Abstract
Vincent Debaene, Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science and Literature, trans. J. Izzo. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 398 pp. ISBN: 0-226-10706-X (pbk)
The language of ‘the human sciences’, Vincent Debaene (2014) informs us, had no currency in France until the 1950s, albeit that the vocabularies of science and ‘the human’ had been brought into a set of variable relations with one another through the debates and practices that constituted the trajectories of French anthropology during the inter-war period. The primary institutional incubator for this distinctive anthropological discourse of ‘the human’ was the Musée de l’Homme and the closely related Institut d’ethnologie, and its main agents were the anthropologists who – whether as the museum’s principal officers (Paul Rivet), the architects of the Institut’s professional training programmes (Marcel Mauss), the leaders of the museum’s fieldwork missions (Marcel Griaule, Alfred Métraux, Claude Lévi-Strauss), or as the more refractory members of those fieldwork teams (Michel Leiris) – articulated its tensions in different ways. If this institutional ensemble constitutes Debaene’s point of entry into French anthropology’s engagements with the languages of the sciences and ‘the human’, his focus is on how these engagements were inflected against the grain of the sciences by the contrary pull of literary discourses. His discussion also oscillates between a forward movement leading beyond the inter-war years into the postwar period and a backward one toward the early 19th century. The science and the literature between which anthropology is ambivalently installed, it should be added, do not function as constants throughout the different periods of Debaene’s discussion. Liable to internal shifts and mutations as a consequence of the dynamics governing their constitution as intellectual fields, their currencies are also pulled hither and thither as the relations between these fields – and between each of them and anthropology – also change. And they do so, Debaene insists, without any sense of an immanent telos governing their trajectories.
The result is a complex intellectual ménage à trois orchestrated around shifting epistemological bedposts. This calls for a certain kind of openness on the reader’s part to the flux and fluidity of the categories governing the organization of Far Afield. At the same time, though, Debaene mobilizes a series of intermediate concepts to provide a more concrete route through these abstractions. Chief of these is the concept of the ‘ethnographer’s two books’ – the scientific reports produced by the leaders of the Musée de l’Homme’s fieldwork missions on their return to base, and the later, more literary texts, through which they sought to express those aspects of the anthropological encounter that were unsayable within the rules of the scientific monograph or the rationalized museum display: most notably Griaule’s Les Flambeurs d’hommes, Métraux’s L’Île de Pâques, Leiris’s L’Afrique fantôme and Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. The questions posed by these two genres of anthropological writing are, in their turn, worked through via the discussion of a number of themes which simultaneously connect and separate them: the ambiguities characterizing the concept of the document in the fluctuations of its interpretation between the sciences and surrealism; the attempt to capture the atmosphere of a culture that eludes the sociologism of the ‘total social fact’ that defined the Durkheimian tradition; the ‘farewell to voyage’ – the original title of the French edition of the book – through which French anthropological fieldworkers distanced themselves and their narratives from other travel literatures, past and present; and the Musée de l’Homme as constantly divided against itself amid the competing demands of science and publicity. And all of this, finally, is accompanied by a strong insistence on the singularity of the French intellectual field and, accordingly, the unique disposition of the science–literature relations whose shifting terms define the varied courses of anthropology as, in navigating the relations between these, it in turn altered their courses. There are some references to other traditions – mainly Malinowski, but also, albeit very briefly, to the culture and personality school of American anthropology. These are, however, momentary asides to a discussion of the French intellectual field as one that is presented as having been more or less hermetically closed in on itself.
