Max Gluckman

DATA AND THEORY

he Beginnings of Anthropology Some anthropologists, like other folk, have tried to

lengthen their pedigree and they have traced the origin of the subject far back through the
centuries—indeed, as far as Herodotus. It is true that Herodotus was interested in
describing the societies and the cultures of men and these are the fields of study of
anthropology. But the subject as a specialized discipline, with its own name, began to
develop in the second half of the nineteenth century. It has changed radically, particularly
since the First World War, but as a science’s development continues to be influenced by its
history, I survey briefly how modem social anthropology has evolved.

The anthropologists of the second half of the nineteenth century studied a mixed bag of
subjects: skull-shapes, types of hair, folktales, the material objects of the so-called simple
peoples which were beginning to be assembled in Western museums, wedding customs,
magical practices, as-yet unwritten languages, and so forth and so forth. Looking back, I
can sympathize with the wit who described anthropology as ‘the investigation of oddments
by the eccentric’. In this chapter I consider how the investigation of oddments has broken
into several disciplines, maybe all pursued still by eccentrics.

Studies of the origin of religion and magic were characteristic of the era, and the most
famous of those who worked on this problem was Sir James Frazer, who wrote The Golden
Bough. Frazer began his study, in twelve volumes, by setting out to explain the ritual of the
priest-king of the grove of Nemi in ancient Italy: \ .. in this sacred grove there grew a
certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim
figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and kept peering
warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a
priest and murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him
and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the
C l priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he
retained office till he himself was slain by a stronger or a craftier.’ In order to understand
this ritual, Frazer was led to consider priestly kings in general, different kinds of magic,
worship of trees, sexuality and marriage in ritual, taboos of all kinds, the soul and its perils,
the killing of divine animals and propitiation of slain game, the treatment of the last sheaf
of com, scapegoats and sacrifice, fire, first fruits and the mistletoe and peasants’ games.

Frazer brought order into this varied set of data by connecting them with one another in
terms of an evolutionary theory, since that type of theory was dominant at the time.
Anthropologists were then largely interested in so-called primitive societies and their
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customs because they saw these as representing earlier stages of civilization, antedating our
historical knowledge of early European society, from which there had been steady progress
up to the high peak of Victorian civilization. Some primitive customs had indeed survived,
and at times threatened to be revived.4 But on the whole these were being left behind in the
march of reason. They recognized that the societies which were being observed in Africa,
Asia and the Americas, in Australia and the Pacific Islands, had long histories, and they
tried to penetrate through extant customs to the ultimate original circumstances in which
custom and culture were born. To do this, in many cases they used a mode of reasoning
which a great social anthropologist, Professor A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955), called
the ‘if-I-were-a-horse’ argument.3 This refers to a story of a Middle West farmer whose
horse strayed out of its paddock. The farmer went into the middle of the paddock, chewed
some grass, and asked himself: ‘Now if I were a horse, where would I go?’ It is
undoubtedly caricature to apply this joke to the very learned and intelligent books of many
early anthropologists; but there is also a sad element of truth in this—as in many—
caricatures. The anthropologist in effect asked himself: ‘Now if I were a man, just
becoming a man, and not quite a man, still without a culture, what would I think in such-
and-such circumstances?’ Take the passage in which Frazer introduces “The Myth of
Adonis’ into the argument of The Golden Bough:* ‘The spectacle of the great changes
which annually pass over the face of the earth has powerfully impressed the minds of men
in all ages, and stirred them to meditate on the causes of transformations so vast and
wonderful. Their curiosity has not been purely disinterested; for even the savage cannot foil
to perceive how intimately his own life is bound up with the life of nature, and how the
same processes which freeze the stream and strip the earth of vegetation menace him with
extinction. At a certain stage of development men seem to have imagined that the means of
averting the threatened calamity were in their own hands, and that they could hasten the
flight of the seasons by magic a rt Accordingly they performed ceremonies and recited
spells to make the rain fell, the sun to shine, animals to multiply, and the fruits of the earth
to grow. In the course of time the slow advance of knowledge, which has dispelled so many
cherished illusions, convinced at least the more thoughtful part of mankind that the
alternations of summer and winter, of spring and autumn, were not merely the result of
their own magical rites, but that some deeper cause, some mightier power, was at work
behind the shifting scenes of nature. They now pictured to themselves the growth and decay
of vegetation, the birth and death of living creatures, as the effects of the waxing or waning
strength of divine beings, of gods and goddesses, who were born and died, who married and
begot children, on the pattern of human life.

‘Thus the old magical theory of the seasons was displaced, or rather supplemented, by a
religious theory. For although men now attributed the annual cycle of change primarily to
corresponding changes in their deities, they still thought that by performing certain magical
rites they could aid the god, who was the principle of life, in his straggle with the opposing
principle of death.’ Hence they now performed ceremonies which were religious or ‘rather
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magical dramas’ setting forth ‘...the fruitful union of the powers of fertility, the sad death of
one at least of the divine partners, and his joyful resurrection. Thus a religious theory was
blended with a magical practice. The combination is familiar in history. Indeed, few
religions have ever succeeded in wholy extricating themselves from the old trammels of
magic. The inconsistency of acting on two principles, however it may vex the soul of the
philosopher, rarely troubles the common man; indeed he is seldom even aware of it. His
affair is to act, not to analyse the motives of his action. If mankind had always been logical
and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime.

Frazer thus imagines to himself what it would be like to be original man confronted by the
cycle of the seasons, and their uncertain clemency, and works out that he would react by
trying to control them by magical rites based on his associating like things with like: similar
objects or actions will produce similar effects, as that black smoke will produce rain clouds.
Or things which have been in contact with one another will continue to influence one
another so that lightning-struck trees provide substances which produce rain. All this is
worked out by a priori speculation, as is the next step that ‘in acuter minds magic is
gradually superseded by religion, which explains the succession of natural phenomena as
regulated by the will, the passion, or the caprice of spiritual beings like man in kind, though
vastly superior to him in power.

‘But as time goes on this explanation in its turn proves to be unsatisfactory. For it assumes
that the succession of natural events is not immutable, but is to some extent variable and
irregular....’ Yet order is there to be found, and order is gradually extended: \.. the keener
minds, still pressing forward to a deeper solution of the mysteries of the universe, come to
reject the religious theory of nature as inadequate, and to revert in a measure to the older
standpoint of magic by postulating explicitly, what in magic had been implicitly assumed,
to wit, an inflexible regularity in the order of natural events, which, if carefully observed,
enables us to foresee their course with certainty and to act accordingly. In short, religion,
regarded as an explanation of nature is displaced by science. But science, though it has
something in common with magic, postulates a quite different kind of order in nature.

With all respect, this is all ‘If-I-were-a-horse’ reasoning. Frazer knew of course that all
tribes must have a reasonable amount of accurate technological knowledge, or they could
not have survived. Science in the sense of a deliberate search for the immutable
connections between events, and the testing of already ‘established’ truths of this kind, is
not found in tribal society— and indeed only flowered in Europe from the time of men like
Bacon and Galileo, though Ancient Greeks were clearly scientists. But tribal society has an
organized body of empirically verified, applied ‘science’. It has magical actions and
religious activity: and, equally, religious activity, and actions comparable with magic, exist
into the present as we shall see. Frazer did not attempt to examine the contexts in which
these different types of activity were practised and different sorts of ideas were employed,
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as I shall show his successors did. He postulated a theory of intellectual development by
placing on a time-scale institution which co-exist. He worked out the stages on this scale by
imagining how he himself would have reasoned had he been there: first, thinking he could
control nature by associating like antecedents with like after-events; by thereafter escaping
from his keen-witted disillusionment into the belief that the powers were there but superior
to him; and yet thereafter by escaping from his further disillusionment, this time with
religion, to accepting a regularity and an immutability in nature of which man could avail
himself, once he bowed to necessity.
This is, again, caricaturing Frazer’s main thesis of the movement from magic through
religion to science. In the course of his monumental study he lighted on illuminating
themes, he pointed to significant associations, he suggested many lines of research. But he
was always working out where the horse would have gone, had he been the horse. It did not
— perhaps could not— occur to him that science, magic and religion may operate in quite
different contexts of social relations and serve different kinds of emotional and intellectual
needs. These we shall examine in a later chapter.

