Abstract
Van Gennep’s research interests were located in the region where the fields of folklore, anthropology, sociology, and religion overlapped. His Rites de passage reflected a broad approach to ritual and social life that took into account the natural environment, biology, and history. This article scans his interests and emphases in relation to the American school of cultural anthropology that developed in the twentieth century. It assesses parallels and differences, and points to areas deserving further clarification such as Van Gennep’s understanding of language.
The reconsideration of the work of Arnold Van Gennep in this collection evokes in my mind another theoretician – perhaps viewed as out-of-place here by some – Talcott Parsons. In his discussion of the importance of theory in The Structure of Social Action (Parsons, 1968 [1937]: 16–17), Parsons calls up the image of a strong light trained on objects of interest while everything surrounding them remains unlit. Detailed examination and conceptual attention are enabled for some phenomena, while others are relegated to darkness. This does not mean that the light cannot be shifted, whereby “residual categories” might become important empirically and theoretically. From the present volume, we learn that the same image might be applied not only to “the world” but also to the writings of theoreticians themselves. It becomes clear that throughout the twentieth century, Van Gennep’s (1909) Rites of Passage has been read, at times carefully and at times cursorily, but typically with blinders.
I cite Parsons for another reason too. My classroom training in anthropology took place during the years 1958–1963, the latter two in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard. Parsons was the driving force behind that attempt to integrate the social sciences, and working closely with him was anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn who died about a year before my graduate studies began. I had relatively extensive exposure to Parsons’ teaching and, while not viewing myself a “Parsonian” in any conventional sense, was impressed by his deep conviction that any important theoretical insight in the human sciences should find a place in his “theory of action.” This ranged – for example – from the insights produced by behaviorist psychology (even while one factor leading to the creation of “Social Relations” was to separate from the experimental psychology dominated by B.F. Skinner), to the then-recent contributions of Claude Lévi-Strauss whose impact upon Anglo-anthropology was becoming prominent. I have little doubt that Parsons would have been attracted to the current collection that locates Van Gennep’s “sociology” of rituals both in relation to physical and biological factors, on one hand, and to “cosmic” horizons on the other.
Parsons (1971) came to locate his system of action between two “environments.” One was the physical environment per se, external to human action, whose interface with the latter took place through the workings of the “behavioral organism” which was part of the action system. The other external environment was “ultimate reality” which created “problems of meaning” in the sense that concerned Max Weber. Here “culture” in its manifold forms and dynamics is the major interface. Given these correspondences between action theory and the refreshing readings of Van Gennep encountered in this collection, I will train my own disciplinary light – that of a cultural anthropologist – on some of the topics discussed, shifting focus as called for to inspect different corners but also to wonder about the unlit areas. I undertake this limited scan neither from the heights of grand theory nor from the depths of extensive familiarity with primary written sources, but as a researcher animated by ethnography – both through fieldwork and through sources appearing in earlier documents – while at times calling upon ancestors of my discipline to re-orient, re-affirm, and re-energize activity in the field.
By using the term “cultural” anthropology, I locate myself in the American tradition that defined anthropology as made up of four fields: physical anthropology, archeology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology. The latter term contrasts with what became established in Great Britain as “social anthropology,” reflecting Durkheim’s influence mediated by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. 1 While different from Malinowski’s functional approach, Radcliffe-Brown’s structural-functionalism also turned away sharply from “conjectural history” and privileged synchronic analysis, a step that never was taken to the same extreme by anthropologists in North America. On this basis, I offer some anthropology-informed observations on the re-reading of Van Gennep with reference to several themes: the sociocultural world in relation to the environment, the variable place of biology in thinking about society, and tensions between ethnography and history.
Environment
That human life is played out in a physical matrix has always been a given within anthropology. Both physical anthropology and archeology, in their late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century expressions, took this for granted. Franz Boas was highly influenced by human geography; the environment continued to be important in his work, even as he delved into the notion of culture and insisted that the environment did not operate on human life in a simple deterministic fashion. The culture areas – with special reference to native North American societies – that were mapped by him and his students had obvious anchors in their natural settings while also providing the frameworks for understanding how societies might have influenced one another over time.
