This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

Phantom Africa by Michel Leiris

• Leiris, Michel. 1968. L’Afrique fantôme. Paris: Gallimard

  Leiris, Michel. 2017. Phantom Africa (trans. Brent Hayes Edwards). India: Seagull Books

Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss

• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1993. Tristes Tropiques Paris: Plon

  Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1969. World on a Wane (Tristes Tropiques) (Trans. J. Russell). Boston: Beacon Press

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

The Timeline: Between World Wars II and the Early Modern Period

I almost had a creative burnout from reading The Abyssinian Journey of Marcel Griaule. I now realise that reading it in a vacuum is a disservice and is unhelpful towards understanding the full context of both the writer, the subject, and the historical context. This time, I will try to read these two books side by side and see the contrasts. This has also produced a pleasurable side effect of finding pleasure (not the tyranny of deadlines) in reading once again.

The Africa that I traversed in the period between two World Wars was no longer the heroic Africa of the pioneers, nor even that from which Joseph Conrad drew his magnificent Heart of Darkness, but it was also quite different from the continent we see today awakening from a long slumber…working toward its emancipation. From this perspective, I am tempted to believe, must be sought the reason that the only thing I found there was a phantom.

Leiris, p. 63

Michel Leiris’s Diary of Becoming

Introduction |

In contrast to the absence of the self of Griaule in his accounts, Phantom Africa is the opposite. It is the direct publication of Michel Leiris’s journals that he kept, almost day to day, of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti field expedition from 1931 to 1933. In here are his thoughts, words, and observations. In effect, the chaos of change in Africa also belies the turmoil of personal growth of Leiris in his career, but also in his manhood. His later works in poetry and scholarship, for which he would be recognised, drew from this two-year expedition traversing the West to the East of the African continent. The translator of the English edition, Brent Hayes Edwards, recommends that we should actually read his personal struggles in Manhood alongside this piece. This work was written in the early 1930s, published in 1939, and republished with additional essays in 1946 during his treatment for mental illness before he became well-known. This memoir preceded his long expedition and informs his personal and career uncertainties in his Phantom Africa journal accounts.

Michel Leiris, recognised as an anthropologist, started not as one but as a writer. This would be an excellent field training to be a researcher if anyone had mentioned it to me during my crucial younger years. It is a privilege to have these early French ethnographers live a long life and look back at their work. Born in 1901, part of the Surrealists group, he passed away in 1990, spanning a period in which the world looked so different by then that the pre-war period feels like an anachronism for us. This meant that through the decades, we see Leiris shift his position on the nature of ethnography and what happened in Africa. Leiris's later reflections solidify his anti-colonial position by 1950, and explicitly stated in his 1981 preface to the English translation.

Some fifteen years later, at the beginning of the process that would lead to what was presumptuously termed “decolonization,” it seemed that the black world—was truly taking shape for me, because circumstances permitted me to think that as a researcher and writer, I could offer—rather feebly—indirect but positive support to those emerging from that black world who were struggling against oppression and asserting their cultural particularity across the globe. Surely, in order to concretize a man from an entirely different part of the world, and in order to gain his recognition—a requirement for the creation of an authentic humanism—I would have to revise my previous understanding of my profession by practicing an ethnography of militant fraternity, rather than one of detached examination or artistic sampling.

More than simply gathering information and objects—as my companions and I have done between Dakar and Djibouti, at times resorting to means that, had we been less certain of acting in the name of the good cause, we would have condemmed—so that our collections, recorded in our archives and preserved in our musems, would attest that unjustly unrecognized cultures have a value in themselves (in addition to having much to teach us), our aim was to furnish the people we were studying with the means to construct a future that would belong to them, and in the meantime to produce unassailable work to support their claims; such were the inspiring goals that I assigned to ethnography a few years after World War II, after I had matured under the trials of the German occupation and been aided by the course that my professional life had taken in the new era.

Leiris, pp. 59-60

Aside from what his work means for anti-colonial activists and scholars, or advocates for a radical museum practice, his eyes and mind’s eye take us back intimately to a time no longer in existence—a double phantom, a shadow left over from momentary fragments of two time periods—Leiris’ 1930s Africa and our own memory of 1940s-1950s, increasingly further away from our AI-driven delirium standpoint. What we have left are Leiris’s notebooks as evidence of regret, adventure, and disappointment.

