Anthropology, Ecology, and Anarchism

A Brian Morris Reader

Brian Morris

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781604869866
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Anarchismo

Over the course of a long career, Brian Morris has created an impressive body of engaging and insightful writings—from social anthropology and ethnography to politics, history, and philosophy—that have made these subjects accessible to the layperson without sacrificing analytical rigor. But until now, the essays collected here, originally published in obscure journals and political magazines, have been largely unavailable to the broad readership to which they are so naturally suited. The opposite of arcane, specialized writing, Morris's work takes an interdisciplinary approach that moves seamlessly among topics, offering up coherent and practical connections between his various scholarly interests and his deeply held commitment to anarchist politics and thought.

Approached in this way, anthropology and ecology are largely untapped veins whose relevance for anarchism and other traditions of social thought have only recently begun to be explored and debated. But there is a long history of anarchist writers drawing upon works in those related fields. Morris's essays both explore past connections and suggest ways that broad currents of anarchist thought will have new and ever-emerging relevance for anthropology and many other ways of understanding social relationships. His writings avoid the constraints of dogma and reach across an impressive array of topics to give readers a lucid orientation within these traditions and point to new ways to confront common challenges.

1

The Rise and Fall of the Human Subject (1985)

Is there in the human sciences a specific psychological approach or level of analysis? Is there a conceptual space for the human subject?¹ There are two extreme positions on this issue. One gives the abstract individual, or subject, or personality variables, priority as factors in explaining human behaviour or culture (see Kaplan and Manners 1979, 127–59). This strategy is assumed by existentialists, ego psychologists, and some psychoanalytic writers, personality structures being most commonly employed as intervening variables. It is also implicit in much transactional analysis—such as the early writings of Barth and Leach, where the abstract individual is seen as an agency of social change. Often described as methodological individualism, this position has serious flaws.²

The other extreme position expunges the subject from the analysis entirely, and sees sociocultural phenomena as an autonomous realm, completely independent of psychological variables. This is the viewpoint of behaviourism and sociobiology, which put great emphasis on the biological analogy of “organism and environment” and not only play down cultural variables but find little space for the concept of person or even the conscious mind. This is why there has been a strong reaction against behaviourism by existentialists and humanistic psychologists. It is also the viewpoint of many anthropologists within the Durkheimian tradition, for Durkheim saw culture as a phenomenon sui generis, and in reacting against any kind of psychological reductionism eliminated—in theory—psychological variables from the analysis of culture. “Man is double. There are two beings in him: an individual being which has its foundation in the organism … and a social being which represents the highest reality in the intellectual and moral order” (1915, 16). Social facts could therefore only be explained by other social facts, and the social realm is seen as independent of both psychological and environmental factors. In countering the suggestion that this therefore left social life “in the air,” Durkheim drew an analogy between this social/individual duality (which he stresses) and the relationship between mental faculties and the brain, arguing that we cannot reduce the “mind to the cell and deny mental life all specificity” (1974, 26–29). But he could hardly affirm—if he followed his own reasoning and analogy—that there is no relationship between these two entities or variables.³

The anthropologist who has taken this kind of cultural emphasis to the extreme is Leslie White, for whom the individual is no more than—as the Gestalt psychologist Köhler (1937) put it—“an empty container” for the products of the group. White (1949) distinguishes essentially between three distinct levels of reality, the physical, the biological, and the cultural—and psychology is firmly associated with the second category, as one of the biological sciences, or as a kind of analysis that links the individual organism with cultural facts. The individual as such is but “the expression of a cultural tradition in somatic form,” and human behaviour simply the response of the human organism to “extra-somatic, symbolic stimuli which we call culture” (1949, 139). The human individual is therefore neither the creator nor a determinant of culture; “he is merely a catalyst and a vehicle of expression.” Like Durkheim, White stresses that culture is an entity sui generis, with “a life of its own,” and more than once he writes that to study culture scientifically one must proceed “as if the human race did not exist” (1949, 209).

For all these writers there is a radical separation of the individual from the cultural setting. The theoretical orientation is essentially positivistic (see Allport 1955, 7–12). Yet some recent developments within the Marxist tradition have stressed a viewpoint similar to that of White and the behaviourists. Whereas Marxists in the Hegelian or socialist humanist tradition—Sartre, Marcuse, and Fromm—have advocated a dialectical approach to social life and have viewed history as the project of the human subject, some recent Marxists, following Althusser, have viewed the concept of the “human” as essentially a part of bourgeois ideology and hence unscientific. History, for Althusser is a “process without a subject” (1972, 183), and he is equally keen to reject any notion of human nature in general, or at least any notion which implies that the individual has any explanatory role in the science of history (see Callinicos 1976, 66–71; Thompson 1978, 193–406). This anti-humanism has gone hand-in-hand with a rejection of historical time or process; it is the advocacy of a static structuralism within a highly mechanistic discourse.

