Romanticism and holism in the anthropology of the West (revisiting Bergson’s paradox)

Introduction

In Totemism Today, as part of his revision of earlier theories regarding the book’s central topic, C. Lévi-Strauss examined the paradoxical quality of philosopher Henri Bergson’s thought, at once removed from the orthodoxy of Western sociology and proximate to a sharper understanding of the structural correlations between social groups and emblematic natural beings. ¹

According to Lévi-Strauss, Bergson – a philosopher notoriously attentive to questions of ‘affect’ and ‘lived experience’ – was more successful in understanding certain aspects of social life than his contemporary, French sociologist Emile Durkheim, given the latter’s excessive sociological rationalization of totemic phenomena. Lévi-Strauss even proposes that Bergson’s thought could be analogous to that of the ‘so-called primitive peoples’, in sympathy with that of ‘totemic populations’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1969: 141).

The expression ‘Bergson’s paradox’ is also found in contemporary philosophy, used to articulate (in the philosopher’s own words) the difficulty of presenting the logic of ‘duration’ or temporal flux in a spatializing language such as our hegemonic and official tongue. This difficulty ends up violating the fluid sense of vital experience (cf. Mullarkey, 1999).

Bergson notoriously insisted that a fundamental opposition existed between ‘duration’ and ‘time’. The first category refers to the perception of a lived vital flow: the second, to rationalized demarcations which are compartmentalized as if they were spaces. There is a dynamic between these two poles, but the dominant culture of the West is constantly inclined to privilege the mechanical and devitalized mode in detriment to the experiential force of the fluid mode (Bergson, 1968).

Both of these paradoxes are built upon the recognition of a structuring dichotomy. One side is committed to a style of rationalization that is currently predominant in the West, of which Durkheim’s thought is emblematic. The other rails against the first and parades this very difference as its distinctive sign.

This dichotomy reverberates through many others which are essential to the constitution of modern Western thought. A review of their intimate affinity may highlight the relationship between Western thought and anthropology, mostly in connection with a possible heuristic fertility of the structural opposition between Enlightenment and Romanticism.

My title is intentionally ambiguous: ‘anthropology of the West’ signifies both that anthropology which constitutes itself within ‘our’ culture and an anthropology that takes the West as its analytical focus and object of knowledge.

Many analytical schemes have organized the opposition between the West and other human cultures, an opposition presented in so many diverse ethnocentric and evolutionist formulae, and chastised by the ambitions to supersede the ‘great divide’. This opposition continues to haunt our anthropological conscience, even in such mocking expressions as ‘the West and the Rest’. The divide implies the question of how we might define this anthropology of ours and its autonomous or extraterritorial rights, its authority to deal with difference, with alterity: that essential ‘rest’.

As I have proposed elsewhere (Duarte and Venancio, 1995; Duarte, 2000, 2004, 2005, 2006), contemporary anthropology must recognize the truly deep complexity of the culture from which it emerged and assume the privileged relationship it entertains with a specific cosmological facet of this culture. The demarcation of analytical divides within the walls of the West, or even within its ‘modern’ version, is certainly nothing new. This multiplicity of the West frequently repeats the sort of oppositions which were elaborated for contrast beyond its frontiers (in fact it is prior to the latter), but it colors itself in other tones, organizing itself around an axis that is conceived of as diachronic (traditional vs. modern; old-fashioned or backwards vs. contemporary, vanguardist, up-to-date, etc.).

Nevertheless, ethnology and many of its interlocutors insist on referring to ‘modern Western culture’ (or some equivalent, such as the ‘Euro-American world’ of Marilyn Strathern or Roy Wagner’s ‘North American’ West) in a univocal and monolithic fashion, which often verges on a caricature.

Following a certain literature, I insist upon the precedence, pertinence and amplitude of a specific dichotomy when attempting to model the complexity of Western cosmology. I call the parts of this dichotomy Enlightenment and Romanticism, and this should be understood as a tentative terminological approach. It doesn’t reject the conventional formulae of the classificatory tradition of Western history, but maintains them in suspension. It is conscious of the impediments which a heavy reflexive patina imposes upon these parts; just as it is aware of the many combinations and distinctions of the historical experiences which constitute the two sides of this ideal dichotomy.

I thus proceed here with an exercise in the interpretation of a set of analytical possibilities that are current and expanding today and which are very critical of earlier hypotheses, frequently defaming these in the course of acerbic debates. I refer to what we might call the ‘post-’ configuration, in which a series of not always concordant categories (postmodernism, post-structuralism, post-social, etc.) proclaims the ruin of the ‘modern’ configuration of social knowledge and announces the advent of a more sensible, ductile and complex alternative. ²

This exercise operates as a framework for two specific heuristic goals. First of all, it seeks to highlight the need to give serious consideration to the West’s cosmological complexity (recognizing that its ‘sociological’ and ‘phenomenological’ counterparts have always been quite evident – a criterion of its self-definition, in fact), going beyond off-hand references and reactive denials. Secondly, it seeks to explore the enigma that underpins Bergson’s paradox: the affinity or analogy between the Western idea of a ‘savage thought’ and the non-hegemonic modalities of cultivated Western thought.

