In Search of the Primitive

A Critique of Civilization

Stanley Diamond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351615440
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Anthropology is a kind of debate between human possibilities—a dialectical movement between the anthropologist as a modern man and the primitive peoples he studies. In Search of the Primitive is a tough-minded book containing chapters ranging from encounters in the field to essays on the nature of law, schizophrenia and civilization, and the evolution of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Above all it is reflective and self-critical, critical of the discipline of anthropology and of the civilization that produced that discipline. Diamond views the anthropologist who refuses to become a searching critic of his own civilizations as not merely irresponsible, but a tool of Western civilization. He rejects the associations which have been made in the ideology of our civilization, consciously or unconsciously, between Western dominance and progress, imperialism and evolution, evolution and progress.

1
Introduction: Civilization and Progress

Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home. Each is an aspect of the other. Anthropologists who use, or misuse, words such as “acculturation” beg this basic question. For the major mode of acculturation, the direct shaping of one culture by another through which civilization develops, has been conquest. Observe, for example, the Euro-American “influence” on the South Vietnamese, or the fact that white Protestant Anglo-Saxons who settled in New England learned a few things from the aboriginal Indian peoples (of which the writers of history for civilized children make so much), and that black slaves “contributed” African rhythms to southern American music. In all these instances, one group was dominant and the other subordinate. Such examples of the diffusion of cultural traits suggest the struggles that have taken place within various societies. When—as generally happens—this diffusion is traced as an abstract exchange, somehow justified by the universal balance sheet of the imperial civilization, the assault by civilized upon primitive or traditional societies is masked, or its implications evaded. The propagation of basic elements of ancient Egyptian culture along the eastern Mediterranean strip was, for example, a precipitant of political and economic conquest. The politically “weaker” peoples were confronted with a single set of alternatives, rooted in the Egyptian experience. This historical fact is then reflected as a law of development; as civilization accelerates, its proponents project their historical present as the progressive destiny of the entire human race. The political component is obscured by deterministic arguments from natural law, natural history and natural science. Anthropology as a civilized discipline has, despite the pretentious relativism of many of its practitioners, “reluctantly” shared these ethnocentric notions of historical inevitability. Political decisions, however, are rather more existential in their nature. They can be literally decisive; they are implicated with problems of will and authority. For popular—as opposed to imposed—politics is people in groups deciding to act in order to reject, create or maintain a given form of social life. Civilized peoples and civilized disciplines have, therefore, been particularly sensitive to political action on the part of “backward” peoples which created the possibility of autonomous societies and alternative cultures. In the mind of the imperialist, the world is small, and loss of control in one area threatens the whole. The fabric of world culture, our oral or inscribed literary, esthetic and religious inheritance, may be, as anthropologists are prone to put it, a “multicolored fabric”; but since the rise of civilization that fabric has been woven on a political loom.

No matter how far we range in time and space, from Teotihuacan to Angkor Vat the tale is always the same. No matter what distinctions we encounter in language, art, religion, cultural style or social structure, the history of civilization repeats itself, not as farce, which Marx supposed to be the fate of all historical repetitions, but as tragedy. In the shadow of this tragedy, the achievements of civilization are reduced to their proper proportions. They were intended for the use and pleasure of the very few at the expense of the skill and labor of the many.

The original crimes of civilizations, conquest and political repression, were committed in silence and that is still their intention, if not always their result. For most of the victims, through most of human history, could not and cannot read or write. It is sometimes said that they had no history. That is a complex opinion—false, yet profoundly true in a way not intended. It is false because it assumes that history is a matter of documents. Conventional historians, who live by documents and, therefore, consider them sacrosanct, would deny authentic history to most of the human race for the greater period of time on this planet. The opinion of H. Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, is typical: “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none. There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness. …”

Africa, along with all other areas inhabited by human beings has both a “pre-history” and a “history” recorded in the migrations of people, the artifacts found in the earth, the connections traceable among myriad languages, and the oral traditions of indigenous societies. Africa is the locus of predominantly unwritten, deeply self-conscious human experiences, the ensemble of which constitute the only authentic definition of history. Even so, documents exist; in the Western Sudan, for example, the Kano chronicle provides information about events ten centuries old. Of course, that kind of “history” is necessarily skewed by the official attitudes of invading groups; the distortions are probably of the same magnitude as the information that has come to us, filtered through the scribes, priests and courtiers of eleventh-century England, or, for that matter, the journalists and closet academicians of the twentieth century. But Trevor-Roper is, in a sense that he would not admit, perfectly correct; most men, whether Africans, medieval Europeans, or working-class Englishmen, have lived in the “darkness” to which they have been confined by those who record and rationalize the career of civilization. For their histories, in Africa, for example, were of no use to the European historian—not being reified, they could not be endlessly mined for the sake of either the academic specialist or the establishment he represented. When Trevor-Roper claims, therefore, that Africa has no history, he means that Africa has no history that he can use.

