This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

Phantom Africa by Michel Leiris

• Leiris, Michel. 1968. L’Afrique fantôme. Paris: Gallimard

  Leiris, Michel. 2017. Phantom Africa (trans. Brent Hayes Edwards). India: Seagull Books

Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss

• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1993. Tristes Tropiques Paris: Plon

  Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1969. World on a Wane (Tristes Tropiques) (Trans. J. Russell). Boston: Beacon Press

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

Introduction | Departure | Strauss’ Origins | Confronting Colonial Brazil | Racial Landscape in Brazil

Suffering for sweetness

Part III The New World | Chapter 12 Town and Country |

As Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) moves westward towards the hinterlands, he continues to plot for us a ravaged terrain wrought by man, time, and capitalist commodities. It is a complex global politico-social economic terrain that rewrites how the country and town evolve or deteriorate. In this chapter, not only does Lévi-Strauss introduce us to a complex racial and intercultural mixing in São Paulo but also a rough sketch of the physical landscape of the vicinity leading to his field site of Mato Grosso.

Sugar, the global commodity, is responsible for fashioning the natural destruction, urban and rural landscape, and loss of food autonomy of the local population. I confused the Central American gold rush in the previous post with Brazil’s own gold rush—sugar. There has been a historical demand in Europe for a product that originates in Asia. Thus, sugar scarcity (much like gold and silver) drove huge risks and the promise of immense profit to whoever could cultivate and sell the plant more cheaply.

According to historian Stuart Schwartz, the sugar cane plant moved with the conquering Arab Muslims to Persia, the eastern Mediterranean, and eventually reached Cyprus by the fourteenth century. The area would become the major supplier in Europe. From there, sugar moved westward—Crete, North Africa, and eventually to Sicily, where it replaced Cyprus as the leading supplier of sugar. Schwartz argues that evidence from the Sicilian island would become the model by which sugar cultivation would be reproduced elsewhere—coerced labour, large land estates, and an integrated network of commerce and trade. The Venetians and Genoese traded sugar worldwide. Still, the production scale was inadequate for popular consumption, rendering sugar a medicinal rather than a mass consumer product.

By the time sugar was cultivated in the Iberian Peninsula, Schwartz noted that slave labour was almost always required for sugar cane. Historically, slavery has always been a fixture in Southern Europe since the Roman period, with war conquests, such as the Christian-Islamic wars, among others, providing a supply of coerced labour in the sugar plantations. It is no different for the Iberian Peninsula.

The importation of African slaves into Spain and Portugal to work in these plantations in the Algarve and Madeira is a significant finding of Schwartz. He argues that the labour relationship rested on racial and also cultural differences between the owners of capital and the labourers, consisting of Africans who ranked higher than the Indians. This impetus is one of productivity more than anything. Indigenous populations were outside the logic of capitalist extraction and productivity. Therefore, it was difficult to force people to work beyond subsistence, which was what they were doing. This racial ranking becomes a critical feature of the sugar and social economy that emerged in Southern Europe and was transplanted in the Caribbean and Brazil. The racial politics of Brazil arose from this organisation.

To turn sugar into a cheap commodity not only requires scale but also almost free labour cost in the form of slavery. Cane planting, harvesting and processing are dangerous tasks that require backbreaking work—clearing land, cutting canes using machetes, confronting sharp leaves that cut workers, and speed in transferring the harvested cane to a mill to extract the juice quickly before it ferments. Add the running of the furnaces of mills to process the cane juice crushers, and, unsurprisingly, labour must be coerced under these brutal and labour-intensive conditions. This has characterised the plantation structure across the sugar economies of the Caribbean, the South American mainland, and India under different colonial powers.

Sugar colonialism made us all slaves to sweetness

While slavery and slavers are mostly the focus of any discussion of colonialism, Brazil is an example of why this happened. The why implicates all of us, until today. Sugar (and therefore, sweetness) is a peculiar good and taste in which consumer demand is virtually limitless. When mixed with hypercapitalism, a term I use to describe an almost feverish frenzy to extract profit by means of extreme violence, cheap sugar calories make slaves of all people. Once you start pointing fingers, please do not ever forget to point them at yourself with your cookies, cakes, cupcakes, and sweet coffees. It is this same demand that transformed sugar production into global commodities.

It is this mercantilist frenzy to profit that turned sugar into another form of gold and silver. Smaller kingdoms such as Portugal, could not compete against the larger and stronger kingdoms of France and Spain, in the mining of gold and silver in their colonies. Thus, Portugal sought to expand its sugar production. It gambled on transplanting sugar cane from Sicily to Madeira in 1420. The experiment in Madeira was so successful that it was able to establish 150 sugar factories. Such success pushed the Portuguese into expanding sugar production to another colony, the Island of São Tomé off the West Coast of Africa in 1493.

There were already slaves being used in Portuguese society beginning in the cane fields of the Algarve in 1441 and in Madeira. However, the access to cheaper slaves from West Africa and the establishment of the São Tomé colony made the trade and the scale of production more profitable and robust. The São Tomé colony housed sixty sugar factories and used “as many as 3,000 Negro slaves” in the process. By 1522, the production in the two islands made Portugal the leading trader of sugar. This massive expansion of sugar production plunged the price of sugar to an all-time low and successfully made sugar a commodity for the masses.

This business innovation and transformation on the back of slavery permanently closed the loop on cheap sugar. The market needed and relied on it. Thus, the westward move of sugar production to Brazil was inevitable given the intensive resource depletion in its wake. Just like the cultivation of monocrop commodities, soil degradation is the price of scale and intensive cultivation. This meant that volume production in Madeira, São Tomé and even Sicily and Cyprus quickly depleted and collapsed. New frontiers must be opened to continue sugar production despite its low market price.

Brazil became quintessentially an example of textbook colonialism. The occupation of land for purposes of extracting resources, enslaving people, and exporting its benefits abroad. The existing historical records do not show any move (or urban design or planning, as Lévi-Strauss would find out in the 1930s) for civilising impetus except to propagate sugar. Any discussion on civility would later happen when the Dutch and the Jesuits appear in the scene.

The first urban landscape was designed around the plantation and the sugar mill. These plantation communities were called engenhos, or the sugar mills and, by extension, the sugar-field plantation. The rhythm of the plantation revolves around the planting, harvesting, and cooking of the sugar cane. Between August and May, Brazil expanded its sugar season by doubling up to 300 days of sugar processing1, which was roughly 120 days in other colonies.

Sugar production was enviable that even the Dutch fought and sought this colony for themselves. And so it goes, fighting over sugar. What is left is a cycle of destruction after productivity. Lévi-Strauss saw this in the cities and in the hinterlands.

The use and disuse of these territories corresponded to a historical evolution whose visible marks came and went in much the same way…But in the interior towns of a sort would come into being, only to find the surrounding countryside suddenly deserted. The population moved from one region to another, did not increase in numbers, and changed constantly in social type, with the result that fossil-towns could be observed side by side with towns in embryo; and in a very short space of time the anthropologist could scrutinize transformations as striking as those revealed to the palaeontologist who studied the history of anatomical organization over a period of millions of years.

Lévi-Strauss, p. 115

The massive tracts of land available in Brazil ensured that it eventually outcompeted Madeira and São Tomé, when the sugar cane was first brought into Bahia or Northeast Brazil before 1519. By the time Lévi-Strauss travelled towards the interior in the 1930s, coffee had replaced sugar but also progressed into decay. Thus, his most hated memory is of the “squeaking axle of an ox-cart,” a surprising sign of what he viewed as proto-history and a seeming time travel into the past, the indicators of decay from stripped wealth. Such is the fortune of colonies—diminished once again back to their forgotten poverty status.

Round Up

I took a long excursion studying Lévi-Strauss’ chapter and unearthing history I had very little knowledge about—sugar colonialism in Brazil. As a reader of Lévi-Strauss’ observation of the urban landscape, I was confused about the archaeology of Brazil’s past. This is the first brief foray into understanding Brazil’s past.

What I have uncovered is a harrowing and brutal history of the emergence of sugar as a global commodity. This means that everyone is implicated. It is not just the slaves and slavers who need to be the focus, but also the poor working-class people reliant on sugar to labour for poor wages. The demand for sweetness is limitless. From a controlled, regulated medical product, to the creation of the low price for sugar on the backs of slavery and territorial occupation ensured sugar’s role as a global cheap commodity available for all. This is the business innovation of that time, hypercapitalism, a profit practice built on violence.

Lévi-Strauss’ Brazil landscape in the 1930s shows the cycle of productivity and demise; a terroir mix of progress but also of neglect. This hodgepodge of time scales and landscapes is rooted in early commodity farming as early as the 1500s, which Brazil inherited.

Further Reading:

O’Leary, Jessica. 2024. The uprooting of Indigenous women’s horticultural practices in Brazil, 1500–1650. Past & Present 262.1 (2024): 45-83. (a forgotten account of how slaves and residents were fed with traditional food like manioc and manioc flour)

Schwartz, Stuart B. 1985. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835. Cambridge University Press (covers a comprehensive history of sugar in Europe to Brazil using a broad range of historical sources - from the structure to technical sugar production)

Wiznitzer, Arnold. 1956. The Jews in the Sugar Industry of Colonial Brazil. Jewish Social Studies 18(3): 189-198 (notation on the earliest inhabitants and a brief description of the religious sanctuary and conversion in Brazil)

The ongoing draft and outline of our project are available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous related post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

Phantom Africa by Michel Leiris

• Leiris, Michel. 1968. L’Afrique fantôme. Paris: Gallimard

  Leiris, Michel. 2017. Phantom Africa (trans. Brent Hayes Edwards). India: Seagull Books

Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss

• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1993. Tristes Tropiques Paris: Plon

  Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1969. World on a Wane (Tristes Tropiques) (Trans. J. Russell). Boston: Beacon Press

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

Introduction | Departure | Strauss’ Origins | Confronting Colonial Brazil |

The Melting Pot that is Brazil

Part III The New World | Chapter 12 Town and Country |

After meandering into the past/present of Brazil, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) takes us around his present time. We encounter the sad frontier towns dotting the wayside on his way to the “field site.” Brazil is being opened up, abandoned, and re-opened. Agriculturalists, planters, immigrants, and other pioneers leave their mark as Lévi-Strauss himself moves in the frontier of the State of São Paulo on his way to Mato Grosso.

That is to say, as Lévi-Strauss moves closer and closer to his target population, he is inevitably also following the westward move of capitalists and interlopers. We start in São Paulo, but unlike the disdain of Michel Leiris (1901-1990) of Dakar’s dregs, Lévi-Strauss notes this as part of his “Sunday anthropologizing,” though he feels misled by everyone who told him that he could easily find Indians in the suburbs. What he finds instead is a surfeit of mixed races bearing the phenotypic expression of intermarriages after centuries of immigration.

Germans left their mark and their gold hair and blue eyes in a city that also finds Italians and Syrians among them. In his dissertation on the German immigrant population, Eugene Cassidy describes how the confluence of population pressure, landlessness and land enclosure, and hunger (including a potato blight in 1842) drove internal migration of southwest Germans north and eastward in Germany but also overseas, including the U.S. and Brazil. This coincided with the ruling monarch, King João VI, king of Portugal and Brazil, proclaiming a decree in 1808 opening Brasil to non-Portuguese and non-Catholics. Thus, in 1819, the first three villages in Bahia were established with German immigrants. Though many of these villages did not survive, immigrants to the southernmost province of Rio Grande do Sul in 1824, along the border of Argentina, proved to be more resilient. São Leopoldo grew to municipal status by 1846. The reasons for this impetus to import a foreign population were both political and cultural.

According to Cassidy, the monarchy was facing pressure from the Napoleonic Wars, with French and British occupying forces pushing King João to flee and live in Brazil for nineteen years. During that period, he established institutions and services that formed the backbone of the bureaucracy of contemporary Brazil. The context of his departure meant that the king was afraid of disloyal Portuguese troops stationed in Brazil. At that time, the king was facing liberal revolutionaries who wanted to convene the Portuguese Cortes and establish a representative government. This political pressure coincided with his preference for non-Portuguese soldier-settlers in Brazil who will have no loyalty and ties to Portugal.

With the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the inaguration of the new Brazilian republic in 1890, the country required agricultural labourers to replace slaves. The new form of gold—the coffee plantations in São Paulo have replaced the depleted silver and gold mines as the source of new-found wealth. There is consensus between Cassidy and historian Stewart Lone, who both studied immigrants in Brazil, that the freed slaves and their descendants avoided manual labour because it was a sign of their former slave status. This perception but also self-fulfilling cultural status play coincided with the Brazilian racial hierarchy that ties cultural and psychological attributes to specific groups. This was applied especially to potential immigrants into the country. At the top of the hierarchy sits the Italians who Lone described as the most ideal group by Brazilians because they brought in whiteness branquemento and other preferred chracterstics. The state encouraged this movement as reported by influential 1900s public intellectual and cultural historian Gilberto Freyre,

Of all the new immigrants, they were the most wanted, the most imitated, and received the highest praise. They were not rude like the Germans, nor were they the country bumpkins who furnished so much material for Portuguese, Galician, or Spanish jokes. They were intelligent, adaptable, friendly, likeable, and they worked very hard. They were not clannish, but rather mixed happily with Brazilians at religious festivals and during Carnival. They quickly learned to sing Brazilian songs along with their traditional operatic tunes.

Gilberto Freyre, p. 256

Freyre noted the idealised phenotype of white matching other cultural characteristics valued in the culture such as congeneality, industriousness, and the ability to assimilate. In essence, it was Brazil’s value of racial inclusivity that contrasted with the two other immigrant groups that caught the attention of Lévi-Strauss. The Germans and the Japanese were prominent because they maintained their sub-cultures and language.

Though Lévi-Strauss himself does not engage with this topic directly in the two chapters, he feels a discomfort bodily as he moves westward. He defends his position as merely a researcher and yet Brazil by then was mired in a unique form of ‘racial democracy’ or the harmonious interrelationships across the skin colour divide, a term coined by Freyre, in contradistinction with American perceptions of blackness and race politics (see Peter Fry).

In the heart of São Paulo several of the markets in the poorer quarters were run by coloured people. But perhaps the word ‘coloured’ has little meaning in a country where a great diversity of racial strains and—in the past, at any rate—an almost complete lack of colour-prejudice has led to every kind of cross-breeding. Let us rather say that the visitor could train himself to distinguish the mestizos (black crossed with white), the caboclos (white crossed with Indian), and the cafusos (black crossed with Indian). The goods on offer displayed, by contrast, an unmixed ancestry.

Levi-Strauss, p. 112

Of course, this ideology is not necessarily true on the ground and difficult in practice. The frontier is a convoluted creation from the past to the present. It has become a interesting discussion in the literature. Racial hierarchy is a social fact that is acknowledged as discriminatory but also badges of nationalism as traced by anthropologist Peter Fry. According to his analysis, race valuation shifts between exclusionary but also important sources of pride and identity. It is this curious tension that I argue that the term ‘colonialism’ used by researchers to describe the settlement of foreign groups as wholly inadequae to the Brazilian experience. Researchers of German emigrants to Brazil are likely labelled as colonialists more than the Japanese despite the two being somewhat comparable in profile. The only distinction is the skin colour of the subject. Unknowingly, researchers have not recognised the bias in themselves which are exposed when you start reading the literature about the two groups side-by-side.

The trajectory into Brazil was an outcome of government sanctioned commercial pathways for the two groups in Cassidy’s study. In the case of the economically-squeezed Germans, Brazilian officials, with the assistance of royal influencer, naturalist, and doctor Major Georg Schäffer, were sent to recruit from German states in 1819. The racial/cultural values of Brazilians aligned with the risks willingly undertaken by poor Germans with the promise of free passage and land. By 1830, the numbers rose to 6,000. Immigration ceased in the late 1840s when state funding and support ended due to an attempt by the province to break away from Brazil and the change in ruling monarchs.

Still, the coffee plantations required more labour and experienced agricultural farmers. Brazilians experimented with importing Chinese workers for tea plantations but this initiative failed and did not align with their racial preference and characterisation of the Chinese as socially polluting with their sickness and lack of hygiene. Though the Japanese appear to be similar phenotypically, the Brazilians respected/feared them as historical warriors, possessing discipline and hygiene. In the racial hierarchy, they are superior to the Chinese. Brazilians recognised the Japanese as an admirable small country that later conquered Taiwan in 1895, defeated Russia in 1904-1905, and occupied Korea in 1910.

Similar to conditions in Germany, the rural Japanese population during the mid-1880s was languishing in poverty. Historian Stewart Lone, identified the causes of emigration due to the punishing land tax system, the yen deflation that reduced the price of harvested rice, increased food prices, and military conscription. The developing urban industries could not absorb the poor farmers; emigration was a stop gap solution. In 1895, Japan signed a commercial treaty with Brazil, one of several South American countries during that time period, that prompted the large scale movement of labour. The first wave in Brazil consisted of farmers, the shokumin (Japanese colonists), from Niigata prefecture, Yamaguchi, and Hiroshima beginning in February 1899.

This was only the start of human and material layers between what Lévi-Strauss refers to as town and country, of abandonment and progress, of modern technology and backwardness. Rather than gloss over the urban areas, Lévi-Strauss uncovers one significant matter on the ground. I noticed his mild surprise over the acceptability of intermixing across groups in Brazil.

This is one of many other observations he made in this chapter. For this post, I zeroed in on his mild surprise of the racial politics of the locals. Inevitably, this local grounding counters what one reads in the literature over certain groups. In this case, it is to question key words that may seem relevant in scholarly circles, such as ‘colonialism,’ to what really matters among Brazilians, the racial hierarchy. This is the case of the insider vs. outsider perspective that makes anthropological fieldwork valuable. Which should you represent? And how?

Round Up

As Lévi-Strauss approaches his field site, much of the cities of Brazil, and the continent is unknown to me. Therefore, his excursion into the immediate suburbs and urban areas provided me an opportunity to understand the immigrants and the Brazilian racial politics that underpin Levi-Strauss’ brief description of the transition towns of Sao Paulo.

A contemporary layer of racial hierarchy is revealed with the socio-political preference towards whiteness branquemento because the dilution of other phenotypes and cultural characteristics make for a stronger and fitter society. This ideology stems from the colonial past and transformed in the present into correlating status with cultural characteristics. Racial hierarchy more accurately represents what is happening on the ground rather than ‘colonialism’ as preferred by scholars writing about German immigrants, in particular. Such language is absent in Japanese immigration though the two groups have very similar profile and entrance into the country. This became clear once I read the two groups side-by-side.

The study of the frontier and transition zones provides a necessary critique about what is important on the ground versus using keywords from the outside looking in. Insight usually comes from an unlikely source such as the frontier zones of any ethnographic field study.

Further Reading:

Cassidy, Eugene S. 2015. Germanness, Civilization, and Slavery: Southern Brazil as German Colonial Space (1819-1888). Unpublished dissertation for the Doctor of Philosophy in History in the University of Michigan

Freyre, Gilberto. 1986. Order and Progress: Brazil from Monarchy to Republic. trans. Rod W. Horton. Berkeley: University of California Press

Fry, Peter. 2000. Politics, Nationality, and the Meanings of “Race” in Brazil. Daedalus, Spring 129(2): 83-118

Lone, Stewart. 2001. The Japanese Community in Brazil, 1908-1940: Between Samurai and Carnival. Hampshire: Palgrave (definitive Japanese immigration from both sides using Brazilian and Japanese source materials)

The ongoing draft and outline of our project are available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous related post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

Phantom Africa by Michel Leiris

• Leiris, Michel. 1968. L’Afrique fantôme. Paris: Gallimard

  Leiris, Michel. 2017. Phantom Africa (trans. Brent Hayes Edwards). India: Seagull Books

Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss

• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1993. Tristes Tropiques Paris: Plon

  Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1969. World on a Wane (Tristes Tropiques) (Trans. J. Russell). Boston: Beacon Press

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

Introduction | Departure | Strauss’ Origins

Brazil’s Timescapes

Part III The New World | Chapter 8 The Doldrums | Chapter 9 Guanabara | Chapter 10 Into the Tropics | Chapter 11 Sao Paulo

More and more we are going to talk about time and its effect in monograph writing. There is nothing but time. This is the primary difference between the field sites of Michel Leiris (1901-1990) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009). It is not because they are separated by oceans and continents or even by contemporaneous times. Leiris is stuck in the torment of real-time reporting, without the comfort that (time) distance afforded his compatriot Lévi-Strauss as he writes his ethnographic memoir. This is what distinguishes the amateur recorder from a seasoned ethnographer.

Before Lévi-Strauss even landed in the New World, that is, Brazil, he is distinctly aware of the imposition of time and history with his imminent arrival in Santos, the port, on his way to Sao Paolo and the interior (Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso). By the time he first arrives in 1935, Brazil is an archaeological layer of time and history that makes the term New World superfluous. For those who refuse to read ‘white old men’s’ work, miss how this French ethnographer wrote the colonial and post-colonial timescapes in Brazil.

I like the idea of an irrevocable yet also revocable past-present and present-future. Lévi-Strauss finds himself in an avalanche of colonial tyranny before he embarks on his fieldwork. This is the weight of time. Brazil’s history is inscribed not just temporally but also spatially—I call this the timescape. This comes from the argument of Arjun Appadurai on transnationalism that transformed anthropological field sites beyond the village border. He calls this phenomenon the ethnoscapes. Once understood as highly localised villages now mean a culture without borders—the village that an anthropologist envisions or wishes to, no longer exists, even during the time of Levi-Strauss in the 1930s. The Amazon Indians he so wanted to record and preserve have already been subjected and are continuously being subjected to forces of past-time, present-time, and future time.

The chapters we are reading demonstrate the clash of the past/present and provides us a jarring picture of the old New World before he even enters the frontier in Mato Grosso.

French Brésil

The unknown world and the race to discover vast still undiscovered lands fueled many of the expeditions, not unlike Lévi-Strauss’. He was already preceded by hundreds of years of contact and travels for the church or for trade. The unverified journey of Captain Binot Paulmier de Gonneville’s accidental discovery of an unnamed southern land, suspected to be Terra australis, was recorded in a document to Pope Alexander VII by Abbé Jean Palmier in 1503. Though a mission never materialised, thanks to religious orders fighting over ecclesiastical territory, the myth of Gonneville Land permeated French exploration myths in the southern seas. A mythical fertile land, which the French secretly named brésil to refer to the source of the wooden dyes in the twelfth century.

Lévi-Strauss knew about the exploration myths, including the contact by Jean Cousin, said to have discovered the southern continent before Columbus did in 1498. Lévi-Strauss imagines what it was like when Columbus first sighted the Americas.

When Columbus saw a glimmer of light along the horizon by night he took it for the coast of America; but it was merely a marine variety of glow-worm which produces its eggs between sunset and moonrise. These I, too, saw during a night which I spent watchfully on deck in readiness for my first sight of the New World.

Lévi-Straus, p. 82

It is not an authentic land he imagines, though, but one in which plant resources have replaced the rush for silver and gold that had once been extracted from the mountains.

To understand what all that is like, you must first have plunged your nose deep into a freshly crushed tropical pepper; and before that you must know what it is like to walk into a botequin in the Brazilian interior and smell the honeyed black coils of the Junto de rolo, which is made of fermented tobacco-leaves rolled into lengths several yards long. In the union of those two smells you will recapture the America which, for many a thousand years, alone held their secret.

Lévi-Straus, p. 82

Rio does not hold any particular beauty that he observes. Lévi-Straus is unimpressed with the mountains before him, the scale of nature overpowering his urban sensitivity. He knows he is in the process of transitioning in the new milieu.

…yet one feels at a loss before them, simply because their scale is such that the normal adjustment of man-to-environment becomes impossible. Later one gets used to America and comes to make, quite naturally, the necessary adaptations; a momentary change of gear in one’s mind, as the aeroplane comes down, and ‘normal functioning’ continues.

Lévi-Strauss, p. 83

This confusion is what Ton Otto (2013: 66-67) describes as a kind of time travel in which the traveler feels frustrated and alienated from the culture because of the loss of shared time. This means an individual cannot anticipate a meaningful future because of a disjointed present. Thus, Lévi-Strauss traces the multi-layered timescapes from colonial and near post-colonial pasts hurtling towards his present.

Across the chapters, Lévi-Strauss is on a lookout of the remnants of Fort Coligny, a failed France Antarctic dream in the region, built in the 15551; he is following the well-trodden tracks of hundreds of mining mules in the region called Minas Gerais—losing their horseshoes, and others profiting from it—as they trek dirt roads up and down the mountains bringing gold and silver to port; wandering among the decaying villas and mansions built on the backs of labour and resource but has now withered and occupied not by governors but by fishermen; remarking on the rather bland architecture, the hovels, and concrete in the contemporary urban space and the populations that inherited this complex history.

People generally think of travel in terms of displacement in space, but a long journey exists simultaneously in space, in time, and in the social hierarchy.

Lévi-Strauss, p. 89

There is more to this time travel and I urge you to savour the prose of the translator and the original French to understand the multi-layered Brazilian history of extraction and contact.

How to Write the Longue Durée

Given the weight of the past and the ever changing present, can the ethnographic present be enough to represent such histories and to locate one’s position in the timescape? We’ve talked in our previous post about the cautionary use of the ethnographic present (more generally, the use of the present tense). This form of writing flattens time to a now-ness that erases the past and produces an eternal time-present for the reader. João Pina-Cabral, a Portuguese anthropologist writing about the Portuguese since the 1970s, proposes a much deeper problem than simply a technique of writing. His problem is the rapid change of his community, what was once conceived of as peasants, have been integrated into the wider urban and global consumer culture. The tempo of change is accelerated to the point that…

…the growing anachronism of my research troubled me more widely…

Pina-Cabral, p. 346

So much so that his challenge is about relevance and meaning of his research questions, more than the problem of writing tense. It was impossible to do longitudinal research on the same questions when the communities themselves have moved on. There is no way to do a re-study except for that ethnographic present the ethnographer finds himself in.

Lévi-Strauss, in writing several chapters on Brazil’s tangled history of the past but also much of the travails of the present (his fieldwork present - 1930s), flags the conjuncture that Pina-Cabral talks about here. That is, the imposition of the past to his present and upcoming presentation of data.

Thus, Lévi-Strauss, in establishing his ethnographic authority, skirts around The Opening Trope common in anthropological writing. Rather, he reveals the uncomfortable link between his sense of sadness, nostalgia, and preservation with the fact that the Brazilian Indians he will encounter, are no longer in a state of cultural isolation.

Entering the field for him requires opening the portal of historical and mythical time of contact and conquest. There lies authority built on honesty.

Round Up

Two posts and we have not yet reached the field site of Lévi-Strauss. There is a lot of meanderings. It holds us in suspense but there is an underlying reason to this extended liminality of entering the field. Rather than relying on the trope commonly found in travel writing, including Leiris’ account of their entry into Dakar before proceeding to the “field,” Lévi-Strauss took a different approach into establishing his ethnographic authority—he went back in time to show the different timescapes of Brazil’s contact and conquest experience.

This time travel is not neat but is an amalgamation of different events across centuries that is inscribed in the landscapes and his present urban city of Rio de Janeiro. His long exposition of deep historical time, not only situates his position in Brazil’s timeline, but reveals his personal dilemmas and feelings about his work. This is his source of his ethnographic authority.

Further Reading:

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. (see Chapter 3, Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology))

MacGrath, John. 1996. Polemic and History in French Brazil 1555-1560. Sixteenth Century Journal XXVII(2): 385-397

Mead, George Herbert. 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. London: The Open Court Company Publishers

Otto, Ton. 2013. Times of the Other: The Temporalities of Fieldwork. Social Analysis 57(1): 64-79.

Sankey, Margaret. 2013. The Abbé Paulmier’s Memoires and Early French Voyages in Search of Terra Australis in Discovery and Empire: The French in the South Seas, John West-Sooby, ed. Adelaide: The University of Adelaide. pp. 41-68.

Sankey, Margaret. 2021. Jean Paulmier, Gonneville and Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of a Myth. Australian Journal of French Studies 58, 8-23 (2021). DOI:10.3828/AJFS.2021.02

The ongoing draft and outline of our project are available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous related post:

Anthropology Reconsidered (Present) | Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2025) | The Dawn of Everything (2023).

The path towards The Great Books in Anthropology

Say hi, frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

Summer is a time of discovery. The best ones are those that you did not expect at all. Thanks to the Dutch Railways’ unlimited summer spree for a month, you could travel around the Netherlands at off-peak times (9 am-4 pm, 6:30 pm onwards), for 50 euros! What a dream! Though it has now ended, it has allowed me to visit places off the usual map. We did not do much planning or research and you do not need to. That’s the beauty of it.

Just bring yourself to somewhere new.

One of the cities we decided to visit is Breda. If you are a train commuter to the south, your first encounter with this city is as a transfer point. If you need to head to Antwerp or to any other city in the south, you could switch from here. Looking out from the station, it did not seem interesting because all you could see were some industrial buildings or a brutalist train station.

What a silly perspective! I definitely missed visiting a historical city for years now, about an hour away from South Holland. It sounds quite simplistic, but sometimes we miss the obvious. If you live or visit in the provinces of North and South Holland (where Amsterdam and Schiphol Airport are located), you would not see much evidence of the religious cleavage in the country. Perhaps you would have seen the stripped-down churches after the Iconoclast Fury in 1566 (or an otherwise austere, empty church). However, the tragedy and loss can be felt much more strongly in the southern Dutch provinces as a Catholic. Breda is one of the former heartlands, alongside all the cities by the border with Belgium, of Roman Catholicism. And their story is one of many border cities that will be key in understanding the fate of this religion in this country.

Breda was the seat of the Brabant Nassau-Orange House before they fled North to escape the Spanish stronghold in the Flanders region. Breda, which is now part of North Brabant province, was once a large barony landholding held by the Nassau family. I did not know that there was one branch of the Nassau-Oranje that remained Catholic. This branch of the House of Orange produced the devoted Barbara of Nassau (c. 1480 - after 1554),1 the illegitimate daughter of Count Engelbrecht II of Nassau (1451-1504). Nonetheless, she used her wealth to establish monasteries and charity houses for the poor and the elderly. She eventually donated part of the Huis Valkenburg, the dowager’s great manor and the residence of the females in the family, to the Franciscan nuns. She appeared prominently in a series of paintings depicting the Bleeding Host of Breda.

