Mende Nazer

The movie I am Slave is as good as the book, from scenes of wild destruction as Arab horsemen seize 12-year-old Mende Nazer from her home in the Nuba Mountains, to the slave market in Khartoum, to her days of captivity in London. The story of a plucky young woman breaking away from years of Sudanese servitude to recreate herself as a free UK citizen is inspiring: we wish her well. It also provides a dramatic glimpse of one of the stranger fruits of British multiculturalism — a slave-trade that has brought hundreds of captive African youngsters into the land of William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mende_Nazer)

This historic development is very odd. In fact it is so odd that it deserves the attention of someone who has thought long and hard about slavery, a person of broad culture and widely read, and ideally both of African background and a moral philosopher too. With such requirements it might seem hard to imagine anyone likely to qualify — hard even to know where to look. Yet there’s a man in the USA who exactly fills the bill: Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah. Born in London in 1954 before growing up in Ghana, Professor Appiah is a well-known Cambridge-educated figure who has in the past “published widely in African and African-American literary and cultural studies,” but is now, we are told, mainly concerned with “the philosophical foundations of liberalism” and “the connection between theory and practice in moral life.”

The Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Appiah is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Advisory Board of the United Nations Democracy Fund, is currently Chair of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies, and even a cursory look at his long list of achievements reveals a serious mover and shaker in the U.S. liberal establishment today.  (http://appiah.net/biography/)

Slavery in theory and practice

Originally from Ghana, now focused on “the connection between theory and practice in moral life”, could anyone be more suitable for bridging the gap between surreptitiously smuggled African slave-children and higher academic thought? If anyone can explain to the Mende Nazers of the world what it is that happened to them so violently and painfully in Africa, and why it is still happening to African children today, surely Kwame A. Appiah is the man. Though in the 2007 book Buying Freedom one soon discovers that the theory and practice of liberating slaves is no simple matter. Professor Appiah co-authored the Introduction, and his own essay toward the end — “What’s Wrong with Slavery?” — is one of a dozen contributions mainly concerned with the moral and economic perplexities of redeeming slaves by paying cash to slave-traders.

Those like Baroness Cox, in the UK, who forthrightly accept the practice, are opposed by others who claim that paying cash drives up the price of slaves, and increases slave-raiding. Paying cash should have that effect in theory, but whether it really does no-one is sure. Buying Freedom is a book with economic articles about the mathematics of “efficient competitive equilibrium,” on the one hand, and contributions from moral philosophers using words like “deontology” and “consequentialism” on the other. One might hope that despite the fancy vocabulary there’s something here to help Africa’s slaves. But that is uncertain. Deontologically speaking, it seems we are duty bound to buy a slave’s freedom if we can; though some argue that this “commodifies” the human subject, while others point to a whole cascade of undesirable unintended effects. A prudent man might just leave his hands in his pockets and keep walking.

As for Appiah’s own contribution, with its provocative title, we learn that as a boy in Ghana he was at first told very little about the importance of slave trading to the traditional Asante (Ashanti) economy. Only later did he learn that “the suppression of the slave trade began the period of Asante imperial decline, which was to end with final conquest by the British at the start of the twentieth century.” What he calls “the central moral questions” about liberating slaves are the author’s main concern, and he agrees that freedom comes first. But according to Appiah “freedom is not enough”. After the act of liberation we also have a duty to guarantee every freed slave respect, self-esteem, and dignity. While these are all good things, they seem to reflect the idealistic world of academic philosophy rather than the needs of actual slaves themselves. You don’t read much of Mende Nazer’s story without realizing that her own priority was liberty — it’s right there in the title of the successful 2010 stage play about her life: “Slave: A Question of Freedom.”

*    *    *

After this Appiah goes off on a long divagation about the relative status of different kinds of Asante slaves. It seems there were five degrees of enslavement in the Asante Empire, hierarchy being the leading feature of a social milieu where minute grades of status make the Russian nomenklatura seem half-hearted. It’s hard to know exactly what Appiah makes of this fact. Does he admire the overall complexity of the social system as if complexity were good in itself? Or regard an elaborate bureaucracy as something prestigious? Not all students of government feel this way. The world of the old-time Asante he describes is in fact a classical system of aristocratic rank and authority where everyone has a place and everyone is expected to keep it — a quasi-medieval system where what we might call “respect on demand” is vigorously enforced.

Appiah himself emphasizes that if you were lucky enough to be a Grade One Slave you couldn’t be sold, which is good. Then he describes another degree in which the slave was really a kind of pawn — “but then a pawn was not strictly a possession either”, going on to claim that the relationship between slave and slave owner, though unequal, was better seen as “reciprocal” and that the slave had clear rights against his master. Only at the end of what reads like the usual anthropological apologia do we descend to the inglorious level of the Grade Four and Grade Five Slaves, war captives and criminals whose fate was to be used for human sacrifice — though they might have to wait some weeks cooling their heels “until such time as it was deemed religiously auspicious to kill them.”

Human sacrifice

Latinate English is always useful for neutralising disagreeable facts, or veiling ugly realities, and the phrase “religiously auspicious” is a good example of this. In “What’s Wrong With Slavery?” Professor Appiah smoothly invites us to contemplate a world where sacrificial slaves uncomplainingly accept their fate as little more than a social convention. The scene portrayed is calm, formal, orderly, and safely ritualised. With a little imagination you might even be able to hear the victim imploring the executioner, “if His Majesty deems it religiously auspicious please take my head off now — delay is unnecessary.” Yet visitors to the region in days gone by (days as recent as the year 1900 in Appiah’s Ghana) suggest it wasn’t quite like that in the violent kingdoms of old West Africa, where capital punishment was a casual event and severed heads were part of the everyday scene.

In the nearby kingdom of Dahomey, in 1772, Robert Norris found the viceroy passing sentence on a woman who had accidentally started a fire in the market. “I requested that her life might be spared”, wrote Norris, and offered to purchase her as a slave. But the king had firmly made up his mind. Her head was to be “cut off and fixed upon a stake.” The victim’s small daughter ran up to her at this point, unaware of her mother’s situation, causing a brief diversion before the distressed woman was bludgeoned to death.

Also unmentioned by Professor Appiah are the disagreeable preliminaries Thomas Bowdich described. Bowdich was in the Asante kingdom for five months in 1817 and is usually regarded as a reliable, accurate, and racially unbiased observer. He was favourably impressed by much that he saw — the majestic deportment of the Asante king, the color and magnificence of ceremonial life, the elegance of the women, and a style of dancing where “the man encircles the woman with a piece of silk…supports her round the waist, receives her elbows in the palms of his hands,” the two then performing “a variety of figures approximating, with the time and movement, very close to the waltz.”

Less attractive were the sacrifices immediately following. “The drums announced the sacrifice of the victims… The executioners wrangled and struggled for the office: the nearest executioner snatched the sword from the others, the right hand of the victim was then lopped off, he was thrown down, and his head was sawed rather than cut off.” Bowdich writes of a typical victim en route to execution that “His hands were pinioned behind him, a knife was passed through his cheeks, to which his lips were noosed like the figure of 8; one ear was cut off and carried before him, the other hung to his head by a small bit of skin; there were several gashes in his back, and a knife thrust under each shoulder blade; he was led with a cord passed through his nose…the feeling this horrid barbarity excited must be imagined.”

Appiah’s quasi-ethnographic depiction of traditional Asante slavery, with sacrifices culturally authorised and occurring only when “religiously auspicious,” shows, some might say, a proper scholarly detachment. And perhaps it does. But it also shows an unreal legalism where forms are mistaken for facts. When he tells us that reciprocity prevailed and that the luckier slaves even had “rights” against their owners, you would never guess that he is talking about a preliterate society without books, or writing, or written laws, or constitutional guarantees; a world with no independent judiciary, and no rational adversarial procedures for obtaining and testing evidence (though plunging the accused’s hand into boiling oil was thought a useful test); a world — if truth be told — perpetually subject to the whims and passions of powerful chiefs who ruled as much by terror as by consent. In the benign environment of Princeton it may seem plausible that the formal rights of West African slaves against their owners might actually have been enforceable. But you wouldn’t want to push your luck. My guess is that an Asante slave who stood on his rights would not be standing long.

“Moral revolutions” and slavery

According to the title of a recent book by the amiable Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal we live in The Age of Empathy, something he attributes to our warmly social hominid instincts. Also just published is a book by Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, arguing that the modern era has been one of moral progress accompanied by a steady decline in violence. It seems that what Norbert Elias called “the civilizing process” is nowadays on many minds, and Kwame A. Appiah’s 2010 book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, might be seen as broadly in the same vein. Taking an idiosyncratic view of moral and social progress, he sees national and social honor playing a key role in the outlawing of the duel, in the abandonment of Chinese foot-binding, in the abolition of slavery, and in the ongoing struggle by enlightened men and women in Islamic lands against the horror of “honor killings”. All these changes are what he calls “moral revolutions.”

Here we are only concerned with the slavery issue and Appiah’s treatment in Chapter Three, “Suppressing Atlantic Slavery” — a title that reveals a lot. Bear in mind that we’re dealing here with a persistent African problem, wondering how a prominent American liberal trying to bring theory and practice together might have something useful to tell a woman like Mende Nazer about how and why she was enslaved in the early 1990s. The judiciously inserted “Atlantic” however makes it clear that the endemic African slavery that led to her ordeal in Khartoum, and then saw her trafficked to England, is not on the author’s agenda. Regarding slavery his eyes are firmly on the past.

Nor does this moral philosopher feel obliged to comment on the inexplicably violent and cruel attitude to life and limb still found in many parts of the continent, something as grossly visible in the atrocities of the Lord’s Resistance Army as in the sickening events shown in the 2008 French docudrama Johnny Mad Dog. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/oct/22/johnny-mad-dog-review) Then when he defines slavery as “the subordination of one race by another”, entailing “the systematic subjection of black people to dishonour”, a self-serving assumption is exposed. It appears that the centuries-old enslavement of black people by black people, among the very West African societies he grew up in and presumably knows best — the same West African societies that started the “Atlantic” slave trade on its hideous course back in the 15^th century — will not be discussed.

On not being dissed

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen is a curious book, hard to make sense of unless one radically changes the title. Appiah says he found the work of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend “fascinating” and that’s where he got the word revolution from. Lots of people have been fascinated by the word revolution — many still are — but it is not always appropriate, and is in this case downright misleading. The end of dueling, the end of foot-binding in China, the abolition of slavery, came from the incremental development of moral sentiments and legal reforms, as indeed is perfectly obvious from what Appiah writes about them himself. In fact the word revolution adds nothing but a false glamor to his argument. As for what we now see in Islamic lands regarding “honor killings”, the agonizingly slow process by which large male populations between Damascus and Kabul are discouraged from raping and murdering young women is so far from being “revolutionary” that one wonders how any thoughtful man could use the term.

But it is the word “honor” that is most confusing here. Historically it often denoted noble sentiments rather than ignoble, acts and feelings toward the courageous end of the semantic spectrum. But right from the first it is clear that this is a book more about fear than about courage, more about chronic status anxiety than about positive and helpful beliefs, and that a better title might be Face-Saving: an Aspect of Moral Conduct — or more to the psychological point, The Importance of Not Being Dissed.

In a definitive statement on page 175 he writes, “Here, then, is the picture: Having honor means being entitled to respect. As a result, if you want to know whether a society has a concern with honor, look first to see whether people there think anyone has a right to be treated with respect.” Surely most cultures treat most of their law-abiding members most of the time with respect. But indiscriminate respect is withheld because the distinction between good and bad behavior is the foundation of any social order at all. Respect is accorded when deserved; esteem and dignity are won when socially acknowledged. That is how Mende Nazer’s Nuba in the Sudan order their lives, as do hundreds of tribal peoples. That is also how modern civil society allows free individuals to autonomously win distinction — autonomy, by the way, being a major theme in much of Appiah’s writing. But what he is on about here is something else, a kind of ethical overreach to be enforced by a benevolent state. In the utopia he envisages, respect, dignity, and esteem are to be incorporated into a set of legal entitlements defined as political rights.

The contrast between the academic view and the ex-slave’s view is illuminating. While Appiah and others with status grievances appear to require state intervention (for unless respect on demand is made mandatory how exactly is it to be achieved?) you can’t see this keeping Mende Nazer awake at night. A figure of great resource and unmistakable distinction, she needs nobody else to claim respect or dignity on her behalf. Appiah has been anxious to let us know his connections with the Kumasi upper crust of high chiefs and grandly titled kings. It seems to be this aristocracy he feels most comfortable with. I can’t help wondering if he might have obtained a more realistic view of the ordinary human lot by spending some time, like Mende Nazer, as a slave.

“Morality is not enough”

The author of The Honor Code has written novels, and one way of trying to make sense of his book is to regard it as a highly digressive intellectual roman à thèse. The thesis is that “honor” is just as important in moral conduct as firm convictions about right and wrong, and should be preferred to both Christian commandments and Kantian imperatives. Appiah notes on page 181 that Kant himself said that honor “is not worthy of the highest respect, even where it happens to coincide with the common interest and with duty.” Appiah disagrees, but Kant is surely right. The reason being that honor is fundamentally atavistic, a part of our competitive animal nature shared with rutting stags and bellowing elephant seals. For that unhappy reason we find that right across the range of zoological behavior it is inseparably associated with bloodshed and aggression. A psychological aspect of defensive pride, it is often found with unmanageable levels of amour propre, and that’s why it erupts in violence nearly everywhere. In human affairs honor belongs in the touchy, unstable, and tumultuous world of the “dissed”, as they resentfully look for signs of not receiving the respect that is their due.

We may agree that honor is a moving force that prompts men to act, and that can be harnessed to moral goals. But it is entirely relativistic, and what it honors is sometimes very ugly indeed. The honor of a camorra boss in Naples may lead him to massacre an innocent family; the honor of an Islamic father may lead him to kill his own daughter; the honor of the Crips may require them to slaughter a bunch of rival Bloods at the smallest sign they’ve been “dissed”. From which the sensible conclusion is surely that honor is largely indifferent to moral conduct per se — other perhaps than the deeply ambiguous virtue of “solidarity” shared by tribes, sects, cricket teams, medieval nobility, and American street gangs. Indeed, one is bound to point out to Professor Appiah, in Princeton, that the most conspicuous sociological example close at hand is in Los Angeles, where honor and a fierce determination not to be dissed leaves the streets in some areas daily stained with gore. If you want to see the living social universe of honor, where “morality is not enough” and where the passion for face-saving goes perpetually unassuaged, the territory of the Bloods and the Crips is where to look.

Not that Appiah is unaware of the conflict between a safe social morality and his theory. Far from it. Much of The Honor Code can be read as a perverse intellectual struggle between two schemes of moral guidance that he well knows are often opposed. Item: “Honor and morality are separate systems: they can be aligned… but they can easily pull in opposite directions”… Item: “Both recognition respect and esteem can be distributed by honor codes without any regard for morality…” Item: in Pakistan we are bound to “confront one of the dark sides of honor”. And so on. But although on one page he can be found freely admitting the paradoxes within his thesis he invariably manages to ignore them on the next. An entire chapter on Islamic “honor killings” is presented, with gratuitously long novelistic sections about rape, violence, murder, and “murderous families”, all in the name of honor, without it seeming to be seriously understood, amidst all the confusion, that the implication of the very usage itself — “honor killings” — represents not merely “the dark side” of the phenomenon, it tends to make an oxymoronic absurdity of the general argument.

How did Appiah’s moral revolutions really happen?

The phrasing of Appiah’s title — The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen — implies universality. Honor is presented as a psychological constant in human affairs, and it follows from this that its unvarying action must also produce, universally, “moral revolutions” everywhere. Why doesn’t he pursue the implications of this view? Surely it is demeaning to the Rest (some might even say racist) to suggest that a universal process so necessary to the moral improvement of mankind failed to occur outside the West? Shouldn’t we also look be looking for it in Teheran, in Tokyo, in Ouadougou? In Moscow or Beijing? In Khartoum as well as the author’s Ghanaian home-town of Kumasi?

Yet his vaunted moral revolutions never began in any such places. And the reason is blindingly obvious to even a casual reader of the book. Despite colorful examples culled from a wide range of historical and literary sources, far and away the most powerful impulse driving the moral and legal reforms he discusses has come from Western Europe, sometimes embodied in the historic teachings of the Catholic Church, sometimes prompted by the efforts of Christian missions in foreign lands, and invariably driven today by the challenging cultural example of the humanitarian tradition in Western Civilization as a whole. In this humane tradition honor killings are not acceptable. Although it seems he would rather die than admit that the West was ahead of the Rest, or give credit where credit is exclusively due, Appiah’s own pages present all the evidence we need.

The duel, he says, was preceded by something called “judicial combat”, a contest in which “gentlemen of the rank of squire and above could settle legal disputes by passage of arms.” The Church opposed this as early as the ninth century, in the person of Pope Nicholas I, and in 1563 the Council of Trent denounced “the detestable custom of duelling…” The author doesn’t push his argument about national or social honor being the real factor that brought the duel to an end (his last pages on the subject contain airy literary references to Disraeli, Yeats, and Evelyn Waugh). But surely an obvious question must be asked: isn’t it more likely that the sense of honor that so impresses this moral philosopher, and which is found so widely among the touchy and the dissed, has in fact served to perpetuate duelling — just as it perpetuates the grim world of homicidal affray among the Bloods and Crips today?

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What about foot-binding? In deference to Chinese ethnic susceptibilities the author tries to make the most of whatever evidence exists of a native revolt against the practice. Because he declines to state outright that Western influence was the primary source of resistance to foot-binding, Appiah feels bound to try and find an explanation that flatters the moral insight and revolutionary potential of the Chinese people themselves. He points to the social role of an aroused late-19^th-century urban literati, and it is suggested that a 1828 novel by Li Ruzhen, Flowers in the Mirror, amounts to an early critique of foot-binding by a member of this class. Yet on the next page Appiah all-too-typically reverses direction, admitting that “despite these early critics, the organized resistance begins only after the intrusions of the missionaries.”

Christian schools for girls began to be opened in the 1860s in many parts of the country. In Hangzhou, in the Yangtze River delta, the Church Mission opened a school for girls in 1867, which required “from the first,” as Mrs Archibald Little wrote, “that the feet of the girls should be unbound, and that they should not be compelled to marry against their own consent…” Similarly, when the Methodists opened a girl’s school in Beijing, they required all the girls to have their feet unbound.

Comment on the so-called moral revolution that abolished the slave trade is surely superfluous. The evangelical convictions of Wilberforce were fundamental, as were the activities of numerous other church groups, from the Quakers to Wesley’s Methodists to the Clapham Sect that devotedly fought to abolish the slave trade after 1750. But enough: from his own documentation it is amply clear that Appiah’s long-winded examination of honor as a source of his supposed “moral revolutions” is superfluous, distracting, and a largely academic exercise. The more pages one turns the more obvious it becomes that whatever interest it may have in the psychology of moral action, both as motive and consequence honor exists on a decidedly lower plane than whatever ethical principles it may occasionally serve. As Kant understood very well.

Fine words not nearly enough

Of course it took more than the activities of church groups to abolish the slave trade. And more than the eloquence of parliamentarians and preachers. It took concerted military action on land and sea — though you won’t find much about that in Appiah’s account. The author of The Honor Code may have no taste for war, and have never held a gun, but he must know that the only reason West African slavery and human sacrifice were stamped out is that European colonial armies went in, conquered kingdoms incurably given to these practices, and brought them forcefully to an end.

Appiah makes occasional disapproving references to Sir Garnet Wolseley, and given his African background this is understandable. Wolseley was a soldier who didn’t mess about, and his 1874 campaign against King Kofi Kakari was ruthless in crushing the Asante armies, displacing the king, and burning the “charnel house” of the city of Kumasi to the ground. Not for a moment would we claim that his main motive was idealistic and uplifting, or that he intended purely and simply to stamp out Asante slavery and human sacrifice. As elsewhere in the region, the invasion of this West African kingdom was meant to open it to trade with the coast, and to undercut such tribal peoples as the Itsekiri, “middlemen between the early European traders and the inhabitants of the hinterland”, a campaign that had gone on intermittently for many years. But you don’t need a degree in deontology to recognise that the result changed barbarism for the better.

Or does Appiah think the customs of Old Ashanti should have been kept as a living museum, pristine and untouched? Does he imagine that if the Christian missions had been kept out, if Sir Garnet had never existed, if a sufficiently determined Anthropological Preservation Society had opposed all change — then internal war, slave raiding, cannibalism, and human sacrifice, might each have been kept going all the way down to the Age of Empathy and the International Court of Justice in the Hague?

The “reluctant cannibal” and moral theory

Whether or not it’s true that “there are no jokes in Islam” (a line attributed apocryphally to the Ayatollah Khomeini), there is certainly little humor in Appiah’s world of respect on demand and instant dignity. So let’s try and lighten things up. It seems to me that as moral philosophers the British comedians Michael Flanders and Donald Swann look pretty good alongside the Ivy League professor, and when they sing their song about the “reluctant cannibal” who independently decides that “eating people is wrong” they raise serious issues for Appiah’s moral theory.

Recall first his dogma that “morality is not enough.” That individual convictions about right and wrong won’t cut it. And that both the collective reinforcement of shared beliefs and a sense of honor is needed before genuine moral progress can be made. Looking at our reluctant cannibal (let’s call him Jim) we see a man who has on his own moral initiative taken a view opposing his anthropophagous fellows. They think eating people is entirely normal. The steaks evidently taste good and they have even developed an appealing cuisine for human flesh. But when they invite Jim round, offering a dish with his favorite sauce, all he does is lecture them on their sins and pull back from the table in disgust. Jim thinks differently, feels differently, and most important of all has radically different moral convictions.

His tribal companions indignantly assure him that they have always eaten people and that there’s nothing wrong with the practice. Indeed, (and in accord with Appiah’s view of the social psychology of honor) they go further. They tell him that eating people is honorable, and that by not eating them he will bring his family into the worst kind of social disrepute. But Jim is not one of those who live in fear of being dissed. Not one of those fearful of the collective disfavour that looms so large in Professor Appiah’s scheme. Jim’s self-esteem is secure; he takes it for granted that the rule “thou shalt not eat people” is both good enough for him and good enough for everyone. He thinks that “the only thing that deserves full respect is doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do” — as Appiah ridicules the Kantian procedure he disapproves. But such ridicule has no effect on Jim. The right thing to do is embodied in a simple rule: Don’t Eat People. Jim is a Kantian through and through.

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There must be a thousand books about Wilberforce and Granville Sharp, and whole libraries devoted to the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. We hardly need more. What we need now — and which we cordially propose as Professor Appiah’s next project — is an explanation of why the moral revolution against slavery never happened in Africa. It may be this will require setting aside our admiration for exotic cultures, and our romantic enthusiasm for ways of life and being not our own. But diplomatic evasion can’t go on forever; looking African facts squarely in the face will have to be done sooner or later if we are to make sense of Mende Nazer’s world; and as we’ve already explained, nobody is better qualified for the task than Professor Appiah himself.

It happens that in 1826 a British governor on the Gold Coast, Sir Charles MacCarthy, was defeated by the Asante, who cut out his heart, ate it, and made his skull into a much admired drinking vessel for the king back in Kumasi. This was only seven years before the abolition of slavery in Britain. Did nobody in Ghana think this was wrong at the time? Where were Africa’s moral revolutionaries when they were needed? If ever there was a place where a thorough overhaul of values was called for it was West Africa in the 19^th century — and in the noble figure of the reluctant cannibal Flanders and Swann imagine a potentially heroic revolutionary figure for the times.  In Kumasi he might even have been a conscience-stricken Asante of moral sensitivity like Appiah himself. So why didn’t it happen? Why was there no Kumasi Anti-Slavery Convention led by the Appiah clan? No Benin Bill of Rights? No Dahomey Declaration of the Rights of Man? If a biographical history of the last fifty kings of Kumasi were written, would the phrase “human rights” even appear in the index?

