidence, that his parties united in opposition to the authorities’ impartibility position, but he also has evidence that shows the parties divided in the way indicated in the text, Rebels, 123-25, 132-4; for a suggestive comparison see the analysis by T. Ditz Property and Kinship: Inheritance in Early Connecticut, 1750-1820, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1986, who reveals what was going on at the same time with these issues in a part of the world where a land/real estate market was evolving toward greater freedom. There we learn how providing, historically and institutionally, a wider range of options for the “bequest motive” was, and still is, above all a political-ethical matter of personal and familial and also communal and even civilizational choice. 417 excessive indebtedness was part of the causal nexus of the peasant wars.65 Suter in particular again accepts as innately “rational” the implementation by the ruling corporations of limits on the subjects’ ability to hold debt, as when he indicates that it was the peasants’ post-1648 taking on of more debt (while demanding amnesty on old debt) purportedly to convert their family firms’ economies from war to peace that forced the authorities to intervene with debt limits.66 When we examine his very limited evidence for these alleged over-extensions, however, such characterizations appear unsound. Based on only eight of the twenty-one household inventories of convicted peasant rebels that he examines in Appendix 4, he shows an average debt of 54% of all assets. For the persons in question, this is not particularly high, especially in light of the fact that in an Austrian case from about this same period similar peasant rebels’ debt-to- assets ratio was closer to 100% while the average debt for an inventory population of over 800 rural people from all social strata was about 48% of assets.67 At the same time, his data on mortgage debt for the other thirteen peasant rebels, averaging 55% of land value (which, again, is nothing remarkable) reveals that what he calls “new debt” — and he’s stretching it by including all mortgage debt taken on between 1640-53 — was merely 13% of total mortgage debt, all of which actually contradicts his argument that it was post-war conversion debts that were causing the peasants problems. Moreover, there is no information about the content of these debts. What were they for? In peasant-subjects’ family firm arrangements such debts often involved family relations of inheritance, trust fund obligation, dowry and other commitments and the authorities’ imposition of limits on debt (notably in sync with their other “triggering” acts) could indeed reach deeply, catastrophically, into the capacities of peasant family firms to manage their assets not only for business but also social advantages during what were,

65 Luebke, Rebels, 126; Suter, Bauernkrieg, 342-43, 355-59.

66 In his narrative, Suter characterizes as “adventurous” the authorities’ allegation that “excessive” debt was a measure of the peasants’ immorality, but also agrees it was part of the former’s “well thought out” reasoning for declaring war against the peasants. Bauernkrieg, 245-46, also 256.

67 Suter, Bauernkrieg, 649; Rebel, Peasant Classes, 243,65. 418 without doubt, interesting times for them.

Finally, Suter’s assertion that peasants were in a liquidity crisis because too big a percentage of their income went into debt servicing founders when we realize that not only does his figure (66.5% of income) have very limited representational power but that, in any case, it dates from 1690, long after the defeat of the peasantry. His source in fact reveals this defeat’s most significant economic effect; viz., the effect following the assertion of absolutist public-financial and exploitive regulatory power in the market. Contrary to his intentions, he is showing us how miserably the peasants were doing in the new “paternal” order!68 Not only does Suter give us nothing to perceive how the peasants could react “rationally” to the narratively long forgotten shock of the currency devaluation, in an environment where their foreign trade connections were being severed by the authorities as part of a strategy of deliberate provincialization and subordination, but he uses data in circular fashion to show the long-term, and evidently dire, effects of this entire process on the family firms’ economies as evidence to justify the authorities’ measures to put a low ceiling on peasant debt fifty years earlier.

Moreover, by making peasant “indebtedness” the problem, Suter erases a whole spectrum of other problems — illustrated by the authorities’ imposition of debt ceilings to favor public and private tribute extractions over private debt servicing — arising from the new market order of controls, localization and urban-corporate exploitation. At no point do we encounter information or texts that could indicate what the substantive economic and social management problems of peasant households were or that could justify judgments about the possible rationalities that were demanded from peasants who were confronted, beginning in the early 1650s, by imminent imprisonment in powerless, self-exploitive, quasi-colonized and slow-growth regional economies where their family and communal finances were at the mercy of the various Patriciates’ or other sovereign authorities’ secretive, insider-trading, courtier and absolutist finance

68 Suter, Bauernkrieg, 345, 359. Without “control” studies, these figures have to be used cautiously since they were part of a limited census compiled by the authorities with a view toward raising tributes. 419 corporations.

Luebke’s evidence to support a similar claim that peasants were going into excessive debt is that more loans were being made by parish-guild treasuries.69 He provides us with an interesting example of a double misrecognition, encompassing not only the peasants’ economic but also what he calls their “symbolic rationality.”70 While he is right to connect this kind of indebtedness to an economic upswing during the first half of the eighteenth century, he does not appreciate the role such credit formation played in the community and parish institutional innovations that were assisted by the market’s secular movement. This period of (actually quite limited) growth in rural wealth coincided with a religious revival that saw more personal moneys going into the “pious” parish and community projects that we associate now with the religious, domestic and artistic-architectural “peasant baroque” of Austria and southern Germany, beginning in the late seventeenth and ending with the assertion of ecclesiastical and foundational property-confiscating “enlightened” absolutism by the mid-eighteenth century. By reading peasants’ increasing use of parish guild and other confraternal treasuries in a political-economic frame we can make an alternative argument and say that Luebke’s evidence is not a sign of “debt trouble” but fits better into a rationality construction that combines religious pious revival with developing more independent parish and village-corporate financial institutions that not only provided communal benevolent and welfare initiatives but could also shelter peasant family wealth against aristocratic or state tribute-taking and other predations, thereby forming the rudiments of an anti-monopolistic and more diverse financial market at the village level. That this alternative could then in turn be abused by “insider” debtors who did not pay their interest is a significant drawback of the un- or “self”-regulated provincialization of such institutions (in effect, the Miller position) and is another matter, but the market- liberating and competitive potential of nascent parish, craft guild, welfare and benevolent fraternal associations and other such local fund-managing and credit

69 Luebke, Rebels, 126.

70 Rebels, 90. 420 institutions in the period between 1650 and 1750 is a significant context that both Luebke’s and Suter’s stories lack completely. They are not alone in this. It is a dimension that is generally lost in the current (post-1989) historical celebration of religious symbolisms and popular piety in Central European history where the focus is, as it is here, above all on the politically mobilizing effectiveness71 of such symbolic actions and not on their substantive social, economic and discursive applications, i.e., on the full range of options they make available to peasants’ variously “rational” actions.

Luebke’s description of the Salpeters’ organization and performance of Marian pilgrimages in conjunction with their diplomatic delegations to seek audiences with the emperor in Vienna hints at the parish fund raising activities accompanying these symbol-deploying acts but the latter play no role in what he does with this material, which is to contribute to a growing literature on “naive monarchism.” He dwells at length on the practical failure of what he sees, on the basis of no evidence in particular, as attempts by the radical peasantry to evade, by vainly reaching out to royal authority directly, the purportedly costly and slow legal innovations and processes that the Millers were apparently realistic enough simply to accept. This is where some narrative flaws catch up with him. Claiming, as he does, that the peasant leadership’s pursuit of a limited rationality that aimed at purely local prestige payoffs is not only not commensurable with the high risk of failure and extreme punishments that he also reports but it also trivializes and writes out of the story what was evidently at stake for the radicals, which was in fact the very opposite of acquiescing in the provincializing aspects of absolutist rule as measured by constrictions of the market. Luebke’s sense of “symbolic rationality” in effect suppresses the triggering events that began in 1705 with the conversion of royal lien property into private property (cutting off the appeals rights

71 Suter, Bauernkrieg, 227-28; Luebke, “Naive Monarchism,” passim, and idem, Rebels, 193-202.To be sure, particularly Luebke’s discussion of these matters is full of “factual” contents that are a valuable addition to our knowledge and it would be instructive to make these “facts” work in the trans- regional, parish-treasury and confraternal politics of the peasants, something I do not have space for here. 421 of subjects to the former lien lord) and that ended with the imperial restructuring following 1719/20 by which the Imperial authorities in effect abandoned the Hauenstein peasants to local and provincial lordship and created conditions that threatened the kinds of market restructuring-from-below implicit in the renascent proliferation and expansion of parish and guild financial associations.72 In that context, peasant efforts — however unsuccessful (and therefore naive?) they might appear to us now — at sustaining an Imperial connection to try to keep alive avenues of appeal and to resist absolutist invasions by local power, make sense. It makes it possible to credit at least some among the peasants of being capable of moving beyond the kind of hegemonic realism that Luebke, following James Scott, suggests was operating in the pilgrimages and diplomatic delegations by which even the most radical subaltern, when they approached the “strange theaters” of power (Foucault), appeared only to engage in the habitual performances of deference required by what James Scott calls the “official transcripts,” according to which protest, even in a violent mode, is always a negotiation to stay within the precincts of hegemonic participation.73

72 It is here where a more careful reading of Suter’s earlier monograph might have alerted Luebke to a research direction derived from geographically and temporally adjacent and very comparable peasant resistances against ecclesiatical landlords. The Basel peasant rebels too, just like those of Hauenstein, had to deal with newly empowered and restructured offices of local and regional forest stewards. More importantly, the Basel bishops, claiming communal institutions were inadequate for their ostensible purposes, began, with an administrative reform in 1726, to assert fiscal control over communal accounts and to intervene in the administration of welfare, trust fund and other family and associational finances, precisely in those realms where pious and benevolent associations were seeking to forge new links between public and private financial institutions. Even though his peasants’ “symbolic reason” points to it, Luebke appears not to have investigated this arguably central area of economic- and social-political conflict. Suter, Troublen, 246- 47,324-28.

73 Luebke, “Naive Monarchism” 101-2, and, idem, Rebels, passim; J. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990, 90-93 and passim. 422 Negotiations to stay within and “realistic” capitulations to hegemony are not necessarily the same thing and both were certainly present, indicating that these differences might have been the grounding principles dividing the parties. The process also contained, from the Salpeters’ side (and the same goes for the radical Swiss leaderships), historically unacknowledged elements of what I would call “hegemonic intelligence” by which I understand the subaltern’s variable ability to intuit, without necessarily fully understanding, the discourses and texts by which existing world systems’ hegemonic bloc participants negotiate from moment to moment and at all levels of articulation their perpetually unstable relationships, and the further ability to invent languages and acts that cut into, resist, interfere with, avert and possibly change those negotiations in whatever actionable world system locations present themselves to or are achieved by the subaltern. This perception seeks to go beyond Suter’s and Luebke’s understanding of “realism” whose one-dimensionality constitutes a blind fundamentalism in its own right and attributes a pre-discursive, essential quality to Power and gives license to those who claim it to resort to unresponsive silence and extreme, overwhelming violence, against which it is only “realistic” to capitulate.74

Suter’s and Luebke’s one-dimensional closures on peasant rationality forestall and repress an exploration of the dialogic, figural elements in hegemonic processes whose recognition alone can move us beyond the symbolic actionists’ unsatisfying laborings over perceived off-the-shelf “uses” of symbols that subaltern actors merely take from the hegemons and that therefore appear to offer protestors the duplexity of a resistance that can also always claim shelter in the existing order. Luebke is aware that the symbolic choices peasants made contained nuanced differences that sought to make political and factional statements, to retain controllable versions of, in this case, Marian

74 “When even the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them; others should be rational enough to yield to them. Within the range of Fascism, to defy such reason is the cardinal crime.” M. Horkheimer, “ The End of Reason” [1941] in A. Arato and E. Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, New York: Urizen, 1978, 28. 423 shrines and pilgrimages, perceived as “forms of cultural appropriation that ran at cross- purposes to its [the “state cult of Maria Immaculata”] original intent.”75 Leaving aside a perpetual problem with “original intent,” we can see that my previous argument about the peasants’ fight against economic and legal provincialization finds support in his evidence about Marian symbolic actions which evidently sought to connect with Marian cultists at the court in Vienna and also, by visiting shrines across the border in Bavaria and elsewhere, sought allies and connections in the wider region.

Moreover, one of the curious absences in Luebke’s monograph is Lionel Rothkrug’s sustained, political-economic argument about the parish guild and other confraternal production of pilgrimages and shrines whose organization in turn was part of a strong upsurge of alternatives to aristocratic monopolies in competing, potentially “liberating” communal corporate formations.76 Rothkrug’s complex geography of the distribution not only of shrines dedicated to Christ and the Saints but also to two kinds of Mary, the Imperial immaculata and the dissident parishes’ mater dolorosa, offers analysts a far better appreciation of the political-dialogic possibilities residing in the peasants’ itinerant stagings and productions of, (not just “choices in”) political Mariology. The linkage Luebke seeks to create between Marian symbolism and Leibeigenschaft by focusing on the organized parades of “virgins” (Jungfrauen) fails to

75 Luebke, “Naive Monarchism” 104.

76 Lionel Rothkrug, Religious Practices and Collective Perceptions: Hidden Homologies in the Renaissance and Reformation, special issue of Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 7:1(1980). Like Hannah Rabe, Rothkrug makes a brief footnote appearance in Luebke, “Monarchism”,76 n.12, but what he says plays absolutely no role in Luebke’s citationally correct but narrowly conceived argument. Chapter 11 in Rothkrug’s book has the most lucid discussion I have seen of the theological underpinnings of urban and rural confraternal corporations as corpora mystica, arguably a central element in the subaltern’s “participation” problematic (Suter’s language, Bauernkrieg, passim; cf. also 228, for Swiss peasants’ association of pilgrimages with collective strength) besetting both ecclesiastical and secular state-formation theory and processes after 1300. 424 do justice to these complexities. His already simplistic reading of the political divisions arising in Hauenstein over leibeigen contracts is not improved by an addition of speculations about uterine and womb significations, purportedly referencing the maternal transmission of Leibeigenschaft, that he elides into Marian symbology. Without credible evidence for making such a linkage, he ties what he perceives as the most significant symbolic aspect of Marian processions, the purported sexual purity of the young women, to the salpeterisch accusation that the Millers’ treachery had made impure a formerly pure community.77 Not only is this a clever way to present the Salpeters in their scripted role as irrational fundamentalists given to self-serving factional infighting, but it also blocks more plausible readings that connect to issues broader than, but certainly not exclusive of, either Leibeigenschaft or “virginity.”

From Rothkrug and others,78 we learn that early modern Mariological discourses referenced several concerns in the subaltern’s experience, including: 1. clemency for transgressors (a theme Luebke could actually have applied to his hegemonic realism perception) 2. mourning for lost sons to sustain pacifist dialogues for negotiating, with Imperial and other authorities, the peasants’ future support for wars against the Turks,

77 Luebke, “Naive Monarchism” 96-97, also Rebels, 202; the one citation he gives us in which there is a uterine (“mutterleib”)reference makes no connection to Marian symbolism (97 n.87) and, moreover, misses a subtle, perhaps punning, association-distinction in the citation between “leib” (body) and “laibeigenschaft,” a difference in spelling by the same person that arguably recognized that the etymology of the latter derived from “life” (Leben/Laib) and not “body;” cf. F. Kluge’s Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 12./13.ed., 352; and Rabe, op.cit., pp.63ff; also interesting is the discussion of Leibkauf as a gesture of closure between partners in a deal in R. and K. Beitl, eds., Wörterbuch der deutschen Volkskunde, Stuttgart: Kröner, 3rd ed., 1974, 435.

78 Practices, passim; R. Scribner, “Elements of Popular Belief” in T. Brady, et.al., eds., Handbook of European History, 1400- 1600, Leiden: Brill, 1994. 425 or, more significantly, for the drafting of peasant sons for mercenary armies79 and 3. Marian protection for the unmarried and the young. This last brings us to see Marian veneration as an indicator for 4. the increasing admission of women to parish corporate life, as well as for 5. the social presence of the hundreds of (literally drafted) Jungfrauen. While Luebke reads the latter as narrowly as possible, as “virgins” construed in the sense of simultaneously biological and moral “purity,” it is just as plausible, and indeed makes better sense in terms of the other issues of peasant politics raised so far, to read their quantitatively significant presence in terms of their being simply unmarried, possibly unmarriageable women, however virginal and pure. We can thereby move away from Luebke’s forced, projective associations between virginal purity and the allaged impurity brought into the community by treacherous Millers — where is the evidence for such a connection? — and recognize instead a multi-dimensional celibacy figure that was a metonymic sign of something wrong in the unfolding of families, that the combined compulsions of impartibility, of localized Leibeigenschaft contracts and of a closed land market designed to encapsulate peasants in rigidly fixed, tribute-dominated and forever middling family firms forced to operate under the exclusive (absolutist) rules of local public and private financial corporations, all the stuff of the peasantries’ politics, were not allowing the necessarily flexible management of family resources (represented also by parish and confraternal trustee relations) that could ease the pressure on families and communities of the presence of young people without provision. Without acknowledging these undeniably present and by any measure rational challenges to the repressive innovations of the authorities, without a sense of these broader linkages of peasant political-economic and symbolic actions, Luebke appears to have little capacity to make judgments about the rational qualities of the peasants’ “symbolic ” actions let alone to devalue them and their attendant, multi- faceted and representationally flexible social-narrative figurations as “naive.”

It is thus often the analyst’s own naively functionalist and personally projective

79 Luebke skirts this aspect but misses the dialogic point, Rebels 199; cf. Rothkrug,Practices, 66, 92. 426 readings80 of the subaltern’s mental and rational processes that are reimposed, in endlessly circular fashion, on the latter by the analyst’s own crude (though however ‘learned’) figural realism which perceives any and all pious or other symbolic acts as only representing “themselves” in ways chosen by an analyst who is seeking to make historical-anthropological ascriptions about peasants’ less-than-rational, or self- destructively rational, meanings. This imputed stigma of subaltern naivete and rational inadequacy is concretized further by a perception of some subaltern’s finally “realistic” retreat before the authorities’ violent refusal to negotiate further into what James Scott has called the performance of “hidden transcripts.” He means those resistances “below the line” and beyond “safety-valve” releases that take back through every-day pilfering, poaching, collective shirking etc., little shares from what the “elites” have “extracted”.81 Scott concedes as “perfectly true” the criticism that such “practical resistance . . . amounts to nothing more than trivial coping mechanisms that cannot affect . . . domination” but in the same breath claims that such critique is “irrelevant, since our point is that these are the forms that political struggle takes when frontal assaults are precluded by the realities of power.”82

To invoke “the realities of power” as a closure, a final, decisive moment, is to exclude categorically any consideration of counter-hegemony, i.e., of any possible, whether successful or not, subaltern, textual-performative destabilization and

80 Luebke’s response to this part of my argument in “Symbols, Serfdom and Peasant Factions: A Response to Hermann Rebel” Central European History, 34:3(2001), 165-7, reveals he does not get the general point which was to suggest that the parades of virgins spoke to issues larger than Leibeigenschaft and indeed were aimed at an audience beyond merely the Salpeters alone.

81 Transcripts, 187-192 and passim. I question Luebke’s clinical and normalizing usage of “extract” and “taxes” for what were tribute extortions alerts us to the stifling quality of these arguments; also cf. Suter’s repeated clinicalisms “resource transfer” and “redistribution” and his similar use of “taxes” when in all cases tributes are meant. Bauernkrieg 352-3,398-9, passim.

82 Transcripts, 191-92. 427 movement past an intolerable, humanly destructive hegemonic bloc which is at work not just “from above” but also reaches into and is reproduce by subaltern social relations. For Scott,83 and for Suter and Luebke as well, there remains, as the only “realistic and prudent” subaltern position, the Romantic’s expectation of defeat as a prior condition for becoming, only during a proper time of threshold-crossing crisis, an “actor,” for temporarily leaving “the offstage world of subordination” to register a resistance and then returning, blessedly defeated, to the anonymity of everyday life presumed to be outside of and below hegemony.84 Not only is this latter presumption of a saving sphere of subaltern experience “below” a “line” (or, Suter: a threshold) a precise replication- continuation of the early modern absolutists’ vision of society85 but it also makes an a priori Reality claim for Power and thereby dehistoricizes it as a non- or pre-dialogical “real” presence to which those who don’t “have” it but are condemned to experience it must subordinate all their expectations and considerations. Does anyone ever know where these thresholds and lines of Power are from historical moment to moment? Of course, there are barriers to memberships in significant corporations or “clubs” or to access to successful investment funds, but to translate these into a metaphysically discernible separation (for which no sustainable categories exist) between History and Everyday Life is to participate in the ongoing concealment of the perpetual dis- and re- articulations among shifting parties and alliances of hegemons and subalterns, both roles operating inside all levels of any social hierarchy and manipulating hidden as well as official transcripts, even as these latter occasionally reverse places.

83 Transcripts, 103.

84 For a further exploration of the phenomenological ball park in which these conceptions play, see M. Natanson, Anonymity: A Study in the Philosphy of Alfred Schutz, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986: “Mundane life has its own cries and chants which lend themselves to the improvisatory genius of the streets: verbal graffiti.” 133.

85 With, one might add, bleak implications; cf. H. Rebel, “Reimagining the oikos: Austrian Cameralism in its Social Formation” in J. O’Brien and Wm. Roseberry, eds., Golden Ages. Dark Ages.Imagining the Past in Anthropology and History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 428 Perceived as living without hope of ever discovering, let alone successfully articulating, the discursive keys to break into (or, alternatively, down) the eternal hegemonic dialogue, the subaltern are, by this understanding, in all cases condemned to the limited satisfactions of self-referential symbolic actions — to which analysts can then, conversely, reduce every subaltern utterance, no matter how well it may actually be grounded in a “reality” form, in legal documents and official discourses for which the subaltern can reasonably claim general relevance and consideration. Nowhere are the inadequacies of Luebke’s and Suter’s moves to “rethink” peasants’ political-economic and symbolic rationalities more evident than, finally, in their treatments of the peasants’ historical-legal representations.