The Seat of Wonder

Roman Catholicism has become a museum relic in much of Europe, especially in the Protestant Netherlands. On the one hand, it is quite sad that in less than a generation Protestants or atheists have totally forgotten what it was like in the past; on the other hand, I was fascinated by how this alienation from legacy has become the means to preserve some important church relics and sacred items which would commonly be thrown out or sold like commodities. In the process of doing so, the sacred has been repurposed into an atheist approach to wonder such as what happened in the Stedlijk Museum Breda.

This classification of Catholic art and objects as museum pieces can be seen as a convergence with our project here. Way back in 2022, Dutch/Belgian artist Kelly Christogiannis asked that very same question: how might we have wonder in our everyday life? She combed through the permanent exhibition, particularly the church history section, to examine how else these sacred objects might be reinterpreted. Her sculptural work, called Slippery Hands, depicts the gradual loss and leak of Christianity across the generations, with merely a splinter of the cross as the final result.

More importantly, she asked what would replace faith.

Artist Kelly Christogiannis sees friends and acquaintances struggling with the search for meaning and living a meaningful life. They no longer find support in the church and the faith unlike the generation of her grandparents. Where might humankind find hope and comfort today? Christogiannis responds by letting the relic of the holy cross slip through the hands. She wonders whether faith can be replaced.

Stedelijk Museum Breda from the artist’s website

In two generations, there have been no close answers to this question—hallucinogenic drugs, free love, therapy, shopping, vacation, atheism, science, sports (it’s probably the closest)—name all human pleasures and activities we have done it. Still, we ask the question. Of course, you know my answer: Christianity (or more broadly religion). Are you prepared to name your answer?

What stood out for me is that Christogiannis, an artist focusing on myths and stories, has diagnosed the social malaise which she hoped to address in her work—the sense of wonder. Remarkable that believers and non-believers can agree on the sense of curiosity as the starting point.

From this perspective, it can be easier to reinterpret the Catholic story of Breda as one of curiousity, mystery, but hopefully a study in faith.

The Missing Relic

I had not planned our visit to Breda, which meant that I knew nothing of how the city looked or what the museum is all about. There is something to be said about a less rigorous approach to travelling. I was not only surprised by the extensive affinity of the Nassau-Orange family to Catholicism, but also amazed by my discovery of the story of the Bleeding Host of Niervaert (Wonderlijk Schijfje Brood).

The highlight of Breda’s history is depicted in the retable taken from the Church of Our Lady of Breda. These wooden, colourful panels became effective storybooks during a time when most people did not read, and books were rare and expensive. The retable illustrates in six reconstructed panels the story of the Miraculous Host discovered by a farmer from the town of Niervaert in the 1300s.2

What we know comes from the only surviving play written in the Dutch language by Brussels poet Jan Smeken (1415? - 1517). There are only six sacrament plays that survive in Europe today.

It was said that turf farmer Jan Bautoen was digging peat, a heating fuel for homes and salt production, found a host wafer that bled when touched. The two women with him informed the parish priest, who retrieved the host to place it in a ciborium and brought it back to their village parish church dedicated to Mary and St. Nicholas.3 The Bishop of Luik, Theobald van Bar, heard about this and sent a city jurist, Macharius II de Busco, to examine. In de Busco’s testimony, he tested the wafer using an awl to touch it. He was surprised that these were repelled, as if the host was a pebble! On his fifth try, the host bled. This caught him by surprise, which led to his temporary seizure. He even bit his own hand. The Miraculous Host remained in that parish for about 150 years and has been a site of pilgrimage. There have been 21 recorded miracles in Neirvaert between 1300 and 1437.

The Count of Nassau, Jan Droussard of Brabant, wanted to bring the host to Breda for easy access. The perennial floods, especially the Great St. Elizabeth flood that occurred on November 18-19, 1429, flooded coastal cities from Dordrecht near Rotterdam, the Zeeland provinces, and all the way inland to Breda. He convinced the Bishop of Luik to transfer the host, and his wish was granted in 1449 when the Miracle Host entered Breda on March 13.

The sacred host found a permanent home in a chapel designated as the Sacramentkapel at the Church of Our Lady in Breda. There were 12 recorded miracles in Breda, between 1449 and the last in 1456. We do not know what happened to the Host after the Iconoclast Fury of 1566. Like the retable, it was likely kept with no one remembering where it was, or was destroyed during that period—just like the monstrance and other church relics associated with it. The Iconoclasm Fury triggered the Eighty Years’ War between the Dutch and the Spaniards (1568-1648). It was about politics as much as it was tied to religion. It is a shame that Christians fought against each other; what was one universal church shattered into little pieces. I do understand the fervour to one’s principles, though.

Today, the devotion to the Corpus Christi continues thanks to the efforts of the first Guild dedicated to the Sacrament of Niervaert in 1463 and its renamed predecessor, Confrèrie van het Allerheiligst Sacrament des Altars (Confraternity of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altars), re-established in secret in 1697 when the Netherlands officially became the state religion. During the entire period, Roman Catholics could not practice their faith openly. The ban against public processions by Catholics was only rescinded as late as 1983. Thus, the Kleine Omgang or small processions, gave rise to the public practice of the Silent Procession (Stille Omgang)4 throughout different parishes. The first modern Corpus Christi procession in Breda was recorded in June of 1916. Today, the procession is held on the Sunday before the 24th of June in Sint Antoniuskerk in Breda, the only remaining church along the historical route.

The group continued with the devotion around Breda even without the Miracle Host. It is said that the Miracle Host was hidden in the city, and several individuals have searched in cellars, pillars, and basements for it without success. Today, the cathedral is closed for complete renovation and restoration.

Museum of Faith

It is quite fascinating as a Catholic that Protestants view us as a kind of curiousity in itself, with a lot of rituals and ritual objects. This led to the First Iconoclasm in 1566, and one that continues today, destroying the sacred art and historical objects—for absence. In the highly secular Netherlands now, such visual and ascetic absence has resulted in the encroachment of secular modernist understanding of worship into church architecture and the withering of faith. (Think hospitals, brutalist architecture, shopping malls).

The Catholic intrinsically understands that worship involves the whole senses and body—chant, art, ancient language, and architecture that transcends time and spirit. The atheist intuitively understands this too because the Catholic faith remains in the art and history museums as something at one time sacred and powerful enough to provoke emotion. Emotion is the missing element and a tool of conversation, one that modern artists continue to do. Before the proliferation of the printed Word of God, people surrounded themselves with the divine architecture, divine talents, divine treasures, sacred music and other expressions of heaven here on earth. It has long been our need as people, which Protestants in the Middle Ages (including today) do not understand about Catholic devotion.

Catholicism as cabinets of curiousity remains an important deposit of the faith in this country. This is an example of how the museum-ification of religious objects preserves and sets them aside, ready for faithfuls to discover their gifts. In this way, wonder in the supernatural world is a successful result. The danger, of course, is that it remains dead. Art argues that life lives outside of the glass case.

Like all things, the disappearance of a treasure is one that provokes a hunt. That was my question after viewing the exhibit. One of the last ones I know of is in Italy, in the town of Orvieto. This piece of cloth absorbed the blood from the host as a doubtful Fr. Pieter of Prague celebrated Eucharistic Mass in 1263. The Miraculous Host shed blood during his service. The most famous one I just discovered is a similar Miracle Host in Amsterdam, also established in the Middle Ages, but destroyed during the tumult (even the church was destroyed in 1908 to the dismay of Catholics). Just like that man who discovered a treasure chest in the field and sold everything to buy that field. It is that same wonder and excitement that I read through this exhibition. As a believer, I honestly felt a pang of loss with the disappearance of this and other relics. In a world bereft of the sacred, relics offer a tangible measure of the divine.

If you are a non-believer reading all this, this might all sound ridiculous. Transubstantiation has a clear reference in the Scriptures.

Caro enim mea vere est cibus: et sanguis mens, vere est potus; “For my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed.”

qui manducat meam carnem et bibit meum sanguinem,in me manet, et ego in illo; He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me, and I in him

John 6: 56-57, Vulgate

I will tell you, though, that faith and the supernatural are strong forces animating human activity and purpose since the dawn of humanity. Rudolf Otto called it numinous. Unsurprisingly, people undertook pilgrimages to trace landscapes, make bodily sacrifices, and connect with devotees and saints (ordinary people who have transcended their limitations) in the past. This is Church universalism, catholicism. If you are rooted in your legacy, you will never once feel lost in the present. This is the next step to making wonder tangible in our worlds beyond art or theology.

P.S. More later about another big pilgrimage and event here in the Netherlands— the Martyrs of Gorinchem.

My Sources:

Breda Stadsarchief - somewhat clunky but very useful, especially because they provide all the social and political figures- Mirakel van Niervaert, Barbara of Nassau, House Valckenburgh, and archival photos

Dutch constitution - This website from the Montesquieu Institute advocating transparent democracy shows the actual text changes from the original 1848 - Article 167: Public Practice of Religion, reference from Wikipedia’s Processieverbod

Dutch Public Broadcasting is always free to access - NPO on the Nassau-Oranje sadly in Dutch including subtitles

Dutch Wikipedia is quite helpful as a jump-off point but also quite limited to internet sources and few original Dutch archival sources: Sacrament van Niervaert, Retabel van Niervaert, Stille Omgang (use search term Niervaert on Wikipedia)

Kelly Christogiannis - artist focusing on myths and storytelling

Meertens Instituut under the Dutch Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences preserves information about language and cultural tradition, one of which is references to all the pilgrimage and religious sites in the country - Breda

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

Phantom Africa by Michel Leiris

• Leiris, Michel. 1968. L’Afrique fantôme. Paris: Gallimard

  Leiris, Michel. 2017. Phantom Africa (trans. Brent Hayes Edwards). India: Seagull Books

Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss

• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1993. Tristes Tropiques Paris: Plon

  Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1969. World on a Wane (Tristes Tropiques) (Trans. J. Russell). Boston: Beacon Press

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

Introduction | Departure | LS: Literary Arrival Part 1 |

The Emotional Cost of Realist Reporting

1931 | 01 June - 12 June

In contrast to the rather slow and winding way that Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) introduces us to Brazil, Michel Leiris (1901-1990) delivers the harsh tedium of boat travel and arriving at the transit port of Dakar in Senegal. He has little good things to say about the place as he compares it to Fréjus, a resort town on the Côte d’Azur—"a bath of vulgarity”. I can only imagine it to be a noisy mass tourism town and a downright unpleasant place when all you want is to escape. Leiris could not wait to get out but had to contend with customs to release all their equipment.

Without the elongation of time, real-time can be mentally and emotionally aggressive, dull, but also hopeless. This type of mass urbanisation is a result of the colonial state with which Senegal finds itself. This disorder is an erosion of culture in Dakar,

…in places where the black man is in direct contact with European civilization, he only picks up the bad parts.

Leiris, p. 78

This was the observation of colonial officials as well. Dakar seems like a dystopian town where norms and rules do not apply to anyone and to everyone. There were observations of Syrian shopkeepers abusing their enslaved female employees; Seliman, a servant boy hired by the team, reported laundry theft, but the perpetrator seems to be known to the boy, his own Negro laundry assistant—and this is what drives Seliman to despair, along with other misfortunes of forgetting dessert for lunch and burning a pie; a village scheme to rescue stuck cars in the mud for twenty francs; of course, the requisite trip to a Negro dancehall that trips up any form of normativity by its clientele and another sinister, snooty, and garish club for colonials called the Tabarin.

We get the sense that the emotional cost was steep for Leiris, who has been battling doubts on this trip. Dakar was not uplifting. As he writes on June 5th before going to bed,

The goals of the trip are growing dim, too, and I’m starting to wonder what Im doing here.

Leiris, p. 82

A log does not allow for his real feelings to shine through, and we have to thank Zette, who permitted him to be himself during this period.

The people of Dakar are horrible. They’re like people in Frejus, or people in mediocre inns for folks out for a Sunday drive. People like this spoil everything and make you wish you were anywhere else. I fight against my glum mood, trying to behave in the most proper way possible, and scrupulously maintaining the strictest standards of hygiene, for example, or dress. Aside from Griaule and Larget, my best friends are still Mouchet and Moufle. Little by little I've been getting used to speaking pidgin, and l*m beginning to be able to speak to a black man without being too intimidated. But it is very difficult to get accustomed to using the familiar pronoun tu. [ ... ]

Leiris, p. 80

A reader recognises himself in Leiris’ seedy accounts. Everyone has encountered such towns in their own travels, usually on their way to a [pristine] paradise. These transitional, often urbanising areas are what we understand as bereft of [real] culture, similar to how the lowland Christianised Bicolano of the Philippines describe themselves, as people without a culture, i.e. Christianised. Anthropologist Fennella Cannell, of course, debunks this in her work on Power and Intimacy. Rather, she argues that these are the interstices that we observers ignore because it is too familiar and undeserving of any study. Unsurprisingly, this position is both felt by the observers and the observed. In the original, translator Brent Edwards noted that Leiris used the French term évolué for assimilated and educated Africans who have been separated from their indigenous customs. In an interview in 1950, Edwards wrote that Leiris rethought his early use of the term in the book. According to Leiris, this term was somewhat insulting for those in that category who were clearly demarcating themselves as part of a different class. He offered no further insight on what would have been a preferred terminology or how to deal with culture change.

This off-hand observation is a result of a contraction of time that is perfect for recording accurate details, but not for any reflections that benefit from time distancing. Hence, we encounter Leiris and the research mission in detailed descriptive form, one that swings between his depression and some signs of recovery but with little explanation to the reader of what is truly happening.

Leiris balances his dreary account with their continued work in the search for the real. Some characters prove to be potential contacts and sources of sought-after traditional customs. He mentions one such figure, Kasa Makonnen, an Abyssinian ascetic, who walked to Dakar from Ethiopia, a trip that took him three years on foot; Or how to rig a pirogue that they seemed to have purchased mysteriously without having any use after a few days, since they were travelling inland.

I could feel the tightening in Leiris’ mental compunction. Happily, the women and children both in the city and the nearby villages dressed up in delightful colour native dresses, providing him some form of aesthetic balm.

Here at last, I love Africa. The children give an impression of gaiety and life that I haven’t encountered anywhere else. It touches me deeply.

Leiris, p. 83

It was driving to the outskirts of Dakar to two fishing villages of Yof and Ngor that we saw Leiris beam at life.

Again we find ourselves on the stunning beach, with the immense green and white waves cascading in succession, the dunes, and the scavenger birds gliding above the cabins. The beach is always the place where the male portion of the population gathers. Again we watch the pirogues return.

Leiris, p. 85

Finally, we hear some positive writing from Leiris! Something to distract him from his tense relations with others in the research mission. These short episodes waned quickly as we find Leiris writing about his problem with the craft of ethnography and his fellow researchers. Writing on the day of their departure on the 11th of June, Leiris expresses his state of being to Zette:

…I am excited to be among the Negroes. I very much liked the two fishing villages we visited, which reconciled me a little to Dakar. Unfortunately, I am still rather disappointed with regard to ethnographic activity; I am constantly sorry to have to converse with the Negroes only about objects, and never to be able to discuss more human topics. I would very much like to study children’s games, but this is impossible if one doesn’t know the language…

Leiris, p. 87

Here, without meaning to, Leiris gives an honest observation of the pettiness and impersonal nature of objectivist knowledge found in realist description. Contrary to his initial excitement of leaving his previous literary background, Leiris is discovering that realism robs him of rationality. Writing on the 25th of May,

I am having a better time with my present companions because, making an abstraction naturally out of any goal that seems “scientific," our existence is more sincere and, I would even go so far as to say, ‘’cleaner," just as the exis tence—to take a literary example—of Conrad’s characters is more sincere and "cleaner" than that of Proust’s characters, for instance….

Leiris, pp. 73-74

His tune will change in less than four weeks. Writing on 11th June, 1931

By the 12th of June, the party departs Dakar with two flatbed train cars for their vehicles and two coaches for themselves. Their entourage now includes a free passage back home to the Abyssinian ascetic, a washing and ironing boy, Tyermoro Sissoko and a Bambara cook, Bakari Keyta. Once in eastern Senegal, in a town called Tamba Counda, they will have the option to decouple their cars from the train, stop, explore, and proceed at their own pace until they reach Bamako, Mali.

All indications show that Leiris has grown exhausted from the demands of writing in a realist form and his company at the beginning of the trip. This is probably not a promising start to a trip that will last for several years.

Round Up

We can think of Michel Leiris as writing the news—excellent for detail and relevance as a record, but can quickly lose its sense of connectedness or importance in the big picture. This is because time collapses to the now and present in micro distances—an instantaneity that can prove tough for long-term travel and, as we can see, Leiris’ emotional well-being.

We have a taste of the first effects of writing objective description only. This makes Leiris question his sense of purpose and humanity and even lose interest in the craft of ethnography. Having focused only on objects and without social contact, Leiris is clearly frustrated. Language is growing to be quite a challenge. Luckily, we get a glimpse of what is truly happening with his letters to Zette. It is necessary to see here that during fieldwork, the diary (or letters) and the objective description must exist side by side in order for the ethnographer to survive the tedium.

Further Reading:

Cannell, Fennella. 1999. Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

The ongoing draft and outline of our project are available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

Phantom Africa by Michel Leiris

• Leiris, Michel. 1968. L’Afrique fantôme. Paris: Gallimard

  Leiris, Michel. 2017. Phantom Africa (trans. Brent Hayes Edwards). India: Seagull Books

Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss

• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1993. Tristes Tropiques Paris: Plon

  Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1969. World on a Wane (Tristes Tropiques) (Trans. J. Russell). Boston: Beacon Press

Introduction | Departure |

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

First Impressions

There are different ways to start your ethnography: the literary and realist styles, and we get to read two different ones in this instance. The differences primarily rest on how close our ethnographers—Michel Leiris (1901-1990) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)—are to their present time on paper. This is tricky because I am referring here to the ethnographic time or the recorded present of the author when the book was written. This freezing of time, the eternal written present, is one such critique against ethnographic writing. The ethnographic present may be interpreted as cultures continuing to exist as they are, just like in the monograph. It is as if we are reading a photograph—forever sealed and sheltered in a bubble of eternal time. Thus, these recorded impressions perpetuate one aspect or interpretation of a culture for the foreseeable future. I read it as an important record and document of that history. As such, the past that is the ethnographic present is always tinged with nostalgia—one that cements ethnographic authority.

Claude Lévi-Strauss: Time Traveller

Chapter 6 How I became an Anthropologist | Chapter 7 Sunsets

Lévi-Strauss is in no hurry to land in reality. He spent the first five chapters establishing context. We get a sense of time past and time present colliding—even I got confused about his memories of his early travels to the New World as his first fieldwork. At this point, we understand that Lévi-Strauss is using his past to provide a more holistic picture of what happened to him in Brazil.

Lévi-Strauss is a much vilified figure among post-modernists who saw his structuralist framework as rigid in its conception. This makes this chapter particularly significant. We meet someone who did not set out to be rigid or impersonal but his approach to ethnology (the comparison of cultures) for me. He recounts why anthropology as a discipline suited him.

Today I sometimes wonder if I was not attracted to anthropology, however unwittingly, by a structural affinity between the civilizations which are its subject and my own thought-processes.

Lévi-Strauss, p. 56

In his struggle for meaning, Lévi-Strauss found a discipline that included his own self in the process. This was contrary to how people understood his academic work—like in all social sciences, of creating abstractions and models of society—as highly impersonal. He sees it as a joint enterprise and a starting point to even conceive of writing about another culture.

…we have a profession on the one hand, and on the other an ambiguous enterprise, oscillating between a mission and a refuge, bearing within itself elements of both and yet always recognizably one rather than the other…

…The ethnographer, while in no wise abdicating his own humanity, strives to know and estimate his fellow-men from a lofty and distant point of vantage: only thus can he abstract them from the contingencies particular to this or that civilization.

Lévi-Strauss, p. 58

Abstraction cannot exist without having to undergo a form of sacrifice, what he calls abdicating one’s humanity.1 Indeed, the expectation is that you voluntarily surrender who you are to become who you will be at the moment of the ethnographic present.

The conditions of his life and work cut him off from his own group for long periods together; and he himself acquires a kind of chronic up rootedness from the sheer brutality of the environmental changes to which he is exposed. Never can he feel himself ‘at home’ anywhere: he will always be, psychologically speaking, an amputated man.

Lévi-Strauss, p. 58

Thus, he looks back and writes in the ethnographic present how he came to being at the point of the pen. I appreciate that he was highly self-aware, recognising that as a teacher he could never repeat lessons over and over again in his syllabus.

…my mind has the particularity—and it may well be an infirmity—that I find it difficult to concentrate twice on the same subject… it proved physically impossible for me to address my students if I were not delivering an entirely new series of lectures.

Lévi-Strauss, p. 56

Anthropology and/or ethnographic fieldwork forces one to confront the person at his most vulnerable and in the middle of the void. No one tells you this, but the result of that painful growth is the insightful analysis that is the monograph.

Given that he is on that transformative journey, it is unsurprising that he writes a chapter, an ode really, to light, to the sun and sunsets, and forever inscribes the moment in the ethnographic present.

This is one of the great examples of a literary style that fuses what he sees in the journey that no one noticed. The ship ever so slightly veers off course—with no one noticing it, except him. He is, at once, secretly savouring the experience alone and yet in communion with nature and the vast sameness of the ocean. Hence, that slight angle that rendered the direction of the ship in error, simultaneously gave him the ache of inspiration to describe light. He is only present with the sunset.

Many years have passed, and I don’t know if I could recapture that early state of grace. Could I re-live those moments of fever when, notebook in hand, I would jot down, second by second, phrases evocative of the evanescent and constantly renewed forms before me? It’s a gamble that still fascinates, and I’m often tempted to begin it all over again.

Lévi-Strauss, p. 66

And yet he does; its importance is highlighted as a distinct chapter in the monograph, to describe what time feels like and how it looks in different spectrums of colour.

Daybreak is a prelude, and nightfall an overture—but an overture which comes at the end, and not, as in most operas, at the beginning. The look of the sun foretells what the next hours will bring; dark and livid, that’s to say, if we are in for a wet morning, and pink, frothy, and insubstantial if the weather is to be fine. But as to the rest of the day, the dawn makes no promises.

Lévi-Strauss, p. 66

Lévi-Strauss stretches out from the recesses of his mind to recall the promise and also the foreboding approach of sunset on the horizon.

Round Up

Time impacts the way an ethnography is written. Unlike the daily travel log of Leiris, Lévi-Strauss has the privilege of distance from when he first conducted his Brazil fieldwork. The difference between the two is palpable as we shall see. Today, we see how Lévi-Strauss reconstructs his memories, his old self, and in the process revisits his old data and notebooks to tell the Amazonian Indian stories. For now, this distance in both temporal time and place is a specific methodology that he says is essential to the comparative project.

Anthropology is unique as a discipline because it explicitly includes the ethnographer in its analysis. The comparison is not possible until the ethnographer is “amputated” from his context. What results is a double (or even triple or quadruple) level of distancing as ethnographers piece together fragments of their old self, notes, data, and observations. This abstraction, commonly derided as impersonal, is actually the key to analysis. But in that state of liminality, the literary writing style can harness ethnographic authority.

Further Reading:

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1985. The View from Afar. [trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss] Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1983. Structural Anthropology (vol. 2). [trans. Monica Layton] Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology (vol. 1). [trans. Claire Jacobson and Grundfest Schoepf] New York: Basic Books

The ongoing draft and outline of our project are available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

Phantom Africa by Michel Leiris

• Leiris, Michel. 1968. L’Afrique fantôme. Paris: Gallimard

  Leiris, Michel. 2017. Phantom Africa (trans. Brent Hayes Edwards). India: Seagull Books

Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss

• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1993. Tristes Tropiques Paris: Plon

  Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1969. World on a Wane (Tristes Tropiques) (Trans. J. Russell). Boston: Beacon Press

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

The Sea Beckons…

Whether you are off in some exotic locale or in your exotic garden outside your home this summer, what better way to spend these hot days than accompanying our ethnographers, Michel Leiris (1901-1990) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), as they travel across Africa and the Amazon jungle?

In an earlier post, we met these two French anthropology figures as they began their fieldwork. The former, Leiris, was untrained in the science of anthropology, but was recruited anyway as a writer, while the latter, Lévi-Strauss, was about to hold a position at the University of São Paulo, with the alluring promise of a new field site in Amazonia. Though separated by time, both were engaged in a kind of salvage ethnography—a record of the loss, the attempt at preserving a record of practices and beliefs before societies fully transition to late modernity and capitalism. The encroachment of Western-style civilisation threatens to flatten cultures into T-shirts, jeans, and Coca-Cola (or the internet as this generation understands it now). Though we all know that contact with the West had occurred for hundreds of years, there is something different in the urgency during the pre-and post-World War II periods that makes these two books valuable records of human diversity and choices in how to live.

It is this shared nostalgia of a unique past and the terrible loss or looming destruction of cultures that bind these two ethnographers. The result cannot be a scientific document but one that straddles the literary art of the pen. Leiris calls the ethnographic record he writes a ‘phantom’ of Africa while Levi-Strauss expresses it as Tristes Tropiques or translated as World on a Wane. Both are on a mission to document a rapidly changing world but also a reconstruction of themselves in the past.

…the voyage, as I conceived of it (a solitary distancing), far from being a way of making oneself other than what one is by changing ones setting, is only the pure and simple displacement of a person who is always identical to himself,…

Leiris (from Edwards), p. 7

The adage that you cannot escape from oneself means that writing ethnography is just as much a memoir as documenting another culture. The art of writing about the self with the Other in science remains in French anthropology.

As Chateaubriand wrote in his Voyage en Italie: ‘Every man carries within himself a world made up of all that he has seen and loved; and it is to this world that he returns incessantly, though he may pass through, and seem to inhabit, a world quite foreign to it.’ Henceforth I can pass from one of these worlds to the other. Between life and myself, Time has laid its isthmus; and it is a longer one than I had expected. Twenty years’ forgetfulness has enabled me to elucidate an old experience: one that I had pursued to the ends of the earth without managing either to decipher its meaning or to remain on intimate terms with it.

Lévi-Strauss, p. 17

Claude Lévi-Strauss: There is no pure culture

Concluding Part I: Destinations: Chapter 4 |

We begin with how he ends his initial sea voyage—with a caution of what kind of truth his book will contain. None of them is the present but from a reconstructed past.

I may well be the only white traveller to have brought back nothing but ashes from my journeys. Perhaps my voice alone will be heard to say that travel no longer offers an escape? Like the Indian in the legend, I have been to the world’s end and there asked questions of people, and of things; and like him I was disappointed with what I heard.

Lévi-Strauss, p. 43

Claude Lévi-Strauss narrates in horror at the beginning of Chapter 4 of the tentacles of Western civilisation across the world—even in what we think of as the ends of the world—the atom and the military have touched them. “…The notion of travel has become corrupted by the notion of power.” (39) His realisation stems from what he observed aboard his ship as he sailed towards his field site. In his disgust, the French officers and their wives, on their way to a military mission in Paraguay, have transformed the deck into barracks—something everyone became immediately wary of. It was his distaste of their posture acting as colonialists more than anything else.

Everything and everywhere has been touched by outsiders or the West. Nothing is pristine as we imagine it to be—“however honest the traveller may be, he cannot, or can no longer, present them to us in their authentic form.” (40) And so, Lévi-Strauss asks himself, in what time frame could he have visited Brazil to see what a pristine culture looks like.

His answer: never.

It is the case of Schrödinger’s cat in the box conundrum in which the moment you peek inside, the culture shifts. Therefore, any observation renders any culture impure. Hence, his concluding paradox serves a warning to the readers but also speaks to the sense of his frustration to any researcher of human societies.

And so, with no hurry to open the box and observe, we never arrive yet at the port.

Instead, Lévi-Strauss reconstructs his memory from 1934 of his first encounter with the idea of Indians in the august halls of Paris. First, via a telephone call through the Director of the École Normale Supérieure, Célestin Bouglé, who informed him that a position for a Professorship in Sociology was open at the São Paulo University. As a further enticement, Bouglé told him that he could simply proceed to do fieldwork with Indians living next door to the university. Lévi-Strauss

Even George Dumas, a Sorbonne professor who was one of the academic patrons of the Trocadero, the main contact for the position, knew nothing of Indians or of Brazil, Lévi-Strauss concluded. How could Indians be living next door to the university as a carrot dangled by Bouglé to him?

Lévi-Strauss later learned during a luncheon party that even the ambassador of Brazil attested that they were all exterminated in the sixteenth century by overzealous Portuguese.

They used to grab hold of the Indians, tie them to the cannons’ mouth, and blow them to pieces. That’s how they went, every man Jack of them. There’ll be plenty to interest you, as a sociologist, in Brazil—but as for the Indians, you’d better forget about them, because you’ll never find a single one. . . .’

This tall tale overlooked what Lévi-Strauss described as the modern decimation of the Indian population in the city of São Paulo (the size of the entire country of France) by fellow Brazilians as recent as their and their parent’s generation using smallpox-infected clothing. This is in part what he learned as the cultural divide and rejection by the upper classes of their Indian roots. Hence, by the time he arrived in 1935, no Indian communities remained in São Paulo.

Lévi-Strauss would have to travel thousands of miles in the Amazonian interior to meet them.

Michel Leiris’s Tedium

1931 | 19 - 31 May

Unlike the solo travel of Lévi-Strauss, Leiris embarks on a sea voyage similarly packed with people headed back to Africa and manned by mixed crews, Africans ejected from their jobs in the city and headed back to Africa, and by domestic animals. Leiris finds himself making the goat his temporary pet along the seas. From the Bay of Biscay, through Portugal and Tenerife, Spain, cockroaches mark the transition into the tropics. Somehow, the French terms cancrelats, blattes, and ravets in the French Antilles sounded more appealing.

In the afternoon, a lengthy session of oiling boots and shoes on the bridge, all of us roasting in the sun. We are now off the coast of Morocco. A few signs of the tropics: cockroaches appear on the walls; at breakfast, some tiny ants marched across the tablecloth and climbed up the bread. In the afternoon, saw jellyfish with purple crests trailing the ships hull. Spent the evening with Griaule, on the forecastle, chatting, him lying extended, me sitting, looking at the stem, the sky, the sea froth.

Leiris on May 24, Pentecost, p. 71

Though sounding idyllic, the days pass with work commencing on board. Leiris describes receiving anti-typhoid shots, doing linguistic research on board with the Kru or Krummen from Liberia or Ivory Coast, and taking care of equipment. He was particularly observant of the wildlife, such as the dolphins and flying fish astride the bow. Despite all the descriptions we read, we mistake the term journal to reveal the innermost thoughts of Leiris. This is not his diary, at least in the beginning. We do not get a sense of what he is thinking and feeling. This is in part what he despises about ethnography as merely a bureaucratic exercise. A tedium of description without getting into the heart of things or understanding.