Those people who could write, the scribes and priests of Egypt, Babylonia or China, were rarely disposed to record the attitudes of those they taxed, subordinated and mystified. Writing itself was initially used to keep tax, census and other administrative records; it was, in short, an instrument for the recording of official histories, invented by bureaucrats. The oral tradition, the ceremony, the round of daily life, the use and manufacture of tools by the people at large did not depend on writing, nor did they need to be reflected in writing. The compulsive rite of civilization is writing, and the compulsions of the official concept of reality are both experienced and expressed in the exclusive mode of cognition signified by writing. This fixation on one-dimensional realities is particularly evident in the attitude of the ethnologist whose civilized insistence on recording the exact and proper form of a ritual, the exclusive mode of marriage or descent, the precise code of behavior, may reveal his own motivation and certain shortcomings of scientism, but fails to resonate with the variety and flexibility of primitive social usages. The connection between Malinowski’s insistence on word-perfect magic among the Trobriand Islanders and his clinically compulsive personality, as reflected in his diary—“a diary in the strict sense of the term”—is a case in point.

Writing was one of the original mysteries of civilization, and it reduced the complexities of experience to the written word. Moreover, writing provides the ruling classes with an ideological instrument of incalculable power. The word of God becomes an invincible law, mediated by priests; therefore, respond the Iroquois, confronting the European: “Scripture was written by the Devil.” With the advent of writing, symbols became explicit; they lost a certain richness. Man’s word was no longer an endless exploration of reality, but a sign that could be used against him. Sartre, the Marxist existentialist, understands this; it is the hidden theme of his autobiography, Words. For writing splits consciousness in two ways—it becomes more authoritative than talking, thus degrading the meaning of speech and eroding oral tradition; and it makes it possible to use words for the political manipulation and control of others. Written signs supplant memory; an official, fixed and permanent version of events can be made. If it is written, in early civilizations, it is bound to be true.

History, then, has always been written by the conqueror; the majority of people have traditionally remained silent, and this is still largely the case. It is the civilized upper classes who, conceiving their positions as determined by God, talent or technology, create the facts of history and the deterministic theories which justify both the facts and their own pre-eminence. Thus we have no conventional way of knowing what the “ordinary” peasant in Bronze Age China or early dynastic Egypt felt, thought or suffered. Even Shakespeare found it necessary to deal with kings and nobles when exploring the human soul. The Greek novelist Kazantzakis tells us that he was not impressed by the ideologues when he visited Russia shortly after the Revolution. Rather, standing in Kremlin Square, he shuddered at the snarl of rage that rose from the endless parade of peasants, soldiers, workers and urban riffraff. This is the sound that is rarely recorded. It is, rather, the chain of conventional historical chronicles that defines the “mainstream of civilization,” and makes us certain that history as we know it is somehow inevitable, and must be the record of the fittest survivors.

In the beginning, conquest and domestic oppression were indistinguishable. As the earliest societies that began to consolidate as states expanded territorially, local peoples were conquered and incorporated as lower-class subjects or slaves into the evolving polity. We find this pattern everywhere—in the Nile Valley some 5,000 years ago; in England following the Norman invasion; among the Incas of the Peruvian highlands; in the valley of Mexico prior to the Spanish conquest; in the coastal forests of West Africa in the sixteenth century. Imperialism and colonialism are as old as the state; they define the political process. In Dahomey, for example, any person born within the territory claimed by the emerging “king” was, by right of conquest, a Dahomean subject. His ultimate obligations to the nascent state, the political definition of his humanity, took precedence at least abstractly over his local, kin-mediated, social existence.

After the initial consolidation of the state, as V. Gordon Childe relates, the ancient Egyptians colonized the eastern Mediterranean littoral and that, along with their economic imperialism and punitive expeditions, stimulated state-building among local peoples. This archetypal imperial process is worth examining. The importation of raw materials, needed for the development of Egyptian industries as well as for funerary ceremonies, was financed from the royal revenues. Copper and turquoise were mined in the Sinai. Expeditions equipped by the state, escorted by royal soldiers, were periodically dispatched across the desert for this purpose. Similarly, cedarwood and resins were imported from North Syria. Ships bound for Byblos* were equipped and provided with trade goods by the state; government officials led expeditions to the upper Nile and brought back gold and spices.

