Odd Questions

Talking to Audrey Richards

Imagine yourself inside a greenhouse. Surrounded by a mob holding stones, you are counting down the seconds until they throw them. Now look around. Look away from the screen! What if this is the world we’re living in now; though the glass house invisible, the mob neighbours and colleagues, or law-abiding pedestrians walking down your street. A strange way to begin my next chapter on British Anthropology, where I write about a talk the great Audrey Richards gave to a group of Cambridge students in 1982. This chapter the book’s pivot, where I argue a decisive turn occurs in the discipline. And that greenhouse and stones? The Schloss his usual Delphic self? No. Translate into concepts and experiences.…

The advantage of an empty mind: we are not overladen with concepts; heavy boots in a rucksack squeezing my sandwiches to mush. Argh! If only I’d been careful, put my lunch on top not underneath my clothes. This not a mistake Audrey Richards to make. Learning the lesson early, she places the empirical stuff where can’t be squashed. Here she is telling us about ethnographic life, in a film that feels older than its years (technology ages prematurely in a medium forever young). As I watch Audrey reveal the secrets of the subject’s success, I see it changing in those sharp, bright, faces of anthropological youth; some of whom, I surmise, think they’ve stumbled into the wrong studio: plenty of paint, brushes and easels, but where are the microscopes and workbenches, those tomorrow’s world computers…. Already an art is turning into a social science; where intuition gives way to method and ideas, and individuals succumb to the collective and a trend. It is the early 1980s, when anthropologists are already thinking from within the discipline, rather than creating it out of themselves. Even the 1950s feels like a long time ago.

I had never seen any waste in that house. Even orange and lemon rinds were used up, boiled with sugar to make crystallised peel. Bones were boiled for stock, egg-shells thrown in for further nourishment. Stale bread was either soaked for bread puddings or dried in the oven and then crushed for crumbs to coat ham or fish. Fat was rendered down for dripping; sour milk used for scones or for making cream cheese, with chives chopped in and well-peppered. Fruit from the garden was preserved or made into jam; parsley and herbs dried for the winter in muslin bags.

This economy went further than food. String from parcels was carefully wound up; I never remembered my grandmother buying a ball of string, and when Max did so it seemed a terrible extravagance. Butter and lard papers were saved for greasing cake-tins, greaseproof paper from cereal packets was cut into circles and used for steaming puddings. And in the outside lavatory, neatly strung from a nail, were the coloured tissues that had wrapped foreign oranges. Waste, my grandmother said, was vulgar. God wasted nothing, so how could we?¹

This self-sufficient world vanishes in the 1960s. After Manfred Mann and The Small Faces there’s no need to make-do-and-mend when supermarkets supply everything on demand. These eco-warriors are not the poor. Not at all. No, they, I am told by Aunt Rosa, waste their money on rubbish when they should be repairing what they have. A story often forgotten when the Baby Boomers shake their bottoms and pom-poms, cheerleading this glorious decade. For the first time in history the poor could live like royalty, with no fear of the morrow, which was bound to improve; the telly telling us so. Spend! Spend! Spend! They even made a play about it in the 1970s. Every Friday’s paypacket a Pools win. These Aunts haven’t caught up with the story. Living in a huge house on a fixed income, they inhabit the ruins of a once opulent existence, which they stitch together with cotton and wool.

You are suspicious. Suspect the Schloss of swinging you around a metaphor, until dizzy and daft, you’ll believe anything he says. ‘Stop! Let me off! Stop!’ Schloss, who likes to be polite, does what you ask. Gathering your senses, putting them tidily into your string-bag, with the onions and asparagus, you ask a question: ‘come on, tell me, what you doin’?’ Well maybe the supermarket is a metaphor. ‘But for what!’ The Concept.

A student says that a complete field study can’t be done anymore; these societies too dishevelled and syncretic to allow such an approach; the unity, a coherence, has gone. The West penetrating too deeply into these cultures, has disintegrated their form; which suggests that anthropology’s original raison d'être, to discover and explain new kinds of existence, is no more. Jack Goody intervenes. Citing Audrey’s own study of Elmdon, an ethnography of an English village, he rightly says that in capturing a slice of life this study does give a coherent whole. A unity can be through time - history is an obvious example - as well as in space; the initial intellectual frame - the problem, a project - to give the coherence, which is as much theme as a social unit. The student’s question rests on a myth; that the classic studies were portraits of timeless communities untouched by Western trade and tobacco. Yet to read Malinowski is to know that the Trobrianders had already adapted to the White Man’s rule. His ethnography a desperate attempt to capture what remained of what was soon to be lost.²

A slightly distorted view of the subject had arisen; one that takes too literally the idealism of the early ethnographers, who saw in anthropology a protection against the psychological ills of modernity; the anomie of its utilitarianism, the meaning void of the scientific method, those toxic side effects. Anthropology to provide an understanding of society to augment or even replace that of science. A new kind of rationality; one not just different but the equal if not superior to the bureaucratic rationalism conquering the West. Durkheim to trump Weber! Ah those were the days. Now it is the universities that are bureaucratic machines; Max holding Émile in a headlock on the vice-chancellor’s atrium floor.³ Add the aftereffects of the Age of Empiricism, when a subject wasn’t serious unless parodying the scientists; and whose heyday was the 1950s and 1960s.⁴ Wholes! No. Get the analytic hatchet out. Chop everything down, until chips and splinters. This view spreading to the Humanities, who inhaled the laughing gas of Modernist cliché: sent to sleep, giggling on fragments and alienation. All cracked individuals now.

Something has been lost. The touch, a feel, a sensibility, a range of perceptions tilted towards the oblique and the nuanced, has been left out of the transmission process from original guru to fourth generation student; even when their teachers still touched by the Malinowskian enchantment. Why are disciples unable to carry a messiah’s personality across the ages? Or should I blame the Zeitgeist, that glorious decade of experimentation and exploration (my turn to wear the cheerleaders’ uniform) when so much made new? In an interview with Alan, Lucy Mair and Jean La Fontaine say they no longer understand the subject. For the conquistadors had arrived. Those Structuralists (pre, post, present) with their complicated theories, which use the records of ethnography as raw material; it is the wind to sail these scholastic galleons. Not platinum but a new technical language, perfect for an established profession to flash its cash.

Nowadays, historians’ arguments must still stride forward or totter backward on their footnotes. But the lead of official prose has replaced the gold of Gibbon’s classic oratory…. [The footnote] identifies both the primary evidence that guarantees the story’s novelty in substance and the secondary works that do not undermine its novelty in form and thesis. By doing so, moreover, it identifies the work of history in question as the creation of a professional. Like the high whine of the dentist’s drill, the low rumble of the footnote on the historian’s page reassures: the tedium it inflicts, like the pain inflicted by the drill, is not random but directed, part of the cost that the benefits of modern science and technology exact.⁵

Though ostensibly writing about the footnote, this gorgeously written book is actually a meditation on the scholar’s profession. For the footnote, like technical jargon, identifies the professional, shows off her expertise. To learn the technicalities the entry fee we pay to get inside the club; while using it allows me to tip the doorman. Yet such verbal technics have their own problems. I think of the concept. Concepts inject meaning and grow their own vocabulary which empties that meaning out. An odd kind of double helix, that gives a discipline life and throttles it at the same time.

Stand long enough under a waterfall and the finer points of style and sensibility are quickly blunted, and rapidly washed away. The abstractions of laboratory and library to replace the Malinowskian gesture and tone; while the charged atmosphere of an encounter, its buzz and opacity, is lost to the clarity of words on a calm page. The Gemeinschaft of the first generation becomes the Gesellschaft of the fourth. It is Buddenbrooks in reverse. With the greats I feel they learned to fight when in the field. By the 1970s, the discipline established, the pressure of qualifications, of jobs, of departmental reputation, makes such untraining impossible. Before getting into the ring, you spend hours in the gym, shadow box with an old hand, memorise the manuals, copy the latest moves: so well-prepared! Present over past. Monographs not people. Knowledge before experience. The problem with any established discipline; as the subject’s own history, its body of doctrine, creates its own reality, which the outside world must confirm and then conform.⁶

So in the middle ages men found themselves endowed with an explanation of the physical universe and the workings of nature which had fallen upon them out of the blue, and which they had taken full-grown and ready-made. And they were infinitely more the slaves of that intellectual system than if they had actually invented it themselves, developing it out of their own original researches and their own wrestlings with truth.⁷

I add a caveat. There were intellectual mavericks in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, once the conceptual framework is set it takes more than ordinary ability to step outside it. Cleverness, a touch of the rebel, her charm, his will, the charisma; these are essential qualities if one is to attract - I think magnetism - followers from disciplines pulled tight within their ideational forcefields. The mainstream not only resistant and wary of such characters, they soon cease to understand them. Add a natural tendency for knowledge to merge with morality, so that heretical ideas are associated with bad behaviour; which quickly becomes established fact, when Church edicts and university rules must be broken if one’s ideas are to be heard. A concept is first a fence, then a high wall; and when the rapscallions climb and sit astride it…get out the barbed wire! build the watchtowers! A professor who floats on the flux of life isn't going to worry if the life changes and her ideas with it: she’ll go wherever the profession takes her. Professors who live off a concept know that their reputation stands for only as long as we believe in their ideas; it is why, when challenged, we are removed from the building, and locked out into the wilderness.

Much of academic work is a defensive operation. Not just the brigades and battalions of argument and detail, there is also the praetorian guard of the footnote, which contains its own secret traps and snares.⁸ A typical professor is terrified of being attacked and her errors exposed. As if life is not a succession of mistakes.

Cumulatively, the effect was deeply inhibiting. Few published; it was said because anyone trying to write already anticipated the mocking, mock-serious dissection of his words that would ensue. As a community, these philosophers lived in fear of committing a solecism - especially one in cold print: some irretractible naivety that Profess Austin could pick apart in his lectures for all to see, gaffe upon gaffe, one blunder on another. Looking back, the context they created seems one concerned, almost to the point of obsession, with the question of intellectual control. The concern for logic, the avoidance of feeling, the ideal of clarity, the hostility to metaphysics, the assumption that confusion dissolves if examined with sufficient dispassion: all these seem to have been carried over into philosophy from the classical training that so many of the older philosophers had enjoyed - a training designed by the Victorians as a means of translating tradesmen’s sons into colonial administrators and gentlemen. Also Victorian was the sense that philosophical analysis was a process of cleansing; of purging from the temple of reason all that was alien and sullying.⁹

There is a shift in the 1960s. This ascetic rigour is loosened up, and big, fleshy ideas are let into the profession; which becomes awash with a metaphysics that pretends to a harsh materialism; beginning with Marx and Freud it mutates into Theory, as complex as catwalk models are thin. The Concept rules. Let’s speculate why this shift occurs. Hudson says that most Oxford philosophers were ex-servicemen; which may explain that obsession with detail and accuracy, an almost phobic reaction to fancy ideas; it comes out of the war, where one had to be hyper-empirical and hate the ideological enemy. Though, I should add, this is also an intensification of an existing trend, which started in the late 19th-century under the influence of the German research university, and gathered pace with the logical atomism of Russell and Moore. Bound to be a generational reaction, which, given the nature of ideas, would be equally extreme: an almost a vacuous metaphysics written in an incomprehensible jargon. Empty words; soon reduced to fancy dress, hired out for the occasion. Other reasons are more disturbing. Oxford philosophy attracted an intellectual elite, the crème de la crème of a particular cast of mind.¹⁰ Such characters are rare. When the universities expanded such rarefied intellects to be outnumbered by the less esoteric and gifted; those who can learn and apply a concept, but cannot take it to pieces or remake to their own design.