So his letter to his wife, Louise “Zette”, that accompanies the margins of his journal entries here tells us what this journey meant to him. Leiris refused to disclose any sign of weakness to his wife, yet he wrote how he was frightened by the trip and of leaving her and what he knew.

May 25. 1931:

I spent the first two or three days in a sort of stupor: due to the shock of departure, first of all; and for physical reasons too, as I struggled against seasickness (because the boat was dancing violently); and trying to get settled in this new life. Little by little I am starting to get used to it but I was pretty depressed at the beginning, and my decision to leave seemed absurd, almost to the point that I wanted to quit…

Yet, he also expressed hope to her that his writing would turn out to be different, away from literature. A sense of purpose engulfs him as he hopes to cement a longer-lasting legacy from the upcoming mission. Leiris senses the present, the nowness, the reality of his being on the boat, rocking to and fro, the emergence of who he is sans performance.

…Now and then I look out the window to see if the Tenerife peak (Canary Islands), which we were told we would see soon, is finally visible. When I do this. I know that I am not an actor in a play and the character of "voyager" is not merely a role for me, but the only character I can be in all sincerity. I am no longer ashamed before you. the way I was ashamed by my "literary" character, which I am realizing more and more was hideous.

The specific demands of ethnographic writing, or positivist ethnographic writing, are ones he hopes present a truth unmasked from his literary world.

I am having a better time with my present companions because, making an abstraction naturally out of any goal that it seems “scientific," our existence is more sincere and, would even go so far as to say, ‘’cleaner," just as the existence—to take a literary example—of Conrad’s characters is more sincere and "cleaner" than that of Proust’s characters, for instance. [... ]

The bifurcation process in writing is what Leiris hoped would be his salvation, but it also turned out to be a cross. Tedium would set in as Leiris removed himself from his early text. It is interesting to see how his style would evolve during the trip.

And so they pass Cap Blanc (Ras Nouadhibou), the peninsula now a Natural Reserve, to Port Etienne (Nouadhibou) in Mauritania. Here, they re-supply for dried fish and bring a fisherman riddled with cancer to a hospital in Dakar. The “leader” also offloads wicker chairs and potted geraniums destined for what Leiris characterises as a hopeless, dreary place.

It is a sinister yellow dump with hardly any structures aside from the most essential buildings. A small fort. Radio antennae. Pitiful shacks on the j beach and up on the dunes.

Once everything was loaded, there was a promise of access to the mainland by the “trader.” It seems like a shady leader or warlord granting them access. However, in a hullaballoo of retrieving their raincoats to prevent getting wet, the launch leaves without him, Lutten and Mouffle. It was only Griaule and Mouchet who were on the launch, leaving them at their wake. By 10.15, the launch returns successfully with carved flints and knowledge that severe water rationing was happening at Port Etienne. It was the first ethnological collection and Leiris missed it.

Did Griaule know that the only reason I wanted to go ashore was to overcome the nervous apprehension I had of passing from the gangway to the launch over the slightly restless sea, which to my eyes made the operation seem somewhat delicate?

Nevertheless, the next day, the 31st of May, they reach Dakar, the capital of Senegal. It is a deluge of people resembling, as Leiris remembers, the beaches of Frejus in the Cote d’Azur region of southeastern France. Much of the hustle and bustle are familiar. Therefore, this is not yet the site of the Other.

All in all, very little difference between the life of a bureaucrat in Paris and his life in the colony (I mean: in the large urban centers); its hot and he spends his time out in the sun instead of cooped up indoors; beyond that, it s the same stingy existence, the same vulgarity, the same monotony, and the same systematic destruction of beauty. I cant wait to get to the bush. Depressed.

And so the adventure begins or is waylaid by bureaucratic colonial administration.

Round Up

We encounter not just arrivals to the site but a preparation for the reader. The nature of truth involves three aspects:

• the growth of the writer/person

• the process of time

• the devolution of the literary to scientific writing and back

To even start the work requires that one struggles with several realities. Lévi-Strauss present the context in which encounters with Brazil are not separated from the looming nuclear age. Leiris writes of the tedium of boat travel and the harsh realities on board and while on dock. The palpable contrasts between Blacks and Whites are prominent here as well as the extent of the French empire.

More important for our project, we begin to see the different forms of writing demanded from ethnographers. Leiris demonstrates the struggle to move away from his literary training as a writer as he acclimitises in the impersonal realist ethnographic writing he is called to do. In a lot of ways, the journal is a logbook but his letters act as his diary as we read about his fears and insecurities to his wife Louise. In Lévi-Strauss we adjust to his manipulation and time jumps which I myself got a bit confused as he set his recollection of his younger years. The memoir genre or the second book as what we read here convey the attempt (and the sadness) to record a slowly disappearing time in human history and knowledge.

Further Reading:

Leiris, Michel. 1992 [1939, 1946]. Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

The ongoing draft and outline of our project are available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

Anthropology Reconsidered (Present) | Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2025) | The Dawn of Everything (2023).

The path towards The Great Books in Anthropology

Say hi, frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

Hi Folks,

It’s been more than a month since I posted. Now that my family and friends have gone home, I can return to my old routine. More news at the end. Meanwhile, I am sharing with you what I have learned reading David Graeber and writing here on Substack. You can find Part One here.

It’s been helpful to articulate my why and I hope it resounds with you as well.

Melanie

David Graeber is an important turn in my intellectual growth in more ways than one. He was the primary mover of my Catholic reversion, as well as providing the impetus to integrate a multitude of issues that unsettled me. One of which was the prevalence of reductive keyword research frameworks in anthropology.

Though it may appear disconnected, my Catholic reversion is the return to something True (that we all have access to a debt-free relationship with God) and the primary lens by which all social upheavals are judged against. This single piece of insight opened my diagnosis of seemingly disconnected social ills.

The Era of Our Discontent: The Disenchantment Crises

We have forgotten who we are and where we came from.

All we know are guilt, penance, and propaganda. It sounds like the accusations laid against religion are also now at the doorstep of secular Western ideals and concepts. Much of our self- and cultural sabotage is misplaced. Secularism, with its hubris that it can exist in a vacuum, has veered so far away from its own wellspring—Christianity— that Western culture and its adherents are currently suffering from the malaise of disenchantment.

Do you feel hopeless? Apathy or indifference? Distrustful of the state? Institutions? These are some of the symptoms of disenchantment. I myself have feelings of collapse that have become a fixture of our everyday life in the twenty-first century. I am left with the realisation that, at this juncture, this is incomparable to the nuclear extinction threat while growing up in the eighties. The threat today is internal rather than external. Thus, the existential threat is a chronic and persistent condition that lies beyond our purview. But it is there because you can feel it.

My hypothesis is that this internal stress we feel can be attributed to the simultaneous destruction of the four pillars of secular society:

• Science

• Social institutions (especially the family)

• The primacy of the nation-state concept

• Capitalism and the free market

The secular domain focuses on man alone, though there has been a conceptual movement towards decentering man. In anthropology at least, some scholars have sought to mark the end of the Anthropocene and move to an even wider interspecies and planetary lens. That is, to equate man with the other living organisms is to return once again to the proverbial Garden of Wonders sans the Creator or even Adam and Eve. This attempt feels niche (though it has been at least two decades and counting) because we have no other language than a human-centred one. Secularism and its adherents have no recourse to alternatives. This has been persistently magnified by the social media tools that have birthed even more influencers.

Nevertheless, new categories have been formulated to move on and rely on the four pillars of secularism. The categories of gender, race, and ideology have entered the mainstream from academia to supplant some of these weakened domains. For instance, the nuclear family consisting of a man and a woman is no longer the only form legally to constitute a family unit or even biological sex to reproduce children. The concept of having children itself has moved from their nature as gifts to a social justice and debt perspective in which withholding birthing them from this world is considered humane.1

The other pillars are not immune to further attacks. Science, once its bulwark and mast, is in tatters. The social mistrust towards expertise escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Once a beacon of trust, leading institutions like the Centres for Disease Control in the United States and a somewhat reliable global institution such as the United Nations utterly lost their credibility and authority. The consequence of a lack of clear communication, leadership, and information transparency led to a drop in trust in vaccination in the West.

Among all four domains, capitalism has weathered its fiercest criticism: the turn to socialism. The election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor shows a deep attraction to the idea of socialism. Whether this tenure works in the most capitalist city in the United States or not remains to be seen. The important part here is that some of the germane ideas written by his father (whose work is part of anthropology reading lists), Mahmoud Mamdani, found their way into contemporary political practice, supplanting the memory of 9/11 in New York City. His analysis on the binary of African colonialism/colonised, good Muslim/bad Muslim found traction in contemporary and populist propaganda about communism/socialism among Zohran’s voters. Combined with the domain replacement search for capitalism, this has resulted in political electoral practice.

You would think that this is a victory. Yet, capitalism continues to rear its ugly head with its variant of hypercapitalism built on top of Artificial Intelligence (AI). We know that capitalism thrives on the perpetual cycles of collapse. However, hypercapitalism in the era of AI makes no distinction between the we/other but profits from flattening all territories and bodies—not unlike what happened in the Spanish extraction of South America. To accelerate and profit from this new order, an AI capitalism terrorises vast swathes of terrain for its data and computing centres but also consumes earth resources (water, electricity, and more rare earth minerals) and free labour of human beings across borders. The transformation of human beings is imminent because we have come to rely on LLMs due to the deliberate degradation of our traditional digital tools for internet information search and creation, which were initially created for democratic access. The destruction of trust has dangerously eroded the primal objective of science and human institutions, that is, to serve humanity.

The constant pummelling of these three domains is nothing new (even from the stresses of AI capitalism). By their very nature, these pillars have always faced criticism from the very social sciences we practice today since the inception of these disciplines—to little existential threat. None of this should have mattered. Criticism is at the heart of our (secular) way of life.

Something else is afoot.

What is new is an undercurrent of self-destruction that undermines the reproduction of a structure that can withstand present and future blows. The internal threat to secular society will tip it to its final moment of weakness. The secular system is depleted. Where does it get an infusion of energy, strength, and stability to weather the upcoming generation of storms? It used to rely on a heavy infusion of mythmaking and storytelling from a deep well drawing from the Great Works of Western Civilisation, the university, and Christianity. All three forms face extinction: the Classics are now largely unstudied, defunded or worse, unread in schools; the university is currently facing a knowledge, expertise, and enrollment crisis; and Christianity as a practice and culture-building force has become timid and tepid. In other words, the well of resources of secularity has gone completely bone dry.

Secularity alone would have chugged along if not for the destruction of its other components. The quick arrival of the crisis in the last few decades highlights the missing key attribute at its root: the loss of enchantment, a sense of wonder, purpose, and an acknowledgement of a supernatural component of human life.

Without this critical factor, our prolonged feeling of malaise within a secular society remains superfluous, porous, and empty, and subject to internal and external forces at whim.

Enchantment: The missing bridge between Christianity and Secularity

The call to a return to full humanity—a person who can think (without the help of AI); a person who deserves a life of enchantment and a supernatural communion (and not be slaves to consumerism or merely a mirror to ourselves); or having failed those, maintain a shared heritage of their Western historical roots and values—has become louder from different fields, especially on Substack.

Numerous experts and individuals, such as myself, came to the common diagnosis of enchantment as the missing piece independently along specific fields of specialisation. I came to discover that the dialogic relationship between Christianity and secular society is standard knowledge among scholars of different stripes—, in her sacred art project, and highlights the importance of church art to human emotion and worship; Malcolm Guite, poet and Anglican priest, explicitly makes this connection between mythmaking and its significance on enchantment in everyday life in Galahad’s search for the Holy Grail. With the withering of the rigor in university, the opposite has been happening in the lower and middle schools. The explosion of classical learning schools in the United States is a deliberate reaction to the dehumanising emptiness (deliberate erasure) of the current curriculum emphasising identity, ideology or misplaced equality.

Once I came by this conclusion independently, just by reading disparate works, including Graeber’s study of Debt, a cascade of other scholarly works came into my purview—Tom Holland’s Dominion (2019), which piqued my interest in the narrative historical reading right around the death of Christ and its aftermath in the Roman Empire—a book I am continuing to read slowly (the author is now an agnostic). Further scholarly research that has come to my attention includes the works of Charles Taylor on The Secular Age (2018), Brad Gregory on The Unintended Reformation (2015), and Alasdair MacIntyre on After Virtue (1981 [2007]). With a universal Catholic point of view, I was able to unite these disparate works from people of different backgrounds to form my conclusion. This exercise was once unnecessary at the height of secular dominance in the culture—until recently, at secular culture’s depletion.

While the link between enchantment and secularism has been established, what is generally unarticulated is how both fields (Christianity and secularism) are invigorated.

Academic scholarship is not enough, but art is at the core of this traffic. Ethnography, as I have come to understand more recently, is both art and science. The French school understands this more and has retained it compared to its Anglo counterparts. The Disenchantment Crisis has posed a looming existential threat in anthropology. The interrelated causes include the deterioration of critical reading, writing, and, thereby, thinking at all levels brought about by the ubiquitous use of (1) digital tools in the classroom and homes owned by a (2) handful of multinational tech firms and the (3) use of Large Language Models (LLMs) indiscriminately.2

Can the anthropological monograph survive?

This question has a direct impact on long-form and long-term research essential to doing anthropology. To reach the final product of ethnography requires reflection, writing, rewriting and more writing. If someone told me this when I was doing my undergraduate in anthropology, I may not have chosen it as a path. Though I am typing this out digitally, my initial notes and ideas require long-form reading and handwritten notes using a pen on notepaper. The resulting drop in long-form reading (and everything associated with it such as focus and deep learning) is a serious cross-cultural existential question that I have not seen written about in our discipline.3 Perhaps, in exasperated whispers and a shrug.

This sense of dejection has very little to do with borders or culture. It is already palpable when children fail at writing short essays, or any writing, at the grade school level here in the Netherlands. I spoke to a Chinese engineering Master’s student this year, studying at a prestigious tech university, at a cafe, and he admitted that in his cohort in China, they cannot write without an LLM prompt. Last year, I had a great conversation with a nephew who is in his early twenties who also similarly observed this phenomenon among his technical school classmates. We can debate the spiralling negative effects on education, but one dire result of not being able to read books and handwrite is the level of indifference to learning or having any interest at all in anything. It is a form of malaise that infects all forms of social life. This is the killing of enchantment. I came across this humorous take on what the death of curiousity looks like.

It sums up what destruction looks like, not with a bang but with an indifferent whimper. Even that generation attests that the discovery of aliens would merit merely a second headline after the Super Bowl, if any. We are that disinterested or bereft of wonder today, especially with the decline of attention and an all-access to the world. It is as if the world is so obvious, so flat, compressed into digital pixels, that nothing is mysterious or sacred anymore.

Our generation would not say this, having grown up with the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial movie and a shared culture that becomes a huge part of our individual selves. The best description of enchantment in popular culture is the way we talk about mainstream popular art in cinema and television. Watch Joshua Horowitz cry as Spielberg explains to him that Elliot still remains connected with E.T.; also, Roy will come back, presumably transformed from his alien encounter, too, just like all the rest who were “abducted” by aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Compare the reaction of the two generations here. One is checked out from any form of wonder, and the latter is steeped in the shared experience of cinema storytelling. Which one are you? The term “we do not make movies like this anymore” speaks to a kind of loss that those of my generation have experienced, but also a sense of an unknown nostalgic loss by a new generation who know nothing of the shared culture we experienced. Therefore, popular storytelling is a good gauge to see where it all dropped off. (Bonus: watch Josh O’Connor gush over his E.T. lunchbox. I wouldn’t mind having one of those, too, with a Thermos).

It is unsurprising that only twenty years ago, we were celebrating some of pop culture’s great hold on our imaginations, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, Friday the 13th: The Series, Fringe, and my personal favourite, X-Files and its iconic lines of The Truth is Out There and I Want to Believe.4 These phrases are the tagline of a generation still enamoured of the time when science tangled directly with the unknown and the unexplainable.

Aliens, among other conspiracy theories of the Deep State, are the last in the era of enchantment and urban mythmaking among a generation.5 If you examine all the television series beyond the niche nerd communities, these stories proliferated in the mainstream and continued weaving stories combining the occult, folktales, science fiction, monsters, classic good/evil hero journeys and the possibility of the unexplained. Life cannot simply be explained by science, and it is this pop culture conversation that is necessary to ignite infusion between secular culture and Christianity.

Of course, today we still have a smattering of superhero and occult/horror films that remain the only sources of supernatural storytelling.6 Since Iron Man of the Marvel Universe debuted in 2008, this was the pinnacle of mainstream supernatural storytelling that also resuscitated the dead career of Robert Downey, Jr. This wonder would end by 2019 with the release of Avengers: Endgame. None of the succeeding series, though financially profitable, would sustain wonder (not even the disappointing Star Wars genre of films that seems to have earned money but not cultivated any culture of wonder). The Game of Thrones fantasy series also debuted in 2011 and ended disappointingly in 2019 (some argued even much earlier than this; I wholeheartedly agree that the showrunners trashed the writing). Those that remained in the social imagination include the Harry Potter films that began in 2001 and ended in 2011 (books were published from 1997 to 2016); The Lord of the Rings, the Peter Jackson trilogy, was also produced in the sweet spot of the years 2001-2003.

Can you see a pattern?

It seemed the last enchantment in public media culture had a twenty-year run. Nothing succeeded the cultural influence of these stories until the surprising debut of Stranger Things in 2016, a horror thriller series not ironically echoing the eighties. This show not only had a backdrop of aliens and supernatural power but also headlines real-life adventure, friendships and supernatural encounters by a generation with little real-life experience of the storyline. The mainstream appeal had to do with several distinct features—the absence of mobile phones and social media apps. The popularisation of Facebook by 2007 changed the landscape of our imagination and interaction. Unsurprisingly, Stranger Things is a big hit because it encapsulates both the old (nostalgia) and the present generation that wished and aspired to have that digitally disconnected, free lives—the promise of that life. By the time you read this, another phenomenon rising is Widow’s Bay from Apple TV, which is an interesting comedy horror that also borrows a lot from the late 70’s and 80’s mystery sans any reference to digital connection. This has captured the imagination of a mainstream audience beyond the niche platform and genre. The lack of technology and the focus on human emotion and relationships is already a glaring indication of what effective storytelling is.

The consequence of the digital streaming medium impacts how we build a social imagination. It is not just about the stories per se that have changed but also how we consume these stories. This was similar to the print environment, as discussed by serial fiction writers and Ms. Reid as they look back to the sixteenth-century serial fiction and penny fiction that kept the general public glued and in conversation with each other week after week. This was in contrast to the preference for publishing a completed work called The Novel in the nineteenth century. It used to be that the Novel was the compilation of all the serials. This partly explains the enormous book volumes that we see today. Though they argue that short-form writing has little impact on a sense of wonderment (in fact, they argue that the Novel and perhaps long-form reading is a recent urban development), we can agree that the medium of weekly newspaper publication built a shared public culture.

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Crafting serial fiction part 1: What is it?

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The argument for how we consume and what type of medium is difficult to parse to assess the impact on public culture. Are you a binge or weekly serial viewer? Does it build prolonged and sustained interest for a series? I prefer binging all the episodes as opposed to a weekly episode release. Otherwise, I lose momentum, interest, and forget the storyline. The counterargument is that a weekly drop allows a shared culture to develop: it gives people time to catch up once the fire of interest grows for a title. (This also allows podcasts to catch up! This is an important phenomenon.) Therefore, those that subscribe to a weekly episode model argue that this enables a shared environment to form.

However, this is only for shows that are bold enough to put everything on the line in the first episode. No excuses. The danger here is that once the first few episodes are poorly made, the audience falls off the cliff and forgets you. Very few cross the mainstream and niche demographics and explode into the common psyche. Ted Lasso (TV) and Everything Everywhere At Once (cinema) offered comfort and hope during the pandemic. The gas of positivity has since extinguished. Most fall off and die in the digital archive and in the attention economy.

Any argument we have on media consumption becomes nil when the public is fragmented. This is a significant effect of digital streaming on personal portable digital appliances. The digital, on-demand, streaming entertainment environment, alongside the social media landscape, provides unlimited consumer pleasures with a detrimental side effect—it only gratifies the individual. It has circumscribed wonder at the individual level (the precursor is the beloved Sony Walkman). If only such projects often move to the mainstream, then it becomes a balm against general indifference or the pervasiveness of dread and insecurity. Those days of multiple movies that are sources of building a shared common culture are at a precipitous decline.

Combined with the on-demand environment, the digital streaming world gives an impression as if the world is known and mapped. Nothing is a mystery when a life of little friction and all-speed is offered by big tech. Soon, even speed will mean nothing and, unsurprisingly, result in nothing. This gaping maw will result in even more alienation within and between us until we replenish it.

This is the task.

This is the vocation.

Anthropology and the Task of Enchantment

What does it mean to play a role in building public culture—one that relies not just on ethics but on a morality built from Christian virtues and the salvation of the human soul? I say this not just because it is compatible, but an essential fit to the values of secular culture.

It is only by sketching out the shared realities between these two domains that we can see how enchantment, or the sense of wonder that allows us to create, imagine, and inhabit other worlds, is a critical component of human life. How is this enacted in an academic field such as anthropology? Anthropologist Yana Stainova best expresses this idea in her fieldwork studying the impact of classical music training in impoverished neighbourhoods in Venezuela.

Rather than being crippled by the impossibility of the dreams, as I initially was, Ivan and Ana saw dreaming as a playful act that brought them joy. The richer we made the dream, as each of us built on one another’s ideas, the less relevant was its unfeasibility. Our joy, the boldness of our thoughts and words to go to places where structural constraints would not allow us, was a defeat of the capacity of systemic forces to foreclose the reach of our imaginations. It created an opening in the future that cast its light on the present. This dreaming did not have the purpose of escaping from or repairing a broken world. It was an attempt to find meaning, connection, and joy within it (cf. Halberstam 2013). Ivan and Ana had chosen to approach structural violence, and to claim their place within it, by dreaming and imagining themselves otherwise.

p. 217, Enchantment as Method

We become impoverished by remaining earth-bound and solely focused on the rational, the empirical, and the intellectual—just as I was when I left my Catholic upbringing to explore the secular world and anthropological training in my younger years. I had the same realisation as Stainova. She realised that one story, one framework, that of power and dominance, is debilitating even to her own psyche and role as a storyteller. It was not enough to simply highlight the structures of dominance, especially in a country such as Venezuela, part of the Global South. It was time to listen to your interlocutors. It is time to stop imposing the theoretical discourse of dejection.

She traces her own mental poverty because of the totalising effect of critical theory, an “iron cage”, she attributes to the observation made by Max Weber when modernity is defined by “the world knowable and calculable.” Briefly, she tracked the development of critical theory in anthropology from the 1960s. It first emerged from the Goethe University’s Frankfurt School. The focus of the theory was to reveal the underlying structures of dominance to renew society. Well, Stainova says, social reality has become overly defined by a totalitarian analysis of power and domination. As a result, she argues that this imbalance has left off the impetus of imagining a new social order. This feeling of bleakness, the same impasse we feel today, is what Graeber himself also describes as the flaw in critical theory. Arising alongside semiotics and Marxism, Graeber describes critical theory’s totalitarian aspect as its weakness.

Certainly such things are there to be found. But if this is all one is looking for, one soon ends up with a rather jaundiced picture of social reality. The overall effect of reading through this literature is remarkably bleak; one is left with the almost Gnostic feeling of a fallen world, in which every aspect of human life is threaded with violence and domination. Critical theory thus ended up sabotaging his own best intentions, making power and domination so fundamental to the very nature of social reality that it became impossible to imagine a world without it. Because if one can’t, then criticism rather loses its point. Before long, one had figures like Foucault or Baudrillard arguing that resistance is futile (or at least, that organized political resistance is futile), that power is simply the basic constituent of everything, and often enough, that there is no way out of a totalizing system, and that we should just learn to accept it with a certain ironic detachment. And if everything is equally corrupt, then pretty much anything could be open for redemption.

p. 30, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value

Graeber, an avowed Marxist activist, implicates himself within critical theory’s viewpoint but with an important escape hatch. He opens himself to a sense of change or redemption—a promise of cancellation. However, his self-awareness can be read in his successive works following his Theory of Value published in 2001. He constantly takes himself out of the straitjacket of his own principles and fierce ideas. This self-mirroring and critique is a hallmark of good practice. By the time he wrote his book on Debt in 2011, he explored the premise of a life free of any self-interest and the possibility of a debt-free life.

If we want to think about enchantment as a specific method in anthropological practice, Stainova pointed to some difficulties for anthropologists. As a framework, she points out that we usually associate the concept with irrationality. The consequence is that we can be misled by it, with a tendency to designate the Other as exotic. To avoid this, anthropologists, who commonly studied topics such as magic, sorcery, or witchcraft, rapidly sidestep them. Or, in the words that Bruce Kapferer (2002: 20) uses, the domestication of the themes by anthropologists. He argues that this is done to assuage the researcher’s sensibilities and also to align the subject with modernity (not an exotic Other). We can think of it as creating a kind of equality between the subject and the observer. An example of this is that he points to the common and simplified analyses, such as “witchcraft as resistance” or “witchcraft as explanation of misfortune” or similar types of social diagnoses found in a lot of work. Both Stainova and Kapferer describe a difficult situation for anthropologists who have to restrict themselves to statements of reason. It is unsurprising that what was once a common topic in anthropology has slid from the norm. Kapferer solves this by saying that these practices are already inherently modern. The question is to avoid over-rationalising and investigate the hidden dynamics.

The culprit here falls on the observer. I know because they describe the pathway of generations of anthropologists such as myself who fell under the sway of power and domination as social diagnoses. I still remember reading about Aihwa Ong’s work on Malaysian women who were periodically possessed in the workplace. Her analysis relied on Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge relations to explain spirit possession as a result of the capitalist disciplining of Malay land, money, and female bodies under the regiment of factory work. One of the finest ethnographies I have read. Her findings rationalised the supernatural possession of her subjects as a reaction and political action against capitalism, violence and factory disciplining.

This is an example of dis-enchantment in anthropology. Kapferer did not use this exactly, but he described the process perfectly.

Much of religion becomes increasingly subsumed within the anti-capitalist/capitalist framework with little alternative re-reading of spirit possession. I do not disagree with the analysis of Ong here. My question is what have we missed in going this pathway? Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, was similarly undergoing numerous spirit possessions among its students. I remember the idea of contagion but no anthropologist stepped in to explain. It remains in my psyche, and I wonder if there was female child abuse (it was mostly females) among those who were affected.

This domestication process parallels the stamping down of much of the supernatural emphasis in the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. At its core, we are in a spiritual warfare with the Devil. It comes in many forms (the seven deadly sins and temptations are but one of several), but the Devil also exists as a spirit incarnate. The Church is the only one I know who can do battle with them and send them back to Hell. It feels a little absurd as I write this paragraph as an anthropologist. Nevertheless, it is only by taking stock of this set of unexplainable beliefs that I can improve my future apprehension of social reality. As absurd as it sounds, the Devil is real.

Astonishingly, Kapferer shared a parallel observation of the Reverend Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, separated by at least 25 years—disenchantment is a dangerous precedent in one’s spirituality: “today we are beginning either to domesticate the devil or else to deny him…He is most powerful when he is denied.”

Just like magic in anthropology, the devil or sin in our contemporary period is merely a relativist concept. At its extreme, nothing is sin. Either things are rationalised or medicalised, so to offer a counter position is untenable. Without enchantment, the unvirtuous and bad become palatable. Disenchantment seals the diabolic’s final acceptance into everyday life as a benign force.

What do we lose by relativising everything?

Nothing is significant, even humanity.

The New Revolution: Religion

My thesis is that the new revolution is religion. Having skipped the millennials, a new generation is ready to turn to what everyone has turned their backs on: the long legacy of Christianity, its lessons, and, of course, the supernatural in human life.

Re-enchantment is difficult under a totalitarian critical theory/secular regime. I understood the dilemma of Stainova and Graeber. Following Bourdieu, I myself was enamoured by Bourdieu’s post-structuralist approach to analysis. At its simplest form, practice theory highlights individual agency within the rubrics of inescapable structural power—but in the end, it is as if we have no free will and will always succumb to institutional power beyond us. It is like living in a hamster wheel and it led me to nothing. The inescapable torture of totalitarian pressure. Having lived in China for research, this vision and feeling led to nothing but bleakness at a personal level.

Something had to change, and if it takes me three decades to de-program myself, I would like to live in the light. God’s light is better than a nihilist’s emptiness. And so without hesitation, I took up the mantle of my inheritance and proceeded to continue the rites of passage available to my personal growth. After baptism and confirmation, most of us are called to human partnership (the other pathways are the Holy Orders), and so I consecrated a long union in the most sacred way possible. And what do you know, the graces just flowed.

There is more to say, but let me reflect on this new domain more.

Thank you to all the subscribers and the new ones who helped me reach an elusive milestone of 102 since I started on this platform. Unbelievable. I have a hundred and two reasons to continue the work.

Sources:

Kapferer, B. (2002). Introduction: Outside All Reason—Magic, Sorcery and Epistemology in Anthropology. Social Analysis, 46(3), 1-30. Retrieved May 1, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.3167/015597702782409310

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave

Stainova, Y. (2019). Enchantment as Method. Anthropology and Humanism, 44(2), 214-230. Retrieved May 1, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12251

Anthropology Reconsidered (Present) | Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2025) | The Dawn of Everything (2023).

The path towards The Great Books in Anthropology

Say hi, frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

I have procrastinated on this for at least a year, but I cannot postpone this any longer. What is an anthropologist to do after reversion to the Roman Catholic faith?

I don’t know.

What is clear to me is that I am compelled to speak the Truth—that we can enjoy a debt-free relationship in our lives. This debt-free supernatural/human relationship under Christianity has been available to everyone for two thousand years now.1 Restated in this way, this fact astonished me despite being a cradle Catholic. This Truth now nestles among all other truths. As an anthropologist, we live with multiple truths—that is the nature of the discipline. I had embodied it for decades, but these lowercase t truths no longer hold as the singular value above the capital T.

I owe this intellectual debt to David Graeber, the anthropologist I was reading for two years, who proposed an outlandish question—can man have a debt-free relationship? He wrote two books, hoping to find in the annals of human history one such arrangement—none.2 Not even the famed small groups in North America or Anatolia came close to this. This was his atheist socialist fantasy that was worth investigating, yet his conclusions were nondefinitive.