…[Phantom Africa is] an expression of my disappointment as a Westerner uneasy in his own skin who had foolishly hoped that his long voyage in remote lands—and true contact, via scientific observation, with their inhabitants—would transform him into a different, more open man, cured of his obsessions. In a way, my disappointment drove me, the egocentric that I then still was, to deny through my title a full existence to that Africa where I found many things, but not deliverance.

Leiris, p. 59

He is unapologetic that Phantom Africa is a subjective, half-documentary and half-poetic exegesis of his experience of what he calls the drift, as the “slow erasure due to time’s passing.” This approach meant that Leiris’s work endures to a greater number of readers today. For someone in search of the Great Works in Anthropology, Leiris’s work illuminates the urgency of capturing unfashionable insights but also fragments of human culture prior to rapid disappearance by conquest and hypercapitalism.

Travel and travellers are two things I loathe—and yet here I am, all set to tell the story of my expeditions. But at least I’ve taken a long while to make up my mind to it: fifteen years have passed since I left Brazil for the last time and often, during those years, I’ve planned to write this book, but I’ve always been held back by a sort of shame and disgust. So much would have to be said that has no possible interest: insipid details, incidents of no significance.

Lévi-Strauss, p. 17

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Journey to the Amazon

Chapters 1-3 |

Another phantom and time drift also occur in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil. This work by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) reveals his poetic strength that lends authority and also empathy to his ethnographic accounts of the Indians in the Brazilian Amazon. Rather than a diary account, the structure follows what is recognised as the second book in French anthropology, which follows the Rhetorical Sandwich.

I had only known Lévi-Strauss via this theoretical framework, French Structuralism, which argues for a common universal mind and way of thinking (in the simplistic way). It is an answer to the question of why different cultures have the same creation myths and flood myths. He has been portrayed as distant with his abstract view of human culture reduced to linguistics. This book shows Lévi-Strauss as less than a demi-god in anthropology but a nascent ethnographer who found himself an opportunity to practice ethnography.

That one civilization is ending and another beginning; that our world has suddenly found itself to be too small for the people who live in it; these are facts which became real to me, not because of figures or statistics or revolutions but because I happened, a few weeks ago, to make a certain telephone call. I had been playing with the idea of retrieving my youth by a return visit, after fifteen years, to Brazil. The answer was that I should need to book my cabin four months in advance.

Lévi-Strauss, pp. 23-24

Like Leiris, Lévi-Strauss’s phantom Amazon catches him between periods of the World Wars. He situates us with the complexity of travel when alliances in France and across the waters complicate a months-long sea voyage. France was occupied by the Germans (1940-1944) under the sympathetic Vichy government. He could not get a Brazilian visa, so he hatched the idea of going to South America by way of the United States. At that time, there was an opportunity granted to European scholars oppressed by the Germans to travel. He was able to acquire a New School for Social Research in New York visitor entry, which was later promptly cancelled.

For some reason, he did not appear to need a visa in the end but only a reservation made to the same Compagnie des Transports Maritimes office in which he travelled luxuriously prior to the war. This time, the company, recognising him, dissuaded him from buying any ticket because, as Lévi-Strauss later found out, the Capitaine Paul Lemerle was akin to a convict ship. His previous idea of

…sharing the labours of and the frugal repasts of a handful of seamen, sailing hither and yo on a clandestine vessel, sleeping on deck, and gaining in health and strength from the day-long nearness of the sea.

Lévi-Strauss, p. 25

was little more than a cattle train, with three hundred fifty people crammed into a small vessel that had only two cabins and seven couchettes. The nightmare was made intolerable with unlikely ship characters, one of whom is an associate of Lenin, and other mysterious figures. As is common in the opening, personal hygiene tops the list of travel descriptions that wake the reader to the sights and smells of a crowded humanity trying to defecate on two wooden cubicles containing a long wooden trench that protrudes into the ocean at all hours of the day. Trying to shower is also no good with only two douche cabins. His movements and disembarkation were also restricted at times because of his French passport as they made numerous stops in the Mediterranean, West Africa, before finally landing at Fort de France, the capital of Martinique, the Lower Antilles region. Yes, he had deliriums of ease and escape.

