History and Ethnicity

Elizabeth Tonkin, Maryon McDonald, Malcolm Chapman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317271826
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

These essays examine the importance of historical consicousness and the role of historiography in 'ethnic' situations, exploring the many ways in which ethnic groups select history, write or rewrite it, rescue appropriate or ignore it, forget or traduce it. Drawing on expert knowledge of regions ranging from the Amazon to contemporary Germany, the contributors bring anthropological and historical understanding to answer these questions, and investigate major topics such as the relationship between ethnic, national and state identifications, and the cultural work of creating them. Examples include Afrikaaners and Northern Ireland Protestants, as well as Mormons and Catalans. Bringing together a variety of themes that have recently become the focus of study – ethnicity, the uses and nature of history and the likelihood of objectivity in historical telling – the book will be of great interest ot students in the social sciences, anthropology, politics, history and international relations.

Chapter one

The Construction of History: ‘vestiges of creation’

Edwin Ardener

A theory of history has long eluded social anthropology. Even Evans-Pritchard seemed to see it, at one level, as a series of synchronic sections (1950; 1961), at least when discussing practical fieldwork method. At another level, he clearly saw history as a matter of retrospective interpretation (as in his own reinterpretation of the history of social anthropology). Lévi-Strauss (1958; trans., 1963) saw it as the uncovering of unconscious processes (Structural Anthropology). It is not, therefore, entirely an objective matter. Yet the absence of a sound theoretical protection against the dangers of total arbitrariness is evident. In 1971 I drew attention to the problem of the chess puzzle. Some chess problems show a state of the chessboard that has as a ‘history’ previous real states of a game that has really been played. Others are ‘constructed’ states that might have been reached in a game, but were not. These constructed states are passages in games that have never been played. Yet we cannot tell the difference.

Phillip Gosse, the father of Edmund Gosse, and a natural historian, was a committed nineteenth-century creationist. He was unable to bring himself to reject the Biblical chronology of Archbishop Ussher in the light of the tremendous geological and palaeological advances of his period. Darwin’s great work was a considerable shock and challenge to him. He argued that Adam’s body had been itself created bearing the evidences of a non-existent biological growth and development. It was not enough to posit that he must have lacked a navel (a common creationist argument!): the problem was more fundamental than that. In the same way, he argued, the earth was created together with its fossil history of millions of years. The fossils were for Gosse (1907) likewise mere ‘Vestiges of Creation’, which itself took place only a few thousand years ago (Ardener, 1971b:227). Thus this anti-evolutionist Plymouth Brother stumbled on a real question, lost although it was in the preposterousness of its particular polemical application. For, in a sense, all baselines of history are conceptually in this situation: real histories are, in the absence of total documentation (what would total documentation be like?), rearranged by changes in the infinite sequence of successive presents, producing, as with the chess puzzle, histories that did not happen.

If we could artificially start the game, somewhere, we might trace the shape of the changing historical space. Partial approximations are possible. Hastrup’s account of the trajectory of the internal categories of the Icelandic Free State, from its foundation in about 800 (by settlement) to its total redefinition in the eleventh century (by absorption into the Norwegian state), is the most advanced we have in social anthropology (Hastrup, 1985). It incorporates a model of catastrophic rearrangement over time, that takes into account the continuity of the human rearrangers (Ardener, 1975). Yet no historical space is truly independent. The Free State was part of the wider Atlantic space of its own period, and now forms part also of our own historical (or historiographical) space, while Hastrup’s own study is itself part of our social anthropological space. It is thus not a matter of spaces nesting in hierarchical sequence, relatively tidily. On the contrary, we may argue, all such spaces englobe each other anti-, or better, a-hierarchically. The ordering feature is the frame. Perceptually and cognitively the framing ‘rules’ (fluctuating and ambiguously evidenced as they frequently are) are the source of the very concept of the space. We may say the frame and the space are just the internal and external aspects of the same concept.

