The myth of the “static, primitive isolate” and the need for historical ethnography

The myth of the “static, primitive isolate” and the need for historical ethnography

Ryan Schram
ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building 410 (A02)
Week of March 10, 2025 (Week 3)

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2025/3

Main reading: J. L. Comaroff and Comaroff (2009); Gilberthorpe (2007)

Other reading: J. Comaroff and Comaroff (1989); J. L. Comaroff and Comaroff (1990); J. L. Comaroff (1987); Wolf (1984); Trouillot ([2003a] 2016); Trouillot ([2003b] 2016)

Homo duplex and its discontents

In different ways, Durkheim and Saussure both employ the homo duplex model of the subject (aka a “split subject”).

It leads them to a set of corollaries about social systems:

• Societies, social systems, and the collective existence of people are examples of a total phenomenon. They are totalities or wholes which are more than the sum of the parts that make them up.
• Individual facts and social facts are fundamentally different. There’s a fundamental opposition between that which pertains to individual conscious experience on the one hand and social reality on the other.
• Collective things like the norms of a society have their own logic. It’s the logic of the mail sorting machine. Individual experiences and actions have a completely different logic.
  • The logic of collective facts is also a logic that we can only see in synchronic time, a freeze frame where everything exists simultaneously and we can see the connections among them.
  • Individual behaviors come from wants, desires, choices, and preferences. This is intuitively real and pertains to diachronic time, the time of cause and effect.

You can’t step in the same river twice

The river
where you set
your foot just now
is gone—
those waters
giving way to this,
now this. (Heraclitus 2001, 27)

“Class” (a regular meeting of students and a teacher, a “unit of study” or a “course”) is a social institution. Can you go to the same class twice?

What about these other examples? What changes and what stays the same?

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The ethnographic present induces historical amnesia

Ethnographic writing is usually present-tense. History touches everything, but anthropologists usually write as if their fieldwork happened now, not in the past.

Johannes Fabian notes that this means that readers have to assume that they live in a different time than the people about whom they read. Classical anthropology is based on “allochronism” and “denial of co-temporaneity” (Fabian [1985] 1992, 201).

There are two different yet interconnected critiques of allochronism in anthropology:

• Anthropology is an unwitting product of a long tradition of European thought in which people define themselves in opposition to an other, i.e. East versus West; North versus South; modern versus primitive (see Said [1978] 2014; Trouillot [2003b] 2016).
  • Sometimes the stereotype of the other of the West is positive and sometimes it’s negative but the dichotomy is never questioned (Trouillot [2003b] 2016, 23)
  • According to Rousseau, New World Indians are noble savages. They are closer to nature than Europeans, and live in just societies (Rousseau [1755] 1964, 132–33, 178–79).
  • According to Montesquieu, societies of the East are despotic and societies of the West are fair and just. (Montesquieu [1748] 1777, 356)
  • European thought has always had a “savage slot” where it puts images of the other to confirm its sense of a modern European self (Trouillot [2003b] 2016, 19). Anthropology creates knowledge that slots right in there.
• The idea of a total social system has been interpreted too literally. We assume that we should look for actual groups living in actually closed, self-contained systems. Nobody's society is actually isolated or closed in a literal sense.
  • Functionalist explanations of social structure are based on an organic analogy and a machine metaphor. They deliberately ignore diachronic time to examine a synchronic structure (e.g. Radcliffe-Brown [1924] 1952).
  • Evans-Pritchard describes the Nuer of southern Sudan (today South Sudan) as an “acephalous” society that is “libertarian” (Evans-Pritchard 1940a, 296), “egalitarian,” and “democratic” (Evans-Pritchard 1940b, 181).
  • Radcliffe-Brown says societies based on kinship have a tendency toward stability and homeostasis (Radcliffe-Brown [1935] 1952).
  • Classical anthropology, as epitomized by Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard, believes in a myth of the “static, primitive isolate” (Wolf 1984, 394).

Anthropology should take place in the world(-system)

Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) theorizes what he calls the capitalist world-system.

• The global system of capitalism is based on a network of unequal exchanges between core and periphery.
• The origins of the unequal exchange between core and periphery begin in the era of European expansion.