The only definitive answer can be found in faith—the radical step. It is this undeniable link between Christian theology and its relationship with (Western) sciences, of which anthropology is a distinct product, that led to my Roman Catholic reversion. Graeber paved the way for me to see the connection and this realisation. I can no longer unsee the double-sided coin of secularism and Christianity. This is my new reality as a Catholic anthropologist (a whole new area of studies that I rarely read talks about their experience, see Gomez et. al. 2024)

I have been struggling with how to move forward with my why and continue my direction at Frontal Lobe and excavating the Great Books of Anthropology. I had to step back from my weekly posts to crafting a more personal angle. Lately, I’ve been thinking that the latter project is hardly noteworthy, considering no single anthropologist will produce the same book list given the fractious nature of specialisms and political views in the discipline.3

I had an inkling of what I was missing (but it required a whole lot of doing and thinking about nothing!)—until I came across Vanessa Manceron’s Wild and Wonderful open-access ethnography of English naturalists that triggered what a project like that looked like.4 Her work encapsulates all that is lost from anthropology, but all that could be that we, somehow as a discipline, strayed from and lost our footing—listening to our interlocutors. Her writing made tangible what can be true in the practice of anthropology today.

All around, I sense an apathy but also bleakness of the present and future. I am sure that you have too, but this sense of loss is difficult to put a finger on. Is it the breakdown of social institutions like the family? The commodification of human attention? The diminishing practice of reading? Handwriting? The social trust in experts? The mistrust of science? All of this and more haunt the predicament of this generation and the next. As part of Generation X, individuals born between 1965-1980, I have enjoyed the analogue life and the remnants of social norms still filled with a sense of enchantment and wonder in [supernatural] human reality, despite the overwhelming dominance of the secular capitalist, Marxist, materialist, and socialist frameworks heavily competing with boots on the ground during my time. We were likely the last generation to have received the vestiges of a strong religious catechism before it skipped the millennial generation and has now found some footing among Generation Z. That was our failure as a generation. I admit that. The ripple effects can be seen and felt in society today.

You can say secular values won as it became the dominant form of social life, emptying ancient churches and replacing them with temples of consumerism. In Manila, the church had to be relocated within mall developments to satisfy the new, sometimes overpowering needs built by the engines of capitalism. Yet, the secular engine that has powered the dominant human norms is running on fumes—taken to extremes, such as relying on hyper-capitalism, hyper-politicisation, or hyper-logic to define the good life or social reality, is no longer an option for me. After decades of it, I can see that the very nature of these conceptual frameworks undermines our social world if they are the only source. This is what reading Graeber taught me. His glaring analytical blinder is his atheist point of view to understand early temple economies and other forms of capitalisms such as monastic capitalism, for instance. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that his concept of the Jubilee and the cancellation of debt comes from the obscure Hebrew and Christian salvation history in which all forms of debt and sin are expunged. His overt reliance on the intellectual skipped what might have been a deeper understanding if he had merged this with a spiritual understanding.

To survive the final assault on what is good and true (including the gutting of the humanities, classical learning, and social sciences after the death of religion), I can see that my purpose is to re-enchant my own practice and conceptual frameworks and tools for doing science. The path is difficult, unappealing to subscribers with a different sensibility, and unpopular.

Yet, it must be done.

I promised myself that I would document how I reverted to faith and why it was a better idea for myself and my practice than remaining an agnostic for the next few decades. It also helps me become accountable to myself over my own analytical weaknesses and how to overcome them.

I am writing so that I can clarify to myself the intimate relationship between my religious self and my anthropological practice. Ultimately, out of the ashes will rise a better vision and a compass to where I should take my project.

We have been redeemed all along…

You can accuse David Graeber of being a communist, but you cannot fault him for having a lack of imagination. In fact, it is this imagination that distinguished him from his peers. Without asking the big questions about humanity, he would not have been able to write his two books: The Dawn of Everything and Debt: The First 5,000 Years, that has profoundly shaped how I understand the evolution of human societies today. This was only possible because I read too few non-fiction books and committed to slow reading a book. This task astonishingly took me two and a half years! I had not expected my interest to be sustained for such a long period of time. Perhaps, Graeber himself would be astounded that a reader’s religious conversion could happen under his watch. Personally, it is nothing short of a miracle and mystery to me. It only took my love of history to make the connection of my birthright and place in the Christian human story and Western civilisation. I am not a blip. I am a part of the unbroken kingdom of St. Peter for over two thousand years now.

My journey started innocently enough. I was writing for sanity as I slogged through the dehumanising process of job interviews in an otherwise crumbling UX world. If I had a freelance job, it just felt like I was on a treadmill with nowhere to go and with rote linear thinking defined by software (seriously, Post-Its your way on Miro and its software ilk to insights?!) My brain atrophied. So, I set myself a challenge of reading a non-fiction work in anthropology. Though I am a voracious reader, I am a fiction fiend. That meant non-fiction has fallen to the wayside.

Choosing a book and an author presented the first signs of crisis in my discipline that I had otherwise suspected but never fully saw. I did not know how dire the situation was. Few scholars in our discipline engaged with the big questions that have defined anthropology—who are we and why are we different? Almost everyone wrote in a narrow field, a trend rewarded in academic institutions. I was looking for something like my undergraduate-era-still-fresh-in-my-memory, Guns, Germs and Steel (1997), a world historical survey of human conquest written by geographer, Jared Diamond, but hated by anthropologists. I think that everyone was just jealous he wrote a bestseller (but really, it is probably the ecological determinism perspective). My field is lagging in the public imagination. Nowadays, this seat is occupied by historians and psychologists.

The only candidate left who is unafraid to be publicly vulnerable is David Graeber. He was already a titan in the subdiscipline of economic anthropology but largely known (or shunned) because he was in the activist Marxist space.5 His work on the ills of capitalism (hello, Bullshit Jobs) naturally led him to an anti-capitalist stance. Despite this position, he took his clearly leftist and Marxist ideas on a grander scale of human inquiry—precisely asking the questions (1) why are we different—in his historical survey book, The Dawn of Everything; (2) then follows it up with a thought experiment on using debt/credit, not money, to understand a different flow of human history; (ultimately, asking, can we ever escape debt and debt relationships?).

By using debt as the central core of his thesis, Graeber had to tackle the discussion of salvation and redemption as it evolved in human civilisations and eventually in the early Western civilisation. Inevitably, his discussion was the centrepiece of the human problem plaguing Medieval Western thought and philosophy alongside Christianity. How do we deal with debt cancellation between a supernatural Creator and the Created subjects in everyday Christian life? This was a central moral problem with money, interest, sin, and ethics at the heart of the difficulties of merging it with markets, trade, and wealth.

Though limited in scope, I went down into the rabbit hole of the papacy, the Crusaders, and even the herring and salt trade in the Baltic (my favourite readings so far!). Surprise, surprise, I discovered the wealth of the Middle Ages that has been obscured from us by our textbooks (and even the Plague and the narrative of feudalism is too narrow). It is not dark but teeming with trade, credit, mercantilism, pious emotion (that created all the sacred art, the cathedrals of worship, and sacred music such as the Gregorian chants, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem—all encapsulated in the Tridentine Latin Mass), and theological intellect that also asked who we are and how we fit into the world.

Is Christianity ultimately the debt-free promise that Graeber is in search of? After all, if Jesus of Nazarene becomes the Lamb of God, who now replaces all the animal sacrifices of ancient Israelite practice, there is effectively no sacrifice required of man thereafter. A pure cancellation—an unusual promise between a supernatural being and man. (Of course, a Creator in the first place does not need anything if He has everything—that’s another story). It appears that Christianity was the answer he was looking for, but it required faith. In the meantime, Graeber tried to look for alternatives but has not found any equivalent elsewhere. So much so that he reluctantly looked into his Jewish roots and the Jewish covenant for answers that might be instructive for his campaign against predatory capitalism. True enough, the campaign for debt cancellation in the millennium has Jewish roots. Clearly, redemption/salvation has a direct throughput to Christian virtues and practice for over a millennium. Being an atheist, Graeber, perhaps, overlooked the theological significance of this connection.6 Not for me. (Though I have definitely taken it for granted.) The answer here was clear—both in the time since Moses (Old Testament sources) and Jesus of Nazareth (New Testament sources)—Graeber said yes, without saying yes, by the logic of his thesis.

This same connection was an earthshattering realisation for me as I went through chapters nine to twelve of Debt, The First 5,000 Years. My appreciation for my Christian and Western legacies increased like never before. I have tremendously benefited from these, though I was raised in the Global South.

My appreciation of my inherited Western birthright compels me to look at anthropology and the flattening tendency of the nihilistic frameworks that we apply in our work—to the detriment of existing or hopeful tools available to us. The totalitarian tendency of frameworks such as power, habitus, and colonialism for example, can become the analytical hammer to all forms of (nail) problems.

The Reductionism by Keywords in Anthropology

Taken to extremes, these frameworks become reductive keywords that disengage us from the aims and purpose of anthropology—the comparative study of human difference. The anthropology of today is not immune to societal trends. Like any discipline reliant on external funding, anthropology must engage with interests and keywords favoured by other entities. In the eighties, these keywords included: a geographic interest in any communist or communist adjacent countries, development, gender, colonialism, and labour/anti-capitalism/socialism/Marxism. Today, these issues continue, but somehow the contrary views are unwelcome and persecuted by students and faculty, rendering any alternate discussions and points of view mute.

Take the case of Elizabeth Weiss, the face of censorship within anthropology and, more specifically, her field of physical anthropology. The session on “why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” was pulled by the American Anthropology Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society in their 2023 conference, for being transphobic. It is strange that biological sex is not up for discussion, especially in the subdisciplines reliant on identifying human remains both in the past and present. Can we not identify statistically wider pelvic measurements as indicating an infant-bearing womb, as a female? And those that have narrower measurements are likely male? How is this transphobic? It seems shutting down any discussion proves more harmful than helpful in creating better classification categories.

Censorship becomes part of the chipping away of the authority of science over ideology. The panel has since been convened from the platform of the Heterodox Academy, a movement organised by Jonathan Haidt, Quinn Rosenkranz, and Chris Martin in 2015. The mission is to advocate for “viewpoint diversity,” “open inquiry,” and “constructive disagreement,” which seems redundant to say, within supposedly centres of learning on college campuses. Universities and scholars face a different threat to academic freedom. It is no longer about tenure but about (self) intellectual censorship from peers, students, and institutions.

The reason I share this is not to debate over the case details (but one that might be interesting to do). I highlight the unseen threat posed by propaganda or the flattening of perspectives towards homogeneity that is inimical to science. When I use the term science here, I mean a realist and empirical approach to systematic knowledge accumulation. My stance here is not new since this has always been on the debate table from early scholars, as seen from the Great Books Project in Anthropology. If you were radical in the nineteenth century, you would be a racist by twentieth-century standards, cancellable and deemed irrelevant by the twenty-first century. Is this really education?

It is this systematic erasure of the ladder of knowledge that is terrifying in this age of rapid digital compression of ideas that result in a poorer understanding of where we started or what we have learned. I believe it is the case of simply not reading what the past has to say about the very same topics we are fighting over now. If we do, we might learn a thing or two.

The Philippine Decolonial Experience

I do not think any anthropologist today disagrees with the necessity for decolonialism. The only difference is how to operationalise such a practice. Australia and likely New Zealand have one of the strictest restrictions on Aboriginal research practices I know for good reason.

I can only speak about the Philippines and the circumscribed decolonial process that happened in the state university in the capital of Manila. Though the archipelago has 7,000+ islands, the cultural, political and educational centre is the Tagalog region in the island of Luzon. My alma mater sits right smack at its centre. I am at the intellectual hotspot. It is a good example to assess what decolonialism looked like in practice beyond the placards and empty propaganda. Spoilers: It is methodologically untenable to implement. Besides, anthropology is already a decolonial tool in itself, if we can even master it.

I lived through the second modern decolonisation movement in the state university of the Philippines back in the 90’s. I am a cohort of the fourth generation of students trained by the second and third generations of anthropologists who, in the heyday of the 1950’s-1960’s and as late as the 1980’s, received scholarships to study for their PhDs in the United States. Our generation was the recipient of the fruit of this early Western seed—a decolonised social sciences ready for harvest. It was real where it mattered here in the former colonies.

Rather than shout slogans, these early scholars got to work building what the decolonial looked like. The US/Western-trained academics coalesced to put forward an emic view or the insider’s view, even beyond what was already outlined in most social science disciplines, including anthropology. The only thing left to change is identity. In the decolonial movement, this was at the heart of it—identity mattered and supplanted everything else. If you were the colonised, you were an insider. The reverse is true. Following this logic, if you were an indigenous researcher studying your own culture, you are providing an emic view and thereby more valid or valuable, as opposed to an outsider’s view or a foreigner or non-indigenous researcher. This leaves out the very idea of being able to do any anthropology or any writing or research, for that matter, if we continue the reasoning.

You can see by now the multiple problems arising from who is indigenous and who is not. This becomes a problem of degree—who gets to be more indigenous than the other. I do not feel indigenous at all since I am just a second-generation Chinese born in the Philippines. Is that local enough?

I digress. I raise this point because this minutiae is temporarily shelved in the decolonial project. After all, the more urgent requirement is to shape the tools of social science for the insiders (more generally understood). These scholars were concerned with switching frameworks at the meta- and conceptual level of discourse. Filipino scholars relied on the indigenous and indigeneity as a necessary building block towards another grand narrative called nationalism. This comprises the story that underlines the Philippine decolonial project.7

Compared to our peers in Southeast Asia and Africa, we were the earliest republic in the region, having declared independence from Spain on June 12, 1898. In less than a year, though, we would lose it under the Americans. But on the 4th of July 1946, the Philippines regained its independent status. The emic/etic debate is at the heart of the matter when it comes to defining the new modern nation-state. The official date was switched back to June 12, 1898, in 1962, by then President Diosdado Macapagal. His reason was to avoid any overlapping or confusion of the Philippine holiday with the American holiday. However, the real reason is the privileging of the emic view of history rather than the etic assignment of political independence. Besides, July 4th is merely an institutional paperwork compared to the strong-held meaning of homegrown independence of 1898.8

This pushback against an etic definition of selfhood resulted in an essential requirement for the shape of the social science decolonial model—its first project is to de-program the indigenous researcher from his/her Westernised perspective. The mission is to enthral the young students with a mirror of society that must first convince them to see themselves as insiders. One that is stripped of all things foreign, Western, and a distanced lens. The emic, indigenous, and nationalist view is a necessary mirror that functions on two levels:

• It serves as a mirror to reflect and transform the researcher who has been conditioned by colonial history that he is deeply flawed and inadequate.

• It serves as an insider’s tool of analysis to assess what is relevant and valuable in the understanding of an insider’s [Filipino] culture, psyche, and character.

The researcher is deeply intertwined and enmeshed in the emic, nationalist, identity-transformative process. He has no choice. Once the total integration happens, then the job of the decolonial project to resuscitate and to fill in the missing indigenous makeup becomes triumphant. Though we may not fully recover the past, your identity can replace it.

Hence, it is important to append Philippine + [social science] to demarcate such a project from its Western counterparts. The most notable include these three fields that have achieved traction among my generation of students/academics:

• Philippine History under Zeus Salazar (Pantayong Pananaw for-us-by-us)

• Philippine Psychology under Virgilio Enriquez (Sikolohiyang Pilipino)

• Pilipinolohiya (Philippine-ology), a combination of linguistics training with Filipino cultural concepts under Prospero Covar

At its core, these three decolonialism projects are connected with each other and spring from the use of the local language and emic terminologies. From conceptualisation, research, to publications, the founders require writing in Tagalog, incidentally, the dominant Philippine language. It made sense because the founders were from the Tagalog region, but all strive to achieve cultural depth. The idea is that the researcher possesses the insider language and thereby can access the emic terminologies of the object of study. This, of course, is nothing new to anthropology. It has always sought a fusion between the researcher and the target of study (the insider’s world) with the required language learning to achieve the same results. In anthropology, this is called “native anthropology,” “anthropology at home,” or “insider anthropology” when researchers study their cultures of origin. This traditional attempt in anthropology is deemed artificial, of course; hence, the researcher's identity is key to the decolonisation project. Anything foreign is suspect; whether it is the motivations (harvesting data) or the imbalance of power (North/South dichotomy), the assumption is that the same identity as your subject matter is better.

It is clearly much more difficult to implement the decolonialist approach in anthropology when some of the processes of decoloniality and the categories used to implement it are already available to decolonialists. (Let’s hold this thought) For the other social sciences (in psychology but less so in history), such epistemic demand is not an obligation; thereby, the insistence on using the local language is transgressive. Today, I am unsure whether the framework reached universities outside of the Tagalog region. The main idea is that as long as the researcher carries or is a native speaker of other languages, then the same methodological process can be implemented. The decolonial science has no obligation to translate because the reader, or who gets to benefit from it, is ideally someone from that insider culture. The decolonial science clearly serves the very people you did your research with. This much is clear. The decolonial science is first and foremost, writing for them, not for the sake of scientific progress or the establishment.

How does this project look?

Much of the original work by Zeus Salazar is not translated into English (see Reyes (2008) for an overview). However, critics have translated some aspects of it for us. Let’s take the case of identifying key political terminology to unlock a culture’s core concepts. Ramon Guillermo, a critic of the Pantayong Pananaw, describes the decolonial approach by examining the terms: rebolusyon, a borrowed term from the Spanish revolución, and the emic Tagalog term of himagsikan. Once identified, the next step is to break them down to their etymological roots. Here, Guillermo describes how Pantayong Pananaw operationalises it, Zeus Salazar delineates the former term, rebolusyon, as a “return,” “profound change,” or “reversal” in the Western context, but in the reinterpreted form in the Philippines, this same term refers to the revolutionary liberal bourgeois ideals. For Salazar, this is inadequate to get at the root of knowing the insider’s culture. Salazar differentiates the latter term, himagsikan, as reflective of the understanding of revolution. Himagsikan comes from the rootword bagsik, or “cruel, ill-tempered, strict, effective, fierce,” and when added to the prefix him or h-in, it refers to the imbibing of said characteristic, and the an as a suffix for the collective, results in a more “authentic” reading or what to us appears as the decolonial approach to begin studying the local mode of resistance. In this case, the local response includes bearing arms or violence when possible.

Of course, this decolonial approach has several problems, with Guillermo noting that very often native speakers do not know the etymological meanings of parent words or how the framework ignores new meanings that can be attached to old terms. Thereby, for him, context trumps etymological investigations.

These decolonial sub-disciplines culminated in a new degree offering called Philippine Studies. This trend reflected the area studies program, which divided anthropology according to geographic specialisations done extensively in the United States.9 It makes sense to have a geographically bounded study that encompasses history, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, etc., as an interdisciplinary attempt at recovering culture sans foreign influence. This movement was very attractive for undergraduates looking for new ways to think about an anti-capitalist, therefore, anti-Western framework. Both indigeneity and nationalism were critical storytelling themes as history transitioned into the Atomic Nuclear Age, characterising the Cold War until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The Marxist nationalist political order story provided a Western contrast. Southeast Asia was a patchwork region of red/blue, with the looming big Red that was isolationist Maoist China in the backyard. A revolutionary nationalist social science emerged during this ideological tumult in the Philippines’ post-colonial period. The revolutionary himagsikan Marxist and Leftist social and armed movements escalated with the American-propped dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, remaining in office from the late 1970s up until his fall in 1986.

There is something electric focusing on the emic view by indigenous researchers for local populations. It was very attractive, but as a student in training in anthropology, I could see how this was untenable. I struggled with the fact that the remit of the discipline is already broad, comparative, and expansive—the only difference was that it was deployed by Westerners and white men/women. Was that in itself evil? Plus, coming from an immigrant background and phenotypically an outsider, it did not feel like a good fit. My own subculture is separated from the mainstream Filipino population. What made it attractive for me was the nationalist storytelling component. I was still a Filipino.10

However, this decolonial story relies on an indigenous movement and fervour whose goal is to unearth a pristine culture. That is an impossibility, but I can see why this is necessary, especially when there is a dearth of historical and archaeological records. It is good to play in the bubble to recover a sense of self/identity, but that is also concealing the full reality that the Philippine self is part of the conquest/contact relationships we had in the past. The further you look back to pre-Western colonial times, you still find the northern islands under a tributary relationship with China; the South and the Central Visayas face the threat of incursions and slavery from the Sultanates of Indonesia and Sulu. Is there a pure indigenous? If I answer yes, I refer to the groups that were not incorporated into the mainstream political and cultural system or converted to Christianity. This demarcation is a historical rather than a contemporary delineation. Arnold Azurin has more to say about this.

The urgency of recovering the indigenous came to be a Philippine modern political project. The culmination is the politically motivated sensationalist discovery of the Tasaday, meriting a National Geographic cover in 1973. The group consisted of 26 individuals who were described as Stone Age people with little ceramic or hunting technology and who exclusively subsisted by foraging. They exclusively lived in a cave in southern Philippines that was isolated from its nearest Manobo neighbours, three hours away. They were discovered in June of 1971 by PANAMIN, a government entity in charge of indigenous affairs headed by Marcos crony Manuel Elizalde, Jr. Arnold Azurin gives an honest behind-the-scenes retelling of that time period, implicating anthropology itself, the government, and seedy entities.

The controversy for anthropology was not whether these people existed or not, but rather the degree of authenticity closer to how we understand an indigenous group. This question has spawned controversy, but with little resolution.

The tale of Filipinos recovering their identity in the twenty-first century has a new plot twist now that China supplants the United States’ influence in the region.11 Will nationalism remain a viable storytelling key? Having an external threat makes identity clearer, but also the indigenous category even more problematic. It is a good source of memes, though threats to sovereignty remain a tangible flag of identity that Filipinos rally behind, no matter how passe a category like nationalism is elsewhere.

My digression into the appropriation of a Western science framework for other purposes, particularly subverting its own self, is uniquely its foundation. So far, nowhere else is there an equivalent science from any of the older existing civilisations that possesses a critical self-assessment across all disciplines (maybe, Chinese medicine?) or as a way of life. The fact remains, the framework we are using, including our tools of cultural critique, is clearly a product of the conversation between Greco-Roman thought and Roman-Christian civilisation. It is that broadmindedness, the flexibility, and expansiveness of the framework that allow for internal self-critique, seen nowhere else. This is not just science but Christianity at its core. Living here in Western Europe, I have seen this birthright ignored and unstudied by those who have grown up within it. Can ideology be science?

The exercise of decolonialism is possible because of the nature of science itself. It allows for internal criticism, but what I highlight here is what is usually missing from any alternative approach—its implementation and assessment in the process of research, open to criticism. Anthropology makes it even more difficult because of the nature of writing and interpreting evidence, as we have learned from the Great Books Project. Identity, in itself, can be instructive but inadequate, unhelpful or vague. It is more feasible to think about one’s positionality (see Subaltern Studies in Indian history) since it infers hierarchy and power relations towards access to people, subcultures, and the field site, regardless of phenotypic, genetic or sexual identity. Or even more importantly, the kind of questions you can ask in a project and who you can talk to. Identity itself does not confer you an automatic insider status, nor does the same language (it greatly helps, though). In this case, subaltern academics in universities abroad cannot speak for those in the colonies. Who can then? In anthropology, ideology can neither be the hypothesis nor the conclusion at the same time.

Round Up

Reading Graeber led me to come home to Roman Catholicism, a religion I was born and educated into. The intellect can serve as a powerful basis for faith. Without the merging of intellect and catechism, it was easy for me to fall out of faith. It was only by slowly reading Graeber that I saw how Western philosophy and Christianity fed into each other. This realisation has only enlarged my understanding of the interconnected legacy of Christianity with the Western sciences, of which anthropology is a unique outcome.

The conversation between these two domains has lapsed dangerously, leaving secular society empty of the key factor of enchantment or wonder, a positive re-imagining of human social life. As a discipline, anthropology’s mission is a comparative approach to human variation with an eye for wonder and curiosity over other people’s way of life. It is this sense of wonder that has been flattened out with the dominance of nihilist frameworks of power, which tends towards totalitarianism in viewpoints and spirit. Taken to extremes, we are experiencing self-censorship towards the questions we can ask and the conclusions we can reach. I use the case of colonialism/decolonialism and highlight the methodological difficulty in operationalising decolonialism in practice. The Philippine experience, much like the Subaltern Studies in Indian historiography, is creative and necessary. I have problems with indigeneity and nationalism as a decolonial discourse, then and now. Why has the movement died? Rather than harp on ideologies, I think it is best to assess how to move forward with it.

In the coming weeks, I will be looking at the death of enchantment and its impact on our imagination.

Hello Reader,

You might have noticed my irregular and missing weekly postings. Thank you for your patience. I have been grappling with integrating my new life stage with my anthropological practice. I have decided to post this separately, although it directly impacts my writing on the main page. Nevertheless, I have excluded this post for subscribers who specifically signed on to Frontal Lobe. I shall be integrating this, though on the Great Books Project after publication.

I look forward to sharing Part 2 with you.

Onward,

Melanie

Sources:

Aguiling-Dalisay, G. (2013). Panayam kay Prospero R. Covar. Daluyan Journal Ng Wikang Filipino. (Unfortunately, the interview is in Tagalog, but here it describes his life as a student until he became an academic)

Aquino, Clemen C. (2004). Mula sa Kinaroroonan: “Kapwa, Kapatiran” and “Bayan” in Philippine Social Science. Asian Journal of Social Science, 32(1), 105–139. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23654689 (provides a summary of all three fields in English, but read the good overview on Covar’s Pilipinolohiya, combining culture, linguistics with the Tagalog language)

Azurin, Arnold Molina. (1993 [1995]). Reinventing the Filipino Sense of Being and Becoming: Critical Analyses of the Orthodox Views in Anthropology, History, Folklore and Letters. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press (an irreverent and eclectic mix of cultural issues and behind-the-doors gossip and intellectual brew of that time period)

Darby, Philip. (2018) ‘The multiple identities of the postcolonial: tracking the making of our project’, Postcolonial Studies, 21(3), pp. 271–277. doi: 10.1080/13688790.2018.1493967. (Though a bit dated, the article discusses a form of malaise that has surrounded this thematic study since its height in the 90s, with the loss of a keyword focus on nationalism.)

Diamond, Jared. 1997. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Company

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave

Graeber, David. 2018. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (there are a lot of floating copies that stem from his original 2013 rant on bullshit jobs, in which he later expanded in book form)

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House Publishing (create an account on Archive.org so you are able to borrow this book online)

Graeber, David and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London: Penguin Random House UK

Gomez, Cristina Lledo, Agnes M. Brazal, Ma. Marilou Abita. 2024. 500 Years of Christianity and the Global Filipino/a: Postcolonial Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47500-9 (open access book covering a range of disciplinary approaches to being Catholic but also studying Catholicism)

Guillermo, Ramon. (2009). Pantayong Pananaw and The History of Philippine Political Concepts. Kritika Kultura (13) 2009: 107-116

Guillermo, Ramon. 2016. (Hinggil kay Prospero Covar) Pagkataong Pilipino: Isang Teorya sa Lalim ng Banga (no proper citation but provides the central construction of Pilipinolohiya on the Filipino identity by the use of terminologies of the body, culture, and the water cistern (banga), an important reference to the Manunggul Jar that dates the presence of people (precursors to the Filipinos) on the islands to the Neolithic age of 890-710 BC)

Guyer, Jane I. (2004). Anthropology in Area Studies. Annual Review of Anthropology, 33, 499–523. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25064863

Headland, Thomas N. (ed.). 1992. The Tasaday Controversy: Assessing the Evidence. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association.

Helmreich, Stefan. 2009. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Berkely: University of California Press

Lepselter, Susan. 2016. The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity and UFOs in the American Uncanny. Michigan: University of Michigan Press

Manceron, Vanessa. 2022 [2025]. Wild and Wonderful: An Ethnography of English Naturalists. Chicago: Hau Books

Pe-Pua, Rogelio, & Protacio-Marcelino, Elizabeth A. (2000). Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino psychology): A legacy of Virgilio G. Enriquez. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3(1), 49-71. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-839X.00054

Prakash, Gayan. (1994). Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism. The American Historical Review, 99(5), 1475–1490. https://doi.org/10.2307/2168385

Reyes, Portia L. (2008) ‘Fighting over a nation: theorizing a Filipino historiography’, Postcolonial Studies, 11(3), pp. 241–258. doi: 10.1080/13688790802226645.

Rosaldo, Michelle Z. 1980. Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

San Juan, E. (2025). Sikolohiyang Pilipino: Vicissitudes of Indigenization in the Philippines. In: Gao, Z.Z., Medved, M.I. (eds) Global Perspectives on Cultural Politics in Indigenous Psychology. Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-96813-6_7

Sopranzetti, Claudio, Fred Myers, Anastasia Piliavsky, John L. Jackson Jr, Yarimar Bonilla, Adia Benton, and Paul Stoller. "Why Do We Read the Classics?" HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, (2017). Accessed May 30, 2026. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau7.3.002.

Tsing, Anna. 1993. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in the Out-of-the Way Place. New Jersey: Princeton University Press

My study journey:

Anthropology Reconsidered (Present) | Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2025) | The Dawn of Everything (2023).

The path towards The Great Books in Anthropology

Say hi, frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

I have been wrestling with my why in my writing for the last couple of weeks. It should have been easy. I have always done my book reviews as a tennis match—read, react, assess. It worked before but I could not get pass even a small measure of that. It has been a cyclical loop that appears like writer’s block but feels much more elemental and darker—until I came across this hopeful gem for my anthropology book club.

It encapsulates what I felt was missing in anthropology and ethnographic writing lately. It is this sense of just being in one’s approach to the practice and to writing. Much of the discipline nowadays is colonised by keyword frameworks and approaches that it is hard to tell whether the data was collected to fit the researcher’s hypothesis or selecting a skewed sample that fits the agenda. This is especially true for subdisciplines involving the environment and climate change.

This one does not. Vanessa Manceron encapsulates what a project of enchantment and how to bring it back in anthropology.

Vanessa Manceron is the Director of Research at the National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS) and a Director at the Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative (LESC) and writes primarily in French about the environment in France, the UK and Italy. Looking at her profile and publications, she is an advocate for the environment and wildlife. Yet, this work, pending reading her other works, is distinctly separate from her advocacy and theoretical suppositions expected from a scientist working in those areas. And this is the hallmark of a good anthropologist—the ability to listen to her interlocutors and convey who they truly are without imposing one’s position or predilection.