Scott’s paradigm of escalating practices of “domination and resistance” identifies the invocation of mythic historical figures and events as an intrinsic element of ideological resistance in what he calls the “infrapolitics” of sub-threshold actions.86 Both Luebke and especially Suter depict political deployments of such apparently mythical histories to illustrate the naive and less-than-rational but effectively mobilizing character of peasant politics. Ostensibly being somehow passed along in the sub- threshold world of everyday life — Suter believes, by means of official memorializations turned to resistant purposes — are iconic names and events often associated with “historical,” i.e., once-held but now stolen or lost freedoms or practices of freedom that are not founded in substantively grounded and understood historical or legal knowledge but are part of a kind of folk-remembering of moments of resistance that resurface in and are reinvented (in purportedly creative ways to incorporate “new learning”) for any present crisis. Where Luebke makes this point in passing, Suter builds it into his central (and in its execution unbearably patronizing) theme of “collective learning.” His ambition is to avoid “dismiss[ing] with categories of historical error” the subaltern’s finally unsuccessful memory politics but to show rather that “collective memory, delivering the experiences of the past only vaguely and in fragments . . . became a very

86 Transcripts, 198. 429 dangerous counselor.”87 His devaluation of the peasants’ rationality goes beyond any individual’s or group’s historical-analytical failing. Peasantries’ weakness as historians is perceived rather as rooted in the inadequacies of subaltern historical culture itself, dependent as it is, in his estimation, on the frailties of living memory and inherent forgetfulness, on oral transmission and, beyond that, on wishful thinking.

He contradicts his own good intentions about avoiding accusations of “error” when he singles out one of only two referenced performances of peasant remembering in 1653 as presenting a “false interpretation” (falsche Deutung) — an accusatory “falsch” occurs here, with Ciceronian vigor, four times in less than half a page.88 That aside, one does have to take issue with his reductive judging of the peasants’ “historical memory” by standards of (untestable) tactical effectiveness and also with his accusation that their false historicizing somehow (without any innate mechanism or relevant utterance in evidence) led peasants to have fatally delusional expectations of success. Even as he rhapsodizes about the peasants’ inventive genius as historical bricoleurs putting together what he calls an “intellectual patchwork,”89 it is actually, and throughout, the radical peasants whom he brands as historical fundamentalists whose “false” histories and consequently false expectations created the, by his measure of rationality, unwinnable and therefore unreasonable peasant war and ensured its failure as well. His is a double-entendre message that undermines this work’s claim to “understanding the peasants” throughout. There are, in addition, a number of sleights-of-hand in Suter’s presentation of the battle for “history” that we have to point to, especially since his moves place under erasure the “hidden transcripts” being deployed by the patricians, who were only, “rightfully” (zu Recht) in Suter’s estimation,90 defending their exclusive

87 Suter, Bauernkrieg, 255.

88 Bauernkrieg, 409.

89 Bauernkrieg, 598.

90 “Zu Recht sahen sie darin ihre staatliche ‘Souveränität’ grundsätzlich in Frage gestellt.” Bauernkrieg, 398. As the preceding pages 363-90 had shown, however, Suter’s “darin” refers to the peasantry’s decades-long resistance against the 430 corporate claim to representing Swiss Confederate sovereignty.

During my reconstruction above of Suter’s versions of the 1653 war, I noted a narrative lapse where there was no motivation to explain what suddenly expanded the peasant alliances and toughened their resolve to repudiate Lucern’s authority in late February of 1653.91 Only in the “analytical” part of the book did we find (and Suter does not then draw a narrative inference) a coincidence in timing in the obviously important discovery of a 1358 document known as the Vidimus in an archival chest at Schüpfheim. This notarized exemplification of an agreement by Duke Rudolf of Habsburg to release Entlebuch from all future lien (Pfand) contracts purportedly invalidated Lucern’s lordship as well as a 1405 lien contract whose terms had, in any case, presumably long run out.92 This last was a point that the peasants had been having a hard time proving, however, since the copy of the lien contract that Lucern finally gave them in 1653 omitted the, by then paltry, 3000fl amount of the original loan whose repayment would have, and probably already had a long time ago, been redeemed to terminate the agreement. The Bernese peasants had also had some success in grounding their protest in two copies of the Kappel letter of 1531, already in play during their 1641 uprising, by which the city had granted them specific freedoms. Suter reports but effectually ignores, in both his narrative and his analysis, the intense fight the peasants had against the

Patricians’ absolutist program and not to their calling into question the Patriciate’s share in state sovereignty. There is no doubt where Suter’s allegiances lie; he even apologizes for his usage of “peasant war” and assures us he does not wish to endorse the peasants’ use of the term, 253. Elsewhere he takes the absurd position that the peasants were threatening the “existence” of the Patricians and that the latter were therefore fully justified in their actions, 216.

91 See pp.13-14 above and note 36.

92 Suter, Bauernkrieg, 425; it is worth noting, as an almost universal “trigger” mechanism, the comparatively significant and widespread perception of the destabilization of subjects’ contractual rights that the historical evolution of Habsburg lien administration (Pfandherrschaft) practice initiated; Luebke, Rebels, 32-33 and passim, also Rebel, Peasant Classes, passim. 431 patricians’ occupation of a speciously legal (but certainly not “rational”) high ground by declaring such contracts to be arcana, secrets of state, and then mounting under that cover their own aggressive “hidden transcripts” campaign of foot-dragging delays in producing contractual documents, of denying documents’ existence, falsifying and destroying documents and, perhaps most indicative, confiscating of peasant archives wholesale.93

In yet one more collaborative “hidden transcript” move, this time by the historian, the peasant radicals’ efforts to achieve some standing in court with processes of legal discovery not only founder against the authorities’ absolutist quashing of their struggle to assert the necessarily mutual accessibility and enforcements that make contracts binding in a functioning market, but they founder as well against Suter’s repressive conversion of the authorities’ systematic and destructively aggressive “oralization” of the peasants’ legal-historical capacities into his own fuzzy discourse about “artifacts of remembering” (Erinnerungsstücke) and “places of memory”94 which then evolves into a victim-blaming turn toward lengthy, diffuse accounts of the “fairy tales” the peasants told themselves, of the “fictionalized” histories that they became victims of. This switch to a “memorialization,” to an ostensibly fanciful peasant satisfaction with emblems of “memory,” that then becomes a mythologization of the peasants’ unsuccessful efforts to gain legal recognition may be illustrated by what happens to the Vidimus in Suter’s account. Only at the end of the book, as a kind of afterthought, does he tell us that the authorities confiscated the entire Entlebuch archival chest, Vidimus included, in June of 1653, and then released the document back to the peasants, requiring them on December 1, 1653, to take a collective oath attesting

93 How can we not see here a prefiguration of “modern” Swiss archival practices, particularly in light of recent efforts to get the Swiss to confront the realities of their involvement in Nazi-era genocidal banking? Cf. G. Kreis and B. Müller, eds., Die Schweiz und der zweite Weltkrieg, special issue of Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 47:4(1997).

94 Suter, Bauernkrieg, 422-23. 432 that this document did not in any way challenge Lucern’s sovereignty.95 This comes long after Suter closed his discussion of the document with the observation that the peasants “fastened on to,” among other things, “songs and myths, signs and rituals as, for instance, the Vidimus” to express their resistance. He left it as a document that posed no serious challenge; it was just another cultural artifact, a curious legal antiquity perhaps, available for peasants to construct their delusional, historically distorted failure.96 It is, however, inadequate to the history of an “event” to deny a narrative place for a document that evidently could not be legally tested and had to be overcome by force. Here it is the historian’s misrecognition (precisely in Bourdieu’s sense of a violence that is not recognized as such) that short-circuits the peasants’ lost battle to gain and retain archives and documents for a significant effort to engage history in the processes of legal discovery, as a naive, merely ideologically functional search for “memory,” for places of memory, in the currently modish cant. Luebke’s and Suter’s presentations, from this perspective, are both typical of symbolic actionist approaches’ unfailing retroactive collaborations with (or better: compulsively repetitious figural fulfilments of) displaced historical repressions.97

V

At one point Suter claims that “the [peasant] actors . . . cobbled together (bastelten) a new, original, coherent design for a better political future for themselves

95 Bauernkrieg, 527-8.

96 Bauernkrieg, 455.

97 In another instance concerning a donation by a “Good Count Hans,” Luebke’s Hauensteiner had in hand a similar 1396 Pfandschaft document from Count Johannes IV of Habsburg- Laufenburg that guaranteed, in Luebke’ thin paraphrase, unspecified freedoms all of which, without missing a beat, he reduces immediately to “this legend” and “myth of origins,” functioning inside the peasants’ “naive monarchism.” This is right after he claims that Salpeter Hans referred to “an imaginary oath of Emperor Charles VI” but then cites reprints of the oath in a footnote. Rebels, 163-4, 172. 433 and sorted out an original tactical way to proceed to realize this design.”98 This is curious praise since his evidence for and readings of the peasants’ political-economic and symbolic programs and actions expressly demonstrate the exact opposite. He celebrates the “New Tell Song” of 1653 as one of the most revealing innovations of peasant war learning and yet almost immediately buries the several recognizably new narrative figurations of Tell in his distracted, questionable and, frankly, maundering talk about the Khyffhäuser legend, a savior figure and a “spiritual,” regenerative faith in an originary “upright, patriotic and old Confederate belief.”99 But the actual 1653 version of the “myth” is at best an ambiguous revitalization figure. Why are there now “Three Tells” and why do they appear at the end, when defeat is certain, in an almost elegaic- suicidal act that closes rather than begins a rebellion against a perceived “tyranny?” Suter’s diversionary mythification further deepens his contextual exclusion of the moment of historical-constitutional “realization,” after 1648, of the long (and however “mythicized”) process initiated by a medieval Tell’s refusal to bow to a hat on a pole. He fails to credit this last as the Swiss peasantries’ “originary” claim, even if without “real” historical foundations, for having their claim to have played a creative role in the centuries-spanning struggle against foreign domination recognized with political inclusion at this decisive juncture in the history of the Confederacy.100 The 1653 innovation that is the political inward turn of the Tell story, the characterization by these last desperate resistors’ against the Patriciates’ absolutist pretensions as unacceptably “aristocratic” and tyrannical, is noted by Suter but submerged immediately in allegedly primary peasant concerns for doing it “just like Tell” — which is obviously not adequate to what the Three Tells were about. Rather than being part of an ongoing Swiss pathos of resistance, with the 1653 errors perpetuated in even later versions,101 the

98 Suter, Bauernkrieg, 455.

99 Bauernkrieg, 435-6, 64, 229 and passim

100 Suter notes, but makes nothing of it, that the Tell figure did not appear in the several rebellions that had, beginning in 1570, preceded 1653. Bauernkrieg,433.

101 Bauernkrieg, 573. 434 Tell figurations of that year were variable references to an ongoing process of modernizing the terms of resistance that was intertwined with (in Elias’ civilizational process sense) and capable of recognizing and contesting, however fatalistically, the simultaneous modernization and absolutization of urban, patrician-corporate tribute forms becoming, in turn, a model for Austro-German absolutism.102

Suter’s repeated claim that the peasants’ defeat halted a drift toward absolutism and initiated instead a “paternalistic” evolution of government requires careful consideration since it is the ground for his further claim that modern Swiss liberalism emerged from specifically Swiss paternalism (figured as a kind of absolutism that has learned its lesson) as it “modernized” in the decades before 1848, rather than from prior anti-tyrannical and Enlightenment traditions.103 We can, for a start, go beyond his seeing the peasants as seeking to “revolutionize” and the patricians as seeking to

102 Suggestive along these lines are E. Naujoks’ classic, Obrigkeitsgedanke, Zunftverfassung,und Reformation: Studien zur Verfassungsgeschichte von Ulm, Esslingen und Schwäbisch-Gmünd, 1958 and M. Paas, Population Change, Labor Supply and Agriculture in Augsburg: A Study of Early Demographic-Economic Interactions, New York: Arno, 1981; for some further thoughts, see my review of P. Blickle, ed., Landgemeinde und Stadtgemeinde in Mitteleuropa: Ein struktureller Vergleich, Munich :Oldenbourg 1991 in Journal of Modern History, 67:1(1995), 203-6.

103 Suter, Bauernkrieg, 563-4, 578-80, 588, 593 and passim; seventeenth-century Swiss and South German peasant talk about tyranny, democracy and aristocracy in the manner we find in Luebke and Suter can not but recall the still instructive treatment of these themes in R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964, Vol.2, chap.13 and passim; for a more recent, and not altogether unproblematic, Swiss voice on these matters see H.Böning ,Der Traum von Freiheit und Gleichheit: Helvetische Revolution und Republik (1798-1803), Zurich: Füssli 1998; and on the political front we have, from the Right, yet another version of these issues, one that reproduces a popular, moralistic version of an “it takes a village” mythification of Swiss “liberty,” F. Muheim, Die Schweiz — Aufstieg oder Untergang. Entscheidung an der Jahrhundertwende, Schaffhausen: Novalis 1998. 435 “preserve” the “corporate order.”104 Not only is a juxtaposition of “revolutionizing” and “preserving” a misdirection, since the latter often, both now and historically, employs the former, but it is far more instructive to see both Suter and Luebke’s reports as possible histories of a confrontation between competing modernities.

On the aristocratic-Imperial side (and this includes the urban Patriciates) there was a modernization of tribute that turned away from feudal incomes, tithes etc. and toward encapsulating militarily defeated and policed “populations” in deliberately closed and limited regional economies where all movements were controlled and the subaltern were unable to prevent the implementation of innovative, more sophisticated, more experimental, i.e., more“modern,” types of tribute skimming in the form of treasury paper and currency manipulations by insider-trading aristocratic corporations, extractions from “private” export cartels subsidized by “public” funds, the unilateral imposition of legal, judicial, entry and transaction fees of all kinds, tributes from “cautionary” deposits, from orphan and other public/private trust fund “management,” from forced loans and forced labor, from forced public military recruitment for private regimental economies and the leasing of mercenaries etc., etc. The reactionary “modernist” component of these corporatist-absolutist (and violently enforced) hierarchies of monopolistic combinations of public finance and private banking cartel formations did not lie, as one still finds throughout the dominant historical literature, in their “disciplining-for-modernity” but rather in their exploitive internal-colonial subordination of peasant and urban “subjects” to press out sufficient funds to allow aristocratic corporations to cross insider-participation thresholds in emergent financial markets and to be protected against and to pass on to those outside their sovereign circles the vast losses incurred in this first great era of Europe’s “modern” waves of state- organized pyramid and Ponzi schemes and colonial bubbles. At the same time, some peasants’ political-economic vision (perhaps more “modern” from our vantage point than theirs) was, if nothing else, merely a largely unsuccessful defense of perceived interests and of alternative directions for individual and collective market advantage

104 Bauernkrieg, 252. 436 against this broad frontal assault by Central European tribute formations seeking to “modernize” for articulating with North Atlantic capitalism. Sufficiently strong parties among Central Europe’s peasants obviously wanted a freer market with transregional commodity, labor and capital movements and with more flexible rules to assist toward a family-firm management that was not forced to be in sync with local and community rules. These “fundamentalist” parties lost and peasants settled for a pseudo-communal evolution under “bureaucratic” mandates, sheltering their incomes as best they could and free only to extort more out of their familial and hoarded labor.

It is hard not to perceive as “modernity” the more radical peasants’ goals to maintain their trans-regional access to markets (deliberately denied them, as noted, by authorities that wanted to weaken them politically by isolating them economically) and access to legal appeals processes beyond the local courts of their masters, to intra- and trans-regional networks of independent parish, guild and confraternal corporations for more competitive family firm and communal capital formation, and the independent disposition and management of their families’ labor, real estate and financial assets, etc. etc. In these terms of political desiderata the “Swiss ideal” was evidently not a dead letter but was itself perceived as capable of an evolving, “modernizing” potential, identified in these two accounts with peasant fundamentalists and radicals who in fact sought a continuation of an already ongoing evolution of market forces as well as of legally secured community and family institutions, all of which was actively reversed and repressed by the assertion of absolutist “modernizing” models after 1648 and, then in earnest, after the onset of global colonial and dynastic wars in the early eighteenth century. The peasant “realist” parties were simply those who acceded to aristocratic- corporate and absolutist tribute- extracting modernity; they took over to become those uniquely German and Austrian clans of village notables, the Honoratioren, occupying permanent local and regional magisterial offices under “state” auspices, functioning as agents for and as brokering manipulators of the sovereign corporations’ and dynasties’ rules in limited, provincial magisterial republics.105 Suter and Luebke provide us with

105 Cf. U. Kälin, “Strukturwandel in der Landesgemeinde- Demokratie: Zur Lage der Urner Magistratenfamilien im 18. und im 437 graphic moments in the hegemonic victory of aristocratic-corporate modernity in the provinces as we witness the installation of both the Millers and Salpeters as perpetual ins and outs or observe the Swiss “mild” parties, as they signed on to the arbitration agreements and, to seal the bargain, disposed of the Three Tells in an object-relational transition from open support to secret betrayal.

Suter’s ascription of a paternalist, and therefore presumably “not-absolutist,” character to these emergent rural authority relations does more than merely repeat the absolutists’ favorite self-representation as well-meaning, necessarily stern but also lenient fathers to subjects who are re-cast as ”children.” These infantilizing formulas were widespread in the German/Austrian ecumene and do not at all signify a Swiss “third way.” It is, rather, language that points to where the roots of this absolutism lie, to where paternalism was a metonymic concealment of modernizing, absolutizing, tribute formations empowering “housefathers” at every level to enforce their “family” members’ submission to institutions, rules and procedures (including impartibility, family credit, mortgaging and trust fund restrictions and supervision, village draft boards to select households’ “expendables”106 for recruiting and sale as mercenary-auxiliaries etc.) that guaranteed the ongoing viability and tribute productivity of the houses and offices that constituted, altogether, the new absolute state.

If there is a moment of hegemonic duplexity — in Scott’s sense of the subaltern’s hedging, prior admission of defeat in the very act of rebellion in order to remain inside the hegemonic formation that is threatening and oppressing them — it appears,

frühen 19. Jahrhundert” in S. Brändli, et.al., eds., Schweiz im Wandel: Studien zur neueren Gesellschaftsgeschichte, Basel/Frankfurt a.M.: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1990, 171-90.

106 The social, political-economic and cultural-figurational aspects of this widespread, albeit regionally varied, dimension of early modern German-speaking central Europe’s tribute modernization is explored most fully in P. Taylor Indentured to Liberty; see also P. Wilson, War, State and Society in Württemberg, 1677-1793, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 74-96. 438 ironically, at this core where “paternalist” discourses mediated the new tightening of exploitive political-economic articulations among capital markets, tribute lords and subject families. In the peasants’ demands we find several areas where they in effect declared their willingness to bargain for weakening the property rights and other economic and legal positions of women and heirs. When we look past Suter’s point about what he thinks is the authorities’ “paternalistically” high percentage of concessions to peasant demands, we note that while the patricians categorically denied the challenges to their monopoly over public finances and the admission of peasants to full political-corporate status in the Confederation they also agreed, precisely in these family and communal areas, to allow the advantaging of male heirs, exempting women’s inheritance and dowry funds from securitizing in mortgages, closing avenues of appeal beyond the local magisterial courts for wards in inheritance and trust fund matters and so on.107 To answer further the question implied in Tom Brady’s paradigmatic perception, we can say that the peasant “realists” accepted provincialization in return for the more limited economic and political opportunities of familial and communal involution which entailed the perpetual downward mobility of and displacement of social costs among women, children, servants and, increasingly, the old. While one might acknowledge that this hegemonic, “paternalistic” (or, better, absolutist- patriarchal) bargain is indeed the core of Swiss “modernity” it is impossible to perceive it, as Suter does, as a “liberal-democratic” form, especially in light of the finally not surprising facts that Swiss women did not acquire the right to vote in national elections until 1971 and that it took until 1990 (!) for them to have the vote in all cantonal elections.

While Luebke touches on it indirectly by his irritating and labored indexing of “ironies,” Suter places the “modernity” problem at the heart of the history of this region’s peasantries. Much of what he sees as a positive, comedic-ironic evolution

107 Suter, Bauernkrieg, 516-17, 626-640. 439 contains historical costs that have not simply disappeared with “success”108 but continue to surface when some of the forgotten threads holding closed the wounds of Swiss history are torn away, as they were in the recently renewed disclosures of Swiss bankers’ entanglements with “Aryanization” and Nazi genocide.

VI

We do not have the space to look at several themes in both these fact-filled studies that deserve more extended discussion, including peasants’ invocations of old and new law, the interesting ambiguities of “oath-taking,” the militarizing social restructuring of peasant “peripheries” as a function of French, German and Austrian military colonialism, etc. There is, however, one last moment in Suter that warrants notice for the bearing it has on the overall significance of the symbolic-actionist and event-oriented kinds of peasant histories being advocated by both authors. In the closing pages of Suter’s book, the post-historic intellectual finds his way back to reveling in the Bastelei, in the “intellectual patchwork” of the “actors participating in the conflict.” He salutes their bricolage as a “fundamentally unpredictable, indeterminable, and creative translation and construction achievement that transcended (aufhob)109 their own world and the possibilities for action it contained” and, for him, points to “the significant role accident (Zufall) plays in the coming to pass (Zustandekommen) [!] of historical events.” This greatly undermines, however, what historians can possibly do: “one can not explain further but only ascertain as an accident of history and pass on the story of the extremely complicated combination of exogenous shocks, structural transmission

108 Cf. A. Imhof’s positive history of what he perceives as seven centuries of Swiss stability “in spite of everything,” i.e., in spite of what he calls the “dark spots” in Swiss history. Die Lebenszeit. Vom aufgeschobenen Tod und von der Kunst des Lebens, Munich: Beck 1988, 136, 138-9. Of course he was writing between rounds of historical recognitions of Swiss Holocaust banking but one wonders why it doesn’t occur to him that the stability was possible because of inadmissibly necessary “dark spots.”

109 It is not actually certain which of the several meanings of “aufheben” Suter had in mind here. 440 mechanisms and the creative construction achievements of the actors.” This in turn ends in a self-consuming, circular formulation according to which “the accidental combination of external influences and structural preconditions [as if “accidents” had no willed, only colliding, paradigms] could . . . only through the original [and therefore outside of structure?] collective action of the actors achieve that effectiveness that the historical event and its far-reaching consequences made possible.”110 This is a circularity that says structures become an event through the acts of actors who are made possible by the event that their acts create. This completely de-humanizes, mechanizes, exteriorizes and removes from any historical judgment the actual contents and motivations at work inside the “triggering shocks” in prior historical formations (which certainly do not just “go away” once the action starts) and leaves only the completely “free” and “threshold-crossing” momentary responses of the shocked peasants as the force that holds together and converts “chaos” into event, reducing historians (wearing white lab coats and holding clip boards)111 to standing on the sidelines to take notes and give off gratified, encouraging noises. The payoff is that we all get to celebrate once again a perceived “autonomy of human action” without which “the accidental and complex combination of exterior influences and structural preconditions can not be thought of as an event-creating force: precisely therein consists also our freedom before history.”112

Our freedom before history, i.e., our essential humanity without history, signifies a retreat into a pre-Kantian homo clausus, to use Norbert Elias’ term. However one reads this reductive subordination of historical understanding to a fundamentalist- religious notion of free will that reduces itself to judging what were (and therefore are)

110 ”Die zufällige Kombination äusserer Einflüsse und struktureller Vorgegebenheiten konnte demnach allein wegen des originellen kollektiven Handelns der Akteure zu jener Wirkung kommen, welche das historische Ereignis und seine weitreichenden Folgen möglich macht.” Bauernkrieg, 593.