After several decades, the Boasian paradigm came to be viewed as too “mentalistic” by some trained in its tradition. This may be related to the influence of and emphases by some of his prominent students – and later colleagues – Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Julian Steward (1955) was a central figure in “rebelling” against attributing a reified status to “culture.” In his scheme of “multi-linear evolution,” environment, adaptation, and technology were major factors in explaining social and cultural change. Steward’s students included Marvin Harris, an ideological and erudite cultural materialist, and more nuanced scholars such as Eric Wolf (1982) and Sidney Mintz. My hunch is that Mintz’s (1985) analysis of the historical role of processed sugar, which became a “currency” of sweetness that both flowed through human bodies and also lubricated colonial structures, would have been pleasing both to Van Gennep and to Parsons.
Beyond various concrete mutual impacts of “the environment” on humans and vice versa lies the question of how the structure of the physical universe, as it is perceived at a given period and place, becomes a taken-for-granted element of human understanding. Single anthropological monographs do not bring this question to the fore, but it was never too far from the surface during the decades when the discipline was identified with the goal of documenting human life in its variety across the globe. This apperception went hand-in-hand with the claim that anthropology was an extension of the broad thrust that looked to “modern science” to come to grips with the evolution of life forms on the planet including the human species.
The desire to unify the natural and the human was probably a more widespread background issue than is immediately apparent. A recent paper by A.M. McKinnon (2010), analyzing Weber’s famous phrase – “elective affinity” – that he took from a play by Goethe, argues that Weber built upon Goethe’s attempt to depict interactions among humans by utilizing a model from the chemistry of his day. Another example, from a corner less well known to social scientists, is found in the nascent Zionist movement which turned to the sociology of the day to learn more precisely about the situation of the Jewish people and about the region that was the focus of its national aspirations. Alexander Alon (2016) has analyzed how science and literature intertwined in these early ethnographic explorations.
Biology
In the early decades of the twentieth century, some of the challenges raised by viewing human social life in terms of natural science might receive explicit attention. In Totem and Taboo, where Freud (1950 [1913]) finds resemblance between “taboo and obsessional illness,” he also cautions not to be hasty in conclusions because “Nature delights in making use of the same forms in the most various biological connections” (p. 26). Expressions of encompassing perspectives that placed human life within nature appeared occasionally among subsequent theorists too. Lévi-Strauss has stated that the ability to analyze structure in social life is contingent upon the basis of structuring being situated within myths, society, and the human mind. At the same time, he is resigned to the reality that human beings, as the universe itself, are inexorably on the road to entropy. 2 This latter vision of a dying universe differs from the image of re-energized vitality that is found in sections of Rites of Passage but does underline that Van Gennep placed his oeuvre within the science of his day.
A different – but still related – example, and history of research, is found in the work of Gregory Bateson (1972) who has studied “primitive peoples, schizophrenia, [and] biological symmetry” (p. xvi), while he concludes that it is still necessary to continue “the search for a bridgehead” (p. xxi) that can link the fundamentals of natural sciences and those dealing with behavior. Most social research goes on while bracketing out explicit reference to such concerns, while we find a continuation of this concern in the systematized work of Roy Rappaport (1999). The foregoing sketches argue that the physical environment – including biology – was important within anthropological analysis and may further sharpen the question of why Van Gennep’s approach was overlooked. In the paragraphs that follow, I speculate (it might be more precise to say “wonder about”) about another possible dimension of this “ignor-ance.” These thoughts will lead to a further topic – the social sciences in relation to nineteenth-century paradigms of history – wherein some more firm documentation may be cited.
History
I begin this discussion by discerning a point in which Van Gennep may be set apart from American anthropology of his day. In 1896, Boas published “The limitations of the comparative method of anthropology.” In this essay, he challenged the dominant assumptions that ranked societies on an evolutionary scale and implicitly served as substitute for real history. Models of evolution relied on schemes of biological classification, including Darwin’s theory that had pervasive influence upon anthropology. Van Gennep, like Boas, rejected this overarching approach that purported to reconstruct the human past. He did not, however, detach himself from the method of close observation in vivo, nor from classifying the variety of life forms that he examined.