Her book allowed her subjects, the English Naturalists, to emerge from her pages. This ability to listen is usually taught as cultural relativism in the discipline—the suspension of one’s background to elicit the truth of another person’s or group’s worldview. It seems to be rarer nowadays as being political (what was commonly classed as applied anthropology) or advocating for social justice is highly rewarded at the institutional and classroom level.1 Sadly, the primacy of advocacy, activism, or the political within the discipline as the only valid way to represent reality is alarming and contributing to a dearth of alternative visions of other worlds that is central to the discipline.2 And consequently, anthropology and anthropological writing has less and less sense of hope and wonder. We contribute little to what an alternate vision of the world could look like.

This work stands out because this is what anthropologists are called to do—to find differences and write about other people whose world are so different from us, that we can ask, what can we learn from them?3

The Creature that is the English Naturalist

The English Naturalist is a figure of eccentricity, but also one of intense knowledge built from experience and a creature of attention. It is of nature but it is not nature. They do not aim to change or transform but to be with them. In so doing, they achieve a form of self-creation, into a person, into a naturalist.

There is no limit to how much nature lovers are out there, but there are only so few that could be called naturalists like the English. In the Dutch annals, the love of nature transformed quickly into the conservation perspective and land management approach by the nineteenth century. Van Der Wint marked 1895 as an important period in which the Dutch naturalists, led by teachers Pieter Thijsse (1865-1945) and Eli Heimanns (1861-1914) had to take up the mantle of conservation and engage with scientists because of the destruction of the very world they were studying.4 This last generation of Dutch naturalists espoused the same principles and character similar to contemporary English naturalists,

…natural history involved empirical study, with no religious connotation or speculation, which could be combined with the enjoyment of nature and result in a feeling for the beauty of nature and a respectful attitude.

Heimanns, 1901 in Van Der Wint (2012)

They established a journal called the Living Nature, De Levende Natuur, for nature lovers that emphasised, “beauty, harmony, and coherence.”5 My dearly departed neighbour, Ria La Large-Mathis photographed flowers and her last series on mushrooms showcase this sense of beauty of the fungi as she perceives them from the everyday environment. But without the naming that so much characterises a naturalist, she does not qualify as one. Or can Jasper de Ruiter, a professional wildlife illustrator, who provides free downloads of observation cards and other fieldguides for children, is not necessarily similar to the English variant. It is inarguable that all these people are nature lovers but not (professional) naturalists in the sense of Maceron’s description of the peculiar English naturalist. What is missing is the key differentiator of recording and naming every observation that an English naturalist does incessantly.

Naming thus corresponds to that moment when, awed by the sight of a creature never previously seen or recognized, one is driven to give a consistency to the surrounding world, to begin to look at animals and plants and to consider them, to learn them, and to grasp them in words…

…name-giving is the fruit of a long empirical experience that involves continual detailed observation, ceaseless repetitions required for spotting similarities and differences, permanent features and variations. Naming in this sense is a prospect rather than an enclosure, an endless activity leading to an understanding of taxonomy as a relational and categorial interplay, to explore rather than to tick a series of boxes. It is a ceaselessly repeated process of disclosure and enchantment, as though it involved finding or personally rediscovering something that is nevertheless already known and registered, of naming anew and for the first time.

Manceron, p. 46,49

The act of naming is not just placing a natural specimen within the Linnaean taxonomy universe. Naming is an individuating process of an otherwise generic species. This happens because the observer is unique and once he or she utters a label, he or she is transformed in the process. This is only possible because they work in a predominantly analogue manner.

This obsession with labelling and identifying the physical world comes with using not digital tools but the field notebook and index cards. The interior transformation does not happen by secondary transfer to a device. Rather, the same tools used in the naming process links these contemporary field adventurers to their counterparts from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. This legacy imbue naturalists with their motivation to be precise and use the tools of the Linnaean taxonomy of classification to distinguish themselves. It is this mastery that they recognise each other, not to produce knowledge for dissemination, but also who have they become.

1832.

196. Fruit from the great Adansonia. N. E. of Porto Praya. St Jago.─

200. 2 sorts of Fucus & (14. (b)

269. + The commonest tree in the island, growing in the valleys; the juice abounds with gallic acid making all iron things directly black.

NB. The following plants collected at St. Jago. cape de Verd. Islands} from Jany 16th to Feb. 8.

270. Near stream at St. Domingo. a little town in S Jago} No. 412 of JSH}

271. 272. Plants.

273. Ribera. Grande.

274. 275. Plants.

276. 277. Water cress and other plants from St. Domingo. {976. Achyranthes argentea JH) x

278. 279 Plants

280. St. Domingo. damp place

281. Do. {410 of I.H. Adiantum Capillus} ─ x

282. St. Jago. (Achyranthes argentea JH) x

283. Dry places.

284. St. Martin.

285. Plant.

286. The two lowest (in the Page) plants are the commonest on desert places. The bush smells sweet.

287. 288. Plants.

289. Quail Island.

290. 291. Do.

292. Plant with stalks on rocks near sea.

293. 294. St Domingo.

295. 296. 297. 298. 299. 300. St Martin.

301. 302. 303. St. Jago

309 Lichen. From the highest peak of Fernando Noronha.

347. Fuci. Do.

384. + A leafless tree bearing beautiful pink flowers

Charles Darwin (even his description here is quite sparse) from John van Wyhe ed., 2002-. The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, http://darwin-online.org.uk/

Tedious and almost elementary. These words seems to only appeal to the writer and requires decoding by an outsider. The record is a distinct mental mapping of the both the specimen’s number, location, and identity but also the specific position of the observer and how he was feeling and seeing (e.g. damp place). The observer and the observed are one and the same recorded within the annals. It is this embodied knowledge that is not possible with accelerated Large Language Models (LLMs), social media, and mobile phones. The naturalists intuitively know this by keeping to handwriting, using paper assiduously including maps, full attention and focus in the use of their senses on their desks and on the field. It was not about the amount of data but knowing that this thing in front of them is a surprise, a repeat visitor or an extinction event. All this comes with a minor cry or a sadness. Grief or joy, it all gets written down in the autobiography of the field journal, tucked away in the shelf.

The naturalists I encountered do not use them [smartphone recognition software for plants or birds] and remain skeptical about the potential for learning to look, for plunging into details, and immersing oneself with the help of these devices. If the reference type and the thing observed come together in the device rather than in the observer, how can a new perception of reality be built up, how can it be incorporated into the fabric of the living?

Manceron, p. 224

Are we going to have naturalists in the next generation?

Garden Interiority

The English naturalist interiority is only possible because of the combination of the recording obsession with the distinct English countryside and their relationship with it. The English ‘wilderness’ is not something that is out there but rather an expansive countryside that combines home gardens, with farms, and nature. The obsession with the green lawn and the small garden at the back of the house is part of it. This made me understand why in Australia, homes keep insisting on a green lawn despite living in a desert and water rationing. Perhaps, it is that longing for the bucolic and rambling English countryside that curiously was noted as an important landscape seen by the first colonialists in Australia. It is not a coincidence that Bill Gammage in his work, the Biggest Estate on Earth, started off his pre-colonial reconstruction of Aboriginal Australia from the perspective that the colonialists was amazed to find the landscape looking like the English countryside and gardens.

For the most part we passed through green valleys with rich soil and luxuriant pasturage. The hills adjoining the valley were grassy, and lightly wooded on the slopes facing the valley; towards the summits they became scrubby, and beyond, the scrub almost invariably made its appearance.

Remarked John Edward Eyre (vol. 1, p. 156) as he observed the landscape

Ironically, the colonialists did not envision the Aborigines as a kind of naturalist himself. They failed to see that the Aborigines were horticulturalists of a physical landscape tangibly understood as the entire Dreaming universe that provided food, shelter, and the continuity of life. (This visual green countryside landscape dramatically transformed into desert environments that we recognise today.)

I use the term ‘kind of’ as a differentiator of the queer persona of the English naturalist. Unlike his Dutch and Aborigines counterparts from the past and present, the English naturalist remains staunchly independent from nature and does not necessarily seek to transform it. They are not farmers, not horticulturalists, or cultivators. They resist an idealised picture of oneness with the environment. The wildlife and wilderness, as Manceron understands, from her interlocutors are very much independent from the human world.

Naturalists do not speak to plants or animals and do not enter into exchanges with them, regarding them as beings endowed with the same interiority. No doubt naturalists will therefore disappoint those tempted by animism…

…Naturalists marvel at life’s potential without seeking to minimize it or reduce it to a morality of pity toward more vulnerable beings; they create forms of companionship at a distance, neither dispensing with identification nor transforming the other.

Manceron, p. 10-12

To become an English naturalist is an interior transformation by their encounter with nature. However, this only happens because they remain in a unique position that is free from the constraints of scientific institutions, the labour market, status and class inequalities, utilitarianism, any form of control or domination to other beings, and even scientific objectivity. They do not even define themselves as activists or mobilisers or self-ascribe as ecologists or environmentalists. Even they resist the blanket terms of ‘managing biodiversity’ that has become ubiquitous.

They have chosen to keep their movement slow by acting with patience, humility, and an attention to details, eschewing heroics and any frontal mobilization against the balance of power. They do not construct all-embracing narratives, no denunciations, lamentations, or prophecies…

They do not topple into objectivity as a calculable, accountable thing, even though they too use counting and contribute after fashion to the world of Big Data. They do not transform transform the living into mute things; they do not endow them with the capacity for dialogue and do not seek to be their representatives or to speak for them. They concede nothing to the values that bring nature into poetry or romanticism, even though they too are moved by beauty and aesthetic feelings. They do not confuse facts with values, depriving themselves of an autonomous knowledge and an independent morality, even if they mobilize them in common.

Manceron, p. 12

Yet, the naturalist themselves are transformed by their encounter. Slowly, privately, and quietly. Thus, the naturalist sees the independence of nature as reliant on their acts of care and attention. Without those, they cannot be naturalists who can read nature and attune their perception to the distinct physiological differences, movements, behaviours and interactions.

In other words, nature is individualised most curiously in an English empirical way. Not everything Western is destructively reductive.

The Anthropologists as Naturalists

There is much to say about the similarities between anthropologists and naturalists displayed here—both the subject and with the author’s approach of matching the gentle and hopeful work of her interlocutors. Looking at Manceron’s profile, it would have been easy for her to follow the popular approach in the environmental/climate change sub-discipline of anthropology.

I could have chosen to undertake a multispecies ethnography or I could have mobilized an interdisciplinary approach. Discussing naturalist knowledge as a system of collective representations of a unified natural world would indeed lose sight of the active part played by those groups of beings that are, as the naturalists themselves would agree, quite the opposite of an inert, acted-upon environment…

…To give myself a chance of capturing a multilayered world interlaced with different meanings, I have therefore opted for an uneven symmetry. I have done this for the simple and good reason that naturalists take that same approach to fauna and flora.

Manceron, p. 16

It is quite difficult to attempt what Manceron displayed here nowadays—the position of (theoretical) humbleness. I see it today as a transgressive act of doing anthropology. She recognised that representing symmetry between people and nature such as what happens in popular multispecies studies or reversing the power structure between men and nature as is the case of those advocating for the environment, is also highly problematic.

Symmetry here, she says, means attributing agency or culture to nature or its reverse—when people people are depicted as actually conversing with nature, or a representation of people as one with nature (see Manceron 2016). This is the flattening of relationships that remove hierarchy and use networked connections instead. Though that might appeal to those that subscribe or advocate for a form of democratised representation of the world, Manceron sees unseen consequences of doing so. One of which is to eliminate difference and points of ruptures between the two domains.

What is emerging in this subfield is a scale ranging on the one end, symmetry, and at the other, asymmetry, in ethnographic writing and the practice of doing ethnography with nature. Everything in between is to some degree variations of entanglement and distance between nature and humans.

The unified natural world of symmetry was something Manceron noticed as far back as 1988. She saw how anthropologists began asking, les animaux pensent-ils?, do animals think? Since then, examples flourished in assigning agency to plants and animals in both writing style and data collection. For instance, in How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn declares this as a statement rather than as a question. Nature is equal to man. In his ethnography of the Runa Indians of the Amazon, animals such as the jaguar who have an all-seeing agency, the agentivité, to select their hunt and recognise life or death for certain Runa individuals. This was quite revolutionary in the discipline that typically depicted a relational kinship with nature. Kohn wrote an an immersive mythical view of life that lies between fantasy and reality. I was not sure if I was reading creative fiction of the author or the Runa themselves—or both, as Kohn was himself delirious due to bouts of illness and hunger.

The interior life of nature is a very difficult realist exercise. Typically, anthropologists have depicted the animal-human relationship using the politico-eco-religio-functional approach such as Marvin Harris’ classic Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches or Evans-Pritchard’s numerous accounts of the Nuer’s relationship with cattle for religious purposes. One contemporary successor include Radhika Govindrajan’s Animal Intimacies in which she positions nature as part of the religio-magico and kinship-building among the Himalayan Indians. Govindrajan lovingly anthropomorphises animals as kin to the extent that it was hard for a wife to sacrifice a goat in the temple.

Alternatively, those that move away from the functional approach reveal or reverse the power structures between the two domains. Typically, the symmetry appears in supply chain ethnographies implicating both nature and humans commodified by the machine of capitalism such as Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World; the interdisciplinary approach tends to also flatten differences across species as scholars band together to share in the despair, the looming climate crisis, and the hope beyond grief and impending death that it possibly entails. This is what Stefan Helmreich calls as the athwart theory, or a side by side transverse storytelling by way of theory piercing empirical data and back to apprehend reality. Some of the most cited examples include Anna Tsing’s Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet and Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, both these works should be read in tandem. My top favourite read of all in this genre is Helmreich’s Alien Ocean, a triumph in pleasure reading and experimental ethnography. Rather than a Marxist approach like those advocated by Arturo Escobar in his Pluriverse, these new collaborations and frameworks demand creative fiction to write non-fictional tales. The result is that to imagine dystopia or the natural universe, one has to use science and speculative fictions to get out of the straitjacket of dominant theoretical frameworks.

Those that prefer a more realist less speculative attempts to symmetry turn to the natural sciences for help. John Hartigan, Jr. learned to become a botanist in Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Diversity and surrendering to certainty with a useful chapter on How to Interview a Plant. In that chapter, Hartigan is fusing the anthropologist with the observational skills of a naturalist without being a naturalist. This was followed by his more successful attempt at knowing animals, or the horse, through animal ethology. Instead of interiority, he dedicates himself to deep, tried and tested technique of observation called the EquiFACS (Equine Facial Action Coding System) typically used for mammals including humans. The result is an eerie description in Shaving the Beasts of a painful Spanish culling ritual called rapa, or the domestication of wild horses. Here, Hartigan leaves the human culture and describes the tension and pain of the animal. It was harrowing reading. His work is probably the most successful realist depictions of animal perspective I have read so far. This makes other realist attempts pale in comparison.

Though this brief digression is not exhaustive of ethnographies in the field, these defining works demonstrate the trend in the subdiscipline towards symmetry between nature and the human worlds. Manceron’s ethnography bucks this trend by going local and small and staying there. Yet, truly her English naturalists view their worlds neither as local and small. Quite the opposite, the English countryside is an expanded garden, forest, farms, and meadows made distinct by the naturalist who wanders. Nature and the naturalist himself is located in a long arc of history and persona that lives in records and on paper. All these specimens are individual yet also universal.6 By keeping asymmetry intact, Manceron is not afraid by remaining as distanced yet close observers of nature and people. The sense of uncertainty and unknowability of nature is not at all treated as failure or undemocratic but one of respectful distance defined by care.

As I think about my project of re-enchantment in anthropology, I am reminded by how far we have strayed from and forgotten the basics. In our quest to change the world and forego everything else, we had forgotten to be with the world and listen. The study on English naturalists shows us one does not have to wander very far to return to who we are.

Dear Reader,

If you have reached this far, thanks for reading. It is likely the first time I ignored the newsletter email limits and decided for a long form essay. It has been harder than expected.

Something snapped within me the last few weeks (partly I had been planning events that overcame my patience). I had not posted and it was a bad case of writer’s block that has never quite happened in the three years of this newsletter. Was it a case of sudden burnout? I was just continuously churning out book reviews and playing tennis with all these wonderful authors. I think I really needed my why.

I was compelled to write more personal pieces (or what seemed to me more personal than usual) and this was one of those. I still have an unfinished draft for a separate newsletter which has been giving me anxious days. I was never inclined about the personal in my writing, but there comes a time when it is no longer possible to hold back.

I shall complete the other one and get things moving.

Grace is upon us in the upcoming Pentecost.

Onward,
Melanie

Buy me a coffee!

Sources:

Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. (I gave a scathing review here)

Evans-Pritchard, E.Evans. (1956). Nuer Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press (Chapter 10 discusses the role of the cattle as sacrifice)

Candea, Matei. (2007), Arbitrary Locations: In Defence of the Bounded Field-Site. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13: 167-184. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2007.00419.x Accessed 15 May 2026 (an interesting take on the advantages of traditional ethnography vs. multi-sited ethnography)

Govindrajan, Radhika. 2019. Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India's Central Himalayas. University of Chicago Press, 2018. Chicago Scholarship Online, 2019. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226560045.001.0001. (Kinship and spirit stories between families and their animals, yes, there’s even some sexual accounts here)

Haraway, Donna J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin with the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. (I partially reviewed this book here; again, this is another experimental collaboration work between anthropologists and other scientists)

Harris, Marvin. 1974. Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture. New York: Random House. (Easy to read ecological puzzles of human cultures answered using functional approach)

Hartigan, John, Jr. (2020). Shaving the Beasts: Wild Horses and Ritual in Spain. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press (Harrowing account of horse life during culling and domestication using ethological observation techniques)

Hartigan, John, 'How to Interview a Plant: Ethnography of Life Forms', Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity (Minneapolis, MN, 2017; online edn, Minnesota Scholarship Online, 20 Sept. 2018), https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816685301.003.0010, accessed 15 May 2026. (Compare this to Manceron’s description of naturalist behaviour)

Hartigan Jr., John, Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity (Minneapolis, MN, 2017; online edn, Minnesota Scholarship Online, 20 Sept. 2018), https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816685301.001.0001, accessed 14 May 2026.

Helmreich, Stefan. (2009). Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (1st ed.). University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11hpsjh. Accessed 15 May 2026.

Helmreich, Stefan. (2011). “Nature/Culture/Seawater.” American Anthropologist, vol. 113, no. 1, 2011, pp. 132–44. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41407381. Accessed 15 May 2026. (If you want to read a taste of Helmreich’s writing and theorising, this is an introduction to his athwart theory; also, colour of seawater as theory!)

Gammage, Bill. (2011). The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin (a must read for Australians or who has been and who will visit Australia; this is an example of a post-colonial re-reading of landscape history)

Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology of the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press (immersive mythical and creative fiction account)

Manceron, Vanessa. 2022 (2025). Wild and Wonderful: An Ethnography of English Naturalists. Chicago: Hau Books (open access)

Manceron, Vanessa. (2016). Exil Ou Agentivité ? Ce Qe L’anthropologie Fabrique Avec Les Animaux. L’Année Sociologique (1940/1948-), 66(2), 279–298. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44956086

Tsing, Anna, Swanson, Heather, Gan, Elaine, & Bubandt, Nils (Eds.). (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1qft070 (I gave a gushing review here and cite this as a compelling experimental ethnographic storytelling)

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Van Der Windt, Henny. J. (2012). Biologists Bridging Science and the Conservation Movement: The Rise of Nature Conservation and Nature Management in the Netherlands, 1850—1950. Environment and History, 18(2), 209–236. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23250917

Wyhe, John van ed., 2002-. The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, https://darwin-online.org.uk/. Accessed May 14, 2026 (full transcribed texts and scans of all pages of Darwin’s notebooks even the notorious stolen and returned Notebook B)

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

Phantom Africa by Michel Leiris

• Leiris, Michel. 1968. L’Afrique fantôme. Paris: Gallimard

  Leiris, Michel. 2017. Phantom Africa (trans. Brent Hayes Edwards). India: Seagull Books

Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss

• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1993. Tristes Tropiques Paris: Plon

  Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1969. World on a Wane (Tristes Tropiques) (Trans. J. Russell). Boston: Beacon Press

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

The Timeline: Between World Wars II and the Early Modern Period

I almost had a creative burnout from reading The Abyssinian Journey of Marcel Griaule. I now realise that reading it in a vacuum is a disservice and is unhelpful towards understanding the full context of both the writer, the subject, and the historical context. This time, I will try to read these two books side by side and see the contrasts. This has also produced a pleasurable side effect of finding pleasure (not the tyranny of deadlines) in reading once again.

The Africa that I traversed in the period between two World Wars was no longer the heroic Africa of the pioneers, nor even that from which Joseph Conrad drew his magnificent Heart of Darkness, but it was also quite different from the continent we see today awakening from a long slumber…working toward its emancipation. From this perspective, I am tempted to believe, must be sought the reason that the only thing I found there was a phantom.

Leiris, p. 63

Michel Leiris’s Diary of Becoming

Introduction |

In contrast to the absence of the self of Griaule in his accounts, Phantom Africa is the opposite. It is the direct publication of Michel Leiris’s journals that he kept, almost day to day, of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti field expedition from 1931 to 1933. In here are his thoughts, words, and observations. In effect, the chaos of change in Africa also belies the turmoil of personal growth of Leiris in his career, but also in his manhood. His later works in poetry and scholarship, for which he would be recognised, drew from this two-year expedition traversing the West to the East of the African continent. The translator of the English edition, Brent Hayes Edwards, recommends that we should actually read his personal struggles in Manhood alongside this piece. This work was written in the early 1930s, published in 1939, and republished with additional essays in 1946 during his treatment for mental illness before he became well-known. This memoir preceded his long expedition and informs his personal and career uncertainties in his Phantom Africa journal accounts.

Michel Leiris, recognised as an anthropologist, started not as one but as a writer. This would be an excellent field training to be a researcher if anyone had mentioned it to me during my crucial younger years. It is a privilege to have these early French ethnographers live a long life and look back at their work. Born in 1901, part of the Surrealists group, he passed away in 1990, spanning a period in which the world looked so different by then that the pre-war period feels like an anachronism for us. This meant that through the decades, we see Leiris shift his position on the nature of ethnography and what happened in Africa. Leiris's later reflections solidify his anti-colonial position by 1950, and explicitly stated in his 1981 preface to the English translation.

Some fifteen years later, at the beginning of the process that would lead to what was presumptuously termed “decolonization,” it seemed that the black world—was truly taking shape for me, because circumstances permitted me to think that as a researcher and writer, I could offer—rather feebly—indirect but positive support to those emerging from that black world who were struggling against oppression and asserting their cultural particularity across the globe. Surely, in order to concretize a man from an entirely different part of the world, and in order to gain his recognition—a requirement for the creation of an authentic humanism—I would have to revise my previous understanding of my profession by practicing an ethnography of militant fraternity, rather than one of detached examination or artistic sampling.

More than simply gathering information and objects—as my companions and I have done between Dakar and Djibouti, at times resorting to means that, had we been less certain of acting in the name of the good cause, we would have condemmed—so that our collections, recorded in our archives and preserved in our musems, would attest that unjustly unrecognized cultures have a value in themselves (in addition to having much to teach us), our aim was to furnish the people we were studying with the means to construct a future that would belong to them, and in the meantime to produce unassailable work to support their claims; such were the inspiring goals that I assigned to ethnography a few years after World War II, after I had matured under the trials of the German occupation and been aided by the course that my professional life had taken in the new era.

Leiris, pp. 59-60

Aside from what his work means for anti-colonial activists and scholars, or advocates for a radical museum practice, his eyes and mind’s eye take us back intimately to a time no longer in existence—a double phantom, a shadow left over from momentary fragments of two time periods—Leiris’ 1930s Africa and our own memory of 1940s-1950s, increasingly further away from our AI-driven delirium standpoint. What we have left are Leiris’s notebooks as evidence of regret, adventure, and disappointment.

…[Phantom Africa is] an expression of my disappointment as a Westerner uneasy in his own skin who had foolishly hoped that his long voyage in remote lands—and true contact, via scientific observation, with their inhabitants—would transform him into a different, more open man, cured of his obsessions. In a way, my disappointment drove me, the egocentric that I then still was, to deny through my title a full existence to that Africa where I found many things, but not deliverance.

Leiris, p. 59

He is unapologetic that Phantom Africa is a subjective, half-documentary and half-poetic exegesis of his experience of what he calls the drift, as the “slow erasure due to time’s passing.” This approach meant that Leiris’s work endures to a greater number of readers today. For someone in search of the Great Works in Anthropology, Leiris’s work illuminates the urgency of capturing unfashionable insights but also fragments of human culture prior to rapid disappearance by conquest and hypercapitalism.

Travel and travellers are two things I loathe—and yet here I am, all set to tell the story of my expeditions. But at least I’ve taken a long while to make up my mind to it: fifteen years have passed since I left Brazil for the last time and often, during those years, I’ve planned to write this book, but I’ve always been held back by a sort of shame and disgust. So much would have to be said that has no possible interest: insipid details, incidents of no significance.

Lévi-Strauss, p. 17

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Journey to the Amazon

Chapters 1-3 |

Another phantom and time drift also occur in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil. This work by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) reveals his poetic strength that lends authority and also empathy to his ethnographic accounts of the Indians in the Brazilian Amazon. Rather than a diary account, the structure follows what is recognised as the second book in French anthropology, which follows the Rhetorical Sandwich.

I had only known Lévi-Strauss via this theoretical framework, French Structuralism, which argues for a common universal mind and way of thinking (in the simplistic way). It is an answer to the question of why different cultures have the same creation myths and flood myths. He has been portrayed as distant with his abstract view of human culture reduced to linguistics. This book shows Lévi-Strauss as less than a demi-god in anthropology but a nascent ethnographer who found himself an opportunity to practice ethnography.

That one civilization is ending and another beginning; that our world has suddenly found itself to be too small for the people who live in it; these are facts which became real to me, not because of figures or statistics or revolutions but because I happened, a few weeks ago, to make a certain telephone call. I had been playing with the idea of retrieving my youth by a return visit, after fifteen years, to Brazil. The answer was that I should need to book my cabin four months in advance.

Lévi-Strauss, pp. 23-24

Like Leiris, Lévi-Strauss’s phantom Amazon catches him between periods of the World Wars. He situates us with the complexity of travel when alliances in France and across the waters complicate a months-long sea voyage. France was occupied by the Germans (1940-1944) under the sympathetic Vichy government. He could not get a Brazilian visa, so he hatched the idea of going to South America by way of the United States. At that time, there was an opportunity granted to European scholars oppressed by the Germans to travel. He was able to acquire a New School for Social Research in New York visitor entry, which was later promptly cancelled.

For some reason, he did not appear to need a visa in the end but only a reservation made to the same Compagnie des Transports Maritimes office in which he travelled luxuriously prior to the war. This time, the company, recognising him, dissuaded him from buying any ticket because, as Lévi-Strauss later found out, the Capitaine Paul Lemerle was akin to a convict ship. His previous idea of

…sharing the labours of and the frugal repasts of a handful of seamen, sailing hither and yo on a clandestine vessel, sleeping on deck, and gaining in health and strength from the day-long nearness of the sea.

Lévi-Strauss, p. 25

was little more than a cattle train, with three hundred fifty people crammed into a small vessel that had only two cabins and seven couchettes. The nightmare was made intolerable with unlikely ship characters, one of whom is an associate of Lenin, and other mysterious figures. As is common in the opening, personal hygiene tops the list of travel descriptions that wake the reader to the sights and smells of a crowded humanity trying to defecate on two wooden cubicles containing a long wooden trench that protrudes into the ocean at all hours of the day. Trying to shower is also no good with only two douche cabins. His movements and disembarkation were also restricted at times because of his French passport, as they made numerous stops in the Mediterranean, West Africa, before finally landing at Fort de France, the capital of Martinique, the Lower Antilles region. Yes, he had deliriums of ease and escape.

After a month at sea we suddenly glimpsed, in the middle of the night, the lighthouse of Fort de France. And the hope which filled all our hearts was not that of enjoying, at long last, an eatable meal, a bed with real sheets, or a night’s unbroken rests. No: these people who had been used, on land, to what the English call the ‘amenities of civilization’ had suffered more from the unavoidable filth of these conditions—aggravated as these were by great heat—than from hunger, or fatigue, or sleeplessness, or promiscuity, or other’s contempt.

Lévi-Strauss, pp. 27-28

It was not to be. Lévi-Strauss discovered that toilets were no less in existence in the capital than they were on their ship. The nightmare continued on Port de France, rendering him to remark that their sea voyage was an Eden compared to the military reception that they would receive. The garrison was overcome by paranoia about the Allies (enemies) despite not seeing them. Happily, this was only restricted to the morning; by afternoon, they were rambling around the city with Lévi-Strauss ruminating about the state of human society and war. He goes back into his memory bank of the time he almost lost all his research on his return trip back to France on account of stricter rules on artefact collection. Lucky for Lévi-Strauss, a foul up of bureaucratic proportions enabled him to haul his research back to France. Sad for Brazil. It is this same cock up that enabled him to keep his research materials in Customs in Martinique and receive them intact as he landed in Porto Rico under the U.S. flag. Lévi-Strauss returned to the Carribean and later on to his position to the University of Sao Paolo in Brazil.

Round Up

The twin readings of two different types of books—a diary and a standard second book counter the demand for scientific detachment for two different reasons. In Michel Leiris’s case, he was attempting to show a different type of ethnographic writing practice—what it is exactly is unsure for the moment—but one that is not hinged on the impersonal as a form of knowledge creation. Thus, his decision to publish an unadorned and unedited accounts from his series of diaries hopes to express some of his early ideas about anthropological practice and socio-historical context through unvarnished impressions as a way to reveal truth in the field.

In Claude Lévi-Strauss’s motivation, he is clearly aware that he is writing within the genre of the second book. The structure follows the travel book format though he resists the idea, but his tale of an ethnographic travel is one that explodes the myth of the pristine and isolated tribes. For the world is reeling in chaos and his opportunity came to take up a position at a newly opened sociology position at the University in Sao Paolo, making fieldwork among the Amazonian Indians, merely convenient and expedient (as is common in our field).

None of their encounters are isolated groups of people. In both their disparate works, they witness the old ways that are vulnerable to loss from conquest and rapid industrialisation. How knowledge and personal growth can best be described or recorded is the reason literature writing is a balm for these two authors.