Frazer was not alone in reasoning thus. The other great British anthropologist of the same
period, Sir Edward Tylor, tried to determine the origins of religion, which he defined as
basically a belief in spiritual beings. He came to the conclusion that men must have tried to
explain the differences between human beings before and after death, what happened to
them when they were asleep or unconscious or in a trance, how they dreamt and saw other
persons in their dreams or themselves appeared in the dreams of others. He then concluded
that it is obvious that men must have seen a person as possessing a life and a phantom, in
addition to a body. He went on: ‘These two are evidendy in close connexion with the body,
the life as enabling it to feel and think and act, the phantom as being its image or second
self; both, also, are perceived to be things separable from the body, the life as able to go
away and leave it insensible or dead, the phantom as appearing to people at a distance from
it.’ Later, he argued, the beliefs would be combined: this too is an obvious step. Then men
would work out that they have what Tylor calls ‘the ghost-soul’, a type of belief which we
know ourselves and which is reported from most of the peoples of the world. This is
arguing, again, ‘If I were an original man, where would I have gone?’

Tylor supported this particular reconstruction skilfully, by citing piecemeal beliefs from all
over the world, such as that of the Fijians, who think that a man must be awakened
gradually lest he be roused before his soul has time to re-enter his body.* Tylor’s theory is
plausible enough: like Frazer he explains a whole range of facts quite logically. And the
sequence of temporal origin and development may of course be correct: there is not, and
never will be, any means of knowing. It is delving in what the American anthropologist A.
Goldenweiser called ‘a chronological vacuum’. But the facts are logically explained by
putting them on an evolutionary ladder, erected out of Tylor’s thought processes, and the

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rungs are fabricated by detaching from one another different customs and beliefs in the
same community.

Survivals

Sometimes it happens that the wrong kind of beliefs and practices are found in a particular
society. This was explained by the subsidiary thesis of ‘survival’: magical thinking in
Frazer’s analysis survives into religious thinking. Other customs are dim forerunners of a
later historical phase. None of the analyses of this type set out to relate together and show
the interdependence between the customs and beliefs existing in one community at any one
time. Instead the customs and beliefs are shifted about, as material products of tribal
societies may be moved around in and between museum cases. Here one can show that men
first swam a river with an arm across a log, then they flattened the top of the log to put
goods on, then they hollowed the log a little, then they hollowed the log to get a dugout,
then they added strakes to the dugout sides, then they built a boat of strakes on keel and ribs
— but many peoples still scrape a hollow in the top of the keel, to connect the boat back to
its origin. Doubtless this is an accurate picture of the evolution of the boat from a log : and
the evolution of customs and beliefs may have proceeded along the paths that Frazer, Tylor
and others postulated. But besides the fret that we cannot check these theories, they were
structured on pure imagining of what human thinking was like. And they always left a great
deal of associated behaviour unexplained. For example, Tylor’s theory of the ghost-soul did
not explain the nature of funeral rites, nor the varying attributes of the soul for different
ranks in the same society or in different societies, nor the fear of death. Glancing ahead to
modem anthropology, I cite how Radcliffe-Brown gave us a theory which does enable us to
study these problems.

Death and the Social Personality

Radcliffe-Brown points out11 that two things do in fact survive a man’s death. The first is
the body which has to be disposed of in some way. The second is what Radcliffe-Brown
calls the social personality, which is the total set of the man’s relationships with other
members of the community— that is, his position as father to children, as son to father, as
husband to wife, as subject to chief, and so on. After a man has died, these relationships
continue to exist: his social personality survives. In the funeral rites these relationships are
adjusted to accommodate them with the fact of his death. If he is a mature adult, occupying
an important position in society, his heir must be appointed to take over his place. Often the
heir replaces his dead predecessor in so many respects that a social position is maintained
in perpetuity through the generations: ‘The King is dead, Long Live the King!’ The widows
may be taken in marriage by the heir, save that a man may not inherit his own mother, or
they may remain married to the dead man, under what we call the ‘levitate’ (from ‘lcvir’, a
woman’s marriage to her brother-in-law, after the ancient Hebrew institution Those
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obligations Onan refused to fulfil), while they cohabit with some kinsman who gives them
sons who are still children to the dead man.

Radcliffe-Brown’s formulation of the ‘origin’ of the belief in a soul in terms of a person’s

position in society enables us to study what happens after a death. We see too why the rites
vary for chiefs and commoners, men and women, adults and children, and so forth. Each of
them had a different social personality, and hence it is reasonable that each should have a
different form of burial, though each has the same kind of ghost-soul on Tylor’s theory (but
not in his descriptions of the variations). It is clear too why so many peoples believe that
the soul undergoes a period when it wanders loose, in the wilds, before it is instituted
among the ancestral spirits or makes a safe journey to the place of the dead. This is the
period during which the survivors, the community, are adjusting themselves to the
alteration in the pattern of their inter-relationships which must follow on a death. The
theory also suggests why death is feared, not by the individual alone, but by society: it is an
attack on the society of living men for it wrenches and dislocates their relationships with
one another; and once it has gained a foothold, they fear it may not be content with a single
victim. It transforms a man who was a source of satisfaction into a source of pain.

Social Facts

When Radcliffe-Brown began to work out his analysis around 1910, he was influenced by a
school of French sociologists or anthropologists, under Emile Durkheim. Durkheim and his
colleagues followed a very different line of interpretation from that of Frazer and Tylor.
Frazer and Tylor (and many others) had an ‘intellectualist interpretation’, as it has been
called by Evans-Pritchard :12 that is, they imagined themselves as intellectual savages
faced with the problem of explaining natural and human events to themselves. Durkheim
argued throughout that there was a domain of ‘social facts’, which were peculiar and
separate from psychological and biological facts; and further he contended that social facts
could only be explained by reference to other social facts. He attacked various theories of
society, such as that of Herbert Spencer, which attempted to derive social facts from
individual personal needs and arrangements. The two chief characteristics of a social fact
were that it was external to the individual and it constrained his actions. That is, the
individual did not invent the action or belief: it existed before he did, and he was under
compulsion to accept it, or at least behave as if he did. Hence the source of social facts had
to be sought outside individuals. For example, religion could not be explained by reference
to individual thinking and feeling: religion was part of society. Durkheim in fact argues that
God is the force of society which each individual feels pressing upon him, constraining him
through what Durkheim called the collective conscience. The argument that society" and
culture were ‘super-organic’, greater than any individual, was to continue for very many
years. There are still many psychologists and anthropologists who in practice explain
societal and cultural phenomena by reference to individual personality. Durkheim
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contended that this was a fundamental error, since the whole can never be explained by its
parts: he compared this error with trying to find the characteristic of life in the atoms of
hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen which make up the substance of cells. Again, he
stated that the hardness of bronze is not in the copper or the tin or the lead which are its
ingredients, and which are soft and malleable, but in their mixture. So society is much more
than the individuals who comprise it, and culture is greater than the individuals who bear it.