Where is the real world among these possible worlds? Is it worth asking this question? Some have seemed happy enough to do without it – hence the extreme idealist tendencies of many approaches that have otherwise been ready to undertake the specification of the cognitive aspects of human social life. The approaches loosely seen as structuralist were ultimately subject to this criticism. In their strong form they are totally nihilistic in their contemplation of the question of reality. Nevertheless, in a ‘post-structuralist’ world we can attempt to unpack this anomaly in structural analysis, for its nihilism is technically most evident in the matter of history. In the structuralist frame, history is subject to the same structuring as other narrative, and is ultimately reducible to text. This achievement (which was anticipated and paralleled outside social anthropology) is a genuine one. The study of mythology is now seen to encompass at one level all history, or at least all historiography. It seems, then, that structuralism is ‘Gossian’ in its view of the past. Any ‘historical’ elements (in the older, securer sense) in a narrative are mere ‘vestiges of creation’. Although likely to be hotly rejected, even by structuralists in their heyday, this is a strong position (as I have already argued) and not something to be ashamed of. Nevertheless, this ‘flatness of vision’ in structuralism is a result of its essential ‘textuality’, the demonstration of which I will not repeat here (Ardener, 1985).

Edmund Leach was early involved in this controversy through his analysis of Old Testament sources (Leach, 1969). This is a field in which the documents are seen as both text and truth by many experts. I recall that, in a public lecture, he extended his analysis to the New Testament, and showed Christ and John the Baptist to be structural transformations of each other. A theologian rose and said: To some of us present these were real people’. That is: the text was indeed history. I do not intend to go into all the possible discussion. With Biblical data all neoanthropological analyses produce versions of this reaction. For example, Mary Douglas’s analysis of Leviticus (1966) produced parallel objectivist discussions. The Biblical objections merely raise in relatively explicit doctrinal form the question of whether the very possibility of structuralism denies the possibility of history, save perhaps by a version of Piaget’s inadvertently appropriate remark (cited in a previous discussion) that ‘God is a structuralist’ (Piaget, 1971; cited in Ardener, 1985:53).

Nevertheless, the answer to the implicit question, like what songs the sirens sang, ‘is not beyond all conjecture’. It is interesting to compare two classes of text with this question in mind. Leach (1969:81) cites various memorable features of the rulers of the Tudor Dynasty of England. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I appear as structural transformations of each other (broadly as male/overuxorious: female/underuxorious). They and other royal figures associated with the dynasty also appear in structural opposition to each other. Although intended lightheartedly (but no less revealingly), this sort of thing (or rather, the very possibility of this sort of thing) inevitably raises questions about Lévi-Strauss, just as the ‘proof’ that Max Müller was a Sun-deity did concerning that other great mythologist.

Let us suppose that such analyses are possible on ‘historical’ narrative, and there is plenty of evidence that they are, how could they come about?

(1) For oral history, ‘traditional’ history, or the like, we may simply argue that the memory of events has been totally restructured. They have been turned into narrative, and obey the structuring processes of narrative. In effect this is the position taken about the majority of texts that tell a story about the past – before the advent of ‘professional’ history, or alongside it. It is the uncomplicated structuralist position. In cases like the Tudors, however, the documented accounts of the period itself have strong narrative features, which give it a certain ‘epic’ quality. If these derive from retrospective restructuring, does it occur particularly in particular periods? Is it possible that certain historical conjunctures are prone to crystallize historiographically in such ways? ‘Happy the country whose history is boring’, the saying goes. Why, if history is simply (unconsciously) restructured as narrative, is any history boring? We may have been able to conceive such a question since the ‘objective’ recording of poorly structured times and places has become possible (Ardener, 1987). In oral history there are, indeed, actual blanks, which suggest the failure of the structuring process.