Oh no! Herr Schloss wants his say. ‘Don’t worry’, he says, ‘I’m quoting Anthony Grafton.’

In a modern, impersonal society, in which individuals must rely for vital services on others whom they do not know, credentials perform what used to be the function of guild membership or personal recommendations: they give legitimacy.¹¹

A concept can act as a credential; it slots you into a niche, proves you are respectable, shows, or appears to show, that you’ve done the hard work, and understand the rules of this scholarly game. A rise in numbers almost requires an increase and simplification of signs to recognise the ‘quality’ at a glance. Concepts the quickest way for professors to identify each other in conference hall and quad.

Theory to have an enormous impact on the Humanities, and especially literature; for like philosophy, only a relatively few have the sensibility for the subject; who feel its nuances, resist the scholarly rules, sink the conventional abstractions, who touch a poem’s spirit. Literary criticism is an art, one difficult and chancy - I think of William Empson – and which risks banality, if not written with feeling and insight.¹² The solution is simple! Reduce the scholarly risks by turning into it a social science, whose methods and ideas can be copied and repeated.¹³ However, what fertilises science - an array of assistants with their test tubes and needles – may sterilise those subjects that rely, not on a myriad of microscopic gains out of an identical process, but the eccentricities of character, their originality, their depth. Theory was sold as being agin’ The System; which has misled not only its political critics but the practitioners themselves; for Theory is the ultimate in production-line scholastics, the most efficient way of running an academic business.

Theory relies on mass-market ideas, quickly rinsed of meaning through overuse. No need to think about them, just type the latest Kardashian into a laptop. Perfect for an industry where success is measured by the quantity of words, and success is weighed on industrial-sized scales, administered by bureaucrats. Quality is best assessed by small groups of insiders, each with an individual's colourful but feather-light judgement. In today’s idea-factories there isn’t the time to look too closely at a colleague’s work; while if too critical your own reputation could be at risk; dangerous if no tenure, and it’s the managers who hire and fire. So write the thinnest of papers and no-one is going to criticise you. Too busy writing their own.¹⁴

Stay inside the conventional wisdom, crowd into group think, keep well within the bounds of whatever concept is on today’s chat-show, and you will be safe. No-one is going to go after you. Nevertheless, the fragility, that Liam Hudson describes, returns in another form: those meaningless concepts are so thin, one feels the cold when some crazy like the Schloss opens the conceptual front door. Shiver! Shiver! Shiver! or tweet! tweet! tweet! in today’s media world. Or silence. The most effective way of removing an outsider.¹⁵

If you’re thinking it’s just academics.

Marx, who, like many dedicated intellectuals, was himself haunted by a perpetual feeling of insecurity, and was morbidly thin-skinned and jealously suspicious of the least signs of antagonism to his person or his doctrines….¹⁶

A concept is a poor foundation on which to build a personality. Weak and wobbly, it is liable to idea-slides and fashion-quakes. Easy to attack, requiring constant maintenance, you are never quite safe from the enemy. Castles whose walls are polystyrene not stone.

Except for Engels and his family, Marx was a loner, forever at war with his colleagues: ‘get inside my concept or get out of here!’ It is to produce the conditions for a cult, where a supremely powerful but suspicious Jehovah attracts those who are equally insecure but lack the intellectual tools to compete with the master. In universities such characters have outsize influence on a discipline - F.R. Leavis, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins… - but most professors are satisfied if their students learn their lessons and buy their books.

The Schloss asks a question I can’t answer: ‘how much of academic work is structured to protect the academic’s ego rather than to discover or impart knowledge?’

The mind an insecure place. To live there permanently, either we have supreme confidence in our ability and a mastery of the field, or to find a secure refuge in a respectable concept.¹⁷ The latter the most common strategy today, producing its own fragility, as the concept gradually separates us from the reality it thinks to describe.¹⁸ The world to become not just strange but inexplicable. I was talking to someone only yesterday. An old-fashioned Socialist he couldn’t understand why the workers aren’t voting Labour. ‘Floating voters!…where have all the principles gone! My mother was a right-wing reactionary, but she held to what she believed.’ As if working class voters should be more principled than the politicians. His concept crumbling, his world no longer makes sense.

Concept as blindfold.

We think an idea explains things. That they explore, they discover. But what if concepts are filters, whose purpose is to secure our mental universe not make it sensitive or acute? An intellectual adventure is to think in a continuous flow; with its oxbow lakes and trickling streams, those mad crashing rapids: ‘watch out the Schloss, you’re sliding off a waterfall!’ A concept makes the world known. Let me shuffle my pack of metaphors: our mind a steelworks, where the end-product is our sensibility; concepts its waste product. We put knowledge before, make it more important than, the growth of a person’s mentality. It is our great error, mistaking slag for precious metal.

A concept is the high wall that blocks the view. By knocking this wall down Malinowski and his followers created a new world, a new constellation of ideas, out of material they were seeing firsthand and fresh. By killing the old king - J.G. Frazer - they became the new, ruling the territory with whatever at hand.¹⁹ No concepts just activities! Which explains Malinowski’s (perhaps too pure) behaviourism, that produced the later reactions from more orthodox minds, who prefer theory to thought and description. Malinowski’s great revolution was less his ideas than his approach; which was closer to a lifestyle, to a way of being, than a scholarly discipline. A remarkable achievement. Though the complete academic he stepped outside all academic categories to create utterly novel perspectives on his subject. Like Wittgenstein, who turned philosophy into poetry, Malinowski was an original, difficult to categorise.²⁰

Functionalism begun as a method to understand societies. Later it became a theory that explained them; a tension already in Malinowski, who gives a ‘thick description’ of the relations, which are then used to explain what is described. Malinowski could easily have called his approach Relationalism rather than Functionalism; and, indeed, I think this the more accurate term, for it avoids the chief defect of function, which suggests actions have a purpose. If societies viewed in terms of relations, there’s no problem of internal coherence, for it is the activity, its force, the emotional magnetism, together with relations they encourage and fortify, that holds the social unit together. Functionalism, by implicitly adding a purpose, embeds a metaphysical meaning into these relations; which then became the entry point for later speculation and scholasticism. The ethnographer stays on the surface - like writers and artists - so that the ideas emerge directly out the material and are not separated from them: ‘relation’ is both a description and an idea. Function adds a layer of abstraction, which stands outside or above the activity; and, moreover, was found, unlike God or matter, not to be self-supporting. It proved an insufficient explanation: for what is function for; what is its purpose, its destination point? Structuralism-functionalism supplied the missing link: society. Function keeps a social entity intact.²¹ Yet, if I read van Gennep right, relations are full of superstition and magic; these the force, the social glue, that binds a community.²² Not function but feeling, emerging out of relationships, to create habits almost impossible to break.

The ironies of intellectual history. For Gellner, Frazer’s theory relies on Hume’s association of ideas. But when Frazer was killed in the glade of Nemi, Hume too fell. Our philosophical Scot to offer the best explanation - custom and habit - for the hold of the social on an individual. Customs and habits create superstition, an emotional or spiritual forcefield that keeps us in a place.²³ Superstitions are Nature’s electricity station. One that modernity likes to decommission.²⁴

Under Structural-functionalism society operates as a unit. Which in practice means a concept. Think of Radcliffe-Brown and how he uses the modern scientific idea of a body as a self-regulating system to describe the mechanism of a social group.²⁵ It is to project contemporary categories onto very different kinds of communities.²⁶ No longer a cluster of individual relationships between neighbours and neighbours and growers and their plants; but a principle that links up a metaphysical entity: the Social. It is Hobbes’ Leviathan, the true start of our modern era. For in Hobbes, God is translated from Heaven into the polity, which becomes a self-organising whole mediated through the idea – State, Nation, Society – of itself. No longer to look at the individual relation, it has meaning only when fitted in the entirety of a conceptual entity.²⁷ Dots only understood as part of a pattern. This encourages a new theology – political science – and leads to the scepticism expressed by our student; for ideas suffer the entropy of overuse and redundancy. The student has picked up on a weakness in the whole approach, but the mistake is to think that these metaphysical entities - Society, Community, Culture - have always existed, and are only now being flown and drunk away by Easy Jet and Coco-Cola. They never did exist in the form given to them by Radcliffe-Brown and his followers enthral to Durkheim. This great French sociologist thinking to describe the origins of human society – amongst the Aborigines in Australia – was in fact describing current Western polities; each dominated by a concept that structures its activities.²⁸ Marx to give an almost perfect example of our present predicament, when new ideas are replacing that of the nation-state.

Credit is the economic judgement of man’s morality. In credit, man himself instead of metal and paper has become the medium of exchange, but not as man, but rather as the existence of capital and interest…. Human individuality and human morality have become an article of trade and the material in which money exists. Instead of money and paper my very personal existence, my flesh and blood, my social virtue and reputation is the matter and the substance of the monetary spirit.²⁹

Money is an idea as well as a relation. In our society the idea comes first, at least amongst those trained as the governing class.³⁰

It is here, perhaps, were anthropology started to go wrong. Intuiting there is a problem with the old lot, these young guns looked to the obvious, the literal, the empirical, for an explanation: the villages described by Audrey Richards & co no longer exist. But as Jack Goody knows, and Malinowski knew, they never did exist in the idealised, theoretical form which appear in textbooks and examination papers. Pedagogy by its very nature simplifies – how else are young minds to learn? – reducing complex, amorphous communities into fixed ideas, which in classroom and testing hall are believed the reality.³¹ The damage had already been done before the 1980s. It is why, when faced with an obvious inconsistency, these bright students dump Structural-functionalism for more concept-laden alternatives; and which is later allied to an activist politics that accepts as an ideal the central idea of classic British anthropology: of the integrity of a conceptual community: whether the Trobriander, the Nuer, the Dinka.³² Thinking to wear the Lenin cap and coat they are in fact dolled up in Durkheim’s wellingtons and Barber jacket. Also far less self-reflexive than their predecessors who openly espoused their creed.³³

Alan is not keen on the Frenchman; he resists that powerful, coercive strand in Émile’s thought and personality. Better the openness of Malinowski, Gellner and Goody. And the Schloss? you ask. I like that power, but treat it as energy; thus not the ideas themselves, but the electricity they generate, tingling my fingertips. I think of him as Nietzsche, as Schopenhauer, as Kant. A philosopher who creates aesthetic effects.