Further Reading:

Leiris, Michel. 1992 [1939, 1946]. Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

Edited:

05/08/26 - Caption provenance for Michel Leiris found in Centre Pompidou and was taken by Man Ray!

The ongoing draft and outline of our project are available on our main page.

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If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

The Abyssinian Journey by Marcel Griaule

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1991. Les Flambeurs d’hommes. Paris: Gallimard

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1935. The Abyssinian Journey (trans. E.G. Rich) London: J. Miles

Beginning: My faulty impression | Chapter One| Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapters Four and Five | Chapter Six (Part 1) | Chapter Six (Part 2) | Chapter Seven and Eight

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

Postscript to Marcel Griaule

My initial impression of the travel book by Marcel Griaule, one of the first French ethnographers who went on field after training under Marcel Mauss, remains the same. With my contemporary sensibilities, I would not personally read this for literary entertainment. It is difficult to be enamoured of this work because he wrote in the third person and we know so little of his actual thoughts, ideas and analysis. Thus, it was difficult for me to find myself continually fully immersed into the journey. This was an example of the empirical descriptive mode of transmitting knowledge.

This writing experiment attempts to transmit authentic information and experience to the reader by way of minimal interpretation. The assumption is that the less interpretation there is, the more transparent it is for the reader to judge the events accordingly. Rather than an immersive experience, the reader is forced to use this distant lens to ascribe a greater weight of truth-telling because he can ultimately be the judge to what is happening. Therefore, Griaule need not cover up any of the harsh conditions on both sides of the field—he was the White Man, a person who sits atop the horse while meeting new interlocutors, a person who cannot stomach the stale bread that they had to eat daily or the slaves that even his Abyssinian contacts hired, how they treated them, or the fear and dislike of the subjects of the King himself because he taxed them too much. Those that simply see colonialism (with a big C) here miss the nuanced local, sometimes oppressive, realities happening on the ground, too. We read a lot of terrible conditions for the sake of research.

This writing style allows for interpretation and re-interpretation from his peers and contemporary readership as we shall see in the coming weeks.

It is unsurprising that the rhetoric that Griaule uses (or the impression that the translator made in this instance) to convince his reader of his ethnographic authority rests on recognisable Christian key themes of suffering (Cavalry) and eventual redemption as his opening and closing tropes.1 This is effective bread sandwich for the otherwise bland middle filling using ‘scientific’ empirical reporting. Remarkably, despite his interest in deep knowledge of the sacred, secret knowledge and ritual, spiritually is not a question he tackles. This is fairly common for those that investigate religion or beliefs. It is just much easier to account for what can be seen on the outside—performance and other observable patterns such as repetition. In doing so, spiritually is left for things and experiences outside of our governable senses—such as, why they never shot the hippopotamus during a hunt. If only they asked that question, perhaps we might get a different answer from all the priests and ritual specialists they talked with.

It took decades—until the end of Marcel Griaule’s life for him to pierce the veil of knowledge among the Dogon. His legacy is a step ladder moving from the external observations using his early experiences in Abyssinia to publish about masks and games as prelude to finally entering the interal world of the Dogon in Mali. His Abyssinia fieldwork in 1929 provided the foundation to the larger and extensive Mission Dakar-Djibouti field expedition that took two years between 1931-1933.

From the small to the grand, this extensive French expedition produced numerous contributions in multiple fields. But also fodder for criticism in Africanist and the discipline of anthropology until today. His work on The Abyssinian Journey will be overshadowed by his later works on the Dogon of Mali.

The Dogon of Bundiagara in Mali is a community nestled in the highlands with residential hamlets embracing the cliff sides. Griaule and all successive ethnographers were fascinated by the extensive use of masks for ritual and what’s behind them.

His interest in the Dogon follows his second fieldwork, the extensive Mission Dakar-Djibouti, with several other trips in 1935 to 1939 in Mali, Cameroun and Chad. After the War, several visits continued between 1946 to 1956. That wouldbe his final visit since he succumbed to his illness and died. His findings culminated in a summary of his understanding into the hidden knowledge of the Dogon in the work, Conversations with Ogotemmêli. All is not lost since he trained and collaborated on the next generation who continued and expanded other shared research interests and questions on other fields such as art, linguistics, archaeology, ethnobotany, and ethnozoology.2 A research vessel, a kind of mobile laboratory was even set up at the river of the Niger to continue investigations beginning 1955.

Griaule’s legacy may be mapped in two phases according to Africanist scholars—before his book on the Conversations with Ogotemmêli, originally published in 1938, and those that came after it. His early study on the Masks of Dogon characterise his first long fifteen years of research. This early phase was characterised by his descriptive writing of what informants call ‘simple knowledge’ cluster or la parole de face. His interview with the sage Ogotemmêli was characteristically different both in writing and the level of knowledge. Here, he sheds his academic descriptive approach to one that worked for him with communicating to his general reader—an informal tone, reminiscent of his book on the Abyssinian Journey. This approach is in contrast to its contents, what his primary informant agreed to share with him called la parole claire, or secret knowledge.

I think the interest is quite common among anthropologists at that time, a search for a pre-colonial African civilisation. African art has already achieved high culture status and admiration in France even before the fieldwork but has even soared higher with research into the Masks of Dogon. A longing to understand a deep culture beneath every day life is one he first explored in Abyssinia and continued in Mali with his search for a pre-colonial African philosophy foregrounding their civilisation. A belief system ordering every day life is reminiscent of Pierre Bourdieu’s search of the structure/practice undergirding Moroccan culture. In his work with Ogotemmêli, Griaule attempts to connect the Dogon cosmology and creation myths to cultural features such as textiles, basket weaving and to the larger institutions of kinship, family life and political life.3 It begins with the creation story, defined by the Nummo Pair creative spirits, much like water, as the source of life. It continues to the description of the celestial skies by way of a basket that describes the cosmic organisation.

Unlike his disengaged narration in Abyssinian Journey, I really quite find this translated work rather engaging with Ogotemmêli leading the charge and teaching Griaule about the secret ways. The tables of power seemingly has turned and Griaule seems to have become a student after all these years! Life in the village is interspersed with some quite interesting details about the creation of man by the Nummo as explained by the cowrie shells arranged in front of Griaule.

The Nummo’s womb had transformed a man’s bones into coloured stones…so as to form the outline of a skeleton laid out flat on its back in the place where the body has been [bottom of the tomb], with its head to the north.

Griaule, p. 50

Whithin this illustration, the order of the gender is defined as a relationship of position and location in which the males are the upper part and the females occupying the lower part (such as the forearm assigned to females and the males as the thighs).

This logic also follows the alternating physical composition of the fingers on the hand to structure the number the days of the week. Within this framework, Ogotemmêli’s creation myths also matches the Dogon’s eight ancestral families. The family ranking determines who the ideal marriage partners are. In what would be life’s symmetry, these matches total into the number 9 which is the rank of chieftainship.

Had I known that this work is not just about ritual chants or anything of that sort, I would have lapped this up.4 I am a sucker for ethnographic detail that describes mythmaking and its correspondence to culture and real life! This is why I was attracted to studying mortuary ritual practices, the last bastion before modernity and post-modernity completely erases unique beliefs. The work also includes information on basketry, weaving, house layout and construction, ritual and sacrifice, bodily composition, and it seems endless and I am just halfway on the book. Every anthropologist who go to the field dreams of a key informant who can spell out everything in a culture. This reads like that—a specialist who outlines every single cosmological relationship with every day life. I now understand why this work not only had a big impact on African scholarship but also on the general readership that continue to visit the Dogon area and build a tourism culture there.

Fake or Fraud?

It is this neat correspondence to cosmological order and culture that Dutch ethnologist, Walter E.A. van Beek picked apart. Van Beek was part of a multi-disciplinary team, focusing on ecology, who settled in the drier highlands. Although he attested that he did not set out to study the Dogon, it was inevitable that he had to deal with the previous work several decades after Griaule. His fieldwork in the late 70’s and 80’s was contemporaneous to the second generation of anthropologists continuing Griaule’s work such as Germaine Dieterlan. She published and co-authored with Griaule about a mythical trickster figure, the opposite of Nummo, called The Pale Fox.

A critique of a prominent dead anthropologist is sure to garner a measure of fame for any anthropologist (as one of the responses lobbied against him).5 Indeed, this has gone below my radar because this was largely limited to the African studies circle which should not have been the case. What Van Beek raises here is the discussion regarding the nature of evidence but also the methodology leading to knowledge in Anthropology. This is why it remains important to read these (the gossip/insider aspect is too tempting to ignore as well).

In a nutshell, Van Beek disproves most everything that you have read previosuly. It started out innocently curious exercise since Van Beek had always been interested in ritual. Thus, it didnt take long for him to try to track and verify Griaule’s findings. Without going to extensive details one by one, Van Beek found that none of his informants, priests, or villagers knew about the creation myths outlined by Ogotemmêli or any of its real-life counterparts or equivalences. He scoured other African cultures and found no correlation or similar data to match up to what the sage mentioned. Is it valid to have secret knowledge when the rest of the folks had no idea about what he was talking about? None of Ogotemmêli’s successors and descendants knew about the myths he mentioned except perhaps his circle that has long passed.

Could this be an elaborate hoax on Griaule? One story going around is that perhaps Ogotemmêli was playing a harmless game on him. However, Van Beek’s criticism comes at a time that Griaule is no longer alive to contest these accusations. No mention of journals or fieldnotes were made during the course of his criticism or responses so I do not know if those exist to corroborate or refute. It seems the predominant appraisal is that Griaule was extrapolating his own knowledge and understanding such as (especially when it came to naming and describing Sirius star sigu tolo or pô tolo, and the associated star companions èmè ya tolo). Van Beek argues that no one outside of Griaule’s informants know about this or its relevance to daily life. According to Van Beek his informants attest that if these are relevant, it is “tèm” or that everybody knows about it. The reason for secrecy, he argues, is less about exclusivity of knowledge but rather of shame, accusations of witchcraft and sorcery. The astronomy misdetail is one such discrepancy he highlights. Though the creator spirit Nommo exist, the other god figures were missing. There are a lot of details Van Beek raised but you get the gist.

My main point here is that, just like some of the responses pointed out, Van Beek is several decades too late (50 years) to ask Griaule. It was not clear what the responses of the Griaule school since Van Beek did have a French translation and sent it to Dieterlan and was available to be read by other colleagues who have since retired. From what Van Beek shared, none of them contradicted his findings but he is expecting them to defend Griaule’s data. Jacky Bouju of University in Provence Aix-Marseille agreed with Van Beek’s position and positions this work in its extreme as “intercultural fictions”, a literary work.

What remains interesting are the responses from prominent people in the field that highlight problems in methodology.

• What could be the potential methods that can be used to disprove Griaule taking into account historical changes, different informants, villages, and time? (Mary Douglas, E. Redaux, Claude Meillassoux)

  • why did Van Beek not use the two films available since 1938 (au pays Dogon and sous les masques noirs) for verification, authenticity, or objectivity?

  • why did Van Beek not clearly state his methods? such as the life histories of his informants?

• Is this an exercise in the question of truth or trust? (Ian Crawford)

• What about the work of other anthropologists and linguists following Griaule such as Calame-Griaule on linguistics, Le Boeuf’s body-house connection, Paulme’s ethnography? or even Daniel Forde organising workshops on the topic? (Mary Douglas)

• How do we separate Ogotemmêli from the anthropologist himself? (Claude Meillassoux)

The best take that I have read so far was from another African scholar, Andrew Apter who had a much more nuanced position. He contradicted a predominant view that much of Griaule’s observations did not exist or has ever existed in Dogon. He argues that secret knowledge la parole claire is not a fixed set of knowledge but one that was fluid. This was what he has seen among the Yoruba in Nigeria similar to the Dogon in which they had secret knowledge. Rather than pierce it, Apter opted to study the surrounding mechanisms that maintain the secrecy. The result is that he started getting multiple responses ranging from surface level interpretation to symbols (e.g. blessings) to forbidden themes (e.g. division or bloodshed) relevant especially to royal political institutions and ritual practice. This means that secret knowledge must change as local relations also change. It would not be a surprise that Van Beek never found the same corpus of knowledge 50 years ago.

Aftermath

Like a lot of these debates, these questions remain unanswered in Anthropology more generally, especially to specific methods on evaluating work decades after. I thoroughly enjoyed one great example that this was done on the Nuer of Sudan. Dr. Sharon E. Hutchinson revisited the research done by E. Evans-Pritchard but the key differences include not recovering or reconstructing a pristine culture untouched by the colonial administration as was the typical approach of anthropologists quickly documenting a disappearing way of life. This meant that Hutchinson included the realities of inter-cultural war, the presence of guns, child soldiers, the pressures of the nation-state, and the commodification of their valued cows. I read her ethnography, Nuer Dilemmas, for pleasure almost twenty years ago and it has stayed with me because it was so good. It doesn’t completely discount Pritchard’s work but paves the way of seeing the Nuer without filters. There is value in keeping both types of records in conversation with each other.

Just because Van Beek did not see these realities on the ground meant that as Apter argues, secret knowledge change as the social conditions shift. Reading more and more of Griaule’s other works demonstrates how a historical record of an older way of life remains valuable for critique but also a description of a way of life that may no longer be in practice today. Typically, anthropologists admonish that no culture really dies because they adapt. Traditions still die and practices are forgotten. It is part of the job of an anthropologist to document those as closely as possible with the flaws of the observer and observed with the clarity necessary for any judgement to be given.

Round Up

The impact of Marcel Griaule on anthropology and African scholarship begins from The Abyssinian Journey. This was our first peak into how he approaches research and writing. The explorer/hero persona he wishes to convey are genre specific that not just establishes his authority but also initiates the reader into another travel genre that is ethnographic. He uses the suffering trope of a hero to communicate not just his physical survival but also the success of a science/exploratory enterprise.

This was essential to fund the grander two year Mission Dakar-Djibouti in 1931-1933 that began the long commitment of Marcel Griaule to the Dogon of Mali. His work on Ogotemmêli capped his dedication to unlock the secret knowledge and cosmology of the Dogon. This is where his legacy truly shines by the amount of criticism and review that continues up until today. The questions critics raise haunt the field of anthropology and deserve further discussion.

Further Reading:

Apter, A. (2005). Griaule’s Legacy: Rethinking “la parole claire” in Dogon Studies (L’héritage de Griaule: repenser la Parole claire dans les études dogon). Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 45(177), 95–130. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4393464

Borofsky, R. (1997). Cook, Lono, Obeyesekere, and Sahlins: CA* Forum on Theory in Anthropology. Current Anthropology, 38(2), 255-282. (overview of the debate on interpreting the historical figure of Captain Cook and re-reading the archives)

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1972 [1977]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Ferguson, R. B. (2015). History, explanation, and war among the Yanomami: A response to Chagnon’s Noble Savages. Anthropological Theory, 15(4), 377-406. (This is one of many responses to Chagnon which is typical of the anthropologist’s position to cultural representation.)

Griaule, Marcel. 1938 [1948]. Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press (a fun informal and easy read of cosmology with daily life)

Hutchinson, Sharon E. 1996. Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State. Berkeley: University of California Press (highly recommended for pleasure reading)

Shankman, Paul. 2009. The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press (my first encounter to the harsh criticism against Mead that deserves to be read)

Van Beek, Walter E.A., Bedaux, R. M. A., Blier, S. P., Bouju, J., Crawford, P. I., Douglas, M., Lane, P., & Meillassoux, C. (1991). Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule [and Comments and Replies]. Current Anthropology, 32(2), 139–167. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743641

The ongoing draft and outline of our project are available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

The Abyssinian Journey by Marcel Griaule

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1991. Les Flambeurs d’hommes. Paris: Gallimard

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1935. The Abyssinian Journey (trans. E.G. Rich) London: J. Miles

Beginning: My faulty impression | Chapter One| Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapters Four and Five | Chapter Six (Part 1) | Chapter Six (Part 2)

Chapter Seven + Chapter Eight

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

Dear Readers,

It is never a popular to review in-depth any book. The downward trajectory of readers statistics follow what we already know from any TV series of any kind—the numbers fall off a cliff. I am sharing out loud what Iam seeing. Hence, we already know why the churn is so high and so many of our favourite series are cancelled, just like that.

Yet, if you are continuing to read this, I appreciate your commitment and patience. I am learning just as much as you are about a country I hardly know, much less its past. This is the reality of learning; none of it might be flashy or make sense now, but the pay off is down the line. I am almost sure all the time.

We´re halfway to the Lenten season marking 25 more days before Palm Sunday and Easter. I am getting used to the meatless one meal a day though one still struggles daily. That is the way.

Onward,

Melanie

Life in Addiet, Gojjam Country is working out nicely for French ethnographer, Marcel Griaule and his colleague, Marcel Larget. The year is 1929 and Griaule is beginning the French fieldwork tradition in anthropology. Once merely a rational project, collections are now starting to be animated from its context in the field. Their connection to the governor Ras Hailou of Gojjam Country in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) has paid off with access to court priests, painters, artists, and doctors who offered them information. They are in the moment of settlement, thus, the novel becomes ethnographic, like what we saw in an eerie moment of execution in the princely court.

Riding to Lake Tana

It does not suffice for the reader of any novel to simply stay under the canvas of the tent, or for Griaule to do so. Hence, the expedition continues to look for other examples of churches elsewhere and drawings found in them. They were thwarted from visiting Bégamder since Hailou warned them that the governor there mistreated two European diplomats and their wives. Instead, Hailou prepared a light caraven for them to visit Lake Tana.

They moved first to Abbaye d´Eau, then to a place with no water source before reaching Gong-Michel. It is here that we read of an account of the men transferring charcoal tracing from a deteriorating church-temple for their collection. Though the resident resisted it, it was only through the authority of the Ras Hailou through his chamberlain Mon Soleil that they relented. Such is the nature of their collection disclosed in these pages.

As I sit here beside my picture window, I feel the afternoon heat of the sun strike me and I could feel the desert heat that Griaule´s expedition undergoes especially as they stop in the oasis as they head north.

As happens every time when one has toiled for days in waterless and joyless districts, the immediate borders of the banks seemed a paradise of freshness, verdure and the like…anyone can realise them by walking in the dunes for a week, under a sun as heavy as a rock, and coming out suddenly on an oasis.

Griaule, p. 182

They have arrived at Lake Tana. At Gong-Michel, water was drawn by lying on rocks on your side and stretching your arm inside a deep hole with a jar to draw out the water. Not so at Lake Tana, you would have to wade until it reached your chest to draw water. What Griaule found along the shore was disgusting.

Walking along this hospitable shore, it was found to be full of filth; the lake also was covered with refuse of all sorts, human and otherwise, with swollen bodies of small mammals and birds, rushes and limp flowers. It was a collection of sewage. The women went to draw water beyond this latrine thirty meters broad which was a frieze along the banks. The laziest stayed near the bank, pushed aside the putrefying stuff and plunged the jar.

The Tana is the reservoir of the Nile, its water tank and cesspool. There one begins to comprehend the mystery of the fecundation of the whole Egyptian system by the rise of the river.

Griaule, p. 182-183

This disabuses the reader from imagining a pristine lake. The locals living in the area are not naturally environmental and problems plague a common resource such as the source of the Nile.

Eaters of the Hippos

After pitching their tent at the mouth of river, Griaule and his expedition encountered the Wohitos, also speaking Amharic, who have come, not on the behest of the royal chamberlain Mon Soleil or Ras Hailou but a chance encounter. The Wohitos came to hunt hippopotamuses on the river using a gun but also paralysing them with poisoned arrows. However, it takes many arrows and a long wait, sometimes days or nights to find a wounded beast by the river beds. Hence, the preference for the gun.

Like any good researcher, Griaule was interested to learn more about how this was done. Thus, he arranged for the next morning a trip aboard two reed boats (tanqwa) which Griaule himself cleaned it to ensure that the boat was of sound quality before boarding it. One cannot be too sure!

It was neither a canoe nor a raft, but a careful assemblage of dry reeds, which overlapped each other. The two ends were held by lashings of palm fibre,but while the bow ended in a sort of roll which slid along on the level of the water, the stern turned up vertically.

Griaule, p. 185

This watercraft measures five yards and twenty inches wide at its bulkiest part. For a chase, they used a narrower craft than this. With an oarman in the bow and another on the stern, Griaule and Larget sat at the middle and sailed through the gulf of the Bord du Lackuntile they entered a narrow channel bounded by thick vegetation. They moved slowly through the network of canals until they reached clumbs of papyrus and hipopotamus grass. The dung of the hippos looked like anthills. They reached the island called the Head of the Nile and this was the junction in which the canals turned into rapids. They carried the tanqwas on their heads until they found a gentler current. Once they reached the rocky inlets, the landscape was filled with a multitude of waterfowls.

After selecting an area, the Wohito became motionless and started to sing in the extinct Wohito language, naming the special parts of the hippopotamus. He was convinced of its efficacy and tapped their reed poles to check that nothing was underneath them to capsize them.

Suddenly, a hundred yards away, six spots were sighted and it raised to become a whole head then quickly disappeared. At fifty yards, there were eight hippopotamus heads appeared in a line to the hunters.

There are three males and five females. One is with young; three small ones are coming behind.

The singer enthusiastically sang expecting the bounty of meat for the winter. The hippos moved closer at twenty yards, displaying their open Yet, Griaule and Larget did not shoot and neither did the Wohitos. They were supernatural beings, remarked the Wohitos. They came so near because they were drawn to the music of their fathers, they intoned.

No hippopotamus was killed.

I rank the hippopotamus hunt as the second most entertaining event in this entire book. The next few events find the expedition visiting churches, documenting the paintings and visiting other neighbourhood localities.

It is clear that nothing else is happening. Griaule and Larget are ready to go home. Food is one indication that you have had it.

Some people get used to native cooking; to the rancid cakes, the excess of pimiento, to the smoky smell and the unspeakable butter. Others make loyal attempts, craning their necks at the passage of the bowl of food, cleverly spacing out mouthfuls and ending sooner or later by vomiting out the whole.

The two travellers belonged to the latter category.

Everyone to his taste.

Griaule, p. 213

Aside from the food, money was depleted. The expedition had spent a total of fifteen hundred francs on food and they withheld further outlay for future expenses. France had also not received any news from the expedition for four months. It the Prince who offered a caravan with guards and muleteers. Griaule felt his gifts cancelled out the cost of the court´s outlay and so he accepted. So they trudged back to Addis-Ababa, with a horse and mules dying along the way in their twentieth day marching back.

The Departure Trope

It was a grand send-off with the Prince summoning himself on a white mule and thousands at his behest. Before departure, he asked Griaule to send a letter to Minister Poincare and a gold cup which has not been made. This meant that couriers would accompany the already burgeoning mass of people with them. Their departure is a grand exit full of gifts of animals for the museum and for Griaule. The trumpet sounded their departure and finally the crowd receded as the expedition left Addiet on to Addis Ababa.

The journey is a bookend to the suffering at the beginning of the trip—sixteen fully loaded mules delivering the triumph of the research; the final meals of potatoes that were replaced by the detested cabbage. The expedition was shedding guards and animals with the chamberlain Mon-Soleil instructing the peasant how to care for a dying mule. Griaule was annoyed as to include it in his entry.

It was as if the animals were also tired, as wounds stink from the packs and the lashings around their girths and pustules swelling. The jackals keep close smelling the mules and howling by day and night. They have not crossed the Nile and the mules were weakening. Griaule was hungry and dreaming of food. No grass or barley and no fowl for the people. They had to unpack and repack them as the mules climbed the hills. It was desperate until locusts attacked and covered the plain into a buzzing black blanket. Now the crew had snacks, even the monkeys feasted. But it came too late for the eagles, the partridge, the toucan, even the monkeys from indigestion. Griaule and Larget could no longer keep the native cakes in their stomachs. They still had a hundred and five or ten kilometres more from the field of Ellelle to Addis.

The last stage involved Griaule walking beside the animals and ensuring that basketry items destined for the Trocadero would reach home. As they approached nearer and nearer to the capital, Griaule gained more and more energy and joy and even hallucinating a French tart from the sun at the plateau. They were going at an average speed of eight kilometers an hour. They encountered a tornado, light rain and rested at Souloulta. Griaule needed to lie on his back to ease the sun burn. No drinkable water after a storm, turning a brook yellow. At least it was the late afternoon with the sun waning but the approaching night dangerous from the hyenas at a distance.

At the final stages, they were delusional from hunger, exhaustion, and dreams of food.

The two men (Kabbada, Griaule´s Mohammedan guard accompanying him) awaited a miracle. At heart one is always waiting for a miracle. One is always thinking that he is going to turn the corner of the road and enter a life of splendour and ease. Great fatigue and great hunger resemble each other as sisters with intoxication by alcohol, as far as their influence on the imagination in the beginning is concerned.

Griaule, p. 244

They encountered two travelers and traded money for their two mules. Initially frightened, they scrambled to pick up the coins tossed on the ground. Within an hour´s travel to the hill of Entoto, the ascent was arduous and the descent was equally interminable.

Suddenly, lights flashed before them, like Jesus Christ.

Griaule saw a reddish brown beard—saved by the French Legation.

The traveller went on his way and reached the Legation. They took him from the saddle, undressed him, cut off his boots from his feet stuck to the leather with blood, and put him into a hot bath, where he fainted, with the idea that he was no longer of any importance.

Then he went to the table. He emptied a tureen of soup and was brought other things. And bread! Fresh bread, well raised, bread for a king, the bread of a dream, impossible bread.

Then, still with that idea that it had absolutely no sort of importance, he wept before the servants.

Griaule, p. 246

Apparently, Griaule and his guard went ahead and fresh mules were sent to the expedition. It would be four days later that Larget descended the hill of Entoto. Only two of the mules survived from the original sixteen. Larget arrived with a monkey in his pocket surrounded by servants. He tipped his hat to Griaule, who responded in kind. At last, it was the end of their campaign.

The tension broke with a trumpet blasting sounds of joy at the return. Kabbada shouts for joy.

And so Griaule writes a dramatic finish, even with more flair than when he started at the crossing of the Nile. He borrows from Cavalry, at near death and starvation towards the finish. Half dead he reached the Legation and was revived by the comforts of Western life—a warm bath, soup, and real bread. It drove an adult man to tears. I am unsure whether Griaule exaggerated his account because Larget seemed fine upon his return. He could be describing his inner turmoil and death. Nevertheless, the end marks the creation of heroes who will cross again the width of Africa from Dakar to Djibouti in 1931 told in our next French work, Phantom of Africa by Michel Leiris.

Round Up

The final chapters of Marcel Griaule´s account highlights one last interesting ethonographic encounter with the Wohitos, the eaters of hippopotamus. In contrast to their objective of visiting churches and collecting rubbings of church art and drawings, they make a supernatural encounter in the wild. A song summons the hippos close and yet the Europeans and the Wohitos did not kill them. Something moved them and will remain unexplained. It is uncanny that they attribute the spiritual in nature but never in their numerous visits in churches. Not once.

The departure trope provides an appropriate heightened capstone for the expedition—much suffering for the cause of science, yet triumphant in the end. Despite the deaths and near starvation, the fieldwork proved to be fruitful and signalled the success of the ethnographic project for France and anthropology. There are precious items collected for research and display. They remain difficult to digitally access but they are there in the archives.

This account demonstrates what an ethnographic project looks like without any interpretation by Griaule. It was a notation of facts, though filtered, the reader still does not grasp what was truly happening. Without the insight of the researcher, we the reader only sees a description but never the meaning. An objective reality does not exist and knowledge suffers as a result.

Further Reading:

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Engelke, Matthew. 2008. The Objects of Evidence. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14: S1-S21. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00489.x (click the title to read the full paper on JSTOR)

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press (see Chapter Three)

Kuipers, Joel. 2013. Evidence and Authority in Ethnographic and Linguistic Perspective. Annual Review of Anthropology. 42:399-413. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145615 (open access)

The ongoing draft and outline of our project are available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

The Abyssinian Journey by Marcel Griaule

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1991. Les Flambeurs d’hommes. Paris: Gallimard

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1935. The Abyssinian Journey (trans. E.G. Rich) London: J. Miles

Beginning: My faulty impression | Chapter One| Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapters Four and Five | Chapter Six (Part 1)

Chapter Six (Part 2)

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

The court of the Prince, son of the governor Ras Hailou of Gojjam Country in Abyssinia (Ethiopia), is all summoned.1 The Dwarf Court of Justice is what I call the importance of the sacred in matters of adjudication in Gojjam. The figure of the dwarf or the court jester as the literal seat in the proceedings manifests the divine and material power of the Prince.

Every travel account needs a sensational account. After all, the public must buy books. And this is Marcel Griaule’s first fieldwork whale. Now, we are ready to begin.

The Prisoner’s Examination

The criminal, no longer assumed to be innocent in this account, after all, he was caught red-handed shooting at the Prince and falling into the bosom of the tree he was atop. Unsurprisingly, he received heavy blows when he was pushed towards the dais of the Prince.

The man bore a heavy stone on his neck; he had chains on his wrists, which joined, on the one hand, an iron collar, and, onthe other, rings on his feet which were bound together by a single link. He bent towards the bed the austerely solemn head of the Jew of the Passion; his head was haloed with long crisp hair dressed straight on his head in the ancient mode of true warriors and hunters. He had the bright complexion which the Abyssinians call red.

Griaule, p. 158

The stream of spectators at times struck the prisoner, who had to jump forward in order not to fall. Slowly, with short steps which made the rivets rattle, as he approached the Prince. The crowd surged to ogle, breaking the reed doors and tearing a folding door loose. Griaule saw a “white crowd like a raft in the sea.” The hall was hushed.

The examination was conducted by a magistrate but the prisoner would only look at the Prince as he responded.

Who are you?

Dog!

Whose son are you?

Dog!

Where do you come from?

Dog!

And on and on, the prisoner continued to respond with ‘dog’ as answers as he faced only the Prince. The guards forced him to bend his neck.

By the Trinity, stop your abuse and answer!

Dog!

Driven by frustration, the magistrate “gasped for breath and no longer closed his mouth after a question.” It was into this that the prisoner spat into the magistrate’s mouth before he looked the Prince. The magistrate intoned

Slayer of Kings! Disturber of customs! You have broken the luck of the country!

Dog!

And so the questioning continued with no answers. Griaule could not track what was happening as the prisoner spat sideways, his answers whispered, then violently retorted, until his resignation to his fate. To which he answered his final, “dog!” before capitulating to the process.

You shall have my soul, said the accused gently.

And so the useless dance between the magistrate and prisoner continued with Griaule describing the scene as one of a high-strung magistrate and a placid criminal. The roles were now reversed.

