Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World by James Clifford Review by: Roy Wagner American

Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 87, No. 4 (Dec., 1985), pp. 936-937 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/678171 . Accessed: 05/04/2012 20:08
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make most of the assumptions about rationality identified in this book. The addition of a mechanistic process such as selection is not inconsistent with Riches's approach, since it does not underlie (as Riches suggests in chapter 1) but acts on individual decisions. What the author proposes, therefore, I recommend as good reading for anyone interested in either northern nomadic hunter-gatherers or in the ecological approach; however, I don't recommend that the reader accept the humanistic approach as an end in itself but as the means to an end.

Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in ley: University of California Press, 1982. xi + 270 pp. $28.50 (cloth).
RoY WAGNER

Berkethe Melanesian World.James Cliford.

University of Virginia Successor to Marcel Mauss in his teaching chair at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and predecessor of Claude Levi-Strauss, Maurice Leenhardt stands as a counterexample to what is often spoken of as the "French tradition" in anthropology. If Lvi-Strauss extended the "total social facts" of Mauss into systematics and analysis, Leenhardt emphasized their wholeness, concreteness, even intransigence. A candidate, perhaps, for the exasperating category of "post-structuralism," Leenhardt's work (contemporary with Malinowski's) is as much prestructuralist; a captive, perhaps, of the New Caledonian imagination, Leenhardt himself won his ethnographic certainty the hard way, by first trying to capture that imagination as a missionary. It is very much to Clifford's credit that he does not try to resolve these (and many other) contradictions in this intellectual biography of Maurice Leenhardt, but proceeds rather as Leenhardt himself (who could not resolve them either) might have: by burnishing them instead. A missionary to the end, Leenhardt was perhaps a better ethnologist for his bringing together the New Caledonian "total social fact" of no ("word,"parole),and the facts of nature his father had told him were "the word of God." As with Malinowski, much of the conflict in Leenhardt's life involved the relentless colonialism of his day, but he also represented the archetype of what Clifford calls "a restless Western desire for encountering and incorporating others, whether by conversion or comprehension" (p. 126). The contrast with Malinowski, Leenhardt's

secularist counterpart, is instructive, for Malinowski's empiricism invariably led him to locate the concreteness of experience within in a kind of "object fetishism" of culture things, that implied the inevitable shallow comparisons between magic, science, and religion. Leenhardt, by contrast, insisted on the concreteness of cultural concept, as "myth" or as the indigenous "word," and spoke for culture as the transformation of experience rather than the discovery of scientific method. Whether this was a legacy of his Huguenot upbringing or a conviction that fused science and religiosity, it makes Leenhardt something of an exemplar for an anthropology struggling with its own convictions about conceptual concreteness. Much of Leenhardt's writing (and much of Clifford's effort, in chapter 11, to situate that writing critically), arose in response to an informant's surprising comment to the missionary: "Spirit? Bah! We've always known about the spirit. What you brought was the body" (p. 172). It was, in short, the "object fetishism" of Western thought, the transposition of concreteness from thought (or "spirit") to its object, that struck New Caledonians most forcibly about their colonizers. Clifford, following Roger Bastide, traces this tendency to Descartes's separation of "clear and distinct ideas" from "obscure and confused ideas" (p. 178), through Kantian "pure reason," to the rationalism of Levi-Strauss. Leenhardt's idea of mythic reality, by contrast, is sensual, constituted of thought's interpenetration with its object. If the salience of concrete, enacted thought emerges more clearly from this sensitive biography of ideas than Leenhardt's (and Clifford's) focal themes of person and myth, this, too, is something of a consequence of concrete conceptualization. Like his esteemed friend Lucien Levy-Bruhl, though far less abstractly, Leenhardt was concerned to characterize conceptualizations of person, myth, spirit, or aesthetics, more than he was ever disposed to consider them constitutively. Person and myth become less definite as their Melanesian evocation develops its peculiar resonance and sonority. And so, Clifford tells' us in his concluding chapter, did the person of Maurice Leenhardt himself. Leenhardt would have especially liked the conclusion that a person must always be something more than a theory of the person, for he seems to have lived it, taught it, and believed it as his own achieved form of Christianity. Whether such a faith, or such an approach, makes for a superior anthropology, or merely adds the study of humanity to litera-

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ture's celebration of idiosyncracy, it is the hallmark of superlative biography. And one is not likely to find a better critical synthesis than James Clifford's study of myth's personification in one person's myth.

