Preferred Citation: Needham, Rodney. Circumstantial Deliveries. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1981 1981. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6c6006tn/

Circumstantial Deliveries Rodney Needham UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1982 The Regents of the University of California

Preferred Citation: Needham, Rodney. Circumstantial Deliveries. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1981 1981. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6c6006tn/

To the Memory of my grandfather
Andrew Needham
(1875–1951)

Preface

The addresses collected here are circumstantial in the sense that at their inception they responded to particular events and settings. They were proportioned to their circumstances, and here they are printed in the main as they were delivered.

Although they were independently written, for divers purposes and at sundry times, they have turned out to possess a fair concinnity. They accord one with another in approach and ultimate intention, and when ranged in a series they exhibit a thematic continuity from analytical particulars to metaphysical generalities.

It is not deliberate that the collection opens and also closes with the contemplation of man's isolation in the infinitudes of the universe, but it is surely not quite fortuitous either. Under this wide aspect, one way to appreciate the tenor of the addresses is to recall an enigmatic description, stemming from Paracelsus nearly five hundred years ago and continued by Swedenborg, and to see them as intimating something like a doctrine of signatures.

In this character they make a sequel to previous though more concerted sets of essays which have appeared under the titles Primordial Characters (1978) and Reconnaissances (1980). It is in like character also that they are not distractingly provided with references; instead, the sources and authorities mentioned or tacitly drawn on have been consolidated into a select bibliography.

The parts of this book were all delivered, at some state or another of their composition, in the United States of America. It is fitting therefore that they should be dedicated to the memory of a forebear of mine who spent much of his adult life in that great land. His laconic and quizzical style, like his Bostonian intonations, reflected the impress upon him of a country to which he was as devoted as I too was later to become. Something of my own commitment to the qualities of American life and character can doubtless be traced to his example; and I should like it to be taken that in publishing these circumstantial deliveries in the United States I shall be making some return of thanks on his part as from myself.

R.N.
All Souls College, Oxford Trinity Term, 1980

Acknowledgments

"Essential Perplexities" in its original and longer form was delivered as an inaugural lecture at the University of Oxford, on 12 May 1977, and was published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in 1978.

"Physiological Symbols" was delivered as the Andrew Lang Lecture for 1980 at the University of St. Andrews. I am grateful to the Senatus Academicus of that university for the invitation and for its hospitality.

"Inner States as Universals" was written as a contribution to a collaborative volume to be entitled Indigenous Psychologies , under the editorship of Dr. Paul Heelas and Dr. Andrew Lock, due to be published by Academic Press. It is printed here by permission of the editors and the publishers; copyright © Academic Press Inc. (London), Ltd.

"Characteristics of Religion" was the address at the Guy Johnson Colloquium held on 27 March 1980 at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I am grateful to Prof. R. W. Tyson for the occasion to visit the university, to Prof. J. L. Peacock for the invitation to deliver the address, and to Dr. Guy Johnson for his kind attendance.

"Existential Quandaries" was the Neal de Nood Memorial Lecture for 1980 and was delivered on 8 April 1980 at Smith College, Massachusetts. I am indebted to the college for the invitation, and to Prof. E. Hopkins for arranging the visit and for her warm hospitality; also to Dr. Harriet Lyons and her pupils for further friendly attentions.

With the exception of "Essential Perplexities," one or another of the essays has also been read out in draft, and in various versions, at the University of California at Berkeley, the Australian National University, the University of Virginia, Mary Washington College, The Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, Wellesley College, and the University of New Hampshire.

Among many individuals who kindly involved themselves at these institutions, the following are particularly thanked for their aid, company, and hospitality: Prof. A. Dundes, Prof. W. S. Simmons; Prof. Wang Gung-wu, Prof. J. D. Freeman, Prof. J. J. Fox; Mr. W. D. Whitehead, Mr. J. C. Crocker, Mr. P. Metcalf, Mr. T. Caplow; Prof. M. H. Williamson; Prof. R. Price; Miss R. Behar, Mr. B. Wilson; Prof. A. Shimony, Dr. J. Bamberger; and Prof. R. E. Downs.

I remain greatly indebted, as constantly over some decades past, to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and to its assiduous and amiable staff; also to Mr. J. S. G. Simmons, Fellow and Librarian of All Souls College.

The frontispiece depicts a nonperiodic tessellation and is the invention of Roger Penrose, F.R.S., Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford. I am most grateful to Prof. Penrose for permission to reproduce it and for his kindness in composing the following description:

This pattern is made up of just two simple matching marked diamond shapes. It can be continued indefinitely to cover the entire plane, exhibiting an endless variety and an increasing complexity as it unfolds outwards. Yet, despite the simplicity of the two basic shapes, there is no repetitive way of covering the plane with them.

The pertinence of this figure to the present book is that a restricted repertory of basic and relatively simple cultural

constituents can be seen as making up the endless variety and complexity of singular forms of civilization.

Dr. Michael Sheppard drew the figure, and I am warmly obliged to him for his careful skill.

Rehearsal

Capital truths are to be narrowly eyed, collateral lapses and circumstantial deliveries not to be too strictly sifted. And if the substantial subject be well forged out, we need not examine the sparks which irregularly fly from it.
Sir Thomas Browne

I

The essays that follow have a common character in that they all implicate what I take to be central notions in the comparative interpretation of human experience. It is not by way of collateral lapses that these matters recur in one essay after another. Their intrinsic importance, rather, is displayed by the very fact that disquisitions on various topics should converge, as the examination probes deeper, on a common set of concerns.

The general premise is that social facts may be revealingly analyzed by reference to characteristic features in polythetic combination. Underlying such features, it is contended, are certain primary factors of experience which form the elementary constituents of culture. Among these relatively steady agents are synthetic complexes recognizable as archetypes. In addition, there are in any form of civilization, as in the life of any individual, more idiosyncratic affective representations which here I call paradigmatic or exemplary scenes.

Some of the terms just adduced, critical as they are, may call for some explanation.

The notion of "characteristic features" is taken from Wittgenstein, who uses it to refer to likenesses that are more or less connected with certain things in question; the features may occur sporadically and in different combinations, or they may even disappear from the constitution of a thing of a given kind; their incidence is literally incidental, not essential. Thus there are characteristic features among the class of events described as wishing; and in the sphere of more patently social facts there are characteristic features of marriage or of a descent group, though none of them is essential to the recognition of either institution. By contrast, when Wittgenstein looks for what is usually taken to be definitive, in the sense of an attribute common to all members of a given class, he writes instead of a "specific" feature. In the classification of social facts, anthropologists have usually employed specific features in their definitions of institutions, and this procedure has entailed grave disadvantages in the framing of comparative propositions. The effect can be brought out by the explication of another analytical contrast.

The distinction between characteristic and specific features is solidary with that between "polythetic" and "monothetic" classification. Much has been written on this topic, and I have elsewhere drawn out its implications for the study of social facts, but the crux of the matter can be stated briefly. In the traditional definition of a class in western philosophy, and also in dictionary definitions, the members of a class share at least one feature in common; it is by virtue of this point of resemblance that the individuals belong to, or constitute, the class. This procedure has been termed monothetic classification. The conception has clear advantages in the exact sciences, so that the class of photons for example can be unambiguously defined; also, the princi-

ple of substitution comes into play, so that what is asserted about one photon can be taken to hold for any other photon. But in the comparative study of social forms, typically, the features in question are semantic discriminations, and these do not possess the autonomous character of natural facts. Characteristically, the members of a class of social facts may share no feature in common; things are classed together by having each a preponderance of the defining features, but there is no single essential feature that is common to all, and any missing feature can be different for each member of the class. This is true of the classificatory concepts of other civilizations, as represented in their lexical discriminations, as well as of those which are more or less deliberately devised by anthropologists. This mode of classification has been termed polythetic, and its recognition has had trenchant consequences, both descriptive and theoretical, for comparativism. Further implications are traced in the chapters that follow.

The "primary factors" which are described as forming the elementary constituents of culture correspond to aspects of thought and imagination, as exhibited in cultural traditions, which appear to have a universal distribution in world ethnography. These factors of experience are heterogeneous; they include sensory perceptions such as texture or color, and abstractions such as number or binary opposition. Also, they vary greatly in the meanings that they are made to carry; and there are no necessary connections among them such as would compose them into systems. In regarding these factors as primary, the idea is that they may play in forms of consciousness a part similar to that of ultimate predicates in epistemology. Nevertheless, they are not strictly primary, in the sense of being absolutely elementary, for as semantic vehicles they are more or less synthetic products of other phenomena, both cerebral and traditional.

Hence they are not ultimate particulars of the kind that a thorough-going reductionism might seek, and their isolation constitutes a transitional or provisional phase in comparative analysis. They will be found further treated in my Primordial Characters and especially in Chapter 1, below.

As for "archetypes," these have been extensively resorted to throughout ancient philosophy, medieval mysticism, and modern depth psychology. Rather than open the way to some of the usual objections and qualifications, I do not offer a prior definition but shall leave the present acceptation of this idea to emerge from the uses that it serves in the investigations that follow.

Illustrations of what are introduced here as "paradigmatic scenes" will be found in Chapter 4.

This array of ideas goes far, to the extent that the cogency of each is admitted, toward the formulation of a comparative method which, in a sere but accurate description, will integrate global characteristics of collective representations with innate vectors of individual cerebration. In combination, they subtend remarkable similarities of ideation, imagination, and organization among what are otherwise very divergent and idiocratic forms of social life.

II

A few more particular comments on the individual essays may help the reader to approach them in a suitable frame of expectation and forbearance.

"Essential Perplexities" was an inaugural lecture at Oxford. It is reproduced here slightly altered and after the deletion of the local allusions that were called for by the occasion. It is a schematic statement of certain consequences of the view that a critical task of social anthropology is to chart the limits of human understanding. Some of the points of

research or method adumbrated in it are developed in the succeeding essays.

"Physiological Symbols" takes up the topic of symbolic elements and examines the possibility of accounting for certain of them by reference to the physiology of the human body. The positive suggestions made the substance of an address delivered extempore to the 23rd annual meeting of the Kroeber Anthropological Society at Berkeley, California. The subsequent critical observations and the overall form of the argument were worked out later, so that the investigation records both the persuasions of a line of explanation and the counterarguments emerging from a deeper consideration. The refutations are decidedly the more in accord with the methodological stance which the present collection is meant to demonstrate.

"Inner States as Universals" pursues the suggestion that the psyche is not so complex as many psychological vocabularies, beginning with that of English, seem to assert. The background to it was provided by my monograph on belief and the language of experience; and it was designed as a precursor in a deliberate expansion of academic interest in indigenous psychologies.

The circumstances of "Characteristics of Religion" were less typical of my theoretical impulsions, and not so methodical. I was asked to deliver a lecture in the context of a symposium on interpretations of religion and culture, and in reflecting on the presuppositions of that undertaking I found myself committed to an inspection of the characteristic features of what is commonly taken to constitute religion. Although this is not the kind of enterprise that I should normally embark on, or at any rate not with much hope of saying anything new, I hope that in the outcome it will be found to have transcended the usual involutions of a concern with mere definition.

"Existential Quandaries," finally, is an exercise of yet another kind. I was invited to deliver a public lecture on some topic that might have a general appeal, so I settled on some of the standing worries in the everyday explication of human life. This is indeed much the kind of employment that I think social anthropology should have in people's assessment of their nature and their place in the world, though not perhaps so directly or in this form. It is one thing to impart a new edge and force to questions about life, so that others may if they are persuaded reformulate the terms in which they speculate on their condition. It is quite another matter to isolate specific questions from among existential concerns, and then even to propose answers to them. No doubt a comparativist has no special authority to draw such conclusions, but then I should not concede that a student of mankind was disqualified either.

III

Toward the end of Anna Karenina , Levin knows himself to be happy with his family and the fullness of his practical life, and yet he is overwhelmed by the uncertainty and the seeming pointlessness of existence. Nevertheless, he goes on living, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he is and for what purpose he has been placed in the world. He is tormented by this ignorance to the extent of fearing suicide; this happy father and contented husband hides ropes lest he hang himself, and he will not go out with a gun in case he obliterate the quandaries of life by shooting himself.

Others, however, have taken comfort from what they have seen as evidences of design in the world, and this character has given them the confidence that they themselves had their parts, and their lives a real justification, in some

overriding purpose behind existence. In the year that Tolstoy published his tragedy, a pioneer anthropologist, L.H. Morgan, presented in his Ancient Society a scheme of stages in the advance of man toward civilization, and he represented this evolution as discovering "the plan of the Supreme Intelligence." Now, more than a century later, comparativism can discern in the forms of human life many more numerous, and more evidential, regularities and concomitancies. These are as remarkable as the natural facts which have conducted to the idea that the world reflects a divine design, and in certainty and detail they far exceed the plan of progress inferred by Morgan. But to the extent that we can account for the design-like features which frame human lives, none of them can plausibly be ascribed a purposive character; nor can they well be interpreted as keys to a general significance imbuing the variety of institutions which frame human existence. The cosmological argument from design did not carry much conviction; a sociological argument from design, by resort to the global comparison of social facts, remained to be made. In this sphere the supposed evidences are as plain as they are in cosmology; and so, I think, are the conclusions.

Ideally, I assume, it is a mark of a humane discipline that under one aspect or another, whether directly or by implication, it shall have some bearing on the perplexities that are inseparable from reflection on human experience. The essays that follow, taken together, are minor and occasional exercises in a semantic comparativism toward that end. Because these deliveries are circumstantial, they are indeed not to be too strictly sifted; they are meant to be received as they were delivered. If the substantial subjects are not yet fully forged out, in their immanent forms they may nonetheless prefigure capital truths.

1—
Essential Perplexities

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
Samuel Beckett

I

"What is man, that thou art mindful of him?" (Psalms 8:4). Let us approach this unevadable question from an inhuman point of observation.

In the silence of the infinite spaces of the universe, that so much affrighted Pascal, mankind is alone. It is true that by the early sixteenth century theories of a plurality of solar systems and inhabited planets were already common topics of discussion in Europe, and that by the beginning of the eighteenth century these notions were widely accepted in even orthodox circles. Kant declared that he was ready to stake all he had on the contention that at least one of the visible planets was inhabited; and today we are told that there are probably innumerable parts of the universe that are capable of sustaining recognizable forms of life. But so far as we actually know we are absolutely alone.

What view we take of this conclusion depends on predispositions that are not entailed by the mere observation. It can be taken as a ground to magnify man as a singular marvel; or else it can be taken to show that man is an accidental and inconsiderable epiphenomenon of mindless and

implacable material factors. Either way, it is hard indeed, against this scale, to maintain that our presence is at all impressive. From a few miles up, the eye can detect no sign of man or his works. From a height of only a few thousand feet, there is no sign of men themselves. Yet here we are, not only scanning space but looking at ourselves. For the crucial fact is that man is self-conscious; he can represent himself to himself, treat his species as an object; and so far as we can be sure this also asserts man's isolation from the rest of things.

What this fact is worth depends, in its turn, on values that are independent of its empirical grounds. Lichtenberg's comment was quizzical: "The most accomplished monkey cannot draw a monkey; only man can do that; but then only man thinks that to be able to do so is a virtue." At any rate, when we seek our counterparts in further space this self-consciousness is not what we first require. What we look for are signs of intelligent life. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, and we take the quality of intelligence to be a decisive point of comparison in deciding whether an alien form of life is or is not significantly like ourselves. What else do we then presuppose in responding to the question of what it is to be man or man-like? Sir Thomas Browne sounded a high note when he contended, with honorific capitals, that "Man is a Noble Animal." It sounds grand, for nobility is a precellent virtue, but the declaration was much muted in the next century by the irony of Lichtenberg's remark: "That man is the noblest of creatures is readily concluded upon from the fact that so far no other creature has contradicted him."

Man is by his nature a religious animal (Burke); or he is a wild beast (Bolingbroke). He is Heaven's masterpiece (Francis Quarles); or he is Nature's sole mistake (Schwenk Gilbert). Contradictions set aside, he is the measure of all things (Protagoras), or he is even the master of things

(Swinburne). That he is a political animal (Aristotle) is too partial; that he is a tool-making animal (Franklin), too pragmatic; that he is simply a detestable animal (Swift), too vehement. That he is at any rate an animal seems well agreed, except that La Mettrie made a witty case for regarding him as a peculiarly intricate machine. Certainly it seems right to conclude, with C. C. Colton, that man is an embodied paradox. Yet there remain two tags by which to characterize man and which I find not only striking but useful. One is Wittgenstein's remark that man can be regarded as a ceremonial animal; the other, which goes deep, is Lichtenberg's statement that man is an Ursachentier, a cause-animal.

With this observation, making allusion to the external causes that actuate man, together with the causes that he conceives and seeks, we approach the objective and analytical stance of a scientific assessment. Now it is a commonplace in the history of ideas, or at any rate in those traceable from Europe back to Babylon and Egypt, that scientific investigation began with the heavenly bodies and only after millennia came to focus on man himself. Nevertheless, our predecessors in this deliberately detached enterprise can be traced quite far back. I do not refer to Herodotus, though he can indeed be hailed as the first great ethnographer in our tradition, but to the school of Skeptics who followed him and whose precepts were collated around A.D. 200 by Sextus Empiricus. The critical change of perspective that was introduced by the Skeptics, as far as we are concerned, was that they were not content merely to record the different customs of various peoples and to remark that they were different. Their scientific achievement was that they methodically collated the most disparate customs, by reference to similar institutions and forms of behavior, and then drew general conclusions from their comparison. The validity of their inferences is a separate question, but what I want to

stress is that they were comparativists, and also that they intended their findings about human nature and social forms to bear consequences in the reassessment of their own ideas and conventions. For my part, too, I am not indifferent to the fact that they were literally skeptics.

The subsequent course of investigation into mankind in general is a long story and I need not relate it. What matters at this juncture is not so much the story as the antiquity of it, and then the crucial feature of comparativism. But in spite of the foundations so clearly laid out by the Skeptics and their methodological successors, it was not until the Enlightenment that an empiricist theory of knowledge conjoined with the ethnography of global exploration to provide the premises for our modern studies; and it was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that natural history conjoined with a moral revulsion against slavery in the institution of those private societies and learned bodies, meeting outside the universities, which formally established what has become known as social anthropology. Since then there has been rapid intellectual and academic progress, procured against odds of many kinds by men of admirable vision and pertinacity. But we cannot advance a science by the impulsion simply of respect for illustrious predecessors, nor direct our inquiries within the lines solely of their authority. Our task is to determine how to go on, and this presents us with certain standing questions of method in comparison with other subjects.

II

The first query, still, is whether social anthropology is indeed a science and concomitantly in what respects it may emulate or learn from the acknowledged, that is, the exact, sciences.

Here the conventional criterion is the employment of

mathematics, and the position is that mathematics has not so far proved revealing in its application to any theoretical topic in the comparative study of social forms. Our intellectual congeners therefore include philosophy, classics, philology, history (especially social history, the history of ideas, the history of art), theology (particularly the ancillary of biblical studies), and other nonmathematical kinds of humane study. Accordingly, among the works that I should expect any serious social anthropologist to acquaint himself with are Thought and Action by Stuart Hampshire, Polarity and Analogy by Geoffrey Lloyd, Seth, God of Confusion by H. te Velde, Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas, Mitra-Varuna by Georges Dumézil, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indoeuropéennes by Émile Benveniste, The Survival of the Pagan Gods by Jean Seznec, Montaillou by E. Le Roy Ladurie, The Semantics of Biblical Language by James Barr, The Awe-inspiring Rites of Initiation by Fr. E. Yarnold.