And this is true over the long durée of the book’s concerns. These focus mainly on anthropology’s negotiations of its position in the relations between literary studies and scientific discourses. The latter are represented by the French social science traditions running from Emile Durkheim’s sociology to its influence, in the 20th century, on Marcel Mauss’s conception of anthropology with its strong stress on cultures, mentalities and systems of classification. However, Debaene’s discussion also traverses the longer-term intellectual trajectories – roughly, from Diderot to Derrida – through which the social sciences were able to wrest from literary studies some degree of the monopolistic authority this field of study had earlier enjoyed in claiming to be solely licensed to speak on behalf of human values. It concludes by considering the counter-action represented by Jacques Derrida’s and Roland Barthes’s project of writing aimed at debunking the human sciences, and their object ‘man’, as the front guy for the exercise of a form of power whose claims to have eluded the effects of language were to be stripped bare by the analysis of writing and textuality. Yet this ‘new deal’ of the 1960s and 1970s serves only to confirm Debaene’s assessment of the self-enclosure of French anthropology. Informed by and accentuating the respects in which the second texts of the earlier generation of anthropologists had troubled their first texts, the projects of Derrida and Barthes helped to nurture the poetic awareness of its own textuality that informed the post-structuralist trajectories of French anthropology. This was, however, a tendency that was so turned in on itself that it failed to register the significance of the parallel ‘literary turn’ in American anthropology – most notably represented by James Clifford and George Marcus (1986) – which, taking its cue from Derrida and Barthes, had beamed their focus on the poetics and politics of writing onto the history of anthropology.
It is not that I think these claims regarding the distinctiveness of the relations between science, anthropology and literature in France are unfounded. Mary Poovey’s (2008) analysis of the breakup of the 18th-century British discipline of moral philosophy and its transformation, through the opposing paths taken by post-Romantic literary criticism and early 19th-century forms of economic commentary, into the disciplines of economics and literary studies, is – for the period in which the historical focus of her study overlaps with Debaene’s – a telling example of an equally nationally specific set of relations between literary studies and the social sciences. Yet, inasmuch as they are both concerned with the processes through which a field of social scientific ‘facts’ came to be differentiated from the field of imaginative writing, while never entirely escaping its influence, the two studies do speak to one another in intelligible and mutually enlightening ways. It is in this light that I think Debaene’s claims to French exceptionalism are exaggerated – a product, at times, of the singularity of his own attention rather than that of his object of study – with the result that, for the mid-20th-century period that is his main focus, significant international parallels and cross-fertilizations are lost sight of.
There are other difficulties too, chiefly of a more general methodological and theoretical kind. Debaene is clear that science, anthropology and literature are to be understood as socially ordered knowledge practices that are to be considered in terms of their relations to each other, opting for the vocabulary of field theory as best suited to this task. Yet he pays little attention to the formal requirements of field theory and, inasmuch as he does, is pulled off-track by a somewhat gratuitous, and not especially plausible, polemic against Pierre Bourdieu’s approach to the dynamics of intellectual fields. If this is one problem, a second is the lack of any considered engagement with the contributions that work conducted in the Foucaldian tradition both has made, and might have to make, to the modus operandi and effects of the knowledge practices Debaene is concerned with. I shall come back to these questions. I look first, though, at how far Debaene’s claims to French exceptionalism are warranted, and at what they miss. In doing so, though, I should stress that I do so with a view to suggesting ways in which Debaene’s extremely useful and challenging account of the relations between science, anthropology and literature might be further enriched rather than in a spirit of negative fault-finding.