The crowd thought the magistrate silly while the elders, wrote Griaule, couldn’t help but wonder how the head of the prisoner still remained. In the meantime, there’s a lot of drama among the crowd, with one almost falling atop a pile of bones, as the people occupied all the spots to view and hear the spectacle.

The magistrate, we now understand is an orator of magnitude. The adolescents were used to poetry from the court. The military was used to the merriment and jokes of the violin players. This time they were floored. Perhaps it was the “archaic and pedantic forms of the language” or the “internal plurals, unusual feminines and frequentives.” On top of this, the praise to the Prince, everyone knew was just skillful calculation on his part. It all ends with his final sentencing,

Death by fire, in muslin.

Death Watch

The sentence was unusual. It is usually only given to those who committed regicide. The eunuchs stopped the noise. The Prince was not yet the king and the kung was not dead. The Queen Mother tried to dissuade her son the previous night against this sentence that only his father could receive. Yet, the Prince refused to budge from his decision—I shall be king one day, he replied. And so everyone else around them, the bakers, the guards, and the servants all deigned to ignore the conversation.

The final sentence was not a surprise. The ordainer already prepared the braziers in the “hot house,” a hut with a low opening used by the Prince during colder winter mornings. There, a large kettle is boiling a malodorous liquid stirred by two Goum slaves wearing corded white cotten around their loins. They were stirring in bright yellow wax, perhaps beeswax, as honey dripped. Occasionally, they licked their fingers. Finally, they unspooled thin muslin cloths, white almost cheesecloth or drape quality, into the kettle to have the wax set on it. This will be the muslin that would be wrapped around the prisoner.

The prisoner, fully naked, was knocked out cold as the six eunuchs prepared the condemmed man.

With the muslin, from which scales of wax still dripped, they wrapped both legs separately, being careful to leave the top of the mid-thigh free. In this way they avoided for the patient the unbearable pain which would have prevented his holding himself erect…The body was less easy to dress; it had to be raised every time so as to pass the ball around…for only the eyes and nose in his face were free; the rest of the head had disappeared under several layers of the bands…The hollow of the neck had been entirely filled, and the rolls went around the trunk, imprisoning the arms in the mass…They placed him upright, and he remained in that position.

Griaule, p. 166

Griaule likened this to a suit of armour in the Middle Ages or an armless Michelin man. They marched him as the prisoner broke the rolls by his knees. At the cenre of the counicl stood the Prince surrounded by his dignitaries. The prisoner stood before the Prince and behind him is a large circle of fire lighted by cedar. The people smelled the perfume of honey from the human candle.

Heat, the Prince shouted.

Two eunuchs shoved the man into the poor man’s fire and stepped away to watch. One of the Whites (I am unsure whether it is Griaule or his colleague Marcel Larget) fainted at the sight. Everyone else—the Prince, the dignitaries, Wouddie, the dwarf, breathed short breaths through their mouths.

Griaule described the layers of smell and sound in the hall. Though he was enmeshed in honey, Griaule knew that this was the poorer quality of honey, “thrown regretfully by the tax into the government jars” smelling of eucalyptus and euphorbia-candelabra. It smells of burnt honey. Still, it is honey, he attested, gathered from the warmer valleys between sycamore trees. It contrasts with the stench of sweat and rancid butter applied on the hair of the people. You can hear the criminal shriek in spite of the gag sounding like hyenas feasting on the carcass. The honoured guards surrounding the fire poked him, as a precaution, with their lances to keep him in the pyre. Both shouting and competing, resulting in canceling out the noise. In the end, the smell turned into what Griaule describes as a “peaceful odour of a church where a hundred women have offered virgin wax candles.” But without any redemption. This eventually will be replaced with the smell of roasted meat, hence the baying of the dogs. It made Griaule think of “the great feasts of meat around the fires of St. John.”

Spectacle of Lies or Truth

There’s something about the execution that pricks the mob. The guards and spectators were feverish with battle, honouring the Prince and the crowd jostling to view the macabre display of dying and death.

The crowd had become one group. They bruised the feet with unintentional blows of the butt and might have done it intentionally and no one would have said anything. Everyone was beside himself. The themes shouted rose on a foundation of murmurs which breathed impatience, rancour, and the grudges of a whole unlucky people; everyone wanted to be in the centre and go around that glorified and still-smoking corpse.

Griaule, p. 173

And so in the final fumes of the burning, functionaries displayed their allegiance to the Prince, hoping to catch his attention. The loudest praise was obviously performance.

Writing this as if it is true, to the extent that this happened, maybe not in Griaule’s time, this incident would probably sear into the eyes of the French reader. It has been a long time since France had a public execution. Michel Foucault in his Discipline and Punish, a study on penal power of the state, traced the outlaw of public executions on April 1848. That was the last time that public punishment was made visible to the public. This gaze has since been transferred to the trial. Foucault argues that in the concealment of the actual sentencing, the state washes itself clean of the penalty of justice and criminality by condemming man. Thus, it is the reverse, by making it very public and celebrated that power (and brutality) is established with the reigning monarch.

It is unsurprising that Griaule chose to include this account despite its questionable provenance. He ultimately borrows what power and shock that it produces to not just record the details of the justice system but also to garner attention to the research project. Perhaps, Vincent Debane, in his book Far Afield, was correct. It is so mundane out in the field that it is almost necessary to include such a tale.

Round Up

The most impressive piece here is the three layers of smell of death by fire. It is a pretty good use of the senses to record the unfolding drama. Of course, I am skating around the horrible corporal punishment of a human. Though convicted of an actual crime, it still is shocking to witness a sentence we all clamour for—death to a fellow man.

Punishment’s stark description whets the appetite for the macabre by the reading public. I can tell you going through most of the chapters—nothing is happening. Without this, the entire novel is pretty bland unless you are interested in Abyssinia. In all my readings, I had never before encountered a similar account. Hence, it is unsurprising that this was questioned for its veracity. Like the modern tabloids, the travel account requires a jolt for its readers. And we all secretly relish reading true crime and horror. I know I am. Travel accounts are no different. Selling literary travel books require a sensation. This is it. Can you smell the honey?

Further Reading:

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Engelke, Matthew. 2008. The Objects of Evidence. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14: S1-S21. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00489.x (click the title to read the full paper on JSTOR)

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press (see Chapter Three)

Foucault, Michel. 1977 [1995]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Translated by Alan Sheridan). New York: Random House

Kuipers, Joel. 2013. Evidence and Authority in Ethnographic and Linguistic Perspective. Annual Review of Anthropology. 42:399-413. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145615 (open access)

The ongoing draft and outline of our project are available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

The Abyssinian Journey by Marcel Griaule

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1991. Les Flambeurs d’hommes. Paris: Gallimard

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1935. The Abyssinian Journey (trans. E.G. Rich) London: J. Miles

Beginning: My faulty impression | Chapter One| Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapters Four and Five

Chapter Six

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

This is the controversial truth chapter that French anthropology researcher, Vincent Debane, railed against Marcel Griaule. Debane mentioned that Chapter Six, Death in Muslin did not happen. Well, in my first post on Abyssinia, I pointed out that this incident did not happen during Griaule’s trip. It seems that this story was recounted of an actual incident based on Jacques Mercier’s, fellow contemporary French anthropologist of Ethiopia, investigation into Griaule’s research. In the footnote to Far Afield, Debane wrote that Mercier attested that historians accepted the truth of the incident and it was attributed to Menelik1 and how he punished a rebel Bezzabeh.

As Debane argues, since nothing seems to happen in the field, this chapter gives you a big splash of an incident in an otherwise mundane situation. Plus, the readers lapped this up, this was serialised in the public press as part of the book promotion.

What is this incident?

One of the hallmarks of a travel account are some lurid tales of fantasy: of cannibalism, crime, or the weird. This classifies as one. It reminds us that this is not just a scientific project by Marcel Griaule and Marcel Larget, but also a self awareness to the French public’s interests and for the expedition’s future funding.

Chapter Six is the last account of field research (settlement) in Gojjam country, Abyssinia. In the remaining chapters, the expedition slowly travels back to Addis Ababa to conclude their journey. This makes the chapter the significant penultimate account of court life in Gojjam. It is a display of what constitutes as justice and the ceremonies of punishment to crime. Contrary to what Debane and Mercier have shared about the truth of this incident, in the monograph, it is written as if it was an eyewitness account. The characters from the ceremonial feast return here.

Inciting Incident

We find ourselves back inside the palace in Addiet. Griaule describes a small palace, an outcome of improper construction by the peasants instead of the governor’s masons. It was something bizarre because this was the provisional capital and where power was exercised, observes Griaule.

Despite this size, hundreds of men with arms flooded the palace grounds alongside peasants garbed in white cotton togas. Everyone was there on the second day to witness the sentencing of a man who fired at the Prince, the son of the governor, Ras Hailou. Previously, the Prince was out in the yard of the storehouses with the dignitaries and workers.

Favourites on foot sustained his thighs and passed their arms behind his loins, with their faces turned towards the sky so as the better to follow his words. All seemed taking nonchalant poses while they relieved him of his own weight. The umbrella-carrier achieved unbelievable feats of balance, as he was nearly always separated from his master by petitioners.

Griaule, p. 148

Suddenly, a shot rang out from the top of the trunk of a tree that the cortege was passing.

It detached some bells from the collar of the princely mule, rubbed the pubis of a favourite, buried itself in the loins of the buckle-bearer, came out and pierced the clay on the level with his foot.

Griaule, p. 149

The guards responded with a volley of shots that felled a monkey and the guard who both dropped into the well of the hollow trunk, screaming, “by my death! by my death! by my death!” Groups of men were trying to climb the try and fish the perpetrator from the hollowed trunk. They were figuring out how to get the man out.

Meanwhile, the Prince, closely surrounded by his courtiers and faithful, “silently and with all the speed” return to the palace. He traveled by the shortest route with a troop of soldiers from Tigre which were the source of jealousy by the Gojjamites.

The Dwarf: the stool of justice

The next day we find the court dwarf, Wouddie, rushing to attend the proceedings.

Taking the short cut by the church, the governor’s dwarf went to the palace of the provisional capital; he passed over the loose stones of the still practicable fords, waving his short arms to keep his balance. He was followed by a servant who carried his rich apparel in an ox-hideand sheltered his hair under a flap of his toga.

Griaule, p. 153

Even more humiliating, he had to wait for his servant to catch up so he can cross the ford at Chigaz. Only until he was carried on the shoulders was he able to continue. Though he was diminuitive, those around him in the palace accorded a degree of caution and awe. Wouddie held a baton taller than himself while his hand pointing on the ground looked ridiculous.

No one thought of smiling at this for no one knows what sorcery souls enveloped in such a body conceal.

In the scale of human values the dwarf is the first corporeal manifestation of the passage from the invisible to the ordinary world; princes are well aware of this, so they cover the little men with honours and use them in the execution of their evil designs.

Griaule, p. 154

Wouddie is important in the ceremonial execution of the accused. Not only they play the court jester, the Prince dispenses justice literally at their head. Wouddie entered the council hall with a circular wall and pointed roof with two niches opposite each other. There were two beds within one of the niches: one lower one in front of the higher one designated for the Prince. The area was decorated with wollen rugs and imported embroidered cushions.

The crowd slowly massed the hall lighted with only candles and oil lamps. Wouddie had to jostle to get through, “make room…make way…pray…wider!” He was hustled through and berated for being tardy eventhough the bed of the Prince was still empty. Upon reaching the ‘throne, ’

With furtive gestures he assumed the silk smock with its green and white stripes, and the red cloak chasuble with gilt edges and flaps which fell down on his belly like the bosons of a woman of fifteen pregnancies.

Griaule, p. 156

Once settled, he called the Head of the Treasury, Gabra Kidane, much to the latter’s annoyance, for he was busy on account of the use of precious objects for the ceremony.

Where is it? cried Wouddie

Gabra Kidane advanced towards bed without answering, inserted his staff in a crack in the leather strips and stuck with the stock on an invisible lump which gave out a hollow sound. Without saying a word Wouddie sank down again and found what he was seeking.

It was the golden chair! It was a stool with gilded four legs and a hollowed out seat. This was where kings and all his predecessors sat to judge the criminal. Wouddie sat waiting.

Wouddie would not have long to wait. The swish of togas could be heard behind the beds. These were the heads of the guards of eunuchs “with their hair dressed high spread out in vacant places.” They were displays of authority with pufffed chests and lightly greased chins and necks. Everyone knew they aimed well and fired easily so no one sought to criticise them.

Enter the Prince after them. He was heavy, tall, both hands on the arms of his men. His black cape wide open revealing the red lining. He looked like the bateleur eagle, writes Griaule.

The Prince climbed on the lower bed and sat in the chair, which sank down on the dwarf’s skull. (The Prince is literally sitting on top of him!) Now justice is ready to be served.

Part 2: Next Week

Round Up

Disputes around the veracity of this chapter does not detract from the detailed account of the dispensation of justice. From among his chapters, this and the ceremonial feast constitute the only interesting account in his expedition. I am not surprised if Griaule, indeed, had to include this story to spice things up a bit.

What a story it was.

We’re presented with an unclear source of the hullaballoo with a guard atop a tree shooting at the Prince, but missing him. He fell and would soon be in the hands of the court. In the meantime, it appears that justice sits atop the golden stool literally on the court dwarf Wouddie. Though little is explained in the monograph, the figure of the dwarf is supernatural and endows the ceremonial dispensation with authority.

I cannot get my head wrapped around the dwarf carrying the entire scales of justice literally on his head! Sit on that for a while.

Further Reading:

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Engelke, Matthew. 2008. The Objects of Evidence. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14: S1-S21. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00489.x (click the title to read the full paper on JSTOR)

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press (see Chapter Three)

Kuipers, Joel. 2013. Evidence and Authority in Ethnographic and Linguistic Perspective. Annual Review of Anthropology. 42:399-413. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145615 (open access)

The ongoing draft and outline of our project are available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

The Abyssinian Journey by Marcel Griaule

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1991. Les Flambeurs d’hommes. Paris: Gallimard

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1935. The Abyssinian Journey (trans. E.G. Rich) London: J. Miles

Beginning: My faulty impression | Chapter One| Chapter Two | Chapter Three

Chapters Four and Five

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

Our idea of evidence and truth as objective or some disembodied thing is not the same in anthropology. Much of writing and ethnography is embodied for both the researcher and the informant. Hence, evidence is intimately inscribed into the modes of authority of the bodies and identities of these individuals. It is useful to know this so we understand why Marcel Griaule, with forty mules and untold group of carriers, trudge for months to find the Ras Hailou, the governor. For it is with him that sole political and social authority rests and thereby access to what Griaule believes is the fountain of concealed knowledge in Abyssinia.

Recap

Last week, we were finally treated to an account of ethnographic holism as a result of finally pausing from the movement expected in a travel account. Holism is when we get a total picture of a culture based on disparate elements such as accounts of belief systems, types of decoration, dietary preferences, entertainment, food and other impressions from the travel, like the churches and priests previously encountered. We finally got an impression of Abyssinia's culture through its ceremonial feast. This place north was the culmination of Marcel Griaule and his forty mule expedition’s travel from Abbaye-de-Marc or Däbrä Marḳos, the capital of Gojam Country in Abyssinia, to pass Lake Tana and finally meet Ras Hailou, the governor.

Settlement and Field Routines

The travel account finally becomes a brief account of his field research. Though he was clearly feted as an honoured guest and deserved a large banquet from Ras Hailou, he resided outside of the palace grounds in a campground.

At last, we have a pause in movement and settlement begins as Griaule proceeds to establish his routine. They wake at dawn to study churches and investigate the clergy and finish by noon and avoid the burning sun. Their afternoon remains busy

The afternoon was passed under the tent in the reception of men of all classes bringing information, the buying and translating of manuscripts, and the conduct of enquiries entrusted to letters. When the sun was not too strong, there were visits to the peasants. At the end of the day the Ras came to camp and talked for hours.

Both Ras Hailou and Griaule built their relationship at a distance. Funnily enough, we read that the Ras and Griaule spied each other using spyglasses and would sometimes catch each other looking over what was happening in either encampment.

Monsieigneur, this morning I saw great agitation at your place; I thought you must be ill.

I heard a shot in your direction; I looked through the glass, but you were not in danger.

Griaule, p. 114

What a sight that must be! And so the dance goes between the two—one an informer, one a researcher; one a Prince, and the other an ordinary non-subject. Power and positions are constantly switching—one after the other. Griaule remains in an enviable position since “floods of people put themselves at the foreigner’s disposal for work” to please the Ras. The informants came into the tent with information.

By nighttime, work is not done, with more desk work to the delight of the anthropologists. It was only late at night that photographs were processed.

By this regime the domestic servants and the mules were on their knees.

Griaule, p. 114

Witchcraft: Unlocking the Culture Key

With settlement, you get the sense that finally Griaule is happier, busy with collecting, and figuring out everyday puzzles. A glaring crevasse is the presence of Abola Negous, a towering presence in Griaule’s passage up north. He discovered its vital importance because the Ras refused to speak about it when asked. This tickled Griaule’s sensors and convinced him that his investigation into Gojjam religion would bore fruit.

But explorers have a God.

Griaule, p. 114

Lo and behold, it came in the person of the head of the expedition logisitcs, Edjigou. When you cannot gain something directly, as it often happens, an incident becomes a way in hidden knowledge.

Edjigou suddenly stormed in the tent announcing the death of a priest, a semi-relative, as Griaule understood. This seemingly untimely passing released a torrent of reaction: he scalped a large bird and brought it at their doorstep and he coudn’t sleep on account of the noise from the animals and monkeys. To ease his worries, he was taken to the country with his Lebel rifle and belt of cartridges. Luckily, he encountered no one and avoided any altercation.

Facing the Abola Negous in his journey, he held his hat and shouted abuse in his Galla tongue at the mountain. Griaule grabbed the blabbing Edjigou to stop him. When he finally recovered his senses, Edjigou took off his hat and there Griaule found tufts of white feathers, the scalp of the corbivau, a common type of corvid found in Ethiopia that has a white feathered neck. The parallels were not lost on Griaule as Abyssinian clerics have a white turbaned head. Cutting off the crown of the corbivau is a preventive act against the witchcraft cast by the living spirits of the Abola Negous. Though the bird was destined to be part of the museum, killing the bird was deemed urgent by Edjigou in this instance.

Upon a more formal deposition, Griaule found that Edjigou was haunted three days earlier by “swarms of devils, genii of the water and the air, and other subtleties submissive to the far-seeing authority of the Living Spirit of Abola Negous.”

Griaule has found his object, the key

This incident proved ultimately to be the origin of an investigation fruitful for angelology, mythology, the history of religions and diverse other knowledge disdainfully hidden from the public by the erudite.

…But by making a sacrifice to the customs of edrudition, here is a place to direct cataracts on air-tight publications.

Griaule, p. 177 & 118

This incident pushed Griaule to finally taking a trip to the cavern of Abba Goureza or Père Colobe in the Qotat area of the Bachibbal Mountains as the month of the Guennbote1 arrives.

The series of events that follow is a series of confusing events in the grotto in the caves. Families, the head of the Church, old men, all about a hundred men gathered around to perform a ritual. Later on, the death of a soldier called Juge was mentioned but mysteriously Griaule could not figure out why he was clambering up the mouth of the cave for hours and mysteriously shot himself by the chin with his Mauser and died. He was not fondly remembered as he was a troublemaker, ate during fasts, and spoke rudely to the clergy. Such death climbing is considered a suicide so people could not mourn. In its place, guns were fired, but without repercussions such as maiming a dog. The rebels even come to visit and steal cereals. And so it goes, the disconnected stories from the ever increase of the people gathered around Abba Goureza.

The cavern area becomes a temporary encampment with two honey mead tents serving alcohol and women serving the sexual needs of the soldiers. Mountain muscians performed to the delight of the crowd. It appeared to be a time of temporary unity and forgiveness as rebels were pardoned and given millet. The tensions between the Prince’s taxation, as represented by Alaqa Gourkan, the Prince’s advisor seemed to dissipate as the events close with very little to show for it. Not wealth, power or influence for himself.

The Making of an Anthropological Object

At this point in the journey, we see a convergence over Griaule’s interest in myths and its guardians and what he encounters in the field. He felt that knowledge, the key to understanding Abyssinia, was concealed to him. Now, he has some inroads of confirmation that the truth resides in investigating specialists myths from clerics. In the process, he is creating the anthropological object, in this case, myths and secret knowledge as the key feature of Abyssinian culture. Interestingly, Griaule is convinced that they resided within ritual and religious specialists.

He is not entirely wrong here. When we speak of evidence, we refer to one who is in authority. They are inseperable. Joel Kuipers says,

evidence and authority are not inherently opposed but rather inseparably intertwined.

Kuipers, p. 400

It is clear from Griaule that it is by seeking those in the highest echelons of the clergy and politics (Ras Hailou, rather than the daughter), he is providing evidence and reliable witnesses to practice. It is something that Griaule remains unwavering in his field research. Unwittingly, by writing on these, Abyssinian culture is reified through these myths. Gojjam will forever be associated with their clergy—rightly or wrongly. The politics of evidence and truth is something we shall return to again.

Round Up

Finally, the travel journey is over. Griaule and Larget establish their field site and now proceed with the work of anthropology—studying, collecting, and interviewing people. This requires settlement and we transition from a travel/adventure to the business of interpretation. Though brief, we get a sense that finally the expedition is achieving its goal.

More importantly, these two chapters lead Griaule to confirm that his interest in the myths of Gojjam would unlock his understanding of Abyssinian culture. The discovery of the keyword—witchcraft, is for Griaule a peek into hidden or concealed knowledge. It is this dedication that as a reader, we see how Griaule creates Abyssinian culture in the text. The reliance on specialist ritual practitioners as guardians of culture will lead Griaule to focus on them throughout his career. It is the hallmark of the science of anthropology.

Further Reading:

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Engelke, Matthew. 2008. The Objects of Evidence. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14: S1-S21. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00489.x (click the title to read the full paper on JSTOR)

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press (see Chapter Three)

Kuipers, Joel. 2013. Evidence and Authority in Ethnographic and Linguistic Perspective. Annual Review Anthropology. 42:399-413. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145615 (open access)

The ongoing draft and outline of our project is available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

The Abyssinian Journey by Marcel Griaule

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1991. Les Flambeurs d’hommes. Paris: Gallimard

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1935. The Abyssinian Journey (trans. E.G. Rich) London: J. Miles

Chapters Three and Four

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall be using these tropes as a way to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers in anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

What is truth and how is it represented?

We now reach the point that The Abyssinian Journey moves into ethnographic observation and interpretation. We are feted with how Marcel Griaule’s arduous trek hauling equipment, people, and mules through Gojam Country in Abyssinia chose to bring the reader the truth about the culture of hospitality.

From Ritual Truth

The capital of Gojam Country in Abyssinia, Abbaye-de-Marc or Däbrä Marḳos, finally opened up in view to the expedition of Marcel Griaule and Marcel Larget, with at least forty mules trailing them in 1929.

The scene must be remarkable for them to note in contrast to their trek through the Nile and the mountains, but they were now greeted by a barely forested town, save for eucalyptus trees. Everything else, Griaule observed, was used for cooking and building the residences. This in itself brings the vaunted resource of the cakes of dung for fuel readily available to the villagers.

Griaule set out to meet Ras Hailou, the governor and second only to the Emperor Haile Selassie I, to establish his fieldsite in the town and to meet his renown priestly court, but he would be disappointed yet again. They were forewarned by the functionaries sitting by a tree that only the Princess Épi-de-la-Vierge, daughter of Ras Hailou, was tasked to greet the visitors. This was only the first of two disappointments he had.1

The Ras went up north (no clear reason was given) with his army. “The governor had gone on an expedition of six days’ march and sent nothing except orders in relation to the inner care of his house.” Nothing about Griaule’s request. Thus, Griaule was left to endure a banquet to honour him rather than continue on his journey. This was his second disappointment, but for the reader, we finally get some description of what this ceremonial banquet was.

Twelve ushers in white togas, with staffs entered as if from the corners, striking the barrels of their guns; an official with a surly face, dressed in a soutane of green and white velvet and a black hood-chasuble with four flaps edged with gold, offered the Princesses’ compliments. He held on his stomach, like a huge navel, a curcular buckler of buff skin, pricked with gold. He leaned on his gun which he carried turned to the ground. He effaced himself to leave a place for twenty young dignitaries, crowned with lions’ manes, with long smocks of honour and velvet hoods, who wore their cartridges across their breasts. They formed the advance guard of the festivity, placed in column of fours with broke up the hubbub before the foreigners.

Griaule, p. 78

Unfortunately, Griaule later inferred from the young age of the participants and the overheard remarks from his entourage that these people were impostors, wearing the garb of warriors who had done heroic deeds.

With their stolen plumes!

Their sabres to flatten flies on the meat!

And their smocks without merit!

Griaule, p. 79

This led to Griaule’s extreme frustration. He no longer described what followed. Instead, he offered his own insight into what constitutes the truth and, therefore, recorded only what is authentic.

One felt that regular service was non-existent and that everything had been sacrified to appearances. Without a doubt the governor had given to his daughter formal instructions that the foreigners should have an unforgettable vision of the strength of the country. But what was to be done in a capital without a regular army, where a hundred and fifty officials could sacrely manage the most pressing business, except to decide for an honourable make-believe?

Apart from the ordainer and some others, the actors in this moving comedy were only personages of the moment.

The European (Griaule speaking of himself in the third person) was furious in the depths of his heart, because he could no longer verify from the ethnological point of view certain details which interested him.

Griaule, pp. 80-81

Another fake. One can almost understand why Griaule approached his research as an initiant, as James Clifford, a preeminent anthropologist who evaluated Griaule’s works, rather than in a more dialogical manner. Within the context of an initiation, an initiate receives and interprets a specialised body of knowledge that becomes revelatory. The truth emerges, but only by drilling through it. Griaule was on a mission to identify that specialist and had little patience for performance, though his life's work involved theatricality, games, and masks.

In the meantime, the lull rendered the group bored in Abbaye-de-Marc with little action aside from the honourable ceremonies. The banquet hall was massive and could accommodate five hundred people. The kitchens had a thatched roof blackened with smoke, surrounded by pottery, and sheds of wood and dung for fuel.

At fine ceremonies they gave out underdone meats, white and grey cakes and plates of sauces, enough to feed the entire region of Damot for ten ordinary days.

Griaule, p. 81

Aside from a description of the palace grounds and school, Griaule discontinued any further elaboration of the Princess’s ceremonial banquet. Instead, with little happening, Griaule provoked a reversal of norms by attempting to exit the palace through a service gate designated for women only. This unleashed horror and vexation among the palace servants and his entourage. Shame would potentially be cast on Griaule, but also on everyone else there. His attempt could be methodologically useful, but the benefits of revealing the truth or norms would only come further in time when he settles in, rather than in the immediate present.

To Interpretive Truth

Despite the requests of the Princess, Griaule was adamant to proceed north to the governor’s camp in Dembetcha. It was only a couple of hours away and the neighbouring city presented itself with shrubs that concealed the dwellings.

Their first encounter was less sight but the smell of incense that followed the togas of the priestly court in the churches and its vicinity. Apparently, the Prince (the title of the governor) retained community members to record and praise him on sheep parchment. Most notably, the town was anchored by the Church of the Assumption, which was the location of the royal tomb. Griaule inhaled the overwhelming myrrh that staunched the smell of the dead. Inside, reed baskets of bone were stored willy-nilly. They were accompanied by a monk assigned by the prior for their visit around the necropolis.

We are entering Golgotha.

The monk regaled the guests with the genealogy of the father of the present Prince—stories of miracles, sexual tales about serpents penetrating women, and about Abbo, the hairy saint of Abyssinia. This short account is a peek into an early interest of Griaule in matters of myths and beliefs, and his goal of uncovering the seat of wisdom hidden within monks and priests.

So, the caravan continues across recently burnt land. “The country was vacant for God’s new intentions,” Griaule intoned as the site of ash and smoke greeted them. A lone bare tree stood amid a sea of ashes.

Finally, oh finally, they reach the end: Lake Tana with Mount Abola Negous in the distance, said to be only a few hours from the temporary capital of the governor. The emissaries greeted them and walked towards the Mount, and within two hours, the governor’s five hundred-strong army met and announced their arrival with heavy gun blasts. They have arrived in Addiet.

Griaule and Larget were accompanied to the ‘tent of state’ in which the Ras greeted them in an Italian salute. The room is decorated with carpets, and at the centre of the tent is a green table laden with champagne and two crystal cups! Nothing traditional here. Clearly, this set Abyssinia in the politics of its day when the threat of war and Italy was interested in the country. Griaule was not concealing this. Yet, he focuses on documenting as much of its history as possible.

He describes the palace of Addiet as part of a set of government buildings in ethnographic detail.

along a clay ridge facing Mount Abola Negous, dropping gently to the valley of the Chigaz, which was striped with irrigation canals. As was fitting, they were enclosed in a double square, one hundred and eighty metres a side, exactly oriented. The principal entrance was towards the west, a practice ordinarily used only in churches.

Griaule, p. 94

The palace grounds were only populated by women—servants, slaves, and courtesans, with only the armed males for protection. But it was Sunday, and the banquet hall would have rotations of men eating from three to eight o’clock. People basked in the proximity to the Prince.

If one let one’s gaze wander among the higher masses of the edifice, one had the impression of living in a time which was very ancient in the world’s history; the foreigners made no mistake by remaining silent in this magnificent excitement. They were seated at the right of the Prince, before a table covered with astonishing foods which were the admiration of their individual servants, a punishment to their stomachs and the boundless admiration for the palace cooks.

Griaule, p. 97

The palace was part of Griaule’s mission to document and experience the real Abyssinia. Oh, for sure, the palace was magnificent as Griaule describes the fresh canvases of paintings from Abbaye-d’Or attached to the palace pillars. Servants brought piles of grey or brown millet cakes, quarters of raw meat for the guests to slice off and small decanters of hydromel or honey mead. Unlike the previous banquet, this time, Griaule proceeds to narrate in detail about the meal, having agreed with the Prince at the beginning that no change should be done during the banquet ritual and presentations remained plain. This was as it was. In other words, what authentic Abyssinia looked like.

For the first time, we read in detail how food was allocated and received by guests according to rules and the identity of a “tyrannous genie” that possessed them.

The man possessed by the genie Gragne eats everything except mutton; the man possessed by the genie Parole eats only goat and fowl. Those possessed by the genie Deho-Derg only eat lentils, chick-peas and raised bread. On the other hand, men possessed by the genie Bresieur, also called l’Epée-Housssine, the the genie Magal, or the genie Dira-Koto, and the female genie Dengata, can eat everything, on condition that they wear a toga with a red band.