As Flanders and Swann showed, all of this makes good comic material. Yet it is no trivial matter. It is largely because such things never did happen in Africa that the exact reverse of the civilizing process described by Norbert Elias — what amounts in fact to an uncivilizing process — is now flourishing on Europe’s fringes at the present time. For that is what the modern slave trade represents — the trade that trapped Mende Nazer in the Sudan and has doomed hundreds more African children from elsewhere.

The king of the Asante is said to have been surrounded by wise counsellors. But were they wise enough? Is it because there was no black William Wilberforce to stand up among the king’s counsellors in Kumasi and tell him forcefully that Slavery Is Wrong, that more than 200 years after the British abolition of the slave trade, Africa still practices slavery? This also relates directly to Appiah’s respectful anthropological account of the numerous grades of domestic servitude and patriarchal subordination in traditional West African society, grades blandly euphemised by numerous apologists as “our regional family culture,” and that all too easily collapse into subjection and brutality. Books take time to write, and no doubt we shall have to wait a year or two. But we look forward to learning from Professor Appiah why there was no spontaneous African push for abolition. It will certainly be of interest to the hundreds of Mende Nazers smuggled from Africa into England today.

Note: This essay is an expanded version of “The Slave Girl and the Princeton Professor,” first posted here on 22 October 2011.

Sources

Link for play about Mende Nazer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWLBxvl_yss
Mende Nazer website: http://www.mendenazer.org/
Slave, by Mende Nazer and Damien Lewis. Perseus USA 2003
The History of Dahomy, by Archibald Dalzel. Frank Cass UK 1967 (1793)
Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, by T. Edward Bowdich. John Murray UK 1819
Buying Freedom, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martin Bunzel. Princeton USA 2007
The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Norton USA 2010
The Fall of the Asante Empire, by Robert B. Edgerton. The Free Press USA 1995

New ways of trying to understand the Middle East are being wheeled out almost every day. From Francis Fukuyama comes Praetorian Realism, an acknowledgment of Samuel Huntington’s scenario for imposing order on civil chaos in modernizing lands. (“Political Order in Egypt”, The American Interest, May/June 2011.) From Robert Springborg and Clement M. Henry comes Matrix Realism, similarly emphasizing the army’s role in the institutional arrangements of the Arab states. (“Army Guys”, The American Interest, May-June 2011.) In this expansive intellectual climate, with its growing range of options, perhaps there’s room for one more. Let’s call it Tribal Realism, the aim being to bring anthropological insights to bear on our political prospects abroad.

Tribal Realism should have a number of practical applications, but its immediate goal would be to vet Western political speeches carefully deleting all references to “the people” of Libya, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. It will then try to decompose this popular collective noun into its actual constituent parts. Admittedly, removing such a warmly democratic term as “the people” will make a sizeable hole in the prevailing rhetoric, exposing speech-writers for assorted presidents and prime ministers to a pressing need for workable replacements, but the benefits should outweigh the costs.

For one thing, it will expose the enemy too. From his Bedouin tent Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has said he wouldn’t dream of harming “his people” — let alone shooting and shelling them — and he undoubtedly means it. Correctly understood, however, Gaddafi’s people are, first, his family consisting of his wives and children; next, his clan; then, his tribe; and finally, by a no doubt deplorable process of geographical attenuation, those tiny insignificant figures in the direction of Benghazi who hardly count at all.

Once this meaning of “the people” of Libya is grasped, we will see that Gaddafi is telling the truth. In the Colonel’s ethical universe those who deserve his exclusive concern are the men and women he regards as kin: in contrast, that unruly rabble further east may legitimately be hunted down, wherever they’re hiding, and mercilessly killed. That is what desert chieftains have historically done when they could. That is what men like Gaddafi see it as their duty to do. And that is what his numerous dependents — “his people” — expect him to do.

We might reserve the role of resident Tribal Realist and vetter of speeches for Robin Fox, University Professor of Social Theory at Rutgers, and a man who has made the study of kinship, clans and the mental world of tribalism a lifetime speciality. His newest book, The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind (Harvard, 2011) is an exciting synthesis of earlier work like the anthropological classic Kinship and Marriage (1967) and his latest wide-ranging thoughts. In a way reminiscent of the breadth of Charles Hill’s recent masterpiece Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, Fox ranges from a discussion of the Ten Commandments to an analysis of the great warrior epics and Sophocles’ King Oedipus, from incest taboos and the myth of Isis and Osiris to the ambiguous nature of “human rights,” from the plot of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights to Karl Popper’s thoughts on the desirability of “open” rather than “closed” societies. But his most topical and provocative comments are found in a chapter entitled “The Kindness of Strangers: Tribalism and the Trials of Democracy.”

Unkind Strangers

Fox begins this chapter by describing New York Times columnist John Tierney’s bafflement, in September 2003, upon discovering that the lavish weddings regularly taking place in his Baghdad hotel were mostly marriages of first cousins who were the children of brothers. Questioned about this practice, the young people told Tierney, “Of course we marry a cousin. What would you have us do, marry a stranger? We cannot trust strangers.” That, as others might have told him, is what marrying in low-trust cultures lacking effective central authority often entails. After presenting a similar example from Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, Fox writes of a scene in David Lean’s 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia. A British agent tells the tribal chieftain Aouda that he should attack the Turks in Aqaba for the sake of “the Arabs.” “Who are these Arabs?” the chieftain asks. After reciting the names of some of the tribes he knows, Aouda demands to be told exactly what tribe “the Arabs” consist of that he should risk his men’s lives on their behalf. Fox comments, bringing all this to bear on Iraq today, “Thus some of the sheiks in Anbar province will ally with the Americans against al-Qaeda and its allies if it suits them. But their and Aouda’s sole concern is with their tribal advantage. This was Aouda’s highest moral imperative.”

Fox knows what Tierney and most other educated Americans apparently do not: that tribal communities are the default system of human social nature. Humanity evolved that way for millennia after leaving behind the hunting-and-gathering band stage of social life. Many of the world’s diverse societies have since moved on toward becoming modern states, but not all of them have. And even for those that have, the shadowy emotional residues of the distant past remain; we never lose anything in evolution but instead add new developments to older ones. That is Fox’s central idea and the theme running through The Tribal Imagination.

It is also a truth, he believes, that we ignore at our peril as we go stumbling about in strange far away places where tribes rule with an authority denied the more-or-less absent state. And the pride and latent violence of groups of mutually suspicious kindred must be the starting point, Fox says, for anyone venturing into this political landscape. Such men and women are not the free individual citizens of a recognized territorial jurisdiction; nor are they people with clearly defined and defensible legal rights vis-à-vis the state — whether in Libya or Iraq or Afghanistan.

This truth, Fox argues, sheds a harsh light on instances when our leaders make claims about human nature and the natural state of human society as justifications for political action, armed intervention included. These leaders, he suggests, simply refuse to understand the essentially tribal nature of the lands they hope to remake. They are reluctant to grasp that:

there is no ‘Iraqi People’. The phrase should be banned as misleading and purely rhetorical… What is not understood is that Iraq, like the other countries of the region, still stands at a level of social evolution where the family, clan, tribe and sect command major allegiance. The idea of the individual autonomous voter, necessary and commonplace in our own systems, is relatively foreign.

Numerous unforeseen events during the Iraq occupation have demonstrated the priority of tribal authority. When men came out and stole copper wire connecting hospitals to the electricity grid, indignant US soldiers tried to make the thieves see that their actions would hurt “the Iraqi People.” True to form, the thieves responded just as Aouda had a hundred years before. Who were these “Iraqi people,” they wanted to know, whose claims outranked the claims of their own needy relatives? The thieving clansmen felt no responsibility for some mythical collectivity called “the people” that, as far as they knew, didn’t include them, and that had been invented by foreigners without their approval. In contrast, they were absolutely bound to help their kin: those cousins who were also, in some cases, their own spouses.

To realistically understand the world of kinship obligations and tribal authority, Fox argues, one must first understand both history and social evolution. The domestication of homo sapiens and his living arrangements has been a very drawn-out affair, and requires a better grasp of tribal life than whatever the parents of a Baghdad bride or bridegroom might say to a passing journalist: namely, that strangers are not to be trusted, and that it is considered the only safe way of obtaining a virgin bride. While these passing remarks do tell us something, a deeper understanding of parallel-cousin marriage must be historical.

Fox writes that in the Middle East this institution probably originated in the desert-nomad stage of Semitic society when the patrilineal and patrilocal (descent through males, residence with the father) bands of Arab Bedouin wandered isolated in the desert, and when all other bands were potential enemies. They married within their own band, their own clan, their own tribe. Even among the settled Bedouin this was maintained, because it kept wealth and property inside the lineage. Outsiders were unmarriageable. This social arrangement represented a form of tribalism, moreover, that protected the individual “from the worst ravages of both neighbors and strangers. This includes the ravages of the predatory state organization that exists only for its own benefit and thrives on the plundering of its subjects.”

Social Evolutionist

Passionate, restless, curious, and intellectually driven, Robin Fox was born in 1934 in West Yorkshire. His soldier father was decorated for service in India on the North West Frontier, and the strong Empire, King, and Country sentiments of his parents helped make him some kind of conservative from an early age — the story is told in his autobiographical Participant Observer. This background may also have stimulated an interest in kinship well before settling into anthropology as a vocation. When contrasting social theories about incest taboos came up in conversation, most people he met at the time favored Freud over Westermarck, the late-19^th-century Swedish-speaking Finn and pioneer of social evolutionary thought. Fox adopted Westermarck’s theory because it was more commonsensical (a natural aversion underlined by a cultural rule) and because it put him squarely in opposition to the majority. Checking out the full range of theoretical solutions that had been suggested for the subject, he says it took him “only a few Popperian minutes to dump the lot.” It seemed self-evident even then that Westermarck was right, not Freud.

At the London School of Economics he joined the students’ Conservative Society at a time when Hayek was there, and Karl Popper, and Michael Oakeshott as well. In the 1950s the ethos of the LSE after Harold Laski still remained one of “determined, earnest, Fabian socialism.” As a student Fox hugely enjoyed being against all that. The year 1956 brought political distractions. He briefly found himself allied with the Left on Suez, chanting “No war in Egypt! Eden must go!” at a demonstration, and tangling with police. Soon after this fugitives from Hungary arrived, among them a student from some grey Institute for Marxism-Leninism, and Fox helped relocate him in England. The young man explained that his previous study had been “Proletarian Philosophy.” Asked what he wanted to do now he was in England he replied “Go to Oxford University.” Asked next what he wanted to study at Oxford he said “Bourgeois Philosophy.” No worries, thought his British interviewer, he’d do fine…

“God bless the USA! So large, so friendly, and so rich!” So sang the English poet W. H. Auden en route to California, and Robin Fox felt much the same way alighting in his own academic Promised Land. An ethnographic foray into New Mexico got him thinking about matrilocal marriage (where men moved in to live with their wives’ families) and he was pleased to meet members of an actual Fox clan in Cochiti. But maths was always a worry and when he attended a seminar on the componential analysis of Zuni kin terms, and was asked by the Chairman of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, Clyde Kluckhohn, if he would like to comment, he said “No. I didn’t understand a word of it.”

There was a silence, a collective gasp, then a spontaneous burst of laughter and a round of applause. No-one in the thirty-year history of the lecture series had ever made such an admission… You never said you didn’t understand: this was status death.

Even harder to understand than componential analysis was the American infatuation with anthropological “culture”. In America culture was king. There were presumably at least some Americans who understood Darwin’s remark “Origin of man now proved… He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke”, but they were thin on the ground at Harvard. There, understanding human behavior meant understanding the kaleidoscopic variety of cultural rules. Whole courses (whole degrees and entire careers) could be built around minutely interpreting exotic details of ritual, conduct, and belief. But as for taking seriously a systematic comparison of the social behavior man shares with his fellow primates, or the universals we share behind all the cultural dazzle, forget it.

Of course the anatomical evolution of all those apes was recognized and accepted: the shared skeletal elements were inescapable. But Fox noted that human social behavior, especially its more tribal aspects, was somehow exempted from this rubric. Anthropological “culture” was in the USA a sanctified, autonomous, and purely human invention. Out of the air (not the genes) a numinous cloud of symbols and meanings and shapes to be delightedly scrutinised according to this or that intellectual scheme. In contrast, Fox saw human society as biosocial, and human social behavior as indissolubly linked to the social behavior of our primate kin. Back in England for a while he got to know Desmond Morris (author of The Naked Ape and “a chubby, balding, ebullient, bright man — a kind of animated Humpty Dumpty”) who was curator of mammals at the London Zoo. Morris encouraged Fox to take on the whole topic of inbreeding/incest and its controls, both among mammals generally and in human society.

Then Fox met Tiger. Intellectually it was a marriage made in heaven. Lionel Tiger said that “male bonding” was a behavioural inheritance from the days when our early ancestors made the evolutionary transition to hunting. You had to have this bond to successfully hunt and fight; it was part of “the biological substrate of human behavior.” From the day of their meeting the two anthropological soul-mates hunted together, drank together, and sometimes wrote together. Their arrival at Rutgers after the department of anthropology was relaunched by Fox in 1967 planted fresh and challenging ideas in American academic soil, some of them for the first time. In 1970 The Imperial Animal, by Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, became an intriguing title in university catalogues.

Lévi-Strauss and Ernest Gellner

The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind is dedicated “to the memory of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) and Ernest Gellner (1925-1995). The Gellner dedication is to a man whose ideas about social and political evolution are broadly congruous with Fox’s own. The Lévi-Strauss dedication is more complicated, since the French sage’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship is dogmatically opposed to Fox’s evolutionary account, and indeed to any kind of historical explanation at all. On page 142 Lévi-Strauss forthrightly asserts that “We have been careful to eliminate all historical speculation, all research into origins, and all attempts to reconstruct a hypothetical order in which institutions succeeded one another.” Westermarck’s “familiarity” explanation for human incest avoidance was anathema to Lévi-Strauss: agreeing with Freud, he was convinced that we are all sexually attracted to close kin.

Lévi-Strauss went even further — he believed that Culture is to Nature as Rules are to Chaos. According to Lévi-Strauss the rules prohibiting incestuous relations were not only an “intrusion into nature”: by saying “no” to nature (in accord with his view that we are naturally sexually attracted to close kin and really want to say “yes”), they are foundational. For Lévi-Strauss incest taboos established the Nature/Culture distinction as not only basic but sacred.

But is animal behavior chaotic? Are there no regularities to be found among other primates that both anticipate and parallel our cultural rules, including the incest taboo? Fox thought there were, and his 1983 The Red Lamp of Incest became an authoritative study. He had by then already argued for some time that Lévi -Strauss confused rules with order. It was, he said, a re-run of an older muddle. “If you’re going to make that kind of mistake you are back to the old ‘law of nature’ and ‘law as edict’ confusion again.”

Chimps did not have rules. But they did have order — the regularities observed by primatologists. From a comprehensive 2008 study by Bernard Chapais (Primeval Kinship, described by Fox in The Tribal Imagination as “a brilliant recent account of incest avoidance, in-laws, and social origins”), it is clear that whatever Lévi -Strauss and his followers may have thought, Westermarck’s ideas have finally won the day. In some anomalous or pathological circumstances incest can occur (Egyptian royal marriage; enslavement in an Austrian cellar), but for most of humanity most of the time it doesn’t. Nor are legal edicts required. Sometimes discussed under the psychological rubric of “imprinting”, Westermarck’s theory suggested that close and prolonged childhood association led to spontaneous sexual aversion in adulthood. Fox agreed: “Familiarity did not only breed contempt, it did not breed at all.”

Back to the Baghdad Hotel

On this matter Lévi -Strauss was perverse, but his surpassing brilliance wins him the honor of being a dedicatee in The Tribal Imagination all the same. His exposition of the way human kinship rules work to ensure we marry out of the natal group powerfully stimulated Fox’s own interpretation. The distinguished member of the Académie Française was wrong to think there was no continuity between Nature and Culture. But he was right to emphasize an important difference between the behavioural routines of apes and men — a difference encapsulated by Fox as follows: while primates have kin, they do not have in-laws.

Unpacking this highly condensed formulation reveals a whole range of connected evolutionary phenomena: the dispersal of animal populations, the need for genetic variability, and the origin of language, the last enabling social structures to form in time and space among men and women who have never seen each other and in some cases never will. Other primates don’t do this, and here Lévi-Strauss was dead right. The uniquely human cultural fact that arose was something new: not (as he thought) the avoidance of incest — that was widespread among primates — but “the enduring relationship between natal kin separated by marriage but linked by kinship, by descent from a common ancestor…”

All mammals ensure genetic variability through population dispersal. Fox argues that this goes all the way back to “the emergence of self-replicating matter, and the crucial revolution that produced sex to replace cloning”. Sexual reproduction, plus dispersal, spontaneously produces the genetic variability natural selection needs to work on. If mammalian populations did not disperse, “close inbreeding resulted in a loss of such variability, hence mechanisms evolved to avoid it.” At the same time too great a dispersal — so great that separated bands lost contact with each other — meant that beneficial features might be lost. So it is that “organisms breed out to avoid losing variability, but not so far out that they dissipate genetic advantages.” Not too close, but not too far; that was the evolutionary Golden Rule.

Which brings us back to what was going on in that Baghdad hotel. In human terms, the Darwinian imperatives of dispersal, variability, and natural selection eventually produced a social world in which marriage with cousins was preferred. Historically, that’s how it has been in most traditional preindustrial societies until quite recently. And for Fox it is an integral part of the tribal default system of humanity everywhere.

Civilized men, tribal minds

The true originality of The Tribal Imagination lies in the author’s exploration of the historical and literary consequences of these facts. For the stories mankind tells itself about its own origins in creation myths repeatedly echo a primeval conflict between the bonds uniting kin, on the one hand, and the evolutionary need to marry out on the other — to divide the primal unity, to socially separate, to genetically disperse. Often the original bonded creators were brother and sister, like Osiris and Isis. “For the Egyptians, as for the Greeks and Teutons, a series of sibling marriages characterized the early history of the gods.” For ordinary mortals this was forbidden. But although brothers and sisters cannot marry (a near-universal human rule), their children not only can but often should. And in the commonly prescribed marriage of a brother’s daughter and sister’s son (more common than the Arab union of brother’s daughter and brother’s son) the centrifugal tendency of parents marrying “out” is balanced by the centripetal tendency of children marrying “in.”

This is the original atom of kinship from which a wide range of marital, procreative, and residential patterns throughout the world derive. It is also a source of continually repeated tensions and conflicts that humanity dramatises in its myths, legends and art — conflicts originating in the one between the illegitimate primordial pair of brother and sister and the legitimate outsiders (those strangers always regarded with suspicion) as marriage partners. Fox’s analysis of literary narratives leads to conclusions that are often surprising: What was the true sin of Oedipus? (Was it really incest?) What was the real conflict in Thebes involving Antigone? (Was it really individual vs. state?) “How do the descendants of Adam through Seth foretell the problem of democracy in Iraq and question the Westermarck effect? Does the story of Lot and his daughters reflect a demographic problem in evolution?” These questions are answered in successive chapters — ‘Tribal Norms and Civilized Narratives,’ ‘Ancient themes in Modern Literature,’ and ‘Tribal Bonds in Warrior Epics.’

But it was in his powerful reinterpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone that Fox had earlier set out the problem we face today, when a dose of Tribal Realism is sorely needed — the problem of clashing systems of authority and allegiance: of kinship versus the state. In “The Virgin and the Godfather: Kinship Law versus State Law in Greek Tragedy and After” (Reproduction and Succession, 1989) he radically alters our usual understanding of the play. And he begins with a quotation about the clash of kinship and authority from his own book Kinship and Marriage that is worth reproducing here:

The war between kinship and authority is alive in legend. In story and fantasy kinship struggles against bureaucratic authority, whether of church or state. It undermines, it challenges, it disturbs. The Mafia constantly fascinates because ‘the family’ demands total loyalty and provides total security. When the state fails to protect, people look longingly at the certainty of kinship.

Fox regards the European habit of viewing society as a loose aggregate of autonomous individuals as a barrier to understanding. It prevents us seeing the truth of Ernest Gellner’s argument in Muslim Society that under Islam “the individual acts toward the state essentially through the mediation of his kin group.” It equally prevents us seeing that in Ancient Greece (meaning the Greece of legend that long preceded the reforms of Cleisthenes and the rationalistic speculations of Plato and Aristotle), both autonomous individuals and the state itself were problematic.

To illustrate the point, Fox contrasts Sophocles’ dramatization of the issues with the issues themselves. In the play, the figures of Antigone and Creon individuate what are essentially collective matters. As Greek drama increasingly emphasized character, and the merely histrionic, the theatrical roles of individuals became inflated. But this should not deceive us as to the political point and meaning of the enterprise overall. In Antigone, Fox argues, the leading roles of Antigone and Creon are synechdochic: they stand for issues much larger than themselves. In the case of Antigone it is the inescapable kinship obligation to bury her brother the dead Polynices; in the case of Creon it is his demand that the body instead be left exposed.

Those who see this as a conflict between a passionate individual conscience and the state, says Fox, mistake style for substance. What is at stake for Antigone are divinely ordained sacred claims of kinship, eternally linking her ancestors to the born and the unborn for generations to come. What is at stake for Creon is more like an arbitrary municipal ordinance issued by a local chief whose amour propre seems to be running out of control. Creon almost hysterically invokes his “will” as if this alone were a self-sufficient certificate of legitimacy. But is he even a bona fide ruler? Or are his actions those of the chiefly leader of an embryonic and still insecure state formation where he may indeed call himself a king, but is perhaps better seen as the apex of an unstable confederation of tribes? And doesn’t all this sound familiar? Not unlike, indeed, the code of pashtunwali standing against the pretensions of the Kabul Karzais.

[Originally in The American Interest, July/August 2011 www.The-American-Interest.com]

What’s with The Arabian Nights? How can we explain the lasting attraction of the mysteriously medieval East? The djinns? The camels? The metamorphoses? The alluring houris in dove-grey veils? Or could it be for some readers the vision of exquisitely delayed beheadings — so unlike the rude explosions of roadside bombs?

Whatever and however, in the 1820s young Benjamin Disraeli found The Arabian Nights an enchanting alternative to his life as a London law clerk — and he wanted out. Escaping from Swain, Stevens, Maples, Pearce and Hunt, and inspired by tales of Scheherazade, this dandified young man headed east where he dressed up as a pirate in “blood-red shirt, with silver studs as big as shillings,” and a sash stuffed with pistols and daggers. That was on a boat sailing from Malta to Corfu.

Then in 1839 Austen Henry Layard followed Disraeli’s example. With a travelling companion he too fled eastward, escaping both his uncle’s law office and his aunt’s literary salons. Only after crossing France and Italy, and reaching the shores of the Adriatic, did he feel able to fill his lungs and breathe freely at long last. In the company of another adventurer named Edward Ledwich Mitford, (Layard was 22, his companion Mitford 32) the two men planned to walk and ride all the way to India and Ceylon. But already as they rode along south of Trieste they could feel the grey burden of England lifting — and their spirits did too. Writing about it Layard told how delighted they were by the beauty of the Dalmation countryside in late summer, “and with the picturesque costumes of the peasantry, which seemed to increase in gorgeousness as we went south and approached the land of the Ottoman.”

