Howes, David

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

COMPTES RENDUS- BOOK REVIEWS 383 Fogel also does much to rehabilitate the vast amount of research published by the SMR. Although the research was carried out at the behest of the Japanese army, it was carried out by persons whose outlook was, for the most part, marxist and not naturally sympathetic to the military. The research is not without bias, but it is not the one that appeared to be obvious. * * * Brian L. Evans University of Albena Clifford Geertz- Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Pp. vi, 157. Clifford Geertz begins this charming, witty and profoundly perplexing little book by posing the question of why some anthropologists are listened to, and others not. Anthropologists themselves like to think their monographs are heeded because of the sheer power of their factual substantiality, but so much of this consists of incorrigible assertion that this can hardly be the reason. Geertz, there-fore, suggests an alternative explanation: "some ethnographers are more effective than others in con-veying in their prose the impression that they have had close-in contact with far-out lives" (6). The implication of this suggestion is that it is not so much how one does fieldwork as how one does things with words - and, in particular, the success with which one creates the impression of "being there" - that separates the read from the unread. Needless to say, this suggestion will not sit \\\!II with the many anthropologists who regard the problems of ethnography as essentially epistemelogical rather than literary. Their mistake, according to Geertz, is that in focussing all their attention on how to at-tain a meaningful understanding of "the Other", they neglect that what they also do is write, and the former matters not a jot if the latter fails to convince. After discussing some examples of how ethnographers get themselves into their texts, Geertz goes on to distinguish bet\\\!en authors who seek to "communicate facts and ideas", and authors who seek to "create a bewitching verbal structure" or "theater of language" (20). The former author books, the latter traditions. It is with authors of the latter type, individuals who "mark off the intel-lectuallandscape, differentiate the discourse field" (20) that the rest of the book is concerned, be-ginning with Claude Levi-Strauss, and then turning to consider the works of E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Bronislaw Malinowski and Ruth Benedict. In the chapter on Levi-Strauss, "The World in a Text", Geertz begins by dismissing the two most usual approaches to Levi-Strauss' reuvre. The first of these is to see that reuvre as progressing linearly from the study of behaviour in Elementary Structures of Kinship to that of thought gamboling freely in Mythologiques; the other is to see it as a rotating searchlight bringing the same view to bear on each of the domains it successively illuminates. The problem is that neither of these approaches can explain where Levi-Strauss is coming from in Tristes Tropiques, whereas, by taking a "cosmic egg view" of the latter, Geertz argues (32) all of Levi-Strauss' other works can be understood. Geertz proceeds to show how Tristes Tropiques is not one text, but many: a travel book, an ethnographic report, a philosophical discourse vindicating Rousseau, a reformist tract and a symbo-liste literary text. Moreover, the meaning of the work is not to be found in its parts, but (in good struc-turalist style) in the relations between them. Understood this way, what Tristes Tropiques is really about is its own syntax, not the facts and ideas it recounts. As such, it is an analogue of Levi-Strauss' own "formalist metaphysics of being", the most basic tenet of which is "that 'savages' are best known not by an attempt to get somehow personally so close to them that one can share in their life, but by stitching their cultural expressions into abstract patterns of relationships" ( 4 7) -just as Tristes Tropiques is stitched together. Geertz's treatment of Tristes Tropiques certainly seems to illustrate his claim that "the way of saying is the what of saying" (68), and the same must be said of his analysis of Evans-Pritchard's 384 HISTOIRE SOCIALE- SOCIAL HISTORY manner of going about things in prose in the chapter "Slide Show". According to Geertz, the point of Evans-Pritchard's African ethnographies was "to demonstrate that nothing, no matter how singular [blood feuds, cucumber sacrifices, poison oracles], resists reasoned description" ( 61 ). The way he did this was by writing with such homogeneity of tone, "by talking about [their ideas, feelings, prac-tices] in the same equanimous 'of course' tone in which one talks, if one is who one is about one's own values, practices, feelings" (69), and by constructing sentences so intensely visual, they read like transparencies that Africa could not but appear "as a logical and prudential place- orderly, straight-forward and levelheaded, firmly modelled and open to view" (70), rather alot like England when you come right down to it. The demonstration was in the prose style, a prose style which brought "Africans into a world conceived in deeply English terms ... confirming thereby the dominion of those terms" (70). In the next chapter, "!-witnessing", Geertz treats the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, cham-pion of "immersionist ethnography'' (92). Malinowski's most consequential legacy, according to Geertz, was to pose the problem of "Participant Description" in its most radical form (83). The man-ner in which Malinowski framed this problem, the problem of passing from "field work as personal encounter" to "ethnography as reliable account" (84) was by alternating between two "I's" in "this-is-your-author-speaking passages": "Absolute Cosmopolite'' or the Romance-! that sees as the natives see, and "Complete Investigator", or the Scientific-! that always succeeds in transcribing the chootic social reality into a law-governed one (79). Alas, the authorial presence of both these "I's" was un-dermined by the posthumous publication of A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. This book ex-posed a third "I" capable of writing such things as "my feelings toward the natives are decidedly tending to 'Exterminate the brutes'" (74), which rather discredited both the capacity for empathy of the first "I" and pretense of objectivity of the second. The remainder of this chapter is concerned with the work of "Malinowski's children", as Geertz calls them, a new breed of anthropologists who, instead of oscillating between two 'Ts" as Malinowski did in his ethnographies, have invented the reflexive-!, which is actually closer to the "I" Malinowski sequestrated in his Diary. Indeed, what these authors have basically done is