After a month at sea we suddenly glimpsed, in the middle of the night, the lighthouse of Fort de France. And the hope which filled all our hearts was not that of enjoying, at long last, an eatable meal, a bed with real sheets, or a night’s unbroken rests. No: these people who had been used, on land, to what the English call the ‘amenities of civilization’ had suffered more from the unavoidable filth of these conditions—aggravated as these were by great heat—than from hunger, or fatigue, or sleeplessness, or promiscuity, or other’s contempt.

Lévi-Strauss, pp. 27-28

It was not to be. Lévi-Strauss discovered that toilets were no less in existence in the capital than they were on their ship. The nightmare continued on Port de France, rendering him to remark that their sea voyage was an Eden compared to the military reception that they would receive. The garrison was overcome by paranoia about the Allies (enemies) despite not seeing them. Happily, this was only restricted to the morning; by afternoon, they were rambling around the city with Lévi-Strauss ruminating about the state of human society and war. He goes back into his memory bank of the time he almost lost all his research on his return trip back to France on account of stricter rules on artefact collection. Lucky for Lévi-Strauss, a foul up of bureaucratic proportions enabled him to haul his research back to France. Sad for Brazil. It is this same cock up that enabled him to keep his research materials in Customs in Martinique and receive them intact as he landed in Porto Rico under the U.S. flag. Lévi-Strauss returned to the Carribean and later on to his position to the University of Sao Paolo in Brazil.

Round Up

The twin readings of two different types of books—a diary and a standard second book counter the demand for scientific detachment for two different reasons. In Michel Leiris’s case, he was attempting to show a different type of ethnographic writing practice—what it is exactly is unsure for the moment—but one that is not hinged on the impersonal as a form of knowledge creation. Thus, his decision to publish an unadorned and unedited accounts from his series of diaries hopes to express some of his early ideas about anthropological practice and socio-historical context through unvarnished impressions as a way to reveal truth in the field.

In Claude Lévi-Strauss’s motivation, he is clearly aware that he is writing within the genre of the second book. The structure follows the travel book format though he resists the idea, but his tale of an ethnographic travel is one that explodes the myth of the pristine and isolated tribes. For the world is reeling in chaos and his opportunity came to take up a position at a newly opened sociology position at the University in Sao Paolo, making fieldwork among the Amazonian Indians, merely convenient and expedient (as is common in our field).

None of their encounters are isolated groups of people. In both their disparate works, they witness the old ways that are vulnerable to loss from conquest and rapid industrialisation. How knowledge and personal growth can best be described or recorded is the reason literature writing is a balm for these two authors.

Further Reading:

Leiris, Michel. 1992 [1939, 1946]. Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

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This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

The Abyssinian Journey by Marcel Griaule

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1991. Les Flambeurs d’hommes. Paris: Gallimard

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1935. The Abyssinian Journey (trans. E.G. Rich) London: J. Miles

Beginning: My faulty impression | Chapter One| Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapters Four and Five | Chapter Six (Part 1) | Chapter Six (Part 2) | Chapter Seven and Eight

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

Postscript to Marcel Griaule

My initial impression of the travel book by Marcel Griaule, one of the first French ethnographers who went on field after training under Marcel Mauss, remains the same. With my contemporary sensibilities, I would not personally read this for literary entertainment. It is difficult to be enamoured of this work because he wrote in the third person and we know so little of his actual thoughts, ideas and analysis. Thus, it was difficult for me to find myself continually fully immersed into the journey. This was an example of the empirical descriptive mode of transmitting knowledge.

This writing experiment attempts to transmit authentic information and experience to the reader by way of minimal interpretation. The assumption is that the less interpretation there is, the more transparent it is for the reader to judge the events accordingly. Rather than an immersive experience, the reader is forced to use this distant lens to ascribe a greater weight of truth-telling because he can ultimately be the judge to what is happening. Therefore, Griaule need not cover up any of the harsh conditions on both sides of the field—he was the White Man, a person who sits atop the horse while meeting new interlocutors, a person who cannot stomach the stale bread that they had to eat daily or the slaves that even his Abyssinian contacts hired, how they treated them, or the fear and dislike of the subjects of the King himself because he taxed them too much. Those that simply see colonialism (with a big C) here miss the nuanced local, sometimes oppressive, realities happening on the ground, too. We read a lot of terrible conditions for the sake of research.

This writing style allows for interpretation and re-interpretation from his peers and contemporary readership as we shall see in the coming weeks.