Politics and History in Band Societies. Eleanor Leacock and Richard Lee,eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. xiv + 500 pp. $44.50 (cloth).
JOHN H. DOWLING

University Marquette There have been three major conferenceson foragers, the first in Ottawa in 1965, the second in Chicago in 1966, and the third in Paris in 1978. Each has produced a volume of pais an pers. Politics and Historyin Band Societies outgrowth of the Paris conference. From a theoretical standpoint, the editors and many of the contributors are dialectical and historical materialists whose goal is the formulation of a system of laws to explain human behavior (p. 6). Theirs is a heuristic methodology and a goal long shared by many of us. Yet, as is too often the case with Marxists, the editors' hortatory rhetoric occasionally approaches the level of a fundamentalist's pulpit and is no more appealing in one context than the other. Fortunately, invective rhetoric mars only one paper in the 21-paper volume, Rosaldo's fulmination on the historical and contemporary treatment of native peoples in the Philippines (chapter 14). His sermon may well need to be made and reiterated, but not to an anthropological audience. The remaining papers are a virtual mine of exceptionally good ethnographic and ethnological material. The volume is divided into three sections: "Foragers among Themselves," "Foragers and Farmers," and "Foragers versus Capitalism." The six papers in the first section are concerned with the dynamics of intraband and interband relations among the San, Australian aborigines, Inuit, and Mbuti. Focusing on different aspects of social relations, they collectively probe incisively into the sociopolitical nature of egalitarian social processes. In doing so, the anomalous "headman" of !Kung San is thankfully reduced to a misunderstanding. Unfortunately, one important aspect of band life receives little attention. The ethnohistorical data on bands document a much higher incidence of homicide in the remote past than in the recent past. Such data need

serious consideration. After all, in a time when the police power of encysting societies is strong, becoming "harmless people" is clearly an advantageous adaptive strategy. The extent of mortal combat for foragers living among foragersneeds attention and the implications of such combat for social relations cry for consideration. Foragers have, for hundreds or thousands of years, been interacting with societies exploiting domesticated plants and animals and ranging in social complexity up through egalitarian tribes and ranked chiefdoms to preindustrial states. All these various "others" are subsumed in the second section under the rubric "farmers."Given the economic and political diversity of the foragers' "alters," this is an area of theoretical concern that needs much tighter control and exploration. The seven papers of this section describe the interaction of the Montagnis-Naskapi, Indian Malapantaren, Congo Aka, Kalahari Basarwa, and Kenyan Okeik (Dorobo) with their more politically advanced neighbors. Focusing on the socioeconomic niches occupied by foragers, the papers provide exceptional insight into intercommunity relations in specific situations. Undoubtedly, the included papers will all contribute significantly to our understanding of intersocietal relations at a more general level once the ambiguities inherent in "farmers" are given political and economic precision. Aside from Rosaldo's paper on the Philippines, mentioned earlier, the remaining papers in the third section are concerned with the militarization of the San, the problems and strategies of boreal forest Native Americans, and the recent resurgence of foraging among Australian aborigines. It is patent that each ethnographer is committed to and sympathetic with the subject community. Yet each writer recognizes the problematic situation involved and the unpredictable future. Each writer provides explicit data in the best scientific tradition, but, more than this, they collectively raise questions that industrial societies must confront and with which they must cope. This last section of the book is in the best anthropological tradition of raising questions about received truths. Yet one wishes that in addition to examining the "predatory expansion" of industrial capitalism the book had also considered the inexorable blossoming of industrial socialism and the ethnohistory of foragers in the path of that behemoth. The Politics of Truth: Essays in Critical Atlantic Anthropology. GeraldD. Berreman.