If we accept this view,— and it seems so obviously correct to me that I shall not justify it
further— , then we automatically reject Frazer’s and Tylor’s type of interpretation, because
it attempts to explain social and cultural facts by individual intellectual reasoning, on the
‘if-I-were-a-horse’ model. Radcliffe-Brown’s explanation is quite different. It secs that men
are born into a society and a culture which impose certain ideas and beliefs on them,
including the idea of survival after death. Men do not believe in immortality— and the kind
of immortality varies from society to society— because of their individual feelings or
efforts of mind, but because they are taught to do so. Some anthropologists have sought the
origin of the belief in man’s inability to accept his own extinction. As one has put it:
‘Man’s hopes will hurdle death itself’ (Wallis); and another wrote that in ‘the conflict and
chaos of death’ religion ‘standardizes the comforting, the saving belief’ (Malinowski).
Individuals may indeed in this situation get comfort and hope from the belief, but the belief
transcends any individual Its ‘origin’ must therefore be sought in the conditions of social
life, for it is found wherever men live in society; and those conditions must explain why all
societies attach such importance to the proper performance of funeral rites. The improperly
buried return to trouble the living. The social importance of the belief is far greater than the
comfort it gives the dying individual. This is shown by the way in which tribes who
worship their ancestors give little heed to the afterlife of the spirits, but emphasize always
the bonds of the spirits with their surviving descendants, and the effects of those bonds on
the relationships of those descendants. The ‘after-life’ of the spirits is left vague, undrawn,
something like life on earth, though better, and below the ground or in the sky.15 In later
chapters we shall examine the results of this shift in approach in greater detail. Meanwhile,
I note that the same objections as have been levelled against the intellectualist interpretation
of ritual and belief can also be brought against interpretations which refer these to the
emotions of individuals—e.g. to the awe which it is alleged they must feel in the face of the
immense and incomprehensible forces of nature, and soforth.1* This mode of analysis has
now disappeared from anthropology. But despite the accumulation of our knowledge about
tribal societies similar a priori speculations about early stages of forms of organization are
still found in books by eminent social and political scientists.

The Development of the Family

A second great field of speculation for the early anthropologists was the development of the
family. Perhaps the most important study of the tribal family in that period was by an
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American lawyer, Lewis Morgan. Morgan had observed at first hand the customs of the
Iroquois and his book on them, published in 1851, is still a standard authority. His most
significant discovery was their system of classifying kinsfolk. He found that the Iroquois
used the same term towards the mother’s sister as they did to mother, and correspondingly
other collateral kin were classified together with close kin. Later he learnt that other Red
Indian tribes had similar systems of kinship terminology, and then they were reported to
him from India. He traced the distribution of this kind of system, which has many variants,
widely through the world with the help of United States consuls, missionaries and others,
and then set out to interpret the structure of the variants. His general thesis was that the
terms of kinship used for relatives are related to other customs and particularly to forms of
marriage; but that kinship terminology changes more slowly, so that a particular
terminology reflects a preceding set of marriage forms. The first stage of human society he
considered to be one of promiscuity, without any rule defining incest, but this stage had
passed out of existence leaving no trace. The second stage was that of the ‘consanguine
family’, based on the intermarriage of brothers and sisters, but barring that of parents and
children. This too was nowhere observable, but its prior existence was demonstrated by the
Hawaiian system of designating kin. In Hawaii all of the parent generation are called by a
single term, with only sex distinguished; and if maternal uncles (mothers’ brothers) are
classified with fathers, this must be because previously all were fathers, in that they had
free access to their sisters. Similarly, a man called all of the lower generation (all nephews
and nieces) sons and daughters— because, said Morgan, all his sisters were his wives, as
they were wives of his brothers; and in his own generation cousins were called brother and
sister. In short, the kinship terminology survives as a kind of palaeontological record of
forms of marriage.

I shall not here try to summarize the elaboration of Morgan’s fifteen stages of development
of marriage and the family, beginning with promiscuity and ending with monogamous
marriage and the family of western civilization. He incorporated this development with
another evolutionary development of the technical basis of society, from savagery through
various stages to grades of barbarism and on to civilization. The general thesis was taken up
and set out, in a strikingly reasoned analysis, by Engels in The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State (1884). Morgan’s own classification of societies in the
stages of technical development was guided by their forms of kinship terminology, so that
it can be attacked severely: to take one striking example, he placed the highly developed
Hawaiians, one of the ‘very noblest of cultures devoid of the metallurgical art’ (Lowie)
among the lowest ’savages’. In addition, he did not examine all the kinship terms, or deal
with anomalies. It is technical beyond my own brief to set out these details, which can be
consulted in many books. I stress that the whole analysis is built on the presumption that
men only use those terms of kinship address which are warranted by actual sexual and
potential reproductive relations, save that there is a further presumption that the
terminology never fits an extant marriage system, but always the preceding one.
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Morgan’s was only one of many similar attempts to work out the evolution of the family,
and most of them depended on treating some customs as fossils surviving from the past and
indicating earlier forms of society, with others as forerunners of the future. I set out one
kind of model of this sort of theory. Travellers in Australia had reported that the Aborigines
knew nothing of the role of men in begetting babies. These Aborigines thought that a
woman conceived when the spirit of an ancestor entered her body as she passed one of a
number of sacred spots. Then when a woman felt a baby stir in her as she passed one of
these spots, she would ascribe it to the entry of a spirit, and her child would be linked to
that spot. The Australian Aborigines were already cast for a lowly place in the ladder of
social development, so this belief fitted in well with the other class of facts which many
anthropologists besides Morgan had thrown into a scheme of evolution. In many tribes a
man inherits clan-name or surname, property, office, from his mothers brother, and not
from his father. The child belongs dominantly to the mother’s family, not to the father’s.
On a priori grounds it was assumed, as by Morgan, that mankind was originally
promiscuous and did not pair in marriage. Therefore no one knew who the father of a child
was; only its mother was definitely known. But the mother’s brother was known: hence his
authority over the child was socially emphasized—and hence the ignorance, or at least the
irrelevance, of the role of man as a begetter. As groups of men began to marry groups of
women, excluding outsiders, still only the mother was known with certainty, so that the line
of the mother was dominant still. Matrilineal (as it became known) succession must have
been the earliest stage of human society. This rule of ‘mother-right’, or matriliny, was
broken when individual men in one tribe began to capture women from other tribes; the
children of these captured wives were their own and did not belong to the mothers’
families. These forcible marriages of women from outside the tribe became the pattern for
marriages inside the tribe. It was argued that the practice of stealing brides survived in
symbolic form as the reluctance which the bride in many tribes has to show when being
taken by her husband. In some, she is ceremonially seized by her husband’s friends in a
mock fight; in others, she has to weep and be enticed with gifts through each stage of the
wedding rites and consummation; even into our modem times, it is appropriate to carry her
over the threshold of the new home, as if she were a Sabine bride. From this stage of
capturing brides, as men and women became paired in marriage or men began to take many
wives, the father got increasing control over the children: father-right steadily ousted
mother-right. In all tribes which have father-right, the mother’s relatives have some rights
over the child, and these were ascribed to customs surviving from an early stage of mother-
right. For example, among the Tsonga of Mozambique, and many other patrilineal peoples,
a man’s sister’s son can take any of his uncle’s property which he pleases: this is because
once he had been the rightful heir to all his uncle’s property.

This kind of scheme was worked out with learned and logical arguments, sometimes based
on elaborate statistics. Nevertheless it was purely conjecture. It cannot be proved or
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disproved. And other, opposite theories have been advanced with equally good logic. Some
writers have argued that father-right must have been more fundamental than mother-right.
In many animal societies one old male dominates the herd or troop, and drives away his
own sons while he keeps the females, so it was argued that early human societies must have
been similar. Freud deduced from his psychological investigations that in this situation
somewhere the sons killed their father, were stricken with remorse, instituted the incest
taboo denying the females to themselves, and from this CEdipal conflict there developed
human culture. Yet others have pointed out that the higher apes lived in pairs, and that was
the original condition of mankind, from which they fell into group-marriage, or a man took
several wives, or more rarely a woman several husbands. Arguments can be worked out to
support all these schemes, and if one varies one’s definition of what has survived from an
earlier stage, the facts can be marshalled to support each argument. When one has worked
out one’s scheme, one places each tribe on the right rung of the ladder: if in a society with
mother-right customs of father-right are found they indicate the beginnings of assertion of
father’s power; if in a society with father-right customs giving some power to the mother’s
family are found, these are survivals from the stage of mother-right— or the other way
round. Aside from their inherent weakness, the theories are sterile, for they pose no further
problems.

