A Revolutionary Discipline

"THE SCIENCE of culture," concluded Tylor, "is essentially a reformer's science. " I would suggest that anthropology is something more-a revolutionary discipline. This does not make anthropology any the less a science; on the contrary, it is more fully a science precisely because it strives toward a more spacious form of knowing, of "sciencing," and is, therefore, a most potent tool for cultural criticism. Anthropology has, in itself, the possibility of becoming a modern metaphysics (in Collingwood's sense), a science of sciences that may inquire into the nature of history and man, for the sake of man and in his name. "Of all human sciences," wrote Rousseau in the preface to his Discourse On The Origin of Inequality, "the most useful and most imperfect appears to be that of mankind: and I will venture to say, the single inscription on the Temple of Delphi, contained a precept more difficult and more important than is to be found in all the huge volumes that moralists have ever written. " The anthropological habit of mind is synthetic, not merely analytic: it looks for wholes, patterns, processes, and relationships among the various aspects of culture and between cultures, and it ferrets out and examines cultural first assumptions. It is historical: we take the deep past seriously; we speak for societies that cannot speak for themselves; and we cherish the things men make-we are preservers not destroyers. We are specialists in tradition in an age that is growing traditionless. Although careerism and slick professionalism have made their inroads among us, we are still largely self-selected to study people off the mainstream of contemporary civilization. We think enough of such people to live among them, to learn from and to respect them, and in their light to examine ourselves and our society. We come close to being real citizens of the world, not merely adherents of an abstract and legal concept of world government. In this final phase of the era of nation-states, not necessarily of nationalities, such on adherence can be a dangerous frame of mind. We are, in other words, marginal in temperament; we are sharply aware of the narrowing chances of cultural variation in the modern world and of the loss of customs and languages. We worry about such matters. We are not easily taken in by political propaganda or advertisements for progress. I think that we are repelled by such slogans as "Progress is our only product," and most of us would probably associate ourselves with LeviStrauss when he wrote: "Civilization manufactures monoculture like sugarbeet. " But let me approach this definition of the anthropological perspective more systematically. We are engaged in a revolutionary discipline, as I have claimed, because of our ancestry. Modern anthropology is a child of the European Enlightenment, the axial age of the modern consciousness. The collapse of feudalism had, of course, destroyed many fixed medieval assumptions about the nature of man, the position of man in society, and the position of the earth in the cosmos. Two intricately connected traditions, which have since polarized the thinking of anthropologists without ever completely dividing it, and which can therefore be described as ambivalent, began to emerge clearly in the 18th century, throughout western Europe but most notably in France. Rousseau, above all, but also Monbaddo, the early Herder, and Schiller, typically represent the retrospective approachthat is, the conscious search in history for a renewed and basic sense of the possibilities of human nature and of culture, not only in response to the fall of feudal ideology but in contrast to the nascent modern realities that were being created by the revolutionary bourgeoisie. The preceding Age of Discovery had introduced the West to the primitive world, and this became the fulcrum for the effort to understand the contemporary scene in a Europe that had, through the late Renaissance and Reformation, been growing increasingly civilized and enlightened even before the Enlightenment itself. The Age of Discovery held a constant image of another aspect of humanity before the Europe that was beginning to break out of medievalism, to look outward in space, and to free itself of the then dogmatic Catholic cosmology, an image shaped by a growing awareness of mankind's primitive past. Montaigne and Camoens in the 16th century, and later Dryden and then Pope had responded with a more or less sophisticated, more or less sentimental, but always arresting, primitivism. More systematic and balanced formulations were to succeed theirs. The direction, and the purpose, were clearly marked by Rousseau, who, in questioning the credentials of missionaries as chroniclers of savage tribes ("for the study of Man there are requisite gifts which are not always the portions of the Saints"), called upon "the scientific academies to send expeditions composed of trained and genuinely philosophical observers to all savage countries, that they might compose at leisure, a natural, moral, and political history of what they have seen. By such a study a new world would be disclosed, and by means of it, we should learn to understand our own. " So wrote Rousseau. The Age of Discovery provided opportunities for direct scrutiny of radically different peoples, and thus foreshadowed today's field work and participant observation. The latter technique, the basic methodological contribution of anthropology, is an extension of the notion of the Romantic historians that sympathy with "the object of study" is essential to historical understanding. The majority of 1 Portions of this paper appear in a longer study, "The Uses of the Primitive," in Primitive Views of the World, ed. S. Diamond (Columbia University Press: New York, 1964), pp. v-xxix.