Leenhardt

8/13/2019 Leenhardt

1/3

Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World by James Clifford

Review by: Roy WagnerAmerican Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 87, No. 4 (Dec., 1985), pp. 936-937Published by: Blackwell Publishingon behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/678171.

Accessed: 05/04/2012 20:08

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at.http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Blackwell PublishingandAmerican Anthropological Associationare collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,

preserve and extend access toAmerican Anthropologist.

http://www.jstor.org

8/13/2019 Leenhardt

2/3

936 AMERICANNTHROPOLOGIST [87, 1985]

make most of the assumptions about ration-ality identified in this book. The addition of amechanistic process such as selection is not in-consistent with Riches's approach, since itdoes not underlie (as Riches suggests in chap-ter 1) but acts on individual decisions. Whatthe author proposes, therefore, I recommendas good reading foranyone interested in eithernorthern nomadic hunter-gatherers or in theecological approach; however, I don't recom-mend that the reader accept the humanisticapproach as an end in itself but as the meansto an end.

Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt inthe Melanesian World.JamesCliford.Berke-ley: University of California Press, 1982.xi +270 pp. $28.50 (cloth).RoY WAGNERUniversity f Virginia

Successor to Marcel Mauss in his teachingchair at the Ecole Pratiquedes Hautes Etudes,and predecessor of Claude Levi-Strauss,Maurice Leenhardt stands as a counterexam-ple to what is often spoken of as the "Frenchtradition"in anthropology. If Lvi-Strauss ex-tended the "total social facts" of Mauss intosystematics and analysis, Leenhardt empha-sized their wholeness, concreteness, even in-transigence. A candidate, perhaps, for the ex-asperating category of "post-structuralism,"Leenhardt's work (contemporary with Mali-nowski's) is as much prestructuralist;a cap-tive, perhaps, of the New Caledonian imagi-nation, Leenhardt himself won his ethno-graphic certainty the hard way, by first tryingto capture that imagination as a missionary.It is very much to Clifford's credit that hedoes not try to resolve these (and many other)contradictionsin this intellectual biographyofMaurice Leenhardt, but proceeds rather asLeenhardt himself (who could not resolvethem either) might have: by burnishing theminstead. A missionary to the end, Leenhardtwas perhaps a better ethnologist forhis bring-ing together the New Caledonian "total socialfact" of no("word,"parole),and the facts of na-ture his father had told him were "the word ofGod." As with Malinowski, much of the con-flict in Leenhardt's life involved the relentlesscolonialism of his day, but he also representedthe archetype of what Cliffordcalls "a restlessWestern desire for encountering and incorpo-rating others, whether by conversion or com-prehension" (p. 126).The contrast with Malinowski, Leenhardt's

secularist counterpart, is instructive, for Mal-inowski'sempiricisminvariably led him to lo-cate the concreteness of experience withinthings,n akind of "objectfetishism"of culturethat implied the inevitable shallow compari-sons between magic, science, and religion.Leenhardt, by contrast, insisted on the con-creteness of cultural concept, as "myth" or asthe indigenous "word," and spoke for cultureas the transformation of experience ratherthan the discovery of scientific method.Whetherthis was a legacy of his Huguenot up-bringingor a conviction that fused science andreligiosity, it makes Leenhardt something ofan exemplar for an anthropology strugglingwith its own convictions about conceptualconcreteness.Much of Leenhardt's writing (and much ofClifford'seffort, in chapter 11, to situate thatwriting critically), arose in response to an in-formant'ssurprisingcomment to the mission-ary: "Spirit?Bah We've always known aboutthe spirit. What you brought was the body"(p. 172). It was, in short, the "object fetish-ism" of Western thought, the transpositionofconcreteness from thought (or "spirit") to itsobject, that struck New Caledonians most for-cibly about their colonizers. Clifford, follow-ing RogerBastide, traces this tendency to Des-cartes's separation of "clear and distinctideas" from "obscure and confused ideas" (p.178), through Kantian "pure reason," to therationalism of Levi-Strauss. Leenhardt's ideaof mythic reality, by contrast, is sensual, con-stituted of thought's interpenetrationwith itsobject.If the salience of concrete, enacted thoughtemerges more clearly from this sensitive bi-ography of ideas than Leenhardt's (and Clif-ford's) focal themes of person and myth, this,too, is something of a consequence of concreteconceptualization. Like his esteemed friendLucien Levy-Bruhl, though farless abstractly,Leenhardt was concerned to characterizecon-ceptualizations of person, myth, spirit, or aes-thetics, more than he was ever disposed toconsider them constitutively. Person andmyth become less definite as their Melanesianevocation develops its peculiar resonance andsonority.And so, Clifford tells'us in his concludingchapter, did the person of Maurice Leenhardthimself. Leenhardt would have especiallyliked the conclusion that a personmust alwaysbe something more than a theory of the per-son, for he seems to have lived it, taught it, andbelieved it as his own achieved form of Chris-tianity. Whether such a faith, or such an ap-proach, makes for a superioranthropology, ormerely adds the study of humanity to litera-

8/13/2019 Leenhardt

3/3

Politics and History in Band Societies.EleanorLeacock nd RichardLee,eds. New York:Cambridge University Press, 1982. xiv + 500pp. $44.50 (cloth).JOHN H. DOWLINGMarquetteUniversity

There have been threemajorconferences onforagers, the first in Ottawa in 1965, the sec-ond in Chicago in 1966, and the third in Parisin 1978. Each has produced a volume of pa-pers. PoliticsandHistory n BandSocietiess anoutgrowth of the Paris conference.From a theoretical standpoint, the editorsand many of the contributors are dialecticaland historical materialists whose goal is theformulationof a system of laws to explain hu-man behavior (p. 6). Theirs is a heuristicmethodology and a goal long shared by manyof us. Yet, as is too often the case with Marx-ists, the editors' hortatory rhetoric occasion-ally approaches the level of a fundamentalist'spulpit and is no more appealing in one contextthan the other.Fortunately, invective rhetoric mars onlyone paper in the 21-paper volume, Rosaldo'sfulmination on the historical and contempo-rary treatment of native peoples in the Phil-

ippines (chapter 14). His sermon may wellneed to be made and reiterated, but not to ananthropological audience.The remaining papers are a virtual mine ofexceptionally good ethnographic and ethno-logical material. The volume is divided intothree sections: "Foragers among Them-selves," "Foragers and Farmers," and "For-agers versus Capitalism."The six papers in the first section are con-cerned with the dynamics of intraband and in-terband relations among the San, Australianaborigines, Inuit, and Mbuti. Focusing on dif-ferent aspects of social relations, they collec-tively probe incisively into the sociopoliticalnature of egalitariansocial processes. In doingso, the anomalous "headman" of Kung Sanis thankfullyreduced to a misunderstanding.Unfortunately, one important aspect ofband life receives little attention. The ethno-historical data on bands document a muchhigher incidence of homicide in the remotepast than in the recent past. Such data need

serious consideration.Afterall, in a time whenthe police power of encysting societies isstrong, becoming "harmlesspeople" is clearlyan advantageous adaptive strategy. The ex-tent of mortal combat for foragers livingamong foragersneeds attention and the impli-cations of such combat for social relations cryforconsideration.

Foragershave, for hundreds or thousandsofyears, been interacting with societies exploit-ing domesticated plants and animals andranging in social complexity up through egal-itarian tribes and ranked chiefdoms to prein-dustrial states. All these various "others" aresubsumed in the second section under the ru-bric "farmers."Given the economic and polit-ical diversity of the foragers' "alters," this isan area of theoreticalconcernthat needs muchtighter control and exploration.The seven papersof this section describe theinteraction of the Montagnis-Naskapi, IndianMalapantaren, Congo Aka, Kalahari Bas-arwa, and Kenyan Okeik (Dorobo) with theirmore politically advanced neighbors. Focus-ing on the socioeconomic niches occupied byforagers, the papers provide exceptional in-sight into intercommunityrelations in specificsituations. Undoubtedly, the included paperswill all contribute significantly to our under-standing of intersocietal relations at a moregeneral level once the ambiguities inherent in"farmers" are given political and economicprecision.Aside from Rosaldo's paper on the Philip-pines, mentioned earlier, the remaining pa-pers in the third section are concerned withthe militarization of the San, the problemsandstrategies of boreal forest Native Americans,and the recent resurgence of foraging amongAustralian aborigines. It is patent that eachethnographer is committed to and sympa-thetic with the subject community. Yet eachwriterrecognizes the problematicsituation in-volved and the unpredictable future. Eachwriterprovides explicit data in the best scien-tific tradition,but, more than this, they collec-tively raise questions that industrial societiesmust confrontand with which they must cope.This last section of the book is in the bestanthropological tradition of raising questionsabout received truths. Yet one wishes that inaddition to examining the "predatory expan-sion" of industrial capitalism the book hadalso considered the inexorable blossoming ofindustrial socialism and the ethnohistory offoragersin the path of that behemoth.

GENERAL/THEORETICALNTHROPOLOGY 937

ture's celebration of idiosyncracy, it is thehallmark of superlative biography. And one isnot likely to find a better critical synthesisthanJames Clifford'sstudy of myth's person-ification in one person's myth.

The Politics of Truth: Essays in CriticalAnthropology. GeraldD. Berreman.Atlantic