111 Taking an image from Richard Cobb.

112 Bauernkrieg, 592-4. 441 the “right”choices between good and evil in threshold-crossing historical events,113 one has also to be aware that its proponents actively continue to produce highly tendentious chronicles and projective symbolic readings that occupy the space of history even as they undermine the scientific complexity and potential for change of historical work. For both Suter and Luebke, professional history returns to a high antiquarianism, to a mere observing, recording and cataloguing of the predictable ironies of the human comedy; we are back to “the event,” to what allegedly “actually happened,” and not, still with Ranke, to “what it was actually like,” to remembered experiences that are themselves saturated with prior remembrances of experiences.114 In Suter’s view, only peasant amateurs, bless them, would hope to learn something from history to help them put together their “intellectual patchwork” for inevitably misguided action. We do not even need to know what the “intellectual” or factual dimensions of this patchwork were as long as somehow recalled historical symbolisms were being acted out, the signifying war clubs manufactured, the virgins crowned, and all paraded about in public, and we can be edified by observing how out of these historically deluded, failed efforts “the good” ironically emerges after all. If it seems duplicitous of Suter to celebrate what he calls the two most important products of peasant “learning” in the 1653 war, the articles of union

113 Such scholastic-Realist fundamentalism has achieved center stage everywhere, it seems, as one of the most significant discourses driving historians’ debates to contain the specifically post-1989 dilemmas of identity-representation and Holocaust ethics; a particularly prominent example is the controversy surrounding D. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York: Knopf 1996 where the purportedly irreducible burden of “willing” evil is claimed to be the central question.

114 Cf. F. Gilbert’s initiatives toward taking apart “es,” “eigentlich” and “gewesen.” as aspects of Ranke’s sense of historical experience that has, in the end, more in common with the Hegelianism it overtly rejects than it wants to admit, History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, chapter 3.This flies in the face of the neo-conservative turn in the current reception of Ranke, c.f. G. Iggers and J. Powell, eds., Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, Syracuse: 1990. 442 and the New Tell Song, without ever producing them as full texts, then we have to remember that this is history under the Romantic assumption of an “always already” present expectation of defeat. In this light, historical significance is not in anything that “actors” actually say or intend but is in the threshold-crossing motion of the action itself. Suter’s upbeat optimism challenges us to think about what this cultural-analytical figuration of inevitable and ironically positive defeats of the subaltern signifies for an ethics of historical practice at this time.

The forced and repeated appearances in Suter of the “surprising event” of 1989 as an equivalent moment to 1653115 for displaying a transcendent “free will” in historical action provides an opening for considering such questions. Why would a historian put forward an unequivocal celebration of 1989 in the later 1990s, in full view of what ensued, beginning in 1991, in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Russia when the “intellectual patchwork” of those “restructurings” failed and the “realists” could resort to threshold-crossing “shocks” empowering piratical currency manipulations and treasury lootings, regional pyramid schemes, national bank frauds, mass real estate expropriations, population “relocations” and outright genocide, altogether destroying, presumably necessarily, millions of victims’ lives? Following Suter, we can begin to puzzle out what the widespread renewal in the cultural and social sciences of symbolic actionist approaches (in neo-Kantian, pragmatist-behaviorist, Chicago school, Turnerian etc. guises) can do for the ethical-historical and largely exonerative reception of such crimes. Not only can individual victims (of, say, torture) be construed as just “unfortunates” (thus Suter),116 caught in a larger cultural collapse but also, more significantly, the increasingly urgent present puzzle of how to re-stabilize populations that were targeted for and have experienced genocidal de-stabilization finds new

115 ”Between the peasant war of 1653 and the overthrow of 1989 there exists a basic fundamental parallel: both were historical events.” and “In contrast with the event of 1989, the effective change brought about by the peasant war of 1653 remained restricted to the territory of today’s Switzerland.” Bauernkrieg, 587, 588.

116 Bauernkrieg, 304. 443 languages and strategies in researches such as these.117 Need we add that such political science functionalism brings together several politically reactionary understandings of human motivation and experience, couched in languages of acculturation, symbolic management, performance theory, group analysis etc., altogether making up a bricolage of world-system ethics that can countenance the targeting of regional populations for destabilizing “shocks” that can, in turn, be expected to devolve into historically predictable and therefore, it is hoped, “containable” genocides. (see note 30) If one sees history, as I do, working not for specious accommodations with “reality” but for recognitions-for-change, then it behooves one to reject the current “post-historic” assignment to furnish theoretically and archivally prejudiced historical representations that “grant agency” in the very act of casting ordinary people as culturally belled and branded cattle to be corralled and herded from event to “event.”

117 The currently ubiquitous nature of these approaches may be illustrated by L. Horton, Peasants in Arms: War and Peace in the Mountains of Nicaragua, 1979-1994, Athens, Ohio: Center for International Studies, 1998, who also finds dualistic party formations and accompanying “habits” of symbolic action among Nicaraguan rural people that in many respects make a good fit with Luebke’s and Suter’s (and, for that matter, J. Scott’s, Transcripts, 307) ”ironical” model of rural revolutionary and counter-revolutionary political mobilization. One has to respect the thought and the fieldwork that went into Horton’s study and the conscious effort he makes to “say something” to both sides, but in the final analysis he too gives us a manual on how to mobilize revolutionary peasantries’ bet-hedging participation and turn it to explicitly counter-revolutionary “learning” and strategic-tactical planning, 297-310. 444 11. After the Next Genocide: Reactionary Modernism and the Postmodern Challenge to Analytical Ethics. In Recollection Of Bill Roseberry (unpublished)

Consider, for example, Clifford Geertz’s eloquent critique of positivism while he distanced himself from those who ‘run on about the exploitation of the masses’ (1973), or his rejection of mechanistic, top-down notions of power in favor of an interpretive understanding of the ‘exemplary center’ to understand politics in . . . Indonesia. - B. Roseberry-1

Not to mention the stories brought back by Maha . . . who participated in eliminating the Communists in the Pare area . . . What he said was that the victims were taken off by truck and then set down in front of holes prepared in advance. Then their heads were lopped off with a Samurai [sword] that had been left behind by a Japanese soldier in the past . . . (W)hen the Ansor Youth surrounded a particular village to the east of the sugar factory, they went into a number of houses to clean out the Communist elements. In one house, as it happened, there were two kids living there who were listed as activists in the People’s Youth. When the Ansor people knocked at the door, it was the parents of the two hunted boys who answered. “Where are your sons?” “If it’s possible, please don’t let my boys be killed.” — such was the request of the old couple. They offered to give up their lives in their children’s stead. Not merely was this offer accepted, but the exterminators also killed their two children. - account of the 1965 Indonesian genocide -2

After Suharto replaced Sukarno in 1966, the theatrics were muffled. . . By the time I got back in 1971 (having been to Morocco — and to Bali — in the meantime), the killing fields had come and gone . . . Pare was still physically about what it had been . . . Daily life, except for the fact that the ideologues were quiet or silenced, was not much different . . . What was different, or anyway, seemed different to me, was mood, humor, the color of experience. It was a chastened place . . . (B)y 1986, twenty-one years after the event, it hardly seemed a memory at all, but a broken piece of history . . . the town was like a pond across which a terrible storm had once swept, a long time ago, in another climate. - C. Geertz -3

To experience nausea at reading this narratively perverse summary, by Pare’s North American anthropologist, of the selections and killings there as mere theatrics, as a chastening, that is, as a punitive recall to good behavior, and further, as a “broken” historical object, presumably to be discarded along with the murdered, or

1 “The Unbearable Lightness of Anthropology” Radical History 65(1996),15

2 Cited in R. Cribb, “The Indonesian Massacres” in S. Totten et.al. eds., Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views, New York: Garland 1997, 257

3 After the Fact, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1995, 90,5,10-11. 445 finally, as a natural event,4 a long-gone storm leaving no traces on a once again placid pond, is to experience postmodernity. This is a condition where such modernist and disingenuously metaphoric narrative re-workings of a known genocide, such grossly comedic, all’s well that ends well historical emplotments for state-organized death squad terror — Geertz: “the killings, halted after a while by the army [!]”5 — are simply not bearable. They are manifestly only one (albeit highly visible) instance of many academicians’ contributions to the simultaneous reproduction and discounting of Cold War oppression, still ongoing in post-Cold War “restructuring” by means of multiple, speeded-up and overlapping rounds of strategically organized, historically mis- recognized and thereby “contained”6 genocides that are intrinsic to corporate-state cartels’ deal-making for the control of securitizable resources and slave labor on a global scale.

Indonesia’s and other places’ experiences of this kind seem perpetually to find social and other “scientists,” with anthropologists (and, for that matter, historians) often in the forefront,7 to dress up the genocides as unavoidably necessary for “development”

4 A. Kuper reminds us of the closing footnote to Geertz’ much- celebrated Balinese cockfight essay where he makes the claim that from the Balinese perspective the “massacre” looked like “the laws of nature,” in Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1999, 108.

5 Fact, 8

6 For one significant post-Desert Storm collection of high-level foreign policy thinking along such one-dimensional lines, with no consideration given to how “events” identified as “substate and civil violence,” “ethnic conflicts” or “state disintegration” etc. are often intentional products of planned interventions and of state and corporatively funded destabilizations-by-terror, see J. Nolan, ed., Global Engagement, Wash. D.C.: Brookings 1994, 44- 5, 236, 322, 491-99.

7 L. Nader, “The Phantom Factor: Impact of the Cold War on Anthropology” in Noam Chomsky, et. al, The Cold War and the University, New York: New Press, 1997, 122-3, 136 and passim; see also J. Gledhill, Power and its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics, London: Pluto Press, 2000,221-7. 446 in cynical histories about ideologues being silenced and in fraudulent redemptive discourses about green revolutions, new democracies, developmental take-offs, market growth, global (or, Geertz: mutual) engagement for alleged “ healing,” nation-building, whatever. To have to endure these repugnant contortions as part of the normal and acceptable language of the academy, to be subject to a drumbeat of persuasions that these erasures are to be celebrated as innovative and even ethical directions in scholarship8 is to be forced into an oppressive collaboration with reactionary modernist closures of the off-the-books accounts of genocidal murders among those “we” allegedly only want to understand. Bill Roseberry’s amazement in the face of Geertz’ Indonesia construction poses the fundamental question: what can be the value of an understanding that needs to proceed as if decades of mass murder and state terror (in which “outsiders” were active agents) are merely further local exemplars of a functioning, centralizing cosmogony acceptable to the “natives” and therefore properly left out of a circular, and by its own lights ethical, modernization fantasy claiming to be nearer to realization if such “locally scripted” killings can be forgotten.

Geertz’ memory work toes a fine line by contributing tendentious “after the fact” mis-recognitions of facts that, from the exterminators’ view, do not bear remembering, exactly, but yet necessarily have also to remain as an absent presence, as emblematic tracings in language. Memories of successful, that is to say historically unremarked, genocides need to be rendered unspeakable while they yet remain in mnemonic suspension, “in another climate,” a reserve for future chastenings slumbering in the saturated solution of the collective imaginary, waiting to be jarred into appropriate-to- the-moment crystallizations, reactivations of vermicidal signifiers to produce, once again, among those selected to have lost a game that (we will always be told) could have

8 The nausea deepens when we find Geertz described as “a committed moral thinker” in the editor’s “Introduction” to S. Ortner, ed., The Fate of “Culture”: Geertz and Beyond, a special issue of Representations 59(1997)5. Her reference is to R. Rosaldo’s contribution to the volume, “A Note on Geertz as a Cultural Essayist” where Geertz’s critics are stigmatized as “intolerant positivist polemicists” to be disposed of later! Perfect. 30. 447 gone either way,9 a desirable suicidal willingness to be murdered. Decades after the fact, and in expert hands, such genocides may then be written to persist in a happy modernist conjuncture between culturalized game-theoretic justifications for murder and an anthropological reading that predicts from retrospect that the victims, for reasons that are “theirs” alone and do not concern us, will suffer extermination quietly, leaving “us” unburdened and free to get on with the world’s real business.10

I

A satisfied settled feeling, knowledge that “the ideologues were quiet or silenced,” is the emotional pay-off for the effectual genocide-denial inside this kind of absurd representation of history. It speaks brutally to the families of the Indonesian victims, the latter known to number several hundreds of thousands, including women, children, Chinese merchants, and others, a million by the triumphalist exterminators’ own estimates.11 It raises questions about the ethical quality of the assumptions inside the repressively cheerful modernism of Geertz’ perception that “buying and selling . . . replaced getting ready for doomsday.”12 I greatly miss Bill Roseberry’s unique capacity for a steely but always restrained and genteel response to such destructions of ethical- scientific narrative that he liked to call, altogether, “anthropology-lite.” His was a special voice among those few of his generation of anthropologists who had the nerve to face up

9 Geertz, Fact, 6; dissenting on this point is S. Reyna, “Right and might: of approximate truths and moral judgment,” Identities 4(1998) cited in Gledhill, Power, 219-20.

10 One is reminded of the 2000 U.S. presidential election campaign when, during one of the televised debates, the eventually successful candidate, asked if he would intervene in a genocide, replied: “if it’s in our interest.” He did not elaborate, but two further questions seem unavoidable: i. how exactly can an unattended genocide be in “our” or anyone’s interest? and ii. does this open the option of authorizing a genocide for the sake of someone’s interest?

11 Totten, Century

12 Fact, 11 448 to the crude failures inside the primitive philosophies furnishing such celebrated pseudo-explanations, the latter giving themselves away in their insistence on constructing the “human” without a provision for memory while often actually claiming the ground of history. Revealing also is their narratives’ attachment of symbolic actionist conceptualizations to once again ascendant genetic and neo-Stoic materialist models of human experiences and capacities for “virtue.”

My original intention for this paper had been to recall Bill Roseberry as the unacknowledged (the “real”) postmodernist of his generation of anthropologists. How wrong that would have been became clear to me when I re-read Lyotard’s The Post- modern Condition and was reminded that “being postmodern” is not a choice one can make, an identity one can assign, assume or reject.13 Postmodernism is not a “movement.” Rather, it is an epistemological condition, an acknowledgment of what the possibilities and limits of “knowing” are at this unavoidable global-historical conjuncture where we have collectively lost, by our own best collective efforts, the philosophical-theological ground for establishing the singular coherence of any kind of narrative about singular reality, but most especially of narratives that stake a power- claim on the authority of being the only reasonable means of access to an overriding Last Instance. To reject, deny, ignore and repress, wittingly or not, those destabilizing modernist insights into the indeterminably evolving and articulating universes that we inhabit, as these are revealed by modernist mathematics, art, science, philosophy, literature etc., is to produce work lacking the figural, discursive and other qualities necessary to engage productively the critiques available within modernist discourses for marshaling competing narratives and “proofs.”14

13 J-F Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988. Of course, my reading of Lyotard may not be someone else’s. For example, just as I can not recognize Hegel in Kojeve so I can not recognize Lyotard in P. Anderson’s The Origins of Postmodernity, London: Verso 1998, nor, for that matter, in F. Jameson’s introduction to the Minnesota edition of Condition.

14 An occasionally flawed but nevertheless instructive and engaging survey of this historical moment is W.R. Everell, The 449 Lyotard’s recognition was that modern epistemology has outrun itself on a global scale. Postmodernity is the condition where modernity has pushed us all (“moderns” and “pre-moderns” alike) out of the nest to learn how to live without reassuring finalities, controls and futurities. Postmodern experience requires a reconsideration of how we have been using the term “modernity” itself, how we have underappreciated both its many capacities for recognitions (which we discard at our peril) as well as its conflicted self- and other-misrecognizing violences when it betrays its characteristic open-endedness for reassuringly transcendent integrations into final truths. It is our diminishing, simplifying conventions about modernity (as “improving,” progressive, technological, liberal-democratic, rationalizing etc.)15 that then lead us to mis-identify as “postmodern” attitudes and practices that, in historical experience, actually make up modernism’s central features.16 One still hears hoary accusations, for example, about alleged postmodernist “relativism” when the latter was from the outset ingredient to the narrative experimentalism of modernism. This suggests that the accusations themselves are nothing other than self-styled modernists’ nervousness (sometimes to the point of understandable hysteria) before the sense of a loss of control that results from having nailed their narrative flags to any designated central necessity that turns out to have been a vastly destructive and even murderous mistake. Shaken modernist confidence, often displaying a persistent reactionary tendency in modernism to desire a master- narrative that promises “success,” leaves more than a whiff of repressed fear in the often forced common sense pose of much “anti-pomo” writing as it seeks to silence and rule out of court evidence and concepts that expose ethical dead ends in specific modernist narrative experiments.17 This is to say that in current culturalist discourses across the

First Moderns, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997

15 R. Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Science, New York: Oxford Press 1976, 174-5, 132-3.

16 As, for example, in A. Munslow, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, London: Routledge, 2000, 188-90 and passim

17 See, for example, the self-satisfied, francophobic and superficially informed rejection, by a highly visible German historian, of perceived postmodern “hypersubjectivism” as too 450 academic spectrum there persists a misrepresentation of the history of modernism that is at fault for much confusion about postmodernism. Too often equated with the succession of philosophical-scientific enlightenments and material-political revolutions beginning in the seventeenth century, modernism has, in fact, a deeper genealogy, one that is suppressed in an epistemological erasure of some modernists’ retention of and persistent regression to pre-modern formulas. It is in this area that we can begin to identify the philosophical ground beneath reactionary, or “anti-modern,” modernisms.18

More on this in a moment, but for now it is worth repeating that it is not a matter of being or not being postmodern, but rather of a qualitative rethinking of one’s operative analytical and ontological schema in light of this “condition,” of this undeniable epistemological explosion-in-slow-motion, this unrelentingly modernist de- stabilization of all scientific, efficient and ethical narratives, this crisis in conceptualizing a direction of action for freedom when the once sure grounds for modernist freedom (the good, reason, justice, Arbeit, science, efficiency, technology, even allegedly autopoetic national-racial cultures etc., etc.) have, in their actual histories, broken apart and turned against themselves and each other.19 That places all our utterances and frivolous for the “seriousness” that German history demands, K. Barkin, “Bismarck in a Postmodern World”, German Studies Review 18:2(1995), 241-51; the reply to Barkin by M. Geyer and K. Jarausch in the same issue, “Great Men and Postmodern Ruptures: Overcoming the ‘Belatedness’ of German Historiography,” 253-273, has a more intelligent take and envisions an ethical project for history in defending against confusing the anti-modern as the postmodern (thus Barkin on de Maistre, 251, n.25)and in offering narrative options for recovery to “badly fractured societies” (269).

18 For a contextually different take, not followed here, on the term see J. Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, culture and politics in the Third Reich, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

19 To forestall objections that this is simply to impose another master narrative (freedom), I point out that Lyotard’s project specifically means to keep alive the paralogically formative aspects of all narratives; i.e, those aspects that are “free” in the sense of being testable beyond the pale of inherently flawed 451 actions under a particular kind of stressful scrutiny to discern not whether they are “pomo” or not, but whether they say what it is possible to say, given what can be said in terms of what can be known critically, not just scientifically or hermeneutically or “analytically.” To return to my initial impulse, I would now rather say that the perspective shift demanded by postmodernity concerning how intellectual and ethical quality can be achieved and understood favors work of the kind Bill Roseberry produced, work displaying an ethically measured understanding that at its best moments was capable of giving up on the necessary ground of a hidden coherence, of an essentially prior (or true) direction of Meaning. He strove for narratives that were ethical not in some sense of absolutes but in the sense that they had to be adequate to the complexity and depths of human experience. He could face the uncertainty and intellectual vigilance that are the postmodern burden without the pathetic playfulness that often passes for academic postmodernity, without indirection or immobility or, worse yet, without the retreat into factual and ethical closure in the local, the familiar, the known self, the Mother Tongue (Quine), defying anything anyone else might say.

It must be understood that behind Bill Roseberry’s critical dissections of self- styled postmodernists was his appreciation for what was involved in the condition thus

judgments imposed by any kind of pure reason. It will be recalled that Kant’s notion of the paralogical had two dimensions: he rejected the false logic of the closed self but retained a strong sense of our (however dangerous) paralogical power to will beyond the limits of logic. Lyotard’s sense of the paralogical seeks to uncover moments of crisis where modernism’s gain — open-ended narrative experimentation — is caught between competing injunctions to defer to a projected closure in the logos and to defending its own open-endedness when it is threatened by the closures and exclusivities of meanings imposed by modernist sciences claiming to be that logos. This does not preclude, indeed it requires, accepting a critically provisional master- narrative focus — like one that recognizes the present condition of a historical confluence of multiple modernist narrative erosions of reactionary modernist certainties — and granting that focus a sufficient experimental primacy that deserves to be addressed by any analytical narrative claiming attention. 452 identified and what kinds of work it demanded.20 He was able to perceive that some ethnographic descriptions were often pseudo-postmodernisms, stuck in narcissistic and consumerist cosmopolitanism, bemused at variety itself,21 in perpetual flight on to the next thing before any further experimental constructions about how things got to be this or that way might want to be thought of.22 I do not have a precise sense of what led him into a career-changing migration toward history but it was clearly a turn away from what was to him a trivial representation of anthropological subjects’ lived and remembered experiences by cliques of professional anthropologists whose considerable academic influence Bill perceived as disproportionate to the weakness of their conceptualizations. His contribution to social scientific interdisciplinarity steps away from any adherence to prior and over-riding culturalist-materialist philosophical commitments. His sense of a common ground between history and anthropology is not in a self-styled and “new historicist” materialism’s perception of restless poetic energies

20 Cf. B. Roseberry and N. Polier, “Tristes tropes: postmodern anthropologists encounter the other and discover themselves” Economy and Society, 18:2(1989). The currently chic citation cartel pretends Roseberry’s critique doesn’t exist. When he does get to make a rare appearance, he is usually dismissed, as for example by Wm. Sewell, as a simple “materialist” who is “confused” — in contrast with Geertz whom Sewell celebrates for perpetrating “a brilliant piece of materialist argumentation.” “Geertz and History: From Synchrony to Transformation” in Ortner, ed., Geertz, 36, 45.