Perhaps the most telling lost opportunity arising from the singularity of Debaene’s national focus concerns his lack of interest in the parallels and connections between the trajectories of French anthropology as these were shaped across the relations between the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro and the Institute d’ethnologie and the trajectories of the Boasian tradition in American anthropology. Debaene’s discussion of the ambivalent status that was accorded to the concept of ‘the document’ in the rationalizing museology that informed the progressive rearrangement of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro’s galleries during the period from Rivet’s appointment as its director in 1928 through to the opening of the Musée de l’Homme in 1938 is extremely revealing. By placing the tension between the framings of museum exhibits proposed by aesthetic conceptions of their unfathomable singularity and the need for a rationalizing pedagogy to frame their public reception in the context of the ethnographers’ ‘two texts’, he shows how the second of these texts undermined the rationalizing ethos the Musée de l’Homme placed on the materials the ethnographers had brought back to it from their field expeditions just as much as the authority of their own scientific reports. Yet, as Christine Laurière has shown, the Musée de l’Homme’s rationalizing pedagogy also depended on, rather than being undermined by, a certain conception of the aesthetic in its subscription to what she calls its ‘environmentalist conception of the object’ (Laurière, 2008: 416) in which the object bore testimony to the shaping influence of its social and cultural environment as well as to a generalized human capacity to reshape such environments. In thus testifying to an aesthetic capacity for human self-(re)creation, this conception of the object formed a key aspect of the museum’s concern to broaden its public so as to encompass the working classes – through an equation of labour with creativity – in the context of its political alignment with the Popular Front. Boas’s evocation of ways of life in the exhibits he arranged at the American Museum of Natural History reflected a conception of the capacity of territorially defined peoples to reshape their cultures by virtue of the unique genius – a concept derived by Boas from the German tradition of Bildung – distinguishing them as a people. The parallels here are undeniable and, albeit somewhat exaggeratedly so, were noted by Boas’s student, Melville Herskovits, when identifying the respects in which the Musée de l’Homme’s vitrines were modelled on Boas’s life groups (Herskovits, 1953: 21). This is, however, only a specific instance of a more general point: while the torsions that characterize the early to mid-20th-century development of French anthropology are no doubt shaped by the particularity of the fields of science and literature that it was caught between, American anthropology was caught in a similar dialectic at each and every turn of its development from Boas through Alfred Kroeber, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. 1
Debaene’s horizons are also more limited than they need be when he discusses the ethnographers’ second books. One of his concerns in relation to these is to clarify the light they throw on the insufficiency of the documentary concept of the object as a model for anthropology’s affective engagement with its publics. This is especially true of his account of the emphasis that Métraux, in L’Île de Pâques (1966[1941]), places on the need for anthropology to evoke the atmosphere of a culture in order to make it accessible as a felt reality. In also showing how this presentation of an atmosphere served as something that might be acted on in order to reach and, thereby, shape the affective dimensions of public opinion, he adumbrates the respects in which the anthropological discourse of atmosphere functioned as a governmental actor. This discourse, however, had a much broader international career in the 1930s and 1940s, and one which functioned not just alongside but in conversation with its French vocation. This was evident, in American anthropology, in the significance accorded to the emotional atmosphere of a culture by Gregory Bateson whose wartime work, alongside that of Margaret Mead, recast the concept into means for acting on morale (Mandler, 2013). The concept of atmosphere also had considerable influence on the wartime projects of Mass-Observation, lending it a more pragmatic interpretation in harnessing it to the task of governing civilian morale (Dibley and Kelly, 2015). This was, nonetheless, an interpretation which owed a good deal to Mass-Observation’s earlier fusion of surrealist conceptions with the project of ‘an anthropology of ourselves’ which, like the French tradition with which it was contemporary and from which it borrowed freely, was riven by the tensions occasioned by its aspirations to be both a science and a poetics. 2
Similar issues arise in relation to Debaene’s discussion of the Musée de l’Homme which, except for its location as the point of departure and return for the fieldwork missions it organized, he situates solely in its national context. This misses a good deal of the museum’s colonial ambition, an ambition that was effectively summarized in a poster Anatole Lewitsky produced for New York’s 1939 World’s Fair in which the museum is visually presented as the point of connection between a set of national institutions – the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, the Université de Paris, the École des Hautes Études and the Collège de France – and an array of museums, scientific institutes and associations in French Algeria, Morocco, Syria and Indo-China (Conklin, 2013: 231). To be sure, Debaene is right to contrast the French model of direct rule with the more central position accorded anthropological expertise in the administration of indigenous populations both in settler colonial contexts and in the forms of indirect rule more typically associated with British forms of colonialism. However, while it may be true that the forms of direct rule that characterized French colonialism did not place the same premium on knowing, in order to govern, the ‘soul’ of the colonized, they did invest a good deal in knowing, in order to exploit, the body of the colonized and French anthropology did not shy away from engaging in this aspect of its contract with colonialism (Dias, 2010; L’Estoile, 2005). This colonial connection was, moreover, central to the Musée de l’Homme’s conception as, alongside its public educational functions, a research and archival centre dedicated to the service of colonial administration (Rivet, Lester and Rivière, 1935; Sibeud, 2000). Just as much to the point is the influence that these wider colonial relations exerted on the national projects that the reforming wing of French anthropology directed against the ascendency of the more conservative traditions of anthropology and folklore studies represented by Louis Marin. 3