Montenegro 1839 — a whiff of things to come

Austen Henry Layard, by William Brockedon

Their next stop was Montenegro. Layard tells in his Autobiography how they had received a letter from Montenegro’s leading chieftain, or Vladika, that “courteously invited” them not merely to visit but to stay with him in his palace at Cetinje. To ensure their safety the chief had sent horses and guards to escort his guests — “four savage but fine-looking fellows… presented themselves at our lodging. They each carried a long gun, and were armed to the teeth with pistols, yataghans, and knives.” These accoutrements added a spice of danger. Could they really be just ornamental? Or were they meant for serious use? But whatever the two young Englishmen made of this daunting arsenal they were entirely unprepared for what came into view at the palace. There “a circle of forty-five gory Turkish heads were stuck on poles, trophies from a battle the previous week.” For the last seven days they had been ripening outside the window of what became Layard’s sleeping quarters during his stay.

The Vladika (the combined prince-bishop of Montenegro) was a poet, and a man fond of learning and literature. He was delighted to find his English guests were too. It galled him that German newspapers had praised the courage of the King of Saxony, who had visited Montenegro in the course of a botanical excursion, for venturing into “the territory of a barbarous, sanguinary, and perfidious race”. This was simply untrue, he protested, pointing to a sign of his own civilized taste — the billiard table he had recently installed — but one fine day while he and Layard were chalking their cues they were interrupted by a clatter of hooves outside, with much shouting and firing of guns. Some Montenegrin warriors had been on a foray into Turkish territory and had returned with a present for their leader. Layard writes in his Autobiography:

They carried in a cloth, held up between them, several heads which they had severed from the bodies of their victims. Amongst these were those apparently of mere children. Covered with gore, they were a hideous and ghastly spectacle. They were duly deposited at the feet of the Prince, and then added to those which were already displayed…

Then and later Layard’s political sympathies were with the Turks. Russian despotism was the main enemy: the Sultan, however decadent his administration, deserved British help resisting it. This accorded with long-term British policy that saw the Ottoman Empire as a necessary bulwark against Russian expansion to the south. Yet the trophies on display outside the palace in Cetinje must surely have given pause — must have provided at least some sense of leaving behind not only the London law office he despised, but law itself; of having crossed a frontier separating civilization from the tribal past.

Not long ago Samuel P. Huntington pointed to the fault-lines dividing cultures, and on page 159 of his well-known book he provides a map of “The Eastern Boundary of Western Civilization”. Running southward from the Russian shores of the White Sea, it bisects a number of countries in Eastern Europe before passing through Montenegro to end in the Adriatic. Layard was on his way to Mosul in Mesopotamia, and the unearthing of the Assyrian remains of Nimrud and Nineveh that would be forever associated with his name. Both in antiquity, and in the 1840s, he would discover there a markedly cavalier attitude toward both human life and human heads — especially in the region we now call Iraq.

Enter The Arabian Nights

A paradox was becoming obvious. On the one hand picturesque peasants, colourful textiles, novel dishes to whet the appetite, followed by exciting music and dance. On the other, grisly customs and diabolical politics. For romantic aesthetes the discovery that in tribal societies the appealing and the appalling are often inseparable always comes as a disappointing surprise. In Layard’s case, one wonders how such an exceedingly cultured young Englishman understood so little — less indeed than ordinary German newspaper readers might expect to know in 1840 — about the ‘barbarous, sanguinary, and perfidious’ political customs east of Huntington’s line? In short, knew so little about lands, unlike his own, where life is cheap and where both civil and civilised law is thin on the ground.

His formal education had been patchy, and his childhood experience of various schools in England and on the continent had been miserable. Tri-lingual, in France he was tormented for being English; in England he was persecuted as a “frog”. He was only truly happy in Florence, where the family went for nine years hoping that a change in climate would restore the health of his asthmatic father Peter. It was in Italy that Peter Layard took his son to galleries where he learned to appreciate the Masters, and it was there the boy first read Shakespeare, Spenser, and Ben Jonson. But these proved of minor interest — he was spellbound by something else.

“The work in which I took the greatest delight,” he wrote, “was ‘The Arabian Nights’.” In their apartment within the Rucellai Palace, the Layard family home in Florence, “I was accustomed to spend hours stretched upon the floor, under a great gilded Florentine table, poring over this enchanting volume. My imagination became so much excited by it that I thought and dreamt of little else but ‘djinns’ and ‘ghouls’ and fairies and lovely princesses, until I believed in their existence…” Moreover, he adds, “My admiration for ‘The Arabian Nights’ has never left me. I can read them now (he was writing this late in life) with almost as much delight as I read them when a boy. They have had no little influence upon my life and career; for to them I attribute that love of travel and adventure which took me to the East, and led me to the discovery of the ruins of Nineveh.” [For more on his youth and boyhood see also Young Layard of Nineveh]

Layard’s sympathy for the Turkish cause was not unique. On the same voyage that found him sailing so splendidly dressed between Malta and Corfu, Benjamin Disraeli tried to help Turkey suppress a rebellion in Albania. His biographer Robert Blake tells us that the revolt was over before Disraeli was ready, but that he nevertheless went to Janina in north-western Greece “to congratulate Reshid Pasha, the Grand Vizier, who was in command of the Turkish army.” Disraeli was both a friend of Layard’s uncle Benjamin Austen, and a regular visitor to his aunt Sara’s salons. He wrote excitedly to Austen: “For a week, I was in a scene equal to anything in the Arabian Nights. Such processions, such dresses, such cortèges of horsemen, such caravans of camels!”

In Constantinople he found “the meanest merchant in the Bazaar looks like a Sultan in an Eastern fairy tale”, adding in another letter to Austen that “All here is very much like life in a pantomime or Eastern tale of enchantment, which I think very high praise.” In the opinion of Gordon Waterfield, author of the biographical Layard of Nineveh, Disraeli’s thrilling stories about his travels in the 1830s influenced Layard as much as the tales in the Arabian Nights itself: both encouraged romantic dreams of the East — an aesthetic vision that far outweighed any political misgivings.

Only a short time after the grim experience of Montenegro, having crossed into Turkish Albania and arrived at the city of Scutari (modern Shkodër), Layard was enthusing about the colourful life of an eastern bazaar. He was pleased to find that the dress and manners of European civilization “had scarcely penetrated into the realm of Islam” and that he felt he had at last passed into “a world of which I had dreamt from my earliest childhood.” Once more he sees the ferocious weaponry men habitually carry, not as a symptom of lawlessness, or the absence of civil society, but as largely decorative. In fact he treats it on much the same level as cuisine. In the bazaar he is delighted to encounter

The jaunty Albanian with his white fustanella and his long gun resplendent with coral and silver, his richly inlaid pistols and his silver-sheathed yataghan, the savoury messes in the cook’s shops… etc.

Layard in Bakhtiari Dress

From Constantinople he sent a letter to his Aunt Louisa that might have come from Disraeli himself: “With this place I am much delighted. It even exceeds any description I have seen. The imagination could not picture a site more beautiful as that occupied by Constantinople. In the hands of any other European Power it would have been the strongest city in the world; in the hands of the Turks it has become the most picturesque.” The costumes of the Dalmation peasantry are picturesque; the city of Constantinople is picturesque. It also became necessary for this fugitive from a London solicitor’s office to proclaim his new identity in a suitably picturesque way. Two of the most commonly reproduced portraits of Layard as a young man show him “in Albanian Dress”, by W. H. Phillips, and “in Bakhtiari dress”, a watercolour painted in Constantinople by Amadeo Preziosi in 1843.

From Jerusalem to Petra and back

At Antioch Layard had seen the springs associated with Daphne and the remains of what may have been the temple of Apollo. On the way to Aleppo he found reminders of Crusader days — churches, convents, and castles. In Jerusalem he was determined to see the strange rock-carved architecture of Petra, and explore the lands of Moab and Jerash. There was however a small problem: south of the Dead Sea the whole countryside was in disorder following an invasion by Egyptian armies under the famous Muhammad Ali Pasha. The British Vice Consul warned Layard that he’d be attacked and plundered by Bedouin who would strip him naked and leave him for dead. Upon hearing this the prudent Mitford declined to go: he would wait for his companion (assuming Layard survived) in the safety of Damascus.

At this stage Layard knew no Arabic, and the area where he was going was infested with Bedouin who lived by robbing and murdering anyone they could find on the roads. But none of this dimmed the glowing vision of the desert tribes he had acquired from the writings of the Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. According to Burckhardt the Bedouin lived in tents; they were people of virtuous simplicity and simple virtues; and their natural hospitality meant that a traveller could happily trust them with his life. Defying augury, Layard hired an interpreter and set off. Later he confessed:

I had romantic ideas about Bedouin hospitality and believed that if I trusted to it, and placed myself unreservedly in the power of the Bedouin tribes, trusting to their respect for their guests, I should incur no danger. I did not know that the Arab tribes who inhabit the country to the south and east of the Dead Sea differed much from the Bedouins of the desert, of whom I had read in the travels of Burckhardt, and that they fully deserved the evil reputation they had acquired in Jerusalem.

The consequence of placing himself unreservedly in the power of armed and dangerous brigands, however picturesquely dressed, was not what he hoped. After skirmishes with drawn swords, and confrontations at pistol-point, half-starved, exhausted, robbed of books, papers, medicines, his beautiful robe of Damascus silk and most of his clothes, wearing only an “Arab cloak, now almost in tatters and not worth taking,” he dragged himself into Damascus to meet the British Consul. Exactly what the Consul thought is unclear. But he kindly offered his countryman some tea.

On to Baghdad

Now somewhat less trusting, and a lot more wary, Layard next took the road to Mosul. “We rode during the whole day through a desert plain… constantly on the look-out for Bedouins…” Then in Mosul the future archaeologist came face to face with destiny. On the banks of the Tigris were the long-buried remains of Nineveh, the ancient city where he would make his name. Although it would be five long years before he was allowed to begin digging, and all he could see were vast enigmatic mounds, “I was deeply moved by their desolate and solitary grandeur”, he wrote, and spent a week in the area taking measurements and looking for inscriptions.

The dress, manners, and political institutions of European civilisation had scarcely penetrated into this Islamic realm at all — presumably a huge plus — but Layard was beginning to understand the limitations of Turkish rule. His lodgings were on the Mosul side of the Tigris. Nineveh was on the other. There had once been a bridge, but it had been swept away long ago, “and, under the careless and fatuous rule of the Turks, no attempt had been made to replace it.” It was also obvious that the consequences of Ottoman government were more serious than a mere indifference to roads and bridges. The town of Mosul was governed by “a Pasha of the old school, almost independent of any control… who could oppress the subjects of the Sultan under his rule, extort money from them, and reduce them to utter ruin and misery with impunity.”

But these imperfections seemed ignorable: at Mosul all the old childhood emotions and memories of books read under the gilded Florentine table came enjoyably flooding back. The approach to Baghdad by water as he floated down the Tigris delighted the senses. Beneath tall and graceful date palms “were clusters of orange, citron, and pomegranate trees, in the full blossom of spring. A gentle breeze wafted a delicious odour over the river, with the cooing of innumerable turtle-doves. The creaking of the water-wheels, worked by oxen, and the cries of the Arabs on the banks added life and animation to the scene. I thought that I had never seen anything so truly beautiful, and all my ‘Arabian Nights’ dreams were almost more than I realised.”

Yet where every prospect pleases man can be uncommonly vile. Layard had been warned of Arabs along the banks of the river that “would rob and plunder us if we ventured to land”. When somewhat surprisingly this did not happen, he soon found why — it was because a highly disagreeable penalty for robbery had been imposed by the previous Pasha. In Baghdad there had been a rule of uncompromising punitive terror. The Bedouin had been kept under control and the roads kept safe by “the horrible punishment of impalement.” There was a bridge of boats across the river, and the former governor, a man proud of his province and determined to defend the progress he had made from inveterate criminals, “was in the habit of placing them on stakes at the two ends of the bridge of boats, and on either side of it, as a warning to those who visited the city and had to pass between them.” A British resident in Baghdad, Dr. Ross, had recently seen four offenders thus exposed. Bear in mind this was 1840, not 1480.

Joining the Bakhtiari

In Baghdad Layard spent his days exploring Babylonian ruins, and looking at the fine collection of Arabic and Persian manuscripts in the library of Colonel Taylor, the Political Resident of the East India Company in Baghdad. But soon his mind turned toward the region of the southern Zagros mountains, a territory vigorously contested between the Bakhtiari tribe, who pretty much controlled things on the ground, and the Shah in Tehran who claimed sovereignty. To do this however meant dealing with the Persian governor of Isfahan, Manuchar Khan, a man who had recently shown he was not to be trifled with by building a tower out of 300 prisoners, mortared together like bricks, who all died slowly and hideously.

About this time Mitford decided that his travelling companion was incorrigible. If Layard was now going to defy Manuchar Khan and throw in his lot with the Bakhtiari — a tribe regarded by Tehran as “a race of robbers, treacherous, cruel, and bloodthirsty”, that Governor Manuchar Khan plainly intended to crush — then he wanted none of it. Edward Mitford now journeyed on to India alone, while Layard turned his mind to the months ahead. In a full-blooded romantic outburst he wrote to his uncle-solicitor back in London (on whom by the way he entirely depended for funds) that he was sick of the civilised and semi-civilised world and lived “happier under a black Bakhtiari tent with liberty of speech and action and nobody to depend on, no-one to flatter, certain that I shall have dinner tomorrow — for there is always bread and water — and without need of that source of all evil, money…”

In his memoir about these days Layard was however more calculating. He wrote that despite the bad reputation of the Bakhtiari “I was very hopeful and very confident that my good fortune would not desert me, and that by tact and prudence I should succeed in coming safely out of my adventure. I determined at the same time to conform in all things to the manners, habits, and customs of the people with whom I was about to mix, to avoid offending their religious feeling and prejudices, and to be especially careful not to do anything which might give them reason to suspect that I was a spy.”

His confidence was justified — he soon fluked his way into the patronage of a great and powerful Bakhtiari chieftain, Mehemet Taki Khan, a man able to command a force of 10,000 men. In the fortress of Kala Tul the Khan’s ten-year-old son lay dying of fever. He was at the point of death, and “the father appealed to me in the most heartrending terms, offering me gifts of horses and anything that I might desire if I would only save the life of his son.” Taking a huge chance Layard gave the patient some quinine.  Within hours the boy broke into “a violent perspiration”; by dawn he was on the way to recovery; after this Layard found himself welcomed into the most intimate areas of Bakhtiari domestic life, and even lodged in the residential inner sanctum or enderun (harem) itself.

No longer a solitary alien on the outside, perpetually having to explain himself and at risk of being murdered on the road, his position was suddenly reversed. Now he was on the inside, and tribal life looked increasingly like the warm and hospitable world he had fantasised about for so long. It is not impossible that in these days he may from time to time have been romantically involved with Bakhtiari women. They found him attractive, and he was certainly attracted to them. After saving her son’s life Layard tells us that the Khan’s wife “treated me with the affection of a mother”, while he described her sister Khanumi as the most beautiful woman in all the tribe: “Her features were of exquisite delicacy, her eyes were large, black and almond-shaped, her hair of the darkest hue; she was intelligent and lively.”

Urged by the Khan to convert to Islam and marry Khanumi, Layard resisted, though he told his aunt that the Bakhtiari custom of sigha interested him: it enabled a man “to marry for a period, however short — even for twenty-four hours — and which makes the contract for the time legal.” The marital arrangements of the Khan himself seemed ideal. He married and divorced monthly, enjoying a continual honeymoon. It is perhaps not entirely irrelevant that in the Arabian Nights, before Scheherazade found a beguiling way around it, the Sultan had married, enjoyed, and then calmly killed each of his ‘wives’ next day.

Lord Curzon described Layard’s account of life among the Bakhtiari as “one of the most romantic narratives of adventure ever penned.” He not only joined the tribe, he mastered their Persian dialect and participated in their lion hunts, their feuds, and their battles with Persian authority. This did not go unnoticed. Upon learning of Layard’s active participation in skirmishes with Persian troops, the Vizier in Tehran told the British Ambassador Sir John McNeill, who inquired after his whereabouts: “That man! Why, if I could catch him I’d hang him. He has been joining some rebel tribes and helping them.”

At the gates of Baghdad

Anyway it was tremendous fun living amidst forays, feuds, and death by the assassin’s hand, or sitting long into the small hours listening to stories told by men “constantly engaged in bloody quarrels arising out of questions of right of pasture and other such matters. When they were thus at war they ruthlessly pillaged and murdered each other. With them ‘the life of a man was as the life of a sheep,’ as the Persians say, and they would slay the one with as much unconcern as the other.” The excitement of life in the great chief’s fortress was all very well as long as Taki Khan was in control and the Persians were not. But it couldn’t last. Manuchar Khan was determined to break and punish the Bakhtiari, the clans sensed it, and before long their fealty weakened and the chief’s followers began to melt away.

In a land where oaths were lightly given and lightly broken, Mehemet Taki Khan soon found himself beleaguered and on the run. As for Layard, confined by Manuchar Khan in the city of Shustar for helping the Bakhtiari, he boldly escaped and made his way back through parching deserts and fearful heat to Baghdad. Attacked and thrown from his horse by marauders of the Shammar tribe, Layard lost the disguise of his Arab keffiya (or cloth headdress) and was mistaken for a hated Osmanli.

“One of the Arabs cried out that I was a ‘Toork’, and a man who had dismounted drew a knife and endeavoured to kneel upon my chest. I struggled, thinking that he intended to cut my throat, and called out to one of the party who, mounted upon a fine mare, appeared to be a sheikh, that I was not a ‘Toork’ but an Englishman.” The sheikh relented, mistaking Layard for Dr. Ross of Baghdad, and again Layard

escaped with his life — but most of his clothing, his watch, compass, and his last few silver pieces were lost. When he reached Baghdad it was Damascus all over again. Lying alone at dawn in the dirt outside the city gates, waiting for them to open, clad in rags and with bare and bleeding feet, “overcome by fatigue and pain”, he was ignored by parties from the British Embassy who rode by without recognising him — nor did he hasten to make his presence known. But following behind them came Dr. Ross:

I called to him, and he turned towards me in the utmost surprise, scarcely believing his senses when he saw me without cover to my bare head, with naked feet, and in my tattered ‘abba’.

From Arabian Nights to Assyrian Horrors

Layard’s experiences along the Turko-Persian border made the young adventurer an authority on the geographical issues involved — when it was in his possession he put his compass to good use. This drew the notice of the British Ambassador in Constantinople, Sir Stratford Canning, who in 1842 made him an unpaid attaché at the Embassy. In 1845, after much hesitation, Canning allowed Layard to commence the excavations that led to the discovery of several long-buried palaces, including that of Sennacherib.

The subsequent achievements of Sir Austen Henry Layard, as he eventually became, were prodigious — excavating an enormous site, making remarkable drawings of the palace sculptures, mastering cuneiform, firmly responding to the continual obstruction of his work by venal and mendacious Pashas, transporting both the palace reliefs and two colossal stone bulls down the Tigris — all the while fighting off armed marauders who, both at the diggings and while rafting the reliefs downriver to Basra, were always waiting their chance.

Turning the yellowed leaves of his 1853 folio publication The Monuments of Nineveh, the dry and disintegrating leather of its old Morocco binding falling apart in one’s hands, one may learn from Layard’s drawings much about ancient Mesopotamia. Plates 8 and 9 show dates, apples, grapes and pomegranates being carried to a royal banquet, and groves of palms, and one can easily imagine a gentle breeze wafting the scent of citron across the river, for the noble Tigris ripples through many scenes. But soon the images become more sombre. Hundreds of prisoners, criminals, and naked slaves, harnessed by long ropes to sledges on which great stone bulls were being moved, are seen with overseers, their arms always threateningly upraised to lash and beat.

And then in Plate 21 something else catches the eye — as perhaps it was meant to by the Assyrian architect who placed it near the middle of a scene. The relief sculptures show Sennacherib’s destruction in 701 BC of the city of Lachish, in the Kingdom of Judah. We are presented with three captives impaled on stakes. There are also scenes of beheadings, and of government scribes counting piles of heads, and of prisoners being flayed alive. Today sensitive museum administrators are a little shy about this sort of thing, preferring to keep it out of sight, but Layard himself was unflinching. Some prisoners, he wrote,

had been condemned to the torture, and were already in the hands of the executioners. Two were stretched naked at full length on the ground, and whilst their limbs were held apart by pegs and cords they were being flayed alive. Beneath them were other unfortunate victims undergoing abominable punishments. The brains of one were apparently being beaten out with an iron mace, whilst an officer held him by the beard. A torturer was wrenching the tongue out of the mouth of a second wretch who had been pinioned to the ground. The bleeding heads of the slain were tied round the necks of the living who seemed reserved for still more barbarous tortures.

Today we can only wonder at the historical echoes across nearly 3,000 years. That civil society never developed in the region is an anthropological puzzle where culture, psychology, intransigent tribalism, military imperatives and religious belief, are probably all involved. It is also a political puzzle for which we are unlikely to find a solution anytime soon.

[The above is a variation of “Layard of Nineveh,” an article in the July/August 2010 issue of The American Interest. www.The-American-Interest.com]

Note: Substantial excerpts from Layard’s writings, mainly Early Adventures and Autobiography, are here: Young Layard of Nineveh. For a discussion of more recent regional issues, and the political influence of Lawrence of Arabia, see also Nihilism in the Middle East.

Reading
Blake, Robert. 1966. Disraeli. London, Eyre and Spottiswoode.
Larsen, Mogens Trolle. 1996. The Conquest of Assyria. London and New York, Routledge.
Layard, A. H. 1853. Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon… London, John Murray.
Layard, A. H. 1853. Monuments of Nineveh, V. 2. London, John Murray.
Layard, A. H. 1894. Early Adventures in Persia… London, John Murray.
Layard, A. H. 1903. Autobiography and Letters… London, John Murray.
Waterfield, Gordon. 1963. Layard of Nineveh. London, John Murray.

Reply to Comments

Lighten up guys! You might just be missing the point. Arabian Nights, Baghdad Days offers all-too-typical scenes from the human comedy — in this case the long-running farce of East meets West. Nice clean-living London law student reads a book of tall tales, ships out to Turkey so he can dress up and meet princesses and ride on magic carpets through the sky… Then crashes to earth and is lucky not to lose his head.

Shakespeare could have done something with it and given Will Kemp a role. Or Cervantes — Layard’s delusions are as crazy as Don Quixote’s. Or perhaps Voltaire: the naivete of young Austen Henry Layard reads like Candide among the Ottomans. Anyway the adventures described provide a hilarious metaphor for Western delusions about the historic cultures of the region — fantasies whose consequences, as we can see today in Iraq and Afghanistan, are sometimes not funny at all.

That’s what 99.9% of the article is about. Not some definition from Sociology 101. So imagine my surprise when I find the only items discussed are two words, “civil society”, occurring in the final paragraph. A speculation ruminatively tacked on the end.

Civil society (for me pretty much synonymous with civilized society) is the only social order that satisfies the hopes, values, and understandings of the modern mind. That is the broad subject under consideration. It does not exist in Iraq today and it never did. Sufi lodges and madrassas, like the local donkey market and a thriving carpet trade, just don’t cut it. Sorry. They all belong to an intensely parochial and limited world, whose freedoms, both mental and political, are crippled by local cultural constraints and enduring religious fixations that make it difficult for the region to move on.

But let’s begin at the evolutionary beginning… More simply and just by way of adumbration, in civil societies the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker count themselves lucky because after hundreds of years they’ve at last got out from under the feudal lord, the military caste with its blood-thirsty warriors, the raving mullah with his dogmas and constraints, the clan and the tribe with their xenophobic prohibitions and endless fighting; and last but not least, the political regime of “ruler takes all” with its Khans and Kings and Emperors.