The major purpose of this traffic was to secure luxuries and magic substances or raw materials; while peasants and laborers still used stone tools in the fields and quarries, soldiers were armed with metal weapons. This trade also helped sustain new classes—merchants, sailors, porters, soldiers, artisans and clerks were supported from the surplus revenues collected by the pharaoh. More specifically, the effects of the imperial trade on Byblos were as follows: the Egyptians needed cedarwood for tombs, boats and furniture; they obtained it from Lebanon, and shipped it from the port of Byblos, close to Beirut. Before the rise of civilization in Egypt, Byblos had been the site of a neolithic town. As early as 3200 B.C., the Giblites had been self-sufficient fishermen and farmers. But the consolidation by conquest of the Egyptian state from a series of neolithic villages strung out along the banks of the Nile turned Byblos into a primary supplier of raw materials for the use of the Egyptian upper classes. In satisfying the Egyptian demands, Byblos abandoned the economic self-sufficiency of its neolithic structure, and came to depend upon a foreign market. One is reminded of Rousseau’s observation: “Alexander, desiring to keep the Ichthyophay dependent on him, forced them to give up fishing and to eat foodstuffs common to other peoples.” Moreover, Egyptian traders and officials settled there in order to secure their interests, and the Egyptians “instructed” the Giblites in the administration of the city and the management of their money, establishing what was in effect a protectorate. A stone temple was built in the city, decorated by immigrant Egyptian craftsmen; and the Giblites learned the Egyptian script, the language of commerce.

As time went on, Byblos became a pre-industrial city, a market for raw materials, and a further center for the diffusion of the new social economy. But it should be noted that the imposed elements of Egyptian civilization tended to remain static in Byblos. The Imperium changed the nature of the indigenous society, which retained certain of its cultural traits by adapting them to the new structure, but Byblos, in the classic colonial mode, did not and could not keep pace with further developments in Egypt. While the Egyptians improved their script, for example, the Giblites maintained for a millenium the archaic characters which they had originally adopted. The imperial process, then, increased the affluence of the Egyptian upper classes, and converted Byblos into a little Egypt through the direct effect of the division of labor needed to supply raw materials for the related tasks of administration and defense. This, in turn, led to the impoverishment and dependence of the majority of people engaged in fishing and farming.

A similar chain of events was set in motion by the imperial thrust of Mesopotamia, which resulted, after 2500 B.C., in the breakup of the neolithic communities and their replacement by urban civilization. Here again the “secondary centers” remained provincial, compared to the “dynamic” metropolitan powers. But self-replication, which is both the need and the desire of the imperialist center, was not always accomplished so directly. The nomads of Sinai, for example, those “wretched Bedouins,” refused to mine copper for the Egyptians in return for manufactured trinkets. Workers from Egypt, under the eye of the royal army, had to do the job. And in other areas, such as Nineveh, the primitive farming settlements were forcibly converted into imperial towns. Eventually these archaic civilizations (Egypt, Sumer, India), through direct or indirect conquest, reproduced themselves throughout the ancient world. Childe writes, “Initially, on the borders of Egypt, Babylonia, and the Indus Valley—in Crete and the Greek Islands, Syria, Assyria, Iran and Baluchistan, and further afield on the Greek mainland, the Anatolian Plateau, South Russia, villages were converted to cities and self-sufficient food producers became commercially specialized.” Only those who lived in the most remote areas could escape this process; only the nomads of the desert denied its reality. Like the primitives who flee civilization, they refuse to cooperate or to alter their image of themselves, as imperialism invests each secondary and tertiary center.

More than 2,000 years after the inception of archaic imperialism, the same imperatives are constantly at work. In 416 B.C., the Athens of Plato and Socrates, then at war with Sparta, refused to recognize the right of the inhabitants of Melos to remain neutral. Thucydides reports, truthfully in spirit if not in fact, a dialogue between the Melians and the Athenean envoys in which the latter reject all reasonable and humane argument. Power, they say, is what counts in this world; and it would be better for Athens to be defeated by Sparta than to reveal so damaging a weakness to other subject peoples by accepting the friendship of defenseless Melos. The Melians insist on their independence and reject the honor of becoming an Athenean colony. The Atheneans then attack Melos, killing the mature men and selling the women and children into slavery. Thereafter they colonized Melos themselves. This was the same Athens that condemned Socrates as a traitor a few years later. The two events taken together, the one externally imperialistic, the other internally repressive—remind us of the still more ancient association between this twin dynamic of the state, which converges to a single process at the origins of civilization itself. And it is always useful to remember that in Athens, at the height of its cultural achievement, there were at least three slaves to every free man. This fact is reflected in the classic utopian projections of civilization, as instanced in the work of Thomas More, where it is assumed that a special class of the disenfranchised will engage in “black labor.” And in Plato’s Republic, that prototypical apology for the state, the workers and farmers constitute lower orders of being.