Modem social anthropologists approach the task of explaining this wide extension of
kinship relationships in a different manner.19 First, we have to explain why these systems
should exist in tribal society but not in developed industrial societies; for Europeans also
drew distant kin into closer relationships till well into the Middle Ages. We refer this
correlation of extensive kinship reckoning to what I shall stress throughout as the dominant
characteristic of tribal societies: they all had primary goods only, and no luxuries. That is,
practically all their goods had to be consumed at once, since they had only foods which
easily rotted or were eaten by insects in their simple means of storage, clothes of skin or
backcloth or other material with relatively little wear, mud and grass houses or skin tents,
and so forth. In this situation, the rich man could not use his wealth to raise his standard of
living markedly above his fellows. Chiefs could not build palaces, stage luxurious and
selective feasts, wear jewels and costly robes. A man with a thousand head of cattle could
not himself consume all their milk, meat and skins. He could only use them to attract and
support dependants and thus acquire power over people. For, second, the main social
investment available to a man was investment in personal relationships with others. Even
into modem times we invest our wealth in gaining the right to demand goods and services
from other people: but we do so through impersonal systems of relations, in production and
in exchange with others who link us to far-flung networks of relations with very distant
folk. Each family under subsistence conditions is too small to support itself, and it cannot
depend on this sort of impersonal network. It acquires its helpers by calling on more
distantly related kin, descendants of recently living common ancestors, and treating them as
close kin. In consequence, these economic relations are direct and personal.
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Men acquire their rights to call on the services of others through putting them under
obligations of reciprocity, by helping them with goods and services, and usually they do so
through established kinship relations, or by entering into marriage alliances with them.
Even trading relations are converted into quasi kinship relationships: in Barotseland in
Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) men begin by bartering with one another, and when they
have bartered a few times they strike up a compact of friendship with general obligations of
hospitality and help, until they may eventually go through a rite which makes them ‘blood-
brothers’. These relations of kinship and quasi-kinship enable a man to mobilize labour to
assist him in major tasks and they are also insurance against disaster and shortage since he
can call on his kin and his in-laws to help him when he is in need. Hunger, due to drought
and flood and crop-blight or stock-epidemic, always threatens these people who are
subsistence husbandmen, so that they are constantly in danger of famine. Their simple
technology makes it easier to move people to food, than food to people: in times of
shortage tribesmen move towards those of their relatives who have escaped disaster.

Poor and Rich

Simple technology has a further effect. With available tools— axe, hoe and adze, spear and
trap and bow-and-arrow, dugouts or canoes and fishing-nets— each man can produce little
beyond what he can himself consume. Hence though the poor might work for the rich, they
cannot be employed to give the rich an elaborate level of life above their own. This
limitation in the economy is strikingly illustrated in a statement by David Livingstone, who
himself fought the external slave-trade, about the condition of domestic slaves among the
Ndebele, a Southern Rhodesian tribe of raiding warriors. He quotes with approval a
missionary who had worked among these people: ‘The African slave, brought by a foray to
the tribe, enjoys, from the beginning, the privileges and name of a child, and looks upon his
master and mistress in every respect as his new parents. He is not only nearly his master’s
equal, but he may, with impunity, leave his master and go wherever he likes within the
boundary of the kingdom: although a bondman or a servant, his position . . . does not
convey the true idea of a state of slavery; for, by care and diligence, he may soon become a
master himself, and even more rich and powerful than he who led him captive.’

Of the working of the slaves, this missionary said: ‘Neither the punctuality, quickness,
thoroughness, nor amount of exertion is required by the African as by the European master.
In Europe the difficulty is want of time; in Africa, what is to be done with it.’

There are widespread systems of trade in some areas of the tribal world, but these mostly
do not take place only as direct barter. Pairs of partners are linked together in ceremonial
exchange, sometimes of valuables which have symbolic worth only, though under the
protection of this ceremonial exchange important useful goods, produced only in one area,
11
may be traded; and then these may move from one ceremonial partner to another, in a quasi
kinship relationship, for hundreds of miles, as across Australia10 or New Guinea.

These economic limitations influence all forms of relations in tribal society. This appears
most markedly in the situation of chiefs. Many well-authenticated records describe how
African chiefs distributed the tribute which flowed in to them from their people, back
among the people, either as individual gifts or in huge public feasts. A t the beginning of
the nineteenth century Shaka, the chief of a small tribe, conquered many other tribes16 to
build a powerful kingdom.** He had tens of thousands of warriors at his command: yet, as
a writer on Zulu history said, ‘It is, perhaps, easier to secure increased means than a
corresponding increase of capacity of enjoying them. Thus the great wealth which the
spoils of fallen tribes suppUed made little change in Tshaka’s personal wants. His fare
(differed but little from that of a native of ordinary means. He knew of no choicer food than
boiled beef, and the beer which was the beverage of any man successful in raising a crop of
grain. His eyes were reddened by the smoke which filled the ventlcss hut in which he lived.
He slept on a straw mat, with a wooden pillow to support his head, and a mantle made of
the skins of animals to cover his body. His apparel was neither so rare nor so costly as to be
beyond the means of a common man/ An English trader who lived with Shaka described
how when Shaka wanted to build a new barracks for a regiment of some thousand men, he
had them all march from distant forests to the site, each warrior bearing a single sapling. At
the site, they danced as well as worked, and then feasted. Shaka could not put his labourers
into big enterprises, though he derived great power from them.

Dr. Ian Hogbin, a professional anthropologist, virtually repeats the historian of the Zulu,
when he writes that the ‘possession of wealth in the Solomon Islands, as amongst ourselves,
ensures prestige. But in a Native community, the same scale of comforts— or lack of them
— is available for all; everyone has to spend several hours of the day at the same kind of
work, all eat the same kind of dishes prepared in the same type of utensils from similar raw
foods, and all sleep on the same kind of mats for beds. The house of a wealthy man may be
larger it is true, and better built than that of one who is insignificant, and he may have
several wives, but the difference otherwise is negligible. Reputation is accordingly
enhanced not by accumulating possessions in order to use them oneself but by giving them
away.’

And here is one final example of this giving away. Francis Coillard, the first French
missionary to the Barotse kingdom on the Upper Zambezi, considered that the chiefs
exploited their people; but he described how the Barotse king distributed among the people
all the cloth he obtained from a caravan of goods brought in from the West Coast, until
every man around the capital had cloth fluttering from him, while the king hadnone. This
philanthropy is basic in these systems: kings, however cruel and tyrannous, were always
acclaimed as generous. Shaka’s assassin and successor Dingane is said to have ‘fed the
12
vultures’ with those he executed, but his praise-songs speak also ofhis feeding the people. It
is, in some ways, the kind of American philanthropy which O.Henry satirized.

To follow the theories about tribal society on which I shall concentrate in later chapters it is
essential to grasp these fundamental limiting economic conditions, for I shall refer all
characteristic institutions to them. Here I suggest they account for the widespread system of
classifying distant relatives as if they were close kin, though we are still left with the
problem why some tribes are patrilineal, some are matrilineal, and some are omnilineal,
emphasizing equally rights in all lines of descent.4* There is too the problem, why different
tribes have specific forms of terminology. We must seek the origins of both in extant social
conditions.

