The Age of the Anthropologist
The problem, said the Friend, one of the closest I had made during the years of No Aging in India , is that we have grown up. It was over a decade since both project and friendship had been conceived, and I was back in Delhi writing another final draft. New timetables had intruded: a job, a relationship, changes in the economy, the imponderabilia of life. Things seemed different, and we waited for a sign from one another across the minor embarrassment that was our sense of ourselves in time.
Barbara Myerhoff wrote that to be an anthropologist in the country of the Old was to study the Other that is one's future self.[1] Myerhoff died of cancer before becoming the old lady of her imagined future, and the tragic irony of her effort to number her days—-to see how the self and the world were unmade and remade in time and therefore to know oneself in it—gifted us with a sense of the gerontological sublime. A teacher of mine once said we become doctors because we are afraid of death, and something similar could be argued for gerontologists and more generally for moderns. Gerontology in this sense may be the quintessentially modern social science, marking off the shifting limits to interiority and to life. The failure of its sublime for me may lie in being part of a cohort of persons hard hit by AIDS, many of whom did not or will not live to be old—-and thus the fears I seem to carry with me each day and which inflect and infect my sense of a horizon—though I distrust my sentiments here. This book has charted some of the many other places and reasons for the failure of such a sublime, the "No" of its tide.
But it is not just as a body set against death that one does and writes, but as one set against time, and change, and decay. These are obviously related but distinct things, and the book has been centered on the last of them. The decay of the body, the social and material fact against which modern gerontology was organized and around which "postmodern" gerontology is being articulated, has presented a crit-
ical problem to anthropology since its origins. One of the discipline's charter narratives was that of the dying and regenerated god-king of James Frazer's The Golden Bough . Primitives and tropicals make tropaic errors, in Frazer, and confuse the wellbeing of the social body with that of the individual body of the king or priest totemically standing for it. At the first sign of physical decay, the individual body must be replaced by a younger one: the struggle in the sacred grove, the regeneration of the social body through the killing of the king and his replacement by a body once again ageless, like the substitution of Ajara for Vinayashila in the Kathasaritsagara .
Frazer can be read as more than an armchair anthropologist brandishing a theory of primitive error; his category of "magic," the nexus between the decay of the individual and the social body, becomes the realm of the symbolic for both later anthropologists and for psychoanalysts. The story of the Golden Bough, of the violent rupture at the heart of the sacred, offers a way to think about the relation of the body in time to the totalization of social relations as a seamless, purposeful, and atemporal hegemony, the anthropologist's Culture. The position of the king, priest, or god—in psychoanalytic terms the position of the father—is not only a position in and of language (as it was for Max Muller and would be for some Lacanians) but is, for Frazer, a fundamentally embodied stance: when the body reveals its temporality with the first recognizable signs of old age, the king/god/father must die. The body of language and culture is not simply the body of the powerful but of the powerful able to stand outside of time, a body hegemonic in not revealing its temporal contingency but appearing just so. The powerful individual body and the social body are metonymically linked as presences out of time, obviously and necessarily just so, totalities whose comportment and configuration are maps of the self-evident relations between their parts.
But the "ageless" individual body becomes marked : age comes to matter. The recognizable signs of decay—the white hairs that alert Vinayashila to the collapse of his world, framed as his ability to hold onto his subjects and to younger women—create a scene in which the hierarchical relations between king and subject, man and woman, and old and young become palpable and contestable. A younger body, one not recognizable as aging , must be substituted so that the seamless continuity of the social world can be maintained.
This need for the continuity of the world in time is formally a matter of primitive error for Frazer, but one that as cultural critique he implicitly extends to his own modern Christian world. Primitive error in The Golden Bough —the desire for the maintenance of a totalized world in space and time through signifying practices of metaphor and metonymy—suggests the potential for an analytics of culture that recognizes the problem of history—of change, death, and time. If culture is the possibility of the coherence of things in time, the story of the dying and regenerated king in Frazer locates the violence at its heart. The act of suture, which preserves the order of things through a substitution of bodies, is an act of destruction, the heart of darkness that for Frazer ultimately lies not in the nature of primitivism or civilization or the desire of the child but in the possibility of
meaning, of the move from time to totality, hegemony to culture, body to sign. And if modernity and coloniality replace this possibility of the coherence of things in time with a normalizing reason and a frozen metanarrative of absence and loss, then the decaying body moves from its secret place in the sacred grove into the full light of day, and the body of the king and the father is replaced by the new corporeality of the citizen, of the old woman at the polls.
Old woman voting. Reproduced by arrangement with The Times of India Group.