The hypothesis that a great opposition or tension exists between two cosmological currents or configurations of Western thought is, at the present moment, concentrated on the Enlightenment/Romanticism opposition, which is considered to be broad and flexible enough to shelter an infinitude of historical variations and ideological nuances of the so-called ‘modern’ period of Western culture.

This hypothesis, which is quite present in analyses of our culture since the 19th century (when the term ‘Romanticism’ began to become popular), seeks to encompass a wide selection of phenomena that are not always understood as homologous or as being part of the same historical or sociological condition. It is possible to have an idea of the enormity of this task when one contemplates the fact that idealism, historicism, vitalism, hermeneutics and phenomenology are all associated with the Romantic half of this other divide.

My most basic point of inquiry into this theme is Louis Dumont’s proposal of an anthropology of the West, as a means of illuminating the emergence of a hegemonic ‘ideology of individualism’ – the source of the impediments he describes in the understanding of Indian cosmology and of the phenomenon of ‘hierarchy’ (2000). At the same time, I have made use of Georges Gusdorf’s exhaustive historical reconstructions of the Romantic configuration (1976, 1984), and the enlightening indications of such diverse authors as Arthur Lovejoy (1948), George Stocking Jr. (1968, 1989), Adam Kuper (1978, 1989), Judith Schlanger (1971), Joel Kahn (1990), Richard Shweder (1984), and Mariza Peirano (1991).

Dumont highlights the intriguing association between the typically Western phenomenon of Romanticism and the principle of hierarchy, which he describes as a universal property of the human condition (or of human thought). What ties them together is their opposition to ‘individualism’ and its corollaries: rationalism, universalism, the flattening of cosmological levels, and the rejection of the sensory in the processing of knowledge. The demonstration of the structure of this ‘hierarchical opposition’ emphasizes the ‘difference’ it contains: a difference in value between the terms that cause the one to be encompassed by the other (with the consequent possibility of localized ‘hierarchical inversions’). A ‘holistic’ quality is attributed to the relational totality that is thus constituted; a common and differentiated implication of terms which are opposed to the individualistic worldview, with its ontologically equal parts, lineal reciprocity and totalizations resulting from the mere contingent juxtaposition of elements. The hierarchical/holistic position being universal, its opponent, the individualist position, cannot be but one of its manifestations – paradoxical and challenging, but still an element of an encompassing dynamic in which it seeks to contain (or be contained by) its opposing partner. The external opposition to the West that is paradigmatically represented by India would thus correspond to an internal opposition – an ‘anti-individualism’ – which Dumont associates with Romanticism (1991).

This Dumontian interpretation is backed up by a set of concordant analyses describing an opposition to the set of traits characteristic of Western ‘modernity’. ‘Anti-progressivism’ (Mitzman, 1966), ‘anti-capitalism’ (Kahn, 1990), ‘anti-Enlightenment’ (Berlin, n.d.; following Nietzsche’s Gegenaufklärung), ‘anti-materialism’ (from Goethe to W. Wundt, at least), ‘anti-rationalism’ (in Nietzsche, above all else), ‘anti-naturalism’ (Meloni, 2011), ‘anti-modernism’ (Compagnon, 2005), or ‘anti-universalism’ – negative descriptions have not ceased to accumulate around that which I have chosen to portray as a Romantic ‘reaction’ to the hegemonic ideals of the modern West.

But this opposition is not just negatively reactive. To the contrary! Since the middle of the 18th century, affirmative threads running counter to the modernizing drive began to accumulate and weave together in complex and varied linkages: sensibility, subjectivity, spontaneity, spirit, flow, experience, drive, wholeness, uniqueness, life.

The diffusion of this reaction gradually promoted a true didactics of difference, irony, estrangement, relativization, relationality, cosmic solidarity – definitely of a holism. This has become particularly noticeable in the field of art, but also in political and philosophical thought.

My Bateson epigraph highlights one of the great focuses of cosmological opposition in Western history: the Protestant Reformation and its continued gnoseological effects. Bateson evokes the substitution of ‘traditional’ sacramental embeddedness (as seen in Catholic practices) by the rationalization of a ‘metaphor’ that is detached, modern and Protestant, as a summary of the long process of disenchantment within Western culture.

The threads which link this opposition to those which came about in the field of religion following the Reformation are densely woven. As several authors have pointed out, this equation is much more complex than a simple opposition between ‘traditional Catholicism’ and ‘Protestant modernism’. One cannot forget the complexity of the variants of this latter religious movement, as well as the willingness of the Catholic Church itself to accept the new cosmological disposition during the Counterreformation (cf. Latour, 2004). It is also necessary to take into consideration the link between the Romantic configuration and pre-modern mysticism (Benz, 1968) or certain minor threads of Protestantism such as pietism (Dumont, 2000).

The representation of a valuable totalizing experience, imbued with subjective intensity and vital flow, is not expressed through religion alone. Western art has also been totally dedicated to this alternative, creative, and sensitive state (at least since the 18th century). But cultural difference, following Herder’s history, can also express this quality. Here we find 19th-century antiquarian and orientalist interests pulsating in the prestigious hands of people like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. An entirely ‘different Europe’ could be constructed out of the Romantic inspiration, as Uberoi (1984) so sensitively proposed, thinking of Goethe.