Status to Contract

This account of how we now approach the problem of the kinship terminology of tribal
society shows that we look not to some past form of marriage, worked out by ‘if-I-were-a-
horse’ reasoning, but at existing technical and economic conditions to explain the present
form of institutions. Something of this sort of approach was already appearing during the
period of Morgan, Frazer and Tylor, in the writings of a few students, who were not
anthropologists, of the early history of mankind. Notable among them were Durkheim and
his colleagues, sociologists rather than anthropologists. In his De la division du travail
social (1893) Durkheim did not make a speculative reconstruction of stages, as from magic
through religion to science, but demonstrated how the character of religion and ritual, and
of types of law and morality, altered with the increasing division and specialization of
labour. But for me personally the greatest of these men, whose book I can read as if I were
conversing with a modem anthropologist, was Sir Henry Maine, whose Ancient Law (1861)
put forward a patriarchal origin for society on the basis of Roman and Celtic ana Germanic
law, and his knowledge of Hindu law gained as a judge in India. Maine was a lawyer, a
professor of jurisprudence at Oxford. He saw the major development of society as from a
state in which its law was dominated by status, to a state in which the law was dominated
by contract, a generalization which has been validated by subsequent research, and which
will inform my whole analysis. And when evidence turned up to counter his evolutionary
thesis that societies were originally all organized in patriarchal extended families, he
acknowledged that ‘the observation of savage or extremely barbarous races has brought to
light forms of social organization extemely unlike that to which [I have] referred the
beginnings of law, and possibly in some cases of greater antiquity’—these were reports on
matrilineally organized societies, with which Maine dealt in his Early Law and Custom
(1883). He was ready to accept new evidence, not to distort it.

The evolutionary theories I have been summarizing passed out of fashion, though of recent
years a new school of evolutionism has regained strength among some American
13
anthropologists, whose work I refer to in Chapter III. The older evolutionists were
discredited pardy by the demonstration of the weaknesses in their arguments, and above all
by the development of much more careful methods of tracing the historical connections
between different societies and the diffusion of cultural traits and material objects from one
tribe to another, and from one region of the world to far-distant regions. Some of the
historical theories produced were as speculative as their evolutionary predecessors, and as
cavalier in handling evidence; but much important work was done in this vein. It continues
to be done, under the tide of ethno-history; but it has not influenced social anthropology so
I leave its story aside.

New Modes of Analysis

One of the general principles found in the classifrcatory system of kinship terminology is
‘the identification of alternate generations’— grandparents and grandchildren are identified
with one another, and united in ‘hostility’ to the intervening generation, which is adjacent
to each of their generations. In our society, we know the effects of this identification in our
belief that grandparents spoil and do not discipline their grandchildren. In some tribes,
grandparents and grandchildren may call one another by the same terms as they use to
brothers and sisters; or a grandfather may call his granddaughter ‘my wife’ and a
grandmother her grandson 'm y husband’. These are the kinds of terms which the
evolutionists interpreted as survivals from an earlier situation in which these relatives
married one another. When we find these customs in a tribe today, they are a form of joking
relationship, an instituted and privileged, indeed prescribed, form of teasing. As I observed
it in Northern Rhodesia, when a grandparent called a grandchild of opposite sex ‘my
spouse’ it provoked him or her and adult onlookers to mirth, while it embarrassed the child.
They explained to me: ‘She [he] is my wife [husband] of the mouth only’, and the idea of
actual marriage was horrible to them. Radcliffe-Brown has suggested that this identification
of alternate generations is related to the fact that children replace, socially, their
grandparents and not their parents, with whom, indeed, they are competitors. When a man
reaches the age of 20 his father will be, say, 40, and in the full bloom of mature adult life,
while his grandfather, at 60, is passing out of active participation in many activities. There
is competition between parent and child: it may be considered improper for a woman to
continue bearing children after her eldest daughter has given birth to a child. This situation,
together with the strains which arise in the parent-child relationship because the former
have to discipline and train the latter into decent ways of living, introduces an element of
tension and constraint in the relations of parent and child. Without these elements of strain,
grandparent and grandchild are regarded as having mutual interests and are therefore
identified with each another. But there is a substantial difference in age between them, and
age is a basis for social differentiation: this discrepancy between two tendencies within the
one relationship is handled by the pattern of joking. We shall see that joking relationships
are often found in this kind of situation.
14
I cite this example of joking now because academically Frazer and Tylor and Morgan are as
grandparents to me; and I am entitled to jo k e about them ana their ‘if-I-were-a-horse’
arguments, without giving offence. I have an anthropological charter to justify my
privilege. I can poke fun at their out-of- datedness, which they wear like outmoded dress.
But I must also praise them for their tremendous achievement in bringing order into a mass
of facts pouring in from all over the world, and for developing a large number of concepts
which are still basic in our classifications: clan and moiety, exogamy and endogamy
(prescribed marriage outside and inside a group), matriliny and patriliny, the logical
principles of magic, and many more. Illuminating ideas fight their pages. Despite all this, I
find them intolerably boring to read, and even to present them I have indulged myself in
caricature. What is the source of this boredom?

I am bored when I read their work because even when they select some special problem for
analysis, they build the argument out of oddments of information— oddments gleaned from
a variety of different books about the tribal peoples, written by observers with a variety of
interests and varying degrees of understanding of what they saw and heard. In many cases
this information on tribal customs came from casual travellers, who passed rapidly through
a succession of native habitations and often spoke the local language inadequately or
employed interpreters not very competent in the observer’s home language. The notes that
these travellers made were determined by the chance of what happened to be going on
when they were there. They were also likely to record what struck them as interesting in
itself, and as likely to be of interest to people at home. Thus the unusual, the exotic, the
bizarre, even the grotesque, found their way into diaries and letters, or were extracted from
these when it came to the publishing of a book. Witchcraft trials, fertility ceremonies,
masked dancers, wedding ceremonies, myths— these appear to be more interesting to write
about and to read about than is the daily round of agricultural tasks or the routine of
domestic life. And they are far easier for the people to describe when they are questioned. I
myself have found that it is much easier to get descriptions from informants of the
beginning and the end of marriage— the wedding ceremony and the law of divorce— than
it is to find out by questioning how married couples live together. The data on these
customs, and even those on laws and political organization, were usually reproduced out of
their context in the on-going process of social life. There were exceptions to this marked
biasing of information among early travellers, as well as among missionaries and
administrators who lived for longer periods among particular tribes: some endeavoured to
get at the roots of daily domestic and political life. I have already quoted a number of these
better observers. But even with most of them the bias remains. And it was on these already
‘selected’ frets that the early anthropologists had to draw to develop their theories.

The bias is clearly shown in what is a classic book on an African tribe, The Life of a South
African Tribe (1913,1927). It was by a Swiss missionary, Henri A . Junod, who resided for
15
many years among the Tsonga (Thonga) of Mozambique. He had written about their
customs and their songs and legends, but his main hobby was the study of insects. Viscount
Bryce visited him and urged him that it was more interesting to study the men; and nearly
twenty years later, after reading assiduously the work of the armchair anthropologists in the
metropolitan countries, Junod wrote his deservedly applauded book. Junod knew the
Tsonga well; but his page of contents is indicative of severe bias. This is how he records the
life-cycle of a man: twenty-two pages deal with birth and infancy of which some five pages
are concerned with secular matters, interlarded with taboos, while the main part is
concerned with various ceremonies. Five pages follow on childhood, to be capped by
twenty-six pages on rites at puberty. Marriage altogether consumes twenty-one pages, of
which only six deal with secular matters; mature age and old age take seven pages; while
death, with the elaboration of funeral rites, takes thirty pages— and these lead in his second
volume to fifty-six pages on the ancestral spirits and their worship. This is surely out of
focus; and it is in one of the best books we have on a single tribe— a book which I learnt to
admire so whole-heartedly that when I first looked down from the Lebombo Mountains on
to the coastal plain where Junod’s Tsonga dwelt, I raised my hat in tribute to him.