The anthropology/literature relations that are Debaene’s main concern were inflected by the tensions between anthropology’s progressive, ‘scientific’ tendencies and its conservative, folklorist tendencies. The relations between the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires – accorded no more than the fleeting attention of a brief note – are crucial here. Emerging together through a process of symbiotic incubation in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro under the directorial superintendence of Rivet and the curatorial direction of Georges Henri Rivière, the applications of anthropology in colonial contexts provided the model of a rationalizing scientific discipline that Rivière drew on in developing the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires in what was a pointed intervention against the conservative and, at times, proto-fascist leanings of French folklore traditions. The role of anthropology in the administration of France’s overseas territories also provided a template for its role in the governance of France’s provinces: the petites patries of Indo-China resonated with the petits pays of regional France, and vice versa, in an ‘anthropology at home’ project that situated the peoples of France’s overseas colonies and its regions in analogous satellite relations to its capital (Bennett et al., 2017: ch. 6).
These are, then, some issues that might usefully add to Debaene’s account of the ‘museum moment’ that forms the historical pivot of his account of the relations between anthropology, science and literature. The centre of his interests, however, and the key aspect of his argument regarding the distinctiveness of French anthropology in this period, rests on the two texts of the anthropologists. His contention here is not that fieldwork anthropologists in other national traditions did not write in two genres – their strictly scientific studies addressed to their peers through professional journals and monographs, and more general texts addressed to broader publics. This was true, in an earlier period, of Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen’s Across Australia (1912) and, in Britain, of Alfred Court Haddon who, indeed, notoriously published his ‘second texts’ before the reports of the Torres Strait expeditions he led were completed (Henare, 2005). But neither of these cases presents us with a second text which, in seeking to evoke the ineffable qualities of the ‘feel’ or atmosphere of the culture under investigation in the first text, thereby simultaneously placed the value of those first texts into question. 4 This was not, to be clear, so much a question of an explicit rebuttal of the specific analyses made in the scientific reports prepared on return from the field as of ‘hovering’ or placing their value into suspension when compared with the deeper insights to be derived from a more literary evocation of the phenomenon in question. Debaene’s discussion of the ambiguity of the conception of the document as articulated across its interpretation in the anthropologists’ first and second texts, and, straddling the relations between these, the public and pedagogic discourse of the Musée de l’Homme, is wonderfully illuminating, as is his discussion of the tensions and torsions which shape the ways in which, in their second texts, Leiris, Griaule and Lévi-Strauss distanced their concerns from those of earlier and contemporary forms of voyage literature.
Putting to one side, then, questions as to exactly how unparalleled these aspects of French anthropology were, Debaene undoubtedly establishes that they are distinctive enough to merit specific attention. What is less clear is the claim that the relations between French anthropology, science and literature constitute ‘the singularity of a national tradition for which dominant historical and epistemological models do not allow us to account’ (317). He registers this claim not just in relation to the moment, running from the late 1920s to the 1950s, when these relations were centred on and worked through via the Musée de l’Homme’s institutional dominance of French anthropology. It also informs his approach to the ways in which the putative ascendency of the social sciences over literature was resisted in the 19th century, and, in the 1960s and 1970s, rolled back in the priority accorded to textuality and writing in the projects of Barthes and Derrida. A part of the difficulty here is that Debaene is a little opaque as to precisely which historical and epistemological models he has in mind, and exactly what it is that they fail to account for. There is, in the introduction, a nod in the direction of Foucault when Debaene presents his project as a genealogical account of the relations between science and literature. But this line of analysis is not pursued any further. This is surprising for there are many points of productive intersection between Debaene’s project and Foucault’s The Order of Things, particularly Foucault’s account of the respects in which the ‘reappearance of language as a multiple profusion’ (Foucault, 1970: 303) disrupts the logic of representation associated with the classical episteme and, more generally, his account of the role of ‘the anthropological sleep’ in the historical formation of the human sciences and their object Man whose erasure Foucault famously anticipated.