It may be found strange that I have not mentioned other subjects that are often assumed to be close to social anthropology, or at any rate closer than art history or theology. Let me very rapidly allude to some of them. Sociology, to begin with, may seem an obvious relative, and it is true that we acknowledge common ancestors in the last century, but it is hard to cite titles in modern sociology that bear significantly on our own problems.

Linguistics, that is, theoretical linguistics as distinct from philology and the practical study of translation, would seem in principle to be indispensable but has proved in practice to have little useful pertinence. There would for instance be great interest in the actual delineation of "deep structures" common to Nuer and Penan, to Nahuatl and Aranda; but so far as empirical relevance to the comparative study of social facts is concerned these entities remain at about the level of

innate ideas in the seventeenth century. The notion of deep structures stands for an exciting theoretical ambition, just as does the topic of language universals in general; but I think that social anthropologists have been rather more convincing than linguists in their attempts to discover, at the level of collective representations, persuasive evidence of anything of the kind.

In the investigation of possible correlations between language and thought, also, linguistics enjoys no precedence over philosophy or biblical studies or comparative literary criticism, and here too I think that ethnographers have independently done the necessary work in more convincing terms. If I stress this independence, one reason is that much high-sounding talk has been propagated in the vocabulary of linguistics, with the claim that the subject is the origin or should be the model of objective analysis in the sphere of social facts in general; but this, when judged by work actually done, often turns out to be either pretentious rhetoric or defective history of ideas.

In a similar vein, arresting claims have been made for what is now called ethology, and it is urged that much is to be understood by relating human behavior to that of primates or octopi or black-headed gulls; but with each case that is presented empirically, whether the topic is incest or hierarchy or local grouping, the assimilation of human conduct to the behavior of other species breaks down irremediably, as The Biology of Human Action by Vernon Reynolds decisively bears out, at the boundary with self-consciousness and collective representations.

Finally, in this list of very blunt contrasts, there is physical anthropology, a respectable branch of biology the title of which conduces to the disrespectable idea—since the nineteenth century, at any rate—that there is a unitary subject

called anthropology of which the social and the physical are conjoined forms. Well, there is no such unitary subject, and it serves no serious intellectual purpose to name unconnected disciplines so indiscriminately.

Now I do not want to make it appear that I am pressing (perhaps in order to preserve the autonomy of my own subject) for rigid separations among academic specialities. Quite to the contrary, the social anthropologist must ideally be eclectic to the extreme in his range of interests, perpetually alert to points of instructive contact, and the variety of matters that he may find relevant to a particular study in his own field is quite unpredictable. To give a sample of real instances, he may well need to know, for particular purposes, something about meteorology, the sexual apparatus of the rhinoceros, the periodicity of the palolo worm; Hindu iconography, foetal development, irrigation techniques; glottochronology, body images, the transmission of textile designs, or the distribution of blood groups. But he would be insane to attempt to become a polymath on that scale; and he would be deluded also if he thought he could identify in advance, say, half a dozen basic subjects that would provide him with a general-purpose preparation and set of techniques for the study of human beings. So what he does is simply to keep his mind avidly open to whatever may just happen to prove pertinent or provocative; and to get this benefit he has to be insatiably curious about other subjects, and he ought to know something about what can reasonably be expected of them. When it comes down to particular problems, though, he cannot rest there: he turns to the experts and he must rely only on them.

It will be seen therefore that in such regards the elastic unity of a social anthropologist's approach may come largely from what he chooses to study, together with the

adventitious network of evidences that he may find useful, rather than from some prior circumscription of what he presumes to be anthropology proper. An outsider is then perfectly entitled to wonder what on earth does characterize a social anthropologist. So far the definition has proceeded negatively, as the boundary has been drawn nearer and nearer in and as one criterion after another has been eliminated; and yet at the same time it has appeared that there is no a priori limit to the range of his concerns. It looks almost as though a social anthropologist—unlike an archaeologist or a geneticist or a museum curator—is someone who never does anything properly.

III

One of Iris Murdoch's donnish characters asks about another, in an idiom typical of Oxford: "Is he any good?" The question is not how good the man is at whatever he does, but, with utter skepticism, whether he is any good at all. How, then, against this exacting and bracing standard, do we gauge if a social anthropologist is any good? The answer is: by the same criteria as in any other humane discipline. There are no tricks to scholarship, no private methods, no arcane springs of understanding. We all know that, given time and opportunity, we could switch from one humanity to another and do the job respectably; and this is so because there are common conceptions of scholarship, of what it is to do the job properly. The question then is merely what in particular to do.

For the anthropologist the job consists in the first place in acquiring a working acquaintance with the distribution and distinguishing features of cultural traditions around the world. He has to think of mankind on a literally global scale. This is a cumulative undertaking, demanding diligence and

memory: it is, as it were, a kind of natural history. But it brings with it certain uncommon intellectual advantages: a habit of world-wide comparison; a readiness to assess disparate customs neutrally, as social facts; the diminution of prejudices, as one assumption or expectation or ignorant censure is given up in a better realization of what men in society are really like; the identification of sources of misunderstanding, as when ideas framed in our own linguistic tradition are found inapt to the comprehension of other styles of civilization; a clearer view of the themes and social forms that are typical of mankind in the construction of society and of its versions of reality.

This universal purview is of quite fundamental importance. It is a necessary condition of the practice of the subject that professional discourse can advert with equal readiness to the Trio of Surinam and the Kédang of eastern Indonesia, to the Konso of Ethiopia and the Batek of Malaysia, to the Eskimo of Alaska, the Yamana of Tierra del Fuego, the Gilyak of Siberia, the Aranda of central Australia. There is after all no other way to gain the authority to speak of mankind. Naturally, an anthropologist will know considerably more about one region of the world than about others, and this is where exact scholarship must come into play. If he is interested in China, for example, it is essential that he shall be a sinologist; if he works on India he must learn the classical traditions of Indian civilization; if his area is Latin America he will start from the history of Spanish and Portuguese exploration and the astounding states that Europe destroyed. But always he will have present to his mind the premise that the institutions he studies are instances, however grand or otherwise remarkable, in a world-wide range of social possibilities.

What then can the social anthropologist do with such a

huge extent of evidence? At first sight there are at least three reasons, quite apart from the sheer quantity of the data, to wonder if there is anything that he could do. First, the rapid changes to which the meanings of words are subject; second, the constant reshaping of institutions; third, the prominence in human action of innumerable and unpredictable purposes. In the face of these perpetually fluctuating factors, the likelihood might seem that no secure and constant sense could be made of man and his doings. This apprehension seems confirmed moreover when we look back at some of the more prominent attempts by schools of anthropologists to formulate theoretical schemes: evolutionism, diffusionism, functionalism, scientism (by which I mean Radcliffe-Brown's emphasis on the need to establish a natural science of society, expressed in a body of sociological laws), structuralism. Against this background the comparativist's undertaking looks pretty discouraging on a theoretical plane, except to the extent that we may be said to be making progress simply by identifying mistaken approaches that we should avoid in future.

Yet there are things that I can claim we do rather well and by means that are peculiar to the subject. It will be seen in a moment that it really is not feasible, unfortunately, to demonstrate either contention in the present place, and I shall simply indicate what they are.

One task can be called, after Evans-Pritchard, the translation of culture: that is, the rendering of alien concepts and forms of life into terms that will make them intelligible, as semantic constructions, to members of the anthropologist's tradition. In some regards, of course, this is what is done by theologians, historians, and professional translators; but the difficulties are far more formidable when exotic cultures are in question, for much that can be taken somewhat for

granted within the European or even the Indo-European tradition cannot be taken for granted at all when the object of study is a Melanesian island or a band of forest nomads in Borneo. For the social anthropologist a major difference is that, in addition to coping with the contrast in ideology or in implicit metaphysics, he will need to analyze the contrasting institutions that compose the framework of social life. These will include principles of incorporation; rules of marriage; laws of succession, descent, and inheritance; rights of land tenure; definitions of property; offices of power and ritual; and a great deal else. Not only will the analyst need to comprehend these social forms as they are indigenously conceived, but he will have to compose his own understanding into a synthetic interpretation that makes extreme demands on his capacities for imagination and systematic construction. An excellent example from France is to be seen in the classical studies made of New Caledonia by Maurice Leenhardt, and in particular in his exquisite monograph Do Kamo .

This brings me to the second kind of competence, one that makes a far greater divergence from the practices of other humane disciplines. This is the analysis of classifications of descent and affinity, together with the correlation of jural and other institutions that the categories define and govern. The cant term for this field of study is "kinship," a trivial label indeed for matters of such fundamental consequence. In this sphere social anthropology has a continuous background of work, showing overall an increasing pitch of skill and comprehension that can be traced well into the past century. Although much of it depends on a capacity for the articulation of abstractions, a talent which certainly cannot be arrogated to social anthropologists, this

kind of work has also a considerable technical component that is commonly found quite demanding. If I could explicate here the method and cogency of one exemplary analysis, for example, Francis Korn's study of a five-line alternating asymmetric prescriptive system among the Iatmul, the quality that I refer to could be easily seen. Studies of this sort have constantly preoccupied most leading anthropologists: Morgan, Fison, Howitt; Rivers, Kroeber, Lowie; Radcliffe-Brown, Lévi-Strauss; Leach, Dumont; latterly, P.G. Rivière, R. H. Barnes, and a growing company of modern collaborators.

The analysis of systems of social classification has, in addition to its technical aspect, two main intellectual attractions that make it outstandingly important. One is that it is formal and systematic, permitting exact analyses that can be proved or disproved; and in this regard it can be claimed as a distinct type of scientific advance. Although the comparison cannot be pressed at all far, there is something of a resemblance to the determination of molecular structure; and under this objective aspect we can maintain that we are making progress and that we have a good idea how to go on. The second factor that makes this work important is that it corresponds to dominant concerns in the greater number of those societies, in recorded history and all around the world, that social anthropologists have made it their special business to study. The social facts that we represent in our diagrams comprise all sorts of rights and duties, norms of etiquette, modes of cooperation, principles of symbolism, ascription of sentiments, partition of authority, metaphysical concepts, and very much more in limitless detail. (A superb example of such classificatory implications is to be found set out in Kédang by R. H. Barnes.) So there is

both theoretical and semantic importance to the study of such systems. No wonder it is found quite taxing, and that even clever men are sometimes not very good at it.

IV

After these confident contentions there may be some puzzlement about where the perplexities come in. The answer lies in the very degree of success that the discipline can register.

I have alluded to the extreme contingency and variation of social phenomena, the perpetual restlessness of men's minds, the unpredictability of their intentions. These factors make it seem unlikely that we might say anything useful about men and society in general. Yet the fact is that we can teach students what to look for, what to expect, and how to undertake an analysis. A particularly surprising realization is that often it is possible for an academic supervisor to guide and correct research into a society with which he has no direct or scholarly acquaintance. It is very perplexing, and against expectation, that this should be possible; for the more we think of men as directing their actions by free decision, and in the light of conflicting interests and purposes, the more striking it is that they should so regularly end up with very similar institutions.

Let me very quickly just mention some of the factors responsible, under six headings: symbolic elements, relations, forms, classification, psychology, and reason. This will have to be very superficial, and I can only proffer the assurance that each point rests on empirical analyses.

Elements. Men have at their disposal, for the symbolic representation of their world, as many things and qualities as are distinguished by their languages; and it might be inferred that this latitude, combined with the exuberance of

their imaginations, would tend to make their symbolisms incomparable in such particulars. Yet over and over again we find that societies resort to the same elements or vehicles of meaning: not only colors but particular colors; also numbers and material properties. In very different parts of the world, birds, and sometimes even the same species of bird, stand for feminine sexuality. The mythical figure of the half-man, consisting of only one side of the body, can be found in a hundred or more traditions in every quarter of the globe. Percussive sound has a peculiar significance and a special connection with transition from one category or condition to another. The more one reads ethnography the more one is struck by the constant recurrence of such symbolic elements, and the more it appears that there may be a limited or basic repertory of them that might eventually be established. There may be 500 of them, or even 5000 for all we know, and the definition of "basic" is in principle uncertain in any event; but the prospect remains that we may be able to compile a catalogue of symbolic elements that make a natural impress upon the imagination.

Relations. Categories and symbols tend with great frequency to be ordered in dual schemes. Sometimes the dualism affects an entire society, as when it is divided into moieties, usually named and often exogamous; sometimes the dichotomy is seen in a range of less inclusive particulars, ranging in extent from one society to another. A famous example is the complementary opposition between right and left, together with the contrasted values (male/female, strong/weak, and so on) for which the sides are made to stand. Another instance is the regular partition of governance between secular power and mystical authority (king/priest, chief/shaman, judge/diviner). At the borderline between categories also there is great regularity: the boundary

is commonly marked by one of three stock symbolic means; and rites of passage are commonly divided into three stages in which the marginal stage is itself marked by the same means. And then there are social systems that can be integrally defined by relations such as symmetry, asymmetry, alternation, and so on, so that the formal analysis of their constituent relations provides the key to their normative structure.

Forms. In spite of much variation in the discrimination of jural statuses, relationship terminologies everywhere can readily be analyzed and compared by reference to certain common principles. Instead of making up an endless range of forms of social classification, as one might find for example in the classification of objects, these terminologies tend to cohere into a very limited number of forms resulting from the combination of a similarly restricted set of principles. Similarly, descent systems can be compared universally by reference to only six elementary modes, and of these six only four are socially feasible as modes of organization. Even rules of marriage can be assorted into a very small number of formal possibilities. It is these formal constraints that may account for the fact that, as Wittgenstein remarked, rather as we speak of the association of ideas so "we could speak of an association of practices."

Classification. Modes of classification, other than by descent and affinity, fall into one or another of two main types: hierarchical and analogical. The former is familiar from the traditional method of genus and difference. The latter is a topic to which it is possible for social anthropology to make decided contributions by comparative study, especially of systems of dual classification and prescriptive alliance. With each study comes a renewed recognition of simple principles and familiar forms. And even when an unconventional

analytical discrimination is introduced, such as the contrast between monothetic and polythetic classification, one finds that it too is a common recourse in the conceptual practices of other traditions.

Psychology. By this term I refer to the range of capacities and inner states that Hampshire accommodates under the notion of "human powers." These are very variously distinguished and assessed by different linguistic traditions and by their indigenous theories of personality. The disparities may alert us to the possibility that what we take for a distinct capacity, for example, belief, is instead a convenient invention within a particular culture, rather like witchcraft among the Azande; and the wider effect of ethnographic comparison is to incline one to the view that the psyche is not so complex as many psychological vocabularies, namely, those of different cultures, seem to assert. A comparative study of emotions, in particular, indicates that the passions are not naturally so discrete or so numerous as are the names by which in different languages they are distinguished. Moreover, they can be subjected to a formal analysis which indicates that in certain circumstances, as defined by kinship, they are positively correlated with jural classification.

Reason. The common experience that often it is difficult, or even at first practically impossible, to follow the chains of inferences made in exotic cultures had led to the supposition that there are discrete modes of rationality; and the artificial formulation of alternative logics has seemed to confirm this, or at least to show that there are more various types of valid reasoning than have been allowed for. But the usual finding, in the event, has been that in such problematical instances the difficulty lay not in the logic but in the cultural premises, and that as soon as these were well grasped the train of reasoning became clear. No alternative logic has yet been

discovered in a socialized form, that is, as a mode of thought proper to a society as a whole in its general discourse, and the conclusion seems to be increasingly sure that there is an informal logic underlying all languages and styles of thought and cultural predispositions. There is, it appears, a mode of reason proper and common to all men; and this crucial finding is an achievement, necessarily, of comparative ethnography and the discipline of social anthropology.

This catalogue of certain factors that permit effective comparison has been hasty and partial, and the empirical proofs have had to be taken entirely on trust, but I think it has been possible to appreciate the main implications. The multifarious and apparently contingent complexity of civilization, in the thousands of forms that it has assumed throughout the earth, can by abstraction be seen as far simpler than are its traditional expressions. The comparability of cultures, and the anthropologist's ability to analyze them, are consequences, I think, of the natural fact that fundamentally they are composed by certain primary factors. It is by reference to these factors—and not to sociological laws or theories or correlations or typologies—that it proves possible empirically to characterize the elementary forms of human thought and action. An incidental lesson from the history of ideas is that the anthropological schools of evolutionism, diffusionism, and the rest over the past century were trying to do too much and to go too quickly.

It may be that primary factors themselves are interconnected more systematically than at present appears, but we can hardly talk about systems until we have identified the elements, relations, and principles of which they may be composed. As things stand at present, it rather looks as though there is a common repository of factors to which men resort in the construction and the interpretation of so-

cial reality. The impression produced on the comparativist is that different traditions combine these factors, together of course with a great deal else that is contingently generated, by concatenation or by sporadic conjunction rather than by arrangement into discrete systems. Perhaps a useful way to express the matter is to suggest that across the range of human civilizations, and underlying many remarkable syntheses and extreme elaborations, certain factors have combined polythetically. This would accord with the facts that there are at a certain level of analysis characteristic features of civilization; that there are random and often unsystematic resemblances among different and effectively unrelated traditions; and that there appears to be no basic or central set of features that is common to all the varieties of civilization.

On this view of the matter we have next to ask what determines the primary factors and what gives them their natural existence. There are many ways to approach this question, and I do not think a direct empirical proof of any is at all near, but I shall simply state what I think is at present the most convincing inference. I interpret the primary factors of experience as properties of the cerebral cortex. They subsist, I infer, as innate predispositions of the activities of the brain (the material organ) and are actuated via the central nervous system. In accordance with these suppositions, it can be proposed that in studying the characteristic features of collective representations, at the global level of analysis in question, we are studying the constructive resources of the human brain as the instrument of consciousness and the locus of the unconscious.

In saying this I am not offering a blunt advocacy of materialism, if only because that doctrine is a metaphysics which goes far beyond the scope of my present concerns. I am tendering a supposition that is consistent with the results of

world-wide ethnography and that respects Ockham's razor by not gratuitously introducing any additional entity or hypothesis. Nor in any case is it that unconventional, though it is stated with what in this context is an unfamiliar starkness. Durkheim, at the end of the last century, laid great stress on the objective character of collective representations, in that they are general and coercive. It has been easy since then to consider men as organisms for the sustenance and carriage of brains and to imagine collective representations as actuating brains and as traveling constantly from one brain to another.

There is a connection here with the otherwise enigmatic statement made by Jung, with reference to the organic basis of the collective unconscious, that "the psyche is part of nature." And when Pascal wrote that "we are automaton as much as mind," he was subscribing to the same idiom, only without being in a position to appreciate to what extent minds also may be automata. But the phrase that for me encapsulates the matter most effectively, with the greatest power of consequence, is what Lichtenberg wrote in 1789: "We are parts of this world, . . . and the thought that lives and moves in us also belongs to it."