Malinowski’s ethical concern about Western penetration wasn’t to do with the integrity of the Trobrianders, but the physical effects on individuals when its cultural life support – that network of relations and rituals - was disrupted by the White Man. Epistemologically he was worried that the ethnographic material would disappear before anthropologists had time to collect it. Fill your rucksacks with as much description as possible, before it is destroyed by the imperialism of beer bottle and telegraph. The cunning of greedy traders, the zealous stupidity of missionaries: his prose burns with indignation. And yes! Such characters should be the concern of any intelligent individual everywhere. Already with Malinowski we see the impact of particular kinds of plant - pineapple, sweet potato, papaya…and crucially tobacco - on the lifestyle of the Trobrianders; while British officials, the social activists of their time, with their humanitarian mission, had crucially interfered in the self-governance of these islanders, by stopping inter-village wars and the burying of the dead in a central square. It was to reduce the power of the headman, slacken those tight social relations which are a community’s force field; and remove the power of respect, of authority, of tradition, of superstition, of belief; making it difficult for people to organise themselves. Already the Trobrianders had been shaped by the modern world. The great man steps up to the microphone.

…even the reconstruction of all pre-European natives of some fifty to hundred years ago is not the real subject-matter for fieldwork. The subject-matter of fieldwork is the changing Melanesian or African. He has become already a citizen of the world, is affected by contacts with the world-wide civilisation, and this reality consists in the fact that he lives under the sway of more than one culture.³⁴

Malinowski is studying a society in transition. The reason why he could study them at all…it is the very nature of anthropology, which cannot exist without the gunboat and the trading ship and their conquest of every coast and inlet. It is odd that we should all miss the obvious: the participant-observer working in the field, and how that presence must change the field; although this became an obsession later on, when young anthropologists saw only themselves when polishing up their academic armour.³⁵ To look at photographs of Malinowski in the Trobriands, in his linen clothes and pith helmet, is look at an alien. Nobody to mistake him as a native. Nevertheless, he could submerge himself into the society; forget, leave behind, his Western baggage, when travelling through a scene. Easier for actors, artists, the uneducated, than students and professors, because they don’t raise up the plexiglass of an idea between the self and others. This one reason for the artist’s historic dislike of the bourgeoisie, who put the idea of art, with all its abstract crudities, before an actual art object, plastic and concrete.³⁶ It was Malinowski’s great insight, whose origin is an accident – the First World War - to find that even a rigorously trained academic mind can cast off its training if it spends long enough in the field. By the 1980s too much time was being spent in classrooms rather than on the road. This king, King Concept, not to be killed on his own territory.

The concept is a rock, it is a stone, it is a mountain side. Exhilarating to throw or to climb; and what a view from the heights! But to stay there forever; to think there is just one stone, one rock, a single mountain…. We need a poem from Louis MacNeice, praising water.³⁷

Water is beginning, is end, is pure, is pure gift
Of always shifting ground as never ground can shift,
In which, being of which, having weltered once, to-day
Soul retains what body lost scrambling out of a bay,
Shackling itself in legs: our birthright which we sold
For a mess of lungs and limbs. Even now we contain an untold
Capacity for sliding, rippling, filtering under the limestone hill,
Moving in order under ice, charging in combers, lying still,
Reflecting faces, refracting light, transparent or opaque,
Can be wind-curled fountain, tigerish weir, garrulous rain or tongue-tied lake,
Can be all shapes or shapeless, assume all voices or none,
Can alchemise rock and pavement, flatter and fleece the sun,
Maraud and mime and bless. Such is water, such are we,
World’s most variables, constant in our variability,
Termagants and trulls of froth, virgins in the naked heart,
Bombardiers of breaker and bore, who in the end sidle apart
Into still cells of crystal….

A particular concept gets in the way of this student’s vision; the dogma of a fragmenting modernity, which breaks up the unity of communities and the identity of individuals. From normal to schizoid…. A belief that is almost certainly the opposite to the facts of the case. This modern age, when it comes to identity, is far more unified than traditional societies; while no Nuer nor Azande tribe is as tightly knit as an institution. Accepting the reality of a concept, we accept its diktats and live within its invisible boundaries. Think of how we try to define ourselves by class, by role, by virtue, by the idea we have of ourselves, and how these definitions then guide, even coerce, us into ways of life and down runnels of thought. Elizabeth Berridge is a mistress in describing such characters, who proliferate like weeds across the middle classes. In Across the Common, her aunts live inside an idea of their past, making change almost impossible, for this idea now a prison house of belief. The spread of higher education creates a vast gulag archipelago of ideas, enclosing much of the population. Trapped in an idea of the self, we lose that self to others and a society. Bakunin did warn us.

They [the Germans] will never rise. They would sooner die than rebel… perhaps even a German, when he has been driven to absolute despair, will cease to argue, but it needs a colossal amount of unspeakable oppression, insult, injustice and suffering to reduce him to that state.³⁸

Education can make us unhappy and impotent.³⁹ For with the promise of transformation and success comes the real limitations of the idea, which can be an obstacle if not properly understood, accepted or overcome. Ideas are tunnels, motorways, ship-lanes…. They are not a mansion protected by the National Trust. The successful merge their lives with the prevailing ideas to achieve harmony with their time and place, as both idea and self dissolve in the business of one’s life. Sometimes there is a perfect match – the Nobel scientist – while others – think of a high class hostess - wear the conceptual clothes but are naked underneath. Those who remain fixed to a single idea - the intellectuals, the cranks, the lost - are cut off both from the concept’s metaphysical riches and a society’s social wealth; a double poverty, railed against. For these characters, ideas are a barrier to life’s fulfilment, as they serve as an ideal by which to measure one’s failure; though to protect the ego this is projected onto the social unit, its crooks, mediocrities and fools. Here is the origin of the deracinated intellectual and much of the moralism on campus. In today’s neoliberal university, academics dream of fairy-tale revolutions where their concepts will triumph. No chance! Those days are gone. Now to suffer the consequences of living inside an alien faith; one they helped to propagate.⁴⁰

Roll up! Roll up! I have an extraordinary announcement to make: the Schloss has discovered the secret of our current crisis: in education-saturated societies it is not people but concepts that fight it out on street and in television studio.

Malinowski, Gellner, Chomsky, Popper and all the greats, show us that we have to think ourselves out of a concept, and subject it to our informed experience. This is very difficult, if not impossible, with mass education. One of the conundrums of my youth – it was an obsession with a generation: think of George Steiner - was why did Germany, that most educated of states, fall into barbarism. Schools and universities clearly at odds with the savage stupidities of the Nazis. I don’t think there is a conflict at all. For most pupils and students education fixes their key ideas, producing intolerance for those not their own. There are ideas to think with – Marx - and there are ideas to live inside: Marxism. The latter generates fanaticism. For to live aside an idea is to give this idea a value and power greater than the self, which becomes its servant and victim; creating dependency, making us fragile. Ideas their own kind of drug. Only the few, an intellectual elite, the mavericks and misfits, to escape this pedagogical disease. Modern societies, because so widely but thinly educated, are vulnerable to ideological take over, with the barbarities that follow. The classroom the most dangerous place of all.

[Marx had always read enormously, but towards the end of his life his appetite increased to a degree at which it interfered with his creative work.⁴¹

….

His taste in literature, for all his love of reading, was, on the whole, undistinguished and commonplace. There is nothing to indicate that he liked either painting or music, all was extruded by his passion for books.⁴²

….

[Marx] believed in exact scholarship and sternly drove his reluctant followers into the reading-room of the British Museum. Liebknecht, in his memoirs, describes how day after day the ‘scum of international communism’ might be seen meekly seated at the desks in the reading-room, under the eyes of the master himself. Indeed no social or political movement has laid such emphasis on research and erudition. The extent of Marx’s own reading is to some degree indicated by the references in his works alone, which explore exceedingly obscure by-ways in ancient, medieval, and modern literature. The text is liberally sprinkled with footnotes, long, mordant and annihilating, which recall Gibbon’s classical employment of this weapon. The adversaries at whom they are directed are for the most part forgotten names today, but occasionally his shafts are aimed at well-known figures; Macaulay, Gladstone, and one or two well-known academic economists of the time, are attacked with a savage concentration which inaugurated a new epoch in the technique of public vituperation, and created the school of socialist polemical writing which has altered the general character of political controversy. There is conspicuously little praise in the book.⁴³

I recall Hobbes’ devastating critique of the universities: they trained an elite into ignorance and extremism, not wisdom; this lack of good sense responsible for the Civil War. Thinking of Marx and the ‘scum of international communism’ I can’t but think of those other great readers - Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin - who preferred pages to people. What if there is something in a book itself that breeds the fanatic, who, unaware of the difference between life inside and outside hard covers, is apt to collapse the two in a single, abstract standard; the real condemned for not being up to the monograph’s mark? To create an obtuseness about individuals, and a blindness to behaviours on pavement and in pub, where relations are softer, blurred, more ambiguous, than what’s read in black and white. Marx’s poor literary tastes point to a problem…much social and political analysis is intellectually thin, because not enriched either by experiences - Berlin: Marx was impervious to his environment - or the kind of reading matter - literature – made out of them, and which evoke the feeling-thoughts of people and places. Literature comes closest to life, recreating its amorphous ambiguities in its own medium, and which can, if read over many years, grow the sophisticated reader, alive to nuance and context, both in books and on street and in city square.

Socialism’s decline begins when taken out of the factory and moved into the British Library. Abstraction, simplification, and a need for fixed truths and intellectual authorities, soon followed.

The answer to the riddle walks out of its shadow…the fragility and intolerance which suffuses the contemporary scene originates in the place that is supposed to overcome them: the educated mind. Most of us live in the half-way house of knowledge: once learned a concept we don’t adapt or unlearn it. No tree trunk this, from which we grow our own branches. No! Once acquired we shape our experiences around the idea. Few able to educate ourselves out of their education.⁴⁴ Either what we’ve learn is fixed but largely forgotten – until laid out with the wine and cheese at dinner parties - or is used – this the Marxist mistake, based on a misreading of Hegel – to change the world. A concept believed not less but greater than what it describes and explains. Fine if discovering the mysteries of the cosmos, grappling with metaphysical theories, inventing machines; but dangerous, even stupid, when applied to human beings and their actions in the here and now. This not to say that we can’t use knowledge to change and manage society; only it should be treated with much more care, I handle it with oven gloves, when applied to real life situations. The crisis of modernity the result of ill-digested ideas and badly thought-out theories, mixed in with an innocence about their application. All are ignorant about the essence of ideas, their special nature, which creates its own unforeseen effects. Even Popper, who wisely suggested testing ideas in controlled experiments, went astray. Recommending that politics be turned into a social science, he failed to grasp how politics in turn would distort this science. Every bit of knowledge comes with its own risks. We must be alive to this defect.

The Serpent knew why he was in the story.