(2) A second approach would be to admit the aforementioned, but to propose instead that sometimes events arrange themselves, and individuals fall into relationships that have resemblances to the structure of more mythological narrative. This solves the problem of embarrassingly ‘fictional’-looking stretches of history and keeps such questions as the historicity of Jesus and John the Baptist (as well as of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I!) satisfactorily open. This is essentially a concession to the existence of professional history, and it is not without value as accounting for the greater narrative richness of certain stretches of even conventional narrative. This is, however, only another way of conceding in advance that structuralist patterns are coincidences in ‘real’ history – which does not help the structuralist analysis of any text, which someone, somewhere, is prepared to declare historical. Furthermore, when we are dealing with oral or traditional statements we still cannot separate, by inspection, any fortuitous stretches of structuralized history from the hypothesized total restructuring or ‘mythologizing’ that is expected to mark a piece of traditional text in any case, and which was after all the original point of structural analysis.

(3) So we would be better placed to argue alternatively that structural oppositions are built into history as it happens. There are, indeed, plenty of grounds for saying that the ‘memory’ of history begins when it is registered. It is encoded ‘structurally’ as it occurs. The structuring, by this view, is actually part of the ‘registration’ of events (Ardener, 1978). Then we can say that since not all events do survive, but only ‘memorable’ or ‘significant’ events (Ardener, 1987), the structural processes are not necessarily retrospectively imposed, but are synchronic – all part of the very nature of event-registration (with or without any specific physical recording). It is what I have referred to as the ‘slaughter of the event’, the creation of the ‘dead stretches’ of the registering process. Such a conclusion is uncontroversial enough nowadays. Retrospective restructuring simply continues the process, since each restructured event is freshly objectivized and there could be an infinite sequence of rememorizations.

(4) Finally, we may go further and say that the relations between persons, and their mutual definitions, actually embody ‘structuralist’ processes. The relations between parent and child, between lineages, between affines, are self-defining relations of symmetry and opposition. Not only does this recognition properly embody the structuralism of Les Structures Elémentaires and its successors into the historical process (which Lévi-Strauss never did), it also recalls the Freudian processes of identity construction in the family. Henry VIII (uxorious, male) and Elizabeth (non-uxorious, female) then ceases to be a structuralist whimsy, and becomes part of an intergenerational psycho-analytic drama. Freudianism and structuralism are metaphysics of a similar order, as I have argued before (1971a). Nevertheless, we begin at this point to part with structuralism as such, although we are near the world of Lacan and revisionist Marxist-structuralism. The important point is that event-specification begins in one important aspect, in the structuring of relations between persons.

So far in the language of ‘structure’ I have elicited four levels, and a fifth by implication, which I will summarize not in the order of unpacking but in reverse order.

(a) Structures of personal relations, or structures inherent in the mutual self-definition of persons.

(b) Structures by which relationships are registered or perceived (‘events’).

(c) Structures through which registered events are remembered.

(d) Structures ‘imposed’ on events, retrospectively (restructuring).

(e) Structures of text. This is, for our historical purposes, the implicit fifth level, which is critical for our discussion; for narratives can be structured de novo in the absence of all the preceding levels. Mythologies, pseudo-histories, are precisely the core materials which originally lent themselves to structural analysis and which are notionally without history at all.

This summary unpacks further the implications of a fully structuralist discussion of history as fairly as possible, although it has never been previously articulated. It is, as a result, no longer structuralist at all, since it has been possible to articulate it only by revising structuralism in the light of history itself. And, even so, we still cannot dissolve the problem with which we started; for if we have no historical documentation, only a narrative, the levels are obliterated and structuralist analysis cannot ‘recover’ them. All resemble level (e).