V

Evans-Pritchard, at the end of his inaugural lecture at Oxford, declared that knowledge of man and society is an end in itself and its pursuit a moral exercise. When Durkheim published his manual on the rules of sociological method, he found that many critics resented what they saw as a threatened diminution of man's moral autonomy. Perhaps what I have said here will carry the implication, in the minds of some, that moral self-determination is to be subjected yet further to a progressive reduction, and in spheres

of experience and judgment where people tend to be most firmly committed.

One response to such an apprehension is to contend that if we think it good to regard ourselves with "humility of mind" (Proverbs), then comparativism conduces to that virtue; but of course the moral evaluation is not the product of the academic discipline of social anthropology. Some will no doubt repudiate the conclusions that I envisage, not on the ground that they are as yet unproved but because on other grounds they are uncongenial; but it is not the task of a humane discipline to be congenial—only to argue, with empirical demonstration, for what is thought to be the case. Others may take up the materialist aspect of this account because they find a grim satisfaction in the view that mankind is simply a virulent organism swarming destructively on the surface of an indifferent earth. This too is not an evaluation that follows from the researches just adumbrated, but I should think it commendable that social anthropology might impart a new edge and added force to the reassessment of man's nature and of his place in nature and the universe. I take it, in any event, that this has something to do with the essential meaning of the word "anthropology."

What I have had to say in this place, as in my work in general, results from a view of social anthropology (a view which I cannot claim to be shared by all my colleagues) as charting what Kant described as "the limits of human understanding." The venture is not, however, only cognitive: it concerns also the imagination and the passions. Under these aspects it is an integrated semantic discipline, an architectonics of significance. It will not supply decisive or scientific resolution to the enigmas that must afflict any men who reflect on their condition; but it can provide a universal

setting, and the means by which this can be comprehended, within which to form vital judgments on a truly human scale. In this regard the discipline answers empirically to a comment once made by Borges in response to a colleague who declared that philosophy consisted in clear and precise understanding. "I should define it," said Borges, "as the organization of the essential perplexities of man."

It is in this sense that social anthropology can be conceived as the practice of an empirical philosophy, with the special encouragement that empirically there is indeed so very much to be done by methodical research. As for its moral aspect, this too offers a special promise. We all recognize that among the benefits of great art are an expansion of the sympathies, a revision of conventional judgments, the provocation of alternative possibilities of conduct, a vision of man as he might otherwise be, or else a characterization of man as he can newly be seen to be. Typically, however, we come to such works within a given cultural tradition, and we respond to them from concomitant premises that often are implicit and are not subjected to challenge. By contrast, the testimony of ethnography can challenge at every turn (consider the impact of the fictional case in "Doctor Brodie's Report" by Borges), and the cumulative effect of social anthropology can be to make us radically review our perplexities and the grounds on which we can attempt to resolve them. If it is morally instructive to read Hamlet or Crime and Punishment, The Trial or Middlemarch , there can also be much to gain by reading true accounts of what other peoples have actually made of their lives and how they have come to terms with the predicaments of human existence. Earlier in this essay I listed works that I think should be part of any social anthropologist's education, just as Shake-

speare, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and George Eliot are part of the education by which in our tradition we try to make ourselves humane. I now make the suggestion that social anthropology makes its own distinct claim of the kind, and that a liberally educated person might well be expected to acquire a comparable familiarity with outstanding works in our discipline.

Perhaps, too, it will have been glimpsed that social anthropology can be an exciting and advancing subject, and also in what regards it can be, in Alasdair MacIntyre's words, "a fundamental intellectual discipline." It is valuable as a liberal education, and it is useful to other academic subjects. But I think it is important to report, at the same time, that it is a peculiarly difficult discipline to practice. It makes extreme demands on imaginative intelligence and on synthetic capacity; and in the crucial setting of field research it can subject the investigator to the severest intellectual and moral test (sometimes a physical ordeal as well) of his life. Although it is essentially a humane discipline, the mistake should not be made of thinking that it fails to subscribe to the indispensable tenets of exact science. If it is supposed that the only exactitude is that of mathematics, let me respond merely that our task would be immeasurably more straightforward if our evidences did permit the application of mathematical techniques, if only human powers and social facts did have the discrete properties which in other sciences make possible the employment of the supreme achievements of abstract reason. And if any are still swayed by the old calumny that social anthropology is intrinsically a "soft" subject, let them see how comfortable a time they have with Francis Korn's Elementary Structures Reconsidered , Peter Rivière's Marriage among the Trio , or Frank Stewart's

Fundamentals of Age-group Systems , or else with the analyses of prescriptive systems that have also become associated with social anthropology at Oxford.

Before I close, perhaps I ought to say something more about the question of the intellectual standing of the subject. Some fine work is done in social anthropology, and if at Oxford it can earn the respect of All Souls College, of Stuart Hampshire, and of Keith Thomas, there is little need to worry on that score. But much that is published under the name of anthropology is deplorable; the reputation of the discipline is often blemished by opportunists and even by charlatans who peculiarly infest our subject; and it is a standing hazard that what is professionally achieved is pronounced upon not by practiced authorities but by literary critics, Sunday newspaper reviewers, and suchlike pundits of the public media. No doubt this is all a consequence of the intrinsic interest of some of the things that we study—for example, primitive art, sexual practices, dramatic ceremonies, exotic customs, bizarre ideas—and perhaps we should accept the taint and the imputations as natural results of the general appeal of the subject. But let me plead that we be judged by the best work that we do, and that public reliance should be placed on the judgment of those who by the excellence of their own published work have actually proved their professional title to represent social anthropology.

As for the ventures of the discipline in the face of essential perplexities, I have to realize that these are not comforting times in which to consider the future employment of its skills or the prospects of the survival of free thought in any disciplined form of inquiry. It does not need a social anthropologist to make the point, nor has he in any case a special authority to do so, that man—Bolingbroke's "wild beast"—has never refrained from any wickedness or destructive

folly that he had the power to perpetrate. He has now practically become "the master of things," and, since at last he has the means to obliterate civilization, I cannot think it reasonable to doubt that before very long he will make an end to everything, so that hereafter we shall be as though we had never been.

Reason, the careful art by which we interpret the quandary of our existence, is, in the moving plangency of the book of The Wisdom of Solomon , a spark kindled by the beating of our heart, and it will become extinct in the ultimate reduction to ashes:

And our name shall be forgotten in time, and no man shall remember our works; and our life shall pass away as the traces of a cloud, and shall be scattered as is a mist, when it is chased by the beams of the sun, and overcome by the heat thereof.

2—
Physiological Symbols

Wee carry with us the wonders, wee seeke without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us.
Sir Thomas Browne

I

Symbolism posits resemblances. Between symbol and referent there are assigned common properties making it appropriate that the one should stand for the other. But since some resemblance can be posited between anything in the world and anything else, it is not the mere feasibility of assimilation that makes a symbolic association appropriate.

As a symbolic classification develops in complexity, so the criteria of appropriateness assume the character of historical accretions; if they were patent to begin with, over time they appear more and more as though they were arbitrary. Indeed, it is a standard component in definitions that a symbol is said to stand in a more or less conventional connection with what it stands for. This view is strengthened by the comparison of the particulars of symbolism in different traditions; the symbolic terms or vehicles are largely peculiar to the cultures that employ them, and their referents or meanings are still more idiocratic. Each symbolic tradition, considered at this level of particularity, speaks to

itself and is at first encounter incomprehensible to any other. An ethnographer or historian acquires some command of its semantic resources in much the way that he learns a foreign language or an artificial code. When he sets out the distinctive features of an exotic symbolism, he conveys an understanding of it in part by reproducing in a reader the process of learning the meanings of its constituent particulars. The task, in other words, is the translation of culture; and it is affected by all the arbitrariness and contingency of a linguistic translation.

Some relief from these difficulties can be had by concentrating on the systematic aspect of symbolism, for example, on the numerical mode of partition into two or four or seven divisions among which things are distributed. This recourse makes it possible to compare, and to analyze as classes of phenomena, symbolic systems which semantically and circumstantially are very disparate. Another recourse in the service of comparison is to concentrate instead on symbolic vehicles which are common to various traditions; for example, fire, water, blood, hair, weapons, cloth. This approach makes it more feasible to focus on what may be the intrinsic symbolic appeal of the vehicles themselves, without becoming confused or distracted by their contingent uses and meanings.

The comparison of symbolic classifications reveals that there is a remarkably economical repertory of relations, forms, and vehicles which have a global distribution. This is interesting on two counts: first, that anything can stand symbolically for anything else, so that it could be expected that symbolic classifications would be infinitely diverse; second, that any language denotes tens of thousands of objects and qualities, so that the components of symbolic classifications might be very numerous. The fact, then, that

such classifications are readily comparable, by reference to a limited set of common symbolic components, points to a significant degree of determination.

One explanation of the economy in question is that a restricted number of semantic units is more manageable and effective as a code, but this consideration does not explain why it is that different traditions should rely on a common repertory of symbolic components. The components are heterogeneous, and their presence in the repertory—as relations, forms, or vehicles—may call for several explanations. But some components, however different in appearance, may be aggregated into a set by reference to their common mode of formation. Thus symbolic classifications ordered by partition could be analyzed as a set by reference to the formal abstractions of number and division, and here logical considerations might be decisive. Similarly, a set of components can be demarcated by the fact that they all have to do with the senses (touch, sight, and so on), and here experiential considerations may be important.

The aim of the present investigation is to isolate for analysis a set of symbolic components which can be referred to the physiology of the human body.

II—
Right/Left

An obvious starting point is the preeminence of the right hand. Hertz published a seminal paper on this topic, in 1909, and since then it has attracted increasing attention. There is now a very extensive literature on right and left, and the theoretical position is fairly complicated, but for the present purpose the issue is quite simple.

Man is a bilateral animal and, with the exception of certain internal organs, his body is anatomically symmetrical.

The right and left hands are enantiomorphs but otherwise identical; so it could be expected that man would be equally agile and efficient in the use of either hand. Yet if we look at the ways in which men actually employ their hands, we find that universally they make a decided distinction between the two. The right hand is privileged and regarded as superior; the left is despised and treated as inferior. In some societies the left hand is bound or even maltreated in order to oblige a child to resort to the right. The contrast between the preeminence of the right and the degraded status of the left is not confined to the use of the hands; it is expressed also in architecture, ceremonies, the idiom of morality, and in many other ways. The symmetry of the body is made asymmetrical in such regards, and the contrast in handedness is employed as a pattern for a range of ideological oppositions amounting sometimes to a social cosmology.

Underlying dual classifications of this kind there is a natural resemblance among men in that preponderantly there is a slight organic tendency toward right-handedness. There is a small proportion of individuals who are clearly left-handed by nature, but it has been asserted that they are never so decidedly left-handed, or in the same respects, as right-handers are right-handed. The ratio of natural right-handers to left-handers is not known for sure in any population, and there are reasons to think that it can never be settled; but there is no reason to doubt the large preponderance of individuals with an apparently innate preference for the right. On the other hand, there is no doubt, either, that the strength and persistence of right-handedness are to a significant extent the products of social pressure. This is shown not only by the social stipulations themselves, together with all the devices (such as implements designed for

use by the right hand only) by which these rules are supported, but also by what happens when the pressure is reduced.

In the last decade or two there has been a marked relaxation, from kindergarten up, of the former insistence in western societies that children should be, or be made, right-handed; and to even a casual observation it is striking how many young people today use the left hand for writing, holding a knife, employing items of manual equipment, and so on. Concomitantly, there has emerged a branch of industry catering especially for left-handers, and there are shops that specialize in selling anything left-handed. One cannot forecast with any confidence how far this trend will develop or to what extent it may become feasible to decide what is the natural ratio of right-handers to left-handers. There is no reason to think, however, that the distribution will ever be fifty-fifty or that man will ever be gifted with, in Hertz's words, two right hands. Global ethnography, and in particular the crucial fact that no known society has ever accorded preeminence to the left hand, testifies to a genetic physiological bias in favor of the right.

On this basis, as Hertz concludes, the slight physiological advantages possessed by the right can be seen as merely the occasion of a qualitative differentiation; "an almost insignificant bodily asymmetry" is enough, he asserts, to turn contrary representations in one direction and the other.

III—
The Half-Man

Whereas the human body is bilaterally symmetrical, men all round the world have imagined a figure consisting of only one half of the body: it has only one eye, one arm, and one leg, all on the same side.

Narratives featuring this half-man are found all over the globe: Oceania, Indonesia, China, outer Asia, India, Ceylon; the Middle East and all of Bantu Africa; Europe, from Romania to Ireland; North America, from the Eskimo down to the Papago; Central America, possibly parts of tropical forest South America, and ultimately Tierra del Fuego. The unilateral figure is not associated with any particular tradition or with any narrative form, and it appears to be independent also of any institution or system of social organization. It did not arrive at its vast distribution by way of diffusion, nor is it in each instance the product of creative ingenuity, but it gives every indication of being a spontaneous expression of the imaginative unconscious.

A number of explanations, apart from a resort to historical transmission, has been proposed. One is that man can be constituted only by a married couple, and that the idea of the individual is symbolized by the unilateral figure; another is that once it is remarked that man is symmetrical, the imagination naturally conjectures a nonsymmetrical form of human being; yet another is that the reduction of dual limbs to single intensifies their power, especially as the leg is a phallic symbol. There are other formulations, but no explanation advanced is completely satisfying, and none can accommodate the distribution and the varied attributes of the figure. What is interesting, though, is that most attempts at explanation have bypassed history and social setting in favor of a direct recourse to psychological factors.

A number of other approaches to an understanding of the image of the half-man can be made, and in my Reconnaissances I have briefly done so, but in order to advance the present exposition I shall come directly to one particular comparison that is rather compelling. This is a form of im-

pairment of the body image whereby the subject is convinced that one side of his body is missing. Typically, this illusion is caused by a cerebral accident, and self-awareness is then so affected that the sufferer refuses to acknowledge the "missing" parts of his body, though he sees them, as his own. Psychologically, then, there really are unilateral human beings.

What can be proposed, consequently, is that an affliction of the brain, which is potentially universal and is not correlated with social facts, has by its oddity been made the occasion of a cultural representation. What this image will be made to symbolize is a relatively open matter, though it is interesting that the half-man is quite frequently the offspring of spirit and mortal. The point to stress at the moment is that the image or symbolic form of the half-man can be connected with a physiological event.

IV—
White-Black-Red

Two concerns have led comparativists to pay special attention to color categories. One is that underneath the variability of social facts, including the many different ways of classifying colors, they seek a means or basis of comparison that is not subject to the contingency of the cultural; and this is provided by the spectrum of visible wavelengths, which is constant for all human beings. The other concern is that societies everywhere have themselves relied prominently on colors as vehicles of symbolism, and many of them—especially the great literate civilizations—have elaborate exegeses of the selection of particular colors and their meanings.

These two lines of interest have most usefully converged. On the former count, Berlin and Kay have presented an impressive analysis to the effect that "semantic universals do

exist in the domain of color vocabulary." An inventory of eleven basic color categories can be established, and the eleven or fewer basic color terms of any language are always drawn from these. If a language encodes fewer than eleven basic color categories, there are strict limits on which categories it will encode. Of special value are the findings that all languages contain terms for white and black, and that if a language contains three terms then it contains in addition to these a term for red. These three colors, moreover, constitute the initial discriminations in an evolution of color terms: first white and black, then red.

These findings have an interesting parallel in the investigation of the symbolism of colors. In 1889, Gummere published a study of the symbolic use of black and white in the Germanic tradition; in 1926 Wunderlich concentrated on the meaning of red in Greek and Roman cults; and in 1942 de Vries brought these interests together and pushed the comparison much further, in an article on red, white, and black not only in the Indo-European tradition but also among more exotic peoples such as the Batak of Sumatra and North American Indians. Later, in 1954, Dumézil correlated these three colors (with the addition of blue and green to black) with the "three functions" as exemplified by Roman, Vedic, Norse, and Hittite materials; white was the color of the priestly function, and red was that of warrior gods, though the ascription of a third color was rather less clear. In more recent years, Turner's account (1965) of color symbolism in Ndembu ritual has become well known. Among this central African people red, white, and black are clearly established as the basic color triad in their symbolic classification. And recently there has appeared a monograph on the subject, Red-White-Black as a Mode of Thought (1979), by Anita Jacobson-Widding, which surpasses all that went before. In

this detailed comparative study of the color symbolism of peoples of the lower Congo, Jacobson-Widding demonstrates that the triad red-white-black is general and basic, and she clearly demonstrates the distinct significance of each color. Among many other attributes, red stands for sexual desire, physical force, magical power; white signifies good order, reason, generosity; black signifies wrong, guilt, disorder.

There are many other evidences bearing out the contentions that white, black, and red are basic color terms and also that these same color terms receive a basic symbolic employment. Berlin and Kay write that they can offer no physical or physiological explanation for the apparently greater perceptual salience of the color stimuli, nor for the relative ordering among them. Turner, however, argues that the selection of red-white-black can be accounted for. They are, he contends, the three colors representing products of the human body (sc. blood, milk or semen, faeces) whose emission, spilling, or production is associated with a heightening of emotion; they stand for basic human experiences of the body.

The colors white, black, and red stand therefore firmly attested as semantic universals, and it is at least a fair inference that these linguistic discriminations reflect saliencies in the physiology of visual perception. In addition, Turner proposes the special case that the symbolic significance of this triad is occasioned by crucial experiences associated with fundamental operations of human physiology such as menstruation, copulation, and defecation.

V—
Percussion

Rather as light waves provide a constant scale against which the variable discrimination of colors can be set, so

sound waves supply a physical basis to the symbolism of sounds.

A type of sound that has attracted attention in comparative ethnography is percussion, that is, noise produced by striking or shaking. The means used to produce this quality of sound are very numerous; they include drums, gongs, bells, rattles, sticks, anklets; also clapping, stamping, striking the palm of the hand against various parts of the body; and many other devices and methods. A prominent situation in which percussion is symbolically resorted to is communication with spirits or the other world; but there are many other situations, such as birth, marriage, calendrical feasts, the return of headhunters, inauguration of a temple or house, burial of the dead. What such events have in common is that they are rites of passage; that is, they effect a transition from one category, status, or condition to another.

The correlation between percussion and transition, once it was remarked, has been repeatedly confirmed by ethnographers, and the range of occasions and devices has been considerably extended. A good case is provided by Vogt in his account of the symbolic meaning of percussion in Zinacanteco ritual (1977). He reports at least twelve kinds of percussive sound, relating to various ceremonial episodes; these sounds include fireworks, bells, rattles, drum, the striking of wooden lances against a target, and hoofbeats. If transition pertains to points in the passage of solar time that are conventionally marked as critical, then, he concludes, all these percussive sounds in Zinacanteco ritual have a connection with transition.

What we have in this instance therefore is a semantic stress placed on a salient response in the physiology of aural perception.

VI—
Elementary Designs

Those who have studied symbolism comparatively have long been struck by certain more or less simple designs that are common to different traditions, more often than not in societies among which there are no patent historical connections. Examples of such designs are the circle, triangle, and spiral. It has not generally been contended that the symbolic designs carried the same meanings in different societies, though there have been those who thought that the cross, in particular, was vested with an intrinsic significance. The interesting thing, rather, is that the designs themselves, simply as forms, have so very widely been resorted to in the rendering of disparate meanings. The problem, then, is to account for the global incidence of the designs.