To rely on knowledge, on the concept, on truth, misses the key factor in all communities, and the one that Malinowski discovered and illuminated so powerfully: relations. Books are more likely to emphasise, in form as well as in matter, the static; while our experience, in living in and through relationships, makes us physically aware that we are part of a flow. This surely the great insight of the great religions, as well as Bertrand Russell.⁴⁵ Early Christianity and classical Judaism, wary of codexes and manuscripts, believing they removed the word’s spirit, so intimate with breath and movement, devised techniques for putting the spirit back in.⁴⁶ Alas, we have lost all sense of the dangers of the page and the concept, of how they are more likely to kill a thing than keep it alive.⁴⁷

We are ideologically and epistemologically far more rigid than the Trobrianders, whose beliefs are not chiselled into the granite stone of a printed page; and whose ideas don’t stand outside their individual selves, a kind of Platonic form. Everything is relational, the ideas embedded in activities which rub them over and smooth them round until they fit with custom. For sure such societies are stable, but it’s the stability of an organism, not the fixity of an institution or belief system; these causing friction with the daily flow of experience, its endless and infinitesimal changes. Ritual formulae are remembered and repeated, but as Malinowski shows, this is rarely to the letter: the fallibility of memory alters small details. The result is a healthy tension between what lasts and what disappears. Not so with modernity, where Change and Tradition are fixed into concepts, which then fight out it across an ever-changing social scene. Friction. It is Hegel’s great insight - he called it dialectic - although he didn’t read the runes quite right. Not the Geist of the universe but of society plays its tricks on us.

In the modern age, politics, economics, kinship and religion separate out, and become semi-autonomous zones of activity; although in our post-modern era they are fusing back together, as money dissolves all boundaries. Everything is product now. Even philosophy: post-modernism the epistemology of the consumer. Once we were organisms, self-organising systems, in a natural world; today we are socially constructed entities in artificial environments. We have come almost full circle where Man is not a product of Nature but its inventor, and a wholly plastic thing.

Charles usually did what his wife asked: her urgency seemed to rebuke him, perhaps his own caution was laziness? Besides, he had always rather admired her impatience - if a thing was wrong, it had to be put right now, this minute - seeing it as a kind of obsessional, creative energy, a desire for order. Now, for the first time (their first, real crisis) he saw that what drove her was something much more like fear: she raced through life as over marshy ground, fearing to stand still in case she sank in quagmire.⁴⁸

The shift begins in the 1960s, when the hard carapace of modernity, taken to its extreme in the immediate postwar period, breaks apart. This scholarship mother cannot cope with a dropout son.

We have lost modernist stubbornness? Yes/no. Once there were rivers. Then dams. Today we build perpetual motion machines…. Change has changed(!) its meaning. Before, it was part of Nature, intimate with its rhythms; change was growth, ripeness, it was decay. Now it is construction and destruction. To twist and twitch, to hip and hop, to jerk; I think of a stalled car, that robot on the end of my telephone line. Gone the grace of falcon and leopard. Change means inventing new things, not living in tune with what’s around us: to change not be changed. It is to dominate not adapt to an environment (placing Darwin on his pedestal we find the hooligans from Wall Street and Silicon Valley chiselling his pedestal away). Change. It relies on the concept Change, a Platonic form, an eternity in itself: all changes but ‘Change’. It is why the institutions have such a hold. They are artificial persons, ‘individuals’ - it is what the law tells us - who can outlive Methuselah.

The Schloss waves Hume’s Treatise in may face. ‘Isn't the self an imaginary stage where we see ourselves through a series of fleeting appearances, roles?’ Yes, if we haven’t gone to Oxford and Cambridge, or read Galen Strawson.⁴⁹ Though Hume wouldn’t call them roles, which suggests our modern sensibility of distance; of a self separated from Nature, from other people, its own activity. In his great Treatise, the self is simply the mind's reaction to experience, gathered through the senses. Hume, though reacting against the Cartesian rationalism, has in fact imbibed Descartes’ key theme - that the Self is an idea - but gives it his own, empirical, shape: we are not a single but a succession of different conceptual entities. These mental appearances our thoughts, which like MacNeice’s water never stop. A flow of life. Descartes went deeper. Our idea of the self is embodied in our being and we experience it when we think – it is an idea that is also a metaphysical feeling. It was Kant who elucidated René’s meaning: our idea of the self is of an odd kind, it is a category, a form rather than substance, which shapes and motivates us. It is a field…I am thinking of modern physics. But since I know nothing about physics let me keep to metaphor. A field can have any number of different crops, it can be fallow, or a wild meadow; it can be dirt or agricultural rubbish; be trampled by ravers, toasted by a wedding party…through all these activities the field remains. A field there, even when nothing in it. In our post-modern century all this has become weirdly confused and conflated, for the Humean idea of identity - a series of ideas - has merged with the Cartesian - a single idea of the self - to become our identity politics. We are defined by the concept, through which we create a self. No longer the form of our being, which we grow into as we grow old, that Aristotelian essence of the organism, but the ideas we take off the society’s supermarket shelf: Welsh, Daffodil, Yellow, Pistil. We are all philosophers now. But not very good ones.

We wear ideologies as if they were badges. Think we are concepts not animals.

Today’s identity politics sacrifices the individual to a collective. It is the triumph of Hobbes’ Leviathan, where authority comes from Society, the individual to obey its commands. Need I say that we’ve gone way beyond Hobbes, who was thinking within a still traditional society, where politics was a trade…in private laws, in influence, in land and monopolies. When Hobbes lived, most of the human character was untouched by the Leviathan, who had no interest in forming and infilling our minds. Enough that we obey the political authorities, who in guaranteeing stability allowed us to cultivate a self. Accept the rule of a State, and its chief representatives, and you will be a free man. It was why Hobbes wanted religion out of politics – religion takes freedom away, because the fanatics, mountebanks and professors will use it, through seeking to control minds not just regulate the body politic, to coerce us into their modes of thought. Religion is for the study not the stump.

Not since 1789! When Reason becomes a God. The Revolution of course; but also the Revolution’s chief theologian, Immanuel Kant, who transfers Leviathan out of the country and court and into our minds: we to create the moral categories which define and drive us, so becoming our own authority, the source and embodiment of freedom. For we create the moral laws and obey them out of our free will. This ingenious solution to save liberty, and reconcile it both to science and society, solved Hobbes’ problem, which he’d disguised by rhetoric: that the Leviathan is both the body politic and its representative, which produces, when is should dissolve, a tension between them, between the commonwealth as a body and its king (or council) at its head.⁵⁰ With Kant we are Leviathan, for we embody the moral law and are its representative; and because this law is universal - his categorical imperatives - every free man and free woman will freely think the same morality: that all laws should be the same for everyone, that we are ends not means….

Marvellous! Except it is the morality of schoolmasters, which overlooks the coercion of schoolmasters. A classroom is not a village square. The schoolyard no open field. Thinking to create autonomous individuals, Kant was in fact making them subject to the ideas and pressure of those who influence a society at any given time. A new class, with new ways of shaping, of ruling, the world, was to come into being.

It was not the working classes in Germany who were at the origin of Socialist ideas. Germany was only in the process of becoming an industrialised country, and industrial workers were nowhere near the majority of the population. They did not have sufficient organisation and were nostalgic for the past rather than revolutionary. Socialist ideas were spread by a party of the intellectual elite, who saw the proletarian masses as a possible instrument of social renewal.⁵¹

The author implies this was to change. I don’t believe so. Socialism has always been the religion of an intellectual elite; who became a Secular priesthood, replacing those of the Church. The dead Bakunin knows the 20th-century better than its resident scholar.

The difference between such revolutionary dictatorship and the modern state is only one of external trappings. In substance both are a tyranny of the minority over the majority in the name of the people - in the name of the stupidity of the many and the superior wisdom of the few - and so they are equally reactionary, devising to secure political and economic privilege to the ruling minority, and the…enslavement of the masses, to destroy the present order only to erect their own rigid dictatorship on its ruins.⁵²

Rigid. The mentality of the Communist countries was in embryo in the ideology itself, it grew out of Marx’s personality and the inelasticity of his ideas. The same attitudes persist amongst the Left intelligentsia in the West; think of that once fashionable phrase - false consciousness - a polite, middle class way of saying the workers are stupid. And while generally benign, the Welfare Class - the managers, administrators and apologists of the Welfare State - has created its own version of Bakunin’s red class, which increasingly puts its own interests before the public’s. The crisis of our institutions.

The best analysis of this phenomenon is by Harold Perkin.⁵³ He starts by saying that the middle classes typically write themselves out of the history…I think of the character of my education that sought to erase the ‘I’ from essays and dissertations, to achieve an objectivity outside of a self. This idea belongs to a belief system that sought to equate the educated class with society as a whole; who would then be its seers and guardians.⁵⁴ An idea of Hegel’s, it grew organically out of the rising State, whose administrative class came both to instantiate this institution and then, through the spread of social policy, manage what had become a national polity.⁵⁵ Perkin identifies two categories of middle class, the private and the public; the rise of the New Right from the 1960s a reaction from the first against the rising cost and influence of the second. It is through the prism of this class war that we should see our identity politics and its culture wars: two classes with their own interests and faiths are fighting it out; the rest of us army fodder or audience.

An odd consequence of this education, and the Socialism that underpins it, is the creation of a set of rulers - the Welfare Class - who do not think they rule. This largely accounts for a fear of the raw material of life, causing our officials to censor, to cancel, to hide behind nice phrases and empty words. One cannot admit the truth of one’s own authority and self-interest.⁵⁶ Bound to happen. When Dr Objectivity walks from classroom into a government office.

The Schloss taps me on the shoulder: I thought we were talking Hobbes and Kant.

Hegel believed Kant’s moral theories nonsense: there can’t be form without substance. Fill them up! Fill them up! with the stuff of Prussia, France, England. His work a penetrating insight into the relationship of ideas to society and how ideas can produce human fulfilment. However, thinking to increase our freedom, Hegel created a blueprint for its loss, as we become helpless before the endless advance of the Social; what Paul Kingsnorth calls The Machine. Conflating society with the universe, Hegel overlooked the individual’s escape hatch: that metaphysical world beyond the social and the physical, where each of us can lose the self to the mind’s universe. It was the great promise of the rationalist tradition, from Descartes to Kant to Chomsky, that there is a mental world beyond social and natural relations, and which is outside their control. In our modern material times this place has been given a specific geography, it is Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Zone; a dangerous place that is also a place of safety for those who need an absolute liberty.⁵⁷ Hegel’s materialist followers either erase or gentrify this magic space. So that we are left to scramble around the ruins of Chernobyl…a toxic wilderness free from officialdom.⁵⁸ In an institutional society it is the officials who govern; officials who do not have the enlightened metaphysics envisaged by Hegel, who thought of them as an almost perfect fusion of part and whole; as they tune into and act out a society’s essence. Plato’s guardians – the State’s civil servants – ideal social beings. Britain almost had them for a time, in Whitehall.⁵⁹ That said, even without the corruptions of an institution and the fallibility of individuals, there was a ship-sinking flaw to Hegel’s thesis: the idea itself: it is a tyrant. It is why, in the heyday of the British Civil Service, when our top civil servants came to close to the Platonic ideal, they could conceive even something as private and intimate as a home as a ‘slum’ to be demolished.