The personal Bildung, a form of self-cultivation considered to be characteristic of the Romantic configuration, is an ingenious invention propitiating the emergence of ‘normal’ selves shaped by the anti-rational forces of art, religion, and sensorial life. Its essential point is the search for a combination of experience and estrangement conducive to a feeling of uniqueness and to a disposition to serve difference. ³

The consciousness of change and transformation that is intrinsic to the ‘improvement’ project of the Enlightenment acquires new forms, valuing the past and rejecting the obsession with the future; opposing ‘tradition’ to ‘revolution’. The anti-hierarchical modernizing rage of the ‘great transformation’ is countered by the anti-rationalist Sturm und Drang of the ‘Romantic reaction’.

Hegelian dialectic is a vigorous and precocious model of this new form of temporality. Its flow is dense, dynamic, and differential; totally at odds with linear, accumulative, Newtonian logic. Its dynamism and relationality furnish the mold for successive critical analyses of modern rationality. When Bateson proposes his two schismogeneses, Dumont his hierarchical opposition, Lévi-Strauss his distinction between ‘savage’ and ‘cultivated’ forms of thought, or Wagner his opposition between ‘invention’ and ‘convention’, the comparative reference to dialectic is always inevitable, even when it is encompassed or surpassed. In all these cases, a non-linear relationship is affirmed between the terms of the structuring dualisms; with modernity appearing as one of the poles or dimensions of the enigma. Whether in the form of complementary schismogenesis or holism, of savage thought or differentiating dynamics, what is affirmed is an opposition to the maximal rationalization implied by Western modernity.

It is this opposition, anchored in a profound dissatisfaction with the mainstream of our culture, that I propose to follow as it wends through anthropological thought. ⁴ It is not an easy task to evince here my dual aim: the composite character of Western cosmology and the affinity between the idea of a savage mind and the Romantic drive. It is a program for study rather than a finished analysis, since taking the ‘post-’ configuration seriously must involve immense ethnographic dedication. As we shall see, an essential part of its justification is the rejection of systems. As I am seeking here to demonstrate the systematic nature of this very rejection, in its linkage to Romanticism, my argument will inevitably face a frontal repulse. I can only say that, at the very least, this work is a homage – albeit a critical one – to a fascinatingly vital movement that has been one of the central axes of our tradition.

The Romantic drive in the West

It would make no sense to reify Romanticism as a category. It is merely a useful label to designate the aforementioned movements of systematic opposition to modern Western rationalization. It is this systematic character that I am interested in demonstrating. This goes quite beyond the delineation of its vastly complicated history, which I can only briefly recount, relegating to the appropriate literature a more solid justification of my interpretative scheme.

A brief review of the threads or epistemic traits of the Romantic drive must take into account its genetic localization, frequently situated in the opposition to the Cartesian model emerging during the 18th century. Vico and Herder are its heralds and are often evoked to affirm the primacy of lived experience and subjective mediation in opposition to the cognitive poverty of the materialist enterprise (cf. Berlin, 1976; Mueller, 1992). Vico explicitly rejected the application of the ‘geometric method’ to an understanding of the world in general and of human phenomena in particular. He revolted against the primacy of reason, emphasizing human ‘invention’ in opposition to the idea of ‘discovery’: verum et factum convertuntur (the true and the made are interchangeable) (Vico, 2001). His emphasis on sensation and imagination led Vico to an absolutely precocious and unexpected interest in mythology and fables in modern times. Herder – who only read and approved of Vico late in life – constructed the notion of a non-linear history composed of the ‘organic evolution’ of unique cultural configurations which were dependent on the ‘spirit’ of a given people. In order to designate the attitude necessary for the difference to be received within this framework, he formulated the concept of Einfühlen (empathy), which has long persisted in the countervailing currents of Western thought.

In both authors, a nominalist and empiricist undercurrent clearly springs forth in opposition to Aristotelian and Cartesian thought. This is an important dimension of the question which will reappear further on: the relationship between Romanticism and the nominalist-empiricist tradition, typically opposed to realism, from whence emerged modern naturalism (cf. Wagner, 1986).

A neat thread of influences carries these original dispositions forward to the institutionalization of the human sciences at the beginning of the 20th century. We can see it blossoming in linguistics, with the Herderian interpretation of language developed by Wilhelm Von Humboldt, and in the anthropology found in Wundt and Taylor (and later affirmed by Boas and Malinowski). It is visible in Von Ranke’s history and Ratzel’s geography (which links Boas to Alexandre Von Humboldt’s cosmology). And it shows up in the fin-de-siècle sociology of Dilthey and Tönnies, and – paradigmatically – in Simmel and Weber. ⁵ Alongside all these threads, one finds the deconstruction of devitalized naturalism, linear temporality and the fragmentation of elements – following the pristine example of Goethe in his criticism of Newton’s thought in the Theory of Colors (Goethe, 1993 [1810]).