It is unsurprising that the rhetoric that Griaule uses (or the impression that the translator made in this instance) to convince his reader of his ethnographic authority rests on recognisable Christian key themes of suffering (Cavalry) and eventual redemption as his opening and closing tropes.1 This is effective bread sandwich for the otherwise bland middle filling using ‘scientific’ empirical reporting. Remarkably, despite his interest in deep knowledge of the sacred, secret knowledge and ritual, spiritually is not a question he tackles. This is fairly common for those that investigate religion or beliefs. It is just much easier to account for what can be seen on the outside—performance and other observable patterns such as repetition. In doing so, spiritually is left for things and experiences outside of our governable senses—such as, why they never shot the hippopotamus during a hunt. If only they asked that question, perhaps we might get a different answer from all the priests and ritual specialists they talked with.

It took decades—until the end of Marcel Griaule’s life for him to pierce the veil of knowledge among the Dogon. His legacy is a step ladder moving from the external observations using his early experiences in Abyssinia to publish about masks and games as prelude to finally entering the interal world of the Dogon in Mali. His Abyssinia fieldwork in 1929 provided the foundation to the larger and extensive Mission Dakar-Djibouti field expedition that took two years between 1931-1933.

From the small to the grand, this extensive French expedition produced numerous contributions in multiple fields. But also fodder for criticism in Africanist and the discipline of anthropology until today. His work on The Abyssinian Journey will be overshadowed by his later works on the Dogon of Mali.

The Dogon of Bundiagara in Mali is a community nestled in the highlands with residential hamlets embracing the cliff sides. Griaule and all successive ethnographers were fascinated by the extensive use of masks for ritual and what’s behind them.

His interest in the Dogon follows his second fieldwork, the extensive Mission Dakar-Djibouti, with several other trips in 1935 to 1939 in Mali, Cameroun and Chad. After the War, several visits continued between 1946 to 1956. That wouldbe his final visit since he succumbed to his illness and died. His findings culminated in a summary of his understanding into the hidden knowledge of the Dogon in the work, Conversations with Ogotemmêli. All is not lost since he trained and collaborated on the next generation who continued and expanded other shared research interests and questions on other fields such as art, linguistics, archaeology, ethnobotany, and ethnozoology.2 A research vessel, a kind of mobile laboratory was even set up at the river of the Niger to continue investigations beginning 1955.

Griaule’s legacy may be mapped in two phases according to Africanist scholars—before his book on the Conversations with Ogotemmêli, originally published in 1938, and those that came after it. His early study on the Masks of Dogon characterise his first long fifteen years of research. This early phase was characterised by his descriptive writing of what informants call ‘simple knowledge’ cluster or la parole de face. His interview with the sage Ogotemmêli was characteristically different both in writing and the level of knowledge. Here, he sheds his academic descriptive approach to one that worked for him with communicating to his general reader—an informal tone, reminiscent of his book on the Abyssinian Journey. This approach is in contrast to its contents, what his primary informant agreed to share with him called la parole claire, or secret knowledge.

I think the interest is quite common among anthropologists at that time, a search for a pre-colonial African civilisation. African art has already achieved high culture status and admiration in France even before the fieldwork but has even soared higher with research into the Masks of Dogon. A longing to understand a deep culture beneath every day life is one he first explored in Abyssinia and continued in Mali with his search for a pre-colonial African philosophy foregrounding their civilisation. A belief system ordering every day life is reminiscent of Pierre Bourdieu’s search of the structure/practice undergirding Moroccan culture. In his work with Ogotemmêli, Griaule attempts to connect the Dogon cosmology and creation myths to cultural features such as textiles, basket weaving and to the larger institutions of kinship, family life and political life.3 It begins with the creation story, defined by the Nummo Pair creative spirits, much like water, as the source of life. It continues to the description of the celestial skies by way of a basket that describes the cosmic organisation.

Unlike his disengaged narration in Abyssinian Journey, I really quite find this translated work rather engaging with Ogotemmêli leading the charge and teaching Griaule about the secret ways. The tables of power seemingly has turned and Griaule seems to have become a student after all these years! Life in the village is interspersed with some quite interesting details about the creation of man by the Nummo as explained by the cowrie shells arranged in front of Griaule.

The Nummo’s womb had transformed a man’s bones into coloured stones…so as to form the outline of a skeleton laid out flat on its back in the place where the body has been [bottom of the tomb], with its head to the north.