‘Bless you, you're out of date, Miss Lou,’ she grumbled, pursing her lips and beginning to collect the plates. ‘I live here now. Got your old playroom at the top. Didn’t they tell you? My Fred passed on at Christmas. I ‘ad the pensions people after me, and the Welfare wanting me to move to a new council flat. They’re pullin’ down our road, see, and I ‘ad to get out. Interferin’ woman came and made remarks, so Miss Rosa said—‘

…

Gibby went on as if they had not spoken, piling dishes on the trolley. ‘Places goin’ up like beanstalks in the Lane,’ she said. ‘Give me the vertices just to see ‘em. “You’re not goin’ to stick me up in the sky at my age,” I said to ‘em, “I’m not a blinkin’ star. I’m a sight too old to twinkle,” I told ‘em, so—’⁶⁰

In modernity the multifarious individual squeezes herself into an idea, which she then wears like a heraldic shield. In this sense, we moderns are far more coherent than any previous type of human being, who are absorbed into their activities, these to become who they are.⁶¹ MacNeice is their great celebrant and poet. Call a Trobriander a heretic? It has no meaning. And while they believe in marriage, which does fix relations to a belief, this idea grows organically with the relationship between two people, and is broken when it naturally ends. Contrast a Christianity that would impose the idea of marriage across an entire life, so that the boundless sex of the Trobriand adolescence would be categorised as sin.⁶² Once set up an idea as a standard, you create tensions between the instincts and that standard, as the mind vies against the body, the inner bites the outer, experience struggles with an idea of the self. Itch itch. Scratch Scratch. Ouch!

Here is Hegel’s dialectic of modern life: relatively fixed ideas crunch up against a fast moving experience that speeds up under the influence of those ideas, whose power is enormously increased by the social scale. Ideas that appear to be Nature’s gift to sanity, its cognitive stability, are used, by corporations, by politicos, by intellectuals, by teachers, to make us all insane.

This tension gives the idea of fragmentation some validity; but it is more a divide, a split personality, the schizophrenia of an urban existence, where the pressure of a collective society, its need to control the instincts, conflicts with the belief, so incessant to be propaganda, telling us we are individuals. Nothing like the misconstrued version of Hume’s many selves (actually thoughts), flickering across a garishly lighted proscenium. For us, it is the roles we are expected to play in office, around a shopping mall, on the hospital ward. These to rub up against our instinctive life; producing those frictions we see across the media screen. A society of actors, where no one is expected to leave the stage.

With Hume the stage is a metaphor.

Once we were organisms, animals with a touch of the divine. Then for a few centuries there was a war between organisms and machines.⁶³ The machine won. Today humans are an engineering problem; a malfunctioning cog in an otherwise efficient contraption. Each one of us is socially constructed: I’d dissolve tomorrow, if the institutions went out of business. Organisation Woman.

We are also Library Man. I write this piece only because I inhabit a megapolis of print. My mind a haunted house, where the ghosts of thought send shivers down my scaredy-cat spine, its one big idea.

The separation of economics, politics and religion - the classic view of modernity - was but a temporary phase. It starts with the Early Modern Period, those few centuries when the old order broke down.⁶⁴ But over the last one hundred years a new unity has emerged, where all facets of the social are fusing into a single system. Already we can read the runes. A corporate feudalism - I pinch from Yanis Varoufakis - where the institution has its own religion - bioethics - and controls a society through the production of newly manufactured drugs, issued by Big Pharma, Big Tech, Amazon and now Big Food.⁶⁵ This a world where politics is but a corporate appendix; the politicos closer to corporate employees than representatives of State or citizen. Under Christianity, power was shared between Queen and Church; leaving a vast open space for most of the populace, who did not interest the rulers.⁶⁶ With the creation of the nation-state, when society becomes its own God, this free space is narrowed down; for what’s inside our minds begins to interest those who govern - they are now priests as well as queens (the Hobbesian nightmare). Today, to believe in society’s God is also to buy God’s trinkets; Queen, Priest and Businessman are less a trinity then a unitarian whole.⁶⁷

It is an odd historical fact that Marxism saw the trajectory, but then read its details wrong: everyone to be human beings not class actors. Marx hadn’t grasped the nature of the idea and how it is changed by power and custom. This doubly strange because Marx was acutely aware of the relational nature of human reality; which should have alerted him to how both sides of the dialectical equation - idea and social field - influence and change the other. I suspect Mr Marx took a too literal grasp of Hegel’s thought - it was the lawyer in him. For Marx lacks a feel for ideas, their evolutionary plasticity, that his master was so adept in evoking.

There is also another weakness in Marx, directly attributable to his bibliomania. By transforming capitalism into a concept, he wrecked his prophetic skills. It prevented him from seeing how capitalism itself would change; its modern history one of frequent and massive metamorphoses, as each new industry – cotton, railways, chemicals, cars, media, plastics, drugs, computers, Internet – radically changes its nature. It is the irony of the whole Marxist project: what changes most isn’t classes but capitalism itself, as one industry supersedes then replaces the others. At best Marx describes the dynamic power of the new social force and the devastation on those who are its victims. And yet, because he thought too much in concepts, he underestimated – did not see – how capitalism and its classes would evolve and mutate. Capitalism is an idea. But it also a process, an evolving organic form.

A word for Hegel. He is perhaps the first thinker to realise that all ideas are mutable. Gone forever the Platonic idea of a fixed and eternal form.

Functionalism, despite its marvellous insights, suffers from similar problems. Starting as a method for studying a society it became a theory about these societies; albeit the tension already exists in Malinowski, who is saved by the vagueness of his conception. To read Coral Gardens and Their Magic is to come away with many thoughts but no clear view of function. Less a concept than a sense of the interconnections between gardening, magic and social organisation, and how, through constant interaction, they are bound together by the feeling-thoughts they generate. With Malinowski, functionalism is more a descriptive term than a theory. Although I suspect our modern idea of utility has sneaked into what are physical, psychological and sociological instincts. To stress function suggests a purpose, yet what Malinowski shows is activity. An Aristotelian teleology smuggled into human behaviour, where the Social replaces the ontological (society the telos, not the universe or the divine or the species form). The risk is that the sociological purpose is overstated. I see a little of this in Coral Gardens and perhaps a lot more in Magic, Science & Religion. To move from method to theory is to turn relations into functions; thereby elevating the social above the individual and the natural. The influence of Durkheim or a Zeitgeist that saw life in collective terms? Durkheim who, thinking to write about the primitive, actually describes modern France; that tendency of civil society to exist as an independent entity; its myriad social facts to shape and suffuse the individual, now a component in an organic machine. It is this separation, especially at times of rapid change, when we experience these social facts as an alien presence, that causes much anxiety and rage. One feels – one is - at the mercy of forces beyond our control. Too new, too strange, too pressing, to be absorbed.

Alan whispers in my ear: ‘you’ve forgotten Audrey and her audience’.

An unwillingness to do whole field studies is as likely to be related to the growth of the subject, its development into a full university discipline, with the inevitable specialisation, as due to changes in the world. More students, tighter budgets, papers to write, lectures to give, emails to answer…all call out for short-cuts: a topic, a theme, the one big idea; these quicker to study than a village and its environs. Add the need find a niche, become the expert, monopolise one’s own little anthropological asparagus plot; which you will then use to advertise your expertise, on conference floor and think tank. In this new environment, each specialism will ideally speak a shared conceptual language that is more sign than substance. No longer necessary to travel long journeys through a jungle of arcane details to discover your own destination. The discipline already tells us where to go and what to find.⁶⁸ The Schloss taps me gently on the head with his Foucault: ‘you’ve forgotten those ‘blank slates’ - the terra incognito of the political map.’ Filled up, or barred entry if a post-colonial state refuses to allow western anthropologists to study their people; a thousand years of identity swallowed up in a social entity straight off the LSE production line: the newly minted, pre-fabricated, wholly modern, post-imperial nation-states.⁶⁹ That said, there is still much of the globe - the West itself - to put under the ethnographic microscope. The subject reorienting itself to a different geography.

The pressures were different in Audrey’s day. There was a rush to describe as much as possible before these societies disappeared under modernity’s wave. Nevertheless, though the pressures had changed, there was no reason not to take the whole community view; where the focus would be on change and dislocation rather stability and continuity. Slices through time not a slice of time; the rich past of the subject itself to be used as comparative data.⁷⁰ Indeed, with anthropology now creating its own history, the emphasis was bound to shift to a more diachronic approach; Jack Goody the miraculous example.⁷¹ Of course, change doesn’t have to mean fragmentation - a society can be seen as a unit at any given moment - but our student is trapped by an idea of modernity, its clichés of fragments, social atoms, breakdown; which the facts of cultural change and cultural mixing appear to confirm. However, if we think in terms of ideas, then I’d argue that individuals are more unified in the modern era – first as Sudanese, then as the Christian Sudanese South against the Arab Sudanese North - as we live in and are organised by ideas. No longer just tribal or inter-tribal relations, but the idea of the tribe and those within it. Modernity stabilises the identity of an individual and a group; the source of its enormous power and its crazy problems.

As Hegel knew, a unity arises out of tension, competition and conflict, providing the society doesn’t collapse under the pressures of war, famine, disease. Misled by our modern ideas, which push us towards a particular conception of the ideal society – a tensionless whole – we are apt to exaggerate the cohesiveness of traditional societies, and underplay the structure in our seemingly chaotic present.⁷² The Structural-functionalism of a Radcliffe-Brown assumes the natural tendency of societies is to cohere; which creates a research product directed towards identifying the social glue. Yet Malinowski explicitly states that such unity has gone forever, under the impact of trade and colonialism. Already the Trobrianders were adapting to alien ways that were disrupting the old patterns. The image of the organic machine was out-of-date even before it arrived in anthropology’s garage.

Heavily influenced by Durkheim, Structural-functionalism over-emphasised coherence. Did the reaction go too far? Hard to resist the other extreme, once anthropology splinters into its archipelago of specialisms. A discipline’s geography to determine how students look at a world. When Malinowski's empire falls, we are left with the Foucauldian atoll…with its freedom fighters from the Sorbonne and the salon. Nevertheless, these differences are greater than they seem. In both cases, what can be catalogued and conceptualised pushes aside what is felt and smelt.

If I had the power of evoking the past, I should like to lead you back some twenty years to an old Slavonic university town—I mean the town of Cracow, the ancient capital of Poland and the seat of the oldest university in eastern Europe. I could then show you a student leaving the medieval college buildings, obviously in some distress of mind, hugging, however, under his arm, as the only solace of his troubles, three green volumes with the well-known golden imprint, a beautiful conventionalised design of mistletoe—the symbol of The Golden Bough.⁷³

‘Distress of mind’? The Golden Bough his ‘only solace?’ This passage suggests the artist not the academic. And it is indeed striking just how much influence Frazer’s masterpiece has had on writers; while Malinowski hardly any, none.⁷⁴ The artist looks for meaning in life, and will use whatever tools are available; I think of Brian Eno using Stafford Beer’s The Brain of the Firm to organise his music. This is what people forget about Malinowski: the life came first. Anthropology not just a discipline, a museum case of concepts, but a place to find and make himself. The results we see in his methods and behaviours, and not just in Melanesia. Audrey tells the marvellous story of Malinowski crawling over the floor with his students, as they study a huge land-map. Our Pole, his own kind of an artist, a wholly integrated person, who created the subject out of his sensibility.