Civilization has always had to be imposed, not as a psychodynamic necessity or a repressive condition of evolved social life, as Freud supposed, and not only in terms of the state’s power securing itself against its own subjects, but also with reference to the barbarian or primitive peoples who moved on the frontiers. Native communities were the ground out of which the earliest, class-structured, territorially defined civilizations arose. Internally, these native peoples were transformed into the peasant and proletarian “masses” who supported the apparatus of the state. No matter how “necessary” the political structure of civilization may have been initially, the progressive degradation of the independent native communities remains a truth of history. No rationalization for the existence of the early state can alter the fact that the majority of the people were always taxed in goods and labor far more than they received from the state in the form of protection and services.

Even if we acknowledge the necessity—due to population pressure, scarcity of land, water and other resources—for political constraints in the earliest stages of state formation, there is no inherent reason for it to have taken the oppressive form that it did—except for the burgeoning anxiety of those removed from direct production about their economic and political security. That security seems to have been all the more problematic when we assume along with Marx, Morgan, Engels, Radin, Childe and Redfield that primitive societies are proto-democratic and communalistic, and further, that the character of the neolithic communities that immediately preceded the rise of the earliest civilizations could be similarly defined. For primitive customs and habits so long in their formulation could hardly have been transformed without very great resistance. The consequent struggle between the state—the civil authority—and the constituent kin or quasi-kin units of society is the basic social struggle in human history. It is still reflected in local attitudes and institutional buffers against the center, even where distorted.

Their anxiety about not being self-supporting, along with the anticipation of such resistance, seems to constitute the motive for the upper classes’ elaborate extortion of wealth from the direct producers. But even if we accept the necessity of the political transformation of society and agree that no state could survive unless “surplus” wealth created by the emerging peasants and workers was appropriated for the support of the classes not directly engaged in production, this does not account for the accelerating inequities in the distribution of wealth. The widening gap between the rich and poor as ancient civilizations developed could not have been due simply to scarcity, or to the need for supporting specialists removed from subsistence activity. Rather, it was due to increasing expropriation. For as Marshall Sahlins has pointed out, the richer a society, the greater the distance between its classes, and the greater the concentration of wealth at the summit. Nor was the archaic concentration of wealth a function of its presumably rational reinvestment. Not only were the uses of wealth irrational, inflating the tautology of power, but redistribution in the form of public works or services eventually increased, rather than lessened, the gap between classes. The dynamics of archaic civilization reveal the pathology of wealth—wealth as power, or luxury as “well-being”—and the inadequacy of the distribution of wealth. By 3000 B.C. in the Middle East, such rationalizations for the state, which also apply to monopoly capitalism, are apparent. As Marx understood, the processes of state formation and function are generalizable beyond the specific form of the state.

The critical question, then, is that of the socioeconomic exploitation and the concomitant loss of the cultural creativity and autonomy of the vast majority of human beings. Conspicuous extortion from worker and peasant was a confirmation of power; but power, so reified, not only confirmed social status, it also displaced anxiety about the actual powerlessness of the privileged, which was a result of the loss of their direct command of the environment. The sheer accumulation of wealth, the antithesis of primitive customary usage, was thus compensatory, a sign of the fear of impotence. It is a response of the alienated in pursuit of security; the manipulation of people is substituted for the command of things. As civilization spreads and deepens, it is ultimately man’s self, his species being, which is imperialized.

But according to the evolutionary determinists, the support of emerging artisans, soldiers, bureaucrats, priests by workers and peasants, a division of labor and class which presumably insured greater productivity in a given area subject to an accelerating population-resource ratio was rational, if not spontaneous. Specialization of function is supposed to maximize economic results (but the political question is always “for whom”); it breaks down the multi-dimensional functioning of the person in the primitive neolithic community, and leads to the institutionalizing of the division of labor, as not only determined, but socially desirable. The division of labor provides, in turn, the internal logic and coherence of class-structured society. Markets, middlemen, administrators became necessary because property had to be guarded and regulated, and exchange values established; thus the mutually dependent relations of the basic producers to the middlemen and the rulers are “completed” (mystified) in the structure of the state. The state appears as the inevitable sum of its social parts, its ideology is the projection of a unity by the “naturally” differentiated. If the process of civilization had unfolded in this way, as simply an adaptive machine, then all social ills can be ascri...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• In Search of the Primitive
• copy
• Contents
• Foreword Eric R. Wolf
• 1 Introduction: Civilization and Progress
• 2 The Politics of Field Work
• 3 Anthropology in Question
• 4 The Search for the Primitive
• 5 Plato and the Definition of the Primitive
• 6 The Uses of the Primitive
• 7 Schizophrenia and Civilization
• 8 The Rule of Law Versus the Order of Custom
• 9 Job and the Trickster
• 10 The Inauthenticity of Anthropology: The Myth of Structuralism
• 11 What History Is
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index