Week 3—The myth of the “static, primitive isolate” and the need for historical ethnography

Week 3—The myth of the “static, primitive isolate” and the need for historical ethnography

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)

This week introduces a major critique of anthropology’s concept of difference as culture. This critique has been made by many scholars in many contexts, both within and outside of anthropology. They converge on two main ideas:

• When one considers the human subject as homo duplex, there is often a latent assumption that the collective mind of society corresponds to a distinct, completely separate, empirical community. If we assume that culture is a total system, then we also often assume that the people who share one culture are part of a closed social world.
• When one adopts this assumption as a starting point for observing other people’s lives, it is also easy to assume that you as the observer are outside of that system, as if you were floating above it and able to see it all at once. But this is not true; indeed, it’s impossible. By ignoring this problem, one also ignores a lot of facts that are relevant for explaining a community’s way of life.

Both of these critiques have influenced anthropologists in many different ways, and many scholars have made different attempts to formulate (1) different conceptions of the subject, the social subject, and society as a whole; and (2) different ways of identifying an object of study rather than a (fictional) isolate community. So this week is also introducing us to a major theme of the class.

In the lecture and in the discussion of readings for this week, we will consider two major forms that the critique has taken.

The first comes from the work of Eric Wolf (1982), who observes that anthropology has historically been limited to studying societies outside of Europe, and it has also tended to assume that these societies are primitive and isolated, when it is so obvious that they are not. As he says, anthropology has embraced a “notion of a static primitive isolate” as the default model of all societies outside of Europe (Wolf 1984, 394).

The second comes from Michel-Rolph Trouillot ([2003b] 2016), who like Wolf is interested in seeing societies as products of a history that unfolds outside their boundaries. Trouillot argues that anthropology’s myth of a static primitive isolate is the second coming of the Enlightenment myth of the noble savage, and that like the noble savage stereotype, anthropological knowledge also serves an ideological function without intending to.

Yet, neither Wolf nor Trouillot reject anthropology or its interest in human difference. In fact, they still find value in an analysis of culture.

• Are they right? Why?

We will also consider one major effort to address these critiques. It comes mainly from the work of Jean Comaroff (an anthropologist) and her husband John L. Comaroff (a historian). What would a married anthropologist–historian team do in their research together? They would attempt to marry (lol jk) anthropology and history. :D

In the simplest of terms, “The Comaroffs” want to ask how and why societies change, especially how small societies of southern Africa have absorbed the impact of colonialism and its aftermath. But they have much bigger stakes. They argue that there is a parallel movement of

• people’s consciousness of themselves as a distinct community on the one hand; and
• people’s individual and collective dependence on global capitalism on the other.

The more people participate in a global economic order based on private property, the more people emphasize their own communal identity and the more that sense of community takes the form of a nation. People’s consciousness of themselves is a product of history, especially the histories of European imperialism, the expansion of global capitalism, and the formation of new nations in an unequal world-system.

An important idea for “the Comaroffs” is the concept of a dialectical process, particularly as developed by Marx. Yet unlike Wolf, they are interested in Marx’s philosophical inquiry into change.

In this view, the world is full of contradictions. Nothing has a simple definition or permanent, essential character.

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