Typological Conceits: Kinds Of Minds—A Continent in the Great Divide

The quest for the defining "other" led in the nineteenth century to conceptions of powerful oppositions in contrast to European urban society. These oppositions, which left little place for "preaxial" civilizations, were dichotomies of two variously characterized extreme terms: simple, complex; primitive, modern; prerational, scientific; and Eden, Exile. The oppositions implied not only types of community organization but also aspects of the experience and thought of members of such communities, the "states of mind" of Redfield and Singer. "Gesellschaft ," for example, required of its members (in presumed contrast with "Gemeinschaft ")—as a consequence of its emphasis on contract and rationality in regard to an individual's "interests"—that "beliefs must submit to such critical, objective, and universalistic standards as [those] employed in logic, mathematics and science in general" (Loomis 1964, 286).

These dichotomies, like our various historical conceits, although they never fully characterized actual communities, have continued to haunt scholarly imagination as "ideal types" as possible tools in the quest for a clarification of aspects of social order. Paul Wheatley, in his discussion of the beginning of urban forms, uses the classical terms of contrasts. "We are seeking to identify those core elements in society which were concerned in the transformation variously categorized as from Status to Contract, from Societas to Civitas , from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft , from mechanical to organic solidarity, or from Concordia to Justitia " (1971, 167). In a footnote bearing directly on our view of Bhaktapur he added an amplification, the suggestion that the early city was of neither one nor the other type. "It should be noted that this transformation was only initiated by the rise of the ceremonial center and that . . . the society of the temple-city was neither fully contractus, civitatis, Gesellschaft nor organic" (ibid., 349 [emphasis added]).

The social philosopher Ernest Gellner is one of those who makes use of the dichotomy in a very strong form. Modern industrial civilization is unique and stands historically across a great frontier or divide from what went before. It is in "a totally new situation." The clarifying task is to characterize "primitive thought" in its oppositional contrast to the most powerful form of modern cognition, science. This contrast will help clarify how we are unique.

If this contrast is used as a method, then (Gellner 1974, 149f. [emphasis added]):

One is naturally left with a large residual region between them, covering the extensive areas of thought and civilization which are neither tribal-primitive nor scientific-industrial. Hence there is a certain tendency for evolutionary schemata of the development of human society or thinking to end up with a three-stage pattern. This tendency is a consequence of the fact that the very distinctively scientific and the very distinctively primitive are relatively narrow areas, and three is a very big region in between.

Nevertheless, it is my impression that the problem of the delimitation of science, and the problem of the characterization of primitive mentality, are one and the same problem. To say this is not to deny that the area between them is enormous, and comprises the larger part of human life and experience. But this middle area perhaps does not exemplify any distinctive and important principle . With regard to the basic strategic alternatives available to human thought, there is only one question and one big divide. . . . The central question of anthropology (the characterization of the savage mind) and the central question of modern philosophy (the characterization or delimitation of science) are in this sense but the obverse of each other.

It is the burden of this book that within this heterogeneous range of thinkers and thought between "primitive" and "scientific," and in the wide range of communities between the "simple" face-to-face community and whatever it is we have (or had) become, there is a kind of continent in the Great Divide, which has its own distinctive typological features, exemplifies its own distinctive and important principles in relation to both sociocultural organization and to thought, distinctive features that are blurred and lost in these classical oppositions. Bhaktapur and places that might have been analogous to it in the ancient world are illuminating for this middle terrain. Neither primitive nor modern, Bhaktapur has its own exemplary features of organization and of mind.