21 Cf. J. Clifford, “The Jardin des Plantes: Postcards” in his The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. For an antidote, see the more ethical response to presumptions of cosmopolitanism by which J. Levenson, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, gracefully recognized such cultural duplexities and mutualities in global relations that the vacuous laborings of the current bevy of culturalist cosmopolites could not imagine. The “lost” text remains of course I. Kant, The Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.

22 B. Roseberry, “Multiculturalism and the Challenge of Anthropology,” Social Research 50:4(1989) 857. His reference is to Clifford’s “The Pure Products Go Crazy” in the latter’s Predicament. 453 circulating inside bounded and naturalized cultural bodies. Rather, his work seeks to sharpen our perceptions of simultaneously internal and external dis- and re- articulations of multiple human formations in variously evolving local and global conjunctures, whose “meanings” are avowed or contested in temporally overlapping and interacting conceptualizations (including, but not particularly focused on, public symbolic performances) and remembered mutual recognitions.23

He was moving into that embattled area of human experience, historical remembering, the creative, textualized combining of both remembering and forgetting. Bill and I agreed that academic memory work in anthropology and history is increasingly under pressure by a solidifying alliance between techno-corporatist world “developers” and identity-belaboring culturalists whose elaboration of a politically and commercially serviceable anthropological-historical hegemony24 threatens to disable core areas of the critical and ethical capacities of both disciplines, capacities that play a significant role in the broad public trust that a democratic society places on the academy.25 My collaborations with Bill had rested in part on our agreement that the attempts to absorb both history and anthropology by the current moves toward a managerial and commercially serviceable culturalism26 requires a difficult alliance

23 B. Roseberry, “Introduction” to his Anthropologies and Histories, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1989, 12- 13, and passim.

24 Some useful guideposts are set out in C. Nelson and S.Watt, Academic Keywords, New York: Routledge 1999, 84-98 and passim

25 See J.Derrida’s “Mochlos; or, the Conflict of the Faculties” in R. Rand, ed., Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992 for a useful rethinking of Kant’s modernist academic ethics. Also, for a record of the pernicious confusions about “professional speech” in the “marketplace of ideas” that threaten ethical responsibility, see W. Van Alstyne, ed.,Freedom and Tenure in the Academy Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press 1993

26 E.g.: “. ..we can ask how collective beliefs and experiences were shaped, moved from one medium to another, concentrated in manageable aesthetic form, offered for consumption.” S. 454 between the two disciplines’ different engagements with human experiences to defend their scientific self-determination and self-respect against such simultaneously power- denying and power-servile “interdisciplinary” trivializations.27 This paper is intended to be, in part, a recollection of and rededication to Bill Roseberry’s contributions to this cross-disciplinary contestation, a task made easier by Bill’s almost instinctive recognition of the dangers inherent in the logical circularities governing the discourses of a number of reactionary modernists hanging on at the end of their respective tethers and building careers by claiming to provide “guides to intelligent policy,”28 while all the while manufacturing the naturalizing, that is to say the necessarily regressive and dehumanizing, logics and capacities for denial inside manifestly genocidal agendas.

II

To gain a clearer, more long-range perspective on the present paradox of intellectually and emotionally exhausted reactionary modernisms that yet remain powerful by serving extensions of deadly force on a global scale, it is worth considering briefly what happened when, in their moment of epistemological crisis, a growing number of medieval intellectuals, while under pressure of competition for survival in their corporate curiae, courts, and academies, moved toward recognizing an unprecedented, what they perceived as a “modern,” epistemological condition. Although one could travel further back into modernist origins29 (via Joachim, Augustine,

Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988,5.

27 This is, to be clear, not an attempt to amalgamate the two disciplines into one; cf. Kant’s caveat against interdisciplinarities that disfigure disciplines, The Critique of Pure Reason, transl. By N.K. Smith, New York: St. Martin’s, 1965, 17-18.

28 Geertz, Fact, 112.

29 In the current lore there are of course only reinscriptions and never any origins. Probably so, but there remains for me a historical problem in that we do remember certain experiences, however pathetically, as origins, as new appearances, as 455 Lucretius, Varro, Philo, Thucydides, the pre-Socratics) my argument’s point of entry is in the period between the 1270s and the 1470s, when Scotus, Occam, Oresme, Gansfort and a host of others, drawing on an expanding and increasingly dissonant classical heritage, identified their approaches as an unavoidable via moderna, a “current way” (consciously in recognition of an exhausted “ancient way,” via antiqua) for thinking about the qualities and dimensions of possible relationships between words and referents, in particular with regard to philosophically as opposed to theologically viable descriptions of interactions among both experienced and deducible, that is to say cogently imaginable worlds.

As a residual effect following the collapse of the crusader bubble of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the combined impact on European thinking of that period’s intellectual imports from the Eastern Mediterranean’s Persian, Greek, Jewish, Arab and other Hellenized Ancients put extreme pressure on the Catholic-Imperial consensus, unleashing four centuries of intellectual and corporate warfare during which countless judicial murders were committed for crimes against right thinking, beginning, one could say, with the Condemnations and the related executions in Paris in the 1270s and ending with the so-called witchcrazes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Aquinas’ summarizing concordances of the 1270s, a narrative modernization linking (and enclosing) a Christian telos in Aristotelean nature, were met by a synthesizing and critical intellectual assault led by Franciscan and other moderns seeking to separate and then re-ally the many intellectual and social contestants into newly functional camps of spirituals and seculars, men and women, scientists and theologians. They necessarily had, however, also to save the redemptive logos — at the heart of Christianity since its invention in Philo’s Alexandria — by demonstrating proofs for a free, inscrutable particular moments and conjunctures whose subsequent poetic self- revelations we find ourselves following with interest. Such remarked and remembered experiences of origin have to be narrated and appreciated for historical work, especially when we come to Nietzsche’s project where genealogies of promises and fulfilments (if only as histories of evasive displacements-in-action) move to the foreground — a promise being then a kind of origin even (or especially) when it is a scripted repetition compulsion. 456 divinity and by accepting an only contingently free and therefore comprehensible humanity. The via moderna’s paralogical innovation was its recognition and release of our capacity for experimental world narratives30 beyond the necessities of Thomist modernity’s dogma-driven projections and reactionary closures; the former sought, instead, narratives about the contingent, intertwining material, social and mental worlds that we are and that contain, sustain and sometimes destroy us, multiple narratives, evolving descriptions and disruptions, narratives that relativize and falsify each other, allowing for no respite in a final truth and yet having to be lived.

At the same time, when medieval moderns left open the possibility of a divine intervention they left an opening for narrative closure by means of a divine inspiration pointing toward a metaphysically correct and hallowed direction, toward the still- hidden, always deferred realization of the logos where all our errors will be redeemed. It is this duplexity of medieval modernism, a liberated and experimental narrative relativism still calling, if sometimes only for the convenience of argument, on divine power or on metaphysical absolutes to test propositions31 and most often also still under hopes of radical empiricism — that is, of being privately granted a divine inspiration, an intervention from an active vision of divine singularity-in-Being — that altogether make for dangerous and confusing ontological parameters at work inside the intellectual development of “the modern West” during the next four centuries.

This persistently shared and often left unspoken transcendence became the paradigmatic ground for the quarrels, lasting into the present, between variously allied and opposed ancients and moderns,32 differing on everything but the fact of an

30 I am following E. Grant, Physical Science in the Middle Ages New York: Wiley, 1971 and idem, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; I am also still learning from T. Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.

31 Grant, Foundations, 96-7.

32 H. Baron, “The Querelle of the Ancients and the Moderns as a Problem for Renaissance Scholarship” In P. Kristeller and P. 457 overarching totality, of a self-sufficient divine comprehension that was, paradoxically, more mysterious to the moderns than it was to the ancients who could always claim to speak with an authority presumed fixed in specific canonical texts. It also unleashed a conflict along many fronts that we need to recognize historically as contiguous-in- memory across varying distances of continuous time. We find modernism contending to this day with hardy ancients and reactionary moderns accusing it of, among other things, representing the divine logos as irrational even as the latter “rationalizes” plainly insane historical formations and actions.33 When modernist capacities for narrative experimentation appear as a perpetual threat to transcendent agreement, to the absolute “peace” deemed necessary by reactionary modernist before any hermeneutical dialogue can be conducted, then modernism’s narrative potential will be sold short and undermined by a fear of loss of control even by those claiming to speak from a modernist position.34 Modernity’s complicated and inevitable conditional crises, arising from the available multiple capacities for narrative destabilizations of certain knowledge, of certain identifications of “objects” to examine, seems to predicate an

Wiener, eds., Renaissance Essays, New York: Harper 1968 [1959].

33 Thus, e.g., the young Gerhard Ritter’s historical judgment in the early 1920s, cited in H. Obermann, “Luther and the Via Moderna: The Philosophical Backdrop to the Reformation Breakthrough”, draft manuscript, Trent: 2000, 21. It is worth noting that Ritter, a neo-corporatist and Christian moralist, having opposed to the point of imprisonment what he called Hitlerism (because it was an Austrian and therefore un-German modernist extremism!) but also having served the Nazi foreign office, emerged as one of the founding fathers of the German historical profession after 1945 with an assessment of the Nazi period that minimized its significance and denied any connection to what he saw as positive Prussian cultural traditions. W. Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft seit 1945, Munich: dtv 1993,58-65; also A. Dorpalen, “Gerhard Ritter” in H-U. Wehler, Deutsche Historiker, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Vol.1, 1971.

34 Such blockages appear, e.g., throughout one very good essay collection on the state of the debates. T. Maranhao, ed., The Interpretation of Dialogue, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. 458 endless flight into consensus based on certainties not of fact or being but of processes in known or projected locations and events; that is, flight into a consensus about certainties of deeply embedded ontological directives, often seen in terms of “process,” in historical motion. While obviously useful, process paradigms are not, however, immune to reactionary modernist turns, to moments of narrative fatigue and failures that do not yet want to admit their condition. Reactionary modernism is a historically frequent move, a capitulation to a stabilization of dangerous narratives by an enclosure in self-referential and mutually inscrutable process-beings (incorporations) represented as “real,” i.e. as self-willed and bounded systems-in-action.

In these trans-temporal historical contestations among ancients and at least two kinds of moderns, there are differences between and within the often (self)deceptively argued positions of variously allied groupings of ancients and moderns, nuances demanding a heightening of one’s alertness toward the philosophical qualities and implications of any and all statements. It reminds me that at the end of one of his letters Bill Roseberry signed off with a joking “Yours, still sliding into Realism, Bill.” It seems paradoxical that the present moment of postmodernity requires an awareness of key divisions among the ancients’ and medieval modernists’ arguments in order to recognize and avoid the specious attractions of current reactionary modernisms. For example, the persistent elisions of some modernist arguments for individual and political freedom with neo-Thomist notions of “free will” (or worse: agency) are founded and perpetually founder on moderns’ forgetting that the medieval innovation was to abandon that neo- Platonist, neo-Stoic sense of the logos whereby individuals were connected to the divine by individually allotted and variable shares of the divine will, purportedly assisting them in training their character for the virtue of willing “freely” what a projected innate portion, an anamnesis, of the logos required them to will. These notions remain visible, for example, in the Leibnizian versions of Enlightenment modernity and in current so- called“virtue ethics.”35 The main thrust of medieval modernism had actually focused on the human capacity simply to will (and to educate a creative will for freedom) as a

35 It is also evident in Luhmann’s highly touted system theory. See the critical discussion by Lyotard in Condition, 65. 459 moment of individual equality and a possible sharing of recognition with the divine. This initiated a modern sense of a unique and obviously evolving capacity for poetic- dialectical recognitions of acting in the world. The medieval achievement was that we became paradoxically liberated within acknowledged and critically understood human contingencies from the narcissistic delusion of having to carry the burden of an isolated freedom of will that is, in fact, reserved for divinity and remains substantially inscrutable. To return, in this light, to discourses of “free will” as a modern burden of absolute individual responsibility in history is to assume that j’accuse pose where the accusers feel licensed to put on the judicial robes of the divine and write self-righteously pathetic histories that are themselves a kind of violence.36

Before I turn to focus on aspects of this medieval breakthrough to a modernist ontology and what it means for a historical anthropology more adequate to the postmodern condition, we need to note in passing that there were historical moments of mass violence that were part of and drew on the unfolding of the struggles among ancients, moderns and reactionary moderns, beginning in the late middle ages. Noteworthy is that such instances of mass murders were grounded in pernicious accusations of disobedience to or deviation from a (however construed) divine will and occurred during moments of narrative failure and consequent irreconcilable conflict on a civilizational scale. It is, for example, a greatly underappreciated train of historical thought37 that recognizes that one dimension of the etiology of the so-called witchcrazes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — taking the form of judicial visitations of individual, group and mass murders that in numbers of victims, trans-regional sweep and decades-long duration deserve their place in the history of genocides — was the

36 Far from alone, but a well-known case in point is J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, New York: Knopf, 1996.

37 Associated with work by Keith Thomas, Eric Midelfort, Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Davis and several others. An interesting recent illustration (if not explanation) of the problematic occurs in Mary Douglas’ experience with witch persecution in Zaire, “Sorcery accusations unleashed: The Lele revisited, 1987" in her Implicit Meanings, London: Routledge 1999 460 theological war between Thomist and Nominalist modernisms in an age of competing visions of social, religious and political restructuring. The victims’ “extracted” confessions and deaths-by-torture were not only accepted methods for dealing with the alleged crime of becoming the Evil One’s “willing” instrument but, more importantly, were also the key ingredients to the system of proofs for the Thomist-Aristotelean world view itself. From this perspective there was an evident circularity: the victims were killed not only because they could be successfully represented before the courts as “evil-doers” but because their confessions and convictions themselves in turn validated their prosecutors’ version of a divinity that could only act in the world by good and evil proxies.38 Conversely, the victims’ nominalist-modernist legal defenders were finally successful when they learned not to rest on the “innocence” of the accused as such but on a legally effective insistence on material evidence linked to a specific crime in a contingent world in which the divinity acts inscrutably and is independent of any agents. Their system of proof was a narrative modernization asserting an all-powerful God whose agency was as readily available for explaining crop failures, livestock deaths, miscarriages and other calamities as any Satanic agent whose existence the Inquisitors sought to demonstrate with modernized torture and interrogation practices, the latter resting on an early version of “thick description,” claiming to be able to deduce “inner” states by multiple “outer” signs produced during moments of extreme suffering.

With a modernist God-concept, good and evil took on a new, more “natural” life in the closed, only internally mobile Parmeneidean complexity alleged to be God’s mind. This became an opening for reactionary moderns to assert an ethical logos-will that we purportedly share with the divine that teaches us naturally, pre-consciously how to avoid evil and to practice goodness in our divinely guided and collectively, symbolically, encouraged “character” construction (all neo-Stoic survivals) and, as well, to look perpetually forward to the eventual reconciliation of manifestations of good and evil in a mysterious but providentially positive, benevolent and universal-divine complexion,

38 The convictions may be said to be working double duty in the sense of the hegemonic as Bill Roseberry understood it; see below. 461 whose realization is ours to bring about, finally, by finding the right scientific stories to help us recognize our arrival at the moment of predicted, “promised” deliverance. Centuries of such modernist clinging to a materially reproducible but still always transcendent logos has led to successive modernist failures, especially evident now in evergreen versions of a materialist-biological determinism perpetually interested in serving up “sciences” of profiling suitable for genetic, ethnic, cultural and other screenings to effect detentions and selections for the disposal or psycho-pharmaceutical or other management of individual or collective “natures,” that are deemed by duly constituted authorities to be, in their “character,” incapable of modern standards of “virtue.”39

III

For our present purpose of understanding how apposite to postmodernity both the currently dominant symbolic actionist and the marginalized eclectic-historical forms of anthropological analysis are, it is useful to go more deeply into this foundational duplexity of medieval-to-present performances of modernity. We begin by assessing medieval theories of the individual mind and tracing their genealogical survivals into the present formations of philosophical modernism, whose various intellectual, financial, political, psychological and other administrators are vainly trying to contain — with ever-resurgent reactionary modernist formulas — unstable, unpredictable multiplicities by means of controllable singularities and predictable sequentialities and, when these fail (as they must given their denial of the postmodern condition), by overwhelming,

39 S. Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, New York:Viking, 2002, is such a recent sophistry, an exercise in reactionary modernism, walking a pseudo-Darwinist tightrope where genes have “evolved” to exercise ethical agency and where his language gives him away: he claims to see genetically determined “temptations,” genes that battle in us as “angels” for our “good or evil natures,” conscience is a genetic gift, violence, of course, is a genetic predisposition and so on, and all of it, no doubt, to tailor a mind concept useful for expanding the scope of judicial and medical interventions (i.e., selections) by duly authorized professionals, operating, no doubt in a faith-based welfare and care apparatus. 462 brute destruction.

Emblematic of the long history of reactionary modernist dead ends is Geertz’ assertion of “my accounts of change, in my towns, my profession, my world and myself,” all woven together as myth (his term) tempered only with “dispassion.”40 Imperious ownership claims aside, one can recognize here a “homuncular” self-perception by which the world is only a projection of a self that is, itself, also a projection of itself . . . and all at some fantasized remove (dispassion). This foundationally circular understanding of mental functioning that we find in Geertz’ symbolic actionist and in adjacent approaches41 was already recognized a very long time ago as an impossible description of mind and is currently affirmed by what is, arguably, the best scientific mind-narrative that we have. We find Epicurus’ observation that there are materialist determinists who invariably exempt themselves from the determination42 in an evolved formulation in neuro-biologist Gerald Edelman’s perception of the homunculus problem:

“You will remember that the homunculus is the little man that one must postulate ‘at the top of the mind,’ acting as an interpreter of signals and symbols in any instructive theory of mind. If information from the world is processed by rules his existence seems to be obliged. But then another homunculus is required in his head and

40 Fact, 3

41 Thus J. Clifford on the so-called new ‘ethnographic subjectivity’: “. . .note Greenblatt’s own ethnographic standpoint, the complex attitude he maintains toward fashioned selves, including his own. . . He expresses. . .his stubborn commitment to the possibility of shaping one’s own identity even if this means only to‘selfhood conceived as a fiction.’” Predicament,94. It is worth noting this “stubborn commitment” (one of the pure emotions, no doubt) as problematical and resonant with Geertz’ “my world, myself” outcry. This homuncular self-inside-the-self seems to be in a perpetual fist-clenching and, one is tempted to say, infantile-assertive stance.

42 In J. Annas, Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, 126. 463 so on, in an infinite regress. . .”43

Edelman’s alternative mind concept (“neural Darwinism”) presents us with an embodied, complex and evolved architecture of interactive and epigenetic physical mind-structurings producing consciousness interactively and in ways that perform and continue to evolve within but are not perceptibly present for us in their complex entirety at any given moment44 nor for the vast variety and degrees of freedoms these paradoxically “limiting” and focusing interdependent structures release from moment to moment for learned (but always improvised) willing. Epicurus’ sense of an embodied and therefore uncentered mind flow that wills its way through a conflictual as well as complementary pragmatics of competing pleasures had challenged the Stoics’ homunculus notion of an embodied mind’s organizing/acting center, a hegemonikon 45 that, from its location in the heart, gathered in communications from the senses to organize them according to appearance, assent, impulse and, most important, their relation to the logos — but without any evident sense of disappearance, dissent, restraint

43 G. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind, New York: Basic Books 1992 82

44 This is to resist, with historical philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the “Ionian Fallacy” requiring a reduction of everything to a single materiality, a fallacy Berlin identifies in particular with the tradition linking Aristotle to Russell. I. Berlin, Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, New York: Penguin, 1981, 76-7,159.

45 Annas, Mind, 61-64, 66, 129. Annas favors the anthropomorphic circularities of the Stoics(206-7 and passim) and misrepresents the Epicurean position by severing it from its historical antecedents, from roots going down from the Cyreanics to the Sophists (Protagoras) to the Anaxagorian atomized nous made up of “seeds”-that-turn (reappearing as Epicurus’”seeds. . . of actions,” 129). Not only does this lead her to producing a weak critique of the Epicurean-Lucretian “swerve” (181ff) but requires her to project into what one has to insist was Epicurus’ un- centered mind-concept an unwarranted and singularly homuncular “agent who develops.” (130) 464 or conflicting reasons, i.e., with no room or tolerance for narrative invention, for self- contradiction or undecidability. All of the latter, “always already” resolved in the unity of the logos become irrelevant. By keeping a qualitative and vital separation (i.e., an individualized inner alterity, not a “ghost”) between knowledge and will formation in the mind, Epicurus in effect dissolved the logos-driven hierarchy of homunculi that made up the Stoic mind-self. Similarly, Edelman’s materialist conceptualizations46 of neural group selection, “selectional systems,” interactive primary and secondary repertoires and infinitely multiple synaptic mappings and “sproutings” etc. are also a narrative dissolution of the hegemonikon, of any singularized interior agent-self, including the currently popular gene-self that (Darwinist disclaimers-with-a-wink aside) wants to reproduce itself. We will return to this problematic below when we consider Roseberry’s contributions to theorizing a hegemony-dissolving counter-hegemonic narrative project for historical anthropology.