Coral Gardens and Their Magic. The Sexual Life of Savages. More canvas than monograph. The Trobriands a studio not a study. Argh! Pest Schloss is kibitzing: ‘You’re always talking artists. Weber. Robert Paine. Now Malinowski. Artists! Artists! Artists! it’s all you think about. Like some debutante dreaming of Augustus John.’ The Schloss has a point. I should listen to Ernest Gellner.

The members of the Polish-speaking intelligentsia in Cracow and Galicia may not have had worries about their own individual identity. What they were less clear about…was what was to be done about their collective identity: how to link their philosophy to their politics….

Wittgenstein was a reasonably typical member of the Viennese intelligentsia. I am not suggesting that everyone in this class resembled him, but alienated intellectuals seeking escape through very pure thought were there to be found. By contrast, Malinowski’s attitude was really quite unusual amongst, so to speak, his own people. His reaction to the Polish question, and in general to ethnic issues, is untypical: it is to be found in his remarkable freedom from political nationalism, combined with an acute sense of and love of culture.⁷⁵

Reading Gellner’s bête noire, Isaiah Berlin, we know that an intelligentsia is a distinct class of characters, who take ideas to be living things; and are prepared to sacrifice their lives to them.⁷⁶ So already Malinowski is going to be different from a typical scholar. In many ways Wittgenstein is the über-intellectual - he thinks in ideas so much that he embodies them, until they become the stuff of poetry. For Wittgenstein ideas have a sensuous quality - think of his imagery - wholly lacking in his followers, who turn philosophical poems into academic prose. Malinowski is the oddball. He makes of empirical study a literature; our man the novelist of the field survey and interview. A scholar who is at the same time a member of the intelligentsia, immersed in high culture, which shapes, softens and deepens the sensibility, until one thinks and feels like a writer or musician.⁷⁷ Intellectuals and artists are not that different if the intellectual creates her own world.

The Schloss nods his head in approval.

Malinowski brought a different sensibility to anthropology; a kaleidoscopic blend of scholar, intellectual, scientist, artist, priest. It was this syncretic sensibility that transformed the subject and gave its distinct flavour, but which, over the decades, gradually faded away; as the academic mentality slowly reasserted itself. In today’s bureaucratic university there is no room for the aesthete. The boundary wall between knowledge and experience, the library and the field, has been rebuilt, and extended with drones and armed guards. ‘Don’t have a concept, madam?’ Lady Schloss shakes her head. ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you in.’

A student notices an anomaly. She asks Audrey how, as someone trained as a scientist, did she cope with an anthropological fieldwork that had so few rules. Audrey reinforces the point: there was no training at all. On the day she departed Malinowski came running down the railway platform, thrusting notebooks and different colour pens (for different subjects) into her hands. His only advice. What a story this tells! Fieldwork not just another way of doing the discipline but a way of life; its rite of passage - participant-observation - creating the modern ethnographer, who will set up her own villages in the LSE and other schools. No wonder an evangelical flavour; one shared by Durkheim, who turned his sociology into a religion.⁷⁸ Malinowski’s anthropological Gemeinschaft was to go through numerous sects before settling down into a broad church; when it loses its charismatic force to the routines of academic discipline and the institutional imperatives of grants, reputation, numbers. The power of personality gives way to the attraction of ideas; that in turn surrenders to the cartoon concept, which thrives in bureaucratic societies.

I’m forgetting Audrey! Learning through osmosis, through Malinowski’s presence, by talking with her peers, a close-knit group of like-minded souls, a coterie. Open to experience, to the environment, and with a wide-open territory to explore; there were hardly any preconceptions to block the view. Making a subject not trapped within it. A true empiricism. Close to the artist, where the skills more intuitive than cerebral, and where you feel your way into a place, absorbing its atmosphere (contrast Marx, a typical intellectual, shut up inside his mental apparatus). An academic mind puts a distance between the self and the object of study; as the idea, a method, even the words of the discipline, its conceptual language, its jargon, come between observer and observed.⁷⁹ The Malinowski revolution was not in theory but in approach; enabling one to become an insider; like a novelist in local café and law court.⁸⁰ Allowing for much happenstance, which if receptive will undermine your preconceived ideas. This character’s monographs to show a more flexible and ambiguous picture; not welding the raw material into some conceptual hulk.

A novel opens up experience. Concepts close experience down.

Theory is good. My Great Ganesh! where’d the Schloss be without his ideas! But these must be constantly tweaked and altered, to capture the ever-changing context. Concepts are tools. Again I think of a novelist. Each novel its own description, belief, explanation, theory, idea. Once finished the novelist writes the next, each a jug brimming with fresh water. Of course, similar if not the same territory will be covered - writers are exploring their relationship to a society - but for the novel to live, it must be alive with new life, new ideas, new descriptions and thoughts about what is seen and felt. Each time the jug is emptied Elizabeth Bowen puts it under the tap….

I think of concepts as novels. Alas, academia has gone the other way, turning even novels into theories, emptying them of spontaneity and fun.⁸¹ I lead the Schloss away, crying on my shoulder.

Audrey has little to say about theory; her emphasis is on discovery, on the details, the unknown bits of village or town life. Now of course there is an implicit assumption, which is almost certainly true, that much if not all of this stuff is related. Indeed, Malinowski’s chief insight and innovation was to show how kinship, economics, politics, magic and myth fit together; making supposedly bizarre and exotic ideas feel like common sense. Get rid of Frazer’s magpie nest and his ladder of rational evolution! Of course the Trobrianders reason, they just relate to Nature differently to us Brits; such a relationship producing a very different set of ideas. Understand that plants are central to their existence, we can see why their mythic ancestors popped out of the ground. A plant-based existence is going to produce a plant-based cosmology, one where ideas of reincarnation are prominent. ‘Obvious innit?’ says, the Schloss, ‘if plants rejuvenate, so should men and women.’

Ideas must be placed inside the relations between people, and between people and things. In the West we make the idea divine; it is a form - thank you Mr Plato - that exists outside its material embodiment. If I was a Hegelian, Hegel too a philosopher of relations, I would say that the disembodied idea arises out of an individual’s relationship to a polis, these relations becoming increasingly abstract, as the latter grows vast and remote. Surely this why Christianity emerges in an empire, which breaks the connection between citizen and ruler; so that the idea of the imperial city exerts its power through abstract relations of force and duty.⁸² The emperor little more than an idea; which encourages the idea itself to become independent, to be its own power, purpose, direction. Hegel intuited this, but he wanted to be a philosopher not a sociologist. Trying to explain the cosmos, he was, in fact, describing human civilisations.

I have returned to relations, with their fusing, that magic, their habits, that syncretism. This is what I learn from Malinowski, though obscured by his focus on function; which I see as an additional element, a conceptual add-on, which appears to explain more than it does.

This talk of ideas hides the true nature of Malinowski’s revolution. Not a new theory of social behaviour but the wipeout of the existing discipline; to replace it with a completely original ethnography, focused on observation not thought. The word knocked off by the deed.⁸³ Malinowski didn’t just kill the king. He levelled the old kingdom. Here is the anthropologist as academic savage, an epithet our hero liked to use about himself. He belongs to those desert tribes of North Africa who rubble the cities on the shore, burning their libraries and sacking their scholars. Asabiyah. Gellner’s favourite word; it describes the sensibility that Malinowski brought to the subject, creating his anthropological tribe. It is to start afresh, with only the intellectual senses to guide us. Audrey’s conceptual knapsack very light indeed.

Audrey struggles when a student asks the fashionable question about colonialism: how did it affect her relationship with the locals? Already, inside this question, a large assumption is being made, fostering a conceptual divide, an idea’s war, between two groups of people with clearly demarcated identities: the colonisers and the colonised. Oops! It’s far more complicated than that! The magic of Malinowski’s fieldwork broke down such conceptual blocs, enabling an anthropologist to see societies at a fine-grained level, which being close to the ground, made them inherently sympathetic to Trobriander or Bemba. To produce its own odd effects. Malinowski’s relationship to his informants and friends shifts according to his specific ideas, his intelligence and insight. If he repeats a white missionary’s idea, he is rebuffed or rebuked as a dunderhead. If subtle and informed, they him treat as an intelligent man, who knows his business.⁸⁴ Societies are agglomerations of individuals, they are not synthesised concepts.⁸⁵ Human beings have good days and bad days. We are not Sinners and Saved. Though I add this caveat: modernity abstracts social relations and ideas, then pits them against the individual, who must either absorb, accept, reject or suffer their presence. Success depending on our relationship to a society’s chief concepts.

By its nature a concept puts up boundaries.⁸⁶ It creates distinctions that have not existed before. Concepts invent as much as describe. Yet human affairs tend towards the fluid; it is why the Bemba knew Audrey was different from the British officials: her attitude and behaviour belied their ideas, which now had to change. Let’s go further. If one is sympathetic, intelligent and tolerant, if you live in a village for a long time, and are friendly and amenable, distinctions between inside/outside decompose, albeit never totally disappear; the remaining differences more subtle than a simple in/out divide.

‘It’s very odd about George and music,’ the Duke of Windsor once remarked of him. ‘His parents were quite normal.’⁸⁷

Once a relationship is established words like strange, weird, bizarre, fool, may start to appear, which both recognises the foreignness of an incomer and individualises that foreignness, melding you into the group. ‘Taff’ both a recognition that I am Welsh and an endearment, a sign I’ve joined this English club. While in the example above - an insider stepping outside - music is a sign that Lord Harewood doesn’t quite fit with his royal milieu. Difference yes! But this considered unimportant, for you are one of us, where all things are forgiven. When treated with amicable contempt I know that I have arrived.⁸⁸

It is the magic of participation-observation. In creating a relationship between observer and observed the normal categories that separate them soften, melt, dissolve into the typical human relations of a village or town. Life comes first. Which bends until they break the simple, discriminating, ideas so beloved by officials and too many academics.

This is why Audrey struggles with the question: it paints a picture of a place she does not recognise. The student is speaking a different language, where Audrey becomes the alien. It is to transform a complex scene into a simple ideological problem; the consequence of an academic culture that puts concepts first. Audrey’s uncomprehending response reminds me of the bewilderment of factory workers in the 1960s when middle class students told them they were alienated. A world seen through the double-glazing of the Dialectics Department.⁸⁹ Indeed, reading Berlin and McLellan, I can’t help but think that Marx’s baleful legacy on the Sixties generation wasn’t his class war politics but his addiction to print. Marxism, for all its vaunted materialism, is a social theory made out of books.⁹⁰

What is noteworthy here is Marx’s habit of thinking in opposites which he pursues to their furtherest consequences, while at the same time trying to comprehend them as different facets of a totality.⁹¹

McLellan is pointing to the form of Marx’s thought, which was set in mental concrete before he left school. Books then reinforced that mentality; they did not, unlike Malinowski’s time in the Trobriands, break it down. This points to a weakness of what came to be known as social or critical theory. What’s fine for studying the products of the human mind, may be clumsy or inappropriate if used to study human action, which may have its own physical and mental structure. This Hegel’s chief mistake, when he reformulated Descartes’s mind-body problem into a dialectic of individual and society; arguing these are reconciled when the idea of each part fuses with the idea of the collective whole. The Millennium when me and my world are completely rational entities. I don’t believe this true. However, under the influence of Hegel, Marx and others, this belief is coming a fact, as society is made in the image of the rational, which forces individuals to squeeze themselves into its logistic schedules and conceptual tin cans.