The anthropologists at home do not seem to have realized that there was this bias in the
books they conned for their (acts. And they proceeded often to increase the bias by
selecting only those facts which were directly relevant to their own problem: in the study of
primitive religion and magic or of primitive mentality, they took the facts about mystical
beliefs and ritual practice without weighing them adequately against secular belief and
practice.25 They assembled not only oddments for interpretation, but oddments already
selected haphazardly and then culled at random. Frazer organized these oddments around
his thesis of the evolution from magic through religion to science, which he had not derived
from examining the facts, but had evolved out of his own mind. (Incidentally, Junod has a
very careful analysis of the situations in which Tsonga reason scientifically, magically, and
religiously.) Since the analysis came out of Frazer’s own mind, and not out of the facts, he
could do little with the facts except recapitulate them almost endlessly in support of his22
argument—tom out of their context, in both social and individual life, they could be strung
together one after another: facts from the South Seas, from Africa and the Americas, from
Asia and peasant Europe, from ancient classic civilizations and the out-of- the-way comers
of modem Europe. The argument goes on, persuading by recapitulation and repetition, not
by analysis. The Golden Bough occupies twelve fat volumes: it might nave been a hundred;
and it reduces with a lot of this sort of citing of facts to a single large volume.

One of the most biased theories of this kind was Llvy-BruhTs theory of primitive mentality,
published in a series of books. L£vy-Bruhl was following die line of analysis established by
Durkheim: viz. that the modes of thought of all peoples were ‘collective representations’,
external and constraining to the individual. He argued that these modes of thought in
‘primitive society’ were mystical, governed by principles like the law of participation—
16
things which have once been in contact with one another remain in contact with one
another. It is an extremely learned, sophisticated and cogent argument, which makes
excellent points. But as Evans-Pritchard points out, by selecting facts showing this kind of
thinking from books already biased in the same direction, L£vy-Bruhl ends with a tribal
man dominated entirely by this kind of thinking. He then makes a further error, by
comparing tribal man thinking in situations involving magical and religious beliefs with a
European scientist reasoning in his laboratory or a philosopher in his study: he concludes
that their respective modes of reasoning are very different. This error of inappropriate
comparison— contrasting tribal man when dealing with witchcraft fears and magical
techniques with Western man at his occasional rational enterprises— recurs repeatedly in
the works of that period; and it continues among laymen to the present day. It is one of the
errors that modem anthropology has helped to expose.

New Types of Data

It is out of this tradition that modem anthropology was born. Its birth was made possible
not by the development of new theories, but by obtaining quite a different kind of data, data
coming from direct careful and comprehensive observation of life in tribal society.
Interpretation of this data has produced several distinct kinds of anthropology, but all of
them are deeply influenced by a common factor arising out of their com m on heritage: an
abiding interest in custom. I have indicated that our forebears worked on chance and biased
facts, and that they were almost all facts about the standardized pattern of tribal life: beliefs,
ritual, laws, in general, custom. These early anthropologists tried to explain custom, n o t
human behaviour. This led to their insisting that there was some interdependence among
custom s. One of the main themes of this book is that the search forth e systematic
interdependence of customs remains a hallmark of social and other kinds of anthropology,
to distinguish them from other social and mental sciences.

Tylor had travelled in Mexico and Morgan had made an excellent study of the Iroquois, but
it is remarkable that none of the anthropological savants working at home thought it
necessary to go into the field to collect his own data, though they considered themselves to
be scientists. Indeed when William James asked Sir James Frazer about natives he had
known, Frazer exclaimed, ‘But Heaven forbid!’

Inevitably as natural scientists rather than students of the humanities joined the ranks of
anthropology they were bound to go into the field to collect their own facts instead of
continuing to rely on laymen. Boas, a physicist and geographer, led the way in America
with expeditions to the Eskimo and the tribes of British Columbia: he became the ‘father’
of a whole generation of American anthropologists. For various reasons which I shall
discuss later the anthropology he fostered was not social in its bias, but cultural and
historical, so the fruits of his expeditions do not concern us. From Britain, Haddon led an
17
assortment of established scholars in an expedition to the Torres Straits region in 1898 and
1899. They were all natural scientists of different kinds, save for McDougall who was a
psychologist. But their field research suffered from some of the weaknesses of the early lay
recordings: they spent only a short time with each of the peoples they investigated and had
short and superficial contacts with them, while they did not know the native languages and
worked through interpreters. Hence they still tended to record the striking facts of custom.

It is appropriate here to discuss the influence on observation of working through

interpreters. It is true, as the great American anthropologist Robert Lowie pointed out in his
book about The Crow Red Indians (1935), that the average anthropologist cannot speak the
language of the people he is studying anything like as well as an interpreter from their
ranks. But interpretation is a two-way process; and the average interpreter does not speak
English (or French, or other language) anything like as well as the anthropologist.
Moreover the most difficult part of anthropological analysis is deciding into what technical
categories of anthropological analytic concepts to fit the data: and this depends not only on
knowing English, hut also on being trained in anthropological theory. (Someday the
convene position may arise when an African anthropologist studies the English, to analyse
English life in the systems of anthropology in his own language.) Finally, to carry out
anthropological fieldwork one need not know the whole language, with its whole
vocabulary— among the Zulu over 50,000 words. A few thousand words will see one
through ordinary questioning and enable one to follow everyday conversation, as in
Europe; and one can acquire specific, more technical vocabularies— say about law, or
religion— as one studies these fields of action.

With these shortcomings, the work of the Torres Straits expedition did not acquire
information which by its very nature would break the bonds of existing theory. Not even
the longer spells of fieldwork carried out by three members of this expedition (W. H. R.
Rivers among The Todas of the Nilgiri Hills, 1906, and C. G. and B. Z, Seligman among
The Veddahs of Ceylon, 1911) were able to produce a radically different kind of data,
though, like those of Haddon’s company, their reports were far fuller and more
comprehensive than earlier records. Rivers in particular developed the careful collection of
genealogies of actual people. But their work shows the bias I have described in Junod’s:
they still studied the societies from the outside and concentrated on custom without
reference to social action.

As far as British social anthropology is concerned, the revolution occurred with the work of
Radcliffe-Brown in the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal during 1906-08, and of
Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands, which lie off the south-east tip of New
Guinea, at various periods between 1914 and 1918. Radcliffe-Brown has probably had a
more enduring influence on the theory of social anthropology than has Malinowski. It was
the latter who, almost by accident, devised a method of observation of social life and
18
culture that produced facts which could not be confined within the straitjackets— the
Procrustean beds— of existing theories.

Mrs. B. Z. Seligman, wife of C. G. Seligman and herself an anthropologist of repute, tells

me that the)’ were in Sydney for a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement
of Science when the World War I broke out in 1914. Malinowski was an Austrian citizen
and hence an enemy alien. He was in danger of being interned by the Australian
Government, but Seligman, Rivers and other British anthropologists persuaded the
Goverment that since Malinowski came from the Polish part of Austria he was really an
ally. (He was resident in Britain at that time and later was a professor in London University
and became a British citizen.) Hence the Australians agreed to ‘intern Malinowski by
allowing him to carry out field research in the Trobriand Islands, subject only to the rule
that he report his presence regularly to the Australian administrative officers.38 Malinowski
thus went to live among the Trobrianders, and in time to learn their language: he not only
questioned them about their customs, but he also observed directly the process of their
community life. Thus he acquired a quite different kind of data from his predecessors. He
had invented, by chance, a new technique and this virtually created a new series of
sciences. I consider this equivalent to the effect of Leeuwenhoek’s improvements on the
microscope and their influence on biological science.

This development in anthropology was inevitable. It is fortunate that the accidental

beginning should have happened to a man of Malinowski’s genius, a word I use advisedly.
Perhaps, too, he was prepared to make the most of the data he acquired because he had
already from literary sources written an analysis of The Family among the Australian
Aborigines (1913: in paperback, 1963), which emphasized the ‘functional’ interdependence
of various social institutions, and among other points insisted that ‘all the economic, social,
legal and ritual customs and practices of the Australians converge on the nodal point of
family organization.’ It also began to demolish the evolutionary controversy over whether
the family preceded clan, or clan preceded family, by emphasizing that the two coexist
with different spheres of activity, and thus the book disposed of theories of group marriage.