Wolf applies Wallerstein’s framework, concluding that:

• all societies are products of historical changes. They are never static.
• all histories are interrelated. No society exists in pristine isolation. People’s contact and interaction across boundaries drive historical change.
• the material base of a society is where societies come into contact. Social and cultural change are responses to historical changes in uses of the environment.

Eric Wolf (1982) also notes that anthropology’s separation from sociology is influenced by the same ideology (see also Wallerstein 2003).

• Sociology specializes in so-called “modern” societies that change, grow, and improve.
• Anthropology specializes in societies that are assumed to be static and traditional.

Native North American societies and the 17th century fur trade

When Europeans came to North America, they encountered people who were already pretty self-sufficient and, indeed, very healthy and wealthy.

• Typical Native North American adults were some of “the tallest people in the world” at the time of early European contacts (Feir, Gillezeau, and Jones 2022, 1). They were well-nourished.
• Hence, they didn’t trade with Europeans out of need.

Some of the effects of the fur trade noted by Wolf are:

• Native societies gained new opportunities for wealth and technology by trading fur (Wolf 1982, 163).
• The Iroquois confederation of tribes shifted to the mutual defense of valued hunting grounds to maintain access to fur, and becomes more like a state in the sense of a permanent bureaucracy (Wolf 1982, 165–67).
• Large-scale bison hunting by Native societies of the Plains was driven by the opportunity to trade pemmican with fur traders (Wolf 1982, 176–78).
• The influx of European wealth in the Pacific Northwest Coast region spurred the elaboration of competitive gift exchange in potlatch feasts to determine the rank of different groups (Wolf 1982, 191–92).

The dialectic of history

The idea of the dialectic is very old, and versions of it exist in many intellectual traditions. Heraclitus, Hegel, and Marx all have their own interpretations of it.

• Everything flows. Everything is in flux.
• Everything is and is in a process of becoming something else.
  • Everything both is and is not. (A = A but A also = not-A)
• Any one thing also contains its opposite. (A = A but A also = B).

Some examples

• It looks like one single river. It is many different possible rivers all at once.
• It looks like an apple, but it is also a future apple tree in an embryonic form.
• What are clouds? Discrete things or dense regions of water droplets? Clouds are both countable entities and fuzzy collections. Clouds exist in flux.

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis?

You may have heard about dialectic change as a three-step process. This is a simplification that can be a little misleading since it emphasizes distinct stages over flux itself (Mueller 1958).

Dialectic processes in society at large

Private property contains its own opposite.

• If I own something, it means you don’t.
• The fence around my land keeps my sheep in, but it also keeps you mushroom-pickers out.
• A society based on owners of capital and nonowners of that same capital is a society of two interdependent classes at war with each other.

Colonialism contains its own opposite.

• Colonization is the process by which one society expands into a new territory by setting up a new settlement.
• But there are no “new” (empty) places on Earth. It’s only “new” to the colonial settlers.
  • Colonization contains its opposite: It is the process by which one society displaces and dispossesses another society of its territory where it was settled.
• Colonialism is, then, two contradictory realities at once, and it is neither of them.
  • Colonialism is, as Ryan says, “a system of racial governance.” It creates a rigidly stratified society in which a colonizing stratum dominates a subordinate, colonized stratum.

Encountering Fiji: History Etched in Everyday Life

Let’s see how this goes. Feedback is welcome. :)

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. (Marx [1852] 1972, 595)

Extra slide: Dialectics in the kitchen

The law of the dialectic is known even to people who know how to cook soup, or so says Marxist thinker Leon Trotsky (see Thatcher 1991, 134).

• Boil water. Add ingredients.
• Add some salt. Mmmm… soup.
• Add some more salt. Mmmmmmm…. soup.
• Add some more salt. Mmmmmmm…. soup.
• Add some more salt. Mmmmmmm…. soup. (Maybe a little salty.)
• Add some more salt. Mmmmmmm…. soup. (Probably too salty but still edible soup.)
• Add some more salt. 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
• It’s not soup anymore. It’s undrinkable saltwater.

The soup is the flux of salt and water. It is a union of drinkable and undrinkable water.

Soup is always on the verge of becoming something else.

Can we also say this about societies and cultures?

Extra slide: Consciousness of oneself is an outcome of a dialectic process (or, the dialectic of recognition between lord and servant)

Hegel describes individual self-consciousness as an outcome of the encounter between two people, a lord and servant.