This not the rationality of a musician or plumber but that of corporate utility.⁹² The error of Hegel, who thought there was only one kind of Reason, untouched by social context.

Another word about Marx. Like the master himself most of his disciples belonged to the bourgeoisie, a class that tends to place an inordinate emphasis on concepts; and whose origins, I surmise, is in Protestant Christianity. Pure speculation! But I’ll throw it into my weed-clogged pond: as the universities became increasingly middle class during the 20th-century it was inevitable that the concept comes to predominate; this shift disguised by the radical rhetoric of the 1960s, which seemed to emanate from the workers. In truth - I speak from experience - ‘ordinary people’ tend not to look at life through a conceptual lens.⁹³

Most people lived like this in wartime, of course, but The Hollies might have been a beleaguered fortress. The poor, my aunts told me, had only themselves to blame, for they were for the most part improvident. They did not bother to mend their children’s clothes. They merely tore them up or threw the away when they went into holes. Privately I thought this a good idea, for I grew tired of dresses and skirts being let out and remade and turned and dyed. Aunt Seraphina was always unpicking seams and dipping old stockings in tea or coffee; one summer she even painted a straw hat she had found in the attics. ‘If you wait long enough,’ she often said ‘everything will come back into fashion.’ And of course she was right. I could today walk out in one of her long-waisted dresses of the twenties, dripping with jet bugles, and not look out of place.⁹⁴

Change that ‘improvident’ to ‘not ruled by ideas’, and we have an actual class distinction. This rich passage points to other characteristics of both the idea and a life lived around it. Fundamentally Aunt Seraphina and the concept are correct; yet they miss the changing context, which at times ridicules the notion, makes it redundant. Then because the idea - of self-sufficiency and preservation - is sacrosanct, our heroine, Louise, cannot question it. Ideas by their nature repress and restrict, encourage hypocrisy, give rise to rebellion. Told reading damages the eyes, she is forced to turn the bedroom light off. No problem! She gets out her secret stash of candles….

Artists tend to be more sophisticated. Not so easily trapped inside some crude concept; although when they are, it is the end for their creative life. Indeed, much of the artistic revolt against the bourgeoisie has been because of its enervating conceptual language, which rinses out meaning, through mass production and overuse, its poor aesthetic touch. Such ideas are only form; little more than words; whose meaning resides in the definition and social convention, not in what they can acutely describe. I call them cartoon concepts. Believers in such cartoons live half in and half outside such concepts: temples they visit on Sunday, while doing their own profane thing the rest of the week. One is supposed to gesture towards these ideas but not actually live through them; another reason for their emptiness and disconnect from what they purportedly explain. The benefits are enormous: such ideas don’t come with any cost, for they tune into the prevailing moral and social signals, which play across the airwaves. To believe, or to show belief, is enough, it belongs you to a group. (Another legacy of the Protestant revolution?) And where no cost there is little emotional or ritual input: at best a polite smile when one has grasped the general notion. I suspect this why conspiracy theorists play the role of Satan in today’s mainstream media – the bourgeoisie’s intellectual HQ -; for those who squeeze themselves into the catsuit of a concept are both an affront and a parody to the conventionally respectable whose ideas are strictly casual. People who live inside a concept find it hard, some find it impossible, to understand the world outside. Yet most of us live our lives without thinking about ideas at all. This why, when Malinowski asked the Trobrianders for the meaning or the origins of a ritual, they could not tell him: ‘it is what we have always done’ a standard response. Most of us most of the time live in a perpetual present, where we are pushed around by habit and custom, and where ideas are a reflex. If academia recognised this simple truth, many in today’s Humanities, who reside high up in the conceptual clouds playing with their conceptual puppet strings, would be given their P45. So much of current academic discourse a fiction, that would vanish if it ventured beyond the campus gates.

The Schloss is not against fictions. In creating a reality they can tell us about our own.

Audrey Richards is in the field thinking for herself. This Malinowski’s greatest legacy. It is why she could dedicate a book to him while disagreeing with details of his approach.⁹⁵ She thinks he was wrong to recommend no contact with colonial officials. I assume because she recognised their presence as part of the story, the Bemba’s culture shaped by their rule. This is the confidence of living with a people - and how living! - which in creating its own relations allows one to make nuanced distinctions, both between individuals and in one’s actions. With close contact Malinowski could find a solution to the problem of magic: it is a relation between humans and the physical world. The supreme value of Malinowski’s work to put the emphasis on activity; making experience more important than knowledge, if we are to understand the foreign, the strange, and of course ourselves. I suppose it is a kind of behaviourism, but where ethnography is akin to field ethology, not the Pavlovian lab. It therefore doesn’t suffer from the debilitating weakness of the behaviourist enterprise: its reduction to the concept of behaviourism, so removing mind, thus will, from the laboratory. To produce this paradox: ethologists think animals more intelligent than behaviourists humans.⁹⁶

The urge of any established academic discipline is to turn verbs into nouns.⁹⁷ I see this transformation taking place here. One consequence is that individuals disappear into the idea. Audrey thinks in verbs; it is why she can distinguish even between colonial officials. If a district officer is unjust and obtuse she’d take a stand; insisting to the officious that the Bemba are individuals not identikit members of a single tribe. Treat everyone separately. How changed in fifty years! Though with this ironic twist. These young academics are returning to the pre-Malinowski mentality, which was closely allied to European colonialism and its administrative mentality, which reduced Jack and Marge, Chinua and Sembene, to the collective and the type. All those empire men and women are colonialists now, our version of the Savage. The classic anthropologist and the colonial officer, whether brute or G.I. Jones, now a Barbarian, The Other.

It is the problem of Lord Concept; he doesn’t like, can’t cope with, Ms Unique and the Right Honourable Peculiar; who are dismissed as anomaly and anecdote. Science has become our single standard of knowledge. The other day I watched an interview about the effects of lifestyle on the body’s molecular structure, where the interlocutor assumed that the only reliable knowledge is scientific. Even that gained by psychiatrists and psychotherapists is but ‘opinion’.⁹⁸ There is a terrible literalism about the current academic mind, which appears to have lost its aesthetic sense. Knowledge as interpretation cannot exist in an era where there must be no doubt.⁹⁹ Concept or facts. And if I don’t take them seriously, if I lasso them with a question mark….

Bye-bye the arts and humanities.

Concepts are dangerous. But their language is so natural to academics that this danger is overlooked; except in philosophy departments and by an occasional rebel and eccentric.¹⁰⁰ It is to Malinowski’s enormous credit that he showed the inadequacy of his discipline’s conceptual apparatus. Scholars, he demonstrated, had to acquire the humility to learn from the locals. It is the moral element in his work. Whereas concepts – even when professing the Good - remove our humanity, as they suck out the peculiarities from each individual and every scene. It is to forget that on every branch and twig of the unique, of the strange, of the incomprehensible, there is a feeling. In Nina Bawden’s The Birds on the Trees, an adolescent is the victim of a mother’s relentless conceptualising, which compels her to act immediately, to implement her copied and crude concepts. Their subsequent life, dealing with the effects of the Sixties Counterculture and the mother’s clumsy intervention, is learning to suspend judgement, be cautious and wise in one’s acts. Don’t incarcerate your child, friend, opponent, my favourite nincompoop, into the one big idea! So easy to do. Devastating when done.

What is particular is eternally defeated by what is general; the general has eternally to fit in with the particular.¹⁰¹

These students are a various and intelligent bunch. One student says that is easier for women anthropologists to talk about politics, because they are not seen as a threat. Audrey agrees. ‘I was often thought a welfare worker or nurse’ (not without its own problems: she had no medical training), which gave her a special status in the village, one quite distinct from those district officers. It also suggests something about the public realm that is often missed by our obsession with its formal rules and processes (the ballot boxes, campaigns, manifestos). Political influence isn’t just in the patriarchal space - the public plaza - but surrounds it in the homes, where the women rule.¹⁰² It is also to forget that in most large-scale societies, where the two divide, the private sphere is more important than the public.¹⁰³ Another cause for anxiety in the contemporary scene…as public life invades the private, we have less control over what we do and think. Shut off the TVs! Turn off the Internet! The Schloss is stretchered onto the psychiatric ward.

The student’s question highlights the difficulties of fitting the classic anthropologists into a colonial frame. The standard academic, like the official type anywhere, which in many ways they resemble, are a class apart. It is they who put idea and rule before an individual and a situation. To prioritise the general alienates those, the majority, who prefer the specific and the concrete.

There are times when the university has to be saved from the academics….

Bohemians, explorers and mavericks are close to the ‘ordinary’ person; while an artist sits at the crossroads: ideas are important, but these are ideas embodied in the actual and the now; in mood, in object, in man and woman, in symbol, and in the material they use to represent them. Like you and me, dear reader, bohemians are not keen on officials, with their aura of authority and that iron suit of self-belief. The Malinowski lot are not your standard campus type. Malinowski, Audrey, Meyer Fortes, not to mention Edmund Leach, Jack Goody, Stephen Hugh-Jones, are closer to Sixties Soho than their LSE colleagues, with an eye on County Hall and Parliament Square. It follows, it is as rigorous as a syllogism, that they are far closer to the Trobrianders, the Nuer, the Bemba, than the officials – whether in the British Empire or today’s business university – whose sensibilities they offend. The locals to quickly pick this up.

Sir Stirrup whips out his tongue: ‘you don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, sir.’ Schloss gives the simple rely: can’t I rely on my eyes and ears?

No one can control what’s really creative; we have to let it go its own way.¹⁰⁴

The university of Leach and Evans-Pritchard had the strength to let the crazies run wild on campus.¹⁰⁵ In today’s academy what can’t be contained in an examination paper is marched off the premises.

The old anthropology and the new. But I mustn’t draw the lines too sharply. In this film I see a reverence for the old; the Malinowskian magic still working its wonders. Audrey an oracle from anthropology’s own mythic past. We listen with keenness, with awe; struck by the miracles out of a world that is passing.

Interview: Audrey Richards

1. Elizabeth Berridge, Across the Common, p.32.

2. Coral Gardens and Their Magic. Coming from a different place, Norman Lewis says something similar in the forward to A View of the World: Selected Journalism.

3. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters.

4. Liam Hudson, The Cult of Fact and Margaret Archer, Journeys Through Sociology.

5. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A curious history, pp.4-5.

6. Brilliantly lampooned in Robert Irwin, Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh.

7. Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, p.78.