Nineteenth-century philosophy carefully harbored this drive, above all else in the fertile field of German idealism, refining its disposition towards irony and estrangement (towards relativization, we might say now) concerning that which Simmel called ‘objective culture’. Philosophy was aided in this task by art, in all its 19th-century splendor, flourishing in the constant debates of aesthetics.

Although Durkheim came to incarnate the spirit of modernity in the social sciences, being seen as the ‘positivist’, responsible for the reification of the notion of ‘society’, we must also recognize the presence of the Romantic drive in his works. This, Durkheim inherited both indirectly from biological vitalism and organicism and directly from his contact with Wundt, in Leipzig, through the Germanic notion of Kultur. His demonstration of social life as a sui generis reality is equivalent to Freud’s proposal regarding psychic life. Today, it is easy to forget how crucial was the deconstruction of individualism as the foundation of social experience (one of the main axes of modernist mythology) and how radical it was to subject religious experience to a wide systematic and comparative lens (situating it as the ‘spirit’ in the machine).

This same emphasis on ‘totality’ appears in Boas and Weber (under the label ‘configurations’) while ideas such as ‘sensibility’, ‘spirit’, and ‘experience’ instilled life into their writings as well as into the work of Mauss, Simmel, and Malinowski, whence it has all come down to us, meandering through different schools and authors.

The paradigm of a global, integrated comprehension, in opposition to ‘explanation’, has hovered above the social sciences ever since. This is inherited from Dilthey’s discussion of the Geisteswissenschaften, and has come down to us, in many different guises: a comprehension or hermeneutic attained through the mediation of the researcher’s ‘subjective experience’, embedded in concrete sensibility and celebrated in ‘fieldwork’ theory.

As I’ve mentioned above, it is essential to add a third element to the dualism. This is ‘nominalism’, a steady opponent to realism and its modern expression, ‘empiricism’. So-called classical empiricism was fundamental in the consolidation of modern cosmology, and it continues to be an essential part of naturalist science. Its nominalist dimension, however, imposes a permanent tension with rationalism and its realist foundations. The mistrust with regard to ‘abstract entities’ or ‘second level phenomena’ is at the root of the Romantic formulations of both Herder and Nietzsche, with their emphasis on direct experience and the preeminence of sensibility over intellectualization. ⁶

The nominalist function reappears even more vividly in the ‘post-’ configuration, either intertwined with a ‘neo-Romanticism’ or as a constitutive part of a ‘Romantic empiricism’ (Duarte, 2004 and 2006).

Holism and Romanticism

Dumont began to develop his analysis of Romanticism after the publication of his great panorama of economicist ideology outlined in Homo Aequalis (1977). In Homo Aequalis II (1991) there appeared a clear outline of a Romantic counterpoint to the individualism Simmel had called ‘quantitative’.

Dumont’s mapping of the Western cultural configuration focused initially on the central, dominant, hegemonic point through which opposition to Indian culture operated. But it necessarily slipped towards recognizing a counterforce within Western culture that could be related, in certain circumstances, to ‘exotic’ holisms and hierarchies. He discussed intra-Western difference with a focus on the Bildung tradition and the art world – parallel and solidary systems of creators and creatures: the uniqueness of moral careers and that of aesthetic constructions mirroring each other.

The questions that led Dumont to his concept of holism reappear in the works of all historians directly involved with Romanticism. These include an emphasis on the wholeness in which relationships are embedded; a disdain for the separation of subject and object, reason and sentiment, or nature and humanity; and a denunciation of linear time and thought.

With such properties, Romantic discourse takes on an affinity both with the historical alterity entwined around its roots and with exogenous cultural alterity. This is the connection that allows for Romanticism’s active relationships with mysticism and Orientalism. In the first case, sundry references point to the influence of Hamann upon Herder (cf. Benz, 1968), or to those of Plotino, Giordano Bruno, and Jakob Boehme upon Coleridge (cf. Wheeler, 1993). A frankly ‘inspired’ attitude came to permeate the Romantic ranks, as was the case with so many artists, Novalis or William Blake outstanding.

The growing amount of information regarding oriental cultures available in the 18th century fostered an interest in their formal study in the West. Friedrich Majer, a disciple of Herder, initiated Schopenhauer into the mysteries of Hinduism and Buddhism, with a lingering influence on the latter’s thoughts, mostly regarding alternative modalities of human will and their relation to the cosmos. The Dionysian frenzy so dear to Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy is intrinsic to this systematic search for difference and for non-rational integration, encountered both in the Eastern traditions and in the popular and ‘enthusiastic’ movements of the West.

The category of holism – just as the associated notions of wholeness and totality – lends itself to a degree of misunderstanding which often emerges in contemporary discussions. Following the weight that the idea of ‘organicism’ (a key concept in the biological sciences’ reaction to mechanist models) came to have in French sociology, the very concept of ‘society’ has become frequently understood as imposing a static, univocal, and uniform representation of totality. Among those contemporary authors who are highly critical of the concept of ‘society’, Ingold is the only one who seems to perceive the complexity of the notion in all its hues. He proposes two types of holism: ‘the wholeness of form’ set against ‘the wholeness of process’ (2008: 81). Ingold thus effectively points to a fundamental distinction between the abusive objectification of stable units of social relations (societies) or symbolic sharing (cultures) and the recognition that social reality is composed of nuclei of significant relationships that persist through certain levels and amounts of experience, always implying some external limit or frontier. One can emphasize the procedural, dynamic, complex, projective, relative, situational, transformational – even paradoxical – nature of such processes, without eliminating the inevitable necessity of discrete units of experience and meaning.