Restatement

Memory has been an evident theme in the preceding discussion. Sperber (1975) has been responsible for emphasizing this theme, although Leach had early on linked structure to memorability. The structures of structuralism, with their pluses and minuses, work at such a relatively unconscious level, that the apparently banal observation that myths (for example) are structured as they are for their memorability is an explanation of honourable simplicity. Sperber cites Bartlett’s pre-war experiments, whereby messages are modified in transmission in the direction of deterioration modified by reconstruction. We may recall the comic case, immortalized by the late Will Hay, in which the message: ‘Am going to advance: send reinforcements’, ultimately became ‘Am going to a dance: send three and fourpence’. The most stable thing about the message is the structural pattern. What, however, is memory when moved from the individual to the social, from its organic context to a collective simulacrum of itself? It seems that it is mainly a way of labelling that stability of pattern. Once more, the term has moved up a level: the ‘story’ behaves like a memory: but it is the story that is now memorized, not the events it purportedly embodies; and, it must be repeated, we still cannot on structural grounds tell the difference. This is the material basis of the movement of ‘life into text’ (Ardener, 1985), which eventually accounts for the perennial existence of the problem of the actual confusion of life and text.

When regarding the aforementioned summary of levels, we see that they clearly partake of what I call a ‘simultaneity’. The movement from (a) to (b) is a movement from individual experience to social experience; the passage through (b) and (c) and (d) is a passage through the social space. The distinction between (b) and (c): whether historical structuring is laid down as the events occur, or is ‘adventitiously’ perceived retrospectively, is not a difference in principle. Restructuring is a continuous revision of previous states. Again, the distinction between (c) and (d): the perceiving of structural coincidences in past events, or the complete reconstruction of the past, is similarly ambiguous. We can speak of (d), complete reconstruction, only in the absence of knowledge about a continuous series of intermediate stages. What then about (e) or mere myth or story, complete un-history? How do we know that it actually occurs?

By now it seems clear that we have here a total analogue of the theoretical problem presented by sets of unit categories; on the surface they picture a totally relativistic universe. At the level of the social space itself they produce a historically relativistic universe. It is my argument that as materiality is perceived through the concept of ‘semantic density’ in the linguistic aspect, and of variable ‘event-density’ in the synchronic aspect of the social space, so are its effects revealed as an underlying feature of the space as a whole, in the form of ‘historical density’. The problem of the ‘flatness’ of the Gossian world – the inability to decide how much of it was created yesterday – is the macrocosmic aspect of the ‘flatness’ of category sets. ‘Historical density’ is the trace left by previous reconstructions of the space, each of which forms in some sense a barrier to perceiving the realities of their predecessors by wiping out the ‘structures’ that expressed them. Charles Kingsley, in his response to Gosse, exclaimed that he could not believe that God (the Structuralist?) had written ‘an enormous lie upon the rocks’. We may ourselves ask how the shadow of the ‘vestiges of creation’ would appear to us in the search for real past states.

Some cases

In Northern stories to be discovered in Scandinavian, Old English, and German sources appear the names of peoples and persons who are documented on the Continent between the years 360 and 500. During those years Gothic dominance expanded from the Baltic to the Black Sea under Ermenaric, only to be shattered by the Huns. The Western Roman Empire succumbed under the resulting pressures and was replaced by successor German states including that of Theodoric the Great. A minor event was the destruction of the Burgundian set...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction – History and Social Anthropology
• 1. The Construction of History: ‘vestiges of creation’
• 2. Tribal Ethnography: past, present, future
• 3. Fiction and Fact in Ethnography
• 4. Wārībi and the White Men: history and myth in northwest Amazonia
• 5. Triumph of the Ethnos
• 6. Investigating ‘Social Memory’ in a Greek Context
• 7. The Social Relations of the Production of History
• 8. Israel: Jewish identity and competition over ‘tradition’
• 9. German Identity and the Problems of History
• 10. French Historians and their Cultural Identities
• 11. Mormon History, Identity, and Faith Community
• 12. ‘We’re Trying to Find Our Identity’: uses of history among Ulster Protestants
• 13. The Cultural Work of Yoruba Ethnogenesis
• 14. Afrikaner Historiography and the Decline of Apartheid: ethnic self-reconstruction in times of crisis
• 15. Ethnic Identities and Social Categories in Iran and Afghanistan
• 16. Catalan National Identity: the dialectics of past and present
• Name Index
• Subject Index