As a result each of the guests had to be treated with individual attention.

Griaule, p. 100

This, as understood by Griaule, produced a peace to the spirit world and therefore, in the social world. The respect towards the spirit required a measured awareness of movements and gestures that could untowardly agitate them. The Prince, he said, ate slowly and dominated both the spirit and the earthly world, unlike the other individuals. This set him off from the mere mortals.

The highlight of the feast was the appearance of “Monsieur Ababa,” paid by the Ras five thalers to appear and perform the entertainment of a court jester. His persona as a man dressed in women's clothes, called by Griaule the court hermaphrodite. Just like the jester, he jeered at the Prince and insulted him—providing a caricature of the Prince and his holdings, the management of royal property, his tax on the coffee, his fears of his eldest son dispossessing him, the politics of prestige in Addiet, and a whole litany of criticism about his rule na policies. All in poetry, embedded in song played on the violin, and stomped in time to the beat. Only a court jester could speak so forthrightly about what everyone was thinking.

We hear for the first time that Griaule and Larget feel so alone and lost, not having understood the full meaning of the gestures, emotions, and songs heard. With the banquet entertainment unfinished and the last of the arguments heard, Griaule and Larget surreptitiously exited the affair and feigned disinterest with the food.

Round Up

From movement, we approach a brief pause in this travel account. We have two narrations of two different banquets. As my anthropology supervisors remarked to me at different points in my training, something is always happening somewhere. That is to say, everything is data. But in this case, Marcel Griaule negotiated for an ethnographic truth and pursued it. We have little documentation of what happened in Abbaye-de-Marc at Princess Epi’s banquet, but we must nonetheless trust Griaule that it was simply feigned theatricality, unlike the one at Addiet with the Ras himself. (For all we know, they may be similar except for grandeur). This is ethnographic authority. Here, we are finally feted with an extensive discussion of an authentic feast. We have a taste of ethnographic details on feasting and rituals of reversal between the Prince and his court jester. We have no way of knowing or comparing between the two, but we are trusting Griaule to lead us into deeper Abyssinian knowledge. However, if everything is data, faking it is important data as well. I am sure it would be in his notes, but nonetheless uninteresting to the reader who demands authenticity.

Is both equally authentic? If so, are we in agreement with the scale of authenticity chosen by Griaule by virtue of the authority of Ras Hailou?

Further Reading:

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Dorst, J. (2010). On the Porch and in the Room: Threshold Moments and other Ethnographic Tropes in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In: Blinder, C. (eds) New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230111868_3 (Open Access)

The ongoing draft of our classics is available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

The Abyssinian Journey by Marcel Griaule

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1991. Les Flambeurs d’hommes. Paris: Gallimard

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1935. The Abyssinian Journey (trans. E.G. Rich) London: J. Miles

Chapter Two

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall be using these tropes as a way to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers in anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

Before they even emerged from the Nile River, after a perilous crossing in our previous post, the expedition of Marcel Griaule and his colleague Marcel Lancet, was halted by the emissaries of Gojjam’s ruler Ras Hailou. Griaule was on his initial survey and materials collection journey into Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1929. He was on his way to meet Ras Hailou and negotiate for long-term field research in the area.

The expedition was ceremoniously greeted by a troop wading in the water,

But an unexpected spectacle appeared in the stream: a troop of motionless men, only their heads and shoulders visible, waiting, guns in the air, for the European; he was making his way with his servants a little way behind the greater part of the mules. The men had the correct bearing of functionaries. All brandished the same model of Mausers; all wore their hair very long and coiled around their heads. Something sure and fatal emerged from their immobility; they were in ranks, solid as pilework. The saddle trappings of a richly caparisoned mule floating on the water; the owner had respectfully descended into five feet of water to honour the great foreigner, to salute him in the name of the reigning Prince on the farther shore, and to ask him, by a refinement of politeness, to display his passports.

Griaule, pp. 42-43

Threshold crossings are important tropes to tell the story of how the ethnographers gain access to their field sites. In most cases, the actual negotiations and payments for entry are concealed, including those who enter the field as a stranger, student, or child-eyed curious individual, as is common in contemporary approaches. This is contrary to the approach of Griaule, a military-trained navigator, who is described by anthropologist James Clifford as someone aware of the power dynamics in uncovering facts and truth from his interlocutors. Griaule does not pretend to be meek, but rather goes toe to toe to meet his goals. In this case, he accedes to the dance of ceremony to establish his credentials and greater influence over Ras Hailous’s emissaries. I can almost chuckle at his description that exuded the exotic, only to remind the reader with the mundane reality of the passport.

“How did you pass the dry season?” asked the European, who did not deem it fit to dismount from his mule.

The first muleteer blew imperturbably on his trumpet.

“Well, thanks be to the Trinity. My master the Honourable Governor of Godjam has ordered me to say to you that you are on your own soil, from the middle of the Nile.”

“May God give him long life. Doubtless he has been warned of my arrival by his cousin King Tafari?”

As he spoke the European drew from a saddle-bag a passport, bearing the King’s arms. The Infant Mon Soleil—that was the messenger’s name—passed his hat to a servant without turning and out of deference took the paper in both hands. He bowed and looked at the seal.

“I do not know this writing,” he said.

“What! you do not know how to read Abyssinian? or recognise the King’s seal? while a foreigner like me…Give it to me and I will read it to you. Keep still, oaf! sad the White to the trumpeter, who was doing nothing.

“I beg your pardon, Lord, I know how to read, but here you are with my Master the Honoured Ras Hailou, governor of Godjam, that is to say at home. I do not know the Master of the other bank.”

“Then—who warned the Ras of my arrival?”

“The hotelkeeper Guiliz, of Addis, who recommended you highly.”

“Blow!” said the White to the trumpeter, restraining a strong desire to laugh…

and they went forward to the back with shots punctuating the sounds of the trumpet.

The leading beasts already had their flanks free…the group of Franks in their turn reached the fine sand which announced the shore. When the feet of the leader of the Europeans were out of the water, the trumpet gave its final call. The last shot was fired by Edjigou [the expedition lead organiser], who brought up the rear; then he put his gun on his shoulder, his hat on his head…

Griaule, pp. 44-45

And so, the expedition crosses its first threshold of many through Gojjam. However, another hilarity ensues to let us know that these people are not separated from the real world of the urban centre.

Entering Thresholds

The dilemma of an anthropologist writing as a traveller is that all of his accounts are of appraising doorways, openings and entryways—without piercing any depth. And if any depth is demanded, then John Dorst, American folklorist and ethnographer, demonstrates the moral dilemma the situation presents. He argues that a form of double victimisation inadvertently occurs when someone who peeks into and documents the lives of others—just like in ethnographic travel accounts.

Walker Evans went on leave from the Farm Security Administration to continue to document the impoverished conditions of farmers during the Depression Era, originally for Fortune Magazine with writer James Agee. Their work focused on three White sharecropper families: Floyd Burroughs, William Edward Fields, and Frank Tengle in Hale County and Perry County, Alabama. The final product is now the American classic, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a photographic book published in 1941. What is interesting about their work is that Dorst observed the same dilemma in entering new fields. The scene greeted us from the edge of the Nile echoes the power and status inequality with Evans and Agee.

As the landlord begins to bludgeon everyone with disrespectful vulgarities, we quickly realize that Agee and Evans are the intended and captive audience at a small, self-aggrandizing performance of “easy familiarity” between master and subordinate, coded as manly sexual banter. In a classic colonialist maneuver, the landlord directs his questions at the sharecropper foreman, even though the persons asked about are there at hand. The scene is thick with layers of victimization. The most acute for Agee, no doubt, is finding himself trapped in the role of victimizer—the humiliated—but also unavoidably humiliating spectator at a coerced performance. “In a perversion of self-torture,” he confesses, “I played my part through” (FM, 28). He could hardly do otherwise.

Dorst, p. 46

This entry into the field begins from a wider lens of environment, to community, narrowing to the houses and individual—growing closer and tensions simmering up close.

We have much to learn about the travails of such exercises, as it is similar to the Abyssinian Journey of getting closer and closer to the heart of the matter. Like Evans’ camera, Griaule intrudes in his quest for social facts that will hold the key to Abyssinian culture.

Circles of Entry Frame: The Ritualised Negotiations

The expedition has yet to reach its destination. Our lens is still large as we move ever closer, but never getting there as we travel on hooves.

Contrary to Choa [country], where the caravan had met few groups of people on the route from the Doubbar River and the plateau of Djarso, Godjam presented a road full of life. To the right and the left groups of houses appeared like black mushrooms on the hills. Each large pointed roof was surrounded by a small family of modest cones where the household gathered. Great heaps of dung formed marks, and surrounded by thorns, made the site of parks for the cows. Over all hung the smell of smoke, sour milk and badly fermented dough, which told much about the cuisine of the high plateaux. From a certain point of view humanity may be divided into two groups: the civilisation of fresh butter and the civilisation of rancid butter. The Abyssinian is firmly fixed in the latter category.

Griaule, p. 47

Can you smell that?

The caravan of people and animals trudges towards the plateau of St. Jean Venteux, along the ravine of La Betchett. The air endured gusts of whirlwinds and baboons can be spotted on the hills. Nothing to entertain the group except the happenings among the crew and sudden appearances of interlopers that were ritually dealt with by Edjigou, the expedition leader. They camped at two o’clock, “…for they had enough of marching, of stumbling through the clumps, and pushing the rumps of mules towards an end constantly moved on into infinity by the indefatigable White men.”

Our expedition enters into a ritualised negotiation over food. Unlike the trope of establishing kinship over food and drink, we see Edjigou haggle for food and payment. Nourishment for the visitors will not come easily.

What? For honour? And then?

Yes! The tax for honour!

Honour for honour, and you are a dirty mule.”

What, a dirty mule! I am the guardian of the tent. What have you brought in your toga, a snake or a sacred vase? Look no one needs anything here. The food tax is expected. The chief of the country is about to blow his trumpet to assemble the cakes.

I know. Then don’t you see that by depriving myself I brought ten eggs for your master? For honour?

Griaule, p. 65

The expedition was negotiating for a cake tax. What this cake is unclear, but it is much valued as status and desired food, “…be sure to that he has come to honour the stranger with ten rotten eggs and to insult him if they are not paid for with a dear cake! Get out, worthless one! Your eggs are too poor.”

After a time, this ritualised argument brought forth a ceremonial response delivered by a cortege led by a chief (unknown what kind of chief this was, as Abyssinia had multiple chiefs and sub-chiefs) and his aggafari or orderly, accompanied by his small aggafari or his son. They were followed by a train of women carrying baskets of cake on their heads, covered with red cloth to deflect the envious eye. Behind the women were two slaves carrying poultry and dragging a he-goat by the horns, as described by Griaule. This display excited the camp, who had not eaten properly, “We have all eaten together in the deserts and planted pickets. We were brought up among the pack lashings.” Yet, the negotiations were not over but were just beginning again.

Then the chief had the first basket brought forward; the bearer, a woman, placed it on the ground and showed a pretty face pretending embarassment; she made gestures to say to the aggafari:

“Fifty ordinary cakes!”

…Three other women made the same deposit.

“Four hundred ordinary cakes,” said the chief to the interpreter.

“Four hundred ordinary cakes,” the interpreter repeated in French.

“Receive them!” said the White man to his men.

It was the same with fifty excellent cakes and for twenty particularly excellent cakes made from wheat flour.

“For my table!” said the White out of politeness.

Griaule p. 69

The members proceeded to count the cakes, but obviously, much of the actual count was a lie: “one hundred and seventy two!”

“What! One hundred and seventy-two? He said four hundred!”

“There are a hundred and seventy-two!”

“By St. George!”

“George! The two hundred and twenty-eight lacking are for honour [tax]!”

p. 69

This litany of grumbling continued to the acceptance of the animals to be slaughtered. The ten chickens were deemed to be too thin; the goat’s horns were remarked as “tough as leather.” All these were begrudingly accepted in practice. Finally, the exchange was capped with two beeswax candles, which Griaule happily accepted, “Finally…there are the ethnological objects. And he placed them carefully in a box destined for distant museums.”

All is well now that the expedition is well fed (except with some stolen cartridges owing to sleeping night guards). Still, the capital is elusive and nowhere near. That is how slow a thirty-pack mule caravan moves through the landscape. Though the expedition dealt with squabbles and logistics nightmares, this encampment offered Griaule a moment of peace to work.

Fatigue brought the European back to himself. He had made everyone get out of his tent, and was seated on his bed, with his hand in the precious saddle-bag which contained the precious notes of the day that he must classify at the canteen office; he did not have the courage. His head was filled with a thousand facts, with the names of a thousand plants, with a thousand orders to be given, with a thousand enquiries which must not be forgotten. He would have liked to enjoy this evening in peace and throw himself naked into a pool.

p. 73

In one brief confession, we peek at the state of Griaule. We forget the trope of entering into the field and revert to the mental exhaustion that characterises the demands of documentation and the failures to do so daily.

Round Up

We continue the journey of Marcel Griaule as he enters his field site. However, the expedition has yet to reach the capital of Abbaye-de-Marc, but we encounter the trope of entrance into the field site. Unlike the violence on one end or the kinship on the other for the field workers, we encounter ritualised negotiations. Griaule does not conceal his meekness here but understands the ceremonial aggressiveness required to feed his troop properly. And so the dance begins, the lie, deceit and acceptance, with both sides appearing to win and satisfied. It is interesting that, though a foreigner enters, there is also an opportunity to exercise resistance and agency for the residents under the rule of their king.

I am inspired by John Dorst’s observation of troublesome entries and thresholds that define ethnography. We have yet to reach the narrowed lens, and I expect to do so in the next chapter.

Further Reading:

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Dorst, J. (2010). On the Porch and in the Room: Threshold Moments and other Ethnographic Tropes in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In: Blinder, C. (eds) New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230111868_3 (Open Access)

The ongoing draft of our classics can be found on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

One of the ways to distinguish early modern and contemporary works, and even travellers and ethnographers, is their opening chapters. It is one of the most analysed pieces in ethnographic writing that will decide whether the reader will accept what follows as the author’s moral and scholarly authority of what he or she has seen and understood of another culture.

I want to approach my re-reading of Marcel Griaule’s The Abyssinian Journey, and all the successive monographs, using what I call the Rhetorical Sandwich. So far, the ingredients are:

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

These categories increase in scope or depth as I continue my studies.

The Search for Ras Hailou

In a travel book, no long-term settlement is expected. This is what we read from Marcel Griaule’s The Abyssinian Journey. It is a series of openings into the heart of Godjam country in which Griaule sought to penetrate and unlock its culture. Prior to leaving Paris, he challenged the prevailing status quo by choosing to study a Christian group.1 The cabinets of objects at the Trocadero were static information gleaned from secondary sources such as travel, government, and missionary accounts. Fieldwork as a basis of information source was fairly new in the emerging French anthropology discipline. It would hopefully bring the collection back to life and back to the people through a new science of man. This new science relies on the collection of multiple social facts, producing a holistic picture of Abyssinian culture.2 Thus, at the instigation of his teachers led by Marcel Mauss in 1928, Griaule, with his colleague Marcel Lancet, set out on his first trip in 1929 to what would become his lifetime research site of Abyssinia or Ethiopia.

The Abyssinian Journey is a work on a search to meet Ras Hailou or Ras Hailu, then the influential ruler and successor of Godjam country or territory, a vassal state for the Emperor Haile Selassie I.3 The title ras pertains to the highest ranking aristocrat: the equivalent of duke, governor or marshall (see Sbacchi 1977). He would become the access point by which the expedition could locate a suitable place to settle and study the religion and myth of the area through his royal court of priests and scholars. Hence, his travel book is a series of entry points towards a northerly direction terminating in Lake Tana (Lake Dembea in the map) beginning from the south from Addis Ababa, passing through the (Blue) Nile River towards the North.

The Entry Frame: The Conqueror

Marcel Griaule’s expedition is contrary to the typical approaches done in Anglo-American anthropology: as a stranger, student or child who is trying to learn. Rather, James Clifford in his research on Marcel Griaule show him as running his expedition in a military fashion. This is unsurprising because Griaule’s first job was in the Air Force as an aerial spotter and navigator. This helps us to understand how he writes but also approaches his research project. No wonder, Clifford describes him as one that relies on visual observation to collate social facts—”without depending on uncertain oral collaboration, and could provide the edge needed to provoke, control, and verify confessional discourses.” (133)

Instead, to uncover the facts, one must be an interrogator

Griaule's tactics are varied; but they have in common an active, aggressive posture not unlike the judicial process of "interrogation" (1952:542, 547) "The role of the person sniffing out social facts is often comparable to that of a detective or examining magistrate. The fact is the crime, the interlocutor the guilty party; all the society's members are accomplices" (1957:59). He is fascinated by the tactics of oral inquiry, the play of truth and falsehood that can lead into "labyrinths" that are "organized." Like a psychoanalyst, he begins to see patterns of resistance, forgetfulness, and omission not as mere obstacles, but as signs of a deeper structuring of the truth...

Clifford, p p. 137-138

He sees himself more like a detective using the French juridical language of juge d'instruction, or establishing the facts of a case in order to determine the truth of the matter. This means, as we proceed to his Abyssinian Journey, nothing is construed as performance or concealment. It is naked exposure of the power necessary to navigate through a landscape embedded in the ongoing colonial and racial politics in the region. “…The investigator must break through initial defenses and dissimulations.” (Clifford 1983: 137)

This severe persona makes sense with his dramatic crossing of the Nile.

The Nile Crossing

Now it makes sense to read the chapters in Griaule’s entry into Godjam society as a military figure who must control to get things done and get pass the artifice of the surface. This means Griaule’s persistence—to the point of insensitivity, rudeness, and racism becomes bedgrudingly admirable for the reader as he recounts the dangerous crossing of the Nile.

The White man (Griaule) had a completely different outlook. To him a river is a river—a reason for care about the baggage and a pretext for verifying the loads. To him the main problems are the strength of the current and the depth of the ford.

Assuredly the man of the caravan is anxious for several days in advance, and asks travellers coming int he opposite direction about the depth of the water. But the European says:

“The water comes up to the breast? Excellent! Then the photographic plates will be alright.”

While the man of the caravan repeats literally the words of the traveller:

“The Nile takes one at the breast.”

And he remains thoughtful, for one disposes of his life only once, and it is impossible to begin over again after the spirits of the river have taken you and shared your person.

Then comes a series of clumsy compromises; some shout and others grit their teeth; the leader of the caravan manages to delay as much as possible the dread hour of the crossing,mean while the European wants to gain time, which is nothing,…

Griaule, pp. 25-26

Frankly, I don’t know why Griaule would portray himself negatively. Yet, it was his brutal honesty that makes his later ethnographic authority plausible. He was not afraid to show the realities and hardships of running an expedition including recalcitrant yet resigned natives running at least forty pack mules through dangerous territory. This all made for dramatic reading.

There is something to be said about his transparency about the field conditions (or his dramatic exaggerations for the reader). The crossing is a dangerous affair. Panic is the enemy. For the reader, it is all ripe for imagination.

Two men sank, killed by kicks from animals which only wanted to do their best. The master of the caravan whose toga had rolled around the leg of a horse, cut the girths of the animal which was carrying him along. A little blood bubbled in the water, for the knife was two-edged, and it is difficult to be precise when cutting close to the belly of a lean horse…

…But the powers of the valley had no pity on men who invoked above all the names of recent gods; with an even speed the reef of living or half-dead flesh floated towards the distant line of crocodiles which the guards on both banks were hunting with shots that lost themselves in the sands. Bodies which drifted against the rocks were seized by energetic hands; at bends in the river horses and men were cast up safe and sound, certain of them with their loads and all with their guns (death is better than to let go of a gun!); togas dragging in the direft were drawn towards the bank by the marching sticks of the soldiers. All that floated between the two waters followed its own destiny.

The whole of the last part of the event was lost to the Europeans—it happened too far away to the south.

Griaule, p. 35

And so the honest European conqueror manages to traverse the most dangerous natural crossing towards his clear destination, Abbaye-de-Marc, the capital of Godjam Country.

Round Up

Having learned about the rhetorical sandwich used by ethnographic monographs, it is now easier for me to return back to Marcel Griaule’s Abyssinian Journey. I now have a frame to place what’s happening (but mostly, nothing is happening but a bunch of entries) and to situate the travel book. The crossing of the Nile in the first chapter proves to be my most favourite, so far, as it encapsulates all the inequalities, the physical danger, the difference in world perspectives among the players into the best introductory read. I am slowly understanding how to read, perhaps enjoy, and assess an early modern monograph.

Further Reading:

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Salvadore, M. (2010). The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306-1458. Journal of World History, 21(4), 593–627. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41060852

Salvadore, M. 2017. The African Prester John and the Birth of the Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402-1555. Oxon: Routledge (see Introduction to why Ethiopia became Christian)

Sbacchi, A. (1977). Italy and the Treatment of the Ethiopian Aristocracy, 1937-1940. The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 10(2), 209–241. https://doi.org/10.2307/217347

The ongoing draft of our classics can be found on our main page.

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If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

My confusion about Marcel Griaule’s literary/scientific work, The Abyssinian Journey, stems from my inexperience in reading the second book genre of the early modern period in anthropological writing. I have set out to mitigate this. My training in anthropology did not pay attention to writing until late, let alone how to read.

However, I read voraciously when I was directly affiliated with the university. I enjoyed both required readings and those that I discovered from browsing the stacks. (I am still trying to remember a yellow book on Orality and Textuality that, for the life of me, I could not verify the exact title despite looking at my old syllabus and browsing online for years on end now). I had acquired my knowledge of what an ethnography was just by reading—until I discovered the second literary ethnography books.

I will have to correct my previous error in arguing that only the French had their second literary tomes. The Anglo school also had its own, especially in the early 20th century, except these were largely derided or ignored, unlike their French counterparts (see Wheeler’s Traveler’s Tales for some of the works). This shifted with the publications in 1986 of Writing Culture edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, and Anthropology as Cultural Critique, by George E. Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer. It was a time when the U.S. was coming to terms with its Latin America and Asia political meddling. The totalitarian hypercapitalism is yet to wield its ugly fangs and we are a few years away from the fall of the U.S.S.R. Yet, this period ushered in a reckoning of the scientific project of anthropology. Can we ever represent another group? Who gets to speak? How must we write? The answers either put you in the scientific camp or the humanities camp in anthropology. The late 20th century introduced us to a third camp that puts forward an intensified activist position in the metropole that shifted from the largely faraway locations of the ethnographic project. The other is now here.

Writing and reading, though, are twin transformation projects. It is the reader and the act of reading that tends to be forgotten in this conversation. Anthropologist Kevin K. Birth, provides an insightful critique of the two books and highlights what they have forgotten—the reader. The mistake in subverting the scientific or realist mode of writing, he says, is the audience. Birth calls the postmodern project “insensitive writing.”

…the ethical problems of ethnographic representation are not dispelled, but displaced onto readers.

Birth, p. 550, Reading and the Righting of Writing Ethnographies

In other words, if the experimental text is not understood, then something must be terribly wrong with the readers. And they must be changed. Such an extreme position is the exception since contemporary ethnographies today, after forty years, still follow a similar form.

Why is that?

A Reader’s Frame

The audience or the reader is hardwired to understand the information flow, in what Gregory Bateson, anthropologist and psychiatrist, writing Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, aptly calls “frames.” It is an unconscious psychological form of metacommunication by which the audience or reader parses information. He explains that this is borrowed not just from psychology but also from set theory in mathematics, in which dots are connected by a line. Rather than a line, humans perceive the connection of concepts, ideas, or relationships by way of a framing device. Messages with similar meaningful actions are placed within a frame. This creates a “logic of classification.”

…the messages enclosed within the imaginary line are defined as members of a class by virtue of their sharing common premises or mutual relevance.

Bateson, p. 188 Steps to an Ecology of the Mind

Interestingly, the way the mind does logic classification is binary: “this is play” or “is this play?” Though Bateson applies his hypothesis towards psychotherapy, Birth finds it useful to examine why new forms of writing confuse readers. It simply does not fit the frame. “This is fact” or “is this fact?” New and old forms of writing may become obscure because it contradicts the psychological frames of readers.

Since I was used to reading ethnographies, I had unconsciously acquired some of the framing devices that make the text legible.

Rhetoric and Tropes in Ethnographic Writing

Any idea set to paper inevitably has to use rhetorical devices to communicate. Rhetoric, defined by George Marcus of the Writing Culture school, “is the characteristic manner in which a text’s language and organization convinces its readers of the truth, or at least the credibility of its claims.” We are talking about creating the ethnographic authority through the use of literary devices, more commonly known as tropes. These are recognisable characteristics and features that recur and trigger recognition and meaning from the readers.

Birth and Marcus both point to historian Hayden White’s (1973) Metahistory as a foundation work to understand the tropes used in historical writing. White disabuses the assumption of fact in the historical narrative and instead proposes that the reader, but also the writer, understand the underlying structure, style and devices employed that render the text as realist, poetic, or mythical. Though a similar work is not available in anthropology, which is surprising in itself, White’s piercing analysis of the tropes used in historical writing is helpful to understand how information is transferred, translated, and interpreted from the (auto)biographical body of the researcher, the field notes, to a monograph. This book in itself deserves close reading.

White enjoins the historian/ethnographer to create the frame.

…the historian must first prefigure as a possible object of knowledge the whole set of events reported in the documents. This prefigurative act is poetic inasmuch as it is precognitive and precritical in the economy of the historian's own consciousness. It is also poetic insofar as it is constitutive of the structure that will subsequently be imaged in the verbal model offered by the historian as a representation and explanation of "what really happened" in the past. But it is constitutive not only of a domain which the historian can treat as a possible object of (mental) perception. It is also constitutive of the concepts he will use to identify the objects that inhabit that domain and to characterize the kinds of relationships they can sustain with one another.

p. 30-31, Metahistory

He considers this prefiguring decision by the researcher as a poetic choice. Hence, he says, the choices make the claim closer to moral and aesthetic, with epistemology to be discussed at a later period. This is because a researcher must render these ideas around four figurative tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. White defines them as such,

In Metaphor (literally, "transfer"), for example, phenomena can be characterized in terms of their similarity to, and difference from, one another, in the manner of analogy or simile, as in the phrase "my love, a rose/'. Through Metonymy (literally, "name change"), the name of a part of a thing may be substituted for the name of the whole, as in the phrase "fifty sail" when what is indicated is "fifty ships." With Synecdoche, which is regarded by some theorists as a form of Metonymy, a phenomenon can be characterized by using the part to symbolize some quality presumed to inhere in the totality, as in the expression "He is all heart," Through Irony, finally, entities can be characterized by way of negating on the figurative level what is positively affirmed on the literal level. The figures of the manifestly absurd expression (catachresis), such as "blind mouths," and of explicit paradox (oxymoron), such as "cold passion," can be taken as emblems of this trope.

p. 34, Metahistory

These are the linguistic devices that are available during the writing process.

For ethnographers, they must create a conventional monograph frame that includes the moral assessment that we previously discussed, and also a balance between description and specific argumentation (usually referring to the big questions in the discipline, such as how we got here, how different or alike we are, among others). Marcus helpfully outlines other recognisable features of a monograph,

…a sense of the conditions of the fieldwork; of everyday life (Malinowski’s imponderabilia); of micro-process (an implicit validation of participant observation); of holism (a form of portraiture integrated with the pursuit of particular claims); and of translation across cultural and linguistic boundaries (the broad, contextual exegesis of indigenous terms and concepts.)

Marcus, p. 509, Rhetoric and the Ethnographic Genre

His general description of a monograph already includes some of the rhetorical tropes that establish authority, credibility, and “being there.”

• opening trope - how the ethnographer enters the field

• referentiality or evocation style - the decision to use referentiality refers to statements that can be judged as true or false, versus an absence of any prefigured control or organisation by the author

• holism and parts approach - these include uses of micro/macro presentation of events to represent the entire society (e.g. ritual) or self-referential use of the text chapters of the book

• closure trope - the decision to conclude with coherence or open-endedness

What we have here are explicit criteria and guideposts to judge a monograph for its authority and the ability to communicate to the reader the truth of what the anthropologist or traveler has seen. Can we then contrast and measure this against the early French anthropology and literary double books?

Round Up

Any confusion in the reading of early modern realist or even experimental contemporary ethnographies results from the inability of the writer to match the psychological and narrative frame of the reader. Gregory Bateson calls this frame the binary logic of classification that enables the reader/audience to put within an imaginary boundary a relationship of concepts, objects, ideas, things, etc. and exclude all other outside of it. In doing so, a reader can judge whether “this is fact” or assess “is this fact.” You can substitute any word, but the premise remains the same: it allows the reader to unlock the meaning of the text. This frame contains multiple rhetorical tropes that influence yet also produce a poetic quality to scholarly writing (including what would be conventionally recognised as science). Hayden White wrote an influential assessment of historiography that can be applied to ethnographic writing. He offers four tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony as literary devices that are commonly used to frame a text.

In anthropology, the conventional monograph frame consists of fieldwork conditions, narration of everyday life, parts/wholes description or coherence, and keyword concept explanation. This very structure itself uses rhetorical tropes to convince the reader of the truth value of the project. These include putting together the parts into a cohesive whole (from a realist approach) or not (an experimental approach); the poetics of entering and concluding the field; and the participation in everyday life. It is these features that provide us with contrasting guideposts to assess an anthropologist’s traveler account.

Further Reading:

Bateson, Gregory. [1972] 2000. A Theory of Play and Fantasy. In Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press. pp. 177-193

Birth, K. K. (1990). Reading and the Righting of Writing Ethnographies [Review of Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography; Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences, by J. Clifford, G. E. Marcus, & Michael M. J. Fischer]. American Ethnologist, 17(3), 549–557. http://www.jstor.org/stable/644861

Clifford, Jameas and George E. Marcus. (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography; Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Berkeley: University of California Press

Marcus, G. E. (1980). Rhetoric and the Ethnographic Genre in Anthropological Research. Current Anthropology, 21(4), 507–510. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2742067

Rumsey, A. (2004). Ethnographic Macro-Tropes and Anthropological Theory. Anthropological Theory, 4(3), 267-298. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499604045565 (Original work published 2004)

Wheeler, V. (1986). Travelers' tales: Observations on the travel book and ethnography. Anthropological Quarterly, 52-63.

White, Hayden. (1973). Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

The ongoing draft of our classics can be found on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post: