AN101 MT W8 Lecture Transcript.docx

AN101 MT

Week 8: Critique of Equilibrium

Lecture Transcript

This week I am going to introduce you to two anthropologists: Max Gluckman and Edmund Leach and their work rather than somebody writing about them or their work.

It helps that they are both my favourite anthropologists. I remember the excitement of reading Gluckman and Leach for the very first time and how transformed my world was then and continues to be as a result. This is the thing with anthropology is that once you begin to think like an anthropologist, it never leaves you. You can go off and do anything with your life, and I hope you will try a number of different avenues, but you learn to think like an anthropologist. Then even if you are queueing to buy a train ticket, you think anthropologically and that is the spirit of investigation that stayed with me having read Leach and Gluckman,

Max Gluckman is a Jewish South African anthropologist who came to Britain as a student, then goes off to California, before returning and setting up the Manchester School of Anthropology. He does a lot of his anthropological work in southern Africa.

Edmund Leach is British and studied at the London School of Economics. In WWII he goes to Burma (now Myanmar) as part of the British army. When he returns, he writes one of the most important texts in anthropology even today, to my mind, Political Systems of Highland Burma.

Both Gluckman and Leach argue against ‘equilibrium’. That is they are arguing against the functionalist depiction of societies being in equilibrium.

Who are the functionalists you have read?

Durkheim, Evans-Pritchard, Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski.

Functionalists said that society functions as an integrated whole and every institution serves a function in keeping the organism alive. There is also the organic model of homeostasis of how an organism is kept in equilibrium. Any of us, if you think of any organic living creature, we are maintaining the status of equilibrium. Our temperature is regulated, our moods are regulated by an organic system that keeps everything in check. That is the model that is used for describing human societies.

Both Gluckman and Leach, in their own ways, argue against this model and that is what we are going to discover today.

More Malinowski than Radcliffe-Brown

This is an extract from an obituary of Edmund Leach written by two professors in our department, now emeritus professors, who come to seminars, Chris Fuller and John Parry.

“The conviction that action is not rigidly constrained by cultural rules, that within the latter there is always scope for ambitious individuals to make self-serving choices, that there is therefore likely to be a substantial gap between the statistical and ideal norms, and that anthropology reveals both the familiarity of the exotic and the exoticism of the familiar—each of these aspects of Malinowski’s vision was strongly echoed in much of Leach’s writing…” -- C.J. Fuller and J.P. Parry

What I want you to pay particular attention to is the idea of individual choice. This is something that we have not thought about very much so far.

The following is what Leach is pushing back against:

“The social anthropologist normally studies the population of a particular place at a particular point in time and does not concern himself greatly with whether the same locality is likely to be studied again by other anthropologists at a later date. In the results we get studies of Trobriand society, Tikopia society, Nuer society, not ‘Trobriand society in 1914’, ‘Tikopia society in 1929’, ‘Nuer society in 1935’. When anthropological societies are lifted out of time and space in this way the interpretation that is given to the material is necessarily an equilibrium analysis. The authors write as if the Trobrianders, the Tikopia, the Nuer are as they are, now and forever.” -- Leach 1954: 7

We have talked about this, how they are frozen in time. There is no theory of change. No sense of how the societies that we are studying would have been 50 years ago or 300 years later. That is why I have mentioned Sharon Hutchinson's book Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State (1996) because it revisits the Nuer that Evans-Pritchard studies.

So when you have a model like that from the Nuer there is a rigidity. It is a model and models are by definition abstractions, but there is a rigidity to this model in that it does not tell us how this would change in, say, one hundred years’ time. We do not have any sense of that, it will be somehow assumed that these are the principles on which all Nuer societies will always be organised. This is what Gluckman and Leach are pushing back against.

Max Gluckman: Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand

Gluckman is very much immersed in this particular situation. The Bridge paper that you will read is about the inauguration of a bridge that he is there studying and gives you a blow-by-blow account of the whole day. However, before he does that, he provides a little bit of context.

He tells you that in 1930s South Africa there are 2 million whites and 6.5 million blacks who live in ‘reserves.’ Legal colonial laws were introduced to control the movement of black populations in and out of certain areas - The Natives (Urban Areas) Amendment Act (1930). The 1932 Act even restricted their rights on white owned farms (The Natives Service Contract Act).

So, he does not start the description of the bridge completely in a vacuum. He is telling you what white and black populations looked like in his situational analysis of the bridge’s inauguration - this is the backdrop. If you look at the proportion of black to white, less than a third of the population is white. So there are many more black natives that there are white Europeans. But clearly, this is a colonial project in which these populations are controlled through laws, movement, etc.

Gluckman is a young South African anthropologist trained in England, come out to do fieldwork, and the colonial officials there, whom he resembles physically (he is a white anthropologist) are struck because unlike other white colonial officials, he is constantly visiting everybody, he knows everybody, he is asking questions. An assistant native commissioner noted:

“He is always asking people how they are treated, if they are over-taxed, whether they are oppressed, and whether the Chiefs and Indunas like the feeling of being under European rule. I think he is working for someone undisclosed. In fact, the man may be a Communist whom we are warned against.”

Remember when we were talking about Talal Asad and how anthropology’s relationship with colonialism is a troubled one. It is far from black and white, literally. Often the anthropologist’s position was one of ambiguity, one looked like the colonial government but was often on the opposite side because their subject of interest was in fact studying the needs of populations. This was enormously annoying, as you can imagine, to colonial officers who want all white people to behave like white people. It makes it a lot simpler to keep segregation laws. In this context Gluckman then tells you the key details of the inauguration of the bridge.

Important to note is that he never introduces a new character without telling us whether he is black or white and this is critical because it determines the nature of the social interaction, where they will ride in a car, where they will eat their breakfast. Then when they arrive at the inauguration ceremony, the whole playing out of these dynamics in the ceremony itself who makes the speech, who is drinking tea, who is drinking alcohol, who was dancing, who was watching etc. All of this is described, and it is important to pay close attention to all of this because every bit of that description tells you something analytically.

For years I had read the inauguration without actually reading Gluckman’s commentary, but his commentary makes obvious what I want you to note.

Such descriptive anthropological writing came to be known as situational analysis which I find very helpful. I hadn't realised how much part of my own intellectual DNA this had become until I was writing my own book on a village. I had data from over 20 years, but I had so much data that I was struggling to depict it in a single monograph. Using this method of situational analysis, laying out a lot of the details, was enormously helpful.

Imagine those of you in this room who are British are asked to describe to people who have come from outside Britain what a typical family Christmas is like. One way to respond is to say, ‘some people do this; some people do that’. Another way is to say ‘let me tell you about my family Christmas. Usually we gather at my aunt’s house because my parents are now separated. So my dad may come, but usually meet at my mother’s sister’s house and the other people who are there are ‘xyz’ and the menu is decided by X.’ All this detail about who does the cooking, who does the washing up, whether the father visits, where the cousins are etc. seems like an enormous amount of detail until you begin to learn something about kinship relations, familial relations between parents and children, between genders and so on. Then you can imagine doing a situational analysis of your own. So that is the kind of method that Gluckman is using.

Gluckman says a classic social situation is “the behaviours on some occasion of members of a community as such, analysed and compared with their behaviour on other occasions, so that the analysis reveals the underlying system of relationships between the social structure of the community, the parts of the social structure, the physical environment, and the physiological life of the community’s members.”

A very important aspect of this definition is the qualification that you should be able to compare it with their behaviour on other occasions. Imagine somebody concluding what your mother's like on the basis of your account of a family Christmas at her sister's house. That would be absurd because in that situation she is behaving in a certain way, but you would need to see her in other situations to have a full measure of that person.

A social situation, therefore, has to be one that lends itself to this kind of analysis where there is richness, such that unpacking it tells you something about the nature of the community.

Zulu and Europeans “form together a community with specific modes of behaviour to one another.”

So it is not as if the whites are doing one thing and the blacks are doing something else. It is not as if the Europeans inhabit one universe and the Zulus inhabit another, different universe. In this social situation their rules are relative to each other, and they are part of a single community at that point. So the community that they form is the result of a particular kind of colonial situation, which is determined by government laws, labour laws, internal divisions in each of them. Amongst the European population there are all kinds of people. Not everybody is a colonial official. There are missionaries, anthropologists etc. Amongst the blacks too, the Zulu, some people are chiefs, others are not, there are hierarchies etc. So there is grading on both sides but together, in this particular situation where the bridge is being inaugurated, they all come together.

This coming together, and the fact that each of them have a role in it, Gluckman says, is not the kind of holistic, functionalist description that came before but a ‘temporary equilibrium’.

For that moment there is stasis because everybody is functioning in relation to each other, but there is absolutely no guarantee that this equilibrium will continue into the next social situation, which is why it is temporary. So there is nothing to be said about the nature of Zulu society or colonial society from that one instance or that one description, but you are building into your description and analysis a theory of change. You can begin to see how this equilibrium might change.

“The pulls of different values and groups produce strong conflicts [therefore the moment you have conflicts you will have resolutions of them that will lead to social change] in the individual Zulu’s personality and in Zululand social structure. These conflicts are part of the social structure whose present equilibrium is marked by what are commonly called maladjustments.”

“The very conflicts, contradictions, and differences between the Zulu and White groups, and within them, and the factors overcoming these differences, have been shown to be the structure of the Zulu-White community of Zululand.”

So if you want to talk about the community of Zululand, you must have an account of conflict and change. That is why one of Gluckman’s books is called Custom and Conflict in Africa.

Anti-Segregation, Anti-Equilibrium

What Gluckman managed to do, then, is “both to address the ‘reality’ posed by segregationist discourse…and then to marginalize it by using his data to demonstrate the existence of a far-reaching interdependence and integration of all of South Africa’s peoples in a ‘single social system’ or ‘common society.’” (Cocks 2001: 754)

Where this is different from what you have read before is that when we were discussing the Nuer and Evans-Pritchard and Malinowski, we kept saying where are the white people in this? Evans-Pritchard occasionally refers to himself, but there is very little sense of the colonial infrastructure in place. Gluckman, however, makes it all visible, saying I am not studying the Zulu in some ‘frozen in time’ context. They are here alongside white colonialists, who they outnumber by a multiple of three, but they are kept in check through laws and their freedoms being curtailed, and together they form a composite structure. Just the fact that you could describe this togetherness in a single community showed you the stresses and strains of it in a way that people like Radcliffe-Brown and others simply fail to do.

We always say that one thing about teaching and being university academics, as opposed to academics in think tanks or research centres, is that it is very good for research. What makes university academics very different is that we do our research, but we also teach, and each informs the other. So I can tell you accounts from what I have learned from my own research on democracy, but also sometimes teaching helps clarify thinking. This is just a prologue to say that rereading Leach, I remember just how excited I was reading it for the first time, I had completely forgotten how exciting it was and I hope that you will have some sense of that excitement when you read it. So I have prepared these slides which take out some of the best bits of Political Systems of Highland Burma to keep you going.

The introductory note and introduction that you will read is not very long, but each sentence, each paragraph is a little bit like eating very rich, dark chocolate. You cannot just eat lots of it, you have to eat a little bit and then you have got to really chew it and see what is what because it packs a lot in.

There are many statements like that, and he is very self-conscious. At one point he uses the word portentous to describe his statement and then says let us see what that is about and goes on to unpack his idea, so you are aware of what he is doing.

He was in the war in Myanmar which is now the part of Asia which borders Thailand, India and Bangladesh. If you have been following international news you will know there is a lot going on in Myanmar at the moment. These societies that we are studying and reading about are going through enormous change and conflict with governments, international trade, drug trafficking. This is part of the Golden Triangle and so on. So they are far from frozen in time out there, nobody ever knows what happens to them, a lot was going on then and now.

In Political Systems of Highland Burma, Leach is writing about the Kachin and describing what he sees. The Kachin seem to inhabit a landscape where there are mountains and valleys. If there are mountains there are always valleys. In the valleys paddy is cultivated so there is agriculture and these societies who live in the valleys seem to have a much more hierarchical social order. The ones in the hills (Kachin) are ‘slash-and-burn’ so they do not do cultivation in the same way, and they seem to have a more egalitarian structure. At the end of the introduction he makes it obvious. He says actually if you look at it, it is not as if these people are completely different, even though they seem to have very different social structures. He says you could be tempted to say that they are two very different societies, but this is simply not the case because there are some inconsistencies in each and there are family and structural resemblances between them. Therefore, when writing about what he sees, he says, the Kachins have available two contradictory modes of life. One is what is called Shan the people in the valleys who cultivate paddy and have hierarchical structures and gumlao which is a much more decentralised anarchist, therefore, egalitarian democratic society. What the anthropologist sees, he says, is what is called gumsa. By that, he means that gumsa is not a category that is either Shan or gumlao, it seems to have some elements of Shan and some elements of gumlao.

Which is to say there are certain individuals who though they say, for instance, that they are living in an egalitarian society, have managed to somehow accumulate wealth and accumulate status and they begin to behave like a Shan chief. Even though they live in a very egalitarian society, they become more and more like Shan. The opposite also happens where within hierarchical societies you have tendencies to creating, in certain contexts, egalitarian community, and that begins to look more gumlao. So you may say that there are ideal types, and a society is either gumlao or Shan, but when you go and observe a society you are catching it in a particular point in time where they may be tending to gumlao or tending away from it, or towards Shan or away from it.

So what you get is a complete oscillation. It is like a pendulum that oscillates between these different ideals. If a pendulum is oscillating and you need to see its shape you need to stop it. But where you have stopped it just happens to be where you stopped it. It happens to be where the anthropologist has studied it. That does not preclude the possibility that it is part of a much longer temporal cycle. If you were to pull back and let the pendulum, go you would see it would move in one direction or the other. This is the way we need to think about change and society should be studied. Just because we have popped them in that particular slice of time does not mean that is what they are in essence, they may be part of a much bigger cyclicity of time of different kinds of social models.

Fuller and Parry, in an obituary on Leach, they were both his students say:

“Clearly, ‘Kachin culture’ was not a perfectly integrated seamless whole. Several different political ‘discourses’ (gumlao, gumsa, Shan) were available to the actors, and each of them was itself replete with ambiguity, allowing an individual considerable scope to justify the course of action which best suited his own purposes.”

So it is not a deterministic model where you say at some point this society will become more egalitarian or will become more hierarchical. You are saying in that particular moment in time, some individuals would prefer to behave, to make choices. That's what they're talking about. Individuals having considerable scope. You can choose to become a more hierarchical person on the basis of accruing wealth, or you may in fact want to build an egalitarian community, which is a different choice that you make, but that individuals have. So it is a push back against the predeterminism of a certain kind of social culturalism. That you have to behave in a certain way depending on where you are in your lineage.

Leach from Political Systems of Highland Burma

I put these quotes here, so you locate them in the readings and don't miss them, because I want you to be aware of the conversation Leach is having with anthropologists that came before him.

Remember we talked about African Political Systems co-edited by Evans-Pritchard and Fortes. Leach is pushing back against Fortes’s idea of development cycle, which is very important part of that phase of anthropology in which one way temporality was brought in was to look at the development cycle of an individual or a family. The fact that children grow up, they find sexual partners or get married, have children, new generations come in etc. You have to see societies renewing themselves through these development cycles. Leach says I am not doing that because…

“Fortes’s development cycle takes no account of history; they are conceived of as sequences within a total system that is statis and ‘integrated’ in Malinowski’s sense of the term. All the facts under observation at one time cohere together to form one system; in theory there should be no loose ends.” (PSHB 1954: xii)

Just before this quote he says that Fortes’s idea of the development cycle is very tied to biology. It is a fact that children grow up and generations change, and women get married. That is not what he is talking about here, he is basically saying that the coherence of structural functionalist depictions of any society, that everything fits together nicely, is misleading. You must have some sense of being able to put the society you are studying in a much wider cycle of time. Therefore, he says:

“My own postulate of a gumsa/gumlao developmental cycle is of a different scale and quality. In the first place, since the total moving equilibrium system is presumed to incorporate all the events occurring within a time-span of a century or more, the model implies that the facts under observation at any one time will appear to belong to several quite different ‘systems’. No amount of re-sorting of the synchronous data can produce a pattern which is ‘integrated’ in the Malinowski sense.” (PSHB 1954: xii)

The classic anthropological thing is to say economy, politics, religion, kinship are all different parts of this puzzle and if you move them around, ultimately, you are talking about a holistic system in which there is integration, but all of these fit together nicely. Leach says this kind of model simply does not allow for this integrated idea of a society, because a society, at any point that you are studying, is unstable because it is in motion. It is this idea that they are not frozen in time. These societies are in motion, you happen to have caught it at one particular point in time.

For example, if you go to study American politics and you arrive the day after the midterm election results are declared. If you do not have a sense of larger cycles, you would say fantastic, this is a very well-balanced legislature, there is no problem at all. You would have no idea that just a year ago there was a real worry that the whole country was going way to the right and what was predicted meant that the whole country was moving to a political position where it was anti-abortion, anti-globalisation, ‘anti this, anti that’. So when you study any society, you have got to be aware of how to view the different disparate elements in it.

Leach on ritual p. 10-17

Finally, I want to draw your attention to just how brilliant Leach is on ritual. P. 10-17 are the last seven pages of the introduction that are specifically on the nature of ritual. It is very important that we pay attention to Leach’s developing of the ideas about religion and ritual we spoke about last week with Durkheim. Leach is very much taking up Durkheim’s ideas and engaging with them. The first thing that he says is that for Durkheim ritual is what occurs in ‘sacred’ situations. So what is profane is technological, it is instrumental, it is what needs to be done in a society. Whereas ritual is what happens in the sacred part of society, and Leach says, I disagree because ritual in any cultural context, he says is “a pattern of symbols. We describe it through a symbolic system i.e. language. They have a common structure (e.g. sheet music).”

What he says about planting rice is very interesting. He says when you grow paddy you can say that you plant the seed, the saplings come out, you transplant them, then you flush the fields with water, you watch it grow and after so many weeks the crop ripen to harvest but there is no paddy growing society which does this whole process without very particular accompanying gestures, which he calls frills – aesthetic frills.

For example, he says, when you are watching paddy being planted, transplanted, or harvested you can see are how people look at these jobs. Yes, there is cutting, tying, threshing etc. but each of these are determined by a certain manner in which you do things and anthropologists can see that manner. For instance, in my village alongside paddy cultivation, bricks were made. Bricks were made from sand, baked over a period of days, then dismembered and shipped out. You would see this whole thing being done, and there would be little details of how an assembly line was constructed or who sat next to each other in the assembly line etc. When you were walking, driving around the countryside you see all these steaming kilns because that is where the bricks are being baked.

I had been watching this every day in my village and then finally I said when you light the kiln you must call me because it is a culmination of several weeks of work. When they did, when I got there, it was extraordinary because there were c. 100 people. They were all stood around the kiln, and everybody was totally quiet. Now, in an Indian village, you really do not have many moments of complete quiet unless it is a religious ritual. This was not, they were just about to light the kiln. So, there was complete hush and I see a man who is clearly not from the village. I don't recognise him. He strikes a match, and he lights it. There are few flowers, incense sticks, there are even some sweets (there was no sugar in the village, people were too poor, they did not have money). Everybody is still quiet, and he waits until it catches, until the whole thing begins, and you know it has worked. There are flumes through the kiln, everything moves, and then everybody disperses.

So after I ask some of the people who he was. I have never seen him, is he from the village? And they tell me he is not. So where is he from? He came from outside. So why did he come from outside? They say we have to pay him money to do this job (light the kiln). So I ask if it is a difficult job? No you just strike the match, and you light the kiln. So why pay someone ₹5,000 (₹=Ruppee) to do it?

They said, because it is a sin to burn earth so none of us would do it but need bricks, we need to sell bricks because we need to make a living, so we need to pay somebody that much money to absorb the sin. It is only somebody who would be willing to take on the sin and for that you have got to pay them a lot of money. This is an aesthetic frill.

All I could see was some stranger had come and they had been paid a lot of money. It is like a musical notation. Leach says sheet music and the music itself have something in common. They have the same structure. What you are observing as an anthropologist are these aesthetic frills but usually the aesthetic frill is an insight into something much more multidimensional like a musical set, which is the society and its belief systems, and which is what you are trying to understand. These aesthetic frills are not only in religious, sacred situations, like with the brick kiln. It was just a brick kiln. Nothing was being worshipped there except the moment itself was being marked because it was this enormous sin of burning earth. So, he says, this is what we as anthropologist are able to capture and what we call ritual and by studying ritual, asking these questions and thinking about it, we are unpacking something much more foundational. Ideas about earth, ideas about insider/outsider, about collectivity which he says are what make explicit social structure. That is why you need to study ritual. Ritual is not something that people only do in religious situations. It is the way that society presents itself in a number of different practices that are observable.

Concluding slide

Is this a temporary equilibrium? Is it a balanced equilibrium? Is it a dynamic equilibrium?

Gluckman says that historical time is very important. You need to look at the structure and duration of this particular social situation and unpack it to get to the social reality. Leach much more challenging of African Political Systems steers with the word system, but he says Poltical Systems of Highland Burma. So the plurality is in the fact that you can have one place but multiple systems by catching its dynamism in this model.