A number of speculative solutions can be proposed, but the most promising, from a physiological point of view, is that which has been set out by Lorna McDougall (1977). The answer she proposes is that the designs are "somatic symbols," in that they owe their forms directly to phosphenes, that is, the luminous patterns experienced as tremulous visions when the eyes are closed. They can be produced by a light pressure on the eyeball, or else less directly by means of fatigue, shock, fasting, intoxication, hallucinogenic drugs, and toxins accompanying certain diseases. Phosphenes can be representational or "geometrical," that is, like the abstract figures drawn in geometry. With McDougall, it is the latter that I am concerned with here, and specifically the fifteen types of phosphene that she lists.

Experimenters have elicited, by means of electrical stimulation, designs describable as (in order of frequency): arcs, radials, waves, lines, combined figure (e.g., diamond plus dots), circle, multiple figure (e.g., an array of dots), odd figure, quadrangle, spiral, poles, lattices, fingers, and cher-

ries. Phosphenes differ according to the method of stimulation: those electrically produced compose abstract or ornamental patterns, while those that are chemically induced include also representations such as landscapes, flowers, and man-made objects. "The most recent evidence," McDougall relays from her scientific sources, "suggests that phosphene designs reflect the orderliness of neuronal structure"; and "it is hypothesized that the different designs are generated at different loci along the visual pathway."

The prominence of these designs is further brought out by the finding that children of similar ages in different cultures tend to draw a limited range of forms which resemble phosphene types. Still more pertinently, as McDougall proceeds to state, the geometrical designs produced by visual hallucination frequently include the mystical diagram generally known as the mandala. This leads to Jung and his interpretation of certain symbolic forms as archetypal predispositions. At this point, questions of psychological interpretation complicate the issue, and the precise aetiology becomes more disputable, but the main outcome is plain enough. In McDougall's closing words, "certain somatic states may, through their intrinsic structure, be capable of engendering common forms adopted as collective representations and elaborated in accordance with cultural styles."

In this final instance, then, what we find is that symbols possessing a global distribution can be correlated morphologically with the physiology of eye and brain.

VII

At this point we can collect together our present examples of standard symbols and see what common interpretation we can place upon them.

They certainly make an encouraging impression, for in

each case we have a symbol with a global distribution which can be correlated with the physiology of the human body, that is, with a natural organism the distribution of which is coextensive with that of human populations. The obvious inference is that a natural constant—the human body—has provided the stimuli for the contrivance of collective representations which, if not equally constant, have an incidence so high as to suggest the natural. So if there is a common repertory of symbolic components in different traditions, as we began by remarking, the explanation for the presence of certain components (namely those that we have just examined) is that they are symbolic constructions placed on a common set of physiological factors. It is these factors, then, which in part account for the striking economy in symbolic systems and which help to make these systems so comparable. In the present cases, the "significant degree of determination" that we were led to seek is supplied by the physiology of the human organism.

However, if the present symbols compose a set, in that they all pertain to physiology, they are nevertheless heterogeneous in their modes of production. Right/left is a functional differentiation correlated with cerebral dominance and signaled by handedness; the half-man is isomorphic with hemiplegic self-perception; the color triad is a combination of visual perceptions; percussive sound is a salient perception in hearing; the elementary designs are derived from patterns of inner vision, not from the sight of external phenomena. The symbols cannot therefore be treated as an aetiological class; differing causally as they do, one from another, they need to be examined one by one if we are to understand the connection between physiology and symbol. Let us therefore review our five examples and assess in

each case, in its own terms, what exactly the connection may be.

Right/left. There is good reason to agree with Hertz that polarity, or opposition, comes first and that the functional asymmetry of handedness is only subsequently made into a symbol of the conceptual operation.

What lies behind polarity as a mode of classification is, in this respect, immaterial: it might be a cerebral disposition or a logical necessity or a social convenience, but in any event it is not the preeminence of the right that determines the binary mode of classification. It is easily conceivable that the slight functional difference between the right and left hands might be treated merely technically, rather as the superior agility of the fingers over that of the toes is accepted as a functional difference but is not made into a symbolic opposition. Or else the usual advantage of the right hand might be deliberately overridden, as was indeed the ambition of the Ambidextrous Society, by training the left to an equal power. There is no reason to think that either of these recourses would affect the far more general mode of representation known as dual symbolic classification.

More fundamentally, the logical structure of opposition is not ascribable to the physiological preeminence of the right, and it is not likely, I think, to be a consequence of the same determining factor, whatever that may be. The mode of classification is employed in the making of numerous symbolic oppositions, of which right/left is only one and not a determinant of the other oppositions.

The half-man. What is in some respects the most persuasive explanation derives this image from a particular kind of physiological event, namely, a cerebral accident which can

lead to a quasi-hemiplegic impairment of the body image. This is a suitable determinant, since it is potentially universal. Given that the human brain has the same organization everywhere, any human being in any culture can suffer this lesion and manifest its distinct consequences.

But when we consider its social impact, a number of awkward questions present themselves. In the first place, how often does it happen? The indications are that it is rare, and even in large populations with advanced medical services it is possible never even to hear of it. Second, when it does happen, how often are the perceptual disabilities of the sufferer generally remarked? Third, if remarked, why should the impaired body image be seized upon by society and then be sustained and elaborated in narrative and iconology?

There is indeed a formal congruence between the individual affliction and the collective representation, but it is hard to admit that the impairment serves even as the occasion of the social fact; and, even if it did, there would still remain to be explained why the idea or the image of the half-man should so widely be found attractive. The likelihood is that the image preexists as an imaginative disposition, or else that factors of which the image is a product are at work. In other words, the half-man can be seen as an archetype, and the resemblance to the unilateral impairment of the body image is merely formal and accidental.

White-black-red. The argument that this triad constitutes universally the initial set of discriminations among colors is persuasive, but its proponents cannot explain why these colors should be so salient or why they should have evolved in a particular order.

The contention that the colors represent bodily products that are associated with a heightening of emotion is intrinsically unsound (there are numerous reasons to think so), and it is not borne out by comparative study even of societies which otherwise are quite similar to the Ndembu. Turner's argument apparently has some support in the particular ideology of the Ndembu themselves, but it cannot be generalized on empirical grounds. Jacobson-Widding definitely reports from the peoples of the lower Congo that she discovered in the literary sources no mention of blood in connection with red, of milk or semen in connection with white, or of excrement in connection with black; nor, she adds, did she come across terms for these things in connection with colors during her three years of field research in the area. So an interpretation of physiological symbols that relies precisely on physiological processes turns out not to be effective.

For that matter, there is no ground to assume that the perceptual stimuli are of the same kind for each of the colors in the triad. That is, the fact that responses to the three color foci are all visual does not entail that the stimuli operate in the same way in the unconscious selection of the symbolic vehicles. It could be suggested, for example, that man is a phototropic creature and that the "colors" white and black represent intrinsically the contrast between light and dark; whereas red is selected because (just as with certain other species) man spontaneously responds to this hue in advance of others, so that red is the first true color. By this possible interpretation, therefore, the fact that the triad depends on the physiology of vision does not provide a common aetiology in the constitution of the symbols or in their combination.

Percussion. In the case of this symbolic vehicle, it is the quality of sound—and perhaps of visceral resonance also—that commands attention, and there is a plausible hypothesis to explain why it makes its peculiar impact.

My own inclination is to think that the distinctive response to percussive sound derives from imprinting in the womb, when the developing consciousness is unremittingly subjected to the reverberations of the mother's heartbeat. I have accumulated considerable evidence over the years in support of this hypothesis, making the substance of what would have to be a long and intricate argument, but the facts in view still do not explain the connection between percussion and transition or, more generally, boundary-marking. The empirical generalization correlating the two seems increasingly to be well founded, but the augmentation of instances does nothing to make the connection comprehensible.

Elementary designs. That there are formal resemblances between phosphenes and certain iconic features can be accepted, but whether the physiological phenomena operate as determinants of the symbols, or even as occasions for their formation, can be doubted.

If men are going to manufacture designs, whether in painting, tattooing, carving, or by whatever other graphic means, a number of formal possibilities are available and practically inevitable. Let us take the dot, as a minimal mark, for granted. Then, a line can be either straight or curved; lines can be separate or they can intersect; a design can be either open or closed. These three binary contrasts are themselves elementary, and they are sufficient for the composition of the designs which have been attributed to phosphenes. Draw straight lines parallel to one another and

you have one "phosphene" pattern; two pairs of curved lines, facing inward, another; a curved line turning about itself makes a spiral; two sets of parallel lines intersecting make a lattice; four straight lines end-to-end in a closed design are a quadrangle. With the inclusion of mere dots, all of the fifteen types of phosphene alluded to earlier (Sec. IV) can be simply constructed by means of elementary formal resources.

Moreover, if there are patterned resemblances between phosphenes and symbolic designs, the reason may lie behind both kinds of phenomena. It may be that there is a cerebral predisposition toward the discrimination of the elementary designs, and that the phosphenes and the symbols are products equally of that more fundamental determinant. In other words, both inner vision and outer vision are congruent products, hypothetically, of one and the same physiological process.

If these considerations are admitted, there are thus two interpretations—one formal, the other physiological—which obviate the supposed causal or determinative connection between phosphenes and symbolic designs.

VIII

Under a skeptical scrutiny, therefore, the posited class of physiologically determined symbols falls apart.

The common attribute, namely, that each is derived from a process in the human organism, is not evidence of a common mode of production such as would make possible a unitary analysis of the class. Moreover, the force of the argument for a physiological determination is by no means equally convincing from case to case. It is easy enough to admit a functional asymmetry between right and left, but the argument for a neurological basis to the image of the

half-man is very much weaker; there is pretty persuasive evidence that universal features of color discrimination prepare for the selection of white, black, and red as symbolic vehicles, but there is not nearly so strong an argument that phosphenes are models for elementary designs.

If it is conceded that the symbols in question indicate, as I think, that there are natural foci of attention on which men are unconsciously disposed to concentrate, this does not save the physiological class. There are abstract symbolic vehicles as well, such as dualism or properties of numbers, on which men have also focused their attention, and these do not possess the functional and perceptual characteristics of the examples that we have been examining. If it is suggested that among the foci of attention there are some that appear to be physiologically determined, the response must be that the object of circumscribing a class is to say something interesting about its members, and in the present instance the class appears not to serve that intention at all reliably.

It could be argued, nevertheless, that physiological factors can be responsible for the unconscious selection of certain symbolic vehicles (e.g., right/left and white-black-red) and that this common ground helps to explain the presence of such items in a global repertory of symbolic resources. If their incidence varies individually, so that one is practically universal while another is considerably less constant, this difference could perhaps be referred to the differing determinative force of the various modes of production. The class of physiological symbols is not really saved by this means, for what is important analytically is how exactly processes in the human organism determine the selection of symbolic vehicles, and this, as we have discovered, is exceedingly obscure.

A cautious way to put the matter is to say that physiology provides the grounds for the connection between organism and collective representation, and that the stimulus affords the occasion for the connection to be made. But this formulation does not at all account for the connection. If a stimulus (function, color, sound, or whatever) provides an occasion for the attribution of symbolic significance, the question remains: What exactly is happening? It looks as though some other factor were at work, namely, whatever it is that impels men to employ symbolism in the first place; for example, to make the right stand for probity, red for indeterminacy, percussion for transition. Clearly, the physiology of symbolism is not going to do much toward isolating the factor that may be responsible. It seemed initially to offer a promising recourse, by reference to the human organism and its universal capacities and attributes, but under inspection that promise is dissipated.

There is a bolder alternative, namely, to contend that we do not need to account separately for the way in which a connection is made between physiology and symbol. The symbolic vehicles in question can be viewed as testifying to natural proclivities of thought and imagination; their distribution, constancy, and persistence accord them that designation. Under this aspect they can be said to possess an archetypal character, and a phrase of Jung's then comes to bear: "the archetype does not proceed from physical facts but describes how the psyche experiences the physical fact."

It is a question how to construe this enigmatic but seemingly apposite statement. In particular, we need to determine—and without necessarily subscribing to Jung's system of psychology—what is to be understood by the crucial term "psyche." Two ready answers present themselves. One is to be taken from Lichtenberg, who opined

that perhaps "soul" was an empty word like "situation" and was employed as in algebra one uses x, y, and z ; in other words, that it is a formal notion. The other response is that the "psyche" is that of which we have evidence precisely by way of the connections that we have been investigating. In this event the difficulty, as Wittgenstein writes, "is not that of finding the solution but rather that of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if it were only preliminary to it, whereas the solution of the difficulty is a description, if only we give it the right place in our considerations. . . . The difficulty here is: to stop."

3—
Inner States as Universals

Ich muss immer wieder im Wasser des Zweifels untertauchen.
L. Wittgenstein

I

It is a striking feature of "Dr. Brodie's Report" that when the good missionary sums up the claims of the Yahoos (properly, the Mlch) to stand for civilization, in their own repulsive fashion, he delivers as their letters patent a register of their institutions. They enjoy a king, they employ a language based on abstract concepts, they believe in the divine nature of poetry, surmise that the soul survives the death of the body, and uphold the truth of punishments and rewards.

This list, perversely cogent as it is, refutes the denial to the Yahoos of any humane virtues—a horrified reaction towards which the reader has been inclined by the narrative—but it leaves out of account any precise evidence of the inner states of this people. They attract one another's attention (by groveling in the dust), and we are left to infer that they desire to do so, though we do not know for what purposes. In time of war their mutilated king is displayed to excite their courage, but this is a normal practice and it does not in itself testify to whatever the Presbyterian observer took to be courage. The queen offers herself to him, but her act appears to be no more than a conventional prestation; and

that she does so after the missionary has shot two of the Ape-men (paradoxically dismissed as "animals") in defense of the Yahoos may look like a gesture of gratitude, but he more prudently takes it as his cue to make good an escape from their country on the very same day. The witch doctors, exercising their curious power of prediction, state with quiet confidence what will happen up to ten or fifteen minutes hence, for example, that in a moment there will be heard the song of a bird; but quiet though they may be we have no particular evidence that they are in a confident state of mind. It is a mark of royal favor that the queen sinks a gold pin into the flesh of certain of her subjects, and a number of Yahoos therefore stick themselves with pins to encourage the "belief" that the queen herself pricked them, but it would be a hard matter to determine what distinct inner state this fraudulence was to procure.

No doubt our ignorance of the indigenous psychology of these Yahoos has to do with their peculiar epistemology, also with the fact that only a very few individuals have names, so that inner states might be expected to be set at a discount. Whatever the reasons, Doctor Brodie's report presents us with a set of institutions, and with individuals who have their qualified existence merely as agents of the institutions. If there is no account of Yahoo conceptions of inner states, this is perhaps because their minimal recognition of individuality does not call for a psychology. For the observer, at any rate, the society—as a coherent realization of distinct social forms—is intelligible without any critical resort to the postulation of inner states. The Yahoos may be barbarous, even the most barbarous beings on the face of the earth, but they nevertheless constitute a nation. It is their institutions that redeem them from being consigned to the bestial level of the Ape-men, and it is by virtue of these

claims to civilization that the scrupulous Doctor finds he does not repent having fought in their ranks.

II

The fictional society invented by Borges bears an instructive resemblance to the field reports of social anthropologists. The institutions of the Yahoos are so represented as to make an affront to those valued by western Europe, but they are recognizable institutions all the same; and if the psychology of those who act out the institutions is almost wholly obscure, so it is also in ethnographical monographs.

The Yahoos may or may not be occupied by the same inner states as we ascribe to ourselves, and they may or may not discriminate them linguistically in ways that we should regard as appropriate, but our ignorance of these matters nevertheless permits a large comprehension of their way of life. Much the same is true of the generality of factual accounts of real peoples: practically all we know about them concerns collective representations and conventional modes of conduct. The forms of their inner experience are normally left out of explicit account, yet this does not prevent our making substantive advances in the comparative study of social facts.

There is something very odd about this. Historically, to begin with, it contrasts with the prominent concern in western philosophy with the intrinsic characteristics of man. Since the eighteenth century in particular this was seen as an empirical undertaking, though even in the writings of Hume the task was subverted by a linguistic parochialism and by a comparative failure to adduce evidences from other traditions. Yet no sooner was an empirical study of mankind established, and later distinguished as social anthropology, than the topic of human nature tended to drop out of consid-

eration. The contextual specification of inner states, especially, has had little place in ethnographic reports or in comparative disquisitions. This fact is the more remarkable in that exotic classifications are a fundamental concern in social anthropology. The categories studied, however, have typically been those of relatives, groups, political office, cosmology, and so on. The classification of inner states, that is, indigenous psychology, has received nothing like the same degree of attention.

An example is provided by the Nuer. They have an enormously extended vocabulary expressing their interest in cattle, and the importance of this classification has repeatedly been stressed by a number of reporters and commentators. Yet it was not until quite recently that it was remarked that the Nuer possess in their psychological vocabulary a comparably impressive catalogue of inner states and dispositions which both reflects and encourages a highly discriminating conception of the psyche. Now the linguistic facts about Nuer psychology were just as readily accessible as were the terms of the classification of cattle, so the concentration on cattle instead of on the psyche is particularly revealing. No doubt it is more difficult to grasp psychological concepts than it is to learn to distinguish different categories of cattle, but there is no indication that this is the reason that the indigenous psychology of the Nuer has been neglected. The likelihood, rather, is that the direction of anthropological interest in this regard expresses a typical prejudice. The Nuer classification of cattle is patently different from that of European languages, and if we are to understand what they are talking about we have to learn their criteria and match them to beasts that we can observe; but the classification of inner states is less strikingly different, if only because it is less systematically grasped and is approached in a less de-

tached way. It is less well understood because the outsider thinks he can quite easily match indigenous psychological words to inner states, since he presumes that he knows in advance what these are. The prejudice, in other words, is that human nature is essentially the same everywhere and that inner states, dispositions, and capacities have already been adequately discriminated by the psychological vocabularies of western languages.

According to this view of the matter, then, it is understandable that modern anthropological reports should be so silent—as is that of Doctor Brodie—about the psychology of their subjects. But it is perplexing, all the same, that a fundamental problem should have been bypassed in this way when the linguistic evidence points so clearly towards it. Even in Indo-European languages it is rare that the usual words for a particular emotion, for example, are common to two or more branches of this family; and when we compare languages from other families the disparities in the registration of inner states are even more striking. Whatever prior notion we may have of the general phenomenon of an inner state, the sheer numbers of words and phrases by which languages denote such states are highly variable. Some languages possess very extensive vocabularies; others, including well-known ones such as Malay, employ what impress us as remarkably few psychological terms. We know, too, that an individual language or a family of languages can vary over time in the range of states that it recognizes: thus it is thought probable that at an early period the Indo-European vocabulary of emotions was of an ill-defined character, whereas in their later developments the Indo-European languages have greatly enlarged their vocabularies and have come to make a plethora of often divergent distinctions among inner states.

The immediate inferences to be drawn are obvious. Perhaps all such discriminations of inner states in different languages are correct, in some sense, in which case human nature is almost infinitely fashionable and diversified; or alternatively each register is correct in some respects and factitious in others, in which case there may subsist a common human nature onto which various traditions have added their own psychological inventions for the convenience and advantage of society. It would seem of central significance to any humane discipline to determine which, if either, of these alternatives is true.