Malinowski

Malinowski wrote a series of books on different aspects of Trobriand life, which constitute
the biggest single corpus of knowledge, by one man, about one tribe, which we have. In all
of them he emphasizes how a quite new kind of data began to pour into his notebooks—
data about how the Trobrianders lived together and operated their customs, being both
constrained by these yet sometimes seeking to evade their rules. He emphasized how
important it was to observe what he called ‘the concrete imponderabina’ of social life. The
passage in his works which exhibits most vividly for me the change in his thinking, and the
change he wrought in anthropological thinking, occurs in a Riddell Lecture which he gave
19
in 1934-35 at the University of Durham on The Foundation of Faith and Morals (1936). He
describes there how he was recording a myth from an informant, when this informant
started boasting that the myth belonged to his clan, and that he alone had the right to tell
this myth. Malinowski told him to stop boasting and get on with the myth. The informant
kept boasting. Malinowski says it took him some months before he realized that this right
of particular persons to boast that telling the myth was their privilege, constituted a most
important element in it. From this he worked out that a myth might be not an intellectual
response of men, puzzled by the mysteries of the world, but a social charter’ which defined
the rights and privileges of groups and persons to particular positions of social power and to
particular property rights. A myth thus might validate existing social arrangements, and
have to be interpreted by reference to its connection with other extant institutions of the
society. He had first put forward this thesis in his lecture in honour of Frazer in 1925, and
though he excluded Frazer from his attack, he was in effect demolishing the Frazerian-type
of interpretation of myths propounded by men like Max Muller.

In order to demolish the theories of his predecessors, their a priori speculations justified by
stringing together isolated facts tom from their context in social life, Malinowski mobilized
against them the full complexity of that context. He had recorded not just myths of origin,
but the full setting of these myths: who told them and was privileged to tell them, and on
what occasions and in relation to what other activities they were recounted. This kind of
data could not be acquired by casual visitors or short-term fieldworkers, recording largely
by questioning through interpreters, instead of observing the processes in which men co-
operated and struggled within a community possessed of a particular culture.

Almost every one of Malinowski’s books followed the same model. He began by setting
out, say, the over-simple theories on tribal or primitive economic life put forward by earlier
writers— that tribal man was ground down by the bare conditions of surviving, or
alternatively that he was lazy and thriftless, living on the fruits of nature—then showing out
of the complexity of his own field-material that the Trobrianders (here representing all
’savages’) were involved in a complex system of production and exchange and
consumption, determined by their culture, in which all elements were highly
interconnected.34 For example, the Trobrianders are involved in a cycle of exchange in
which shell armbands circle in one direction, while shell necklaces circle in the opposite
direction, the one being exchanged for the other. These valuables have no ‘intrinsic’ value
or outside use: their worth comes from their role in the cycle of exchange, and the more
famous of them increase in value as they are exchanged. Some valuables move thus within
the Trobriand Islands: others travel long distances, and are carried by big sea-expeditions,
to launch winch labour has to be organized to make outriggers and prepare food. This led
Malinowski to investigate the organization of labour through patterned social relationships,
and the role of magic in providing safety for the voyagers and success in their kula trading,
as the exchange of shells is called. Under the shelter of this ceremonial trade there
20
proceeded bartering (but not between &w/a-partners) of useful goods, which are not
available in every kula centre. He showed how prestige and social position are connected
with this trade. He discusses also gardening, and how men in this matrilineal society carry
much of their crops to their sisters’ husbands’ villages to feed their sisters and children:
these crops are displayed to boost the gardener’s prestige. From this kind of material came
other theories: in his Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926) he had begun by
demolishing contrasting theories that primitive man was lawless, or that he was bound by
law like an automaton, by showing that these exchanges and gifts linked people together in
systems of reciprocal obligation. Similarly, in an essay on 'Magic, Science and Religion’ he
cited, and then demolished, the simple theories— as he saw them— of Frazer, Marett,
Lang, Durkheim and others; and then proceeded to examine magic and religion in their
contexts in social and individual life, and to relate them to technical knowledge. Both
magic and religion, he argued, out of his observations on how they were practised, ‘arise
ana function in situations of emotional stress: crises of life, lacunae in important pursuits,
death and initiation into tribal mysteries, unhappy love and unsatisfied hate’. They are
based on mythological tradition, surrounded by taboos and prescribed observances. But the
end of magic lies outside its rites— it is a ‘specific art for specific ends’. Religion is an
affair of public affirmation, in which the end is present in the performance of the ritual
itself. Both have functions, in the sense of serving man’s needs in society: magic gives him
confidence in situations where his empirical knowledge is limited, religious faith
‘establishes, fixes and enhances all valuable mental attitudes, such as reverence for
tradition, harmony with environment, courage and confidence in the struggle with
difficulties and at the prospect of death’. He argues that these beliefs have immense
biological value in enabling primitive man to survive.

One of Malinowski’s great achievements was in this way to produce a balanced all-round
picture of men in tribal society. As he himself wrote in his lecture on myth: ‘Our
conclusions imply a new method of treating the science of folk-lore, for we have shown
that it cannot be independent of ritual, of sociology, or even of material culture. Folk-tales,
legends and myths must be lifted from their flat existence on paper, and placed in the three-
dimensional reality of full life. As regards anthropological fieldwork, we are obviously
demanding a new method of collecting evidence. The anthropologist must relinquish his
comfortable position in the long chair of the missionary compound, Government station, or
plotter’s bungalow, where, armed with pencil and note book and at times with a whiskey
and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from informants, write down
stories, and fill out sheets of paper with savage texts. He must go out into the villages, and
see the natives at work in gardens, on the beach, in the jungle; he must sail with them to
distant sandbanks and to foreign tribes, and observe them in fishing, trading, and
ceremonial overseas expeditions. Information must come to him full-flavoured from his
own observations of native life, and not to be squeezed out of reluctant informants as a
trickle of talk. Field-work can. be done first- or second-hand even among the savages, in
21
the middle of pile-dwellings, not far from actual cannibalism and head-hunting. Open-air
anthropology, as opposed to hearsay note-taking, is hard work, but it is also great fun. Only
such anthropology can give us the all-round vision of primitive man and of primitive
culture. Such anthropology shows us, as regards myth, that far from being an idle mental
pursuit, it is a vital ingredient of practical relation to the environment.’

Malinowski produced many specific illuminating analyses of particular institutions: in the

1920’s and 1930’s his findings burst like a revelation on the intellectual world, and he was
invited to contribute to symposia on magic and science and religion, on language, on law.
Not only students of anthropology, but also scholars in other fields, and the literary world,
were enlightened by his work. His books and the books of his pupils, as well as of those
anthropologists whom he influenced indirectly, are a permanent memorial to his influence.
But he ran into a dead end. When his own pupils began to go into the field and pursue
research by his own methods, as described above, but with his experience behind them, he
was still liable to attack them as he had attacked his predecessors: he simplified and
distorted what they had said, and then attacked their analytic theorizing with the complexity
of his field data. Unfortunately they had data of the same type as he. For one of his major
weaknesses was an inability to appreciate the full significance of another’s analysis: his
presentation of the arguments of Durkheim and of Sir Henry Maine are travesties of the
originals. This led to a second weakness. When he wrote about tribal economics, or tribal
law, his main use of the work of economists and lawyers was to set up their alleged
speculations about primitive economics and law as Aunt Sallies which he could then knock
down with his Trobriand coconuts: he did not try to get at the intrinsic worth in their major
analyses.