Griaule, p. 50

Whithin this illustration, the order of the gender is defined as a relationship of position and location in which the males are the upper part and the females occupying the lower part (such as the forearm assigned to females and the males as the thighs).

This logic also follows the alternating physical composition of the fingers on the hand to structure the number the days of the week. Within this framework, Ogotemmêli’s creation myths also matches the Dogon’s eight ancestral families. The family ranking determines who the ideal marriage partners are. In what would be life’s symmetry, these matches total into the number 9 which is the rank of chieftainship.

Had I known that this work is not just about ritual chants or anything of that sort, I would have lapped this up.4 I am a sucker for ethnographic detail that describes mythmaking and its correspondence to culture and real life! This is why I was attracted to studying mortuary ritual practices, the last bastion before modernity and post-modernity completely erases unique beliefs. The work also includes information on basketry, weaving, house layout and construction, ritual and sacrifice, bodily composition, and it seems endless and I am just halfway on the book. Every anthropologist who go to the field dreams of a key informant who can spell out everything in a culture. This reads like that—a specialist who outlines every single cosmological relationship with every day life. I now understand why this work not only had a big impact on African scholarship but also on the general readership that continue to visit the Dogon area and build a tourism culture there.

Fake or Fraud?

It is this neat correspondence to cosmological order and culture that Dutch ethnologist, Walter E.A. van Beek picked apart. Van Beek was part of a multi-disciplinary team, focusing on ecology, who settled in the drier highlands. Although he attested that he did not set out to study the Dogon, it was inevitable that he had to deal with the previous work several decades after Griaule. His fieldwork in the late 70’s and 80’s was contemporaneous to the second generation of anthropologists continuing Griaule’s work such as Germaine Dieterlan. She published and co-authored with Griaule about a mythical trickster figure, the opposite of Nummo, called The Pale Fox.

A critique of a prominent dead anthropologist is sure to garner a measure of fame for any anthropologist (as one of the responses lobbied against him).5 Indeed, this has gone below my radar because this was largely limited to the African studies circle which should not have been the case. What Van Beek raises here is the discussion regarding the nature of evidence but also the methodology leading to knowledge in Anthropology. This is why it remains important to read these (the gossip/insider aspect is too tempting to ignore as well).

In a nutshell, Van Beek disproves most everything that you have read previosuly. It started out innocently curious exercise since Van Beek had always been interested in ritual. Thus, it didnt take long for him to try to track and verify Griaule’s findings. Without going to extensive details one by one, Van Beek found that none of his informants, priests, or villagers knew about the creation myths outlined by Ogotemmêli or any of its real-life counterparts or equivalences. He scoured other African cultures and found no correlation or similar data to match up to what the sage mentioned. Is it valid to have secret knowledge when the rest of the folks had no idea about what he was talking about? None of Ogotemmêli’s successors and descendants knew about the myths he mentioned except perhaps his circle that has long passed.

Could this be an elaborate hoax on Griaule? One story going around is that perhaps Ogotemmêli was playing a harmless game on him. However, Van Beek’s criticism comes at a time that Griaule is no longer alive to contest these accusations. No mention of journals or fieldnotes were made during the course of his criticism or responses so I do not know if those exist to corroborate or refute. It seems the predominant appraisal is that Griaule was extrapolating his own knowledge and understanding such as (especially when it came to naming and describing Sirius star sigu tolo or pô tolo, and the associated star companions èmè ya tolo). Van Beek argues that no one outside of Griaule’s informants know about this or its relevance to daily life. According to Van Beek his informants attest that if these are relevant, it is “tèm” or that everybody knows about it. The reason for secrecy, he argues, is less about exclusivity of knowledge but rather of shame, accusations of witchcraft and sorcery. The astronomy misdetail is one such discrepancy he highlights. Though the creator spirit Nommo exist, the other god figures were missing. There are a lot of details Van Beek raised but you get the gist.

My main point here is that, just like some of the responses pointed out, Van Beek is several decades too late (50 years) to ask Griaule. It was not clear what the responses of the Griaule school since Van Beek did have a French translation and sent it to Dieterlan and was available to be read by other colleagues who have since retired. From what Van Beek shared, none of them contradicted his findings but he is expecting them to defend Griaule’s data. Jacky Bouju of University in Provence Aix-Marseille agreed with Van Beek’s position and positions this work in its extreme as “intercultural fictions”, a literary work.