The ‘dominant historical and epistemological’ model Debaene has in mind is rather that represented by the principles of field analysis associated with Pierre Bourdieu. Unfortunately, though, Debaene never adequately defines his relationship to this tradition. Although he draws on the language of fields in his presentation of the relations between science, literature and anthropology, it is primarily their operation as discourses that he has in view. While alert to the emphasis that Bourdieu places on the symbolic rivalries that animate the relations between actors in such fields, he pays little attention to the field-specific forms of intellectual capital that are the prizes at stake in such competitive struggles. What he is most concerned with, rather, is the teleological structure that he attributes to Bourdieu’s scientific rationalism which, he argues, over-determines Bourdieu’s account of the relations between literature and the social sciences as one governed by the displacement of the authority of the former as the latter has progressively lodged its own claims to a monopoly over legitimate social discourse about the human condition. It is not that there is no point to such criticisms of Bourdieu whose rhetorical championing of a Durkheimian sociological rationalism was among the least persuasive aspects of his oeuvre. However, an undue focus on this is misleading with regard to Bourdieu’s more systematic analyses of the properties of scientific fields, 5 and it distracts Debaene’s attention when it comes to assessing those aspects of Bourdieu’s work that bear most directly on his own concerns.
This is particularly clear in Debaene’s treatment of Gisèle Sapiro’s discussion of the varied forms of politicization informing the dynamics of the French literary field in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He engages with this in the context of his account of the continuing, albeit weakened, currency of the forms of literary authority developed in the course of Romanticism’s early-19th-century struggles with the ‘man of letters’. In challenging the 18th-century alliance of science and letters comprising the culture of the man of letters, Romanticism gave rise to ‘our modern idea of literature, as the “secular priesthood” of the inspired poet replaced the doctrinal authority of the littérateur’ (13). Debaene marshals the continuing force of this revised form of literary authority against the view in which literary culture, in being opposed to scientific culture as mysticism is to rationality, is presented as being ‘destined to be crushed by the inexorable forward march of the social sciences…(in a historical movement whose endpoint is the sociology of Bourdieu)’ (241).
This is, however, a reading that goes against the grain of what Sapiro presents as the most distinctive aspect of her discussion. This concerns the later emergence of the new forms of literary authority that were produced in association with the autonomization of the literary field that Bourdieu, in his classic discussion (Bourdieu, 1993: part II), associates with the work of Flaubert, and the parallel autonomization of the art field that he associated with Manet (2013). At this stage in the development of these fields literary and artistic authority stand putatively free not only of state and market, and their role in relation to academies and, thereby, of the claims of all professions, but also of science and organized religion. Drawing on Weber’s sociology of religions, and particularly his differentiation of the forms of authority exercised by priests and prophets, Bourdieu’s concern – and Sapiro’s – is to account not for the demise of literary authority but for a transformation in its form. This is a transformation, moreover, which leads away from those forms of literary authority cast in the mould of a secular priesthood – whose authority, for Weber, is vouchsafed by the institutions that employ and renumerate them, and structure their relations to the laity – towards that of the prophet who, rejecting the position of an institutionally sanctioned priesthood, lays claim to a charismatic form of authority that asserts its independence from all institutionalized forms of validation. Far from seeing this form of literary authority as destined to inevitably bow its knee before the irresistible rise of the social sciences, Bourdieu sees in the succession of avant-gardes a mechanism through which the tendency toward the routinization of charisma is successively overthrown by the dynamics of modernist art fields. This, in turn, leads to a renovation of distinctive forms of literary and artistic authority arising from the continuing autonomy of literary and artistic practices relative to the social realities they ‘represent’ and the knowledge of these to which the social sciences lay claim.