Many writers (e.g., Coward and Ellis 1977) have uncritically accepted Althusser’s formulations, presenting familiar ideas as if they had only just been discovered by structural Marxism. The notion that the subject or person is a social construct, and that in different societies or at different periods of European history there have been varying conceptions of the human individual, is hardly new. The category of “human essence,” or of the abstract individual, that transcends any given social context, which Coward and Ellis see as a fundamental premise of idealism was, of course, associated not with idealism but with early bourgeois philosophy of a materialistic kind. Criticisms of this notion are not a recent innovation of structuralism but are pre-Marxist. Stirner, a precursor of atheistic existentialism, made some salutary criticisms of this kind of liberal humanism more than a century ago (1845, 123–29). Marx, in his criticisms of Feuerbach, simply replicates Stirner’s reservations about abstract humanity, and in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels subjected Stirner himself to the same searching critique. But rather than seeing the notion of the human subject as a “metaphysical fiction” (Hirst and Woolley 1982, 131) that must be expelled from scientific discourse, Marx sought a more genuine humanism, stressing that the essence of man involved the discharge of a creative practice that was essentially social (see Novack 1973; Fromm 1970, 68–84). Behaviourism, Durkheimian sociology, sociobiology, structural Marxism and Lévi-Straussian structuralism thus have much in common in their repudiation of the human subject. (Although for Lévi-Strauss the concept of the objective “mind” retains a crucial role [see Shalvey 1979, 35].) Coward and Ellis express this kind of anti-humanist perspective rather well, arguing, like Durkheim, that society is prior to the individual, and that the human subject is “constructed.” Rather than being a critique of bourgeois idealism, this simply replicates it, for culture is only prior to the individual if culture is conceived abstractly as uncreated by humans, and the individual is conceived as a particular asocial organism. But the human subject is an “emergent” entity that makes culture possible. Culture does not “pre-exist” the human subject; they dialectically coexist.⁴ As Piaget insisted, an “epistemic subject” is essential for a meaningful analysis of social life: “if cognitive structures were static, the subject would indeed be a superfluous entity” (1971, 70). The alternative is either a collapse into cultural relativism (and indigenous psychologies), or the positing of a transcendental subject—which is what Coward and Ellis evidently have in mind in their critique of the subject. But there is I feel a way between the static ahistoric structuralism they seem to espouse with subjectivity expunged—and the kind of phenomenology that gives the human subject absolute priority.

What is of interest about these two theoretical treatments of the human subject is that they represent, in extreme form, two tendencies within the human sciences—the humanistic and scientific—and that they show that the social sciences also exemplify Gellner’s “pendulum swing” theory. If we examine the history of the social sciences over the past fifty or more years it appears to have moved through four distinct phases. In the first phase, around the turn of the century, anthropology and psychology happily coexisted as disciplines; there was a salient interest in human consciousness (evident particularly in the writings of William James and Boas); and many of the founders of experimental psychology—Rivers and Wundt—also undertook anthropological studies, without confounding the two approaches. In the second phase, however, after the First World War—when psychology, anthropology, and sociology were establishing themselves as independent academic disciplines, and psychoanalysis and Marxism were finding an institutional footing—the human “subject” was hardly mentioned. Structural-functionalism became the dominant paradigm in both sociology and anthropology—in spite of the influence of Malinowski—and there developed a kind of phobia about psychology (Lewis 1977, 2). Psychology itself was seemingly entrenched in Watson’s style of behaviourism in which concepts such as “consciousness” and “mind” were deemed to denote the unobservable and therefore to be inadmissible in scientific discourse. Marxism too, under the influence of the mechanistic materialism of Engels and Plekhanov, saw little scope for a science of the psyche.

During the 1930s a changing emphasis can be discerned in all the human sciences, and attempts were made in various ways to bring the human “subject” back into the analysis of culture. I shall discuss this third phase in some detail, focusing on the writings of four scholars—Kardiner, Reich, Fromm, Laing—and only briefly mention the latest phase, namely that associated with the dominance of structuralism, which has rejected the historical subject entirely.⁵

Abram Kardiner

During the 1920s anthropologists and psychoanalysts were natural allies in the intellectual revolt against the constraints of sexual and other forms of provincialism. Boasian anthropologists “enjoyed a reputation for Bohemianism which they earned as proponents of the relativity of morals, as taboo-breaking feminists, or as practitioners of exotic custom” (Harris 1969, 431). Benedict, Mead, and Herskovits, in particular, were strong advocates of cultural relativism. Two things happened. One was that there was a continuing move away from evolutionary or materialist analyses towards a more humanistic approach. “Civilisation” then became, in the work of Freud and Benedict, a synonym for culture, rather than a term that depicted Western society or capitalism (as it had been for Morgan and Engels). Secondly, Freudian theories and concepts became an “irresistible lure” and came to permeate more and more anthropological studies. Psychoanalytic theory was a “major stimulus” to anthropology (Hallowell 1976, 212) and to the social sciences generally. By the 1940s some kind of rapport between psychoanalysis and social science (and Marxism) had occurred, and it took various forms.