That goes for the wives of the butcher and baker and candlestick-maker too. If the western butcher’s wife wants to take a course in accountancy she can — whatever her clan or tribe or priest or president might think. If the wife of the baker wants to get away from the oven and an offensive husband too, then civil law allows this, because opting out is protected; indeed, the freedom of individuals to achieve their destinies according to talent and opportunity — not according to ascribed features of tribe or skin color or sex or dynastic connection or prophetic affiliation (Shia, Sunni) — is an intrinsic feature of this historically novel and belatedly evolved social order.

“Old-fashioned” you say? Well, yes, I suppose the subject of civil society is that, since the puzzle why East is East and West is West — including why Oriental Despotism repels and why no thinking man or woman wants a bar of it — runs all the way back to Aristotle. And by the way, minds a lot more powerful than Edward Said’s have pondered the issues involved, from Adam Ferguson and Gibbon in the 18th century, to Marx (the Asiatic Mode of Production) and Sir Henry Maine (status vs. contract) in the 19^th century, to the summarizing discussion provided by Ernest Gellner at the close of the 20^th — Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals.

For Gellner, as for Aristotle, freedom is the crux of the matter and ultimately the point of it all: “Traditional man can sometimes escape the tyranny of kings, but only at the cost of falling under the tyranny of cousins, and of ritual.” Rephrased somewhat (RS): “tribal man must choose between the tyranny of despots, from Sargon to Saddam, or the straitjacket of kinship groups and the equally confining intellectual dogmas of priests.” The legislative framework of civil and secular modernity enables independent men and women to defy political autocrats, domestic tyrants, and religious dogmas, all at the same time — the admirable and courageous Ayaan Hirsi Ali provides a heroic example.

What are the conditions for escaping these assorted tyrannies — an escape Mesopotamia never made? They are largely economic (just as Ayaan Hirsi Ali today could never have found a way out of her Somalian straight-jacket without alternative, non-tribal sources of financial support). The short answer describing a very long process is in Gellner’s words “perpetual and exponential growth”: in this process the commerce and production of free economic agents supersedes predation, replacing the exactions of warrior castes and the forced internal and external tribute of the state.

This alternative route to prosperity requires private property, along with civil law, and other legislative protections allowing wealth to accumulate or be used to best advantage by free citizens — not tribesmen or slaves or serfs or fanatically fierce sectarians murdering each other day after day. Without it, all you tend to get is the chronic instability of a three-cornered contest for power between the state, the tribes, and the sects, as Gellner says.

So what do I mean by civil and civilized society? In brief, a social order where citizens are guaranteed freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom of belief, freedom to pursue economic opportunities as they arise and to keep or use whatever capital accumulates as a result, freedom from obligatory state service — along with the separation of church and state, the right to think whatever you like without being blown up or having your head cut off, and government by the consent of the governed with appropriate electoral procedures.

It would be wonderful if you could find these desirable features shining out in Mesopotamia’s long and notable past. Perhaps here and there you can. But there was no Greek Enlightenment, or game-changing debate about the nature of justice, citizenship, and the duties of government. No Magna Carta. No Renaissance. No Reformation. No relief from religious obsessions, dating back to Ishtar and Asshur, with their persistent theocratic temptations. The political panorama of Mesopotamian history shows little but the dynastic rise and fall of despots and their vassals, rulers whose Ozymandian pretensions stretch from Sargon to Saddam with their armies and captives and slaves, shouting their conquests brazenly from stelae, proudly displaying their grisly triumphs in sculptured panels of military violence, enslavement, punishment, and submission. Shelley got it in one.

RS

The Roosevelt Indian Reservation in the Amazon rain forest is not a happy place. Last year the Cinta Larga Indians slaughtered 29 miners there, and in October the Brazilian who was trying to mediate the conflict was murdered at a cash machine. Neither of these events represented anything new. The reserve, located 2,100 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro, and named for Theodore Roosevelt when he visited Brazil in 1913, is also where a notorious massacre of Cinta Larga by rubber tappers took place in 1963; only one child in the village survived.

The immediate cause of the recent violence is not rubber but diamonds. The Roosevelt Indian Reservation may be sitting on one of the world’s largest deposits, and no one wants to leave it in the ground—neither the Indians, nor the itinerant diggers (garimpeiros), nor the government. But under present Brazilian law no one is free to begin digging. And this brings us to the deeper cause of murder and mayhem in the region.

Under Brazil’s constitution the country’s Indians are not full citizens. Instead they are legal minors, with the status of a protected species. This has one singular benefit for the Indians: the twelve Cinta Larga responsible for last year’s killing of 29 wildcat prospectors may enjoy immunity from prosecution and never face jail. But there is also a down side. As wards of the state, the Indians are denied the right to mine their own land.

As for outsiders, they must apply for permits to dig, and face endless bureaucratic delays that more often than not lead nowhere. The outcome is predictable. Frustrated in their own wishes, and hard-pressed by the impatient diggers, Indians make private deals, which then go sour—and the shooting starts.

At issue here is not just the law; the law is itself the product of an idea, or a set of ideas, that form its underlying assumptions. What should be done about endangered enclave societies situated in the midst of a modern nation? Can they, or their land, or their minerals be cut off and preserved, frozen in time, pristine and inviolate, forever? Or should they be?

The Figueiredo report

The massacre of the Cinta Larga in 1963 gave rise to a Brazilian state inquiry that became known as the Figueiredo Report (after the official in charge of the investigation). The inquiry was meant to find out about the shockingly grave deficiencies and abuses that were then being tolerated by the Indian Protection Service, including the use of individual Indians as slaves. Once it was completed, the old agency was closed down, and a new one created to replace it.

There the matter might have rested had not the London Sunday Times caught a whiff of scandal. The paper dispatched the travel writer Norman Lewis to Brazil; though he did not meet any Indians, he found all he needed in the Figueiredo Report. “By the descriptions of all who had seen them,” Lewis reported, “there were no more inoffensive and charming human beings on the planet than the forest Indians of Brazil.”

Having established a scene of primal innocence, Lewis proceeded to tell of the atrocities against the Cinta Larga, warning that they were being pushed to the brink of extinction and that there might not be a single Indian left by 1980. He concluded: “What a tragedy, what a reproach it will be for the human race if this is allowed to happen!” Reprinted all over the globe, his sensational article had profound and lasting effects.

The first of these effects was to enshrine a form of extreme protectionism, not only as a temporary means to an end–the human and cultural survival of the indigenous peoples of Brazil–but as an end in itself. Soon, all those working for Indian interests were of a single opinion: the only way to protect these tribal peoples was to create inviolable sanctuaries where they would “live their own lives preserving their own culture on their own land.”

The second effect was to galvanize a number of English explorers, writers, and anthropologists into setting up a permanent international lobby. The name of this flourishing body is Survival, self-described as “the world’s leading organization supporting tribal peoples.” Two men who have been associated with it from the outset are John Hemming and Robin Hanbury-Tenison.

Hemming, who served for two decades as the director of the Royal Geographical Society, has written a number of books about South America, among them an indispensable three-volume history of the impact of civilization on Brazil’s indigenous peoples–Red Gold, Amazon Frontier, and Die If You Must, the last installment of which appeared in 2003. Hanbury-Tenison, Hemming’s long-time friend, was also a founder of Survival and is today its president. Less well-known but also important is the documentary filmmaker Adrian Cowell, who has spoken up on behalf of the Amazonian Indians for nearly 50 years.

According to a recent article by Hemming in the British monthly Prospect, the campaign to ensure the survival of the Amazonian peoples appears to have succeeded. This is also the gist of the final chapter of Die If You Must, where he wrote:

The Indians will survive physically. Their populations have grown steadily since a nadir of near-extinction in the mid-20th century. Having fallen to little more than 100,000 in the 1950’s, they have more than tripled to some 350,000 and are generally rising fast.

The health of the Indians is basically good, Hemming reported in Die If You Must. The killers of yesteryear–measles, TB, pneumonia, cholera, and smallpox–are rare. Their land is also secure: “a remarkable 11 percent of the land-mass of Brazil is now reserved for Indians. The 587 indigenous areas total almost 105 million hectares–an area greater than France, Germany, and Benelux combined.” Environmentalist ideals and indigenous interests have apparently been reconciled: “From the air, [one reservation] now stands out as an immense rectangle of verdant vegetation framed by the dismal brown of arid ranch-lands.”

Explorers up the Amazon

It was in the 1950’s and 60’s that Hemming, Hanbury-Tenison, and Cowell, three young men from Oxford and Cambridge, launched themselves on the world. They were talented and energetic, they had good connections, and above all they shared a boyish taste for adventure. At Eton they probably read about Lawrence of Arabia; at Oxford, where Hemming and Hanbury-Tenison roomed together, they already knew that “exploring” was what they wanted to do most. They regarded the rain forests of Brazil as a natural field for their endeavors, and in no time they were paddling up the Amazon in canoes.

Adrian Cowell was a Cambridge man, and his precocity as an explorer makes an impressive tale in itself. As a student in 1954 he joined a university Trans-Africa Expedition. The following year he was in Asia. Then, as he relates in The Heart of the Forest (1961), “the Oxford and Cambridge Expedition to South America . . . brought me to the Amazon forest.” Thereafter he joined the Brazilian Centro Expedition, an enterprise associated with the creation of the new national capital of Brasilia. Its purpose was “to canoe down the Xingu River and burn an airstrip at the exact geographical center of Brazil.”

It was all tremendous fun and very romantic–a word that occurs spontaneously in the books of Hanbury-Tenison, who has written voluminously about his explorations and today runs a booking agency for exotic locations. Here, from his website, is a typical passage about adventuring in Afghanistan:

A sound like distant thunder made me look up at the rich blue cloudless sky before I turned to see twenty wild horsemen in turbans and flowing robes bearing down on me. They carried long-barreled rifles and had daggers in their belts. Beside their spirited horses loped large, hairy hounds. With their Genghis Khan moustaches and fine, aquiline noses they were almost caricatures of the bandits we had been warned about. I should have been frightened, but all I could think was that if I had to go I could not have found a more romantic end.

This tells us quite a bit about the attitude of all three men toward indigenous cultures. In light of it, Hanbury-Tenison must have been somewhat taken aback when, in 1971, he called on the anthropologist Margaret Mead at the Museum of Natural History in New York to tell her about Survival International (as Survival was then called), and she gave him a piece of her mind. Mead at the age of seventy was a very different person from the idealistic young woman who had visited Samoa in 1926. By 1971, she was fiercely unromantic, and the spectacle of yet another young Oxford “explorer” embarking on yet another “expedition up the Amazon” must have set her teeth on edge. With sturdy good sense she tried to talk him out of his fantasies.

In his 1973 book A Question of Survival, Hanbury-Tenison describes this “small, beady-eyed dumpling of a lady who sailed into the attack as I came through the door”:

The main point that annoyed [Mead] was the concept, unstated by me, that primitive peoples were any better off as they were. She said she was “maddened by antibiotic-ridden idealists who wouldn’t stand three weeks in the jungle” . . . and the whole “noble savage” concept almost made her foam at the mouth. “All primitive peoples,” she said, “lead miserable, unhappy, cruel lives, most of which are spent trying to kill each other.” The reason they lived in the unpleasant places they did, like the middle of the Brazilian jungle, was that nobody else would.

There was much talk in those days of the pharmaceutical benefits of rain forests, and Hanbury-Tenison and his friends were sure that the Amazon was about to make a huge contribution to the world’s health. (This was a little before the discovery of the supposed wonders of jojoba oil.) But Mead was having none of it:

She said that to protect [the Indians] on the grounds that they could be useful to us or contribute anything was nonsense. “No primitive person has ever contributed anything, or ever will,” she said. She had no time for suggestions of medical knowledge or the value of jungle lore.

The only grounds on which Mead relented were broadly humanitarian. For one thing, the Indians’ “art, culture, dancing, music, etc. was pleasant and attractive and their grandchildren might thank us for trying to preserve or at best record it now that we have the proper technical means–tape and film–for doing so.” For another thing, “it was bad for the world to let these people die, and the effort to prevent their extermination was good for mankind even if it failed.”

For the rest, however, Mead vehemently denied that the Indians

had any special reasons for being protected, as she denied any advantage of one race over another. She also claimed emphatically that they all wanted one thing only, and that was to have as many material possessions and comforts as possible. Those still running away in the jungle were the ones who had encountered the most unpleasant savagery from Europeans, and even though they might be having no contact now, if they could possibly get hold of any aluminum pots they would use them.

A history of atrocity

Although faithfully recorded by Hanbury-Tenison, Mead’s argument was as lost on him in 1971 as it is lost on legions of like-minded people today who mouth the slogans of multiculturalism. What Mead herself failed to grasp was that, naive though he may have sounded, Hanbury-Tenison and his friends had been radicalized, and they were never going to accept her bleak view of the tribal world. It was not that they had been reading Marx; instead, they had been reading Norman Lewis’s digest of the worst parts of the Figuereido Report, including Figuereido’s judgment that “the Indians [had] suffered tortures similar to those of Treblinka and Dachau.”

Torture, indeed, was too tame a word for what had taken place. In 1963 there had been massacres of the Cinta Larga tribe in Rondonia. One gunman’s taped testimony describes how an employee of a rubber company named Chico Luis

gave the chief a burst with his tommy gun to make sure, and after that he let the rest of them have it. . . . [A]ll the other guys had to do was finish off anyone still showing signs of life. . . . [T]here was a young Indian girl they didn’t shoot, with a kid of about five in one hand, yelling his head off. . . . Chico shot the kid through the head with his .45 and then grabbed hold of the woman–who by the way was very pretty. “Be reasonable,” I said, “why do you have to kill her?” In my view it was a waste. “What’s wrong with giving her to the boys? They haven’t set eyes on a woman for six weeks. Or we could give her as a present to de Brito. [their boss]”

But Chico would not listen:

He tied the Indian girl up and hung her head downward from a tree, legs apart, and chopped her in half right down the middle with his machete. Almost with a single chop I’d say. The village was like a slaughterhouse. He calmed down after he’d cut the woman up, and told us to burn down all the huts and throw the bodies into the river

This is unbearable: but it is not essentially different from what had happened to many Indians in Latin America after 1492. The lawless frontier was for centuries a refuge for loners, criminals, and violent psychopaths who had nothing to lose and could act with impunity. Those who went searching for El Dorado in the 1540’s behaved like packs of ravening wolves, seizing food from the same Indian villagers whom they then enslaved as porters, and who were tortured or killed when they failed to cooperate. As one soon learns from Hemming’s three-volume work, this sort of thing has had a very long history indeed.

Colonial nations fashion their heroes from the timber at hand, much of it twisted and full of knots. Australia, for example, invites its citizens to admire an unappealing Irish bandit named Ned Kelly. But the Kellys smell sweet alongside Brazil’s much romanticized bandeirantes. What are often referred to as expeditions of “pathfinders” from Sao Paulo into the interior in the first half of the 17th century were mostly slave raids aimed at catching, chaining, and marching back to the coast as many Indians as a group of well-armed and ruthless men could seize.

To be sure, there was sometimes a genuinely exploratory aspect to such forays. In Red Gold, Hemming offers a balanced account of this phase of Brazilian expansion inland, and fairly describes the ordeals of the bandeirantes themselves. Since slave-raiding was a central feature of traditional Indian culture, too, the journeys engaged whites, Indians, and those of mixed ancestry (mamelucos) in a common enterprise:

The Indians contributed their forest skills and geographical knowledge. They soon grasped the purpose of the mission and became expert enslavers of other natives. Although brutalized and worked hard by the captains of the bandeiras, the Indians probably enjoyed service on them. It was quite normal for Tupi warriors to make long marches through the forests to attack enemy tribes.

In the course of his own periodic visits to Brazil, Adrian Cowell seems to have come rather closer to the realities of Amazonian Indian life than either Hanbury-Tenison or Hemming. Although aware of the horrors long endured by Indians at the hands of slavers, settlers, and frontier psychopaths, he was also more prepared to face up to the grimmer aspects of the native cultures themselves, and to the horrors Indians had long inflicted on each other.

In The Heart of the Forest (1961), Cowell writes in idyllic prose of the partnership he formed with an Indian hunter, carrying his friend’s gun and studying his craft, teaching himself to decoy wildfowl by imitating their calls. But he also reports how, in 1958 on the Xingu River, there were continual killings of itinerant Brazilian rubber tappers (seringueiros) by Indians, and of Indians by seringueiros. A Juruna Indian told him how

first we lived lower down the Xingu and worked for the seringueiros, but they killed many [Indians] with rifles. So we came up here past the great rapids and lived till the seringueiros say they are friends and gave us rifles. So we went downriver again and worked for the seringueiros till they killed more Juruna. Then we killed many seringueiros and came back here and killed Trumai and Kamayura Indians. Then the Txukahamae tribe came and killed almost all of us so that we are only twelve now.

The Villas-Boas brothers

That is the way things were and always had been. And this, too, was a seemingly ineradicable aspect of the culture that Cowell thought worthy of being saved. Back in 1967, he had joined the brothers Claudio and Orlando Villas-Boas in an attempt to contact and “pacify” the elusive Kreen-Akrore. But violence in the camp was making it hard to manage a community where different tribal groups had been brought together for their own safety. The captions on a page of photographs in Cowell’s 1973 book, The Tribe that Hides from Man, read like the list of casualties on some exotic war memorial: “Above. Javaritu, a Trumai killed by Tapiokap. Above. Pionim, a Kayabi, killed Tapiokap to avenge his brother-in-law.” And so on.

Much has been written about the endeavor of the Villas-Boas brothers to establish the Xingu Indian refuge and entice the tribal remnants of the Kayabi or Txikao or Suya to join it. A passage from The Tribe that Hides from Man offers a glimpse into the thought processes of Claudio, a “Marxist philosopher” in the Latin American manner:

Look around this camp and you will see Indians are more loving than we are. But the expression of their love is confined to the limits of this society. They cut a hole in the wilderness to contain their family, but outside this camp is the jungle where they kill meat for food, kill bamboo for arrows, kill bushes for leaves for their beds. Killing is the essence of forest existence, and if you stopped it, the forest and the Indian would die. Within the Indian mind there is a complete division between the duties within the group and the absence of duty in the land of killing outside.

At one time, Claudio suggested that Indians should feel free to kill white seringueiros or any other uninvited marauders who came into the Xingu Park. While warning them of the inevitable costs of this practice as a permanent way of life, he understood that, according to the tribal code, revenge killing was natural, habitual, and inevitable.

Nor was this the only aspect of Amazonian Indian culture that was hard to reconcile with modern life. Strict rules of seclusion were found among all the upper-Xingu tribes. Women were subjected to draconian punishments for violations of taboo. In a British television documentary from the 1970’s, a young Mehinacu woman was asked what would happen if she were to glimpse, even accidentally, the sacred flutes played by the men. She would be gang-raped, she replied, smiling sadly as if in recognition that in the genteel world of her white interviewer, such sexual punishments—culturally authorized, approved, indeed mandatory—were unthinkable.

Horrors that had to go

Hemming’s account of Amazonian life is hard on the efforts of Christian missionaries, and especially hard on the Jesuits (“fanatical missionaries intent on replacing native society and beliefs with their own Christian model”). One line of grudging appreciation will be followed by the word “but” and ten lines of disparagement. As his impressive study proceeds from volume to volume, he becomes ever more severe, his language becomes more tendentious, and an austere secularism dictates his judgment of religious matters. In his recent article in Prospect, he approves only of the politically radical priests who began to appear in the 1960’s–“trained anthropologists who did not try to undermine indigenous beliefs and ceased to be aggressive proselytizers”–but his view of Catholic missionary activity before that point is mainly negative.

But what exactly were the religious authorities to do when they first arrived from Portugal and had to deal, for example, with the Tupinamba? Did they not have a clear obligation both to undermine and to prohibit certain indigenous beliefs? In modern times, we have seen the rise of whole political cultures gripped by pathology, with hideous consequences; so, too, sick ethnic cultures evolved historically in the tribal world. Few quite so sick as the Tupinamba have been recorded before or since.

They loved human flesh. Prestige and power centered on the ritual slaughtering of prisoners. In an account prepared by Alfred Métraux for the Smithsonian’s Handbook of South American Indians (1948), we read that the killing and eating of these prisoners (who were fattened for the purpose) “were joyful events which provided these Indians with the opportunity for merrymaking, aesthetic displays, and other emotional outlets.” Métraux then describes what took place at a cannibal feast after the victim’s skull was shattered:

Old women rushed to drink the warm blood, and children were invited to dip their hands in it. Mothers would smear their nipples with blood so that even babies could have a taste of it. The body, cut into quarters, was roasted on a barbecue, and the old women, who were the most eager for human flesh, licked the grease running along the sticks. Some portions, reputed to be delicacies or sacred, such as the fingers of the grease around the liver or heart, were allotted to distinguished guests.

That Portuguese settlers in the 16th century did not cope very well with this aspect of the Indian tribal world is probably true. That the missionaries who came after them did not handle the situation as they might have done is also likely. But if they had been around at the time, would John Hemming, or Robin Hanbury-Tenison, or Adrian Cowell, or the entire staff of Survival have done much better? Would any of us?

“All primitive peoples,” Margaret Mead had said to her young Oxford visitor, “lead miserable, unhappy, cruel lives, most of which are spent trying to kill each other.” She was overdoing it, but she had a point–a point largely lost sight of in today’s systematic sentimentalizing of the Stone Age.

The Indian prospect

Of course, as we have seen, Mead also acknowledged that certain aspects of Indian culture—“their art, culture, dancing, music, etc.”—deserved to survive, for the enjoyment of the people themselves and for the admiration of humanity as a whole. That, indeed, is more or less what has happened today in the Xingu Park and places like it elsewhere. On display in such places is a pacified, defanged, and somewhat feminized version of Amazonian culture, of the kind that middle-class travellers from the West like to see: a theatrical world where dressing-up in feathered regalia, and ritual ceremonies, and communal dancing never stop.

Hemming, who welcomes the prospect of self-determination, claims that “modern indigenous policy seeks to empower tribes to manage their own affairs.” Yet both self-determination and empowerment imply literacy and modern education; and here the picture is less clear. Officially, the children are learning to read and write, and in the last chapter of Die If You Must—a chapter with the title “Present and Future”—Hemming makes three rather perfunctory references to schooling. But at the same time, he strongly implies that in his vision of the future it does not matter whether the children learn to read and write or not, because others will be there to do things for them.

Who are these others? According to Hemming, the external political affairs of the Indians on the Xingu reserve are “supported by a remarkable contingent of 33 non-government organizations, a tireless band of missionaries, anthropologists, well-wishers, journalists, doctors, and lawyers, both in Brazil and abroad.” As for their internal welfare, that is served by a “resident tribe of whites, composed of social scientists, doctors, teachers, nurses, biologists, and agronomists from all parts of Brazil.” With friends like these, who needs self-determination?

What Hemming is describing is the fruit of the inviolable-sanctuary approach to cultural survival. This rests on what might be called fortress theory, and has two cardinal principles: that “culture” and “people” and “land” should be seen as indivisible, and that they can be kept this way forever in a suitably constructed territorial redoubt. Whatever is happening in the world around them, ethnic cultures should as far as possible be preserved unchanged. With the help of an army of administrative personnel, custodially responsible for seeing to it that they go on wanting the same things they have always wanted, their cultural heritage will be kept alive. Social change is bad—at least as it affects these picturesque tribal peoples—and should be stopped.

Among the Xingu Park Indians, it is in fact safe to say that the older generation remains strongly attached to its remote lands, and intends to go on living there, hunting animals and gathering fruits. But what do younger Indians want to do with their lives? If there is one thing we have learned from modern history, it is that individuals often outgrow their ethnic cultures, find life in a fortress claustrophobic, and choose to move on. In contrast to museum exhibits, real human beings have a way of developing ideas and ambitions and desires–including for aluminum pots–beyond the ken of conservators. Fortress theory, multicultural “essentialism,” and the enduring cult of the noble savage are the enemies of those ambitions and human desires.