The Romantic movement (in the broad sense that I have defined above) insisted upon the embeddedness of elements in totalities, in opposition to the particularistic and individualistic emphasis of Enlightenment cosmology. On the other hand, it always paid particular attention to the mobile, shifting, and paradoxical properties of these totalities, concentrating in the principles of flow and becoming an essential cosmological emphasis.

Dumont paid particular attention to Leibniz’s monadology, which he felt was the most ingenious attempt to link holism and individualism. ⁷ His exegesis sought to associate this fascinating concept with the notion of ‘uniqueness’ – a key characteristic of the Romantic notion of totality. Simmel had monadology in mind when he proposed his distinction between quantitative and qualitative individualism. The first rested on a collection of individualities (the citizens in the liberal socio-political order, the bodies of Newtonian physics, or the ‘ideas’ of Locke’s associationist psychology) while the second was supported by an encompassing overlapping between ‘singularities’ – unique totalities situated in their respective phenomenological levels (i.e. persons, nations, cultures, languages, communities, artworks, etc.).

The problem of totality or wholeness may certainly be an empirical one, but it is above all else an epistemological problem, as highlighted by the Romantic criticism of any knowledge disconnected from the sensorial, the dynamic, and – ultimately – the ineffable. This is a fundamental theme of the ‘post-’ configuration to which I am bound to return. Suffice it to say now that ‘methodological holism’, as traditionally opposed to ‘methodological individualism’, does not meet Romantic demands, keen as these are to deconstruct the entire mechanism of totalization, in the quest for a new monism and a fluid cosmos.

There may also be some confusion between the more commonsense notion of ‘wholeness’ as a cloistering of the being and this other understanding, which is certainly of greater interest to Romanticism (and to methodological holism), of a harmonious ‘solidarity’ between different levels of a given social form (cf. Schlanger, 1971). Lévi-Strauss’s formulation of the ‘savage mind’ (1970) was an attempt to erect a legitimate cognitive bulkhead against the fragmentation of an ‘abstract logic’ in which sensorial, experienced, properties could be alienated from the process of human knowledge. Carlo Severi aptly exposed a few of the homologies between the thought of Lévi-Strauss and that of a long Romantic lineage dating back to Goethe and his research into morphogenesis (where research into a ‘structure’ of sensorial phenomena is not opposed to aesthetic pleasure) (Severi, 1988).

Be it the ‘intellectualist’ Lévi-Straussian model of savage thought or the more radically Romantic variants, all of these formulations regarding wholeness or totality are permeated by a keen preoccupation with ‘life’, the foundation stone of all opposition to mechanism and materialism. ‘Organicism’ had originally served as a means of expressing this vital sense of wholeness; as did ‘culture’, in opposition to enlightened civilization (Sahlins, 1996: 406). Yet both terms eventually became too objectified for Romantic taste. New vital formulas had to be sought out, even more sense-orientated, more fluid and closer to the vibrant field of ‘art’.

Holism can be shown to express itself in open systems, through inwardly- or outwardly-directed transformational dynamics, capable of blurring and transfiguring borders, identity and alterity – as a challenge to the notion that some sort of organic, all-encompassing envelope inevitably prevails. Each one of the ‘dialectical’ models evoked before, due to Bateson, Dumont, Lévi-Strauss, and Wagner, describes the complex dynamics of some kind of systematic whole, at least as an intellectual construct if not as an empirical immediate entity.

This dynamic was intensely cultivated in the original Romanticism, inspired by the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung, as a mechanism intrinsic to dialectics. This passage to a higher, more encompassing level of the historical or conceptual process demarcates what I called elsewhere a ‘Romantic evolutionism’ (Duarte, 2004), which finds its most complete version in the artistic vanguard. It is actually along this track that I propose that Western anthropology’s ability to access otherness is in fact an ability that pulsates internally, in a dialectical and hierarchical way; encompassed and encompassing in relation to the Enlightenment axis in Western cosmology.

A text I often use in my seminars on the history of anthropological theory is one by Christopher Lawrence (1979), dealing with the image the Scottish Enlightenment, in the 18th century, entertained regarding the Highlanders. Agrarian, Catholic, Jacobite – these Scotts were the perfect image of backwardness and held to be the antithesis of the bourgeoning civilization. At about the same time (c. 1760), the famous forgery by James MacPherson of the traditional Scottish Gaelic poems, ascribed to the bard Ossian, began to inflame Romantic minds from Herder and Goethe to Walter Scott and Franz Schubert. The qualities of the ‘noble savage’ Highlander crossed Europe to and fro. These antithetical images continue to haunt us, in a constant and dynamic dialectic. Both are fundamental and yet both are completely exogenous to the highlands of Scotland!