Within anthropology Freudian theory had a major influence on the “culture and personality” school. This school includes those who did not explicitly or systematically accept Freudian doctrines and concepts, but whose writings are nonetheless permeated with his ideas. The notions that childhood experiences to a large extent determine the adult personality, and that religion, folklore, and witchcraft are “projective” systems, were the two key ideas which were imbibed by the anthropological tradition. Kluckhohn’s study of Navaho Witchcraft (1944) for example is infused with Freudian themes, and Margaret Mead’s later writings, particularly Balinese Character (1942), written with Bateson, are “saturated with psychoanalytic terms, concepts and nuances” (Harris 1969, 434). But the writer who came to represent most clearly this kind of approach, in which psychoanalytic concepts became “embedded,” as it were, in the analysis of social life, thus giving rise to a kind of psychosocial interpretation, is Abram Kardiner. Trained as a psychoanalyst, Kardiner was instrumental in the late 1930s in organising a series of seminars on “culture-and-personality” in conjunction with a group of anthropologists, of whom Ralph Linton and Cora du Bois were among the most prominent. The idea behind the seminar was that the anthropologists of the group should present ethnographic data on the cultures they were familiar with, which would then be “analysed” by Kardiner.

Although a psychoanalyst, Kardiner seems, in developing his theory, to have abandoned all the basic tenets of psychoanalysis: the Oedipus complex and the libido theory in particular are not mentioned at all. For Kardiner the most signal and durable aspect of Freud’s theory was the idea of approaching human life from the “point of view of biography” and in establishing criteria for the “study of the character of the individual” (1945, 11). Given the anthropological framework and the concept of culture Kardiner inherited from Boas, it is not surprising that the central idea of his psychodynamic analysis of culture was the “basic personality structure.” This is defined as “the effective adaptive tools of the individual which are common to every individual in the society” (1939, 237). It thus refers to those personality characteristics that are shared by a majority of members of a particular community and which are the result of formative childhood experiences. The concept, Kardiner admits, is but a refinement of an old idea, going back at least to Herodotus, and generally known as “national character.” This concept, Kardiner suggests, introduces a relativistic factor into the conception of history, enabling us to do away with the idea of a uniform and constant “human nature” (1945, 415). It also has a constraining effect, he suggests, on the type of adaptation that a community will make in specific historical circumstances. This basic personality is essentially formed in the earliest years of life: it is the creation of what Kardiner termed the “primary” institutions. These included such aspects as “family organization, in-group formation, basic discipline, feeding, weaning, institutionalized care or neglect of children’s anal training, sexual taboos … subsistence techniques” (1939, 471). The Freudian influence is apparent here, and “primary institutions” are focused less on the economic infrastructures than on child-rearing practices.

There is some truth in Voget’s suggestion that Kardiner was seeking some kind of “middle ground” between Róheim’s extreme ontogenetic approach, in which virtually all aspects of culture were interpreted in terms of childhood experiences, and that of Benedict who saw culture as moulding the person into its mirror image (Voget 1975, 441). As Kardiner himself put it: “the individual stands midway between institutions which mould and direct his adaptation to the world, and his biological needs, which press for gratification” (1939, 17). The primary institutions, which are instrumental in shaping the basic personality structure, and which have their “focus” within the individual personality, are taken by Kardiner as given. He offers no explanation or interpretation to account for these primary institutions and, a bit like Róheim’s ontogenetic analysis, it is a theory without a “ground floor.” Kardiner himself admits that only history can throw light on the forms which these institutions took, and that he knows of no satisfactory theory to account for them (1939, 471). But Kardiner does attempt to provide an explanation for the secondary institutions—religion, folklore, mythology, art—for these are seen as “projections” fashioned and structured by the basic personality. Thus culture is split into two aspects: the primary institutions which determine the basic personality or structure, and the secondary institutions, which are expressive of this personality as a “projective” system. LeVine (1973, 55–58) calls this the “personality mediation” view. Harris applauds, and sees promise in Kardiner’s attempt to bring religion and ideological practices within a deterministic framework, and concludes his critique of Kardiner with a ...