In the final paragraph of Die If You Must, Hemming wonders uneasily whether the pessimists might have the last laugh after all–whether the Amazon’s “beautiful, ancient, and intricate cultures will be maintained only artificially as curiosities for tourists, researchers, or politically correct enthusiasts.” That is quite possible. But it is not the only undesirable eventuality.

Preserving ancient cultural patterns is laudable, but it is not enough. No society in history has ever stood still, and however beautiful, and ancient, and intricate ancient cultures may be, it is wrong to lock people up inside them and throw away the key. Uprooting the dishonest and patronizing cult of the noble savage is the work of generations; but as far as today’s Amazonian Indians are concerned, the main priority must surely be to ensure that those among them who do not want to play the obliging role of historical curiosities, endlessly dressing up for visitors whose expectations they feel bound to fulfil, are able to find something else to do in the modern world–on the reservation or off it. In that quest we can only wish them well.

In November 2011 the journal Society held a symposium on Chapter Thirteen of Robin Fox’s book The Tribal Imagination — “The Old Adam and the Last Man, Taming the Savage Mind.” My contribution (RS) dealt with some issues arising from the writings of Victor Turner, Durkheim, and Van Gennep. A short excerpt toward the end of the article takes up the question of the origins of theatre.

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O that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

Optimism struggles in this vision of the human prospect, where the restlessly tweeting “children of liberal democracy” are setting the world’s teeth on edge. We are reassured that “The Old Adam will have the Last Word.” But are his numerous descendants listening? It is encouraging to learn that in Victor Turner’s communitas one may find, however briefly, the peace that passeth understanding, along with fraternity of a kind; but after a friendly nod to Comte’s Religion of Humanity it’s hardly surprising that at the end of Robin Fox’s unique and immensely stimulating book, the author, like the rest of us, ends up worrying about social solidarity, and whether the political structure of civil society is strong enough to hold. His closing ruminations are wide in scope. Perhaps Victor Turner’s thoughts on Durkheim, Bergson, and communitas might be a place to begin.

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That Turner often had Durkheim’s ideas about solidarity at the back of his mind emerges in a discussion of ‘Liminality and Communitas’ in The Ritual Process (106-107). There he lists what he calls “a series of binary oppositions or discriminations” in which the first term denotes an amorphous transitional or “liminal” social state, while the second denotes rank, order, organization, and social structure generally. Twenty-six such oppositions are offered, the following ten being representative pairs:

Totality/partiality
Homogeneity/heterogeneity
Communitas/Structure
Equality/inequality
Absence of property/property
Absence of status/status
Absence or rank/distinctions of rank
Humility/pride of position
No distinctions of wealth/distinctions of wealth
Unselfishness/selfishness (Turner 1969: 106)

From their tone one feels it might not be too unfair to summarise the first and morally favored terms of the opposition as follows: The homogeneous totality of communitas is an ethically superior human condition where equality, humility, and unselfishness spontaneously prevail. Yet on reading through this list something seems to be missing — something you’d expect to find. Where in this lexicon is the word “solidarity”? Doesn’t Durkheim’s term and concept plainly belong among these alternatives? Given the drift of Turner’s thought — especially when you consider that solidarity is the tribal-communitarian virtue par excellence — shouldn’t one expect to see it in there too? And more than that: wouldn’t you logically expect to find solidarity on the left side, as the first and honored term, with its dishonoured antonyms aligned on the right, as below?

Solidarity / inequality, property, rank, wealth, pride

But it doesn’t appear. And when, eventually — in the following chapter, and not until many pages later — Turner decides that the concept of solidarity should perhaps be part of the argument, his acknowledgment only deepens the mystery. Expanding on the communitarian ideals of Martin Buber, and picturing a social model of “homogeneous, unstructured communitas whose boundaries are ideally coterminous with those of the human species”, Turner writes that “communitas is in this respect strikingly different from Durkheimian ‘solidarity,’ the force of which depends on an in-group out-group contrast.” (Not just different, but strikingly different.) After this he goes on to add even more problematically that “to some extent, communitas is to solidarity as Henri Bergson’s “open morality” is to his “closed morality.” (Turner 1969: 132)

We shall return to Bergson. As for Durkheim, one might first note that the passage quoted above provides in a confusing way the missing opposition we were looking for earlier (communitas/solidarity). Yet surprisingly, and against all expectation, solidarity is found on the pejorative side of the division as an anti-communitarian and disfavoured term. Since Durkheim famously invented two forms of solidarity (firstly “mechanical,” based on the sameness of social units; secondly “organic”, based on the complementarity of disparate social units in what Hayek would call the extended order of human cooperation) it is quite possible that he means the second. But at the same time such an emphasis would seem odd, since everyone already familiar with Durkheim knows this — knows that “organic solidarity” refers to the vast complex of anonymous and invisible interdependencies on which modern social organization rests. Surely the only point of associating Durkheim with communitas would be to bring out the obvious parallel — the very striking parallel in fact — between Turner’s notion of absolute homogeneity and Durkheim’s concept of “mechanical solidarity” on the other, something the French thinker describes in what are virtually Turner’s terms when describing communitas:

If, by a process of thought, we attempt to constitute the ideal type of a society whose cohesion would result exclusively from resemblances, we would have to conceive of it as consisting of an absolutely homogeneous mass whose parts would not be distinguishable from one another… In short, the mass would be devoid of any definite form or articulation. (Durkheim 1984: 126)

Secondly, as to the claim that “Durkheimian ‘solidarity’… depends on an in-group out-group contrast,” Turner is less than convincing. As usually understood, Durkheimian solidarity concerns internal matters of integration and cohesion. To be sure, it assumes a boundary between sociological exhibits A and B. It may also be conceded that as a group’s sense of solidarity grows, so does its awareness of the boundary between “us” and “them.” But as a contingent social attribute solidarity is clearly both endogenous, and at the same time largely indifferent to out-groups, whether contrasting, similar, or isomorphic. The empirical entity itself may be as small as a family or as large as an empire. But the solidarity that Durkheim describes in The Division of Labor is exclusively a matter of internal integration. External boundaries are something he takes for granted.

Then there’s the allusion to Bergson: “to some extent,” writes Turner, “communitas is to solidarity as Henri Bergson’s “open morality” is to his “closed morality.” The phrase “to some extent” warns that the analogy is imperfect. But one has to ask, more radically, does it in fact express what the philosopher really meant? Or has Turner somehow got things back to front? Bergson did make occasional statements that appear to justify the equivalence Turner claims. In Two Sources of Morality and Religion, where he describes the human scene in evolutionary terms as consisting of “closed societies” (the tribal world) or “open societies” (the post-Socratic and Christian world of Western Civilization), he distinguishes “the closed soul” and “the open soul” as follows: “Suppose we say that (the open soul) embraces all humanity: we should not be going too far, we should hardly be going far enough, since its love may extend to animals, to plants, to all nature.” (Bergson 1935:27)

But here he is speaking of the expansive moral universe where “No man is an island entire of itself”, a moral universe of rational and independent agents all of whom are nonetheless “A part of the main.” Far from being a structureless and somewhat nebulous domain of feeling like communitas, Bergson’s “open society” is (to borrow from Jacques Barzun) a House of Intellect — a house of many mansions in which a myriad social and intellectual activities powerfully and creatively interact. A House of Intellect is not the same as a Sea of Feeling. It is the dwelling place of clear thought rather than the excitements of the limbic system. Despite what Turner evidently believed, Bergson’s “open society” contains the structural complexity of all the legal constraints, contracts, and civil obligations of the functionally differentiated and multifarious Gesellschaft world, as we must assume Karl Popper understood when he adopted the phrase for the title of The Open Society.

Communitas: a Cuban example

In Turner the ideal of communitas seems to embody a dream of escaping the constraints of social structure that closely resembles the utopian dream of political statelessness — the dissolution of social structure paralleling the withering away of the state. All the same, and while a degree of scepticism may be appropriate, there’s clearly a mysteriously communal “something” here that many people report experiencing, and that has a number of literary reflections, from Walt Whitman exuberantly adrift on the oceanic currents of the city, to Chekhov’s country doctor Dorn, in The Seagull, recalling his enjoyment of Genoa with its evening streets “surging with people. You let yourself drift among the crowd… live its life, its soul pours into you, until finally you begin to believe there might really be a ‘world spirit’ after all…” The Sea of Feeling, with its oceanic sensations soaking up and absorbing all the pains and troubles of the troublesome Family of Man, is surely an experiential reality that should be recognized — however hard it is to describe or explain.

At a practical level, however, what is noticeable is its transience. Its instability. How ephemeral it is, that shining dewy dawn of communitarian unity with its holy trinity of freedom, equality, and fraternity. And how quickly it flips into a harsher state as the revolution’s noonday sun beats down. Chemical metaphors come to mind — crystallization for example. One minute there’s the sweetly smiling ambience of come one, come all; the next minute men are waving guns.

Something like this happened to me fifty years ago in Havana about six months after Castro had taken power. Despite restrictions on visits by US citizens, the New Zealand passport I had at the time enabled me to stop over for twelve hours on a Cubana Airways flight home from Mexico City to New York. The atmosphere was infectiously optimistic (Durkheim’s term “effervescent” may belong here). A taxi took me out on a ride along the coast to Miramar where mansions were supposedly being converted into homes for orphans, or into schools or hospitals; and the friendly enthusiasm of the workmen seemed genuine, a feeling that was exhilarating and new — a feeling, moreover, that made you surer than ever that the revolutionary removal of Fulgencio Batista along with the gangsters around Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano could only be for the better. That I was visiting the expropriated homes of what may formerly have been honorable law-abiding Cuban citizens living decent lives never crossed my mind. If there was blood on the walls I didn’t look for it. I neither knew nor cared whether the previous owners were alive or dead. As Paul Hollander has ably documented, such is the mental world of the political fellow-traveller.

Then later in the day I found myself on the fringes of an assembly of perhaps 10,000 people gathered in a central square. Castro was supposed to speak and a rostrum was ready. I stood there idling a long time, wandering about to break the monotony, waiting perhaps four hours for the appearance of el maximo lider. It’s true that this was neither the inception of the Cuban Revolution (to locate it among Fox’s instances of communitas in daily life) nor the revolution itself. The specific revolutionary phase was visually identifiable by the many ESSO signs that had been eagerly torn down, but that nobody knew what to do with. Jumbled where cars formerly had parked, they showed how much easier it is to wreck than to build — especially in the case of political upheavals.

But it was the mood of the crowd, liminal, liminoid, or whatever, that may be of interest. This being that of men and women passionately sharing egalitarian beliefs and sentiments, eagerly awaiting their charismatic leader, and closely bonded by a spirit of — well, call it communitas. Within this animated collectivity I was at first welcomed as a sympathetic member. But the passing hours brought doubts as to who I was and what I was doing, while my mien as an alien observer became a perceptible matter of concern. At this point a girl of twenty or so wearing military fatigues approached me with a pin and a miniature revolutionary flag, and with a look impossible not to misinterpret, firmly pinned the flag on my shirt.

Doubtless that was to be expected. My suggestion, however, is that the warmly deliquescent, unbounded, we’re-all-in-this-together state, the sublime condition recorded by Turner as communitas, and one that might fairly have characterised the emotions of the assembly, quickly crystallized into another where latent structure was abruptly laid bare… Castro, by the way, never turned up. He sent the Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party instead. And the girl in fatigues with her revolutionary flags turned out to be routinized charisma in its direst form: a uniformed official of the One-Party State.

From Ritual to Theatre

In From Ritual to Theatre Turner reminds us on page 114 that the etymological meaning of “entertainment” is “held-in-between”. In agricultural societies in historic times it was a “liminal or liminoid phenomenon” held in between bouts of plowing, harvesting, eating, house-building, and so on. In the introduction to his book he says that its essays “chart my personal voyage of discovery from traditional anthropological studies of ritual performance to a lively interest in modern theatre, particularly experimental theatre.” However, the claimed historical connection between ritual and theatre is not uncontroversial. A severely semiological work by Eli Rozik, The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and other Theories of Origin, (University of Iowa Press, 2002) argues uncompromisingly that “The medium of theatre could not have originated in ritual, since these are ontologically different entities.” The claim that they “could not have originated in ritual” sounds a bit extreme, but that they “need not” is surely defensible. As a one-time film-maker who recorded a number of the Australian Aboriginal ceremonies that figure in both Durkheim’s and Van Gennep’s writings about religion, it may not be inappropriate here for me to simply describe what I saw — suspending judgment and ignoring definitional fuss for the time being: e.g., Is it ritual? Or drama? Or theatre? Or communitas? Or what?

Anyway let’s clear the decks. For the sake of evolutionary argument let us agree that story-telling must be as old as language, and that hunting adventures and the haps and mishaps of gathering roots and berries must have been recited around camp fires for uncounted millennia. Any storyteller of imagination will “act out” certain scenes to make them more interesting; he at first does this solo before an audience of varying size; and the larger the role of the histrionic the more a division is recognized between the “as is” descriptive world of everyday and the “as if” imaginative world of fiction and myth. We thus have a suite of four elements: story, mimesis, actor and audience, and an emergent awareness that in the “as if” world depicted in drama, which soon goes far beyond describing events to the telling of some very tall tales indeed, everyday reality is not to be expected.

Australia appears to have had a largely isolated hunter-gatherer population for 40,000 to 50,000 years before European settlement. I suggest that throughout this period the above suite of theatrical elements may well have existed, and that there are no strong reasons for believing that it did not. All traditional Aboriginal ceremonies told a story; actors personifying totemic figures acted scenes from the story; the performance space separated them from an audience; this spatial separation might be seen as gradually strengthening a cognitive separation between different orders of human social reality, the “players” belonging to one and the audience to another. It is true that the roles of such totemic characters as “kangaroo-men” and “emu-men” are conventional and their actions relatively unvarying. We might say there is an element of ritualization. Nevertheless audiences appreciate the predictable action as much as any modern audience appreciates the predictable death of Claudius or the fate of villains in general. The classic ethnography of Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) describes a ceremony in which actors playing a series of sinister “Kurdaitcha men” (or witches) are violently killed by an old man who is their would-be victim. The authors write that:

A mock fight took place in which the Kurdaitcha was always worsted and tumbled down, the old man each time giving him a final tap with his club, which particularly pleased the audience, for in these performances there are certain conventional actions which must be observed by the actors. One after another the Kurdaitcha men came up, and each was worsted in his turn.

When apparently all had been killed the old man still went wandering about, and the same performance was again gone through. After about fifteen minutes had been spent in this way the old man leisurely walked back to the group of spectators, once more killing each of the men before he got there.

When close to home a combined attack was made upon him, but with no success, as he killed them all and the performance ended with him standing, brandishing his club over their dead bodies, which were heaped together in front of him. The actions of the old man and of the Kurdaitcha men might have been copied from a stage fight. (My emphasis, RS)

In the 1970 film Pintubi Revisit Yaru-Yaru a scene showing a man and boy ambushed at night followed a similar scenario. But were not Aboriginal “increase ceremonies” solemn religious events rather than enactments of violent affrays? In most cases they were — or they were in large part. At these, the Durkheimean boundary between the sacred and the profane was very clear. In the late 1960s our film production team provided transport for the Aboriginal participants, all of them male since women were excluded from such events, back to sacred sites in the desert where the action took place. These were waterholes and rocky outcrops often associated with caves, where totemic spirits dwelled, and they were sometimes many miles from where the men were living at the time. Coming closer, bumping along the dusty desert tracks, we passed both territorially and psychologically from the profane to the sacred, a change signalled conversationally as talk became more constrained, sotto voce, and whispered. Upon our arrival a hush descended, followed by the weeping of men whose failure to visit the site in recent years, because they resided far away, made them feel a guilty regret for neglecting the spirits of their ancestors. (Sandall, see Endnote about films.)

At this introductory stage initiates might be shown the churinga. These long boards carved with totemic designs were described by the Australian anthropologist L. R. Hiatt as “the religious property of one clan… conceived as a tangible relic of the clan’s totemic ancestry.” (Hiatt 1996: 107) Stored well hidden at normal times in obscure crevices and caves, their recovery and display preceded the main ceremonial action. A dramatic example of this occurs in the film Pintubi Revisit Yumari. At dusk the six-foot tall churinga were held erect by a line of ten men of seniority, while smoke swirled about them from blazing spinifex fires. Young men and juvenile initiates then raced across 100 yards of desert to embrace the totemic relics, while fearsome guttural rumblings rising and falling — the baleful admonitions of neglected spirits? — were flung at the initiates as darkness fell. The intimidating nature of the occasion exemplified the universal teen-taming and team-building aspects of male initiation; in earlier years the grim rite of subincision would probably have accompanied the event.

Now, in terms of Arnold van Gennep’s three major stages as set out in The Rites of Passage (separation, transition, incorporation; or séparation, marge, aggrégation in French), the long drive to the sacred site of Yumari in Western Australia involved an unmistakable spatial separation. And by the time the initiates were being frightened into submission by the display of totemic relics we were well into the transitional stage. At another site, shown in the film Emu Ritual at Ruguri, the mood of awed respect for the ancestral shrine lasted through a period in which neophytes were introduced to the painted designs on the walls and ceilings of a cave. These designs had been restored by men senior in the hierarchy of religious knowledge, and men who belonged to one of two moieties (or ‘phratries’ in Durkheim). Plainly, Turner’s “structure” was ever-present. By the same token, however, the communitas-creating music never stopped. It accompanied all ground painting, cave painting, and body painting, along with the building of the wood and hair-string emblems called wanigi; hour after hour its hypnotic and intriguing melody and rhythm served to transport listeners into another realm. Durkheim, drawing on the accounts in Spencer and Gillen’s 1899 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, describes how even if the music momentarily stopped and “the singing died away”, it would suddenly be taken up again. (Durkheim 1965: 249) See video, Emu Ritual.

Neurobiology and rhythm

The neurobiological interest of all this may be obvious, as also its relevance to Fox’s discussion of “savage rhythms and civilized rhymes” in Chapter Nine of The Tribal Imagination. Likewise the matter of neural disinhibition. From those Aboriginal songs beaten out with a heavy stone on the cave floor at the sacred site of Ruguri, to Gregorian chant, to the contemporary mosh pit with its writhing ecstatics, one can see why Oliver Sacks says “the primary function of music is collective and communal, to bring and bind people together.” Truistic, if not trite, the point is nevertheless worth reiterating. He goes on to write that “people sing together and dance together in every culture… and one can imagine them having done so around the first fires, a hundred thousand years ago.” In the documentary films I am describing, however, one does not have to imagine it: they vividly show an artistic union of music, dance, and mimetic theatre that appears to be of immense human antiquity. Regarding the collective excitement and social bonding of music Sacks continues:

…there seems to be, in some sense, an actual binding or ‘marriage’ of nervous systems, a ‘neurogamy’ (to use a word the early mesmerists favored). The binding is accomplished by rhythm — not only heard but internalized, identically, in all who are present. Rhythm turns listeners into participants, makes listening active and motoric, and synchronizes the brains and minds (and since emotion is always intertwined with music, the ‘hearts’) of all who participate. (Sacks 2008: 266)

This “synchronizing” of brains and minds may also be thought of as aiding the experiential fusion of past and present where the Aboriginal “Dreamtime” was actualized, its totemic heroes materialized, and they became prepared to enact their legendary travels and adventures once again. Dramatically, we have a story often filled with blood and violence and rapine; we have scenes of action drawn from mythology; we have mimetic impersonations of definite characters; we have allowance made in these impersonations for a degree of individual interpretation. On other matters theatrical, was there during these totemic re-enactments some sort of physical boundary line dividing audience and actors? No: neither a line nor a proscenium. Audience and actors faced each other on level ground. But a clear space marked the performance region of the two or three actors, on the one hand, and the thirty-odd men of the audience/chorus on the other. This loosely corresponded to the contrasting social realities of the “as if” world, where anything is possible, and the “as is” world where men cannot usually fly or travel underground. Next, carrying the emblems of the rite, the men representing the dreamtime heroes moved away to take up their positions — positions perhaps 100 yards distant across the desert.

Then the action began, each actor dancing out from the heat-hazy horizon toward the audience/chorus accompanied by continual cries and exhortation, until, at the climax, his approach brought him close to the others — so near that it was time to return from the Dreamtime to the world of everyday. While it is true that the sacred site was initially treated with hushed respect, it would be wrong to imagine that solemnity always prevailed. In the film Walbiri Ritual at Gunadjari the most eagerly awaited performance involved the totemic hero Wadaingula, a kind of subterranean sexual predator who travelled underground, emerging periodically to rape and pillage, rape evidently being his preferred mode of insemination. The man playing Wadaingula carried before him a six-foot artificial phallus. While he danced, accompanied by prodigious choral uproar and clattering boomerangs, this emblem — it was just a long bundle of straw tied with string — began to detumesce (the Birth of Tragedy perhaps?) to the hilarity of everyone who was there. And a good time was had by all.

So what exactly was this? Ritual? Drama? Comedy or tragedy? Who shall say? Whatever, it was assuredly, as Turner writes commenting on rituals in Central Africa (Turner 1982: 109) “an orchestration of symbolic actions and objects in all the sensory codes — visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, gustatory — full of music and dancing and with interludes of play and entertainment.” And the fidelity of Durkheim’s now 100-year-old account in The Elementary Forms was striking. A dance included in the film Pintubi Revisit Yaru-Yaru shows a snaking line of men, one behind the other, rising from a kneeling position with their hands on each other’s waists and swaying from side to side in unison. Here is Durkheim, drawing on Spencer and Gillen:

With fires lighted on all sides, making the whiteness of the gum-trees stand out sharply against the surrounding darkness, the Uluuru knelt down one behind the other beside the mound, then rising from the ground they went around it, with a movement in unison, their two hands resting upon their thighs, then a little farther on they knelt down again, and so on. At the same time they swayed their bodies, now to the right and now to the left, while uttering at each movement a piercing cry, a veritable yell, “Yrrsh! Yrrsh! Yrrsh!” … One can readily conceive how, when arrived at this state of exaltation, a man does not recognize himself any longer… Feeling himself dominated and carried away by some sort of an external power which makes him think and act differently than in normal times, he naturally has the impression that he is no longer himself. (Durkheim 1965: 249)

And of course the dancer “is not himself.” Or not his hunting/killing/eating material self. For the duration of the dance he dwells in the imaginary “as if” world of myths and totems along with Wadaingula and kindred spirits. Whilst there his condition is transformed, exalted, liminal, betwixt and between. The dance recorded by Spencer and Gillen was performed among the Warramunga. The territory of the Pintubi tribe whose ceremonies we filmed was further west, and the Pintubi dance ended less boisterously than the Warramunga version as I recall. At the finale the line of men were kneeling down again, their heads lowered and their bodies locked closely behind each other.

Silently, dust hanging in the windless air, an elder who might well be called a master of ceremonies, acting with priestly deliberation and gesturing with the delicacy of someone awaking sleepers from a dream, went slowly down the line touching each man in turn. Released from the world of the Dreaming, they rose to resume their ordinary lives. Subdued conversation began again. Had Durkheim been able to see this action first-hand he would have been pleased to note that each man in the line formed an identical segment like the parts of a centipede — the very model of mechanical solidarity. And, indeed, much more than that. Central Australian increase ceremonies, held annually, were intended to encourage the growth and proliferation of animals and vegetation, and of the fertility of the totemically associated clans. As such, the theory behind them, enlarged on in a broadly religious context by Van Gennep at the conclusion of his book, is “a cosmic conception that relates the stages of human existence to those of plant and animal life and, by a sort of pre-scientific divination, joins them to the great rhythms of the universe.” (Van Gennep 1960: 194)

Note re documentary films

The various ethnographic documentary films mentioned in the text were all produced between 1967 and 1972 by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (now the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies). They have not been publicly seen for forty years, and I am understand that insuperable obstacles prevent their research use at the Institute. The reasons are various. Firstly, in the early 1970s the elders of the communities concerned were anxious to preserve the secrecy of the rites. Secondly, the matter of exclusivity became an exploitable issue for various Indigenous political interests.