Our ‘savage’ anthropologists

The correlation between anthropology’s capacity to deal with difference as expressed in cultural alterity and the roots of alterity that are active within our own Western configuration can be explored in the most important formulations of the ‘post-’ version of modernity.

In his The Invention of Culture (1981), Roy Wagner produced a precious guide to and summing up of these considerations. Tainah Leite refers to him in a work (2011) dedicated to an initial exploration of the relationships anthropology maintained with Romanticism. Her ‘epistemology of ambiguity’ uncovers new homologies between his work and the proposals of authors as crucial as Vico, Herder, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. A contemporary anti-modernist tendency in Western thought involves the constant employment of such categories as ‘spirit’, ‘action’, ‘will’, ‘experience’, ‘life’, ‘subjectivity’, ‘creativity’, ‘integration’, and ‘uniqueness’ in a veritable ‘creative reinvention’ of Romanticism. The Herderian opposition between the ‘inanimate gears’ of rationalist ideology and the ‘dynamic energies’ of life (both social and intellectual) also makes repeated appearances. The ‘spontaneous and creative realization of human culture’ (Wagner, 1981: 37) is constantly urged, re-instilling life in Vico’s ‘reconstructive imagination’.

Wagner’s ‘invention’ – occasionally called a ‘dialectic’ – is one and the same as the principle of ‘life’, driven by ‘motivation’ ⁸ and conducted through ‘improvisation’, ‘innovation’, and ‘creation’. ⁹ It praises the spontaneity that is behind an unconscious, unrelativized disposition (‘a lack of awareness’) – exalted since the Sturm und Drang as the quintessence of human experience. The passages describing life as ‘an inventive sequence’ involving ‘a certain quality of brilliance’ (Wagner, 1981: 89) are justifiably famous for intensely resuming this peculiar sense of life, which wraps, in Romantic jargon, the best sort of reaction to the abstraction, rationalization, and systematization of the world.

Wagner is notably explicit regarding totality, when he deals with an ‘individuation’ that affirms ‘uniqueness’ in the very terms I have described above (1981: 48–9). Creativity is the key to this singular totality, this ‘dialectical and self-creating whole’ (p. 142): ‘the tendency of culture is to sustain itself by inventing itself’ (p. 60), which takes up once again, at the level of culture, the essential of Moritz’s 18th-century proposal regarding the artist and the work of art, as analyzed by Dumont (1991).

At the opposite extreme, we find the negative forces of convention, collectivization, masking, objectivation, relativization – the kingdom of the ‘artificial and imposed’ (Wagner, 1981: 50), characteristic of the ‘central ideology’ of ‘our collective Culture’ (p. 142), of its ‘“official” and everyday Culture’ (p. 146), of ‘our rationalistic Culture in its narrow sense’ (p. 151).

Alterity is generally understood by Wagner as if it resided in the tribal and peasant worlds, as well as in the ‘lower class’ (1981: 89), but also according to a more ideological criterion in tribal and ‘religious’ (p. 59), or non-urban (p. 123) contexts or where ‘other nonrationalistic traditions’ prevail (p. 108).

In this sense, Wagner’s proposals contain notable homologies with those of Tönnies and Simmel (particularly in relation to ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ cultures), even though these authors do not come up in his bibliography – which is not the case with Dumont, who rates many comparisons.

Wagner constantly returns to the theme of anthropology’s self-consciousness as the self-consciousness of the West, although the structural associations that I emphasize here do not end up being explicitly sustained (Wagner, 1981: 142–4). Yet his analytical disposition is certainly a stimulus to the obviation of this fundamental mask (p. 3).

In Deleuze, the dialogue with the Romantic philosophical tradition is immediately made explicit, instead of the dialogue with art that prevails in Wagner’s work (alongside the reference to authors like Oswald Spengler, who glide between art and philosophy). Even a symptomatic and superficial revision may immediately detect numerous threads linking his work both to the preceding Romantic tradition and to its contemporary appropriations.

Deleuze’s association with the thought of Nietzsche (cf. Sellars, 1999: 2), Tarde (cf. Larval Subjects, 2012), and Bergson (Deleuze, 1966; Fornazari, 2004) is certainly the main philosophical axis, allowing for the importance in his work (alone or with Guattari) of analytical categories such as becoming, duration, élan vital, intuition, virtuality, and intensity (cf. Corbanezi, 2009), or transformation, will, and life (cf. Mitchell and Broglio, 2008). Sellars (1999) explicitly develops the theme of Deleuze’s Romanticism, underlining the importance for his thought of such writers as Hölderlin, Kleist, and Büchner, or of philosophers such as Schlegel (with a shared connection with stoicism). Significantly, in Le Pli (Deleuze, 1988) there are references to two thinkers who were critical in linking Romanticism and science; two legitimate (if epigonal) Naturphilosophen: Gustav Fechner and Jakob Von Uexküll (cf. Kull, 2004).