• I am me; everything else is something I can use for me.
• Other people are just other objects in the environment for me to use.
• When two people meet, they each treat the other as an object. A struggle ensues.
• The incompleteness of their initial self-concepts can be changed into an new, unequal, asymmetric relationship.
  • One person is the master of the other.
  • The other person is the servant of the master, and depends on the master for its new understanding of itself.
• This is an unstable relationship. One person’s self-image depends on denying another person a self-image.
  • If the lord kills the servant, then we’re back to square one.
  • If the servant kills the lord, then their self-concept as a free person now depends on killing other people.
• The struggle for recognition between two people ultimately can and will resolve itself when the contadiction is sublated, or overcome, and both parties move to a new self-concept of themselves as equals.
• A new kind of self-conscious emerges: I am a person who is like others. A person is both a self (for me) and an other (for other people).

References and further reading

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 1989. “The Colonization of Consciousness in South Africa.” Economy and Society 18 (3): 267–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085148900000013.

Comaroff, John L. 1987. “Of Totemism and Ethnicity: Consciousness, Practice and the Signs of Inequality.” Ethnos 52 (3-4): 301–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.1987.9981348.

Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 1990. “Goodly Beasts, Beastly Goods: Cattle and Commodities in a South African Context.” American Ethnologist 17 (2): 195–216. https://www.jstor.org/stable/645076.

———. 2009. “A Tale of Two Ethnicities.” In Ethnicity, Inc., 86–116. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1940a. “The Nuer of Southern Sudan.” In African Political Systems, 272–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 1940b. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fabian, Johannes. (1985) 1992. “Culture, Time, and the Object of Anthropology.” In Time and the Work of Anthropology, 191–206. London: Routledge.

Feir, Donn L, Rob Gillezeau, and Maggie E C Jones. 2022. “The Slaughter of the Bison and Reversal of Fortunes on the Great Plains.” Working paper. National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass. No. 30368. NBER Working Papers. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30368/w30368.pdf.

Gilberthorpe, Emma. 2007. “Fasu Solidarity: A Case Study of Kin Networks, Land Tenure, and Oil Extraction in Kutubu, Papua New Guinea.” American Anthropologist 109 (1): 101–12. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2007.109.1.101.

Heraclitus. 2001. Fragments: the collected wisdom of Heraclitus. Translated by Brooks Haxton. New York: Viking. http://archive.org/details/fragmentscollect00hera.

Marx, Karl. (1852) 1972. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 594–617. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Montesquieu, Baron de. (1748) 1777. Complete Works, Vol. 1 (The Spirit of Laws). London: T. Evans & W. Davis. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/montesquieu-complete-works-vol-1-the-spirit-of-laws#lf0171-01_label_1040.

Mueller, Gustav E. 1958. “The Hegel Legend of ‘Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis’.” Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (3): 411–14. https://doi.org/10.2307/2708045.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1935) 1952. “On the Concept of Function in Social Science.” In Structure and Function in Primitive Society, 178–87. New York: The Free Press. https://archive.org/details/structurefunctio00radc.

———. (1924) 1952. “The Mother’s Brother in South Africa.” In Structure and Function in Primitive Society, 15–31. New York: The Free Press. https://archive.org/details/structurefunctio00radc.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1755) 1964. “Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men [The second discourse].” In The first and second discourses, edited by Roger D. Masters, translated by Roger D. Masters and Judith R. Masters, 77–228. New York: St. Martin’s Press. http://archive.org/details/firstseconddisco00rousrich.

Said, Edward W. (1978) 2014. Orientalism. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Thatcher, Ian D. 1991. “Trotsky’s Dialectic.” Studies in Soviet Thought 41 (2): 127–44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20100579.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. (2003a) 2016. “Adieu, Culture: A New Duty Arises.” In Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World, 97–116. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-137-04144-9.

———. (2003b) 2016. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” In Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World, 7–28. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-137-04144-9.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System, Vol. I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press.

———. 2003. “Anthropology, Sociology, and Other Dubious Disciplines.” Current Anthropology 44 (4): 453–65. https://doi.org/10.1086/375868.

Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———. 1984. “Culture: Panacea or Problem?” American Antiquity 49 (2): 393–400. http://www.jstor.org/stable/280026.