III

A central difficulty in assessing these inferences resides in the tacit premise that it is possible to establish whether a linguistic discrimination is correct; that is, whether there exists a distinct inner state that corresponds to the word or phrase.

In some cases it seems possible to do so by reference to bodily signs, such as facial expressions, posture, chemical changes in the endocrine glands, and neuro-electrical events in the brain. Fear and sexual arousal may be taken as good instances; even thinking (in the sense of deliberate cogitation) and deciding may also qualify on the evidences of characteristic inner experiences and also of the traces of electro-encephalograms. By such criteria it is possible to contend also that certain linguistic discriminations do not correspond to real inner states; there is for example a long argument to the effect that belief cannot be established as a distinct inner state and that hence it does not constitute a natural resemblance among men.

To a certain point of proof, then, and in certain cases at any rate, it does appear feasible to sort out conceptual dis-

tinctions among inner states into those that are well founded and those that are not: some are real and universal, whereas others are the artificial constructions of various cultural traditions. The established capacities, as natural universals, would permit us to assess objectively the reality of psychological discriminations that in part are always contingent on changing cultural conventions. From this standpoint, which in principle is located somewhat outside the bounds of any individual society or language, the subsequent task is empirical: to make a global ethnographic investigation to determine the full or characteristic range of such universals. What designations should then be borne by inner states of this natural kind is a matter to be worked out in the course of comparative study; but the presumption is that the lexical concepts of English would, if appropriately qualified, serve the purpose—up to a certain point, at any rate. If the inner states hypothetically in question are universal, it is to be expected that any language (including English) will have responded to them. On the other hand, we have to contemplate the possibility that some other linguistic tradition will have established (not simply named) an inner state for which English makes no provision, and in this case the English lexicon will have to be extended.

This all sounds reasonable, and it is supported by the experience of travelers in foreign parts. Every ethnographer is familiar, I suppose, with the practically instantaneous conviction that he can identify types of personality and inner states among the people he intends to study. As soon as he meets them, and they begin to react to him, his judgments and sympathies are rapidly at work in a subtle registration of their individual capacities and dispositions. Usually, moreover, this quasi-intuitive series of assessments is later borne out, in the main, by the repeated tests of social

encounters. The ethnographer's real difficulty comes not at this literally superficial level but as he learns the language and tries to understand the indigenous psychological vocabulary and an exotic conception of the personality. It is then that he is in danger of resorting uncritically to the terms that in his own language designate the inner states that he is confident he has identified. He may well be right in doing so, within certain limits, but until he has come to terms with the psychological classification by which the people themselves identify inner states he will be in no position to test his presumptions or to appreciate to what extent the terms of his own language are in fact adequate to the description of human nature.

This undertaking presupposes that the ethnographer can in fact comprehend an exotic psychological classification in its own terms, and that these can be internalized not just as an abstract scheme of concepts but as a practical means of discriminating among the expressions and actions of individuals. Certainly this can be done well enough, just as the members of the strange society themselves learn to do as they grow up in it and master its linguistic discriminations in their social contexts. A man is scowling and the observer is told that he is in a certain inner state, known by a particular word which the ethnographer may translate as "angry." But the outsider cannot stop at this point. So far he has merely applied an English psychological word to a facial expression that he has assumed to convey anger; but this procedure begs the important questions, for he does not yet know the conventional significance of grimaces in this society, and he cannot know by simple observation that the inner state of the man under observation is identical with anything that he would recognize in himself as anger.

Let us assume, then, that he goes on to learn how to match psychological words to the expressions, postures, and other forms of behavior to which in this society they are conventionally connected. By the criteria stated, this is no more taxing than it is to learn a cattle vocabulary or the names of features (trees, clouds, and suchlike) in the natural environment. The crucial difficulty is encountered when he tries to identify the cultural signs as natural signs. This is almost certainly what he is doing if he resorts to the word "angry" when he translates the indigenous word that describes the scowling man. But to justify his translation he can surely not stop at this point either. He will need to find out, just as he does in his own society (or as he is told in reading a novel), what are the particular circumstances that justify attributing precisely this inner state, rather than some other, to the man who he infers is angry. To do so calls for a comprehensive knowledge of the values, collective representations, modes of organization, and so on which comprise the society. It is a persuasive hypothesis, indeed, that to interpret a single term in an exotic psychological vocabulary an ethnographer will need also to be familiar, ultimately, with the construction put by an individual on his personal circumstances in relation to the institutions of the society. The scowling man himself will inevitably frame his inner states in terms of these institutions when he sets his own interests and intentions against those of someone else who has occasioned his state of mind.

So to interpret the psychological term that the ethnographer is learning (with the proviso that the very epithet "psychological" may beg the question), he has first to concentrate on institutions, on social facts, before he can comprehend any particular set of circumstances as a partici-

pant may do, and only then can he begin to gauge the appositeness of an English word to a description of the inner state of the subject. He cannot, in other words, begin by identifying the natural signs of an inner state and only thereafter seek out the social occasions by reason of which an individual is in that state. The inner state, apprehended in this setting, is a social fact.

This conclusion has a methodological consequence. In identifying an inner state, we assign it to a class of such instances. According to the method by which the class is constituted, we alter the inferences that can be drawn from the class membership of the instance. By the traditional common-feature (or monothetic) constitution of a class, we can apply the principle of substitution, so that whatever we know of one member of a class we shall also know of other members. If we agree that the inner state of the scowling man is that of anger, and if anger is taken to be a natural state of a universal kind, then the translation by our ethnographer is apt in that the instance observed falls into the monothetic class of angry human beings. The expression, posture, and the rest of the signs are taken as natural expressions of a constant in human nature. The attributes of the class in this case are the supposed natural signs, more or less transformed as they may be by cultural convention, and the common feature of the class of instances is the inner state.

But the traditional monothetic method is not the only way of constituting a class. There is also the mode of classifying by sporadic resemblances, in what has recently been designated as polythetic classification. In this method there is no common feature, and the attributes of members of the class may differ from one instance to another so widely that the principle of substitution is not applicable. The polythetic method is not only a scientific contrivance for the

furtherance of research; it is very generally employed in the classifications effected by natural languages. This means that it is likely to be pertinent to the comparative study of social facts. The argument has already been advanced, actually, that it has a peculiar relevance and that the stock terms of anthropological discourse—which characteristically are monothetic—are vitiated by the polythetic character of the social facts which they classify. Thus it has been contended that anthropological theories about descent, incest, marriage, and so forth, are largely invalidated because polythetic classes are treated as though they were monothetic.

Now the imputation of distinct inner states to individuals in other societies is crucially affected by this taxonomic distinction. If a certain state is considered a social fact, to the extent that the interpretation of the instance depends on a knowledge of the attendant social forms and circumstances, then the class of instances of "anger" need have no common feature but may even constitute what is known technically as a fully polythetic class in which no feature is shared by all of its members. In that event, the principle of substitution cannot apply, and what is known of one instance cannot be imputed, by inference from the class membership, to another instance. This means that "anger" in another civilization is not equivalent to anger in our own. More generally, the outcome is that inner states are not universals and do not in this sense constitute natural resemblances among men.

By this account of the issue, the only inner states that are universal among natural resemblances are those that are strictly natural in that they are constituted by physiological properties of the human body. These states would be identified not by sympathetic observation and the employment of psychological terms, but chemically and electrically by the analysis of endocrine functions and brain waves.

They would best be denoted in the exact and neutral terms of natural science, and words such as "anger" could have no place in the register. The task of the comparativist would then be to trace these states in the collective representations and modes of conduct of other societies, and to exhibit the disparate ways in which different traditions have elaborated or masked or otherwise transformed this set of natural endowments. It would not be the task of the social anthropologist to establish what inner states were universal natural resemblances, but instead to report the very many inner states which cultures had artificially contrived in their various representations of human nature.

IV

These considerations, which could of course be greatly extended, may appear to have some cogency as they stand, but they entirely bypass a really fundamental question.

It has been taken for granted that the task is to determine the real constituents of human nature. This complex entity is not to be presumed but sought: there may be nothing of the kind, under any acceptation of the term, and this cannot be known except by empirical investigation—if by that. The scientific outcome to this ancient preoccupation of men with their own nature lies practically entirely in the future. But the question that should first be tackled is this: Why should we ever try to determine the universal constituents of human nature?

One answer is that we are human beings, and that if there is a common nature to be discovered, it is as well that we should do so rather than not. This is all right but it is not very convincing, since not everything that exists is worth seeking, nor is everything that is feasible worth doing. It may seem a worthwhile venture to determine (to the extent

that it is not a purely conceptual issue) whether there is an ultimate set of constituents that everywhere makes up human nature, but the usefulness of this inquiry depends on the use to which the answer can be put. In other words, assuming that the notion of "human nature" is not just a great category mistake, we need to be clear what we want to establish human nature for. An obvious answer is that to do so would enable us to avoid attributing to members of other traditions any states or capacities which they may not, or cannot, possess. But is this not an end that could be achieved by a skeptical scrutiny of each case? Consider the imaginary example of an encounter with humanoids from outer space. We should not presume that such beings possessed any of the inner states that we attribute to human beings, and we should have no real need to do so in order to describe their behavior or gauge their capacities or predict their future actions. We might well be tempted to employ our psychological terms, and to say for example that the humanoids were angry on occasion, but this is precisely what the characteristic attitude of the comparativist—namely, to take nothing for granted—ought to preclude. Doctor Brodie, dealing with creatures apparently on the margin of humanity, made no deliberate presumptions about their inner states, and an ethnographer should make no more; at least, he should attribute to the people he studies no inner states that he could not justify empirically. So this degree of critical detachment should be enough to preserve the ethnographer from improperly attributing to other men inner states that they do not possess—and this without any reliance on some prior conception of what is or is not human nature.

A recurrent motive in disquisitions on the inner states and dispositions of men has been to subserve other concerns. At the time of Mencius, according to I. A. Richards, the fixity

in unquestioned security of a system of social observances gave a terminus to Chinese thinking about such matters; what the philosophers were doing was not so much to inquire into the nature of man as to give an account of it that would conduce to the maintenance of those institutions. Interests of other kinds have inspired other theories of human nature, such as that men are naturally servile or naturally libertarian, egoistic or altruistic, territorial or exploratory, conservative or innovatory. Doubtless social anthropologists, with their scientific ambition to make an objective study of man in society, would not knowingly allow their conceptions of inner states to be subverted by extraneous concerns, whether philosophical, religious, or political; but it is unlikely (since we do after all know something about our nature and the opacity of some inner states) that they are wholly free of unrecognized impulsions to bear out one conception or another of man's nature rather than others. Sometimes these prejudices can be uncovered; for example, the general conviction among ethnographers that there exists no psychic power to inflict harm invisibly and at a distance such as is ascribed to witches. To take another example, the assessment of alien ethical systems is surely affected by ethnographers' convictions about whether all men possess a conscience illumined by grace, or an acquired sense of prudence, or an ungovernable id. So if students of man are under the influence of subliminal impulsions which may in part determine their observations, it is at least commendable that they should do their best to make their preconceptions about human nature explicit and try to justify their reliance on each of them. But this too is a standard skeptical precept of method that applies to any intellectual undertaking; it does not provide a specific justification of the attempt to determine man's universal inner nature. In

the present context, moreover, its application is premised on the very interest that we are trying to account for.

Why we should be so concerned with inner states is in part an historical question, and we can find some answer in our intellectual tradition and in its contrasts with others. Traditional Chinese philosophy was preponderantly social thought, and it was concerned with the stability of the state in its ritual harmony with Heaven, the maintenance of the "five relationships," and the ceremonial fixing of the proprieties of conduct; the case has even been made out that for Confucius there was literally no such entity as the ego with its private states. But western philosophy, inspired especially by Christianity, has placed an increasing emphasis on the individual and has produced a great variety of conceptions of the inner man. This concern has been strengthened by European forms of art, especially the novel and drama, and probably by other factors such as the operations of free economic enterprise. Even in the study of social facts, as established in the nineteenth century, this line of interest was continued. It was not possible for a positivistic discipline to subscribe explicitly and unquestioningly to any particular doctrine of human powers, and an early consequence in French sociology was to call traditional ideas into question. Thus Durkheim and Mauss tried to explain the very capacity of the human mind to classify, and they thought that epistemological problems, once they were posed in sociological terms, would be liberated from the tautologies in which they had languished. Lévy-Bruhl, in his turn, isolated a nonrational aspect of cognition and initiated the comparative study of the higher mental functions in different cultures. These famous predecessors founded a type of inquiry that has since covered a widening range of topics in symbolism, rationality, and modes of thought. It is true that

such investigations have in general taken certain human powers for granted, and that they have been open to criticism for not having determined the experiential status or the intrinsic properties of the inner states that were presumed, but this line of research has nonetheless been pursued with a gathering impetus. Considerable progress has been made, yet none of this answers our present question about the purposes for which we desire to establish the essential human powers.

It may be that a response is to be found in a particular tradition of analysis. The third precept of Descartes in his discourse on method was to divide each of the difficulties that he examined into as many small parts (parcelles ) as could be done, and as many as might be necessary to resolve the difficulties. An echo of this procedure (as well as of Locke's epistemology) is to be found in Condillac's striking paradigm of the statue which he endowed with one capacity after another until it had acquired all the powers of a human being. The procedure at work is to analyze a complex phenomenon by resolving it into elementary constituents; and there is no doubt that in some fields of research this is very effective. Success has been greatest in the isolation of elements in chemistry and fundamental particles in physics. But there are obstacles in the way of applying this procedure so effectively in the sphere of social facts. In the exact sciences the minimal constituents are systematically interconnected, the relations among them can be expressed in formal notations, and these can be so manipulated mathematically as to deepen analysis and make further discoveries. There is, however, no indication that any of these conditions will obtain when human powers are in question. It may be that cultural constants can be established, and that these can be interpreted as social expressions of fundamental states of

consciousness or of standard operations of thought and imagination; also it may be proved that certain primordial characters of consciousness tend to cohere into symbolic complexes. But, to judge by work so far done, there are no grounds to predict that advances similar to those in the exact sciences will thereby become feasible. It is not so much an analysis into minimal constituents that counts in the field of social facts, but what can be made of their synthesis into idiocratic cultural phenomena. These are highly semantic and contextual particulars which cannot be presumed to express psychic universals isomorphically; nor can they be presumed to be decipherable by decomposition into ultimate components.

V

The outcome can be summed up bluntly as follows. To the extent that inner states may be discriminable as universal natural resemblances, they are in the province of physiology. If inner states are inferred from social expressions, they are social facts like other social facts. There are presumably correspondences between physiological states and certain aspects of the ideologies by which psychological states are attributed to individuals. But in many cases there will be no correspondence, namely, when the psychological concepts are purely social artifacts.

In assessing the reality of inner states in alien cultures, it is possible hypothetically to distinguish those which have a natural basis from those which are ideological inventions; but no inner state can be expressed socially in a purely natural way, and in consequence there are strictly speaking no inner states, as collectively recognized conditions of consciousness, that are universal.

That we are nevertheless impelled to seek such ultimate components of human experience is in part a result of a method of analysis that is appropriate to natural phenomena but is not advantageous in the study of social facts; and that we tend to interpret exotic psychological observations as the varied expressions of universal inner states is in part a result of the uncritical employment of a traditional method of classification that conduces to this outcome.

Rather as Wittgenstein has traced certain conceptual confusions, concerning universals especially, to a "craving for generality," so the search for inner states as natural universals can be traced to a correlated craving for ultimate particulars. But the history of western epistemology can be seen as the progressive dissolution of absolute and irreducible notions such as substance, category, cause, and certainty. The notion of essential and hence universal inner states, as represented by cultural and hence variable conceptions of human nature, belongs in that condemned company. More specifically, furthermore, it is plain that the topic of inner states is central to the vexed philosophical problem of other minds; and, in view of the recalcitrant character of this issue, it is not likely that an empirical solution is to be provided by the comparative analysis of social facts.

This does not mean, though, that there is nothing to be hoped for from the continued search for whatever may approximate to such universals. If quasiconstants among inner states can be discerned, even if by a polythetic definition, then they will at least serve as relatively steady points of reference in comparative researches. They may not be so independent or so certain as ideally we should like, but they will be more reliable bench marks in the topography of human nature than our common presuppositions have proved to be. The very postulation of their existence con-

duces, moreover, to the formulation of interesting questions.

One such problem is whether it is possible to work out for what reasons different cultures should have elaborated their registers of inner states beyond a natural minimum. What advantages of social intercourse or of self-awareness have these psychological constructions procured? Another radical question is whether new inner states are created, that is, distinctively experienced, as new lexical discriminations are made. In the fifteenth century, did the use of the word "squeamish," with the connotation of nausea, merely discriminate a certain pitch of fastidiousness already sensed and observed, or did it become the ground for the development of a novel inner state?

Admitted, this is not the only way of considering such matters, for it may be that terms for inner states are social more than they are experiential; in other words, that they are useful for the ascription of virtues and demerits to the characters of other individuals rather than as the socially contrived instruments by which individuals are enabled to assess their own inner experience.

It seems likely, for that matter, that the delineation of the psyche and an increasingly subtle discrimination of inner states are preponderant concerns only in certain civilizations which have multiplied beyond necessity the social means to those ends. It may be that European civilization, especially since the Reformation, has afflicted much of the rest of the world with its perturbations about the self rather as it has infected other traditions with its religious manias. In that case, our researches into inner states may be concocting the very problems that they are meant to resolve. Perhaps the Yahoos described by Doctor Brodie were not so barbarously backward in these regards—just more realistic.

4—
Characteristics of Religion

As for those wingy mysteries in Divinity and ayery subtilties in Religion, which have unhindg'd the braines of better heads. . . .
Sir Thomas Browne

I

There is no word common to the Indo-European languages which can be translated as "religion." Nor is there any word in either Greek or Latin corresponding exactly to the English word. In Latin alone the etymology of "religion" is disputable: the word is traced from ligare, to tie, or else from legere, to collect. If we are persuaded by Benveniste to opt for the latter construction, we have "recollect," in the sense of to go back on a previous step and to make a new choice; for example, as in being religiosus, checked by scruple in the performance of rites. What is indicated is an inner state, not an objective property of certain things or a set of beliefs and practices.

This doubtful quality of troubled conscience, even if it were thought externally discernible, could hardly make a secure foundation for comparison; and its contingent association with historical, local, and changing forms of action makes it the less reliable as the mark of any distinct and universal institution. The concept of religion is thus easily susceptible to being analyzed away. Similarly, the designa-

tion of a particular religion may, by various use and dissent, become undiscriminating; hence Sir Thomas Browne, in 1643, observed that "the name of a Christian is become too generall to expresse our faith"; and it has grown into a common expectation that religion connotes faction and fission and ceaseless reformulation. There are indeed many grounds on which to conclude that the notion of "religion" is altogether too polysemous, indistinct, and malleable to serve any steady analytical purpose.

Nevertheless, religion has obsessed western consciousness for centuries, and in other civilizations also there are concerns which in one regard or another do appear significantly comparable. If we cannot rely on the concept for any precise task of comparison or interpretation, it still possesses certain odd-job connotations that make it somewhat useful in the preliminary assortment of social facts and in general descriptions. To take the word "religion" very strictly, and to demand of it what we have no reason to think it can afford, would be self-defeating; so let us take it as we use it, and then try to establish what characteristic features give it that use.