It is not obvious to me – perhaps future research will unravel this – what was the process whereby Van Gennep moved passed nineteenth-century paradigms where development, progress, or “evolution” were dominant tropes. The fields of his early studies in Arabic, Egyptology, and religion were forged in these conceptual molds. His introduction to Rites of Passage amply cites classic figures in anthropology and folklore such as Edward B. Tylor, William Robertson Smith, and James Frazer, while he sought to move beyond their insights. He also does not offer any notion of societal “scale” (however roughly defined). This vagueness is apparent if we look at his oeuvre in terms of the disciplines feeding into Rites of Passage or in terms of the actual societies cited within it.
Van Gennep’s interests lay at the intersection of several fields taking form at the time – notably sociology and anthropology, while circumstances brought him to be situated in a formal setting that was designated as folklore. The relationships (similarities, differences, connections, etc.) between anthropology and folklore have varied greatly in different national contexts. A widespread view links anthropology to societies far from Europe, often under imperial rule, and folklore to emerging national states within Europe. Empirically, this classification is quite simplified and hardly constitutes a neat analytic distinction. But some of the stereotypes that have been held of these disciplines serve to raise questions about aspects of Van Gennep’s work that beg to be revisited.
Moshe Blidstein’s article (2018) notes that “Mary Douglas returns to Van Gennep in focusing on purity and pollution.” She “adapts Van Gennep’s pivoting threshold, in which purification can play various roles, to this idea of a dangerous border between states requiring protection and a careful crossing.” Douglas (1966), in her seminal book Purity and Danger, sets forth her own disciplinary and analytic preferences: “Tylor founded folklore: Robertson Smith founded social anthropology” (p. 14). If the insights in this volume are relevant to the continuing folklore studies conducted by Van Gennep, the arbitrariness of Douglas’ invidious comparison (see the essay by Hochner on attitudes in France) becomes apparent and certainly tells us little about Van Gennep’s sociological orientation. We also are left with unanswered questions when one considers the range of data drawn upon in Rites of Passage.
Much of the material in the book reflects what were considered “classic” anthropological societies: not organized into states, lacking literacy, and exhibiting practices that seemed exotic to Europeans. At the same time, terms that were standard fare in nineteenth-century discourse regarding cultural “levels” are barely in evidence. 3 A descriptive term that does appear with some regularity in Rites of Passage is “semi-civilized” societies. Without an explanation, one assumes that these referred to societies that were not understood as the “simplest,” but neither were they viewed as modern. Elsewhere, there were other instances of applying numeric adjectives to societies that were not easy to categorize. Thus, Austrian Jewish author Karl Emil Franzos used the term “Half-Asian” to refer to the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe (Kilcher, 2016: 92, n 31). One criterion that might have entered into Van Gennep’s selection of the term was the role of literacy in shaping customary behavior, suggesting that his knowledge of many languages extended to paying attention to their social settings and implications.
Turning to fanciful semantic analysis for a moment, both nouns in the title Les rites de passage carry echoes of literary culture. “Rite” (both in English and in French) can mean a text-based liturgical tradition, and from the seventeenth century on Latin “passare” could refer to a “portion of writing.” Van Gennep’s examples are taken from both “tribal” and “scribal” societies. 4 At the same, without resort to formal rubrics, the book shows some tendency to consider together cases fitting the latter label. Examples from groups informed by the scriptural religions – Islam, Christianity, and Judaism – appear near one another, typically toward the end of its chapters. 5 On the other hand, they are not at all presented in terms of the philologically oriented understandings that characterized the disciplines Van Gennep had first studied.