Malinowski appreciated that his work had helped to bring the final break-up of the
investigation of a ragbag of oddments, which constituted the earlier anthropology, into
different disciplines.88 Clearly the analysis of social life was something very different from
the study of man as a member of the zoological kingdom. Indeed, though in some British
universities, and I believe in most in America, anthropologists are still trained in physical
anthropology, in archaeology, and in the study of culture and society, it is recognized that
to do research in each of these fields requires highly specialized training. Physical
anthropology, investigating the structure of man and his place among the mammals, has
become allied with zoology, anatomy, physiology, and other biological sciences.
Psychological and cultural anthropology are related to the biological sciences and to
psychology and psychiatry, and require accurate knowledge and understanding of those
disciplines. But all a social anthropologist needs to know is that elaborate and well-
validated research has failed to establish that there are significant differences in the
biogenetic endowment of different groups of mankind— as groups. Individuals within
groups may vary; but we can treat the biogenetic endowment of mankind as sufficiently
equal for us to neglect specific variations as contributing to varying social organizations
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and their relation to culture.3* Man is accepted as a plastic organism, whose actions and
temperament are moulded by the society and culture into which he is born.

The Branches of Anthropology

If you imagine yourself as an intelligent, well-trained thinker about social me, sitting for a
long period to record whatsoever goes on around you in a society you are visiting, and able
as you learn the local language to pursue inquiries into what the people believe to be their
ends and motives, you will appreciate the richness of the data which began to accumulate in
the notebooks of anthropologists. Instead of the chance and haphazard recording of striking
events and exotic customs, anthropologists accumulated stores of information on which,
because of publishing restrictions, they could only draw for their books in meagre measure.
It was akin to the information about the lives of their fellows which had inspired novelists,
diarists, biographers and playwrights, though more comprehensive and systematic. In my
concluding chapter I shall discuss the difference between the ‘artistic’ interpretations of
these data and the interpretations of anthropologists.

These data could he analysed in several scientific frameworks. First, they could be used to
work out patterns which were present in cultures, either in segments or as wholes. These
patterns are there, and the search for them is a long-established line of enquiry in our own
historical tradition, as studies on the spirit of the Renaissance, or the Middle Ages, or the
Victorian era, witness. Cultures show some consistency in this sense; and the analysis of
this consistency became the field of cultural anthropology, strongly represented in America:
There is something unique about the pattern of culture of each tribe, even though we find
distributed among its population the same sorts of persons as we meet in our own society.

Second, it is possible to use these data, collected by observing many different people’s
behaviour in a community with its own culture, to work out whether there is something
common in the personalities of those people, distinctive from the personalities of members
of other communities. This line of interpretation produced the cross-cultural study of
personality, also strongly represented in America; and obviously its practitioners turned to
psychology, psycho-analysis and psychiatry as logically cognate disciplines. It has also
been to these disciplines that the cultural anthropologists have looked for their fellows.

Thirdly, it was possible to concentrate on how social relationships ‘hung together’ : the
manner in which different sorts of relations between persons and groups, and within
groups, influenced one another. This was the line of interpretation which produced social
anthropology; and therefore social anthropologists found their colleagues among
sociologists, political scientists, jurisprudents, historians and economists. They sought help
in formulating their theories from these disciplines, and in turn began to influence them.

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Yet, I repeat, all branches of anthropology still have in common their interest in custom—
and their assumption that customs are systematically interconnected with one another. But
each branch has begun to find allies in various, other disciplines. The hodgepodge
investigation of oddments has broken into different specialized sciences.

Malinowski did not fully participate in this specialization of social anthropology into a
separate discipline, which is the path that British anthropology, under the influence of
Radcliffe-Brown, has followed. Malinowski became so involved in demolishing the
stereotyped views of primitive society held by specialists in the other social sciences, that
he seemed unable to turn to their empirical studies of European society for theoretical
stimulation. He did not draw on economic theory to understand Trobriands economics, as
Firth was to do for the Polynesianisland of Tikopia (see below), not did he draw on
sociology, jurisprudence and political science as his successors later did. In the end, this
blindness condemned him to theoretical sterility. His reports on his field research clearly
and enlighteningly demonstrated the widely ramifying interconnections of various elements
of culture and of social life. When he produced an ‘abstract theory’, he did so by crudely
referring institutions to postulated human and social ‘needs’. He saw economic
organization as providing satisfaction for the needs of man for food and shelter: which
indeed it does— but this is not sufficient a principle to analyse the elaborations of
economic action. Again, he wrote: ‘We could state that the function of the tribe as a
political unit is the organization of force for policing, defence and aggression. . . the
function of age-groups is the co-ordinating of physiological and anatomical characteristics
as they develop in the process of growth, and their transformation into cultural categories.
In occupational groups we see that the carrying out of skills, techniques, and such activities
as education, law, and power, constitute the integral function of the group.’ This is
extraordinarily simple- minded for a brilliant mind. Besides this, he became more interested
in the processes by which the individual was conditioned within a culture, and produced an
extremely crude behaviounstic psychological theory, a theory which appears childish when
set against the sophisticated analyses of the relation between culture and personality to
which I have referred. Our debt to him remains, for he made field research by professionals
into a high art, and in specific study after study he demonstrated that social and cultural
facts were interconnected with one another in the present. If I can criticize him severely it is
because social anthropology is a science; and a science is any discipline in which the fool
of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.

Radcliffe-Brown lacked the personality which enabled Malinowski to immerse himself in

the fives of the people. Malinowski did not see, as Junod did, an individual moving through
a succession of rituals; he saw instead men and women growing up, marrying, living a
domestic fife together, maturing. But Radcliffe-Brown had immersed himself in
sociological theory and had worked out a view of society as a system of regularities

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between the actions of persons dwelling in a physical environment and acting on it with an
equipment of tools and a culture.

In his study of the Andamanese he was influenced by Durkheimian theory in sociology, and
by Shand’s psychology of sentiments. He considered that social life was only possible as a
moral order; and that this moral order was reflected in the sentiments of members of the
community. Myths and legends then became, for example, symbolic statements typifying
these sentiments, and this was their social value. Thus they contributed to maintaining the
social system. Again, the social personality of the individual, whose significance in funeral
rites we have already examined, was also a compound of social and collective sentiments of
this kind; and rituals at changes in social position reflected the social value of the
individuals and symbolically readjusted the sentiments of others to those changes. His view
of society was dominated by organic, physiological parallels: the function of any custom
was its role in maintaining the system as a whole. His successors were to advance this
thesis considerably. With this very brief statement on RadclifFe-Brown’s early work I
complete my survey of the tradition out of which modem social anthropology emerged.
Both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown were to continue work in the modem sense for
many years. I have touched only on social anthropology, since that is my own profession. I
am not competent to discuss other forms of anthropology. Social anthropology is
dominantly located in Britain, and secondarily in France; for many years in the United
States social anthropology was poorly represented, till Radcliffe- Brown began to teach at
Chicago in 1931. Since then it has spread in America, under the influence of British work
and British-trained Americans. But American anthropology is dominantly psychological
and cultural and historical in its emphasis. No-one has explained satisfactorily w hy there is
this difference between the anthropology of the two continents. But the difference runs
deep: leading American anthropologists have accused the British of ‘selling the pass’ to
sociologists. Maybe this points to one reason. In America anthropology has to insist on its
independence from a very powerful sociology, a subject which till recently in Britain has
been on the whole neglected and despised. Secondly, I suggest that the American Red
Indians who were naturally the focus of research in the United States, on the whole had had
their societies severely dislocated by the Whites. Accounts of their culture were derived E
from the reports of surviving individuals, rather than from, observation of on-going social
life. And the facts of culture, gathered in that situation, lead, naturally to a view of culture
as a pattern in itself and as influencing individuals. British anthropology was based on
observation of on-going societies: Malinowski in the Trobriands, Firth in Tikopia, Evans-
Ptitchard and others in Africa. As they saw social life in action, largely on traditional lines,
they concentrated on social relationships, and not on culture or the individual. The
historical accident of Radclifle-Brown’s interest in Durkheim sowed theoretical seed on the
tilth of data derived from working societies. But the general anthropological fascination
with custom keeps social anthropology a discipline distinct from sociology.

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