To that end I shall resort at the limit to the entire span of world ethnography, though I shall have in mind especially those parts of Southeast Asia that I know better than other regions: these will include the interior of Borneo, the island of Sumba in eastern Indonesia, and more widely the sphere of Malay civilization. Inevitably, on such a scale, my observations will be highly general and impressionistic; I shall be deliberately concerned not to be swayed by any taxonomy of religious phenomena, and at the same time I shall suspend attention to the exceptions that can always be found to challenge generalizations of the kind. From these vantage points, and against the personal background of an intensely

Christian upbringing in the High Church of England, I shall see what I can do toward isolating what can be conceived as ultimate predicates in the comparative study of religion. That is, I shall be trying to determine—in the train of countless other investigators—what we are really talking about when we speak of the religion of others.

This undertaking may at first seem to run the danger of turning into yet another definition of religion; but I have already abjured that aim, and as we proceed it will be seen that the course of the exposition actually leads away from any fixed stance of that nature. The global purview of the comparativist militates against any categorical certainty, and the precept to take nothing for granted conduces instead to skeptical detachment.

II

Perhaps the first presumption to offer itself is that religion, whatever else it may involve, has to do with the metaphysical, that is, with a doctrine of first principles.

We may take this, with Kant, as meaning an isolated speculative science of reason; and all the interests of our reason, he asserts, combine in the following three questions: (1) What can I know? (2) What ought I to do? (3) What may I hope? Without quibbling over alternative definitions of metaphysics, we can at least make a rational start by asking to what extent religion can be expected to provide answers to these questions.

The first question—What can I know?—is purely speculative, and I think it is a common experience of ethnographers to find that exotic religions are not metaphysical in this sense. In nonliterate societies especially the religion may well provide a cosmology, a general scheme of how things are, but it cannot be counted on to provide a critical appa-

ratus for epistemological speculation. Usually, I am sure, there will be individuals who are of an analytical or speculative turn of mind; but this is a temperamental inclination and not a response to intellectual demands of their religion or to problems of knowledge to which the religion can provide the answers. For the outsider, however, there is the temptation to presume that the religion must have this epistemological character, because its tenets can be represented as a set of propositions, and the propositions can be interpreted as answers to questions. No doubt an interrogatory urge did contribute to the formulation of the tenets, and perhaps also these tenets will on occasion provide answers in the minds of latter-day adherents, but these epistemological functions need not characterize the religion in its ordinary practice.

A difficulty in this connection is that the ethnographer is not genuinely a participant in this ordinary practice, but an inquirer; he does not entirely understand what is going on, or how the tenets are systematically connected, so all the time he is asking questions. It is practically certain that many of the questions he asks will never have been posed by the adherents, since the intellectual premises of the latter are not those of the inquirer; and if the adherents can nonetheless supply some answers to such questions, this does not entail that the tenets of the religion—that is, its ideological resources—were contrived as the resolutions to speculative concerns. The likelihood, indeed, is that if the inquirer were not present the religion would go unquestioned; for tenets are to be held to, not queried.

This does not mean, though, that religious tenets are regarded by the adherents as knowledge. I assume that any language contains some means of expression equivalent to the verb "to know," and that all languages provide for the

expression of degrees of certainty in what is known; but what seems very doubtful is that the tenets of religion are generally said by their proponents to be known. On this point, in fact, I cannot cite any evidence, outside certain deliberately theological cultures, that people claim to "know" what their religions teach and to which they give their assent. If this is a correct impression, it is probably a reflection of the nonspeculative character of such religions; and if the tenets are not challenged, there is no need to claim to know them. At the same time, the fact that religions are products of change, and are liable perpetually to further change, does not entail that the modification or the abandonment of their tenets is the result of deliberate cogitation about what is known. There are many ways in which ideas can change without being subjected to cognitive criticism.

Correspondingly, it is not a general characteristic of religions that their tenets are held to be true. Even in India, which has an advanced traditional theory of knowledge, it is said (by Renou, I think) that it is very hard to be heretical; and Dumézil has remarked that India is the one great civilization in which contradiction is not a mortal sin. A dogmatic arrogation of truth is certainly a prominent feature of some religions and sects, but on a global scale I do not think that religions are spontaneously asserted to be true; and if under a special stimulus it is claimed that a religion is true, this need not imply that the tenets of other religions are not true. My own experience with adherents of nonproselytizing religions has been that people readily admit of others that their gods are different (or however the contrast may be phrased), just as their rules of marriage and land tenure may differ. This attitude, once again, is an aspect of an uncritical cast of mind toward what, for the most part, is hardly a

distinct object of thought in any case. And by uncritical, let me quickly be plain, I do not mean unintelligent or deficient in judgment, but merely that by cultural convention certain ideas and practices are not distinguished as matters for questioning.

Among certain Kenyah whom I used to know, it was a striking feature of their idiom that they constantly accused others of lying. Sometimes the allegation was a standard form of disparagement, sometimes it was a joke, and sometimes (it seemed to me) it was no more than one ready means of saying that members of another tribe or longhouse were different. But despite this rhetorical inclination, they never in my hearing—and not even when we were comparing customs—said of the religious tenets of others that they were untrue. (This was before the Kenyah were converted to Christianity by missionaries of rival faiths.) Similarly, among the Penan a word translatable as "true" was commonly resorted to in assessing the accuracy of statements, the genuineness of an instance, or as the intensifier of an attribute; but it would not have made sense to ask if their religious tenets were true or to suggest that those of other peoples were not true. This attitude of mind is not peculiar to such peoples, that is, to nonliterate civilizations lacking a critical intellectual tradition. In Confucian China, so far as I know, it would not have been said of ritual precepts and the spiritual personages to whom they were directed that they were or were not true objects of assent and adherence. It is this abstention from such judgments which permits a Buddhist in Sri Lanka both to resort to the orthodox institutions and practices of Hinayana and also to make sacrifices to individual spirits or seek aid from diviners and exorcists. If what is proclaimed by doctrine is true, as we should assess

it, then ideas that are inconsistent with the doctrine are false; but this logical kind of comparison, by reference to truth values, is not essential to religion.

At this point we come naturally to the problem of belief, that is, to the disposition or attitude of mind which by most western definitions is held to be essential with regard to religious tenets. I have already set out at some length, in a monograph on belief and the language of experience, what I think about this supposed capacity or inner state, so I shall be brief on this score. The crucial point is that there are numerous linguistic traditions which make no provision for the expression of belief and which do not recognize such a condition in their psychological assessments. The notion of belief is a relatively modern linguistic invention, and it does not correspond, under any aspect, to a real, constant, and distinct resource of the self. To adopt Hume's words, it is an artificial contrivance for the convenience and advantage of society, in a particular course of civilization, and as such it does not constitute a natural resemblance among men.

This argument has been found hard by some, scandalous by others, and at least awkward by yet others, which is not surprising, for it strikes against some of the strongest and most fervent assumptions in modern Christianity and in western philosophy. Yet at the same time it is no more than a conclusion to a long line of skeptical considerations stretching from Hume to Russell. Moreover, although my argument was an original construction on new foundations (namely, the empirical resources of comparativism), I have latterly discovered that one of its central contentions had been advanced by I. A. Richards in the columns of an intellectual weekly published in 1934. For Richards, the problem of the nature of belief dissolves into "a cluster of undeveloped problems," and this traditional landmark appears as

merely a fiction. Additional unsuspected support, to a similar effect, is to be had from Waismann's paper "Belief and Knowledge," composed in the 1950s but not published until 1977. And in this latter year a theologian, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, proposed (being unaware of my prior study) the radical thesis that the concept of believing is not to be found in the Bible; "the idea that believing is religiously important," he writes, "turns out to be a modern idea." More generally, Ayer has concluded, in a criticism of Hume, that "the problem of giving an analysis of belief which is neither trivial nor circular still awaits solution."

There is useful backing, therefore, to the idea that belief cannot have the psychological standing that it has been ascribed in the study of religion. My own analysis, at any rate, which I take to be neither trivial nor circular, has not been refuted by counterargument; and with the development of current work on indigenous psychologies it seems that the familiar conceptual landmark of "belief" has at the very least had its reliability much reduced.

Nevertheless, there remain two phenomena of adherence to the tenets or the practices of a religion which seem fundamental, even if these also are hard to account for. One is what we can for the present call "commitment," namely, whatever it is whereby we subscribe, with variable intensity, to an object of thought or imagination. This is in part an emotional or temperamental inclination, and it is implicated in one or another of the numerous senses of the verb "believe," but these facts do little or nothing to make the psychology of commitment comprehensible. There is a curious psychic detail, however, which may help to render it more immediate as an object of speculation and introspection.

When we read a novel that we have read before, or watch

a film that we have already seen, we know in advance what will be the outcome of the climactic points in the evolution of the plot; yet it is common, I think, that our breath is bated at such points, all the same, and that we are tense with all the inner sentiments of uncertainty. When Hamlet comes upon Claudius at his prayers, our prior knowledge that he will not act out his fervent threats does nothing to reduce the drama; and we can actually hope that he will do so, when we know perfectly well that he will not. When we reflect at the time upon the fact that we can indeed foresee the resolution of a fictional climax, even this realization does not subvert that response to imaginary events which is, I suggest, intrinsically indistinguishable from what we distinguish as religious commitment.

The other phenomenon, related but distinct, is that of "conversion," namely, the process of detachment from one object, such as a religious doctrine, and surrender to another. Despite the fact that this change is what proselytizing religions deliberately work for, and notwithstanding the many autobiographical narrations of such change, the psychology of conversion remains (so far as I have been able to discover) almost wholly obscure. No doubt conversion is facilitated in those societies which do not estimate religious tenets as true objects of knowledge, but this easiness does little if anything to clarify what happens in the conversion of persons for whom such conditions do not obtain.

Yet if there are ultimate predicates in the comparative study of religion, presumably commitment and conversion will find their places among them. Only of course they will not be exclusively connected with religion, for they are independent of the object of thought. They may indeed be characteristic features of religion, but they are not specific to it. Perhaps this fact in turn will tell us something about the

justification for delineating religion as a distinct object of attachment.

III

Kant's second metaphysical question—What ought I to do?—is in his view purely practical and hence within the scope of pure reason; but even so it is a moral question and not therefore a proper subject, he says, for a transcendental treatment.

As far as we are concerned, however, the central importance of the question is indeed practical in that we are interested directly in the objects of knowledge at issue; namely, in what we comprehensively allude to as religions, and it is a characteristic feature of these that they prescribe right conduct.

We can take it as given that any language will contain words for "good" and "bad," or equivalent means for expressing judgments of approval and disapproval, but religions differ considerably in the ways in which they promote the good and castigate the bad. Hocart, in an incidental observation, has pointed to a fundamental contrast: among most peoples, he writes, "the idea of evil, pure evil, is completely lacking." He does not elaborate, other than to say that Melanesians do not like death and sickness any more than we do, but his contention seems to be that whatever is classed as bad is not hypostasized into a concept or power of "evil." Certainly in any culture there will be an array of activities forbidden or disparaged as bad, but commonly there is not a generic or essential quality of which the activities are merely instances. This too is a reflection, I suppose, of styles of thought (including attitudes toward thought) different from our own tradition of critical abstraction. The hypostasis of evil is a particular cultural product, the result

in part of the Aristotelian tradition of formal logic whereby attributes are progressively subsumed under higher and higher genera. But a society that does not rely on this method of classification need not subscribe to a conception of the world which the method itself reflects.

It may be helpful, incidentally, to recall that the English word "evil" is derived from IE *up -, connoting up or over, and that it can be interpreted as "extreme," "excessive," or "exceeding due limits"—in other words, going too far. This is a long way from the moral category of quintessential evil or the personification of utter evil in the person of Satan; yet it is close, I think, to the way in which religions characteristically treat that which has to be shunned.

Similarly, in the Christian tradition we have hypostasized "sin" in a way unknown to the Hebrews, and we have thereby departed from a view of religious fault which remains characteristic of other religions. In Austronesian languages, for example, there is an extensive family of words related to *salaq and expressing most generally the idea of an error or mistake. Usually a word such as Malay salah or Penan sala' will be employed to castigate what is religiously forbidden, for example, incest or murder or the transgression of a ritual injunction. In Indonesian, it is only in a deliberately theological or analytical context that the word dosa, introduced from Sanskrit, will be used to express the idea of sin as an offense against religion or divinely sanctioned morality. Ordinarily, though, the response of alien religions to the question "What ought I to do?" is not "shun sin" but "avoid mistakes."

This injunction leads directly to the topic of ritual or, more generally, symbolic action. There are many theories of what ritual itself is about, apart from its special connection with religion, and for the sake of generality I shall adopt

Arthur Waley's stance. "The truth," he writes, "is that there is no 'real reason' for ritual acts"; and where such acts are not linked in the mind of the practitioner to any system of thought they will be explained as "customary" or as "the thing to do." So far as the evidence from ethnography goes, the rites of exotic religions seem to be marked by just this character in the minds of the participants. It may be that the celebrants (priests, or whatever they are to be called) have a clearer idea, or a more explicit rationalization; but those who simply attend need have no precise understanding of the ideology behind the rites, and certainly they need be in no particular inner state such as awe, self-abasement, or anticipation.

I think, also, that our appreciation of exotic ritual is probably misguided by our aesthetics. We are predisposed to picture a religious rite as a sequence of acts distinguished by solemnity, a gravity of demeanor, a careful concern for the meticulous performance of each item in the procedure; silence is important; and when movement from one place to another is called for this is done with measured tread, sometimes in the ordered dignity of a procession. Some of these impressive attributes are indeed found in the rites of certain other religions, for example, those of Bali, but they are not essential to religious performances and they are not characteristic of religion. In my own experience, rites can be muddled, gabbled, enacted out of due order; they can be perfunctory, intermittent, or incomplete; those who attend may or may not pay much attention, or they may pass the time in gossiping, quarreling, making deals or assignations, or in anything but a reverent attention to what is being carried out. So even if a rite is no more than what is done, the way in which it is done is not a characteristic feature of religion.

As for what is actually done, there is room for much dispute about whether such typical activities as "worship," "sacrifice," "prayer," and so on are distinct modes of symbolic action and peculiar to religion. A prudent conclusion is that in each case it can be shown by analysis and comparison that the religious institution is assimilable to some more general form of social action—except for the epithet "religious," and it is precisely this quality that we are trying to comprehend by reference to the rites.

IV

The last of Kant's three questions is What may I hope? This looks more in accord with the view that religion provides a metaphysics, but it is not directly eschatological.

Kant glosses the question as If I do what I ought to do, what may I then hope? All hoping, he writes, is directed to happiness; and he defines happiness as "the satisfaction of all our desires." He has more to say about the nature and conditions of happiness, but let us again take his question, so far explicated, as the starting point of a search for characteristic features of religion.

Hocart has argued at length, in his Kings and Councillors, that rituals and the religions of which they are expressions are communal undertakings in quest of life. Under this wide formulation, it can well be said that religion defines and fosters what is to be hoped for: life, fertility, abundance; freedom from want, illness, and pain; perhaps even immunity to death. In some instances it solves philosophical problems, settles moral quandaries, and is a source of inspiration and a sense of direction in life. In many such ways, it can be said, religion handsomely provides for the satisfaction of desires; moreover, in some cases it first defines the desire, for example, purity or salvation, and then provides for

its satisfaction, an expedient which is both attractive and efficient.

Nevertheless, there does not seem to be much enlightenment to be had from our third metaphysical question. It is not to be thought, after all, that anything we were prepared to call religion would grimly frustrate hope and prevent the satisfaction of decent desires. (That Buddhism advocates the extinction of desire is another matter.) Nor, on the other hand, can it be said that religion can be discriminated by the fact that it proffers hope, since other institutions can do that. And to accord it such a sentimental function would not in any case secure a guideline to the comprehension of religion.

V

The reason for approaching religion through Kant's three questions was that I did not want to risk a petitio principii by importing into my premises any consideration that would depend on a prior conception of what religion was or was not.

Since it seemed likely to be generally conceded that a religion was at least a metaphysics, a set of questions that were claimed to comprise all of man's speculative interests seemed to answer the purpose of the investigation. But of course it will be countered that religion is not entirely speculative, and that distinctive attributes have been left out of my account so far.

Certainly some attributes have been omitted, namely, the grounds of those media and connections that qualify a system of representations as symbolic. These attributes are not speculative, and indeed it has been taken as a peculiar characteristic of symbolism that although it is regular it is not rational. Under this aspect, then, it can be said that a religion

is at least a symbolic classification, and that in its iconic and evocative resources it is of a kind with other employments of symbolism.

In the first place, it is remarkable how generally in world ethnography we find, in what can be described as religions, a common and quite limited stock of symbolic resources: for example, the cross, water, blood, lateral values, cardinal points, elevation, scents, colors, and so on. In the second place, however, it is apparent that in these respects a religion is indeed a symbolic classification, and as such formally indiscriminable from other systems of the kind which are not readily describable as religions.

If the values of right and left are religiously important, as in circumambulation or ecclesiastical architecture or blessing, they are important also in black magic, the prediction of the sex of an unborn child, reaping a harvest, or conferring honor on a guest. Similarly, if certain prestations are invested with religious significance, as in sacrifice or the placation of ancestral spirits or as tokens of gratitude for harvest home, they figure also in marriage payments, fees to a medicine man, and fines to a village council. In fact, religious symbolism is, by a conventional definition, merely a subclass of symbolic classification, and it is to be interpreted in the same way as any other symbolic system such as that of prescriptive alliance or Confucian etiquette.

What might distinguish the symbolism of religion is the valuation placed on the symbols, as expressed through religious personages, rites, and intentions; but it is precisely the peculiar quality of religious values that we are trying to determine, and on present understanding they are not manifested in a distinct mode of symbolic classification. At the same time, there is no argument to make the hypothetical case that symbolism in general is itself a derivative, histori-

cally or intrinsically, of the symbolism of religion, however this may be separately conceived.

For that matter, it could instead be argued historically, where there is the evidence, that religion is a residual sphere of values within which are to be found symbolic resources which were originally far more pervasive, and that the employment of these resources did not depend on the discrimination of religion as a separate focus of social interest. In this regard, religion is closely comparable with, for example, the institution of monarchy. In both cases, we come to terms with the symbolism of the institution by means of a more extensive acquaintance with the vehicles and principles of symbolism in general, not by way of the particular values and purposes (religious or monarchical) in the service of which the resources of symbolism happen to have been contingently deployed.

Among the symbolic vehicles that constitute the limited repertory that I have just mentioned, there are some that have been claimed to have an archetypal character. More widely, it could be claimed that the entire repertory, such as can be established by means of universal comparison, is by this very fact to be considered composed of archetypes. The distribution and the constancy of these features testify to the spontaneous production and recognition of certain primordial images and subliminal connections ("secret sympathies," as these latter used to be called) which represent fundamental inclinations of the psyche. An alternative way to put the matter is to ascribe the archetypes to cerebrational vectors, that is, to locate their source in normal operations of the brain and thereby to posit a natural ground for collective representations which have a global distribution. Religions have their own explanations for the appearance in them of crosses, mountains, metamorphoses, and the rest;

and part of what gives a distinct character to religion is that the adherents are committed to just these explanations.