6
The formulations in The Love of Art are clear on the various distinctions that need to be made here: The total opposite of the devotees of culture, who are dedicated to the cult of the established work of defunct prophets, and of the priests of culture, who are dedicated to the organisation of this cult, are the cultural prophets, who disturb the routine of ritualised fervour, only to be ‘routinised’ in their turn by new priests and new devotees. (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1991: 60)
The criticism, then, is not that Barthes fails to bend the knee before the unstoppable authority of social science; it is rather that of placing a ‘bob each way’ in simultaneously backing two different forms of authority. It is, however, the historical mutation of the relations between these that informs Bourdieu’s assessment that I most want to emphasize. While at a certain level Bourdieu presents Barthes’ position as being continuous with the earlier struggle of ‘the literati and the society essayists against the “scientism”, “positivism” and “rationalism” of the “old Sorbonne”’, he argues that his revival of prophetic discourse is transformed by its functioning within a stratified academic system. For here, in ‘reconciling the requirements of scientific rigour with the society elegance of authorial criticism’ (Bourdieu, 1988: 118), the radical chic of the prophetic voice cannot disguise its operations as a new type of intellectual capital in a radically transformed university sector. It is not, then, an immanent telos toward science and rationality vs. the unsayable truths of the literary that most distinguishes Bourdieu’s approach to these questions, so much as the ways in which the relations between these are reconfigured as the institutional orderings of the relations between different knowledges are reshuffled and their functioning as different forms of intellectual capital is also changed as a consequence. For Debaene, by contrast, the projects of Barthes and Derrida are presented as institutionally ungrounded, floating as if in the ether of a general discursive form of science/literature relations.
In introducing his study, Debaene urges the need not to approach the relations between literature and anthropology ‘in terms of intersections between ready-made categories’ (3). Arguing that questions concerning their definition must be deferred to the conclusion, he contends that the inquiry should set off from an examination of what ethnographers do which – in a limiting move he takes for granted – he equates with what they have written. If this postpones the questions ‘What is anthropology?’ and ‘What is literature?’, Debaene, at this point, sees these as legitimate – and even essential – questions. When, in concluding, he does come to address them, however, this particular way of framing them is put to one side. The alternative framing he proposes is spelt out when, in the course of elaborating his reasons for his original French title – L’Adieu au voyage – Debaene explains why he is not tempted to also say ‘farewell to literature’. The farewell to the concept of the voyage informing earlier fantasies of fieldwork that was announced in the postwar trajectories of French anthropology was ‘an act of bidding adieu not to the possibility of the geographic journey, but to the very concept of the journey as a competition for access to Difference “before it is too late”’ (311). All well and good: an appropriate endorsement of a familiar and necessary move in the decolonization of ‘salvage anthropology’.
The invitation to bid literature a parallel farewell is, however, one that Debaene argues should be resisted as bending the knee too much before the ‘fate science has in store for literature and the expropriation to which science subjects it’ (314). This would serve only to capture both science and literature in a reciprocally disabling double-bind in which science disqualifies literature from the field of knowledge, thereby consigning the writer or critic to endlessly disqualifying the scientist from being able to speak to or for the human condition in view of his or her ignorance of the productive capacities of language while, as the loser’s consolation prize, simultaneously claiming ‘an infinite capacity for breaking apart, destabilizing, and challenging’ (315) the orders of language. To break free from this he argues, it is not enough to treat literature as a ‘delimited and circumscribed discursive space, subject to historical and sociological determinations that extend far beyond it’ (315). Nor is it sufficient to move beyond treating science and literature as being locked in a historical zero-sum game with one another such that one can gain only at the expense of the other. It is rather, he argues, necessary to move beyond the kind of essentialist answer that the question ‘What is literature?’ tends to beget to ask not only ‘Where is literature?’ but also what it does. And what it does, he suggests, hinges on what it says in ways that cannot be expressed otherwise: in other words, on the distinctive conjunction of form and discourse that it effects. Far from naturalizing this, however, he urges the need to accept the science/literature division as a historically specific ordering of the distribution of epistemological functions that is to be considered from the perspective of its role in relation to the organization of institutions of knowledge and its psychological impacts (318–19).