Many of these epistemological traces are also found in the work of Ingold (2007), who explicitly evokes Bergson. Ingold’s ideas are essentially centered on the concept of ‘life’. ¹⁰ His discussion about the difference between ‘representation’ and ‘presence’ (2007: 37) is quite significant, as are his analyses of the difference between ‘information’ and ‘transmission’. ¹¹ In both cases, which are developed in his fascinating Lines, Ingold deals with the opposition between a world of ‘life’ (where the lines are experiential, present, transmissionary) and the ‘modern’, devitalized, world where lines become impoverished as a mere row of informational and representational points (2007: 75).

The Ingoldian theme had already been developed by Latour, above all in his texts on the religious phenomenon. There one could also find the opposition between traditional ‘attachment’ (or belonging) and modern ‘detachment’ (2000: 203). The dualism between ‘life’ and ‘non-life’ had already been made explicit in the 1990 text, in the form of an opposition between presence (ingrained, experienced, immediate) and representation (detached, thought, mediated). In Latour’s 2004 text that revisited the religious phenomenon, the same opposition emerges between transformation (presence, experience, life) and information. In these texts, Latour works with the Catholic/Protestant opposition, which I have evoked above. There is an interesting passage in which Catholicism appears colored with all the nocturnal and anti-rationalist tones that Romanticism imparted to it throughout the 19th century. For Latour in these moments, Romantic nostalgia seems to be cloaked in the mantle of pre-Reformation Catholicism, a domain of full presence (1990: 86).

The evocation of Deleuze and Latour means harkening back to Gabriel Tarde – an influence for both authors. It also allows us to revisit the issue of nominalism, associated as I suggest it is with Romanticism in diverse dosages and combinations. ¹² Tarde’s is an extreme manifestation of nominalism in his time, in connection with his enthusiastic appropriation of Leibniz’s monadology. The intense relationship with Bergson does not allow us to forget, at the same time, its immediate Romantic dimension (e.g. Bergson, 1909).

A theme as important as that of panvitalism or panpsychism is immediately related to ‘life’, and to some other equally important themes such as the ‘drive’ (this ‘appetite for the infinite’ – as commentator Eduardo Vargas calls it, 2000), the ‘uniqueness’ (Tarde apud Vargas, 2000: 213), or the ‘flow’, or ‘river of variety’ (Tarde apud Alliez, 2001: 103), of microscopic life. The presence of Hermann Lotze or Schopenhauer (regarding the ‘will’) in Tarde’s work is only less constant than that of Fechner (who is also a fascinating panpsychist), were it not the common inspiration of the monads. ¹³

The Romantic traces in the work of Marilyn Strathern, a radically empiricist ethnologist, are less explicit and enveloped in a foundational nominalism. In many cases, these traces show up in references to Wagner, whose emphasis on ‘creativity’ (1988: xii, 174) she endorses, as part of her opposition to positivist and objectified models of ‘society’ and ‘individual’ – her bêtes noires. Here and there an emphasis emerges regarding the action and agency of subjects (e.g. 1988: 93, 102), such as in those areas of her work where gift economies are counterpoised to commercial economies (p. 134), where she denounces artificiality as opposed to experience and sensibility (pp. 7, 61), or in the opposition between ‘text’ and ‘life’ (1992: 77).

Strathern expresses more frequently than her fellow contemporaries the relativity of the great divide and her preoccupation with a monolithic character of the ‘West’ or the ‘Euro-American world’, but she does this in allusions and never in a systematic manner (Strathern, 1988: 16, 348).

In his most recent works, ethnologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has moved towards the configuration I am describing here, opposing anthropological ‘theory’, for example, to native ‘life’ (2012: 164) in a very characteristic manner. A certain praise for ‘life’ and ‘authenticity’ ¹⁴ is coherent with his explicit affiliation with the tradition of Leibniz, Nietzsche, Bergson, Tarde, and Deleuze, this ‘other side of our thoughts’ or this ‘other metaphysics’, these ‘dominant countercurrents of contemporary social thought’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2012: 166).

Viveiros de Castro’s impressive new interpretation of Amazonian indigenous cosmologies is certainly a privileged place to observe in action the ‘other’ kind of inspiration: the idea of a ‘shamanic’ epistemology concentrates the explicit ambition of an association between ethnological alterity and Western philosophical alterity (Viveiros de Castro, 2002: 358). He attributes to that other epistemology a ‘subjective ideal’ opposed to the ‘de-animization’ (the ‘reification’, no doubt!) implied by the dominant Western objectivity, and proposes, following Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind, that it is restricted – in our culture – to the ‘natural reserve’ of art. And it is exactly regarding shamanism (and art) that he discards very emphatically any connection to the Romantic tradition of his ‘perspectivist’ model (2002: 488). Viveiros de Castro’s dense philosophical arguments in defense of his ethnographic proposals end up, however, confirming that connection, since his resources are all derived from the very centers of Romantic inspiration, percolating up through long and complex capillary veins.

The contemporary intricacies of difference

I have already added to the tentative original dualism a third term: nominalism/empiricism. This allows me to better tackle the complexity of the philosophical and anthropological field in the West. Just as I superficially mentioned the roots this tripartite division maintains in Christian theology, it could have been done with regards to classical philosophy, particularly Stoicism (cf. Sellars, 1999). Other minor clarifications regarding the history of these ideas are still necessary, however, to support my proposal, particularly with regards to holism and difference.