Thirdly, however, it must be recognized that nudity, the copious blood-letting some ceremonial activities entailed (human blood from opened arm veins was spilled on various sacra, was spurted as an elixir into the mouths of elderly participants, and was also widely used as a fixative for building emblems), along with the overtly sexual nature of some scenes, made such records discomfiting for those who want a sanitized and romantically falsified version of the Australian Aboriginal past, and who find such records both disturbing and embarrassing. The following videos offer a selection of scenes from four separate titles: Emu Ritual, Pintubi Revisit Yumari, Yaru-Yaru, Mulga Seed Ceremony.

References

Bergson, Henri. (1935) Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Macmillan: London [Original French edition 1932]
Durkheim, Emile. (1984) The Division of Labour in Society. Macmillan: London [Original French edition 1893]
Durkheim, Emile. (1965) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Free Press: New York [Original French edition 1912]
Fox, Robin. (2011) The Tribal Imagination. Harvard: Cambridge, Mass.
Hiatt, L. R. (1996) Arguments about Aborigines. Cambridge University Press: UK
Rozik, Eli. (2002) The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and other Theories of Origin. University of Iowa Press: Iowa City
Turner, Victor. (1969) The Ritual Process. Aldine: Chicago
Turner, Victor. (1982) From Ritual to Theatre. PAJ Publications: New York
Sacks, Oliver. (2008) Musicophilia. Vintage, New York
Sandall, R. Documentary films. Pintubi Revisit Yaru-Yaru, Pintubi Revisit Yumari, Emu Ritual at Ruguri, Walbiri Ritual at Gunadjari, The Mulga Seed Ceremony. All films directed by Roger Sandall and produced by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies, Canberra.
Spencer, Baldwin, and Gillen, F. J. (1968) The Native Tribes of Central Australia. Dover: New York [Originally published 1899]
Van Gennep, Arnold. (1960) The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. [Originally published 1909]

In November 2011 the sociological journal Society held a symposium on Chapter Thirteen of Robin Fox’s book The Tribal Imagination — “The Old Adam and the Last Man, Taming the Savage Mind.” My contribution (RS) dealt with some issues arising from the writings of Victor Turner, Durkheim, and Van Gennep. This short excerpt toward the end of the article takes up the question of the origins of theatre.

From Ritual to Theatre

In From Ritual to Theatre Turner reminds us on page 114 that the etymological meaning of entertainment is “held-in-between”. In agricultural societies in historic times it was a “liminal or liminoid phenomenon” held in between bouts of plowing, harvesting, eating, house-building, and so on. In the introduction to his book he says that its essays “chart my personal voyage of discovery from traditional anthropological studies of ritual performance to a lively interest in modern theatre, particularly experimental theatre.” However, the claimed historical connection between ritual and theatre is not uncontroversial. A severely semiological work by Eli Rozik, The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and other Theories of Origin, (University of Iowa Press, 2002) argues uncompromisingly that “The medium of theatre could not have originated in ritual, since these are ontologically different entities.” The claim that they “could not have originated in ritual” sounds a bit extreme, but that they “need not” is surely defensible. As a one-time film-maker who recorded a number of the Australian Aboriginal ceremonies that figure in both Durkheim’s and Van Gennep’s writings about religion, it may not be inappropriate here for me to simply describe what I saw — suspending judgment and ignoring definitional fuss for the time being: e.g., Is it ritual? Or drama? Or theatre? Or communitas? Or what?

Anyway let’s clear the decks. For the sake of evolutionary argument let us agree that story-telling must be roughly as old as language, and that hunting adventures and the haps and mishaps of gathering roots and berries must have been recited around camp fires for countless millennia. Any storyteller of imagination will “act out” certain scenes to make them more interesting; he at first does this solo before an audience of varying size; and the larger the role of the histrionic the more a division is recognized between the “as is” descriptive world of everyday and the “as if” imaginative world of fiction and myth. We thus have a suite of four elements: story, mimesis, actor and audience, and an emergent awareness that in the “as if” world depicted in drama, which soon goes far beyond merely describing events to the telling of some very tall tales indeed, everyday reality is not to be expected.

Australia appears to have had a largely isolated hunter-gatherer population for 40,000 to 50,000 years before European settlement. I suggest that throughout this period the above suite of theatrical elements may well have existed, and that there are no strong reasons for believing that it did not. All traditional Aboriginal ceremonies told a story; actors personifying totemic figures acted scenes from the story; the performance space separated them from an audience; this spatial separation might be seen as gradually strengthening a cognitive separation between different orders of human social reality, the “players” belonging to one and the audience to another. It is true that the roles of such totemic characters as “kangaroo-men” and “emu-men” are conventional and their actions relatively unvarying. We might say there is an element of ritualization. Nevertheless audiences appreciate the predictable action as much as any modern audience appreciates the predictable death of Claudius or the fate of villains in general. The classic ethnography of Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) describes a ceremony in which actors playing a series of sinister “Kurdaitcha men” (or witches) are violently killed by an old man who is their would-be victim. The authors write that:

A mock fight took place in which the Kurdaitcha was always worsted and tumbled down, the old man each time giving him a final tap with his club, which particularly pleased the audience, for in these performances there are certain conventional actions which must be observed by the actors. One after another the Kurdaitcha men came up, and each was worsted in his turn.

When apparently all had been killed the old man still went wandering about, and the same performance was again gone through. After about fifteen minutes had been spent in this way the old man leisurely walked back to the group of spectators, once more killing each of the men before he got there.

When close to home a combined attack was made upon him, but with no success, as he killed them all and the performance ended with him standing, brandishing his club over their dead bodies, which were heaped together in front of him. The actions of the old man and of the Kurdaitcha men might have been copied from a stage fight. (My emphasis, RS)

In the 1970 film Pintubi Revisit Yaru-Yaru a scene showing a man and boy ambushed at night followed a similar scenario. But were not Aboriginal “increase ceremonies” solemn religious events rather than enactments of violent affrays? In most cases they were — or they were in large part. At these, the Durkheimean boundary between the sacred and the profane was very clear. In the late 1960s our film production team provided transport for the Aboriginal participants, all of them male since women were excluded from such events, back to sacred sites in the desert where the action took place. These were waterholes and rocky outcrops often associated with caves, where totemic spirits dwelled, and they were sometimes many miles from where the men were living at the time. Coming closer, bumping along the dusty desert tracks, we passed both territorially and psychologically from the profane to the sacred, a change signalled conversationally as talk became more constrained, sotto voce, and whispered. Upon our arrival a hush descended, followed by the weeping of men whose failure to visit the site in recent years, because they resided far away, made them feel a guilty regret for neglecting the spirits of their ancestors. (Sandall, see Endnote about films.)

At this introductory stage initiates might be shown the churinga. These long boards carved with totemic designs were described by the Australian anthropologist L. R. Hiatt as “the religious property of one clan… conceived as a tangible relic of the clan’s totemic ancestry.” (Hiatt 1996: 107) Stored well hidden at normal times in obscure crevices and caves, their recovery and display preceded the main ceremonial action. A dramatic example of this occurs at the beginning of the film Pintubi Revisit Yumari. At dusk the six-foot tall churinga were held erect by a line of ten men of seniority, while smoke swirled about them from blazing spinifex fires. Young men and juvenile initiates then raced across 100 yards of desert to embrace the totemic relics, while fearsome guttural rumblings rising and falling — the baleful admonitions of neglected spirits? — were flung at the initiates as darkness fell. The intimidating nature of the occasion exemplified the universal teen-taming and team-building aspects of male initiation; in earlier years the rite of subincision would probably have accompanied the event. (See Appendix for film links.)

Now, in terms of Arnold van Gennep’s three major stages as set out in The Rites of Passage (separation, transition, incorporation; or séparation, marge, aggrégation in French), the long drive to the sacred site of Yumari in Western Australia involved an unmistakable spatial separation. And by the time the initiates were being frightened into submission by the display of totemic relics we were well into the transitional stage. At another site, shown in the film Emu Ritual at Ruguri, the mood of awed respect for the ancestral shrine lasted through a period in which neophytes were introduced to the painted designs on the walls and ceilings of a cave. These designs had been restored by men senior in the hierarchy of sacred knowledge, and men who belonged to one of two moieties (or ‘phratries’ in Durkheim). Plainly, Turner’s “structure” was ever-present. By the same token, however, the communitas-creating music never stopped. It accompanied all ground painting, cave painting, and body painting, along with the building of the wood and hair-string emblems called wanigi; hour after hour its hypnotic and intriguing melody and rhythm served to transport listeners into another realm. Durkheim, drawing on the accounts in Spencer and Gillen’s 1899 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, describes how even if the music momentarily stopped and “the singing died away”, it would suddenly be taken up again. (Durkheim 1965: 249)

Neurobiology and the matter of rhythm

The neurobiological interest of all this may be obvious, as also its relevance to Fox’s discussion of “savage rhythms and civilized rhymes” in Chapter Nine of The Tribal Imagination. Likewise the matter of neural disinhibition. From Aboriginal songs beaten out with a heavy stone on the cave floor in the film Emu Ritual, to Gregorian chant, to the contemporary mosh pit with its writhing ecstatics, one can see why Oliver Sacks says “the primary function of music is collective and communal, to bring and bind people together.” Truistic, if not trite, the point is nevertheless worth reiterating. He goes on to write that “people sing together and dance together in every culture… and one can imagine them having done so around the first fires, a hundred thousand years ago.” In the documentary films I am describing, however, one does not have to imagine it: they vividly show an artistic union of music, dance, and mimetic theatre that appears to be of immense human antiquity. Regarding the collective excitement and social bonding of music Sacks continues: (Emu Ritual)

…there seems to be, in some sense, an actual binding or ‘marriage’ of nervous systems, a ‘neurogamy’ (to use a word the early mesmerists favored). The binding is accomplished by rhythm — not only heard but internalized, identically, in all who are present. Rhythm turns listeners into participants, makes listening active and motoric, and synchronizes the brains and minds (and since emotion is always intertwined with music, the ‘hearts’) of all who participate. (Sacks 2008: 266)

This “synchronizing” of brains and minds may also be thought of as aiding the experiential fusion of past and present where the Aboriginal “Dreamtime” was actualized, its totemic heroes materialized, and they became prepared to enact their legendary travels and adventures once again. Dramatically, we have a story often filled with blood and violence and rapine; we have scenes of action drawn from mythology; we have mimetic impersonations of definite characters; we have allowance made in these impersonations for a degree of individual interpretation. On other matters theatrical, was there during these totemic re-enactments some sort of physical boundary line dividing audience and actors? No: neither a line nor a proscenium. Audience and actors faced each other on level ground. But a clear space marked the performance region of the two or three actors, on the one hand, and the thirty-odd men of the audience/chorus on the other. This loosely corresponded to the contrasting social realities of the “as if” world, where anything is possible, and the “as is” world where men cannot usually fly or travel underground. Next, carrying the emblems of the rite, the men representing the dreamtime heroes moved away to take up their positions — positions perhaps 100 yards distant across the desert.

Then the action began, each actor dancing out from the heat-hazy horizon toward the audience/chorus accompanied by continual cries and exhortation, until, at the climax, his approach brought him close to the others — so near that it was time to return from the Dreamtime to the world of everyday. While it is true that the sacred site was initially treated with hushed respect, it would be wrong to imagine that solemnity always prevailed. In the film Walbiri Ritual at Gunadjari the most eagerly awaited performance involved the totemic hero Wadaingula, a kind of subterranean sexual predator who travelled underground, emerging periodically to rape and pillage, rape evidently being his preferred mode of insemination. The man playing Wadaingula carried before him a six-foot artificial phallus. While he danced, accompanied by prodigious choral uproar and clattering boomerangs, this emblem — it was just a long bundle of straw tied with string — began to detumesce (the Birth of Tragedy perhaps?) to the hilarity of everyone who was there. And a good time was had by all.

So what exactly was this? Ritual? Drama? Comedy or tragedy? Who shall say? Whatever, it was assuredly, as Turner writes commenting on rituals in Central Africa (Turner 1982: 109) “an orchestration of symbolic actions and objects in all the sensory codes — visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, gustatory — full of music and dancing and with interludes of play and entertainment.” And the fidelity of Durkheim’s now 100-year-old account in The Elementary Forms was striking. A dance included in the film Pintubi Revisit Yaru-Yaru shows a snaking line of men, one behind the other, rising from a kneeling position with their hands on each other’s waists and swaying from side to side in unison. Here is Durkheim, drawing on Spencer and Gillen:

With fires lighted on all sides, making the whiteness of the gum-trees stand out sharply against the surrounding darkness, the Uluuru knelt down one behind the other beside the mound, then rising from the ground they went around it, with a movement in unison, their two hands resting upon their thighs, then a little farther on they knelt down again, and so on. At the same time they swayed their bodies, now to the right and now to the left, while uttering at each movement a piercing cry, a veritable yell, “Yrrsh! Yrrsh! Yrrsh!” … One can readily conceive how, when arrived at this state of exaltation, a man does not recognize himself any longer… Feeling himself dominated and carried away by some sort of an external power which makes him think and act differently than in normal times, he naturally has the impression that he is no longer himself. (Durkheim 1965: 249)

And of course the dancer “is not himself.” Or not his hunting/killing/eating material self. For the duration of the dance he dwells in the imaginary “as if” world of myths and totems along with Wadaingula and kindred spirits. Whilst there his condition is transformed, exalted, liminal, betwixt and between. The dance recorded by Spencer and Gillen was performed among the Warramunga. The territory of the Pintubi tribe whose ceremonies we filmed was further west, and the Pintubi dance ended less boisterously than the Warramunga version as I recall. At the finale the line of men were kneeling down again, their heads lowered and their bodies locked closely behind each other.

Silently, dust hanging in the windless air, an elder who might well be called a master of ceremonies, acting with priestly deliberation and gesturing with the delicacy of someone awaking sleepers from a dream, went slowly down the line touching each man in turn. Released from the world of the Dreaming, they rose to resume their ordinary lives. Subdued conversation began again. Had Durkheim been able to see this action first-hand he would have been pleased to note that each man in the line formed an identical segment like the parts of a centipede — the very model of mechanical solidarity. And, indeed, much more than that. Central Australian increase ceremonies, held annually, were intended to encourage the growth and proliferation of animals and vegetation, and of the fertility of the totemically associated clans. As such, the theory behind them, enlarged on in a broadly religious context by Van Gennep at the conclusion of his book, is “a cosmic conception that relates the stages of human existence to those of plant and animal life and, by a sort of pre-scientific divination, joins them to the great rhythms of the universe.” (Van Gennep 1960: 194)

Note re documentary films

The various ethnographic documentary films mentioned in the text were all produced between 1967 and 1972 by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (now the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies). They have been rarely seen for forty years, and I am reliably informed that insuperable obstacles prevent their research use at the Institute. The reasons are various. Firstly, in the early 1970s the elders of the communities concerned were anxious to preserve the secrecy of the rites. Secondly, the matter of exclusivity became a political issue. Thirdly, however, it must be recognized that nudity, the copious blood-letting some ceremonial activities entailed (human blood from opened arm veins was spilled on various sacra, was spurted as an elixir into the mouths of elderly participants, and was also widely used as a fixative for building emblems), along with the overtly sexual nature of some scenes, all made such records discomfiting for those who want a sanitized, euphemized, and romantically falsified version of the Australian Aboriginal past, and who find such records deeply embarrassing. For others they offer a unique glimpse of old-time ceremonial realities.

Appendix

Selected video sequences are available for the following ethnographic documentary films:

Emu Ritual

Pintubi Revisit Yumari

Yaru-Yaru

Mulga Seed Ceremony

References

Durkheim, Emile. (1965) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Free Press: New York [Original French edition 1912]Neurobiology
Hiatt, L. R. (1996) Arguments about Aborigines. Cambridge University Press: UK
Rozik, Eli. (2002) The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and other Theories of Origin. University of Iowa Press: Iowa City
Turner, Victor. (1969) The Ritual Process. Aldine: Chicago
Turner, Victor. (1982) From Ritual to Theatre. PAJ Publications: New York
Sacks, Oliver. (2008) Musicophilia. Vintage, New York
Sandall, R. Documentary films. Pintubi Revisit Yaru-Yaru, Pintubi Revisit Yumari, Emu Ritual at Ruguri, Walbiri Ritual at Gunadjari, The Mulga Seed Ceremony. All titles directed by Roger Sandall and produced by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies, Canberra.
Spencer, Baldwin, and Gillen, F. J. (1968) The Native Tribes of Central Australia. Dover: New York [Originally published 1899]
Van Gennep, Arnold. (1960) The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. [Originally published 1909]

Contents

• Dreamland
• New Harmony and Robert Owen
• Authority, rules, and Aristotle
• John Humphrey Noyes and Oneida
• Perfectionism
• The perils of polygamy
• Accommodation in the Kibbutz
• Life at Cold Mountain Farm
• Atavism with Ezra at Rockridge
• Crime and confession
• Rousseau and the General Will

Everybody wants out. City dwellers want out to the suburbs, suburbia wants out to the country, and tourists can’t go far enough searching for exotic locations and wide open skies. In America a recent strand of radical libertarianism takes this escapism to a new political level. It proposes autonomous islands in the sea, beyond the jurisdictional writ of the state — or any state you’ve ever heard of — where true individual liberty will be preserved on what appear to be decommissioned ocean-going oil rigs. Anyway that’s what the “seasteads” described by Patri Friedman look like to me. Some even suggest they’re a new kind of nautical commune.

Maybe.

But I have to say that a floating housing estate as big as a rig resembles anything previously known as a commune like a battleship resembles a canoe. Most communes in the past have been agricultural plots where poor and hairy dreamers try to scratch a living from the land — even when most of them have never seen a plow, or an axe, and can barely tell one end of a cow from the other.

“When men complain of loneliness, what they mean is that nobody understands what they are saying: to be understood is to share a common past, common feelings and language, common assumptions, and the possibility of intimate communications—in short, to share common forms of life.” — Isaiah Berlin

What Berlin here calls “common forms of life” are much the same as what anthropologists call “cultures”; while the craving for shared understanding, language, feeling, and intimacy he so eloquently describes underlies our all but universal longing for forms of communal order—family, clan, or tribe — especially as a way of escaping modern life today. And if you don’t have a satisfactory family or tribe then you just invent one of your own: such is Designer Tribalism.

These longings often combine with broadly socialist visions of life and labor. In France in the 18^th century the Abbé de Mably proposed a community where

“all are equal, all are rich, all are poor, all are free, and our first law is that nothing is to be privately owned. We should bring to the public storehouses the fruit of our labours: that would be the Treasury of the State and the inheritance of every citizen. Every year the fathers of families would elect the stewards, whose duty it would be to distribute the goods according to the needs of each individual, and to instruct them as to the work required of them.”

Sounds good. Communes being communal, they are invariably seen as uniquely virtuous, fair and compassionate forms of association. Yet they rarely turn out that way. Discipline and authority are always a problem. A year 2000 Web prospectus for “Dreamland” in the USA began with encouraging talk about friendship and harmony, but closed by warning potential recruits that “thieves, liars, users and violent people will be dealt with harshly. I’m not a sucker, and I’m not going to build a charity mission or a soft target for crooks”.

Dreamland

The guy at Dreamland was looking for like-minded spirits to join him in a cooperative community. He’d had enough of “normal American life” and wanted a “meaningful existence” instead. Romantic primitivism usually comes from a reaction against the ordinary world, and this came through strongly. He knew exactly what he hated: the work ethic, abusive bosses, obnoxious co-workers, invasion of privacy and feelings of fear and inappropriate guilt, along with “blame, accusation, yelling, insults and threats”.

He and his wife were going to escape from all that, form a commune, and “get their dream off the ground”.

At one time he’d thought of being a hermit like Thoreau. But solitary life in the woods was too austere and he couldn’t take the plunge. “Call me superficial or materialistic if you want, but I’ve come to really appreciate things like electric lighting, working toilets, and access to many of the niceties of modern industrial culture like libraries and hardware stores, powered vehicles and medical care when I need it.” Which of course presented a problem. Primitivism demands simplicity. But common sense told him that radically simple living was no longer possible. He also wanted to live without blame, accusation, and yelling. But this goal was likely to be even harder to achieve—or not without a lot more insight into himself and others than this Chief Tribal Designer appeared to have.

Yet he’d learnt a few things along the way. He knew that recent history showed clearly that communism doesn’t work, that the ideal of economic self-sufficiency is a delusion, and that creating a new society from scratch was entirely beyond him — what Isaiah Berlin called “the crooked timber of humanity” was just too crooked for the task. Having learnt these lessons he was better prepared for his project than Robert Owen two hundred years ago.

New Harmony and Robert Owen

By his early forties Owen had made a fortune as a British cotton manufacturer. He was famous for influential factory reforms. Throughout his plants working hours were reduced, conditions improved, and the employment of children under ten was banned. Then around 1813 his mind filled with much grander revolutionary plans. After writing a book setting out A New View of Society he urged his countrymen to reject the industrial revolution and go back to the land.

This attempt to throw everything into reverse was to start in Britain. There he called for the setting up of Voluntary and Independent Associations —“villages of unity and mutual cooperation”—which were to become a vast system of cooperative socialism all over the globe. Each association would be a group of from 800 to 1200 people where everyone would live in communal housing amiably together. How his people were going to spend their working days was rather less clear. Owen said vaguely they would “hold property in common” and do some farming, but he didn’t bother to spell out the details.

If romantic primitivists dream of communities that never were and never will be (something freely admitted by Rousseau) then Owen’s case fits this description pretty well. Turning violently against the world he knew, he embraced a vision of rural life—and farming was something he knew nothing about at all. Countless people imagine alternative lifestyles pictorially, nicely colored and composed like tourist brochures; it was as if Owen himself had fallen in love with a painting of trees and fields, or a pastoral poem of Arcadian reverie.

He seemed to think trudging behind a plow was morally worthy in itself — the aching arms and the sweat on the farm-worker’s brow were signs of virtue. But there was no connection between his pictured images of old-style rural life and the very real practical problems of personnel and incentives and organization he faced on the ground. This soon became clear when he got to America.

“I am come to this country”, he announced at the launch of New Harmony on the Wabash in 1826, “to introduce an entire new system of society, to change it from an ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all causes for contest between individuals”.

He spoke vaguely about cultivating the land in common. Communal land would be an essential moral step away from selfishness. But he had no idea what it meant. According to the diary of his son William Owen, he told his associates only four days before signing the purchase papers for the land

“that it had occurred to him only this morning, that, perhaps, if he purchased Harmonie (the old Rappite name of the settlement) the community might rent the houses and land from him and cultivate the land in common . . . Mr Clark wished to know what become of their present property. Mr (Robert) Owen thought if the soil was wet it might be laid down in grass, if dry in cotton or farmed for the private benefit of the individuals of the society”.

The historian A. E. Bestor comments that however incredible it may seem, Owen was about to sink his fortune in an experiment without any notion as to whether the recruits who had flocked to New Harmony were to be employees, or almsmen, or partners, or tenants. And whatever they were, who was going to till the soil?

The membership was top-heavy with wordy thinkers who knew a good idea when they heard one, but had never so much as seen a plow. Only after a committee had met, and more than once, were some farm implements put into the fields. But by then Owen had left and gone back to England for five months, leaving control of the “Preliminary Society” in the hands of his 23-year-old son William.

