anthropological farce

In Anthropology and Farce (also to be found at this site under Encounter Essays) readers may see the kind of things solemnly euphemized in today's anthropology departments—also a scene from a departmental seminar room with the discipline at the end of its tether.

Face-Lifting the Stone Age argues that romantic primitivism is the faith of preference for today's post-religious middle classes— disenchanted, intellectually adrift, and searching for what they call 'spirituality'.

In Amazing Dahomey we glimpse one of the strangest examples of academic fantasizing about cultures far away and long ago—Karl Polanyi's highly imaginative vision of 18^th century Dahomey. To Polanyi, the bureaucratic arrangements of this bloodstained West African kingdom, where human sacrifice was still found in the 19^th century, made it seem like a well-planned welfare state.

The Venice Prize shows the law of unintended effects in action. A film wins an overseas award, a screening is arranged, but then politics takes over. The result is a veto on the public exhibition of all such documentary records of Aboriginal religious life.

"Anthropology and Farce", Encounter, October 1986

"Face-Lifting the Stone Age: the Middle Classes and The Culture Cult", Quadrant, October 2000.