One bridging moment that links the Hellenistic philosophers’ differences on mind and self with Edelman’s recent neuro-biological narrative attack on rival modernist models of so-called Cognitivism occurs during the medieval invention of modernity itself. When we compare Thomist and Nominalist theories of mind, we find not only the familiar antagonistic models but also narrative figures that allow us to clarify some of the philosophical and analytical implications of the “my world, myself” stance taken by Geertz with which we began a moment ago. Aquinas’ modernizing innovation consisted in a narrative expansion of the Christian persona’s imagined relationship with the reality of universals by which the divine logos, being “before the thing” (ante rem), is realized in entelechies of natural forms that present themselves (in re) for individuals’ contemplations after the fact (post rem) of their appearance. The resulting Thomist mind-figure, written against the Augustinian notion of a mind-torrent, was of a closed body of water, a placid pond reflecting the heavens and creation. Duns Scotus combined

46 Fire, 82-3 and passim. 465 the two visions in a modernist, synthetic narrative47 in which the pond remained but was re-figured as open-ended, a broadening, an expansive slowing of the stream, always limpid and fresh between inflow and outflow. He found his way back, moreover, to Augustine’s mind-architecture of memory, understanding and will combining as successive moments in an individual mind’s flowing from intuition through thought to action. In this view, individuality was the condition of action but not the reason for action. The latter could only exist in individualities who remembered — with memory at the “intake” end of the consciousness stream — reasons for action that necessarily went beyond the boundaries of any individual in any particular moment.48

Where the Thomist mind is secure in its bounded, logos-governed, after-the-fact reflections capable of judging right actions and desiring works of perfection, the Scotist mind of the via moderna is open-ended, endlessly divided and in tension between what it knows and has done and what it wants to know and do. Moreover, unlike the Thomist gesture with narrative modernity that in fact intends a narrative closure (in sum, a reactionary modernization), there emerges out of the Scotist perception of an ostensibly “natural” self-division a mind-concept that offers an endlessly recursive, other-in-the- self, critically open narrativity that we can recognize again in the materialism of Edelman’s mind-concept and, below, in Roseberry’s re-conceptualization of encounters between historical selves and others in “the Americas.” In this conceptualization the boundaries between selves and others are made porous by ceaseless processes of pro- and introjection; minds are not perpetually catching up with the event horizon but are deeply immersed in it, entwining sensed event experiences with rememberings even as new synthetic memories come into play from moment to moment in the living of events.

47 My point of departure is C. Devlin,”The Psychology of Duns Scotus: A Paper Read to the London Aquinas Society on 15 March, 1950" The Aquinas Papers, 15(1950). I read this clarifying, eloquent essay in the garden by the moat, with the figurations in action before my eyes, at Oak Farm in Harleston, Norfolk, on a glorious summer day in 1991. With great gratitude and a memory salute to my late friend, the painter Peter Davis.

48 Devlin, “Scotus,” 5 466 The traces of minds’ presence-in-actions, -events, -facts can not be satisfactorily captured by infinite homuncular regressions, by self-censoring, repressively willed, only after-the-fact abstractions; rather, it is their multiple (neural, figurative, conceptual etc.) paths into the historical consciousness always present at the very thresholds of experience that must be brought into recognition.49

Scotus’ memory formation develops further Augustine’s conception of memory as the opening of the mind, the mesh through which both sense and abstract data pass simultaneously to act as synthetic signs for variously juxtaposed collections and colligations, that is for experimental narrative linkages, of objects retained and synthesized in their signs as objects — even when we are not thinking of them.50 Memory

49 Devlin on Scotus:”The living act. . .is a better likeness of the object than its abstract content.” Ibid. Something to keep in mind for fieldwork and as an opening to help us past the pathos of tendentious Objectivity that Ranke’s “Wie es eigentlich gewesen.” triggered in the American historical profession, recorded in P. Novick, ‘That Noble Dream’; cf. F. Gilbert’s shrewd reading in History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, chap.2, suggesting that Ranke’s modernist insistence on the independence of History as an academic discipline focused on a mobile, open-endedly narrating and critical (i.e., decision- shaping) memory function inside the action.

50 An instructive and elegant synopsis is J. Pelikan’s The Mystery of Continuity: Time and History, Memory and Eternity in the Thought of Saint Augustine, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986, 19-22. It is of interest from a historical- philosophical perspective to point to the continuation of this line of thought in William Dray’s critique of Hempel’s scientistic attempt to reduce discoverable historical human motivations to predictive laws. Dray’s “explanation-by-concept” and, borrowing from M.H. Walsh, his sense of narrative “colligation,” define the historian’s task away from Hempel’s predicting-controlling homunculus formation and toward an open- ended illumination of thought-in-action. W. Dray, “‘Explaining What?’ in History” in P. Gardiner, ed., Theories of History, Free Press 1956, 407-8. My reference to Walsh must not be construed as agreement with his absurd arguments against the allegedly “irrationalist” theory of history of Marx and Freud. Cf. D. Fischer, Historian’s Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical 467 in this conception is multiple, synthetic, in perpetual motion across thresholds of conscious and unconscious “locations,” a prefiguration of Nietzsche’s question in the Genealogy of Morals about where the remembered was while it was forgotten. Scotus anticipates Kant with his sense of an experiencing mind/self in which experience, remaining equally enigmatic in both its inner and outer dimensions and appearances,51 produces and cross-breeds powerful percepts as objects that split the mind, borne along by its habitus for such intake, into multiple developed faculties (habilitates) engaged in a constant clarification of the desiderium naturale in an unending dialectics of ironic and creatively reconfigured realizations directed, to end with Nietzsche’s conclusion to this perception, toward living in a spiteful, calculating embrace with natural as well as historical morbidities. In this instance, the Scotist contribution to memory awareness broadens the modernist capacity for mind-narratives and offers openings for breaking down the reactionary modernists’ “remarkable opposition of an inside to which no outside and an outside to which no inside corresponds.” 52

We leave this medieval, nominalist-modernist breakout when Scotus too loses himself, as he has to in his dangerous intellectual world, in word play about the freedom of the will (non posse nolle/velle) and returns to beatitude,53 to where Aristotle returned Anaxagoras’ free-wheeling nous seeds, to an enclosure in the supreme mind of God. To continue with an elaboration of centuries-long path-crossings between modernism and reactionary modernism into the present would add little to identify further the philosophical genealogies that reside in the functionalist-materialist project of Geertz and his epigoni with its closure of the boundaries of selves. However, before we return to what drew Bill Roseberry’s critical attention to the latter and prompted, in part, his development of an alternative project better able to do historical-anthropological work

Thought, New York: Harper, 1970, 194.

51 Devlin, “Scotus,” 9,12-14; cf. Kant, Reason, 351-2.

52 F. Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, transl.by Peter Preuss, Indianapolis: Hackett 1980, 24.

53 Devlin, “Scotus,” 6. 468 under conditions of postmodernity, there remains yet one more clarification that needs to be made concerning those recent perspectives on mind and the self that underwrite most immediately that brand of modernist materialism of which Geertz provides, according to Sewell, a brilliant example.

The philosophical ground for much of the current “culturalism” is the Anglo- American analytical tradition’s overt rejection of the open-ended, experience-oriented and paralogical conceptualizations of mind and self that run from Kant through Hegel (and perhaps Marx)54 to Nietzsche and Freud and beyond. What began with G.E. Moore’s exasperated protests against the incomprehensibility, to him, of British Hegelianism in the 1890s became, along with Viennese inputs, a purportedly modernist philosophical enterprise that obsesses about the mistakes of “ordinary language” even as it expresses itself in inconsistently and idiosyncratically applied logicalist hieroglyphics that can only enunciate tautologies and belabor various levels and permutations of obviousness and can not allow any speech reaching beyond itself. The ebbs and flows of these formulations need to be examined to gain a better appreciation of what is percolating below the symbolic actionist surface.

Like Epicurus’ determinists who exempt themselves from the determination, the current schools of materialist-behaviorists either have a philosophical tin ear or simply can not hear themselves. Thus Willard Quine’s programmatic and on its face absurd question “Given only the evidence of our senses, how do we arrive at our theory of the world?”55 leads him to a “naturalized” epistemology that rejects not only Kant’s analytic

54 Cf. S. Avineri on Marx’ as opposed to Engels’ and Lenin’s (and others’) versions of “consciousness” in materialist thought, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968, chap.3.

55 Cited in D. Koppelberg, Die Aufhebung der analytischen Philisophie, Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp 1987, 17.Koppelberg ably works out Quine’s relation to the Vienna circle and particularly to Carnap and Neurath and explores, among many other things, the anti-historical dimensions of Quine’s concept of science where forgetting mistakes that preceded an achieved scientific “advance” is a natural attitude. 307-9. 469 a priori (not a difficult step to follow now)56 but also his synthetic a priori, castigated for its “conceptualism.” The attack here is not on the analytic as such; it seeks rather to eliminate the a priori altogether in favor of an a posteriori world of “people and their nerve endings.” Are “people” and “their nerve endings” so easily separable? It makes one wonder, moreover, if he takes a position anywhere on what role “reading” (of, say, a path through the woods, spoor, books) plays in this sensual confinement of world-theorizing. The senses, mostly but not only of sight, while crucial to the physical operation of any kind of reading as such, are incidental to the mental formations (synthetic apriori) through which the read passes, before its deployment in turn as a posteriori synthesis inside the evolving capacities of intuition, constituting together an oscillating sensibility and understanding that can not be bound by simple notions of contextuality or, for that matter, temporal, after-the-fact sequentiality.57 He would deny it, but for Quine there remains an implicitly independent and active hegemonikon, a “conceptual apparatus that helps us foresee and control [!] the triggering of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.”58 By reducing mental operations to cognitions of objects (“place-times” that are “full”) construed as physically present to an observer — necessary to his Realism that requires such entities for every reference to an abstraction — he is under an impossible constraint to account for sustained concepts of abstract objects without physicality, indeed to account for the memory-construction that retains and allows for “the light [?] of the previous triggering” to pass into the present “triggering.” For writing close to a tradition that wants to clean up and police our “category mistakes,” Quine and, indeed, the entire crowd of Ryle, Austen, and now Dennett and Pinker et. al., seem blithely insensible to what they are saying.59 It can be

56 Edelman, Fire, 35

57 Kant, Reason, 65-67, 74-78, 92-3, 475-6.

58 W. Quine, “Things and their Place in Theories” in P. Moser and J. Trout, eds., Contemporary Materialism, Routledge: 1995, 193

59 Quine claims, for example, to have transcended Ryle’s Fido- ”Fido” problem about individuation and indexing confusions that occur when we point at Fido’s head but say “Fido” or “dog” as the 470 no surprise to find that, given his sense of “inscrutable referents” forcing us to reify the world and each other in “proxy functions,” Quine locates in the “physical world, seen in terms of the global science to which . . . we all subscribe, . . . our sensory receptors and the bodies near and far whose emanations impinge on our receptors.”60 With that he leaves us stranded deep inside the Baroque with Leibniz.

This means the logos can not be far. Quine allows for sensually experienced reality to be assigned plural forms in systems of “proxies” of mutually inscrutable translation, that can be freely changed to refer to the same stimuli, i.e., without changing the nature of the triggering objects. My resort here to the passive voice is deliberate to echo Quine’s usage of it throughout to screen out the homunculus- agent, the central scrutinizer and positor, the decider inside the decider inside the decider . . . , that allows his argument to work. While ejecting the transcendent thing-in-itself by the back door he invites truth and reality (on his terms) in by the front in the form of an “immanence” of “science itself” that can achieve “happily and unbeknownst . . . a theory that is conformable to every possible observation, past and future.” There is a two-fold problem with this : i. his is a trans-temporal theory (“every possible observation, past and future”) that necessarily posits, with Aquinas, a self-reflective, static universe that is not evolving, as it certainly is, both within and without the minds that appear and disappear in its course, evolving in ways unbeknownst and for which we can not possibly have, at any moment, proxy stories and ii. he resorts to a single qualitative measure for purportedly equal proxy-systems in their capacities to predict future observations. He

entity being pointed to. “Things”, 194-5; The medival modernist Wm. of Occam, however, in his Summa Logicae (I am using Wilhelm von Ockham: Texte zur Theorie der Erkenntnis und der Wissenschaft, R. Imbach, ed., Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984, 70-1) already took us beyond such “subtlety,” which remains still embedded in Realism, when he points out that the “object” called “dog” may not refer to a dog or part of a dog at all but, possibly, to a stellar constellation thus named, consisting of “objects” to be sure but itself remaining, as a specific object called dog, an abstraction to be read.

60 Quine, “Things” 206 471 follows this by coming to rest with the power of predictability as the only judge of rightness and wrongness, deciding scientific failure and success, acting as the motivator for shifting to different proxy systems and doing so without missing a beat in holding immanent reality-presence to be only in science itself.61

The puzzle is that for Quine to speak of scientific reality immanence on the grounds of predictive “success” is not to transcend linguistic ambiguity; even predictive success correctors are themselves trapped in “rival manuals of translation . . . compatible with all the same distribution of states and relations over elementary particles . . . in a word, physically equivalent.” One can justifiably wonder how or if, at levels of experience other than at such “microphysical states and relations,” these “conflicting” untranslatables apply or matter. Quine asserts that “there is no fact of the matter of our interpreting any man’s ontology in one way or, via proxy functions, in another. Any man’s, that is to say, except ourselves.” These are cryptic, even nonsensical propositions. Should he not have ended with “except our own” (i.e. ontology) for the last sentence fragment to be grammatically intelligible? And are we to read his “in one way” to mean that an interpretation that is not a proxy function is possible? If so, is there then an original, authentic, deep reading of “ourselves” before any proxies come into play? Then who and where is this reader? And how does Quine’s use throughout of the possessive “our” conflict with the principally unbridgeable divide he places between every “self” and every “other” whereby only the self can know and change itself authentically?62 How are his constant references to “we” and “our” possible? How can he

61 “Things,” 202-7

62 Wittingly or not, he provides a clear example of what happens with merely settling for another “weak” resolution to Russell’s paradox of classes, a resolution that claims to find analytic possibilities in deferring indefinitely the final form of the paradox in hierarchies of “types” within classes. W. Quine, From a Logical Point of View, New York: Harper 1963, 92-94. Hence the category mistake that occurs, as we examine below, when “remembering” is listed as one type in a class of dispositional attitudes, when it is in fact ingredient to all the other members in its class of types. 472 speak for “us?” It is this same presumption the symbolic actionists put forward time and again.

Quine concludes: “We can switch our own ontology too without doing any violence to the evidence, but in so doing we switch from our elementary particles to some manner of proxies and thus reinterpret our standard of what counts as a fact of the matter. Factuality, like gravitation and electric charge is internal to our theory of nature.”63 To place “factuality” alongside “gravitation and electric charge” seems a category mistake. Is that “factuality” simpliciter or only “brute factuality” or, going the other way, factitiousness? But perhaps we are all bound by a universal, yet-to-be- discovered natural attractor to “facts” (which seems an unduly limiting version of what the medieval moderns saw as habitus, the mental appetite for stimuli), such facts coming into play presumably only “after” their occurrence in which “we” can have no part at the moment of the sensual trigger-stimulus but only in Thomist “after the fact” proxy constructions whose transcendent truth value depends completely on their location in what is regarded as “science” by those regarding themselves as “scientists.” This is to say that we live within the multiple concentric circularities where only the self can narrate itself to itself while in touch with (and without loss of) an original embodied authentic self that remains perpetually at work in the proxy selves “we” may choose with greater or lesser scientific success for “ourselves.” From the perspective of the two modernist versions of mind already in place in the middle ages, we have to recognize in Quine’s deeply buried (almost to the point of non-existence) mind, collapsing into a perpetual regress toward a unity that is pre-formed and at all times self-enclosed, a version of Aquinas’ pond-mirror, a figure identified with reactionary modernism, as it takes advantage of an opening to narrative plurality (for Quine, endless proxies built on linguistically unreachable microphysical “reality”) and, at the same time, imposes a skeptical exclusion of all narratives save those that engage in self-styled or actual materialist sciences, including variously “pure” materialist psychologies distinguished by their projects for offering successful predictions, successful, that is, in the sense of

63 Quine, “Things” 207-8. 473 showing promise for becoming compliant, power-serving and self-fulfilling, that is to say necessarily violent, prophecies.

One can recognize in Quine and the analytic approaches generally a heroic pathos of solitude, a neo-Stoic pose of self-enclosure64 that in the hands of presently fashionable materialist-behavioral “sciences” can stake a disingenuous claim to an ethics of not presuming to speak to or for “others” in their inner being, i.e., in the worlds of suffering that are uniquely “their own.” This paradoxically empathic shutting out of the suffering of others is not only yet another instance of a refusal to confront Russell’s paradox but is something of a diversion of attention away from what appears to be the “natural” profit- taking authorized by notions of ontologically fixed and separate self- and other-hoods, capable of communicating only through mutually asymmetrical stimulations whose unequal outcomes are made to appear, before those select academic-corporate audiences where references to inequalities of power and capacities for violence are not deemed of interest, as depending solely on the relative predictive (i.e., scientific) powers of the interacting parties’ translation manuals.65 The latter’s mutual untranslatability of “stimulus meanings” (Quine) remains as a matter of purely intellectual curiosity, an

64 Cf. I. Berlin’s critical discussion of Stoic determinism, in which epistemology governs the will, as when we choose to do “freely’ what the “known” chain of causalities determines we should do, no matter what else we might think of doing. As Berlin points out, this is merely a freedom to accept or reject (Quine: assent/dissent) which is qualitatively not the same as a freedom to choose between positive alternatives. Also relevant is Berlin’s pointing to Popper’s critique of the endless regress built into any concept of a self-predicting self. Concepts, 179- 86; cf. also 186-198, 103-42 where Berlin posits wills choosing and governing their epistemologies by the latter’s differential capacities for liberation and where he perceives the so-called chains of causality as never more than changeable, historically evolving — i.e., dialectical and not analytic — conceptual abstractions.

65 An interesting historical episode (and pre-figuration!) that illustrates such an unequal contest is told by C. Ginzburg, Nightbattles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. 474 academic shelter in a world where, according to Quine, “in practice, we end the regress of background languages, in discussions of reference, by acquiescing [why this pose of submission?] in our mother tongue and taking its words at face value.”66 Quine performs a heroic-Romantic capitulation to a foregone conclusion, to a failure predictable by and consequent to the narrow and logically unstable “naturalistic” rules presented as the mark of high materialist rigor. “Science,” the only noble plan, can not ever change anything in this confused world and remains an esoteric sphere reserved only for a few. From the perspective of the present essay, both Quine’s project in particular and analytic philosophies generally in effect produce an option for social scientists, historians, anthropologists, for all those concerned with the problematics of self and other, to be drawn back, “in practice” (i.e., naturally, irresistibly?), into the apparent incongruities and errors of the common languages that the analytic philosophies had sought to transcend in the first place. It is a kind of eternal return of a reactionary modernist move that closes narratives as it opens them: the requisite heroic effort at “translating” others into our terms having been made, found to be as impossible as expected and all duly recorded, we can presumably, by this light, turn with a clear conscience toward manipulating the intrinsic nature, the quiditas, of others as they perform it (and as “they” try to manipulate “us”) by means of symbolic acts we can not (barely concealed relief at this) pretend to understand“really.” In this last, “others” are

66 W. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (1969) cited in Koppelberg, Aufhebung, 265-6. The latter ineffectually defends Quine against Chomsky’s critique of this very passage, a critique that points to what we recognize, again, as the infinite regress lurking in all of Quine’s arguments, which, in this case, lies in the fact that “the mother tongue” is not exempt from the linguistic incongruities between self and other (here: mother)that Quine himself posits. Moreover, that it is only “in practice” that we return to such “face value” usages (Koppelberg’s defense of Quine) makes matters worse and not better for “others” whose experience is implicitly inferior to and forever excluded from the superior scientific awareness of academics who, however, in “their” respective “fields” continue to speak in the several — also mutually untranslatable! — scientific languages that are “theirs” alone. In short, the “mother tongue” is a philosphical or, more precisely, logical mess. 475 perceived to be at a permanent disadvantage because, as people without “our” cultural science, “without history,” they are inevitably bound to act under the illusion that they can directly address “my self” in “my world.” The ethical program Geertz opens is that “we” can manipulate “their” illusions for both their and our good.

IV

Even though it is a mistake even to consider our bodies as machines in the first place,67 I proceed now by assuming agreement among all of “us materialists” (confused or otherwise) that there are no embodied ghosts. As creatures both of nature and of concept, human beings experience life “in” bodies, to be sure, but this does not require anyone to say where and how any “body’s” ongoing and evolving sensory and conceptual narratives are intertwined — and here we leave Quine, who can not get past the after- the-fact inauthentic nature of such “proxies” — in the memory formations that are intrinsic to the synthetic a priori, always understood as a divided, self-negotiating plurality, and not a homuncular entity, in action at any moment of every body’s complex of multiple event horizons. All experiences involve bodily textures whose micro- knittings neither determine them nor need to be precisely discerned for their patternings and re-weavings — not only within but between bodies — to be conceptually apprehensible and thereby historically, mnemonically, available in their own right, and not perceived as mere later, tertiary or quaternary or even further removed proxies of some prior, “always already” buried, “real” intuitions acting as both first and last instances.

Social sciences that have no provision for a dynamic, non-homuncular and

67 G. Richards, Mental Machinery: The Origins and Consequences of Psychological Ideas, 1600-1850, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, throws much light on this “philosophical” language; G. Ryle subverts his own version of the assertion that “Men are not machines, not even ghost-ridden machines.” by conceding us to be the “self-maintaining routine obeying systems” that became the model for machines. The Concept of the Mind, New York: University Paperbacks, 1949, 81-2. 476 evolving memory-function in their models for behaviors and of alleged dispositions are not adequate to the requirements of a social science paradigm that needs to be able address any accounts of any experiences anyone can render. This calls into question the “pure” materialist psychologism of the analytic philosophies (and of those so-called behavioral sciences that have attached themselves), imagining a kind of human intuition where “remembering” is only one of a host of “propositional attitudes,” alongside “believing, intending, desiring” etc.68 This is a category mistake, yet another instance of an unacknowledged Russellian paradox, in that none of the “attitudes” thus identified alongside remembering is itself free of or possible without remembering. Quine’s From a Logical Point of View does not index reference to memory and the latter appears in the text, untheorized, as simply “the past,” as a convenience for when his reasonings about what he calls “recalcitrant experience” demand it: “As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience from past experience.”69 He feels no need to say how we get to “past experience” because the assumption in the analytic tradition — ever since Russell’s elevation (or degradation) of memory to circular universality as the recognition of self- resemblance — has been the further circularity that memory can only be memory if it is a true resemblance-recognition. The ghost-in-the-machine-buster himself, Gilbert Ryle, from whom Geertz took the celebrated key term “thick description,” offers an impoverished discourse on “recollection” which labors the point that something that is not recalled successfully — more precisely, in one of his obscuring mother tongue repetitions, “faithfully”(!) — can not be counted as a recollection. He re-categorizes recollecting away from finding, solving, discovering and toward reciting, quoting, and depicting. Unlike the Augustinian-Scotist mind figure (echoed in the synthetic a priori) that places memory at the intake end of the experience stream where it functions as an ever-evolving multiform within sensual-conceptual matrices, Ryle places memory in the frozen sludge at the bottom of Aquinas’ pond, to seep into the ground according to its

68 Thus e.g., D. Davidson, “Mental Events” in Moser and Trout, Contemporary Materialism, 109.

69 View, 44 477 propensities in what Ryle calls “the stage of export.” In this figuration we merely recite our memories, and recalling becomes a “conning of something already learned,” i.e., of rote but conscious habits of serial performances.70

It is with such an utterly inadequate philosophical memory figure that reactionary modernists in the social sciences71 try to claim the ground of historical awareness even as they simultaneously repress it by assigning it a merely reactively circular, contained and mechanically dispositional presence that belies its forensic, suasive, and narratively unstable meshing with all intuition instants. It is, moreover, just such an analytically immobile memory-self that furnishes the exonerative moment that Geertz relies on in his Rylean style of argument that victims are victims because they are effectually so disposed, like glass breaking when hit by a stone because it is brittle and therefore so disposed.72

Both Cold War and post-1989 ideological restructurings of academia have repeatedly relied on importations into certain of the behavioral sciences, including symbolist histories,73 of this trivializing, philosophic-analytic encapsulation of history.