Authority and rules

What I call Designer Tribalism has limitless faith that the right rules will produce the right results. If the setting is rural, and communal ownership is ordained, then once private ownership is abolished the remaining problems should look after themselves. That seems to have been Owen’s view. In addition to this it’s assumed that as long as people agree on their ultimate goals, communal government can be taken for granted too.

But it can’t. Old-time traditional authority needs deeply lived-in institutions and rules, and they don’t exist in tribes invented yesterday. The habits of respect are missing. Rational authority needs enough like-minded folk to agree on laws, not an anarchy of opinionated talkers. Charismatic authority demands the ever-present dominating force of an inspiring leader—and time and again this is the primitive solution to problems of authority and governance which communes end up with. Charismatic leadership can certainly hold things together for a while, and perhaps New Harmony might have lasted a bit longer if Owen had stayed. But he didn’t. He sailed away back to England, and in May 1827, less than two years after it began, the whole enterprise fell in a heap.

John Humphrey Noyes’ “Inquest on New Harmony” of 1870 is not without a certain disagreeable gloating, but he was right about some of its flaws, including Owen’s optimistically generous way of getting recruits. On one estimate nine-tenths of the membership was useless. They included “scores of whom the world is quite unworthy—the conceited, the crotchety, the selfish, the headstrong, the pugnacious, the unappreciated, the played-out, the idle, and the good-for-nothing generally”.

But could better people have saved New Harmony? With so much being handed out free, what motive did anyone have for working? Or was there a much deeper fault than the quality of the recruits — a flaw in the communal dream itself? Introducing an “enlightened social system which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all causes for contest between individuals” was easy enough for Owen to say. But after private property had been abolished who would care for the communal property, and what incentives would ensure that work got done?

Aristotle made some useful observations on these matters long ago. Individual ownership, he said, had the advantage that “when the care of things is divided among many, men will not complain of one another, but will rather prosper the more as each attends to his own property”. But for some reason, he complained, although it was obvious that men who looked after their own property thrived and prospered, alienated Athenian intellectuals couldn’t resist the appeal of communal schemes.

Day after day they came running up to him in the agora and pressed advertisements for Greek Dreamlands and New Harmonys upon him — places where private ownership would be abolished and everyone would go around hugging everyone else. Men readily listen to such utopian speculations, he continued,

“and are easily induced to believe that some wonderful love of everybody for everybody will result—especially when someone denounces the evils which now exist as a consequence of the fact that property is not owned in common, for example lawsuits for breach of contract, trials for perjury, and flattery of the rich.

But none of these evils are due to the absence of communism. They are due to wickedness, since we see those who jointly own or possess things quarrelling a great deal more than those whose property is separate . . .

Justice requires that we state not only any evils from which those under communism will be free, but also those benefits of which they will be deprived; and when this is done, life under such a system is seen to be utterly impossible”.

John Humphrey Noyes and Oneida

Abolishing private property is usually Designer Tribalism’s number-one goal, and the Abbé de Mably’s vision of a world in which “all are equal, all are rich, all are poor, all are free, and our first law is that nothing is to be privately owned” is typical.

But the inspiring hope of new sexual arrangements runs it close. Plato long ago proposed that an ideal society would “hold women in common”, and the 18^th-century exploration of the South Pacific produced a bright-eyed renewal of interest more recently. Bougainville’s reports of agile nymphs sportively climbing over his ship’s bulwarks in Tahiti, Melville’s golden Marquesans in Typee, and Margaret Mead’s youthful vision of lovers slipping home at dawn  “from trysts beneath the palm trees” all helped to keep the vision alive.

Back in New York State in the 1840s, however, there was a man who needed no literary stimulation to warm his desires. His drive was urgent. His imagination was strong. And his Bible furnished all the text he needed. This was John Humphrey Noyes.

After attending the Divinity Schools of Andover and Yale, Noyes began around 1846 with a small group of family members. With this nucleus there would not be the leadership problems which destroyed New Harmony. His clan held him in awe, his domination was absolute, and for over thirty years the community always knew who was in charge.

Noyes took passages from the Bible about the Primitive Church, and by scriptural interpretation devised sexual arrangements for his New York community which in some ways resemble those of Australia’s Arnhem Land Aborigines, in others seem modelled on the polyandrous arrangements of Ladakh, while others again bring to mind the customs of polygynous Dahomey.

Noyes might have been surprised if someone pointed this out to him, but it’s hard to say. He might just have retorted “So what?” Because although the Bible was important as a guide, for all truly charismatic leaders it can never be more than a guide. Far more important is a strong belief in one’s own inspiration, and in the case of John Humphrey Noyes a complete and unblinking certainty as to what was natural and right overruled God’s word when required.

As M. L. Carden writes, “he taught that one should follow only the inspired spirit of the Bible, not the letter of the law. For him there were no absolute standards of morality. What is right for one time is wrong for another: it is a higher form of ethics to be responsible to oneself than to an external set or rules. In less specifically religious terms, although not without religious justification, he insisted that life is supposed to be happy. Men, and women too, should cultivate and desire the joys of all experience—including the joys of sexual intercourse. With regard to matters ranging from religion to sex, this nineteenth-century prophet rejected the conventions of his day and often anticipated more than a century of change.”

This sounds uplifting. Carden plainly sees Noyes’ sexual agenda as heralding good things to come. But though the oddities of the Oneida Community had compensating virtues, it has to be said that for the most part these were the virtues of God-fearing New England at large — order, work, thrift, cleanliness, and the punctilious paying of bills. They had nothing to do with polygamy. Such values belonged in another ethical universe entirely from those governing the sexual regime of the community’s last days in 1879. By then a small number of old men had privileged access to a harem of nubile females (some as young as ten) one of whom was obliged to service her creaky elders up to seven times a week.

Perfectionism

Describing John Humphrey Noyes as a tormented spirit is an understatement — but it suggests the tensions wracking the man. It all began at a revival meeting in 1831. He was 20. From that point his religious obsession steadily grew until in 1834 he arrived at “an unshakeable conviction that the Kingdom of God could and would soon literally be realized on earth”.

The Millennium was nigh — but how nigh, and how would you know? Intensive reading convinced him that faith, not works, was the chief requisite for salvation, and that a man who was close to “perfect” would probably be saved. He next claimed to have achieved this rare condition himself — only to be ridiculed by those who thought him deranged, to have his license to preach revoked, and to be driven into the spiritual solitude of “three emotionally devastating weeks in New York City in May 1834, during which he plumbed the depths of suffering and came to the brink of mental collapse”.

Wandering the streets day and night he preached to vagrants and prostitutes, visited brothels, drank ardent spirits and wildly added cayenne pepper to his food, and in the midst of these excitements recklessly concluded that the entire sexual basis of society had to be changed. The doctrine he formulated was Perfectionism, and the chief article of Perfectionism was “communism in love”. Noyes based his arguments on his study of the early Christian church, and were doubtless clever. But it is hard to see the main aspects of his teaching as anything more than the rationalization of a shy man, intensely religious, disappointed in love and unable to approach women directly, who showed a remarkable determination to rewrite the book on sex.

Next he announced a divine commission to implement the Kingdom of God on earth. First the marriage laws had to be revoked: “The law of marriage ‘worketh wrath’” he wrote. “It provokes to secret adultery, actual or of the heart. It ties together unmatched natures. It sunders matched natures. It gives to sexual appetite only a scanty and monotonous allowance, and so produces the natural vices of poverty, contraction of taste and stinginess or jealousy.”

The scanty sexual allowance of monogamy would be enlarged by what he called “complex marriage”. Pair marriage would be replaced by love of the entire community — group marriage or “multigamy” if you like. Women were expected to change their sexual partners often, and surviving records show that in one case conception could have resulted from any of four different encounters the previous month.

A man might approach a woman directly, or through a third party, and she was free to accept or refuse. Anyway that was the theory. But what woman would be bold enough to refuse a man representing the Almighty? Noyes himself supervised arrangements for intercourse, and the preferred relationships brought together the more spiritual and older residents who had reached a higher level of fellowship with the younger ones who still had a way to go.

What then resulted was an all-too-visible hierarchy. The most perfect Perfectionists comprised a privileged nobility of bearded old men, whose sexual claims ranked well above a collection of disesteemed minor figures of less perfection, less physical appeal, and less clout.

An unusual feature of Oneida was that reproduction was prohibited. Given that there was a high level of sexual activity at Oneida, what attempt was therefore made at birth control? A procedure was followed which supposedly ensured “male continence”, and which one writer has called “celibate intercourse”. Technically known as coitus reservatus, this involved full penetration without ejaculation. It seems to have worked, however, since very few births were recorded for twenty years. In a discussion of Oneida in his 1981 book Religion and Sexuality Lawrence Foster says judiciously that “Whatever one’s opinion of ‘male continence’ . . . the practice certainly did require male self-control”.

Indeed.

But whatever the frustrations of the community’s adult membership, children at Oneida grew up much the same as children everywhere—or at least this can be said of the boys. To be sure, they were raised together in a large communal “children’s house” meant to restrict the influence of parents. But they romped as infants, got into scrapes at a later age, and though the contact of children with their mothers was severely restricted, it is obvious from Pierrepont Noyes’ memoir My Father’s House that they were happy and well-adjusted on the whole.

Nevertheless after thirty years this unusual society did break up. “On the 23^rd of June 1879,” wrote Pierrepont Noyes, “something happened so unthinkable, so perturbing, that the very framework of life seemed falling about me, as the timbers of a house are torn apart and scattered by a cyclone. My father disappeared; departed secretly from Oneida and no one seemed to know whither he had gone. I saw tears in my mother’s eyes. She would not discuss with me the cause of this startling event or its probable results, saying only, ‘I don’t know. We’ll not talk about it, Pip, until we know.’” From the author’s account his mother may or may not have known—evidently Pierrepont himself did not—that John Humphrey Noyes had fled to Canada to avoid charges of statutory rape.

The perils of polygamy

This ended an instructive sequence of events. Disputes over power and sexual privilege are common in communes. Despite the disapproval of competition for wealth at Oneida, and the community’s vaunted egalitarianism, it is obvious that the sexual regime reserved the most delectable pieces of pie for Noyes’ himself. So-called complex marriage “disguised what was, in fact, something fairly close to a polygynous system dominated by the leader and a few of the older men who had preferential access to the young more nubile girls, while the young men were encouraged to consort with older postmenopausal women”.

And there was another privilege the old men enjoyed too. This was the right to introduce nubile females in the community to complex marriage — to take their virginity from an early age — a right increasingly demanded by Noyes himself. This so-called right to be first husband was nothing more than a primitivistic revival of the medieval jus primae noctis, or right of a feudal lord to the first night with his vassal’s bride. It is said of this medieval practice that it was never truly a legitimate right confirmed by law, but occurred when it did as an abuse of power.

Blatant abuse of power was involved when Noyes tightened control while increasing his privileges. Long interested in selective breeding, he now introduced eugenic reproduction — on his terms. These overwhelmingly favored the genetic princes of the realm . . .  the most perfectly perfect of the Perfectionists themselves. Yet he was shrewd enough not to completely bar commoners from having children. In Pierrepont Noyes’ recollection, “My memory, running over the roster of Community members, notes that almost every man had one child, but that, aside from the preferred ‘stirps’ (or legitimate breeders), they had only one”. (Emphasis in original.)

The Designer Tribe at Oneida instituted one of the most sensational primitivist projects ever. But the rules Noyes drew up are fully supported by anthropology. The Australian Aborigines of Arnhem Land were not only polygynous but gerontocratic as well. There the sexual monopoly of young girls enjoyed by toothless and senile elders has been a source of high tension for years.

Among small groups like the Bushman of southern Africa or the Yanomamo of Venezuela, strong leaders might keep up to ten women for their use. Polynesian chiefs traditionally kept up to a hundred women, while — as in the old-time West African kingdom of Dahomey — thousands and even tens of thousands of women were made available to the leaders of ancient empires like Mesopotamia and Egypt, or India and China, not to mention Aztec Mexico or Inca Peru. And who knows how many children the leading Saudi chieftains have today?

Anyone reading about Oneida will soon notice how indulgently Noyes is treated in most accounts. The attitude is liberal and admiring; the tone is respectful; he is even mentioned as a “Yankee Saint”. You will search in vain for any mention of civil rights. So far as I am aware, no book has yet been written from the perspective of a thoroughly intimidated sexually abused ten-year-old girl, unable to escape from the sanctimonious “culture” of Oneida, and having no-one to turn to, with a bearded religious fanatic climbing into her bed night after night.

Accommodation in the Kibbutz

Romantic primitivism comes from western intellectuals dreaming about the tribal world—and one of their more disturbing dreams is a longing to impose communal housing on everyone else. The more alienated they are, the more they admire extended families, and the more obsessed they are with barracks accommodation. It must be hard for anyone who has not read the sociological literature, and especially the attack on the nuclear family waged by progressive thinkers for the last 100 years, to understand this preoccupation with jamming lots of people together under one roof.

Research in France showed long communal houses dating from the Dark Ages in Western Europe. But it was Eastern Europe which really fired the imagination. “Learn from the Balkans” was the slogan (and learn from Serbia especially) as reams of paper were expended on the glories of the Zadruga, a common household in which fathers and sons, brothers and uncles and nephews, all lived together in unalienated Serbian bliss. Engels had launched this with a warm endorsement. “The South-Slavic Zadruga provides the best existing example of such a family community” he announced — although he reserved his greatest enthusiasm for the Haida Indians where “some households gather as many as seven hundred members under one roof”.

This let everyone know the standard for domestic density tribalism had set, and the writer Rebecca West was one who learnt her lesson. It is typical of the romanticising of something this author herself would find personally intolerable, that she devotes an admiring paragraph to the Zadruga in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. There the claustrophobic pleasures of Serbian housing are contrasted with the dreariness and solitude of English country life. Arrangements in east European peasant households were usually more complicated than they seemed. But misty misunderstandings fed socialist imaginings for years—especially in the Israeli kibbutz.

Back-to-the-land designer tribalism was ingrained in kibbutzim from the start. Most of the immigrants to Israel were patriarchal, capitalistic, and both modern and urban. In contrast the kibbutz was meant to be egalitarian and socialist, and to embody a Jewish version of the pastoral dream. For the new men and women of the kibbutz collective living was mandatory, and the communal nature of child care was spelled out as early as 1916: “Child care is not only the responsibility of the mother, but of all the women. The essential thing is to preserve the principle of co-operation in everything; there should be no personal possessions, for private property hinders cooperative work”.

Collective care also required communal housing:

“For several decades most kibbutzim raised their children in age-segregated ‘children’s houses’. Small groups of eight to twelve children, within a year or so of each other in age, slept, ate, played and went to school in a single building, under the supervision of three adults (almost invariably women). Each kibbutz had ten or twelve large and well-appointed houses, catering for tightly knit little groups of children who changed house from year to year as they grew up, but retained their integrity as a group. . . In effect, each children’s house was a miniature boarding school, which catered to a single grade, from the infant nursery through the primary school grades.”

This was supposed to reduce parental influence. Perhaps if the kibbutzniks had read Pierrepont Noyes they might have saved themselves some trouble. In a chapter about his mother he describes a rare treat he remembers, the day she was allowed to arrange a birthday party for him. He was six.

“There were only two at the party, Dick and I, but it was a real party and we had cake. I think my mother got even more pleasure than I did out of that party. The Community system was harder on mothers than on their children. Whenever I was permitted to visit my mother in her mansard room—once a week or twice (I have forgotten which)—she always seemed trying to make up for lost opportunity, lavishing affection on me until, much as I loved her, I half grudged the time taken from play with those toys which she had—I think somewhat surreptitiously—collected for my visits.”

Kibbutz mothers had an easier time than the mother of Pierrepont Noyes: they could see their children daily. But they still kept trying to make up for the lost opportunity of too much time apart. At first they could only see their children for a short time in the evenings; then after 1964 mothers were also permitted contact during the “hour of love”—a 30-minute period each morning when they took their children out of the children’s houses to play and walk. As the kibbutzim became more prosperous the mothers more assertively tried to get separate houses of their own: they wanted their children with them overnight.

By 1955 a majority of kibbutz women supported family housing, though only 40 percent of the men agreed. Ten years later the gap between men and women had widened. In 1965, in the more liberal kibbutzim where the pressure for change was strongest, 75 percent of women supported nuclear family arrangements, while men’s support rose to 53.6 percent.

The most doctrinaire collectivists were always men. They warned that a more individualistic system would burden the women, and they were right. When children stayed home overnight it was their mothers who had to take them each morning to school in the children’s houses—their fathers were by then at work in the fields. Nuclear households also gave mothers more domestic work. But none of this weakened their determination to get houses for themselves. Their answer to every objection was the same: “We don’t mind, we’re ready to do anything to have our children with us during the night.”

Life at Cold Mountain Farm

Engels announced the coming demise of the bourgeois family in the nineteenth century. It had to go if any serious progress was to be made, and during the high tide of communalism in the 1960s and 1970s feminists said much the same thing. In 1971 Eva Figes wrote that “until marriage is either abolished completely or has become a hollow sham, I am afraid women are going to make far too little effort to improve their own positions”. The following year anthropologist Eleanor Leacock declared: “it is crucial to the organization of women for their liberation to understand that it is the monogamous family as an economic unit, at the heart of class society, that is basic to their subjugation”.

Views of this kind were common among the Designer Tribes of the time. Laurence Vesey’s account from the glory days of the counterculture, The Communal Experience, reports on a 1960s project at Cold Mountain Farm in Vermont. The woman in charge was Joyce Gardner. Like the rest of her team she looked forward to the abolition of marriage, monogamy, class society, and all other obstacles to self-realization. The location was right — Putney in Vermont had been the original home of Noyes’ Perfectionists — and the site chosen was an inaccessible farmhouse without electricity “set in a secluded valley surrounded by an attractive rim of hills”.

The hills were important. Twelve months later they must have been the only attraction left, since the Cold Mountain farmers knew even less about what they were doing than Robert Owen. They bought a tractor which soon broke down. They waited for good weather to sow their seed under the impression that planting only takes place when the sun is shining, and that farmers suntan while they work. Meanwhile the time for planting passed by. There were personnel problems because some of the residents regarded disruption as a right. People drifted in and drifted out. A few chose to work stark naked, a gesture the neighbors found picturesque but unnecessary.

Though summer was passing nobody could be bothered cutting wood for their winter fires. Gardens went unweeded, a hepatitis epidemic struck them down, autumn chilled their spirits, and as falling snow deepened in the leafless woods the last surviving colonists vamoosed.

Vesey says the main difficulties of the community “came from within”, meaning that their utopian fantasies fell too far short of reality. This is putting it mildly. In an account she wrote around 1970 Gardner tells how she dreamed of “a family of incestuous brothers and sisters” sharing everything and everyone, a family “where energies would flow among and between everyone, and all relationships would be voluntary”, a warm community of people “whose love of life and of each other would give us an almost superhuman strength for survival”.

Many synthetic designer tribes call themselves families. But what exactly is a family of incestuous brothers and sisters? Gardner plainly wanted the best of two worlds. On the one hand she wanted the intimacy and caring associated with the sort of family where there are children. On the other hand she wanted the more demanding intimacy of incestuous sex. But the two things are not compatible — and one notices that as usual in fantasized sexuality, no fathers and mothers are mentioned, and no children, and certainly no daily routine of child care. What we have instead is the immature guilt-free sexutopia of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The naked savages roaming Cold Mountain Farm included only brothers and sisters horizontally related in time. This had effects on social structure. They were not linked to any generation before, or to any generation after, because generation had nothing to do with it. As a form of human association the community was both logically and biologically sterile — a strange family indeed. The people at Cold Mountain Farm were being, not generating, pursuing the narcissistic ideal of self-development, self-fulfilment, self-realization—and if self-realization didn’t result, what reason would a resident have for staying on?

Sexual bonds are not strong enough on their own to hold a group together. But it is unclear what other rationale than sex the Cold Mountain Farmers had. “We didn’t become NEW people—we just became physically healthy people”, Gardner concluded. “We weren’t ready yet to put the blade to our own skins and expose the raw, tender, inner flesh inside; to plant the seeds of the people we wished to become; to grow new and beautiful skins from the inside out; to rediscover our tribal consciousness, our human brotherhood…”

Atavism with Ezra at Rockridge

The xenophobia which is the other side of “human brotherhood” can be found in abundance at Rockridge. The leader of this New Mexico outfit is Ezra, and in 1971 his view is thoroughly apocalyptic: the “outside” is plainly heading for catastrophe, and salvation lies only through strict adherence to the “inside” principles of Rockridge itself. Described as a tall and broadly built man of 42, Ezra’s dark hair is short and parted, and he has the general aspect of a construction foreman or perhaps a farmer: “He is no hippie.”

His southern drawl is “rich, deep, full of masculine energy, always the instrument of his purpose, even when he shouts in rage”. There’s a lot of shouting at Rockridge because it has a government of men rather than laws — for to put it frankly Ezra is the government himself. And here we might look back for a moment at that announcement for Dreamland on the Web. The bitterest complaints of its author have to do with surveillance, power, and control. What he finds intolerable about America is the “invasion of privacy and personal life whether by drug or polygraph testing, or other means that result in a culture of suspicion and feelings of fear and inappropriate guilt… camera surveillance and access cards or time-clocks that your ‘betters’ use to monitor your every move and to subordinate or humiliate you”. All this gives rise to “blame, accusation, yelling, insults and threats against your job and livelihood”.

At Dreamland, he says, all this will be banished forever. The author has learnt his lesson from Waco and Jonestown: “I intend to retain some authority over the place, but I hope for the place to be very libertarian. I most emphatically do not intend to become the charismatic ruler, or anything like that.”

No doubt he sincerely meant this. Maybe Ezra himself began with similar good intentions 30 years ago. Perhaps even the Rev Jim Jones of Jonestown did too, though it didn’t prevent around 800 people getting killed. The trouble is that in the absence of separate roles for law-making, legal inquiry, and the impartial judgement of independent courts, men yelling insults is what communes always seem to get.

Ezra and other Designer Tribalists could learn a lot from Montesquieu: “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty… Again, there is no liberty if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive. Were it joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control, for the judge would then be legislator. Were it joined to the executive, the judge might behave with violence and oppression.”

Each day at Rockridge showed how important these wise cautions are. Absence of liberty, arbitrary punishment, hectoring and humiliation, were all routine. This was because legislative and judicial and executive power were joined in the one unmanageable personality of Ezra himself. The larger community of Oneida had witnessed similar public humiliations a century before. But despotism at Oneida was softened by discussions in which various men and women, high and low, young and old, expressed their thoughts; and although Noyes’ opinion always counted most, gross injustice was generally avoided.

At Rockridge the situation was far worse. It was not just that happiness depended on Ezra’s smile, one’s very existence depended on it. As a result his followers would do almost anything to ensure his approval and goodwill — including false confession if required.

Crime and confession

It happened that a woman lost a wheel off her convertible driving into town. And the man who had changed the wheel at the commune (let’s call him Tom) had failed to tighten the wheel nuts properly. Vesey was present at the “court proceeding” to be recounted, and so far as he could tell there was no reason to believe the “crime” involved anything more than simple negligence. But in synthetic tribalism, as in real tribalism itself, misfortune cannot be explained by anything so simple. There is no such thing as an innocent injurious act.

In primitive societies there is a world beyond the veil of appearances, and it is the task of supernatural explanation to search in this world for malignant motives. Ezra said secret motives lay behind the loose nuts on the wheel—and Tom would have to confess to having them.

After placing the wheel on the dinner table as a centre piece Judge Ezra accused Tom of trying to kill the girl in the car. He said Tom secretly hated her, hated all women in fact. Ezra then attacked Tom’s upper-class Protestant background, said that it was because the girl was Catholic that he had not tightened the wheel, that it wasn’t an accident, it was sabotage, that deep down Tom was driven by homicidal impulses and that if the truth be told it was a combination of religious and class motives, plus his dislike of women, which had led him to attempt murder.