Following Deleuze’s prestigious characterization of a ‘baroque’ tradition of thought centered on Leibniz, Chunglin Kwa (2002) has formulated a critique of ‘holism’ in modern scientific thought, claiming that it is the heir of Romanticism. His historical frame does not include the Enlightenment, however, allowing him to attribute to Romanticism all the multiple totalizing formulae that emerged in scientific theories since the 19th century. He can only do this by assigning to the ‘baroque’ the fluid and procedural dimensions that are intrinsic to what I call here ‘Romanticism’. Kwa’s scheme blurs the understanding of the relationship between Romanticism and the Enlightenment, especially with regards to the complex notion of ‘organism’. It also covers up Romanticism’s deep debt to Leibniz’s philosophy. It is telling that Kwa assigns to Romanticism a taste for natura naturata, in direct contrast to – for instance – Georges Gusdorf’s exhaustive demonstration of the actual Romantic worship of natura naturans, the vital flow. ¹⁵

With the exception of Bergson and Uexküll (due to the strength of their cult among the contemporary leaders of the ‘post-’ configuration) I have not mentioned the development of philosophical and anthropological knowledge during the first half of the 20th century, a period in which one can still recognize the influence of the Romantic movement. The post-Second World War revival of these tendencies I prefer to call ‘neo-Romantic’ (Duarte, 2004). The earlier wave is, however, fundamental to our understanding of the discipline’s golden age and its current ramifications. Paramount are the movements of hermeneutics and phenomenology, with an emphasis on the monde vécu, the body, art, and intersubjetivity, in the hands of Merleau-Ponty, in one direction, and of Alfred Schütz, in another. A mention might be made to the epistemological traces of Romanticism in the works of such authors as Bateson, ¹⁶ Whitehead, ¹⁷ or Wittgenstein, all currently very influential in the ‘post-’ configuration (cf. Klagge, 2003; Rowe 1994); but the same could be said about other authors, often relegated to a secondary sphere, but relevant to the subsequent return of difference, such as Michel Leiris, Maurice Leenhardt or Roger Bastide (cf. Duarte, 2005 on the latter).

It is impossible to understand the outlines of ‘neo-Romanticism’ without paying attention to a series of authors, whose works became more or less popularized, helping to assure the flow of sensibilities necessary for keeping alight this ‘spirit of the times’ since the 19th century. I think especially of Rudolf Steiner, with his anthroposophical movement, so reverent to Goethe; Edgar Morin, with his ‘theory of complexity’; Boaventura de Souza Santos and his ‘sociology of absences’; Fritjof Capra and his ‘web of life’; or Rupert Sheldrake and his ‘morphic resonance’.

To evoke – as I did here only too briefly – some of the threads that the Romantic drive has strung through our ‘modernity’ reinforces the demonstration of the composite character of Western cosmology. It is still necessary to adumbrate the motives which led to the systematic obliteration of a recognition of this duality and its genealogy. It is possible that the recognition of the very solidarity between the non-hegemonic dimensions of Western civilization and the ‘savage thought’ which we seek beyond our frontiers might threaten the project of a post-social ethnology, so eager to discover in an alien alterity other ontologies invented ab ovo. ¹⁸

We also can’t discard the hypothesis that this repression is at least partially the result of a disciplinary ‘great divide’ whereby ethnological competency proper is separated from competency in understanding the history of complex societies (and those of the West, in particular). This combines with frequent empiricist suspicions concerning the ethnographic study of Western culture as such, vulgarly understood to be, successively or alternatively, too familiar, too vaguely defined, or too diverse for this sort of scientific approach.

In any case, it seems to be essential to throw more light on this long line of Romanticist revivals within Western ideology, so as to highlight Romanticism’s fundamental contribution to the constitution of the ‘anthropology of the West’ and its further possibilities of success – not without a reflexive twist regarding the relationship between our own symbolic order and the anthropological experience of alterity.

I propose that there is a ‘Romanticism’ – intensely shared amongst authors, currents, movements – that repeats itself in the West as a counterpoint to the Enlightenment project. This is not random, occasional, or singular, but a systematic, structural, recurring process. This demonstration is evidently a cultivated process, collectivized, conventionalizing and molar – entirely against the grain of the ‘post-’ configuration. ¹⁹ And yet a process that is absolutely necessary in order to guarantee the continued dialectic between convention and invention. After all, when the current Romantic wave settles down, in its turn, into a collectivized ‘objective culture’, a new obviation will once again take up our most precious treasures of renewal and innovation. A brand new testament awaits for brand new prophets, who will sound the same ancient trumpets.

We thus return full circle to ‘Bergson’s paradox’ in its philosophical sense: this is a systematic exercise which does not, however, differ much from the proposals of the great neo-Romanticists, who cannot escape the need to hold on to text, to the dead and stultifying logos, immuring the flashing and nervous wings of the Romantic flight.

If we also ponder, as Wagner urges, that ‘the task of building an awareness of invention constitutes the goal and culmination of the social sciences’ (1981: 158), then nothing can be more opportune than seeking the awareness of the ways in which we create – and cultivate and defend amongst ourselves – the invention … of ‘invention’.