70 Mind, 274-6, 178-9

71 The current “Cognitivist” approaches perpetuate this mechanistic enclosure of memory “functions.” Thus, for example, we observe as A. Goldman worries about memory as a retrieval problem and about whether we “possess” memories that will not appear when we seem to require them. Being able to make this kind of judgment about memory is significant for him as part of a megalomaniacal philosopher’s claim to having the power “to set the standards for rationality.” (emphasis in original), Philosophical Applications of Cognitive Science, Boulder: Westwood Press, 1993, 30-1, 9-13.

72 G. Ryle, Mind, 88-89

73 For a detailed critique along these lines of two significant recent historical monographs see H. Rebel, “What Do the Peasants Want Now? Realists and Fundamentalists in South German and Swiss Rural Politics, 1650-1750" Central European History, 2002. There were some problems with the publication process of this and a restored, corrected and annotated version of it may be found at 478 Geertz’ foundational contributions in this regard for anthropology are visible in the well known and much-discussed essays from the early 1970s on Balinese cockfighting and on thick description; but in an interesting earlier theorization he had already developed a modernist evolution narrative in which he asserted, and one has to agree, that “cultural resources are ingredient, not accessory, to human thought.” This leads him, and here I can not agree, to theorizing (as Quine’s restriction of science to the extensional would require) a symbol-focused cultural science as that science of the mind where “human thinking is primarily an overt act conducted in terms of the objective materials of the common culture, and only secondarily a private matter.”74 Is “private” not simultaneously extensional and intensional and therefore not what he wants to say? Why this muddying of the waters with “common sense” terms (“private matter”) that do not speak to the problem under discussion? A possible answer is that he has not thought through the extent to which “symbolic actionist” theories are a colonization of “the private” by hegemonic formations of public sentiments. I will return to this in a moment, when I take up some of Bill Rosberry’s innovative formulations on these issues.

In any case, searching for a “memory” function in such a collectively culturalized mind concept, one finds an unwarranted projection of extensional process language into the black box of the purportedly unknowable intensional spaces of individuals. For Geertz’ mentor Ryle, memory was an immobile reservoir filled with “information,” with a “ fund of recollections” (untheorized), perpetually reminding us of our “lasting inclinations.”75 To this Geertz adds the qualification that such individual memory- reservoirs have little social scientific relevance except when they are in correspondence with an “attitudinal control of perception” under “guidance from symbolic models of the following site: http://w3.arizona.edu/~history/faculty/r/rebel.htm

74 “The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind” [1962] in his collection The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973, 83, also 77.

75 Mind, 90 479 emotion.” Geertz’ contribution to the study of cultural objects was to develop Allport’s critique of the pure physicalism of Pavlovian-Skinnerian behaviorists by extending to symbols the power of sensually affective trigger objects. Like Quine reverting to the mother tongue, Geertz makes it seem, and perhaps for him it is, straightforward, almost self-evident, even circular: “In order to make up our minds we must know how we feel about things [?!]; and to know how we feel about things we need the public images of sentiment that only ritual, myth and art can bring.”76 That impossible but coercive “we” again. And how he gets from the first half of this sentence to the second is completely unclear. As far as historical memory in this understanding is concerned, it appears to be a kind of benevolent (because culturally life-sustaining) repetition compulsion contained in emotionally loaded symbolic forms, discernible in a “thick description,” i.e., in an analytical identification of a people’s “thick concepts,”77 where the ghost is not in individual body-machines but in the emanations of the public symbolic apparatus, however that may be imagined to be.

Such an internalized reservoir-memory is a mistaken metaphoric projection of allegedly natural correspondences between intensional and extensional processes. It fails not only because it is not relevant to the vast physical-material complexity that we

76 “Mind” 82.

77 For this I am following the clarification of “thick concepts” as “action-guiding” symbolic condensations in B. Williams, “The Scientific and the Ethical” in Moser and Trout, eds., Materialism, 284-6. A. Kuper’s well-taken objection (Culture, 110-11) that Geertz’ example of a confusion of such concepts in his presentation of the Berber sheep incident is, after all, a rather thin narrative may be supplemented by noting that “thickness” here is not primarily about richness of descriptive detail — an understanding echoed in many celebratory receptions of Geertz, (see Ortner reference in note 120 below) and especially among historians — but concerns rather the emotional and mobilizing power of certain collective symbolic representations that are presumed to be particular to particular cultural “entities.” I will return to Williams’ ethics in this regard below. 480 know “remembering” to be78 but also because it requires some sort of retriever-, or better, bricoleur-homunculus to do the work. For example, Geertz’ symbolic actionism calls on a specific kind of psychological theory which sees mental action, “imaginal thinking,” in terms of “constructing an image of the environment, running the model faster than the environment and predicting that the environment will behave as the model does . . . These models can be constructed from many things . . . Once a model has been constructed it can be manipulated . . .”79 and so forth. On this basis Geertz concludes that thought is the “matching of the states and processes of symbolic models against the states and processes of the wider world.”80 The point that needs to be made is that Geertz couches all of these epistemological substitutions for experiencing in a passive voice only occasionally associated with something he calls “the organism.” The passive voice conceals the bricoleur-homunculus doing the constructing, model- running, manipulating, predicting, matching and, more important, doing the remembering, here completely excluded, that all of these homuncular after-the-fact

78 Edelman, Fire, 102-8 and passim. Typical of the kind of necessary misreadings of Edelman’s powerful conceptualizations one finds in the cognitivist literature is D. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown 1991, 268, 365 and elsewhere. Dennett’s mind concept revolves around a narrative of so-called “memes,” the fashionable neologism for what are perceived to be “culture genes,” which then authorize language about “toxic” ideas that “poison” minds. And that in turn allows for the establishment of a cognitivist mind police, on the Goldman model no doubt (see note 71 above), to grant or withhold a “scientific” imprimatur on ideas and their expressions at schools and other learning corporations.

79 E. Galanter and M. Gerstenhaber, “On Thought: The Extrinsic Theory” Psychological Review 63(1956) cited in C.Geertz, “Mind” 77-8.

80 “Mind” 78. Wider than what? Such fudging “mother tongue” usages not only wear the reader out but become increasingly repugnant in their open display of a speciously justified desire merely to manipulate others and predict the outcomes of manipulations. How can anyone be expected to keep on reading after reading page after page of these decadent “common sense” formulas occurring at critical philosophical-scientific, logical and epistemological junctures? 481 reasonings and preparations to look for more “information” from the senses, call for. It strikes one, moreover, as an excessive naturalization of experience thus to reduce “culture” to that Wittgensteinian form that “man,” described now as “mentally unviable,” must have and accept or perish. While this is true, without doubt, of cultural forms generally and altogether, symbolic actionist understandings maintain that particular “cultures” perform that function as sine qua non necessities for their “members” who are implicitly reduced thereby to inhabiting historicist-linguistic prisons of “their own” and, apparently, are incapable of creative, self- and other-transcending interactions with (and not mere adaptations of) “others’” cultural materials.

To carry through on this functionalist agenda81 Geertz sees the specific service that his perceived “thick concepts” perform as a kind of symbolic thermostat-memory that keeps excitement, stress, mourning, terror etc. within or up to certain bounds to achieve a constant social-political equilibrium, a happy, quiet state. He invokes Dewey’s closure of human ontology in “a situation that is clear, coherent, settled, harmonious.”82 There is nothing here about how the harmony of some lives is historically as well as ritually purchased by the destruction of other lives except to imply that we can trust the performances of symbolic forms to take care of any awkwardnesses of that kind. In terms of anthropological “science,” nothing is said about how and by whom these cultural thermostats are set, how and by whom the settings are remembered, nor how, alternatively, such automated cultural feedback mechanisms might work — one is left to imagine a kind of ball-governor contraption on a steam engine — to enforce the still somehow (homuncular in origin) preset emotional thresholds. There remains a lurking, implicit (and untheorized) master homunculus, reading the collective emotional states and turning the symbolic heat up or down to achieve some sort of “harmony” that, in itself, is not subject to scientific or ethical scrutiny. We will return later to the ethical

81 Edelman, Fire, 77-9 develops some interesting perspectives on what he sees as cognitivism’s “functionalist position.” Truly mind-boggling is his development of an alternative theory of mind grounded on an interplay in evolution of symmetry, symmetry- breaking events and memory, chapter 20.

82 Geertz quoting Dewey in ”Mind” 78. 482 implications of this curious conception of a regulation of individuals’ emotions by means of “thick concepts” deployed as public stimuli for optimum and stable, i.e., predictable, social performances, played (not lived?) by actors(?) who are reduced to being “concerned not with solving problems but with clarifying feelings.”83 Clarifying feelings is not a problem? And no concern for whose feelings are being “clarified” by whom and for whose edification and interest and profit? It is my sense, having had to think through diverse kinds of genocide denials and trivializations and exploitations, that contained in this pseudo-distinction between solving problems and clarifying feelings is an exonerative moment that permits a dissociation of feelings from actions and actively represses a possibility for civility to be grounded in conceivable “thick counter-concepts” drawn from a generally human-cultural (or, for that matter, from a “privately” conceived) intuition and not from the dominant, identity-enforcing cultural formations to which anyone happens to be subjected at any given moment.84

83 Geertz, “Mind” 81.

84 It is worth remembering, in this connection, that not all of Milgram’s subjects acceded to the symbolically girded and authorized “scientists” commanding them to administer, for the sake of the integrity of a scientific experiment, expressly lethal electric shocks to someone heard screaming and pleading in another room. Conversely, those that did go to the lethal limit may have done so for reasons other than being commanded in a “scientific” public performance. Their “willingness” not only does not necessarily confirm symbolic actionist predictions about the triggering power of “thick concepts” but may merely have found authorization in a symbolic-ethical “public” cover-story for acting out prior, “privately” formed pathologies that have little or nothing to do with the symbolic authorization process. From this perspective, the relationship of symbolic actionist manipulations to genocidal performances shifts away from the former being mere “trigger” mechanisms that quickly fade from the “natural” unfolding of subsequent events. Our attention turns rather toward their functioning as enduring, sustained authorizations for individuals to act out with impunity lethal pathologies — with collective figural dimensions — on variably, hegemonically, selected “others.” Cf. H. Rebel, “Dark Events and Lynching Scenes in the Collective Memory: A Dispossession Narrative about Austria’s Descent into Holocaust” in J. Scott and N. Bhatt, eds., Agrarian Studies, New Haven: Yale University Press 2001. 483 V

One of Bill Roseberry’s important contributions to historical anthropology was his critical questioning of any theoretical regression to a singular intelligence, a hegemonikon, operating either in individual selves or in cultural machines. Paradoxically, however, he also kept and developed further the word “hegemony” because it had a history in modernist hands (most notably Gramsci’s and Raymond Williams’) that was useful for reconceptualizing power and what to do about it. As with Epicurus, the modernist strategy to dissolve the hegemonikon must be to narratize it and that is the possibility that Roseberry’s several discussions of the hegemony problematic open up. He theorized the term to move us past the simplifying and misrecognizing notions of “control” that persistently — one is tempted to say: hegemonically — rule cultural-analytical discourses in both anthropology and history.85 For the most part, the considerable quality of his efforts in this direction has not found the response it deserves.

Leaving aside its handicap as an uncomfortable word on the modern English tongue, hegemony has survived in social- and political-cultural analysis despite its reduction to mere “domination” or “power projection” in the language of international relations86 and despite its both overt and covert rejections and diminishing usages in the social scientific literature. A case in point of the latter is Derek Sayer’s dismissive “dissident remarks on hegemony” in which, after finding an alleged surfeit of “definitions” (Roseberry’s conceptualizations finding no mention) and professing to have an “inbuilt horror of abstraction,” he gives up at the outset, never discusses the

85 I have been most influenced by his formulations of the hegemony problematic in Anthropologies, also in “Political Economy,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 17(1988) and in “Hegemony and the Language of Contention,” in G. Joseph and D. Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation” Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.

86 Thus J. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D.1250-1350, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 484 term and instead substitutes for it the closure of yet another polarity: “resistance and rule” — good, plain-spoken mother tongue words, to be sure, but also, in relation to specific historical moments, abstractions — by which he is then able to turn the debate back to issues of “control.” For him this latter is to be preferred over abstractions like hegemony which mark, for him, treacherous intellectuals always on the side of power. To my mind such a turn is a regression to a reactionary modernist foreclosure on the several narrative experimentations offered by a hegemony perspective. Sayer’s own narrative invention revolves around a speciously emblematic homily about allegedly cynical sociability derived from Vaclav Havel’s projection of motivations on a Prague greengrocer’s window sign, all meaning to reveal to us that “hegemony” was exposed in 1989 as “the emperor’s new clothes.”87 It is difficult to see what connection this has to the hegemony problematic as Roseberry and others developed it in the essay collection Sayer is responding to. In another instance, John Gledhill offers a lengthy footnote on hegemony that gives a fair but brief representation of Roseberry’s conceptualization88 but then simply ignores it, some soundbites aside, in his extensive reception of works by Scott, the Comaroffs, Keesing, Ortner and others, whose variously interesting ethnographic and historical narrative experiments all find relief in a dualistic closure under the common denominators of “resistance and domination.” One has the sense that in much of this literature there is a rush to get to something called “counter- hegemony” which is then understood simply as “counter-culture.” This is, with all due respect to the significant field work and conceptual contributions of all of these scholars, a reactionary turn that re-inscribes into an evolving conceptual formation of cultural hegemony the very dualistic forms from which the latter offers an escape. The present essay draws on Bill Roseberry’s work to argue that counter-hegemony is counter- narrative and not counter-culture; counter-hegemonic works are narrative inventions, Lyotard’s paralogical narratives, unmoored from mandated (i.e., naturalized) logics of identity and authenticity and able, if not always directly intending, to disturb to the

87 D. Sayer,”Everyday Forms of State Formation: Some Dissident Remarks on Hegemony” in Joseph and Nugent,eds., Forms.

88 Power, 77 n.4 and ff. 485 point of incapacity specific negotiation-narratives’ abilities to hold together the hegemonic bloc.

Bill Roseberry’s discussion develops further the break-through contained in Gramsci’s and Williams’ modernization of an older notion about the ideas of the ruling classes acting as the ruling ideas, as the positively ideal representations of historically present and articulating social formations by which labor power, property and surplus are organized for class advantage. His perspective from hegemony, understood as a heuristic, investigative and modeling concept and not as a “being,” requires us to examine power as the ongoing production of an intertwined array of multiple discourses “which present an order of inequality and domination as if it were an order of equality and reciprocity, which give a product of history the appearance of natural order.”89 Roseberry found that Gramsci’s focus on Italian liberalism’s failures to achieve hegemonic consensus had perhaps misdirected the hegemony debate toward its, undeniably significant, negotiation and consensus aspects and he sought to restore the equally significant sense that this consensus among allied ruling groups, Gramsci’s “hegemonic bloc,” is difficult both to achieve and then to maintain and that, for a variety of reasons, it is, in any particular historical location and moment, ready to collapse.

The hegemony project Roseberry proposed is one of understanding the historical unfolding of hegemonic discourses and adjustments among both the hegemons and the subaltern“by focusing attention on points of rupture, areas where a common discursive framework can not be achieved.”90 He saw the subaltern in particular participate in the hegemonic process by not only constructing separate hegemonic discourses to maintain their alliances but by doing so in, among other instances, “bilingual situations in which subordinate and dominant groups interact.”91 This is to say that there are not simply separate “cultures” of the dominant and the resisting with their “internal” hegemonic

89 Roseberry, Anthropologies, 44-5.

90 Roseberry, “Contention” 366; idem, Anthropologies, 47

91 Roseberry, “Contention” 364 486 formations. It is not in mere symbols and metaphors but in these interactive bilingualisms, duplexities and oscillations, in the concealments and disclosures between the metonymic and synecdochic figures of language, circulating within and across the boundaries of a complex of social divides, that the cultural-hegemonic contest takes place and poses problems and opportunities for analysis and action. Because the constantly compelled updating of the hegemonic, naturalizing representations of power needs to misrecognize unavoidable injustices and necessarily violent extortions it can never be complete but is constantly subject to ruptures and crises of explanation that interfere with the necessarily one-dimensional symbolic actionist closures and systems of symbolic triggers with which an endlessly regressive hierarchy of homunculi- controllers seeks to play on the subalterns’ registers of emotional intensities and capacities for action.

A hegemonic consensus thus conceptualized is never a coherent entity but remains a fragile conceptual-political alliance that is at all times, and at very least, to double duty bound. It not only has to “dominate” or “control” the discourses of those subject to its commands with language formations that normalize oppression, but it also has constantly to rearrange itself as a fictitiously coherent alliance of “controllers,” who are not outside the system of material determination and who, if agreed on objectives, can not agree on methods, and vice versa, and who are not necessarily natural allies and, indeed, are frequently in necessarily covert competition with each other. In other words, implicit in Roseberry’s analytical pursuit of the narrative and contentious instabilities in the hegemonic consensus is the perception that at any given historical location and moment the primary goal of hegemonic cooperation may not be “domination” as such but rather the perpetual and simultaneous updating and re-stabilization of relations among the hegemons themselves.92 It is the frequent preponderance of this latter

92 Such an understanding appeared in German historiography in E. Kehr’s conceptualization of a “primacy of domestic politics” to explain German foreign policy in the nineteenth century; see his Economic Interest, Militarism and Foreign Policy, Berkeley: University of California Press 1977 A classic work following this perspective and joining to it business cycle and other discourses 487 function that gives hegemony its often unspeakable, metonymic dimensions and that should become a central problem of analysis. Needless to say, these always threatening divergent necessities can not find narrative-critical exploration in the spectrum of reactionary modernist approaches that have dominated academic conversations since the Cold War.

It is in the interstices of the narrative ruptures in the hegemonic, as they occur at all social levels, as well as in the shared but differently read discursive disjunctures between the hegemons and the subaltern, that there arise, for the latter, counter- hegemonic options to do more than react to domination by exercising “agency” against “structure.”93 The latter terms, much favored in current discussions of “popular culture,” have somehow become linked in ways that equate structure with domination and agency with resistance. This seems to be yet one further instance of a stepping back from the narrative modernity demanded by the Russellian paradox whereby, in this case, resisting agents may plausibly be striving to defend, restore, create or even only imagine or recognize a structure that promises options for living and that dominant agents are trying to subvert or destroy for their purposes. The mere juxtaposing of structure and agency limits the depth of analytical understanding available when, instead, we expect to find structures that can empower as well as set “us” up for destruction with ascriptions of “agency,” that can release as well as stifle creative, productive, resistant and inventive capacities. It is to see better the relations among the dialogic relations among not just structured but structure-reading agents found at every level of social formations, beginning within the individual role complex and extending to the limits of global

of explanation is H. Rosenberg, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967. It is no surprise that efforts, beginning in the mid-1980s, by G. Eley and D. Blackbourn and others to write the likes of Kehr and Rosenberg out of German historiography also deployed symbolic actionist formulas.

93 Roseberry: “It is insufficient to assert that transformations are not structurally determined but result from human agency.” “Political Economy” 171; cf. also Anthropologies, 47 and passim. 488 articulations,94 that conceptions of hegemonic rupture and counter-hegemonic narration would appear to be worth a second look as an analytical alternative to exhausted reactionary modernist formulas that sell resistance short even as they claim to celebrate it.

It is not in dualistic cultural confrontation but rather in the narrative decay and creative alteration of hegemonic discourses making their way, dialectically, through layers of both ruling and subaltern inter-relationships that are, for Roseberry, the sites where counter-hegemony may be found, invented, tested. The latter bypasses power when it appears, for example, in a “state, which never stops talking . . . [but] has no audience; or rather, has a number of audiences who hear different things; and who, in repeating what the state says to still other audiences, change the words, tones, inflections, and meanings.”95 It is worth remembering that at a time when there was widespread professional kowtowing to Geertz’ modernist cockfight narrative (a hegemony-serving construction if ever there was one) Roseberry was already re- narratizing it by mobilizing parts of Geertz’ own evidence that had been excluded from Geertz’ analysis to dissolve the frozen antinomies that marked the latter’s reactionary turn.96

94 On the “role complex” self see H. Rebel, Peasant Classes, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, chap.7 and on its connections to global articulations see H. Rebel, “Cultural Hegemony and Class Experience: A Critical Reading of Recent Ethnological-Historical Approaches” American Ethnologist, 16:1/2(1989).

95 Roseberry, “Contention” 365.

96 Roseberry, Anthropologies, 22-25 and passim. In Lyotard’s sense of the postmodern we can find ways to connect a narrative counter-hegemonic strategy with his discussion of the “small narratives” (petits récits) that continue to grow out from under and through the decaying trunks of dead metasystems and altogether make up the ongoing modernist scientific experimentation that he calls “the paralogical.” By this he means not, as the Ancients did, false logics but an open-ended scientific “plurality of . . . languages . . . a pragmatic game. . . [and] . . . a plurality of formal and axiomatic systems 489 Such narratively destabilizing and restructuring conceptions of the hegemonic contest point in turn toward selves and others that are not naturally and mutually inaccessible as closed incorporations but that can only act and be perceived, rather, as mutually permeable entities engaged in a simultaneously intro- and projective testing and reading of each other’s capacities, epistemologies, intentions and actions. In Kantian terms, it is the difference between narrating both ourselves and others apodeictically (the symbolic actionist approach) or hypothetically.97 In a favorite essay, “Americanization in the Americas,”98 Roseberry offers, from the eclectic, post-Kantian materialist perspective that informs (via Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz and many others) much of his work, a fresh opening to the question about what to do about problems of encounters between selves and others in historical anthropology. Inspired by Darcy Ribeiro’s notion of a “Puerto-Ricanization of Venezuela,” he develops a narrative frame for such encounters in the recognition that the Americanization experience in the Americas has not been one of North American culture acting as “donor” of “modernization” to “receptor” peoples in Latin America. In such encounter-analytic models the latter’s prior histories (including but not restricted to experiences with prior capable of arguing the truth of denotative statements.“ Paralogical narrative inventions are not, in this conception, simply “innovations” bound into systemic closure and hegemonic consensus but they are dissensions, counter-hegemonic disturbances of the order of reason, “a power that destabilizes the capacity for explanation.” Condition, 43.