“What followed next”, writes Vesey, “was from an outsider’s standpoint truly remarkable. Tom tearfully accepted the idea of his deliberate intent, without the slightest sign of resistance”.

But this wasn’t enough. Ezra said Tom was holding something back, and demanded dramatic evidence of how Tom “really felt”—now was the time for Tom to bring out all his lurking inner resentments, to finally rid himself of his need to kill. At this point the accused seized a glass water jug from the table and smashed it against a wall. Later, all passion spent, a process of rehabilitation took place, and the “criminal” was reunited with the community. Ezra invited Tom to come and read them his favorite William Blake poems. Group solidarity, the summum bonum of cultural primitivism, was again restored.

Rousseau and the General Will

Why did something more typical of the world of witches and sorcerers occur spontaneously in an Arizona commune in 1971? On one interpretation this represents a theatrical showdown between the claims of the group and the individual. Coerced public confession demonstrates that the right of the collective to assign guilt completely outweighs the right of the accused to defend himself. At the same time it dramatically denies the value of objective truth.

In the political theory Rousseau developed in The Social Contract the rights of the group and of the state flow from the General Will, which is infallible, and where the General Will conflicts with an individual will the latter must yield. In totalitarian politics this principle is important — it involves the authority of the state — and the striking parallels from Soviet Russian history and the Moscow Show Trials of 1938 are plain to see. As they were fully intended to demonstrate at the time, nothing shows the majestic authority of a regime more than the willingness, on the part of those it accuses, publicly to confess to things they did not do and to crimes they did not commit.

In a book from around the same time as Vesey’s, Rosabeth Kanter’s Community and Commitment, the author argues revealingly that when humiliation is imposed on an individual it serves the purpose of group therapy. “In communities . . . the use of mortification is a sign that the group cares about the individual, about his thoughts and feelings, about the content of his inner world. The group cares enough to pay great attention to the person’s behavior, and to promise him warmth, intimacy, and love . . . if he indicates that he can accept these gifts without abuse. Mortification thus facilitates a moral commitment on the part of the person to accept the control of the group, binding his inner feelings and evaluations to the group’s norms and beliefs”.

This statement deserves to be framed and hung on the wall. Seldom can the process of collective intimidation, humiliation, and thought control, with all its indifference to legal process and its potential for unhinged sadism, have received such an upbeat academic defense — and from Harvard too. But Kanter does indeed throw light on the tribal process which elevates solidarity above truth. If the group says black is white, then the willingness to agree that black is white vividly testifies to an individual’s acceptance of “group norms”.

Vesey also describes after-dinner exorcism procedures at Rockridge. As several women cried “out! Out! While breathing with the rising involuntary rhythm that one associates with sexual climax, I began to think I was eavesdropping on pure and simple hysteria of a kind which might even suggest Salem in 1692.”

But this was not pure and simple hysteria. What Vesey witnessed, in 1971, in New Mexico USA, was the deliberate reinvention of belief in supernatural evil by a marginal psychopath working the romantic primitivist vein, using the whole thaumaturgical box of tricks including irrational guilt, devils, and the ritual casting out of spirits.

The article above is a redaction of Chapter Two of The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays, Westview Press 2001.

Books referred to include Backwoods Utopias by A. E. Bestor, Oneida by Maren L. Carden, Religion and Sexuality by Lawrence Foster, My Father’s House by Pierrepont Noyes, Women in the Kibbutz by Lionel Tiger and Joseph Shepher, The Communal Experience by Laurence Vesey, and Commitment and Community by Rosabeth M. Kanter.

In plain English and with exemplary candor, Ayaan Hirsi Ali compares the virtues of Western civilization with the vices of her original homeland in Somalia, argues that not all cultures or religions are equal, notes the flood of refugees heading west from the Islamic lands, and points to the dangers to their hosts as well as the risks to the migrants themselves. Below are short extracts from her new book Nomad, HarperCollins 2010.

Tribal life and modernity In her Introduction Ayaan writes of the intellectual journey she has made moving from Somalia, to Holland, to the United States.

It was a journey from Africa, a place where people are members of a tribe, to Europe and America, where people are citizens… There were many misunderstandings, expectations, and disappointments along the way, and I learned many lessons. I learned that it is one thing to say farewell to tribal life; it is quite another to practice the life of a citizen, which so many members of my family have failed to do. And they are by no means alone.

Today close to a quarter of all people in the world identify themselves as Muslim, and the top ten refugee-producing nations in the world are also Muslim. Most of those displaced peoples are heading toward Europe and the United States.

The scale of migration from Muslim countries is almost certain to increase in the coming years because the birth rate in those countries is so much higher than in the West. The “problem family” — people like my relatives — will become more and more common unless Western democracies understand better how to integrate the newcomers into our societies: how to turn them into citizens. (xvi) [Separate chapters in Nomad treat the lives and fates of Ayaan’s parents and their children. RS]

Most Muslims, like all other immigrants, migrate to the West not to be locked up in a minority, but to search for a better life, one that is safe and predictable and that holds the prospect of a better income and the opportunity of a good quality education for their children. To achieve this, I believe, they must learn to give up some of their habits, dogmas, and practices, and acquire new ones.

There are many good men and women in the West who try to resettle refugees, scold their fellow citizens for not doing more, donate money to philanthropic organizations, and strive to eliminate discrimination. They lobby governments to exempt minorities from the standards of behavior of Western societies; they fight to help minorities preserve their cultures, and thy excuse their religion from critical scrutiny. These people mean well, I have no doubt. But I believe that their well-intentioned activism is now a part of the very problem they seek to solve.

To be blunt, their efforts to assist Muslims and other minorities are futile because, by postponing or at best prolonging the process of their transition to modernity — by creating the illusion that one can hold on to tribal norms and at the same time become a successful citizen — the proponents of multiculturalism lock subsequent generations born in the West into a no-man’s-land of moral values. What comes packaged in a compassionate language of acceptance is really a cruel form of racism. And it is all the more cruel because it is expressed in sugary words of virtue. (xviii)

The veil In London, on Whitechapel Road, Ayaan sees immigrant women “wearing every variety of Muslim covering imaginable”, and reflects on the veil as a mark of status and submission.

The Muslim veil, the different sorts of masks and beaks and burkas, are all gradations of mental slavery. You must ask permission to leave the house, and when you do go out you must always hide yourself behind thick drapery. Ashamed of your body, suppressing your desires — what small space in your life can you call your own?

The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex.

As we drove down Whitechapel Road I felt anger that this subjugation is silently tolerated, if not endorsed, not just by the British but by so many Western societies where the equality of the sexes is legally enshrined. (16)

Family conflict and polygamy After many years heroically campaigning for democracy in Somalia, Ayaan’s father slipped back into a mixture of religious dogmatism and opportunism, precipitating Ayaan’s disenchantment with his entire view of the world.

Just as I had lied about my identity when I sought asylum in Holland, my father, too, it seemed, had lied to cheat the asylum system so that he could live in Britain. The tribal hero, the preserver of the culture of Islam and the clan, took handouts from the unbelievers on a false pretext, with a fake passport, though, unlike me, he had nothing but contempt for their values and way of life.

Before he died he had even applied for and received British citizenship, not because he wanted to be a British subject but because of the instrumental benefits of free housing and health care. At the same time he continued to lecture me never to be loyal to a secular state; he repeatedly urged me to return to the true faith.

If I had stayed with him for a week he would have asked me to reunite with the family — his wives, their daughters, some of whom probably think I should be put to death and who certainly consider me a whore.

We who are born into Islam don’t talk much about the pain, the tensions and ambiguities of polygamy. (Polygamy, of course, predates Islam, but the Prophet Muhammad elevated it and sanctioned it into law, just as he did child marriage.) It is in fact very difficult for all the wives and children of one man to pretend to live happily, in union.

Polygamy creates a context of uncertainty, distrust, envy, and jealousy. There are plots. How much is the other wife getting? Who is the favored child? Who will he marry next, and how can we manipulate him most efficiently? Rival wives and their children plot and are often said to cast spells on each other.

If security, safety, and predictability are the recipe for a healthy and happy family, then polygamy is everything a happy family is not. It is about conflict, uncertainty, and the constant struggle for power. (24)

Education and cultural tradition In Holland Ayaan worked with Somali refugees, becoming concerned about the prospects for their children, many of whom consistently failed their tests at school. Somali mothers in Holland, she writes —

Were all focused backward, to a mythical past of life as nomads in the Somali desert. They would tell their little children about Somalia’s heroes, about milking camels, and to hate other clans. They would emotionally blackmail their children not to become “too Dutch,” to speak Somali instead of Dutch and not give up their culture.

These children performed poorly in school. As part of their evaluations they were given puzzles to work out; they were required to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and to behave properly at the dinner table. In Holland these are important indicators that children are well-adjusted.

But all the Somali children I translated for, who in their homes certainly ate on the floor, with their hands, flatly failed these tests. That meant they would not go to a normal school; they would go to a ‘special school’ for ’remedial learning.’ The Dutch government would spend a lot of money on coaching them to catch up…

I was amazed that officials in so many different institutions — social workers, schoolteachers, the police, child protection services, domestic violence agencies — all assumed that there was some deep cultural puzzle that they did not understand. In itself that was not a bad assumption, but then they proceeded to protect these puzzling cultural norms.

This was the advice they received from anthropologists, Arabists, Islamologists, cultural experts, and ethnic organizations, all of whom insisted that these behaviors were something special and unique and worth preserving in these homes. (66)

Islam in America Moving to the United States, Ayaan finds troubling signs of the radicalization of Muslim youth. Again one sees the conflict between citizenship, on the one hand, and a primary loyalty to country of origin, to religion, and to tribe.

Can you be a Muslim and an American patriot? You can if you don’t care very much about being a Muslim. If you squint and look away, you can avoid thinking about the very basic clashes between the submissive, collectivist values of Islam and the individualist, libertarian values of the democratic West.

In a 2007 poll by the Pew Center, 63 percent of U.S. Muslims said they saw no conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society. But 32 percent conceded that, yes, there is such a conflict, and almost 50 percent of the Muslim American questioned in that poll said they think of themselves as Muslims first, Americans second. Only 28 percent, little more than a quarter, considered themselves Americans first.

Asked whether suicide bombing can be justified as a measure to defend Islam, 26 percent of American Muslims age eighteen to twenty-nine said yes. That is one quarter of the adult American Muslims under the age of thirty, and no matter how you count the number of Muslims in America (estimates vary from 2 million to 8 million), that is a lot of people. (139)

Muslim schools, by contrast, are more or less like madrassas, which emphasize religion more than any other subject. Students are taught to distance themselves from science and the values of freedom, individual responsibility, and tolerance. The establishment of a Muslim school anywhere in the world, but especially in the West, gives Wahabis and other wealthy Muslim extremists an opportunity to isolate and indoctrinate vulnerable groups of children. (136)

Patriarchy and personal freedom In her chapter on ‘School and Sexuality’ Ayaan discusses the constraints placed upon Muslim women — both within the home and in social life more generally.

Women living under Islamic law cannot travel, work, study, marry, sign most legal documents, or even leave their home without their father’s permission. They may not be permitted to participate in public life, and their freedom to make decisions regarding their private life is severely, often brutally curtailed.

They may not choose with whom they have sex nor, when they are married, when or whether to have sex. They may not choose what to wear, whether to work or to walk down the street.

When well-meaning Westerners, eager to promote respect for minority religions and cultures, ignore practices like forced marriage and confinement in order to ‘stop society from stigmatizing Muslims,’ they deny countless Muslim girls their right to wrest their freedom from their parents’ culture. They fail to live up to the ideals and values of our democratic society, and they harm the very same vulnerable minority whom they seek to protect. (163-164)

Money and personal responsibility Unfamiliarity with modern financial arrangements, saving, and credit, leaves many immigrants of tribal background at risk of exploitation — including exploitation by members of their clan.

In a very slow and painful process I stumbled back and forth discovering the intricacies of financial responsibility. What I did not know, I learned. Based on that  experience, I believe it would be prudent to teach refugees a few basic skills before giving them loans and presenting them with credit cards and furniture catalogs, before they get sucked into a subculture of borrowing and fraud.

In a modern, Western society, citizens’ financial ethics, like their sexual ethics, are based on individual responsibility. Within the tribe, ethics are about obedience top clan values, and because of the ob ligation to assist impecunious family members, those who are irresponsible with their money get away with it.

Loyalty to members of the tribe in faraway countries requires borrowing money to send to them. This makes it hard to see the country of your new citizenship as ‘home’; it has a cost too in terms of your own prosperity. At face value, it may seem very generous to share your money with your extended family, but when this involves taking out loans it has a serious long-term cost.

Skills of earning, budgeting, and saving are indispensable for citizens. But we are not born with them. Muslim girls and women, in particular, are not trained to have such skills. Their ignorance of all things money-related affects them personally, of course, but it also perpetuates the poverty of their families.

These girls become mothers too soon, and as mothers they fail to teach their children what it is to be financially responsible. They fall prey to easy credit and fantasy spending. This breeds dependence on welfare states that are already overstretched. (182)

Group solidarity It is often argued that tribal immigrants need close cohesion for their mental health and self-esteem. On the basis of her own experience Ayaan says this is not true.

The idea that immigrants need to maintain group cohesion promotes the perception of them as victim groups requiring special accommodation, an industry of special facilities and assistance. If people should conform to their ancestral culture, it therefore follows that they should also be helped to maintain it, with their own schools, their own government-subsidized community groups, and even their own system of legal arbitration.

This is the kind of romantic primitivism that the Australian anthropologist Roger Sandall calls ‘designer tribalism.’ Non-Western cultures are automatically assumed to live in harmony with animals and plants according to the deeper dictates of humanity and to practice an elemental spirituality.

Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls’ genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs or stones them for falling in love.

A culture that protects women’s rights by law is better than a culture in which a man can lawfully have four wives at once and women are denied alimony and half their inheritance. A culture that appoints women to its supreme court is better than a culture that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man.

It is part of Muslim culture to oppress women and part of all tribal cultures to institutionalize patronage, nepotism, and corruption. The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better. (212-213)

Human vulnerability

Where human vulnerability most revealed itself was when the attack came by surprise. This was very different from the conditions prevailing among animals. Not only is it more difficult among most animal species to get close to a rival without being noticed, because of more acute senses, but it is also more difficult to finish off your fellow man in one stroke even if surprise is achieved.

An animal’s ‘weapon’ is its body, and that body is very strongly built. Such a weapon is always ready for use. By contrast, if humans are caught unarmed they are at a serious disadvantage and are extremely vulnerable. Humans thus became quintessential first-strikers. As with other animal species, they normally did not seriously fight fellow humans on the open battlefield for fear of being hurt themselves. However, unlike other animals, they were able to kill adults of their own species by ambushing the unarmed and vulnerable.

Fighting among hunter-gatherers

And kill they did. Reported estimates of hunter-gatherer mortality rates in fighting are inherently tenuous, but those we have show a remarkable agreement across time and space. For the Murngin of Australia’s Arnhem Land during a period of 20 years, Warner estimated this rate at 200 men of a total male population of 700. This amounts to about 30 percent of the fighting population.

Pilling’s estimate of at least 10 percent killed among Tiwi Aboriginal men in one decade comes within the same range. Kimber’s estimate, for a generation, of 5 percent mortality in fighting in arid areas and about 6.5 percent in well-watered ones refers to violent mortality in relation to the entire population’s overall mortality rates.

The Plains Indians showed a deficit of 50 percent for the men in the Blackfoot tribe in 1805 and a 33 percent deficit in 1858. Even among the Eskimos of the central Canadian Arctic, who lacked group warfare, violent death, in so-called blood feuds and homicide, was estimated by one authority at one per 1,000 per year, 10 times the US peak rate in 1990. As Jean Briggs has revealingly written: “Readers of Canadian Inuit ethnography, my own Never in Anger (1970) in particular, have sometimes concluded that Inuit are always and everywhere pacific. Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

Fighting among agriculturalists

The data for early agriculturalists tells much the same story as it does for hunter-gatherers. About 15 percent of adult Yanomamo died as a result of inter- and intragroup violence: 24 percent of the males and 7 percent of the females. The Waorani (Auca) of the Ecuadorian Amazon hold the registered world record: more than 60 percent of adult deaths over five generations were caused by feuding and warfare. In highland Papua New Guinea independent estimates are again very similar: among the Dani, 28.5 percent of the men and 2.4 percent of the women have been reckoned to have died violently.

Among the Enga 34.8 percent of the men were estimated to have met the same fate; Meggitt had records of 34 wars among them in 50 years; among the Hewa, killing was estimated at 7.78 per 1,000 per year; among the Goilala, whose total population was barely over 150, there were 29 (predominantly men) killed during a period of 35 years; among the lowland Gebusi, 35.2 percent of the men and 29.3 percent of the women fell victim to homicide; the high rate for the women may be explained by the fact that killing was mainly related to failure to reciprocate in sister exchange marriage.

The Balkans

Violent death in tribal Montenegro at the beginning of the twentieth century was estimated at 25 percent. Archaeology unearths similar finds. In the late prehistoric Indian site of Madisonville, Ohio, 22 percent of the adult male skulls had wounds and 8 percent were fractured. In a prehistoric cemetery site in Illinois, 16 percent of the individuals had met a violent death.

All this suggests that average human violent mortality rates among adults in the ‘state of nature’ may have been in the order of 15 percent (25 percent for the men); extremely sparse populations living in areas where resources were diffuse probably occupied the lower part of the scale, but not by a very wide margin.

Furthermore, as Meggitt observes of both Australian Aborigines and New Guinea Enga highlanders, most of the men carried wound marks and scars, and regarded them as a matter of course. Chagnon says the same of the Yanomamo. In this respect Hobbes was closer to the truth than Rousseau. (129-131)

Bruce Parry and Friend, Bhutan

Of course in 1922 the film-maker didn’t have an anthropologist along with him in Hudson Bay, and that may have influenced things. To begin with, anthropologists are mostly serious chaps who have been to college, whereas tribal people are tough chaps who have not — and to speak plainly, the serious chaps and the tough chaps have little in common. Robert Flaherty himself was a robust and hearty prospector who had spent some years looking for iron ore. One of the tough. He was fully accepted by the Inuit, whom he admired for their indestructible good humour, while the Inuit in turn took to Flaherty as someone able to handle Arctic hardships smilingly day after day.

Most anthropologists are rather different. As romantics (and anthropology is the home of academic romanticism) they incline to a tragically moralistic view of life the opposite of their hosts. Hunters learn to expect misfortune and bad days, but whatever happens you have to get on with it. A moping hunter who sat around complaining that life wasn’t fair would be dead in a week.

Again, where Flaherty was fully accepted as an equal long before shooting his film, your average anthropologist yearns for a social acceptance that is always uncertain, and even after years of fieldwork may never arrive. A creature of the seminar room whose mentality has been formed by the ambiguous pleasures of university life, his own tribe is incurably academic. Abroad, he tiptoes through the forests of alien cultures fearful of solecism and hardly daring to laugh at all.

There are other problems too. The academic outlook in Brian Moser’s distinguished Disappearing World series in the 1970s was both pedagogic and high-minded, and high-mindedness comes at a price. Tribal humour was never intended for classroom use. Granada’s editorial guidelines ensured that in one place after another, all over the world, an entire comic universe of ribaldry and sexual taunting and obscene hilarity was hardly glimpsed.

A ceremony I myself filmed in Central Australia at around the same time featured a much-loved priapic hero, Wadaingula. During his dance he carried a phallic emblem six feet long, with other dimensions to match, and after white feathers had been stuck onto it with human blood it was menacingly waved about. Bush flies in Central Australia are not just a nuisance, they’re a curse, and imaginary flies that landed on the sacred emblem were indignantly brushed off by the dancer, while the audience howled with delight. But in Canberra the whole event was considered unfortunate: the film was solemnly locked away and has not been seen since.

Multiculturalism reinforced this bowdlerising. It ensured that a proper respect was shown during editing and that disagreeable customs were either unmentioned, euphemised, or cut. Cannibalism was certainly unmentionable. Whipping rituals designed to harden women and children against pain were likely to be suppressed. And in one Disappearing World production clitorodectomy among the Masai was actually compared to “a white wedding”.

In such an atmosphere humour suffocates and laughter dies. And that’s why the recent BBC series Tribe is so refreshing. Everywhere indigenes are seen joking, teasing, and generally enjoying themselves. The rationale for the show was that Bruce Parry, a self-described “explorer” and “expedition leader”, should step out of his aircraft and walk straight into the homes of Siberian reindeer herders or Papuan forest hunters, eating raw liver, drinking blood from the communal calabash, and living “as one of the tribe”. But how on earth can you live as one of a tribe whose language you don’t speak, whose most ordinary routines are unfamiliar, and whose food — from rats’ intestines to sago grubs — you find disgusting? Yet in a roundabout and unintended way it works, triumphantly restoring laughter to men and women we have rarely seen laughing before.

This is not because our explorer cuts an impressive figure — quite the reverse. It works because he’s an unimpressive figure, the butt of children’s jokes, who should at times be wearing a jester’s cap and bells. In Outer Mongolia he’s keen to ride, but after losing his saddle bag he manages to lose his horse. In Ethiopia’s Omo Valley young Suri men joust ferociously, trying to disable each other with long pointed hardwood sticks. Parry plans to show his mettle. But the Suri King, used to hot-heads, foresees disaster and intervenes — though not before the tyro’s clumsy efforts bring gales of laughter from a delighted audience. Everywhere Parry is eager to join the hunt. Hunting is manly action and he wants in. But his presence hinders. He disturbs the quarry. He can’t keep up. So he’s often treated as a backward child and told to stay home with the women.

But this is all for the best. Among these women we meet some splendid characters and discover what the word “unflinching” truly means. In Ethiopia a smiling Suri girl is cicatrised on her breasts, and banters with Parry as her blood streams down (he himself, to much amusement, gaspingly suffers a single cut). Among the nearby Dassanech an elder named Abanesh forthrightly defends female genital mutilation, and shows why cultural change will always be slow. Abanesh does not persuade this viewer that FMG is acceptable, and she doesn’t convince Parry, but her warmth and wisdom are memorable.

Anthropologists are unimpressed. They say that Parry is academically unqualified, that he only speaks English, that his stays in the field are short, that he makes no reference to previous anthropological research. All of which is no doubt true.

But like others of his temperament Parry is game for anything. Just as Flaherty’s hosts admired his adventurous spirit, Parry’s hosts find this admirable too. Among the Hamar he leaps over a dozen cows stark naked, in New Guinea he runs barefoot along thorny trails, in South America he ingests narcotic potions that bring on delirium and have to be vomited up.

Only when he finds himself hit on at night by a male admirer in the romantic setting of a tree house, and has to firmly decline, does he feel that life as one of the tribe might have its limits. In his own brash way he is faithful to the father of participant observation, Malinowski himself. “It is good for the ethnographer”, wrote the author of Argonauts of the Western Pacific, “to put aside camera, notebook and pencil, and join in himself in what is going on… Though the degree of success varies, the attempt is possible for everyone.”

It would be absurd to regard Tribe as a substitute for Disappearing World. An ordinary viewer with a taste for realism however may reasonably regard the two as complementary. Struggling to down bowls of semi-coagulated gore for breakfast in Africa, or helpings of rat pudding in Assam, he provides a nice mixture of blood and laughter for millions — and more importantly, brief intervals of welcome entertainment for the tribal peoples themselves. Considering their trials and tribulations (and on this matter the series contains poignant material from both the Akie of Tanzania and from Sarawak’s pitifully besieged Penan) they deserve some compensation. But if Parry wants to go on like this he may need to be more careful what he eats.