work the di-ary form into a publicly presentable genre. Not surprisingly, the attention and space devoted to the "I" of the ethnographer has expanded considerably in these "journal-as-work" sorts of texts with ti-tles like Moroccan Dialogues: Anthropology in Question, which Geertz aptly styles "transcript eth-nography and annotative soul-searching" (96-97). My feeling is that these works, which take "the comprehension of the self through the detour of the other" (92) as their slogan, are more self-absorbed than- reflexive, but Geertz seems to admire them for the novelty of the "being there per-sonae" they construct. In the following chapter, "Us/Not-Us" , Geertz turns to consider the work of Ruth Benedict, the master of "edificatory etnography'' ( 1 08). Benedict's style, Geertz asserts, was remarkably like that of the satirist Jonathon Swift, with the difference that her " ironies are all sincere" (107). Her rhetorical strategy was thus to juxtapose the all-too-familiar with the wildly exotic in such a way that they change places. Take, for example, her book on Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, with its "peculiar passage from perversity to pragmatism on the Asian hand and from levelheadedness to provinciality on the American rigidity and flexibility passing one another in mid-Pacific" ( 121 ). It will be appreciated that her expository purpose was the reverse of Evans-Pritchard's- namely, to make "There confound Here" ( 1 06). In the concluding chapter, "Being Here", Geertz documents some of the adjustments anthro-pologists have had to make now that the people of whom they speak have passed "from colonial sub-. ject to sovereign citizens" ( 132), and are as likely to be encountered in a supermarket in Idaho as in the exotic places in which anthropologists used to situate them. The us/not-us distinction has become blurred, and this has provoked a general crisis in representation. Geertz also articulates what he seems to regard as the main advantage of his "lit crit approach" to anthropology: "Once ethnographic texts begin to be looked at as well as through, once they are seen to be made, and made to persuade, those who make them have rather more to answer COMPTES RENDUS- B(X)K REVIEWS 385 for" ( 138). My sense is that here, more is less. It should be remarked that four chapters of this book were first delivered in the form of lectures at Stanford University in 1983. Works and Lives has thus been in the air for at least five years. In that time, there has been precious little theory construction in anthropology in America, although American ethnographers have displayed an unprecedented degree of literary inventiveness. Literary style has taken the place of theorizing, "the way of saying" has swallowed up "the what of saying". Geertz may be said to have laid the groundwork for this dis-placement as long ago as 1973, when he wrote in The Interpretation if Cultures: "What does the eth-nographer do?- he writes". This functional definition is, of course, only partly true. The tragedy is that if one accepts the premise on which Works and Lives is written, namely, that ethnography (like just about everything else these days) is "a kind of writing" (1), one is divested of any alternative theoretical space from which to call this presumption into question. * * * David Howes Concordia University Myron P. Gutmann- Toward the Modern Economy: Early Industry in Europe, 1500-1800. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Pp. xxi, 257. This slim volume provides an extremely valuable synthesis of recent research and writing on the long-term background to the Industrial Revolution. Combining a detailed account of the economic and social evolution of the area around Verviers in what is now eastern Belgium (which is the area of the author's greatest expertise) with a broader overview of developments elsewhere on the continent and in England, the study emphasizes continuities in the history of European industry, highlights the integration of social structures with demographic growth and economic change, and stresses the role of cottage industry in the eighteenth century in the forging of a new society and economy. Myron Gutmann organizes the long study of industrialization around three turning points. In the "first crisis of urban industry'' in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, new centers fa-voured by shifting trade routes and relative freedom from the disruption of war and religious perse-cution challenged the traditional medieval, regulated, guild-organized textile industry centered in flanders. A "second crisis of urban industry" in the seventeenth century was charaterized by the rise of large-scale cottage industry in the countryside (in metal goods as well as textiles~ As this cottage industry matured in the eighteenth century, bringing new forms of production, businessmen per-ceived a need to concentrate and control manufacturing. The next logical step was the tum to mecha-nization, which constitutes the third turning point. Shifting the focus from technological innovation as an explanation for industrial change, this interpretive essay emphasizes configurations of societies and markets - and the attitudes and behaviours of the people involved. Unhappy with the use of the term "preindustrial" to describe the era that ended in the late eighteenth century, Gutmann distinguishes between early industry, the large scale (but not mecha-nized) industry that developed in Europe up to this third turning point, and mechanized industry, the stage of industrial development in which machines became widespread. While not denying the signi-ficance of this last development, which has long been characterized as the "industrial revolution", Gutmann believes that traditional accounts have overemphasized the "revolutionary" nature and scale of changes associated with mechanization, precisely because they overlooked the importance of early industry and the way it evolved to the point that mechanization became the inevitable next stage in European economic development. This perspective on the process of industrialization shifts the focus backward in time and stresses the extent to which industrial growth and change were affected by interacting forces associated with shifting market opportunities, demographic changes and govern-ment intervention. Finally, while acknowledging the rapid mechanization of the textile industry by about 1830, Gutmann points out that a large part of European industrial production remained artisanal until the end of the nineteenth century. 

Clifford Geertz — Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author.

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Clifford Geertz — Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author.

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)