Quite so. What is less clear is why the analysis of French anthropology’s ambiguous and mutating position in the relations between science and literature should be presented as requiring a move beyond available epistemological models. As I have already indicated, the only such model that Debaene identifies and critiques is that of Bourdieu’s field theory, and I have given my reasons for doubting how far Debaene is to be relied on here. This is not, though, to suggest that field theory offers the only or, indeed, the best means of answering the questions that Debaene poses. Like any body of theory, it answers the questions it generates better than rival theories; but there are, by the same token, limits to the questions it poses and how it pursues them. This is especially true of the answers that field theory provides for the two concluding questions that Debaene proposes: Where is literature? And what does it do? As to where it is, field theory answers that it is lodged in the relations between the education system and the institutions of cultural legitimation and that it occupies a position of relative autonomy in relation to the economic and political fields of power; and as to what it does, it answers that it plays a role in the organization of social relations of distinction, and that it does so, much as for Debaene, through the effects of its forms on different populations.
Whatever the merits and limitations of its claims in this regard, field theory is scarcely the only epistemological and historical model that can be called on to examine the intersections between knowledges, institutional practices and the organization of social relationships. I come back here, then, to Debaene’s lack of interest in the contributions that the Foucaldian literature has made to our understanding of the respects in which practices of the truth are tied up with the constitution and exercise of various forms of power, and particularly with the role they play in practices of governance. There is a now burgeoning literature examining how each of the knowledges he is concerned with – the social sciences, anthropology and literary studies – has shaped, and been shaped by, the development of ‘modern’ governing practices in ways which do not, as field theory implies, derive their governmental rationality directly or exclusively from the logics of the state or capital. Assessments of the role played by anthropology in differentiating between and within populations with regard to their relations to governing across the liberal government/biopolitical spectrum; the role of sociology in the production of the social as a surface for the management of populations rather than, as in Bourdieu’s framing, an underlying structure to be invoked as an explanation for differentiated practices; and the relations between aesthetics and the development of mechanisms for governing through freedom associated with Foucault’s account of liberal government: these all have a critical bearing on the articulation of the relations between science, anthropology and literature that form the centre of Debaene’s concerns. 7 And not just abstractly: these are perspectives that have been brought to bear on the very topics that Debaene is concerned with. Foucault’s discussion of the respects in which the techniques of Christian pastoral government have been carried forward into governmental forms of power, for example, has informed accounts of the ways in which the forms of priestly forms of power that Debaene associates with the literary field were integrated into the state by the endeavours of the ‘pastoral bureaucracy’ (Hunter, 1988) through which the powers of the literary were translated into the machineries of public schooling. These considerations have a special pertinence in relation to late-19th-century France where the values of civic universalism associated with the development of state schooling were shaped by their contest with the universal values that informed the Roman Catholic pastorate’s early control of French schooling (Ahearne, 2011).