97 Kant, Reason, 534-35. It is on the basis of this difference that we can object to Kojeve’s (and Fukuyama’s and others’) apodeictic reading of Hegel”s “master-slave” figure. They miss the requisite intensional hegemonic-narrative formations of “selves” engaged in encounters that are represented, in reactionary modernism, as purely extensional; also missing is a related question about the livability, bearability, of such intro- and projective formations between selves and others; and missing as well, finally, is a mode of production sense of the production and appropriation of selves for and by others as elements of the asymmetrical, i.e., exploitive, cultural coercions essential to the ongoing staffing of any social formation. Cf. Rebel, “Hegemony” 127.

98 Anthropologies, 80-121. 490 imperialist extensions of power) are, even if sketchily indicated, ruled out of the narrative that counts. Roseberry collapses this persistent hegemonic dualism into a far more complicated array of multiple narratives in which there are historical layers upon layers of all Americans’ experiences, both direct and figurative, with each other. These experiences are not reducible, even in the events, to anyone’s or any group’s master narrative because none controls the open-ended, never complete historical intertwining of such multiple encounters, including self-encounters, inside the many extensions of power, the colonializations, the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic contestations that are, altogether, the American experience.

Roseberry’s ethical modernism is most evident when he invokes the perception by Cardoso and Faletto of an “internalization of the external,” echoed later by comments on von Humboldt’s “inner shore,” to find a way to disclose these infinite sets of relationships with a historical anthropology founded on a “more detailed study of particular conjunctions of local and global histories . . . an anthropological and historical examination of a variety of internalizations . . .”99 His is a modernist scientific attitude that avoids self-referential universalisms and seeks rather differential universals in an evolving capacity to conceptualize trans-cultural and multi-temporal formations for a better grasp on the range of complexities at work and play in any location of human experience.100 Implicit in this is an “open systems” ethics, an argument that foundational closures in ethical formulations will invariably be misrecognitions,101 that closures

99 Roseberry, Anthropologies, 81-91, 95.

100 An example of very strong work in this spirit is Steve Stern’s focus on the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic narrative contests in Chileans’ experiences with combined international and local state terrorism. S. Stern,” The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile: Truth, Culture and Politics since 1973" a public lecture at the University of Arizona, Feb. 24, 2003.

101 On “open systems” see Lyotard, Condition, 64; Roseberry’s work connects, in this sense, with such “open systems” theorists as Eric Wolf whose model of modal articulations, in Europe and the People without History and Envisioning Power (Berkeley, 1982, 1999 respectively), opens a global analytical framework that can link micro- with macro-levels of social and discursive 491 generally, including closures of what is ostensibly “the good,” collapse under modernist narrative scrutiny, and that the point is to consider what ethical questions arise with scholarship that continues to insist on apodeictically closed selves in a human world that is clearly not inhabited by such entities.

I began this essay with Roseberry’s incredulity at Geertz’ blindered but acclaimed reading of Indonesian cultural traditions against the backdrop of the “events” there in late 1965. To make the point that this was an ethical incredulity, it is worth, finally, to take a second look at Geertz’ language about the “massacre” in the light of the present essay’s outline of a deeply embedded, centuries-old philosophical-scientific current of reactionary modernism, i.e., of a modernist narrative experimentalism that never leaves the cover of some kind of overriding closure. Geertz’ immediate experience of the 1965 genocide appears in his essay collection covering this period, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), and furnishes clues to the ethical qualities of symbolic actionist narratives. A look at some word and detail choices and phrasings is instructive. We note first that it is in order both to draw the eye away from what makes any particular genocide happen and to portray such events as mobilized by local emotion-generating “thick concepts” able to command for themselves a claim to ethical narrative, that symbolic actionist strategies of argument often relish repetitious recognitions of emblematic horrors in the bacchanal: it is about “the mass slaughter,” (246) “extraordinary popular savagery,” (282) “savage aftermath,” “eruptions,” (322) “the massacres,” “rice-field carnage,”(323n) “the catastrophe,” “political seizures,” “massive internal bloodlettings,” (324) etc. This excess of “admissions” of the Reality of the genocide is an advance over outright genocide denial, to be sure; it also, however,

intercourse without ever needing to reach a final closure, and Sydney Mintz, whose work finds implicitly endless cross- referential, intertwined social- and cultural-figural formations in apparently fundamental nutrition practices; both focus not on metaphoric-symbolic one-dimensionalities but on the duplexities, concealments and diversions which metonymic and synecdochic cultural forms (and they all are that)are capable of. S. Mintz, “Homologies of Thirst” a public lecture at the University of Arizona, December 7, 1998. 492 generates a kind of verbal “fog of genocide” that obscures what is going on behind, around and through the killings.

The last “bloodlettings” reference is particularly noteworthy for its hemorrhagic as opposed to an equally plausible phlebotomic internalization figure. It occurs, moreover, in the farfetched analogy that Geertz draws between 1965 Indonesia and the American and Spanish civil wars, all represented as failures of nerve at critical moments in the domestic “modernization” process, as a fall back into simultaneously individual and collective addictions to repeating a culturally scripted “inner catastrophe” and ending in a fatalistic acceptance, a desire simply to get it over with.(324) Geertz sees, in Leibnizian fashion, the positive side to such collapses only in a conscious stifling of the experience in historical memory. From the view of a public system of “thick” symbols it is better that they be “forgotten” than imperfectly remembered; left to resurface by themselves, they stand in the way of what modernity requires. The logical circularity is that genocides are, for Geertz, the moments where the genuinely modernizing decision to contain the memory of such event-objects can be made. They are opportunities when the de-historicization and effectual privatization of genocide memories can occur, “when the truth of what has happened is obscured by convenient stories, and passions are left to flourish in the dark.” This is a modernism that seeks to write off genocides as events that simply “happen” because of cultural scripts that have to be abandoned, modernized. They are acknowledged as having “happened” but are rendered historically unremarkable, write-offs to left-over residual effects of the pre-modern “culture,” existing finally only in personally traumatic memories that need to be pushed below public awareness so that publically, symbolically, and “[a]ccepted for what they were, as terrible as they were, the events of 1965 could free the country from many of the illusions which permitted them to happen . . .” (Ibid)

The ethical implications of this argument need to be appreciated: what counts is not any conscious elimination of and withdrawal of material interest and support from genocidal actions but rather the burial of the latter inside isolated private memory. From this view, how actual experiences of genocides live on in individual memories is

493 irrelevant once the “illusions that permitted” a genocide “to happen” are isolated and written out of modernizing public memory performances. Besides quietly shifting the blame for the “happening” of the genocide to tendentiously identified prior “illusions,” this points to a concealed but finally controlling hegemonikon in the passive voice (“left to flourish”) and in the “holding” of “illusions that permitted.” And it leaves open the possibility of future visitations of genocides whose hegemonic narrators and mobilizers have been theorized out of existence in advance by a self-contained and self-compelled self-destruction model.

VI

Geertz’ conceptualization marks a narrowed, diminished ethical responsibility toward genocides’ victims and a turn away from awkward social science projects that seek to develop recognitions of and indictments against the global linkages of interests and powers that authorize and sustain genocides. He serves here as a kind of convenient figurehead (who writes and reasons this position with an uncommonly effective style, to be sure) for a more general phenomenon, viz., symbolic actionists’ carving out for themselves a narrowly positive ethical niche by claiming to serve the management and “alleviating” of the privately isolated (and thereby doubled) suffering attendant on genocide experiences and the simultaneous necessary exclusions of those experiences from public epistemologies — and all for the sake of a projected final redemption of a genocide-free “culture” in some indefinite future. This is a version of the absurd analytical memory position we noted above in that it argues that genocides are in effect born of the memory of prior genocides and that by burying the memory in private spaces — invited to find relief in symbolically and ritually contained public “memorial” sites — we can perhaps, over time, diminish such “outbreaks.”

What makes Geertz’ narrative modernism both reactionary and unethical from this essay’s perspective is his closure of event boundaries and the presumption that civilizational-historical crimes on a genocidal scale can be isolated as (still from Interpretation of Cultures) a “great domestic violence . . . a vast internal trauma,”(323)

494 “an inner catastrophe. (324)” etc.102 In a 1972 addendum to a 1962 article, written expressly to address a prediction he had made in the latter about an “impending political catastrophe” in Indonesia,103 he casts an air of traditional and localized normalcy about the killings, making them mutual perpetrations, “largely villagers by other villagers” or “largely along primordial lines” or “ the bulk of the killings were Javanese by Javanese, Balinese by Balinese and so on.” (282) By a not entirely incorrect but opaque overlay of neighborhood, regional and “primordial” identity markers he writes out of consideration the primary selection principles actually at work in the killings and encloses them in a narrative domestication of the genocide that runs contrary to facts. It argues against his internalizing “primordialization” of the genocide, for example, when the greatest numbers of both victims and perpetrators were associated with relatively recently imported or revitalized “movements,” a dangerously syncretic and internationalist Communism on the victim side and militant Islamist “modernizers” at all levels of the state and the army making up the greatest number of perpetrators. The fact, moreover, that there were “actors” coming from various outside directions who had “penetrated” both movements with varying effectiveness is written out of this suitable-for-the-public

102 An entity he calls “external parameters” appears only in passing and is written out as too complicated. Cultures, 325n. Writing in the mid-1990s he claims a “global” perspective but descends merely to Cold War-speak when the East Timorese experience with decades-long death squad and worse violence remains, in his hands, a successful political-medical intervention: “an outbreak of local nationalism . . . The Indonesian army . . . invaded to put it down . . . With American, Japanese and Western European support, the storm [i.e., the UN’s opposition to the invasion!] was weathered . . . and by 1980 the country . . . clearly tilted toward the West.” Fact, 94.

103 To gauge the narrowness of the line a hegemonic account has to walk, we can observe how his hints about the predictability of what may yet turn out to have been another engineered genocide find an outlet in his shocked surprise that the numbers would be so high. He adds a disclaimer to the recognition, by “those trying to penetrate the country’s character,” of “the potential for violence” adding that “anyone who announced before the fact [!] that a quarter million or so [!] people were about to be slaughtered . . .would have been regarded, and rightly so,[!] as having a rather warped mind.” Cultures, 323, 323n. 495 history, striving for an effectively repressive symbolic syncreticism of its own. His is a modernist narrative experiment turned reactionary when it enforces a metaphysics of closure around an “Indonesian self” that then enables a calculating and exonerating misrecognition of the criminal planning and collusions inside this organized mass murder.

From Lyotard’s perspective on the postmodern condition, this kind of modernist performance ethically enables the imposition of what he calls “terrorism” by a culturalized science of selection serving its “own” epistemology’s systemic efficiency. This terroristic naming power threatens populations with imminent extermination, “by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him. He is silenced or consents, not because he has been refuted but because his ability to participate has been threatened . . . The decision makers’ arrogance says . . . ‘Adapt your aspirations to our ends — or else.’”104 Lyotard’s critique of such reactionary modernist terrorism is expressly directed at the closures visible in modernist consensus and system paradigms, associated for him with Habermas and Luhmann respectively, but certainly also recognizable in symbolic actionist formulas and in all narratives that force an effectually obliterating discursive exclusion on classes of participants. He perceives, moreover, that part of the fate of being among the excluded is that one’s request for recognition “gains nothing in legitimacy . . . based on the hardship of an unmet need. Rights do not flow from hardship but from the fact that the alleviation of hardship improves the system’s performance.”105 Purportedly ethical discourses about “alleviating suffering” collaborate with enforced suffering by their exclusion of some victims even as they extol the symbolic resources available to other victims; they render

104 Lyotard, Condition, 63-4; idem, “Complexity and the Sublime” in L. Appignanesi, ed., Postmodernism. ICA Documents, London: Free Association 1989, 22. The best historical illustration of this that I know is D. Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984,Chaps. 1,3.

105 Lyotard, Condition, 62-3; he points out that “there are classes of catastrophes.” 61. 496 suffering more efficient in the name of some future systemic redemption made possible by the gains in efficiency from the victimization. It is in the exposure of such circularities in reactionary modernism that Lyotard’s sense of postmodernity makes possible a recognition that sufferings that can not provoke an alleviating response measurable against some kind of absolute scale of performativity (astutely recognized by Lyotard as cynical), are therefore, logically, forced below the public threshold, sent off into oblivion with a privatized choice-of-death option, murder or suicide, and buried with a wave and an echoing of regrets coming from behind the statesmanly tragic mask at the top of the stairs to the presidential 747.106

Lyotard has identified precisely the ethical retrenchment offered by analytical- materialist philosophers to public policy in the form of “thick concepts.” Returning to a specific version of the latter, we find in Bernard Williams’ meditation on the relationship between science and what he calls “‘thick’ ethical concepts” an absolute separation between an analyst observer-self and an analysand observed-other in terms recognizable also in Geertz, Ortner and symbolic actionist approaches generally. Williams: “An insightful observer can indeed come to understand and anticipate the use of the concept without actually sharing the values of the people who use it.” Even though in “mastering concepts of this kind” the observer “can report, anticipate, and even take part in discussions of the use that they make of their concept . . . he is not ultimately identified with the use of this concept: it is not really his.”107 One has to note that for Williams the observer’s “others” are figured “artificially” as “maximally homogeneous and minimally given to general reflections;” they are, in Williams’ narrative experiment, a “hypertraditional society.”108 The sleight-of-hand here is that the social-civilizational

106 The reference here is to Bill Clinton’s memorable apology to the people of Rwanda for UN inaction in the 1994 genocide.

107 B. Williams, “Ethical,” 284-6.

108 Ibid. There is a prefiguration of such current symbolic actionist usages in C.K. Ogden’s and I.A. Richards’ foundational The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, New York: Harcourt, 1923, where we find a distinction drawn between “educated 497 divide thus created between a scientist-observer and a primitive-observed obscures the significant categorical problem associated with the verb “use,” specifically its erasure of the production and reading, i.e. of the working dimensions of symbolic action, under a consumerist acquisition and ownership figure.109 The insurmountable obstacle inside “thick concept” approaches is that the closure claimed for one “proper use” of a symbol by a “proper owner” is not ascertainable, let alone testable and can, therefore, not be an objective of scientific study; nor can it be invoked, after the fact, to exonerate an apparent deployment of symbols for genocidal “uses” with an ethical separation of proper and not proper “users” in any given instance. This is not to say that such narratives about ownership and disowning are not interesting; indeed, they obviously harbor and signal tensions in the double duties, noted above, demanded of hegemonic constructions and provide narrative openings for counter-hegemonic challenges.

Bernard Williams argues for a difference between science and ethics in that there can not be a science of ethics as such since science is alleged to be ultimately guided by how the world “really is” while ethics is always bound to culturally active and differentiated “thick concepts.” Which is not to say that ethics is not guided by what he calls “world experience;” the latter, however, takes place in a culturally enclosed ethical space where both ethical “thick concepts” and everyday experiences mutually reinforce each other in ethical behaviors that are not necessarily consciously guided by ethical concepts. If this, while obviously circular, may even seem fair enough, it is worth remembering that Williams’ various “thick concept”-containing cultural enclosures and their projected final hermeneutical incompatibilities nevertheless have, by his account, to call on a “world experience” whose individuation can not perforce be bounded in this manner; which is to say that in any global conjucture any specifically conjoined mix of actions with thick concepts, with motivating symbols, is not amenable to hermeneutical persons” capable of handling and not being ruled by complex metaphors and “very simple folk with small and concrete vocabularies . . . Hence in part their comparative freedom from confusions, but hence also the naive and magical attitude to words.” 214.

109 Roseberry, Anthropologies, 26-9; Rebel, “Hegemony” 123. 498 or, more important, narrative separations and closures. Nevertheless, Williams advances toward a revised “science” of ethics where the “truth” of ethics does not lie in an observed “convergence” of holding ethical experiences in measurement against an unattainable ethical abstraction but rather in “a different project” of “showing that a certain kind of ethical life was the best for human beings, was most likely to meet their needs.”110 Fearing that such an approach will “underdetermine” the “ethical options,” he posits a role for the social sciences at the level of providing an implicitly comparative analysis, for which he gives no parameters, to determine how any given formation of ethical thick concepts can answer the question “Is this the best kind of social world?”111 Moreover, he perceives little to be gained by observing how different “restraints” on “killing, injury and lying” appear in what he calls throughout “local” ethical symbolic systems; rather, it is “the virtues” that offer “ the most natural [!] and promising field of enquiry for this kind of enquiry.”112 In other words, this ethics has no interest in shared recognitions of transgressions, crimes, extortions, expropriations by force, enslavements, genocidal perpetrations, but rather only in whether locals are living up to “their” standards of virtues and — here the judgmental role of “our” social sciences — in whether those standards live up to what he claims is a “naturalistic or . . . historical conception of human nature . . . one that timelessly [!] demanded a life of a particular kind.” Here history is naturalised (instead of the other way around) and knocked down to performing silly work, to an impossible object recognition: the timeless in time.

Having previously deposed objective ethics with a modernist narrative experiment involving strictly localized ethical “thick concepts,” he now ends by enclosing these latter within a comfortable mother tongue encirclement, a timeless and otherwise untheorized “human nature.” This effectual denial of scientific status to any social sciences concerned with ethics (“a structure very different from that of the objectivity of science”) is premised, however, on a denial of “human nature’s” dependence on and

110 Williams, “Ethical” 291-2.

111 Ibid.

112 Williams, “Ethical” 292-3. 499 participation in a still continuing evolution through time, in an unavoidable historicising of the natural. The best he can offer, with more “plain” mother tongue speech, with his naturalized “humanity,” frozen in memory-less (i.e., timeless) space, is a social scientific “project” to search for “beliefs that would help us find our way around in a social world . . . which would have been shown to be the best social world for human beings.”113 But clearly, while it may be one thing to look, timelessly, for a best possible life without genocides — presuming, by his lights perhaps wrongly, that these are not in a best possible world — it is another to achieve a recognition of how genocides were and are figured to be actionable and livable in their historical conjunctures. An ethical recognition of genocide is not bounded by the local, by the neighbourhoods, rice fields, desert ditches, refugee camps, the territories, where the murders occur. What is required is an ethical social science capable of narrating historical anthropologies of genocidal and other such terrorist formations, as these latter are experienced in global complexes, in their articulations of overlapping, multiple durations in time and memory; and this includes experiences even by those who are not, individually or collectively, directly aware that such “events” are “happening” somewhere (sometimes in their name) and are invisibly, unaccountably, diminishing the ways of life, couched in “thick concepts,” for which the perpetrators, when pushed to negotiate a hegemonic narrative, will say the killings occur.

This brings us around to our opening problematic and the ethical thrust of Bill Roseberry’s critique of certain fashions in research design that are compelled by their reactionary modernist commitments to styling themselves or others as being postmodern. They pursue an analytical materialism whose ethical capacities remain enclosed in an idealized and in practice unlivable dualism between “self” and “others” that is resolved only in an anamnesically perceived higher logos-in-action, in a conception of a timeless humanity, that then opens the door to universalizing narrative closures that in turn permit those who choose this path to claim to have, in the midst of historical crimes, a disengaging and superior ethical fallback position. Their assumed

113 Ibid. 500 task is to observe and judge the performances of others’ ethical thick concepts and to gauge the latter’s capacities for “conceptions and practices that enable us [Quine’s self- contradictory, impossible universal] to live with the ever present threat of chaos.”114 It is revealing to see a historian of Sewell’s caliber thus write “us” off as limited to cowering before the sublime of a perpetually threatening “chaos” when one of the tasks of history is, presumably, to interact with and contribute professional memory-work to a widespread and everyday (i.e., non-professional) historical intelligence variously capable of recognizing dimensions of order, reasons, connections, “causes,” etc. at work inside allegedly chaotic happenings.

Having dismissed Roseberry as a “confused materialist” and praised Geertz’ “brilliant piece of materialist argumentation,” Sewell agrees with the latter that “our neural organization necessitates as well as makes possible the shaping of both our cognitive and emotional lives by systems of symbols.” As we saw above, this Geertzian version of a closed neural system responding to external stimuli coming from cultural systems is an inadequate model of mental formations. Sewell further asserts that the disciplining “control” provided for our “vagrant” emotions by such symbolic systems is not to be thought of as “repressive” but as “channeling emotions into knowable forms: the flamboyant courage of the Plains Indians . . The quietism of the Javanese.”115 Does

114 Sewell, “Systems,” 45.

115 Ibid. 45, 49. One has to wonder about the quality of reading inside these somewhat odd culture and personality affirmations. For example, we learn elsewhere in Sewell that Weber’s “iron cage” refers to capitalism’s telos.(54 n.40) I mention this not to swipe at Sewell but to point to his committing of an interesting erasure. Weber’s “iron cage” figure does not point to capitalism but rather to the disenchantment and loss of an inner “mythic plasticity” implicit in the bureaucratic, “vocational,” scientific-materialist, institutional enclosures required by rationalist instrumentalism, i.e., in precisely the judgmental disenchantment and pragmatization of so-called thick concepts advocated by the symbolic actionist project to which Sewell subscribes. See the dissenting study by L. Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 501 this take us to the “commercial spirit of Jews” or “the rhythmic sense of Africans?” The culturalized, collectivized mind-organism making up the closed spaces of “the autonomous logics of cultural systems” is patently a circularity that may indeed dissolve, for Sewell, that prior reactionary modernist circularity, the mind-body split, but it leaves an open question about what ethics both these successive and not unrelated circularities can authorize. Sewell concludes by citing Geertz’ claim that symbolic systems teach us “how to suffer” in “the human condition,”116 making the circumstances of suffering in effect analytically irrelevant. The cataloguing and manipulation of such symbolic systems (themselves kept in motion by what homuncular agents?) is designed not to understand and possibly avert suffering but to understand the relative efficiency of others’ culturally systemized capacities to endure (or, in a sleight-of-hand move, “alleviate”) suffering. These are the recognizably time-worn formulas by which materialist-determinists take themselves out of the determination; they constitute the classic neo-Stoic attitudes toward “suffering” as outside of the historical process, intrinsic to human “nature” and therefore only more or less “sufferable” according to the capacities of different symbolic systems shading into, no surprise, functionalized religious formations.