8. See The Footnote, pp.7-11, for how this innocuous scholarly device is used to attack and undermine colleagues. The footnote has its own secret language, known only to insiders.

9. The Cult of Fact, p.35.

10. Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey Through Western Philosophy, both describes the intellectual background of these characters and explains why their particular kind of mind was useless for philosophy. Philologists not philosophers.

11. The Footnote, p7.

12. John Carey was astonished and dismayed by the poor quality of Milton criticism when asked to do an anthology of recent academic work. The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books.

13. See John Haffenden’s biography for the extraordinary and chaotic life of Empson; a writer whose art was criticism. My reading of Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature: An Institutional History is of a humanities turned into a social science.

14. Michael Billig, Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences.

15. Marvellously satirised by Arthur Schopenhauer in the Preface to the Second Edition of The World as Will and Representation.

16. Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, p.76.

17. When people complain about how Left-wing is the university they mistake the real reason: all these academics believe in the same concepts, which just happen to be Left. Most of these people are standard conservative types.

18. The problem of Marxism in the 1960s. See Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change.

19. See Ernest Gellner’s wonderful James Frazer and Cambridge Anthropology in Anthropology and Politics, where one of the key myths of The Golden Bough is transferred to England, with Harald standing in for Frazer, and Malinowski as William the Conquerer, the king killer.

20. Gellner did. Though there is much irony in his last book, which is a brilliant but vitriolic attack on Wittgenstein: Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma.

21. Functionalism is an offshoot of Utilitarianism. For just how ubiquitous this is in modern thought, see Charles Taylor, Hegel; a brilliant overview of our mental world.

22. Brilliantly described by Malinowski in Coral Gardens and Their Magic. For superstition: Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage.

23. Christopher Meredith explores this tension wonderfully in Shifts.

24. Aspects of Hume remain in Durkheim, thus the emphasis on ritual and ecstatic festivals. However, the direction of travel is away from the individual relation to the social whole. There is superb discussion in Ernest Gellner, Reason and Culture.

25. Structure and Function in Primitive Society, pp.178-180. The key sentence: ‘The social life of the community is here defined as the functioning of the social structure.’ Italics in original: he wants to stress the relational nature of function. However, the implicit and actual emphasis is on social structure.

26. Hegel thought he was describing the universe. No! But he did write the most penetrating account of modern societies, whose distinction is to embody the Concept; not like previous great civilisations - for example medieval Christianity - where the concept was in the metaphysical heavens; nor in small scale traditional societies, where such vast ideas play no (or very little) role in their structure and function.

27. For how this idea changed even liberalism: L.T. Hobhouse, Liberalism. For a good history of this shift, which takes place between the 18th and 19th centuries: Fred W. Voget, A History of Ethnology.

28. I explore this at length in Cartoons and Their Concepts.

29. Karl Marx, in David McLellan, Marx before Marxism, pp.227-8.

30. In large part because of Mr Marx and his outsize influence on the New Right, who believed we are capitalists before we are human beings. For just how much of our current economic relations are due to a politics captured by an intellectual cult: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. For the New Right: Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Revolution 1931-1983. The role of intellectual cults in history is a major theme of Cartoons and Their Concepts.

31. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote many profound things. Here is one of them:

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species. A thought that deserves taking to heart. (Aphorisms, translated by R.J. Hollingdale.)

32. Which has its own ironies: the basis of their belief is attacked as imperialist. For a wise defence: Jack Goody, The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918-1970.

33. Always there are ironies. I read a review of a new biography of Durkheim, where the reviewer wrote that the life had so changed that this great French thinker no longer had anything to say to us. Ha! My Cartoons and Their Concepts deals with that chap! For the self knowledge, see Alan’s interviews with Ray Abrahams and Rodney Needham.

34. Coral Gardens and Their Magic, p.480.

35. See the first chapter in Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives; The Anthropologist as Reader.

36. See my Train Them Good.

37. Our Sister Water IV, in Collected Poems.

38. Quoted in Karl Marx, p.47.

39. See my Better than Perfume.

40. David Bromwich, Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking.

41. Karl Marx, p.205.

42. Karl Marx, p.205.

43. Karl Marx, p.182.

44. Joyce Cary, Art and Reality.

45. Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits.

46. Karen Armstrong, The Bible: The Biography.

47. Cartoons and Their Concepts.

48. Nina Bawden, The Birds on the Trees, p.31.

49. Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc.

50. Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics Volume III: Hobbes and Civil Science and Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. The purpose of Leviathan is order and the peace that comes from that order. If there is tension, then there is the possibility of friction, of conflict; and his theory therefore fails.

51. Marx before Marxism, pp.26-7.

52. Karl Marx, p.170.

53. The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880.

54. Its roots pre-date the modern period. Edward VI’s essays were corrected by his tutor to tone down or remove his personality. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation, pp.29-30. The king is both a man and a public, impersonal, body.

55. The history is sympathetically told by Llewellyn Woodward, The Age of Reform: England 1815-1870.

56. Tim Parks has many interesting things to say about cancel culture….

57. My Better than Perfume.

58. Svetlana Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer.

59. Peter Hennessy, Whitehall. Though he is describing its decline. For the type in their pomp: Alan’s interview with Wynne Godley.

60. Elizabeth Berridge, Across the Common, p.4. Note the ‘interferin’ and compare with my ‘do-gooding’ in A Real Adventure.

61. The older literature mistakenly called this collective identity.

62. By the 19th century it has become a legal contract. Read Thomas Hardy’s extraordinary A Conversation at Dawn in The Collected Poems.

63. Once called the Great Transformation, about which Gellner is the thinker.

64. The classic account of that breakdown is Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England.

65. Gellner used to call the West a Danegeld society: our obedience was bought off by consumer goodies. Spectacles and Predicaments: Essays in Social Theory. Like all drugs the effect wears off. So we up the dose…even our food is now literally junk.

66. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. It wasn’t so pleasant if the Church took an interest in you: Carlo Ginzburg: The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller.

67. A case study of how religion and academic psychology metamorphoses into a business which produces its own worldview: Barbara Ehrenreich, Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & the World. In a conversation with Rupert Sheldrake, Alison Millbank describes how the evangelical mission of the Church of England runs on a business model.

68. For this shift see Alan’s interview with Gillian Beer. Students are now expected to know where they are going before they book their tickets: set out the theme of the thesis before you write it.

69. Gellner argues that it is precisely lack of access that produces the ‘subjective turn’ in anthropology. If you can’t go out into the field, stay in the study and write about yourself. Post-modernism, Reason and Religion.

70. Due to official obstacles in the USSR Caroline Humphrey was forced to study in a Moscow library; much to Meyer Fortes’s reluctance. This suggests that Malinowski’s method had become a habit that needed to be broken, to allow anthropology to adapt both to social change and the subject’s own evolution. See Alan’s interview with Caroline.

71. See what for me is a classic: The development of the family and marriage in Europe. He argues that the Catholic Church changed kinship patterns, as emphasis and resources were shifted away from the family to the institution.

72. Alan Macfarlane, in collaboration with Sarah Harrison and Charles Jardine, Reconstructing Historical Communities.

73. Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, Religion & Other Essays, p.93.

74. A.S.Byatt gives a marvellous Frazerian reading of contemporary literature in Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings.

75. Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma, p.139.

76. Russian Thinkers. Marx is a typical example:

Because of my vexation, I was for several days quite unable to think. Like a lunatic I ran around in the garden beside the Spree’s dirty water ‘which washes the soul and dilutes the tea’. I even went out hunting with my host and then returned hotfoot to Berlin wishing to embrace every loafer at the street corners…because of the futility of my lost labours, from consuming vexation at having to make an idol of a view I detest, I feel sick. (Marx before Marxism, p.70.)

77. Contrast Rowan Williams with a bog-standard academic like Daniel Markovits, who to show he is intelligent, a member of the intellectual elite, an educated caste, sprinkles the water drops of Shakespeare across the desert prose of his The Meritocracy Trap. In A Century of Poetry: 100 Poems for searching the heart, Williams thinks like a poet. There is a flexibility and depth to his thought wholly lacking in Markovits, who turns all things, including Shakes, into facts.

78. Picked up by Rodney Needham in his interview. Durkheim such an influence on British anthropology because its members embodied his idea of the collective conscience.

79. A good example is in Clifford Geertz, The Anthropologist as Author.

80. This brilliantly parodied in Robert Irwin’s Satan Wants Me. I am sure this novel is influenced by Tanya Luhrmann’s Persuasions of a Witch’s Craft.

81. ‘Turning to the ‘definitive’ edition of Women in Love, I was appalled. No lesser phrase can be used. All suggestion that a novel might be a book to read for entertainment, even if at a high level of entertainment, is abandoned. Here is purely a machine for the grinder out of theses and dissertations.’ Anthony Powell, Under Review: Writings on Writers 1946-1990, p.186.

82. There is brilliant analysis by Peter Brown: The Rise of Christianity in the West.

83. I am stealing from Bernard Williams:

…the basic truth in Goethe’s verse, that no political theory, liberal or other, can determine by itself its own application. The conditions in which the theory or any given interpretation of it makes sense to intelligent people are determined by an opaque aggregation of many actions and forces. A few of those actions are political actions. A few, a very few, may be the actions of theorists, whether acting politically…[or]…as theorists. (In the Beginning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, Selected, edited, and with an introduction by Geoffrey Hawthorn, p.28.)

84. The Sexual Life of Savages: In North Western Melanesia.

85. This is brought out explicitly in Magic, Science, Religion & Other Essays.

86. Bertrand Russell, Knowledge Its Scope and Limits.

87. The reference is to Lord Harewood, first cousin to Queen Elizabeth II. Oliver Craske, Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar, p.170.

88. Nicely caught in Stephen Hugh-Jones’ first lecture on culture. Alan’s website.

89. Another advantage with most novelists, they live in the world they describe. The results can be miraculous. Shifts one of the few novels to capture the working class experience. This novelist clearly inside the rooms he writes about…. Tredegar is where I was born. I walk the streets of this novel’s sentences.

90. Adam B. Ulam makes a similar point at the end of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

91. Marx before Marxism, p.56.

92. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:.

93. For the slide down the social scale: A.H. Halsey, The End of Donnish Dominion: The British Academic Professions in the Twentieth Century.

94. Across the Common, pp.32-3.

95. Chisungu: A girl’s initiation ceremony among the Bemba of Zambia. With an Introduction by Jean La Fontaine.

96. For how this feeds into our current social media malaise: Jean Lepore, If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future.

97. For both the practice and how it distorts even canonical texts: Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences. Thus a radical thinker like Foucault is turned orthodox by shifting his thought from an activity - a verb - to a concept (noun).

98. Scientific and Medical Network’s Book Briefing with Immaculata Da Vico.

99. Much is due to the media, and the populism which they mass produce.

100. One of the reasons why I like Àlex Gómez-Marín.

101. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, p.23.

102. The great satire about this is Montesquieu, Persian Letters.

103. Which I explore in The Public Squeeze.

104. Maxims and Reflections, p.23.

105. Noel Annan, The Dons: Memoirs, Eccentrics and Geniuses.