It is, however, Gary Wilder’s assessment of the respects in which the ‘colonial humanism’ that was the intellectual signature of the inter-war anthropological projects centred on the Musée de l’Homme operated as parts of an ‘administrative-scientific complex’ (Wilder, 2005: 61) that was articulated to different forms of governing practice across the relations between metropolis and colony that takes us to the organizing centre of Debaene’s concerns. It also takes us back to our starting point in noting Debaene’s interest in French anthropology’s role in producing a new language of ‘the human’ prior to the currency of ‘the human sciences’. Debaene identifies three strands of this anthropological vocabulary of ‘the human’ that were developed in critique of its absence from the prevailing discourses of science and literature. In the first strand, represented by Rivet, the new humanism was ‘progressive, republican, and socialist’, achieving its most influential form in the projects of the Musée de l’Homme to ‘open the doors of culture’ to the masses (122). The second strand, most influentially articulated by Leiris, is the promise, opened up by journeying far afield, of finding in the Other a route to a common humanity that would prove a corrective to its mutilation by the division of labour at home. And the third consists in Lévi-Strauss’s quest for a generalized humanism that would, in reconciling the divisions between the different branches of humanity, also overcome that between man and nature. 8 There was, however, a fourth strand to this ‘new humanism’ which, emerging at the interfaces of colonial administration and new forms of indigenous politics in France’s colonial territories, stressed the need for cultural differences to be preserved rather than anticipating their dissolution in a universal humanity. In their accounts of this aspect of its currency, L’Estoile and Wilder stress the respects in which the new humanism was caught, shaped and defined by its relations to anthropology’s careers’ both ‘at home and away’. For L’Estoile (2007: 98–102) this conception of humanism as a ‘plural universalism’ played a key role in the formation of a new ethical and political project in which the recognition of plurality became central to the make-up of a new sense of the Western self. For Wilder the stress falls on its role in both extending domestic welfare projects to the colonies while simultaneously qualifying and limiting them, producing, in its colonial form, a humanism that was internally divided: concerned with regulating indigenous populations with a view to increasing their value as human capital while also recognizing their irreducible specificity, it yielded a dual and contradictory imperative of both transforming and preserving indigenous culture at the same time (Wilder, 2005: 76–81, 93).
The addition of this fourth strand brings with it a further dimension: the need to consider the ways in which the vocabularies of the human and of culture both emerge from, and play a game of epistemological tag with one another, in the projects of French anthropology. This did not occur in isolation. The pluralization and, to a degree, de-hierarchization and de-racialization of the culture concept had a parallel – and, indeed, an earlier – career in the Boasian trajectories of American anthropology. These intersected with its career in France in a number of ways, especially through the influence of Rivet who developed a significant correspondence with Boas in the context of their involvement in related anti-racist and anti-fascist campaigns, and, as we have seen, in their commitment to practices oriented to pluralizing museum presentations of cultural difference. I draw attention to these interactions here in view of the role they played in the production of culture as a new international governmental actor in the postwar programmes of UNESCO which drew on the anthropological refashioning of the culture concept that had characterized both its French and its American histories (Visweswaran, 2010: 74–82). These were histories which, in both contexts, were shaped by anthropology’s position between science and the aesthetic disciplines. Drawing on aesthetic conceptions of form in the recognition they bestowed on the distinctive patterning of the ways of life of indigenous populations, they were histories which endowed culture with a new form of agency in social life in producing it as lever through which the governance of the relations between ways of life was henceforth to be enacted (Bennett, 2015).
There is, though, another twist to this tale. It is one that Philippe Descola highlights in noting the limits of Lévi-Strauss’s susceptibility to the influence of Boas’s particularism and relativism. These limits derived from his continuing commitment, along with that of French anthropology more generally, to a conception of culture which, in its differentiation from nature, constituted a unity defining the human condition ‘that underlay the multiplicity of its particular manifestations’ (Descola, 2013: 75). Descola’s purpose in noting this aspect of French anthropology’s history is to draw attention to its role in producing and perpetuating the ‘great divide’ of nature/culture and, along with this, the separation of human from non-human actors that is now the central object of critique in the ‘ontological turn’ that comprises the current frontier of theoretical debates in French anthropology and, indeed, anthropology more generally. These are concerns that go beyond the remit of Far Afield, which draws to a close with the 1970s. It is, nonetheless, a study that speaks to them in the light it throws on the ‘humanistic turns’ that were prompted by anthropology’s earlier ambiguous installation in the relations between science and literature.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I acknowledge the value of working with my co-researchers on the ‘Museum, Field, Metropolis, Colony: Museum and Social Governance’ project: Fiona Cameron, Nélia Dias, Ben Dibley, Rodney Harrison, Ira Jacknis and Conal McCarthy.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Aspects of this article, particularly those relating to the Musée de l’Homme, draw on research conducted as a part of the ‘Museum, Field, Metropolis, Colony: Museums and Social Governance’ project funded by the Australian Research Council (DP110103776).