Not only does this undifferentiated sense of common suffering downplay or misrecognize the historical-locational and figural complexities at work inside experiences of suffering; also, in time, the sources of a people’s systematized sufferings in their world-locations and articulations find analytical languages about coping with suffering that, in turn, moves “a people’s” perpetually failing resistances to the foreground as primary analytical objects and, indeed, as the sources of suffering! What draws our critical focus to this analytical move is the metonymic displacement- repression that re-figures observed suffering in an alienating “othering” that in effect blames the victims for whom analysts purport, often sincerely, to speak. An example is Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ very important ethnography of mothering and infant deaths in a Brazilian favela, where, in flat contradiction to the contents of the treasure trove of

116 Sewell, “Systems”,45. 502 voices and accounts of experiences she has gathered, she ends by rewriting experienced suffering thus: “The people of the Northwest have suffered a long history of popular uprisings, armed struggles, messianic movements, anarchist fantasies, social banditry and Peasant Leagues . . .” and, moments later, under the influence of Levinas, “ A more ethical way to think about suffering is to envision it as ‘meaningful in me, but useless in the other.’ . . one may never . . . allow [the other’s] suffering to be seen as serving any purpose. Following from this, the only ethical way to view the death [of, e.g., a particular child] is to see her suffering as useless and her death as irretrievably tragic and purposeless.”117 However well-intentioned such a pious stance may appear, it must be seen as a repression, a denial of victims’ narrative presence in a world that imposes thereby a double victimization of, in this case, both mothers and children. Scheper- Hughes’ fieldwork indicates how such sufferings do clearly have “uses” in articulating systems of organized poverty, in systems where women are oppressively tasked with having to live with the daily terror of “small acts” of selecting (decisions about food portions, who gets good water etc.) from among their children those to be allowed, or “helped,” to die, of having to invent, with or without culturalized and often specious “thick concepts,” private formulas to screen out the pain of what appears in this ethnography as “motherly pragmatics.” It is hard to follow this suggested ethics for representing the death and suffering of “others” as “useless” when the ethnographer’s closure of such a specific narrative of systemic terror in families and neighborhoods rests finally on an astonishingly bowdlerized, even bizarrely ingenuous, reading of Medea’s preference for “slaughter[ing] . . . her defenseless children [rather] than

117 N. Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, 505, 530. The logics and figurations of selections- for-death as woman’s work appear to be but are not necessarily “indigenous” cultural formations. They may also be traced through oikos conceptualizations running from Xenophon and his neo-Stoic successors, through early modern absolutist modernization theories and their successors in the later Austrian-Iberian ecumene. H. Rebel, “Reimagining the oikos: Austrian Cameralism in its Social Formation” in J. O’Brien and Wm. Roseberry, eds., Golden Ages. Dark Ages: Imagining the Past in Anthropology and History, Berkeley” University of California Press, 1991. 503 leav[ing] them abandoned and helpless in a hostile world.” 118 On this one can only comment that Medea’s children’s allegedly uncertain future in a mythologically “hostile world” seems a scant reason to prefer to “slaughter” them. We find here, again, the choice of words feigning a recognition of horror even as it erases the organized horrors buried in a characterization of “the world” as merely “hostile.” This is a tendentious and impoverished reading of the several Medea narratives available for contemplation and indeed bears no relationship to any of them.

The intertwining of fashionable materialist-cognitivist models with the post- mortem effects of culture and personality tropes that appears in symbolic actionist approaches signifies a social science ethics that is founded on an existential disconnection between “self” and “other,” “us” and “them,” making it an Orientalist construction of ethics. Inside Scheper-Hughes’ truncating, distorting transposition of the story of the Asian sorceress Medea’s murder of the children she bore for Jason, her overachieving Greek husband, to the Brazilian mothers’ terrorized and forced selections- for-death, there lies a hidden Orientalist thematic repressing an alternative narrative that might illuminate the full complexity of the obviously transcultural formations and modal articulations one finds in her evidence that require particular “others” to suffer and die in historically misrecognized obscurity for reasons of “their own.” Sewell’s celebration of the “quietism of the Javanese” appears, in this light, as the Orientalist residue of Geertz’ ethnography of an allegedly only “internally” scripted genocide. 119

Bill Roseberry’s critique of “oppositional theories, Marx’s included,”120 of models that separate self and other, aimed at the violence implicit in such models, a violence

118 Scheper-Hughes, Death, 406-7. This is followed by an equally bizarre version of the two mothers’ reactions to Solomon’s famous child-partitioning judgment, 408.

119 Notwithstanding Edward Said’s giving Geertz a pass in this regard (Orientalism, New York, Random House: 1979, 326), cf. Gledhill’s recognition of Geertz’ proximity to Orientalist theorizing, Power, 65.

120 Roseberry, Anthropologies, 224. 504 they perpetrate against the qualities of human experience by reducing the complexities not only of social and cultural formations but also of individuals to mutually exclusionary authenticities, to separate histories, to self-contained and circular “meanings.” In his well-known response to Sherry Ortner’s indictment that political economy approaches “situate themselves more on the ship of (capitalist) history than on the shore” of traditional societies’ own purportedly separate histories, he pinpointed a moment where a narrative modernization turns reactionary and “returns us to a grid of anthropological antinomies.”121 Ortner repeats the performance in her more recent work, where the new cultural poles are the tourist hotel and the base camp in Nepal and where, judging by her description of fieldwork and methods, she never participated in the latter to observe what happens there. Much of her story turns on the different “meanings” apparently “constructed” to address life-and-death risks on the mountain by the non-native mountaineering tourists, known since militarist-colonial days as sahibs, and by their native servant-guides, the Sherpa. The actual focus is on the labor-gang organizers among the latter, the sardar, operating under the ideological umbrellas of both idealized and realized protector-patron figures, the zhindaks, and of religious “thick concepts” drawn from a modernized Buddhism represented by a hierarchy of lay and monastic lamas.122 Her treatment of this thematic is an interesting subject for a conclusion to this paper since it allows us to assess an evolved symbolic actionist treatment of a type of dying that involves, despite its individualized and “everyday” occurrences, a selection process grounded in a complex interplay of otherings that require repressed histories to retain their hegemonic force — and it allows a recognition of how a symbolic actionist research program can collaborate with and uphold such narrative repression of fatal conjunctures.

121 Roseberry, Anthropologies, 52-3

122 S. Ortner, “Thick Resistance: Death and the Cultural Construction of Agency in Himalayan Mountaineering”, Representations, 59(1997) and idem, Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. 505 Reading Ortner is exhausting as one is constantly astonished at the endless piling up of untheorized assumptions, non-sequiturs, self-protective hedgings, pseudo- oppositions, unwarranted discountings of evidence, broad generalizations from superficially read evidence fragments, misrepresentations and reductive simplifications of others’ positions, in sum, at her text’s unreadability. Finding something to object to at every turn and not having the space or the energy to deal with it all, I will try to restrict myself to her version of the Orientalism problematic and how that determines her sense of what she, to add her own neologism to the canons of “thickness,” calls “thick resistance.”

Building on Geertz’ juxtaposition between analyses of meaning and of power — itself an impossible enclosure, a Russellian paradox, since the first is necessarily ingredient to the second — she offers to incorporate into that paradigm a circular recognition of Foucault’s and Said’s “shifts in cultural theorizing toward the power of power.” (!) Her particular concern is with Said’s Orientalism, which she adapts to her use but only with the understanding that while “Said’s discussion of Orientalism is of course also ‘cultural’ . . . it has only one ‘meaning,’ one underlying intentionality: the West’s ‘will to power’ over the East.”123 This underestimates and sells short Said’s rather more complicated phenomenology. The result is that she misses some discussions, like the matter of Islamic Orientalism,124 that might have helped her to think about her largely undertheorized Buddhist Orientalism problematic and to gain some kind of recognition of her own reproductions of the Orientalist paradigm. She returns throughout to a preferred “conception of culture and meaning in the Geertzian sense” which points her toward “caring” for Orientalized others with a somewhat Romantic (i.e., doomed-in-advance) and on its face self-enclosing project by which “if one imagines, however naively, that there is a possibility of gaining access to them despite the blinders of one’s own culture, then one must still make the Geertzian move into

123 Ortner, “Thick,” 137-8, 158.

124 Said, Orientalism, 246-248, 260-1; cf., in a related vein, B. Victoria, Zen at War, New York: Weatherhill, 1997. 506 ‘culture’ and meaning.”125 The problem with that “gaining access to them” is manifestly that it is one-sided and invasive in its posture. She reports on visits to but not on living with people. There is no thought for the latter getting past their blinders with regard to the analyst nor is there any sense of dialogue, of an exchange of views, in any of her writing. She reads accounts, observes, interrogates, and then selects out those aspects that threaten to contradict the story she wants to tell about a “successful” co-evolution of two interactive but closed culture systems. The result is an optimistic construction of Orientalism that leaves alterity intact and restricts itself to judgments about the degree to which the others’ use of “thick concepts” is ethically effective and optimal.

The Sherpa appear in her historical narrative as an “ethnic group who happened to be good at high-altitude portering”126 and who, around the turn of the twentieth century, re-figured themselves in this manner in order to compete successfully against other ethnic groups for higher paying expeditionary guide and domestic service work. Several intertwining economic, social and cultural conjunctures releasing dynamics lasting into the present were in play in this moment of “self-fashioning.” In a trans- culturally and historically recognizable move, the Sherpa found release from the economic restrictions of their egalitarian family and inheritance ethic by finding and indeed organizing servant work on the mountain for necessarily dispossessed or disadvantaged sons; moreover, the family and community labor organizers for the expedition economy, the emergent group of sardar, allied themselves with a simultaneously self-reforming and expanding monastic Buddhism whose ethical “thick concepts” provided a second dimension, in addition to exclusively high-altitude portering, that distinguished and elevated the status of the Sherpa from that of the other local and regional ethnic-labor identities competing for expedition work.

125 Ortner, “Thick,” 158

126 This figure of being somehow “good at” particular forms of dangerous work is a standard Orientalist trope. An interesting study, by way of comparison is B. Muratorio, The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso: Culture and History in the Upper Amazon, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 1991. 507 On the other side of the divide Ortner portrays the increasingly diverse English, German, Japanese and other developed-world employers, the sahibs, whose expeditions and, later, adventure-tourism fuel the twentieth century restructurings of the Sherpa economy. Ortner figures them as driven by an anti-modernist desire to recover, in an earlier masculine-agonistic and Romantic phase of mountaineering and in a post-1960s “counter-cultural” phase of gender-liberating, consumerist bourgeois adventuring, that projected pre-modern spiritualism and deeper authenticity perceived to be lacking in developed modernism. The Sherpa, often subject, especially in the early period, to debasing and even violent treatments (notably at the hands of Germans and Austrians) deemed then to be the natural due of servants, learned, in her view, to stay “cheerful” and thereby “to control” their employers. They gained stature and a measure of greater self-determination by diligently catering not only to the sahibs’ portering, camp construction, maintenance, service and climbing needs but also to their historically evolving need to be in touch with a presumed lost wholeness of self that they had come to Nepal to recover. It is in this regard that she claims the Sherpa acquired the controlling “agency” that managed to turn the sahibs’ various Orientalisms into a counter-cultural instrument actually serving both parties in the still asymmetrical dyad: “This view of power . . . gives a great deal of agency to the nominally unpowerful; the name of the game is neither bowing before power nor ‘resisting’ it, but figuring out how to both acknowledge its force and shape it to one’s own purposes.”127 The implicit rhetorical question here concerns how they can be “unpowerful” (?!) when there are symbolic acts that can “give” them “agency” (itself a circularity) and thereby render their condition of weakness only “nominal.” Would that it were so easy. How can one not recognize the violence and denial in that “nominal?” Not only does this have an air of infantile projection about it, and perhaps tells us more than we want to know about the enthnographer’s approach to the powerful, but it also stops short of recognizing that this kind of catering to power, this projection of “agency” — an ability to act on one’s own behalf? or the power to speak for the remaining”unpowerful” others? — within an exclusionary power-dyad can only mobilize narratives of cultural stimulus systems that

127 Ortner, “Thick,” 147 508 need to stifle, as we will see in a moment, possible sources of counter-hegemonic narrative dissolutions of the violences with which such power-aspirant “agency” narratives collaborate.

In her no doubt “true” narrative, some few Sherpa, capable of insinuating religious and ritual elements, their “thick concept” performances and prescriptions, into the mountaineers’ timetables and activities, gained “agency” by becoming the counter- culture that the mountaineers were seeking. Her narrative about the changing character of the relationship between the sahibs and “the Sherpa” however remains unstable and depends on a pervasive misrepresentation in that it does not speak for the Sherpa experience as a whole but is, on closer examination, a story about the sardar’s emergence and self-invention in a hegemonic alliance with both the sahibs and the monks. Moreover, part of her problem is in perceiving what the sardar do as “resistance” when it is actually only a multi-leveled negotiation about work, remuneration and labor conditions in an at least four-dimensional labor market involving the sahibs, the sardar, the other Sherpa porters and servants the sardar have organized to guarantee the latter’s income and status superiority to, fourth, the other ethnicities and laborers that do work below the presumed dignity of the Sherpa.

Ortner’s reducing of these multi-layered negotiations to a “thick resistance” formula participates, after the fact, in what her own evidence reveals to be a hegemonic restructuring. Not only here but in other areas of the Sherpa experience — in her portrayal, for example, of inheritance or of the role of zhindak patronage in “a culturally egalitarian world”128 — she misrepresents as an acquisition of Sherpa “agency” what is in fact (and, as noted above, in terms of Roseberry’s recognition) a rejuvenated hegemonic formation’s representations of a system of inequality as one of equality. Having said that, it is important not to diminish the sardar achievement, such as it is, but rather to object against an ethical misrecognition of what is a double hegemonic formation that both creates a limited recognition of the sardar — but not of the Sherpa as a whole, as Ortner’s culturalized elisions imply throughout — as equals on the

128 Ortner, Everest, 84. 509 mountain and, at the same time, empowers the sardar in their own hegemonic narratives regulating the Sherpa’s internal and external relations. Ortner’s “agency” language covers over the double duty of such hegemonic discursive arrangements whereby the sardar, re-figured, at least on the mountain, as the “friends” of the sahibs, and even, occasionally, coming to set the latter’s agonistic standard as far as the actual climbing is concerned, are thereby empowered to “control” not the sahibs (as Ortner claims) but “themselves,” i.e., actually the “other” Sherpa, the dispossessed, who are thus forced into the subaltern and high-risk roles of menials both on and off the mountain.

Lurking in the background but playing no role in her analysis is the recognition that the place of “thick concepts” is not only in the negotiating points they furnish for sahib/sardar dealings but in sustaining the asymmetrical relations both within Sherpa society as well as between Sherpa and “lower” ethnic others, both of whose presence, in Ortner’s version of the expedition enterprise, is that of mute instruments. These latter, in every sense subaltern groups are not only not “given agency” by “thick concepts” or by the ethnographer but the precise circumstances of their experiences and managements of risk, suffering and death are actively suppressed in this finally cheerful narrative about how the sahibs and the sardar manage those experiences to their mutual benefit.

One significant moment where this becomes clear is her narrative about Ang Phu, a popular young climbing Sherpa, whose expedition-death on Everest triggered, by Ortner’s account,129 many days of “weeping and anger” in his home village. Rather than recording what was said, however, she suppresses the stories about this death, stories that clearly fueled the emotions of grief and rage, behind a pretext that they were “speculation . . . information (and misinformation).” Hers is, to my mind, an

129 Ortner, “Thick.” 155-57; Everest, 140-42; the two accounts are virtually identical but the first expressly refers to the Geertzian paradigm (as “a rich and complex conception of culture,” 157, which it obviously is not) and it is the one I use here for the most part. 510 ethnographic collaboration with a suspect silencing already present in this fieldwork moment as she neglects, on a pretext that “the truth” was not knowable, to explore the possible sources, however truthful or not, of the anger. In symbolic actionism, anger is not a permitted emotion, only an indicator of emotions to be managed. Hers is a truncated, stifling narrative that suppresses the narrative perceptions of the circumstances of this historical death, perceptions that caused, some days later, a cousin of Ang Phu to storm into the Everest Base Camp to act out his rage, “scream[ing] that he was going to kill the sahbs,” but ending instead with a suicidal gesture, a defeated self- destruction. This later act of suicidal rage aimed at the sahibs signifies for Ortner not a marker for a suppressed narrative but a mere you-can’t-please-everyone “coda” to an event she witnessed on the day after the death, when she happened to be having lunch with the local head lama, the Rimpoche, and the “quite hysterical” father of Ang Phu and some of his family, including the angry cousin, visited the monastery to beg the Rimpoche for a blessing. Ortner records her shock (lasting apparently for several years) at the Rimpoche’s apparent violation of an ethics of compassion in his cool reception of the father and his admonition to the latter, a married lay lama, to calm himself and demonstrate the self-discipline requisite for his position and the control of his family’s emotions. She happily recovers, remembering another local’s approving “that’s the way lamas are,” and concludes that since “ we are in another corner of classic Geertz territory” we have to pay attention to“what is being said” (her emphasis) and to why this was “for most of the Sherpas present, a ‘good’ and productive encounter?”130 It appears, however, from her field records that on the Sherpa side she only recorded the emotional dimensions of the protestations so that we can not know now what was actually said, nor what those who did not think it was a “good encounter” said, nor, most important, what could not be allowed to be said; i.e., whether what was possible of being said was being said. We can only speculate with her about what was “being” said.

Her finally positive assessment of what had happened — summed up in her formula that “death happens” — is one whose most important consequence appears to

130 “Thick” 156. 511 have been a restoration of her confidence in “high Buddhism’s” and, by extension, in the lama’s ethical authority. The latter’s sound modeling of “the correct organization of and display of feelings,” of a tough love ethic of being cruel to be kind, is what Ortner recast as the lama’s “empowering” (her emphasis) of the family,“particularly the father” by means of the thick concepts available in the latter’s religious training,131 whose net result is the stifling of narratives about a death that clearly threatened to undermine the daily maintenance, the acceptance in private experiences of the always fragile hegemonic construction. The duplexity of her own Orientalism requires, on one hand, a more or less convincing demonstration that the mountaineers’ portrayals of the Sherpa were unwarranted Orientalist projections contradicted by actual behaviors so that she can settle, on the other hand, on a modernized Orientalism, a Buddhist Orientalism, to be exact, that leaves intact essentialized separations of “us” from “them.” This move reduces the emotional response perceived as “natural” in moments of death simply to grieving, to a need to “smooth out feelings,” when in fact the death in question produced other feelings as well, feelings that were not given a voice in her narrative. By her own evidence surrounding the occasion of a hegemonically stifled death- experience (and indeed, by Geertz’ evidence surrounding a similarly stifled genocide experience) this new Orientalism remains as narratively impossible and reactionary modernist as its prior forms.

Symbolic actionist social science provides a good example of Bernard Williams’ understanding of an analytical-ethical social science project. It offers refuge in an approving ascription of sufficient ethical meaning in the alleviation of suffering by which, in Ortner’s case for example, the lamas’ thick concepts of moral self- disciplining empower the leading Sherpa to absorb and force others to absorb in private — recalling Geertz’ figure of passions left to flourish in the dark — the deaths in their families and communities arising out of the operations of the localized hegemonic bloc of sahib consumers interacting with alliances of sardar and lamas. We can recognize here a reactionary modernism, a narrative innovation installing, in this case, ethical closures

131 Ibid. 512 and divestitures capable of pushing the deaths of tens, thousands, by implication millions, of people below history and into spaces of alleged meaninglessness, uselessness, when it is in fact clear that these deaths have uses in the modal dis- and re- articulations that demand selections for dispossession and forms of organized destruction in their construction and maintenance of hegemonic blocs that, in all cases, transcend the purely local.

There are numerous misrecognitions inside such effectually and persistently repressive academic collaborations with violence and human destruction. Geertz’ theater state, Ortner’s Sherpa, Scheper-Hughes’ mothering studies are only some examples of apparently sympathetic “otherings” where stifled counter-narratives appear in the evidence but not in the analysis.132 The artificiality of the “othering” in Ortner’s work surfaces when we consider that the “disciplining” for “letting go” of those who died that she finds so comforting has a history of “disciplining” tropes shared, across cultural divides, among the sahibs, sardar and lamas who are the hegemonic partners. The neo- stoic agonism of the sahibs has European, indeed, neo-classical historical roots that finds a counterpart in the similar disciplining “empowerment” of the lamas and sardar. All of the mutual “others” joined in this hegemonic triad have histories of social formations where egalitarian and caring family values form a core of ethical thick concepts that yet require an overriding of that egalitarianism, both in practice and for “success,” with perforce unspeakable deaths. For all three parties this requires in turn a substitution-process by such supplementarities as laboring for the sahibs, inserting all- but-invisible small acts of dire selections into everyday practices whose unequal distribution of risks of danger and even death need to be suppressed, indeed are suppressed, in symbolic forms that simultaneously enable the hegemonic alliance to function smoothly while displacing downward and out of sight the human costs of that alliance, writing them out of the narratives of that functioning. The Geertzian symbolist

132 Even work in historical anthropology that is, by my reckoning, far superior to any of these studies, e.g., M. Bloch’s From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, offers fertile ground for such criticism. 513 rebel/roseberry 514

turn to reducing “meaning” to publicly available thick concepts provides in the end thin narratives that compartmentalize “actors” and reduce their actions to single role dyads, to singular and “deeply,” even biologically, determined(!) public submissions to localized power, when they are, in all cases, nodal locations in a transcultural role complex. It is the kind of reactionary modernism we can identify, in part with Lyotard, as a collaboration with the management of performativity-eroding, debilitating mourning, as the stifling of narrative endangerments to the hegemons’ ability to talk to each other at moments when suspicious deaths “happen.” Bill Roseberry’s lasting contribution is in theorizing an ethical analytical strategy of counter-hegemonic narrative to expose and invalidate the self-dissociating “scientific” constructions that collaborate in the discursive integrations of allegedly necessary and even criminally engineered deaths into a culturalized normalcy of death – “death happens” – whereby “we” all have to die eventually and therefore how people die becomes merely a pragmatic concern of no social-scientific interest.

514