Borges writes that "perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse interpretation of a few metaphors." (The example that he traces is the image of God as "an intelligible sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.") Likewise, in the domain of practical reason, Kant sought what he called "principles of the possibility of experience." Perhaps, also, there are (as is claimed by depth psychologists) certain complexes which are paradigms of psychic experience; and it might be these to which the schemes of symbolism, religion, and psychology itself made their several responses.

At the level of events, there are incidents which make an awesome and poignant impact, as though they conveyed a mystagogical significance about life.

In the Gospels, Christ predicts that the cock shall not crow before Peter shall deny him thrice. After Christ has been arrested and taken to the house of the high priest, Peter is three times challenged as one of his followers, and three times he denies knowing him. "At the third time, while he yet spake, the cock crew." Then Luke (22:61) adds the terrible words: "And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter." How little we need to be told that the disciple, going outside, "wept bitterly."

This kind of profound effect can, in another context, be an achievement of supreme art. In Anna Karenina , for instance, there is the scene in which Koznyshev and Varenka, on a mushroom-picking expedition in the woods, make themselves quite alone. He has already rehearsed in his mind the phrases in which he will declare his love and ask her to marry him; she has divined what it is he wants to say, and her heart grows faint with joy and panic. In a moment her

fate is to be decided. But some perverse reflection causes him to ask instead "What is the difference between a white boletus and a birch mushroom?" She trembles as she answers that there is hardly any difference. "As soon as these words were out of her mouth, both he and she understood that it was over, that what was to have been said would not be said."

In Kurosawa's film Seven Samurai there is a sequence in which the master swordsman, watched with trembling admiration by the neophyte warrior, sits calmly contemplating a flower as he waits for the bandits to return to their horses tethered nearby. One of them blunders onto the scene. The swordsman lightly springs to his feet, sets his legs firmly apart, and with his hand on the hilt of his sword sternly confronts the hapless villain. He does not draw his weapon in a hasty attack: he simply stands there, in a posture of tense challenge and dreadful composure. For a still moment he looks at his petrified opponent with the level appraisal of a superb technician. Then swiftly with perfect movements he draws and strikes.

These affecting depictions, far from being merely dramatic or aesthetic, are direct testimony to deep-flowing concerns which are to be found expressed in religion. They can be seen, in that connection, as corresponding to what Eliade calls "hierophanies," that is, manifestations of the sacred. But the impact of such paradigmatic scenes does not stem from the contestable notion of the sacred; they are exemplary in a far more immediate manner, and they are not to be explained by the idiocratic abstractions of religious terminology. In their archetypal nature they are recalcitrant to definition; this very feature is part of their immediacy, and it is consistent with the supposition that they have their grounds in the unconscious.

VI

If it is difficult to draw up a substantive account of what ultimately we are talking about when we speak of religion, it is easier to learn from global comparison what adjustments we need to make to our expectations.

I am suggesting that there are three main conceptual predispositions, among others, which tend to mislead us in coming to terms with exotic religions. One is our Aristotelian tradition of classification, which inclines us to seek a common essence among social phenomena ("religions") which may stand one to another in relations of only indirect and sporadic resemblance. Another is our stress on inner states, which inclines us to think that the adherents to a religion should be in a peculiar cast of mind. A third is our ceremonial aesthetics, which provides an inappropriate gauge of the external forms of religion.

This is a formidable apparatus of distortions, and unless we take deliberate stock of them it is unlikely that we shall attain a perspicuous view of characteristic features of any social facts that are designated as religions.

On the other hand, if we concentrate positively on symbolic proclivities and affective paradigms, whether in rites or art or inner scrutiny, it is hard to see that there is any need—under these aspects, and on the universal scale of comparativism—to isolate the religious from among the archetypal forms of human experience.

5—
Existential Quandaries

The heart's unrest is not to be stilled by logic.
F. Waismann

I

We cannot just accept life. To the extent that we might do so we should not be living; we should be surviving, subsisting, just continuing.

Restlessly, instead, we seek further satisfactions, not only because we are avid creatures but also because we live our lives within one form or another of civilization, and it is a gauge of civilization that it creates desires and provides means to satisfy them. None of the desires is entirely natural, few are simple, and most are highly contrived.

The resources of civilization are so varied and numerous as to appear inexhaustible, and it is hard to conceive that it should promote any desires that it did not at the same time offer to satisfy. Yet it is a distinctive feature of certain civilizations at least that they inspire and foster an existential discontent which by its very nature can hardly be allayed.

There are numerous expressions of this intrinsic dissatisfaction, but one way to indicate its character is to say that it reflects a deep unease about intimations of an ultimate absurdity in human life. Civilization produces doctrines which are meant to account for man's place in the scheme of things. These doctrines, whether religious or philosophical,

are capable of reassuring some people, but even in these cases only to a certain extent. At one point or another they run into difficulties which, even on their own premises, they cannot resolve; for example, the reality of evil, the problem of pain, or the random incidence of misfortune.

A relative failure in some regard or another is in any case only to be expected; for the doctrines concede the problematical character of what they seek to explain, and by their own ingenuity they inevitably sharpen a sense for the incongruous and the enigmatic. Science does not help, for descriptions such as "absurd" are not its concern; and in any case, as Lichtenberg wrote, "We must not believe, when we make a few discoveries here and there, that this will just keep going on for ever. . . . Sooner or later, man everywhere encounters the incomprehensible."

Nor can men's anxious doubts be exorcised by epistemology, with the claim that such preoccupations are vacuous. Logical positivism tried to do so, with its contention that metaphysical propositions were literally nonsensical; but this attempt foundered on the logical difficulty of validating its own principle of verification, and even if that problem had been circumvented the philosophy would never have brought release from what Borges has called "the essential perplexities of man."

If philosophy can dissolve certain problems, it eliminates only those questions which can be eliminated by such treatment. Not all of them, though, as Waismann writes:

The metaphysician's craving that a ray of light may fall on the mystery of the existence of this world, or on the incomprehensible fact that it is comprehensible, or on "the meaning of life"—even if such questions could be shown to lack a clear meaning or to be devoid of meaning altogether, they are not silenced . It does nothing to lessen the dismay they arouse in us. There is something cheap in "debunking" them.

The story is told of a department of philosophy at an American university, and a good one, which was in trouble with the administration over seriously declining enrollment. Students, it seemed, were not enticed by such austere topics as illocutionary utterances, modes of quantification, or the semantic function of the comma. An alert member of the faculty had an idea. The department introduced a course on "The Meaning of Life." Enrollment soared, and all was well. What was actually taught in the course is not part of the story; what is important is the response.

People do ask themselves the question What is it all about? And they are not to be deterred from seeking an answer by quibbles about grammatical fictions or the implications of the copula. Some of the frustration they suffer is in consequence of the fact that those to whom they turn for answers are often professionally committed to ideologies which are dogmatic or else do not accommodate that kind of question. Thus western religions demand a doctrinal assent, while positivist philosophers disparage the terms in which the perturbation is cast. It is not to be thought, however, that the respondents are themselves immune to the disruptive uncertainties that prompt the question, nor even perhaps that they are always completely contented by their own answers. In some regards, it can be suspected, they may be like the solipsist who has no real difficulty in conducting his affairs as though other selves and things existed, or the idealist who maneuvers his way through life as though a material universe were objectively there.

This is not to make an imputation of bad faith; the arguments in force are cogent enough in their own terms, and their proponents are rightly confident in them on their own premises. The trouble is that the conclusions do not correspond placatingly to the deep needs of those who are anguished about life.

II

In the face of so many disparate explications, didactic or implicit, perhaps there is another recourse; namely, instead of subscribing to any particular ideology, to seek deliberately to divest ourselves of any preconceptions and to contrive a direct encounter, so far as that may be feasible, with human experience.

This is of course a hypothetical and ideal counsel. Kant claimed to have freed himself of all prejudices, and even he did not manage it. But the task is not necessarily categorical, in the sense of arriving at the ultimate predicates of any and all significant propositions. An alternative is to try to divest oneself of categorical commitments, and to attain what Bachelard called a "systematically awakened naïvety," so that we shall be stripped of our conceptual predilections and be liberated from the traditional constraints of our language.

Now there exists an academic discipline which, under one aspect at any rate, has precisely these aims. A current label for it is social anthropology, though I find this rather too occupational and should prefer to speak, with Dumézil, simply of comparativism. The first claim to attention of this discipline is that it takes as its purview the entire span of organized human life. It is indeed the only discipline which claims responsibly to speak of man, and its findings are intended ultimately to transcend the limitations of language, history, and environment. How far it lives up to this grand ambition is a separate matter. The point I wish to make for the present is that here we have a mode of interpretative comparison which might have been designed to resolve (to the extent that this can be done empirically) the existential questions by which men are afflicted. Let us consider some ways in which this aim might actually be put into effect.

The first point to make is that the study of alien forms of life presents us with, in Kant's phrase, "principles of the possibility of experience." In particular, other civilizations demonstrate that alternative ways of living are not merely imaginable but practicable. Of course, we do not need the resources of world ethnography to teach us this, for the essential lessons can be learned by observing our colleagues and neighbors; but the exotic makes the contrasts more dramatic and effective, and in some respects it will actualize what in our own society might only be guessed at. Yet, all the same, is it a practicable option to put any of these demonstrations into effect in our own lives? It is not at first obvious that we could do so, if only because the prospect seems to depend on a weakening of the holding power of those ideological commitments by which we conduct ourselves and manage our judgments. Nevertheless, we are generally persuaded that even fundamental inner changes are possible and are to be striven for, and perhaps they can be in this instance also.

I do not allude to something so extreme as conversion, but to the shifts in the evaluation of life which are meant to be achieved through education and which are sometimes the results of encounters with great art. If a deeper appreciation of the value of life can be had from reading Crime and Punishment, or if a more acute assessment of the springs of action can be acquired from Hamlet, then in principle it should be conceded that like benefits may be derived from a sympathetic observation of other men engaged in their daily affairs. Certainly the Skeptics thought so, and if we can see that they went wrong in their ethical inferences there is that much less reason that we should fall into their mistakes. We direct our lives in part by examples, and there is no reason a priori that we should not find these among the Balinese as

well as in the life of the Buddha, or among the Batek of the Malaysian forests as well as in the Acts of the Apostles.

That there are differences of complexity does not affect the principle of an exemplary comparison. It is a peculiarity of our own tradition that its intricacy and its internal disparities make life, and the understanding of life, increasingly difficult. Hence there are critics who maintain that sanity is to be had by a return to fundamental simplicities, and there is likewise the possibility that a confrontation with relatively simpler forms of civilization may help in the resolution of our more tortuous concerns. Let us examine these buoyant hypotheses.

III

When life is considered to be hard to interpret, what do people have in mind? Perhaps the obvious starting point is the question of personal identity.

This is not only a central question in philosophy but it is quite commonly alluded to as a problematical issue in modern life especially. Social commentators sometimes take it as an index of crisis that individuals are not sure who they are, and a loss of sense of identity is said to be a result of rapid change. Conversely, it is quite often remarked of Himalayan goatherds or Amazonian hunters, caught with a level gaze at the camera, that they show an admirable sense of their own worth and standing in the world, that they know who they are and are their own men. Apparently, however, this degree of assurance in the self is precarious, and indeed there are good reasons to consider it so.

Hume reported that he could never catch himself at any time without a perception, and never could observe anything but the perception; and he affirmed of the rest of mankind that they were individually nothing but a bundle or

collection of different perceptions which succeeded one another with an inconceivable rapidity and were in a perpetual flux and movement. When he considered what were the principles that unite our successive perceptions, he found all his hope vanish, and he prompted the question whether we have any more claim to a self than does an oyster. Marcel Mauss, reconstructing the evolution of the European concept of the self, demonstrated repeated historical changes in this apprehension which otherwise we should be inclined to accept intuitively as sure and constant.

When we turn to the testimony of alien concepts, in other parts of the world, we find that these doubts and difficulties, philosophical and etymological, are only compounded by ethnography. Leenhardt has described how in New Caledonia the person is considered the inner terminus of a set of dyadic relationships. On Sumba, there appears to be no concept of the individual, strictly speaking, but the significance of any particular being is established by linking it in a contrastive association with an opposite particular. Among the Karo, we are told, there is really no individual, but instead a jural triad in which a person occupies one status or another by turn in relation to others.

Doctrines of animating functions, or what are usually called souls, are likewise extremely various. Some peoples ascribe only one soul to man; others postulate two, three, or more. If a number of souls go to make up an individual, they may cohere into some form of unity or they may be separable. Nor are names any surer guides to individuality; a Penan in the interior of Borneo may change his name repeatedly throughout his lifetime; and among other peoples it is common that names are changed at illness or other crises, so that a man's current name can be considered a token of change rather than the index of a persistent individ-

uality. On the scale of world ethnography, then, we find great variation in the concept of personal identity, testifying to a perpetual flux in the ways in which men have tried to account for what we can only vaguely refer to as their own selves.

Cultural concepts, however, do not entirely determine how a man may apprehend his own self, and underneath the cultural disparities there could subsist an intuitive individuation that constituted a natural resemblance among men. One possible form of this intuition is that of the body image; that is, the unvoiced apprehension of one's body as characterized by its boundary and its resistance to penetration or disintegration. But there is not only one type of body image. Psychologists distinguish various types, and by the test scores certain of these are associated moreover with neuroses and other disorders. In addition, there is some empirical indication that the body image itself may be subject to a degree of cultural influence, and the Navaho or the Zuni are found to yield barrier score results which differ significantly from those for Haitians. Within a culture, also, there is a correlation between the body image of individuals and certain characteristics of their parents.

The further a comparative analysis is taken, therefore, the less does it appear that there can exist an autonomous and unmediated sense of personal identity. When people suffer from a crisis of identity, either individually or collectively, the right diagnosis may well be simply that they—whoever they may be, other than a system of habits—are insufficiently adaptive, not that their essential selves are intrinsically at risk. On the other hand, while it is feasible to adopt some other concept of identity, there is no general reason to think that the agent is thereby discovering his true identity. It could mean that in deliberately subscribing to

Hume's view, or that of the Buddha or of the Penan, he was following a temperamental inclination; but this in its turn would still not provide independent testimony to the true character of the self. For some reasons to this effect let us turn to our next source of radical uncertainty.

IV

One of the first ways to characterize human beings is to say that they are sentient beings, and I take it to be true that what we think of as our "real" lives is characteristically an account of our feelings.

Men are highly emotional creatures, perpetually at the peak or in the slump of some feeling or another; our greatest plays are tragedies, our popular songs are an unceasing chorus to love; the Old Testament enjoins fear of the Lord, the New Testament commends charity. In the west particularly, a romantic individualism is bolstered by the idea that, notwithstanding the constraints and directives of institutions, men are ultimately individual in the play of their emotional attachments and aversions.

Against this background, it is all the more remarkable that anthropologists have paid practically no systematic attention to the topic of emotion. In part, this is probably the result of an uncritical presumption that in their emotional lives human beings anywhere are by and large essentially alike. Yet it calls for very little acquaintance with history or ethnography to provoke the serious doubt that this view can be correct.

For a comparativist, the prime field of evidence is presented by vocabularies of emotion in different linguistic traditions; and the first lesson is that simply in the numbers of emotions discriminated they diverge very greatly. Some, such as English, draw the most subtle distinctions among an

extensive variety of emotions; others, such as Penan, make do with a restricted vocabulary that strikes us as rudimentary. Contrasts such as these give rise to a number of problems.

If all the emotions distinguished in all the vocabularies are in some sense psychologically true, then human nature is capable of perhaps infinite elaboration. In that case, some human beings will sense, just by virtue of their linguistic tradition, a more finely modulated inner life than others. Alternatively, it might be that only some lexical distinctions were psychologically true. In this case, some cultures will have exaggerated the number of emotions that is really possible, whereas other cultures recognize perhaps only the minimum gamut—or even, possibly, not so wide a range of emotional states. In either case, it will be a question to what extent there is a correspondence among different vocabularies in the emotions that they discriminate. Presuming some overlap between any two vocabularies, furthermore, it will still be an open question whether they agree in the recognition of what are hypothetically the essential emotions. And of course there are numerous difficulties, of definition and observation and experiment, in the way of determining whether a pair of emotion-words from any two languages compared do or do not denote the same inner state.

The course of theory about the emotions, since the seventeenth century, has not in the main provided much ground for the resolution of such questions. Take just the number of emotions that have been claimed as basic. Descartes thought there were six; Malebranche postulated only three; Spinoza also argued for three (though they were not identical with those of Malebranche); Hume, confining himself to the "direct violent passions," still ended up with as many as eight. These differing counts are not to be ascribed to different

linguistic traditions, nor can it be thought that their proponents were unequally endowed with inner apprehensions or with the power to observe their fellow men.

Modern psychology, even the comparative kind known as ethology, has not yet brought a consistent economy into these matters. Although Eibl-Eibesfeldt speaks of "an international language of facial expressions," corresponding to standard emotions, there is no certainty about what these are. Ekman and his collaborators list happiness, sadness, anger, and disgust, making four in all—but perhaps also surprise and fear, thus making a total of six. This unsureness, however, does not prevent the subsequent claim that "the same facial expressions are associated with the same emotions, regardless of culture or language." If this could be proved, we should have a firm basis for investigating and assessing the quandary of our emotional nature and all the problems to which this gives rise. But to the comparativist, with the crucial factors of language and social setting held especially in mind, the contention is far from proved.

Comte proposed, in 1840, that the best way to study the emotions was from the outside; and latterly this view has led to incipient investigations on the part of social anthropology. In this approach, stress is laid on the premise that emotions are in part at least socially defined and socially directed; that is, in certain regards there is not a free play of feeling, but society stipulates what emotions are appropriate in what circumstances. This makes it possible to investigate comparatively the correlations between social sentiments and certain institutions in the organization of social life. Findings so far indicate that there is a high degree of patterning of emotions in the institutions under study, but also that the patterns are largely independent of the structure of the institutions. These findings depend moreover on an analytical

convention which has proved interestingly productive; namely, that the lexical designations of emotion be replaced by a formal natation of elementary contrast.

In its detail this is an intricate and lengthy matter, but its implication is simple. It harks back historically to 1770, when Holbach considered emotions as states of being either attracted or repelled by their objects, leading to his proposal that they were hence reducible in principle to physical laws of attraction and repulsion. This prediction accords with the pragmatic value of discriminating emotional states not by the denotations of natural languages but simply as either positive or negative; and this development conduces to a radical economy both in the objective registration of emotion and in our private assessment of the inner states by which we are possessed.

The outcome of comparativism, then, seems at present to be that emotion is a function of collective representations, and that in place of an exquisite gradation of numerous subtle emotions we are moved by an elementary contrast of somatic tone. To the extent that these findings can be borne out empirically, they both simplify and reduce our sentimental predispositions.

This does not mean, though, that the affective quality of our inner lives should be considered any less rich. Neither joy nor misery is diminished or denatured by analysis. What continues to frame a quandary, however, and now with all the more power of perplexity, is that our emotional lives should be so obsessive and characteristic when so much about them is artificial and contingent.