Given Van Gennep’s knowledge of a range of languages (Thomassen, 2016: 176 and note 5 on p. 191), one wonders about his views on language per se as a central component of human society and culture. One might guess that there was resonance between the approach to society he was developing and the work of his elder contemporary in Switzerland, Ferdinand de Saussure (Senn, 1974), but a connection does not appear explicitly. I refer in particular to the latter’s opening of the realm of synchronic analysis regarding language, weakening the dominance of philological thinking. I return to the topic of diachronic and synchronic perspectives shortly.
Above, I noted Van Gennep’s retention of the comparative perspective of nineteenth-century anthropology, while turning away from crass evolutionism. He continued to be inspired by biology, both in terms of observing living forms and because he saw comparison as essential to the study of social life. Van Gennep did not classify whole societies, however. One concise but clear illustration appears in his remarks concerning the place of “special languages” during the transition phase of rituals of passage (in chapter 9; Rothem’s essay [2018] considers the broader significance of this chapter). He mentions phenomena as diverse as “languages for women, for initiates, for blacksmiths, for priests (liturgical languages), etc.” (Van Gennep, 1960 [1909]: 169). 6 Here, in terms of content, Van Gennep classifies distinct aspects, vectors, or dynamic features of social action that appear in a variety of concrete life situations in societies in many regions. Classification is crucial but is based on principles that do not entail diachronic assumptions.
This point may be highlighted by looking back at Tylor. Classification is important to ethnography in his scheme: an oft-quoted example of this position is “the bow and arrow is a species” (Tylor, 1871: 8). This fits the perspective wherein the notion of “survivals” was important, and the major task of anthropology was to look at “primitive culture” in seeking to understand earlier stages of human life. A “survival” in this paradigm is barely alive, while one recent reassessment of Van Gennep is that he “wanted social scientists to deal with living facts, rather than ‘dead’ and abstract facts” (Thomassen, 2016: 190, italics in the original). 7 Essays in this collection point in the same direction that Van Gennep’s focus was on the “creative, dynamic aspect of social practices and interactions” (Silber, 2018).
The emphasis on documenting life is one aspect of Van Gennep’s critique of disciplines that focus only on the past. These reservations have been noted by several authors. Nicole Belmont (1979) quotes the following passage: “folklore produces a feeling that the observed facts contain the seeds of future possibilities, whereas the historical fact makes one feel that all its possibilities have already been expressed” (p. 75). An indirect reference to Van Gennep’s work by a scholar of Finnish folklore cites him as calling “the historical, diachronic research the ‘maniac disease’ of the nineteenth century” (Harvilahti, 2012: 399). This does not mean that Van Gennep advocated totally ignoring history, for it was relevant in each particular subject studied ethnographically. Synchronic analysis too, if its terms of concepts are too abstract, could be deadening. Citing Thomassen (2016) again, “Van Gennep refused to see sociology, folklore and ethnography as radically separate disciplines” (p. 190). He “was searching for a new science that could allow us to return to life” (Thomassen, 2016: 189, italics in the original).
Thomassen’s observation should be juxtaposed to the understanding of Giordana Charuty (2010) that Van Gennep was oriented toward “resuming the dialogue with historians and sociologists, while nonetheless maintaining the specificity of a general anthropology in the face of these disciplines” (p. 42). I thus conclude by recalling Van Gennep’s initial training in Arabic, Egyptology, and religion. His later work entailed “passing from knowledge constructed through an exclusive familiarity with ancient texts and works of missionaries to … ethnographic observation …” (Charuty, 2010: 37). It is worth underlining again that in addition to anthropologists’ concern with behavior, the study of languages has held importance for the discipline. In the United States, linguistics was built into the work of Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, while in England, Bronislaw Malinowski (1936 [1923]) advocated careful attention to language soon after becoming the energetic champion of extended participant-observation fieldwork. Probing further into how the different aspects of Van Gennep’s interests – environment, biology, and language – are interconnected in his oeuvre may stimulate a “second life,” for his seminal work. Van Gennep seems to be an in-between figure in the development of modern social science. He advocates a connection to biology and affirms the importance of classification without endorsing evolutionism. He understands the importance of a dialogue with history, while engaging in synchronic analysis. These unsettled aspects might explain the new attention given to the unlit concepts within Van Gennep’s thought.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
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