V

I take it that among the assurances that men desire, as the most general resolution of their quandaries, are order and

certainty. Well, comparativism surely descries forms of order: in descent systems, institutions of government, mystical undertakings, and much else. But the fair success so far achieved poses all the more sharply the problem of accounting for the order.

In some instances it can be argued that forms of order among social facts are the unintended products of logical possibilities and constraints. In other instances it can plausibly be suggested that the order results from cerebrational vectors, that is, predispositions of thought and imagination which reflect normal operations of the brain. And in yet other instances it may be that the order ascribed to the flux of social experience is an artifact of our need for order; that is, that the conscious desire corresponds to an unconscious condition of comprehension. There are thus various grounds on which comparativism can proffer some understanding of the orderly aspect of social life, though whether such demonstrations could alleviate the existential discontent that is our subject must be another matter.

So also with the desideratum of certainty, that is, the sense of sureness permitting decision. The gains in substantive knowledge that have been made in recent decades are encouraging, and our increasing facility in recognizing and correlating social forms makes possible a firmer professional confidence in the analysis of social facts. But this is a long way from procuring the sense of certainty that would respond to the deep unease of men about the sense of human life. Part of the reason for this insufficiency is the sheer philosophical difficulty, acutely expounded by Wittgenstein, in determining what can serve as criteria of certainty. In part also the reason is the relativism which has come to mark modern styles of thought, whether in physics or morals or art, and which militates corrosively against even

the expectation of certainty. The succession of intellectual fashions, such as existentialism or structuralism, indicates the recurrent impulsion towards new sources of authority in the interpretation of human experience; but the very succession and the fact that such doctrines can so readily be regarded as fashions are evidences of repeated failures of conviction.

Underlying these particular considerations, with regard to order and certainty, there is moreover a deeper concern. Men have always sought purpose in the design of the world, and many require a sense of purpose if they are to direct their lives aright. Much of the power of religious ideas has stemmed traditionally from their capacity to interpret the purposes of gods to men; and typically men have found that wars and revolutions confer on their lives a direct and ultimate purpose which otherwise they lack. But the transcendental and the cataclysmic need not be the only sources of purpose; and our present interest is to see if the more level scrutiny of comparativism can, by virtue of its universal purview, detect any purposive principles in the forms of human social life.

It would be easy enough to contend that the scale of the comparison has nothing to do with the issue, and in some respects this objection might be hard to confute; but we need not be tied to a prior conception of principle either, and in the straits where we find ourselves we may take nothing for granted. The least we can do is also the most we can do: to consider man as mankind, not merely in this or that form of civilization, and to look and see if any advantage is then to be had from this most comprehensive examination. The special advantage that is looked for in the end is that of being able to ascribe some teleological meaning to the forms of human experience.

The response to so great a question, and in this narrow compass, must be largely impressionistic. The grounds of the impressions could be justified empirically, however, and in a longer reply, and it is on this premise that I venture to say anything at all on the matter. It seems to me, then, that the evidences of comparativism point fairly consistently in one direction. The institutions that frame men's lives exhibit clear regularities around the world, and they are not purposive. Whenever we can account for the form or structure of an institution, the terms of the analysis make no place for human intention or foresight. This is so whether we are dealing with prescriptive systems or informal logic or complementary governance, with shamanism or sacrifice or myth. The social facts were not deliberately contrived by acts of will; nor, in the ways that they regularly change, do they respond to concerted purposes. That they tend to satisfy human needs is nothing to the point, for any kind of social organization can do that; and of course if the conditions of physical survival were not met there would be neither human beings nor social forms, so the consideration of needs is vacuous.

The essential is that many institutions exhibit such regularity as to appear as though they were evidences of design, whereas the further our comparative analyses extend the less is it possible to admit any purposive factor behind the regularity. Admitted, both dictators and democratic assemblies introduce changes in the constitution of society, but a lesson of history as well as of comparativism is that their ability to effect radical changes is very limited. One reason is that to plan change it is necessary first to form ideas about the present, and these ideas themselves are in the main social artifacts. They are so much the vehicles and moulds of our thought that we speak of the social construction of reality

itself, and their impress extends to conscience, imagination, and self-awareness. Lichtenberg once wrote that just as things happen outside us without our intervention, so also the ideas of them can occur in us without any help from us; indeed, he concludes, we too have become what we are without our aid.

it is on such grounds that it can be maintained, as Lichtenberg further asserted, that we are parts of this world and that the thought which moves and lives in us also belongs to it. In the world of social forms, to the extent that comparativism can demonstrate characteristic features of human conduct, there is no incontrovertible evidence of design or of any general purpose which might tell us what it is all about. If comparativism can establish what can be called an architectonics of significance, as has been suggested, the emphasis falls not on any integral meaning discerned but on the social instruments by which various meanings are traditionally ascribed to human experience.

A consistent interpretation of these social facts is that, over and above the immediacy of our concerns, human existence has no significance of a kind to still the heart's unrest.

VI

By this view, the function of comparativism is to supply a truly humane scale against which to set the various formulations of man's predicament.

In establishing the actual bounds of human understanding and social organization, as registered globally in collective representations, the discipline can show man empirically what his characteristics are and where he stands in the scheme of things. What construction is placed upon these findings is not determinable, ultimately, by the discipline

itself; but at least it undermines parochial categories and opens the mind to some comprehension of the gamut of human experience.

The extent to which such conclusions are accepted will depend in part on what value is conceded to comparativism, that is, to the evidential weight of the range of social facts that world ethnography can muster. We touched on this point earlier on (Sec. II), and are now in a better position to take it up again. At the hypothetical limit, we can call on perhaps four or five thousand relatively distinct forms of civilization, but the objection could be raised that the sheer number of instances has no probative force. All that matters, by this view, is the simple fact of contrast. To that end we need only set the civilization that we wish to assess against any other form that presented significant differences—as Durkheim proposed for the "crucial experiments" of sociology—and in that event it would be of no importance that there remained thousands of other civilizations which could also have been adduced.

There is of course some plausibility in this view, especially when what is intended—as by the Skeptics—is to assess the claims to acceptance of any particular institution. For example, if it is thought obviously right, or even necessary, that one should refrain from sleeping with one's sister, all that is called for is the counterexample of just a single society in which such a relationship is permitted, and then one has to think again. But if we take instead an ultimate question about human existence—such as Why are we here? or What is the meaning of our lives?—and then consider all human traditions as supplying each their own corporate "answer," then the matter looks different. On the broad assumption that, in the most general terms, the question is more or less constant for all men in any tradition, the num-

ber of responses is indeed a factor; and if no two answers are the same, then it is proportionately harder to maintain that any particular tradition has exclusively the right one.

Morally, of course, we find something to admire in an individual who maintains against all odds that he alone has the solution to some problem; but here we are considering the truth-values of disparate philosophies of life, not their moral attractiveness, and in this comparison it is the disparities that make the point. Admitted, it is still logically possible that a single favored civilization should possess the correct answer to our grand existential question; but what makes the present case is the irresoluble disparity among an enormous range of answers, and it cannot logically be presumed that just one of them, against such a preponderance of contradictions to it, will be correct. If we estimate the importance of a quandary by the variety of purported resolutions that it can evoke, then the import of our grand question is greatly magnified by the exceedingly various responses that are testified to in world ethnography. On this premise, comparativism only makes things worse.

That is, it makes things worse if it is assumed that the critical value of comparativism is to permit the formulation of a decisive solution to a singular enigma. In the present discourse we have rapidly surveyed the problematical topics of identity, emotion, order, certainty, and purpose; and on each score the outcome has been skeptical or disruptive or negative. The only encouragement derived from the exercise has been the prospect of evading the constraints of prejudice by the acquisition of a more comprehensive understanding of a global variety in forms of life. This may not look very positive, but there are other advantages to be had from the universal interpretation of social facts.

The view of man that is provided by the neutral scrutiny of comparativism may be thought to resemble that depicted by Samuel Beckett in Le Dépeupleur , on a vaster canvas, and to some this vision will seem austere, grim, and daunting. Under another aspect, however, it can prove bracing and morally salutary. An instructive parallel can be drawn with the different reactions to the infinite spaces of the universe. Their eternal silence much affrighted Pascal, but the starry heavens filled Kant with wonder and awe, like the moral law within him. (Whitehead thought this a triumph of the obvious over philosophy.) In the present perspective, when one contemplates the probability that man is absolutely alone in the cosmos, the effect can be even exhilarating; for if it means anything to be man, then his existence acquires all the more poignancy as it dwindles amid the black and glacial hostilities of cosmic space.

Likewise, if we consider man's character and works in the perspective of comparativism, without capitulating to any metaphysical doctrine and its provision of certitude, there are contrasting responses to be made. One option is to abdicate from responsible judgment by emulating Pascal in his ignoble wager. The other is to learn from skeptical comparison the feasibility of an unprecedented independence, a defiant resilience in the face of implacable forces and inscrutable ends. For those with no taste for dichotomies, or for the decisions they compel, there is always the more placid quittance of resignation—for a time.

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Index

A

Absurdity, 91 , 92

Aesthetics, 83

Affecting depictions, 89

Algebra, 51

All Souls College, xii , 30

Alternation, 22

Anger, 60 -65

Anna Karenina,6 , 88

Ape-men, 54

Apostles, Acts of, 96

Aranda, 12 , 16

Archetype, 1 , 4 , 43 , 46 , 51 , 87 , 89

Architectonics, 27 , 106

Aristotle, 10 , 90

Art, 28 , 67 , 95 , 103

Asymmetry, 22 , 35 , 36 , 45 , 49

Attention, foci of, 50

Ayer, A. J., 79

Azande, 23

B

Babylon, 10

Bachelard, G., 94

Bali, 83 , 95

Barnes, R. H., 19

Barr, J., 12

Batak, 39

Batek, 16 , 96

Beckett, S., 8 , 109

Belief, 23 , 54 , 58 , 78 -79

Benveniste, E., 12 , 72

Berlin, B., 38 , 40

Bible, 79

Biology, 13

Birds, 21

Bodleian Library, xii

Body image, 38 , 46 , 98

Bolingbroke, H. St. J., 30

Borges, J. L., 28 , 55 , 88 , 92

Borneo, 18 , 73 , 97

Boundary, 21 -22

Brain, 25 , 26 , 46 , 87 , 103 . See also Cerebration

Browne, T., 1 , 9 , 32 , 72 , 73

Buddha, 96 , 99

Buddhism, 77 , 85

Burke, E., 9

C

Category mistake, 65

Cattle vocabulary, 56 , 61

Cerebration, 3 , 4 , 25 , 38 , 45 , 49 , 87 , 103 . See also Brain

Certainty, 103 -104, 108 , 109

Change, social, 105

Characteristic features, 1 , 2 , 25 , 59 , 80 , 81 , 83 , 90 , 106

Chemistry, 68

China, 16 , 66 , 67 , 77

Christ, 88

Christianity, 67 , 77 , 78

Class, definition of, 2 -3. See also Classification

Classification, 22 -23;

monothetic, 2 , 23 , 62 , 63 ;

polythetic, 1 , 2 -3, 23 , 25 , 62 -63, 70 ;

social, 18 -20

Claudius, 80

Code, 33 , 34

Colors, 21 , 38 -40, 44 , 46 -47

Colton, C. C., 10

Commitment, 79 , 94 , 95

Comte, A., 101

Condillac, E. B. de, 68

Confucius, 67 , 77 , 86

Constants, cultural, 68 -69

Contradiction, 76

Conversion, 80 , 95

Conviction, 104

Cosmology, 7

Crucial experiments, 107

D

Descartes, R., 68 , 100

Descent systems, 22

Design, 6 , 7 , 104 -105

Designs, elementary, 42 -43, 44 , 48 -49, 50

Desires, 91

Determination, 34 , 44

Diffusionism, 17 , 24 , 37

Dostoevsky, F. M., 29

Dualism, 21

Dumézil, G., 12 , 39 , 76 , 94

Dumont, L., 19

Durkheim, E., 26 , 67 , 107

E

Egypt, 10

Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I., 101

Ekman, P., 101

Elements, symbolic, 20 -21

Eliade, M., 89

Eliot, G., 29

Emotion, 23 , 40 , 47 , 57 , 79 , 99 -102, 108

Enlightenment, the, 11

Epistemology, 3

Eskimo, 16

Ethology, 13

Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 17 , 26

Evil, 81 -82, 92

Evolutionism, 17 , 24

Existentialism, 104

F

Feelings. See Emotion

Fison, L., 19

Forms, 22

Franklin, B., 10

Functionalism, 17

G

Gilbert, S., 9

Gilyak, 16

Gospels, 88

Governance, complementary, 21 , 105

Gummere, F. B., 39

H

Haitians, 98

Half-man, 21 , 36 -38, 44 , 45 -46, 50

Hamlet, 80

Hampshire, S., 12 , 23 , 30

Heart-beat, 48

Hebrews, 82

Hemiplegia, 38 , 44 , 46

Herodotus, 10

Heresy, 76

Hertz, R., 34 , 36 , 45

Hocart, A. M., 81 , 84

Holbach, P. H. T., 102

Hope, 84 -85

Howitt, A. W., 19

Human nature, 55 , 57 , 58 , 60 , 62 , 64 -65, 66 , 70

Humanoids, 65

Hume, D., 55 , 78 , 79 , 96 , 99 , 100

Humility, 27

Hypostasis, 81 , 82

I

Iatmul, 19

Identity, personal, 96 -99, 108

Imprinting, 48

Incest, 13 , 63 , 107

India, 16 , 76

Individualism, 99

J

Jacobson-Widding, A., 39 -40, 47

Jung, C. G., 26 , 43 , 51

K

Kafka, F., 29

Kant, I., 8 , 27 , 74 , 81 , 84 , 85 , 88 , 94 , 95 , 109

Karo, 97

Kay, P., 38 , 40

Kédang, 16

Kenyah, 77

Kinship, 18

Knowledge, 74 -75

Konso, 16

Korn, F., 19 , 29

Kroeber, A. L., 19

Kurosawa, A., 89

L

Ladurie, E. L., 12

La Mettrie, J.-O. de, 10

Leach, E. R., 19

Leenhardt, M., 18 , 97

Lévi-Strauss, C., 19

Lévy-Bruhl, L., 67

Lichtenberg, G. C., 9 , 10 , 26 , 51 , 92 , 106

Linguistics, 12 -13

Lloyd, G. E. R., 12

Locke, J., 68

Logic, 23 -24, 45 , 91 , 105

Logical positivism, 92

Logical possibilities, 103

Logics, alternative, 23 -24

Lowie, R. H., 19

Luke, St., 88

Lying, 77

M

MacIntyre, A., 29

McDougall, L., 42 , 43

Malay, 57 , 82

Malebranche, N., 100

Mandala, 43

Marriage, 22

Materialism, 25 , 27

Mathematics, 12 , 29 , 68

Mauss, M., 67 , 97

Mencius, 65

Metaphor, 88

Metaphysics, 18 , 74 , 84 , 92 , 109

Missionaries, 77

Monarchy, 87

Monkey, 9

Monothetic. See Classification

Morgan, L. H., 7 , 19

Murdoch, I., 15

Myth, 105

N

Nahuatl, 12

Naïvety, 94

Name, 97 -98

Natural proclivities, 51

Natural resemblances, 63 , 78 , 98

Navaho, 98

Needs, 105

Neuronal structure, 43

New Caledonia, 18 , 97

Nuer, 12 , 56

O

Ockham's razor, 26

Opposition, 21 , 35 , 45 , 97

Order, 102 -103, 108

Oxford, 15 , 26 , 30

Oyster, 97

P

Paracelsus, P. A., ix

Paradigmatic scenes, 1 , 4 , 89 , 90

Pascal, B., 8 , 26 , 109

Penan, 12 , 77 , 82 , 97 , 99 , 100

Penrose, R., xii

Percussion, 21 , 40 -41, 44 , 48

Peter, St., 88

Philosophy, empirical, 28

Phosphenes, 42 -43, 48 -49, 50

Phototropism, 47

Physics, 68

Physiology, 44 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 69

Polarity, 45 . See also Opposition

Polythetic. See Classification

Prayer, 84

Prediction, 54

Prejudices, 66 , 94 , 108

Prescriptive alliance, 22 , 86 ;

systems, 30 , 105

Prestations, 86

Primary factors, 1 , 3 -4, 24 -25

Primordial characters, 69

Primordial images, 87

Protagoras, 9

Psyche, the, 26 , 51 , 52 , 56 , 71 , 87

Psychology, 23 , 26 , 37 , 51 , 54 , 98

Purpose, 7 , 17 , 20 , 104 -106, 108

Q

Quarles, F., 9

R

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 17 , 19

Reason, 23 -24, 74

Reformation, the, 71

Regularities, 105

Relations, 21 -22

Relativism, 103

Renou, L., 76

Resignation, 109

Reynolds, V., 13

Richards, I. A., 65 -66, 78

Right/left, 34 -36, 44 , 45 , 49 , 50 , 86

Rites of passage, 22 , 41

Ritual, 82 -84

Rivers, W. H. R., 19

Rivière, P. G., 19 , 29

Russell, B., 78

S

Sacred, the, 89

Sacrifice, 84 , 105

* Salaq, 82

Satan, 82

Scientism, 17

Secret sympathies, 87

Seven Samurai,89

Sextus Empiricus, 10

Seznec, J., 12

Shakespeare, W., 28 -29

Shamanism, 105

Signatures, doctrine of, ix

Simmons, J. S. G., xii

Sin, 82

Skeptics, 10 , 11 , 95 , 107

Smith, W. C., 79

Sociology, 12 , 67

Somatic symbols, 42 ;

tone, 102

Soul, 52

Specific features, 2

Spinoza, B., 100

Sri Lanka, 77

Statue, sensible, 68

Stewart, F., 29

Structuralism, 17 , 104

Substitution, 62 , 63

Sumba, 73 , 97

Swedenborg, E., ix

Swift, J., 10

Swinburne, A. C., 10

Symmetry, 22 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37

Synthesis, 69

Systems, 24 -25

T

Teleology, 104 . See also Design; Purpose

Terminologies, relationship, 22

Thomas, K., 12 , 30

Tolstoy, L., 7 , 88

Transition, 41 , 48

Translation, 17 , 33

Trio, 16

Truth, 76 -78

Turner, V. W., 39 , 40 , 47

U

Unconscious, the, 25 , 47 , 50 , 89 , 103

Universals, 13 , 59 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 69 , 70 , 72

V

Vectors, 87

Vehicles, symbolic, 33 , 34 , 50 , 51 , 87

Velde, H. te, 12

Verification, 92

Vogt, E. Z., 41

Vries, J. de, 39

W

Waismann, F., 79 , 91 , 92

Waley, A., 83

Whitehead, A. N., 109

Wisdom of Solomon, The,31

Witchcraft, 23

Witches, 66

Wittgenstein, L., 2 , 10 , 22 , 52 , 53 , 70 , 103

Womb, 48

Worship, 84

Wunderlich, E., 39

Y

Yahoos, 53 -54, 55 , 71

Yamana, 16

Yarnold, E., 12

Z

Zinacantan, 41

Zuni, 98

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Preferred Citation: Needham, Rodney. Circumstantial Deliveries. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1981 1981. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6c6006tn/