What remains interesting are the responses from prominent people in the field that highlight problems in methodology.

• What could be the potential methods that can be used to disprove Griaule taking into account historical changes, different informants, villages, and time? (Mary Douglas, E. Redaux, Claude Meillassoux)

  • why did Van Beek not use the two films available since 1938 (au pays Dogon and sous les masques noirs) for verification, authenticity, or objectivity?

  • why did Van Beek not clearly state his methods? such as the life histories of his informants?

• Is this an exercise in the question of truth or trust? (Ian Crawford)

• What about the work of other anthropologists and linguists following Griaule such as Calame-Griaule on linguistics, Le Boeuf’s body-house connection, Paulme’s ethnography? or even Daniel Forde organising workshops on the topic? (Mary Douglas)

• How do we separate Ogotemmêli from the anthropologist himself? (Claude Meillassoux)

The best take that I have read so far was from another African scholar, Andrew Apter who had a much more nuanced position. He contradicted a predominant view that much of Griaule’s observations did not exist or has ever existed in Dogon. He argues that secret knowledge la parole claire is not a fixed set of knowledge but one that was fluid. This was what he has seen among the Yoruba in Nigeria similar to the Dogon in which they had secret knowledge. Rather than pierce it, Apter opted to study the surrounding mechanisms that maintain the secrecy. The result is that he started getting multiple responses ranging from surface level interpretation to symbols (e.g. blessings) to forbidden themes (e.g. division or bloodshed) relevant especially to royal political institutions and ritual practice. This means that secret knowledge must change as local relations also change. It would not be a surprise that Van Beek never found the same corpus of knowledge 50 years ago.

Aftermath

Like a lot of these debates, these questions remain unanswered in Anthropology more generally, especially to specific methods on evaluating work decades after. I thoroughly enjoyed one great example that this was done on the Nuer of Sudan. Dr. Sharon E. Hutchinson revisited the research done by E. Evans-Pritchard but the key differences include not recovering or reconstructing a pristine culture untouched by the colonial administration as was the typical approach of anthropologists quickly documenting a disappearing way of life. This meant that Hutchinson included the realities of inter-cultural war, the presence of guns, child soldiers, the pressures of the nation-state, and the commodification of their valued cows. I read her ethnography, Nuer Dilemmas, for pleasure almost twenty years ago and it has stayed with me because it was so good. It doesn’t completely discount Pritchard’s work but paves the way of seeing the Nuer without filters. There is value in keeping both types of records in conversation with each other.

Just because Van Beek did not see these realities on the ground meant that as Apter argues, secret knowledge change as the social conditions shift. Reading more and more of Griaule’s other works demonstrates how a historical record of an older way of life remains valuable for critique but also a description of a way of life that may no longer be in practice today. Typically, anthropologists admonish that no culture really dies because they adapt. Traditions still die and practices are forgotten. It is part of the job of an anthropologist to document those as closely as possible with the flaws of the observer and observed with the clarity necessary for any judgement to be given.

Round Up

The impact of Marcel Griaule on anthropology and African scholarship begins from The Abyssinian Journey. This was our first peak into how he approaches research and writing. The explorer/hero persona he wishes to convey are genre specific that not just establishes his authority but also initiates the reader into another travel genre that is ethnographic. He uses the suffering trope of a hero to communicate not just his physical survival but also the success of a science/exploratory enterprise.

This was essential to fund the grander two year Mission Dakar-Djibouti in 1931-1933 that began the long commitment of Marcel Griaule to the Dogon of Mali. His work on Ogotemmêli capped his dedication to unlock the secret knowledge and cosmology of the Dogon. This is where his legacy truly shines by the amount of criticism and review that continues up until today. The questions critics raise haunt the field of anthropology and deserve further discussion.

Further Reading:

Apter, A. (2005). Griaule’s Legacy: Rethinking “la parole claire” in Dogon Studies (L’héritage de Griaule: repenser la Parole claire dans les études dogon). Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 45(177), 95–130. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4393464

Borofsky, R. (1997). Cook, Lono, Obeyesekere, and Sahlins: CA* Forum on Theory in Anthropology. Current Anthropology, 38(2), 255-282. (overview of the debate on interpreting the historical figure of Captain Cook and re-reading the archives)

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1972 [1977]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Ferguson, R. B. (2015). History, explanation, and war among the Yanomami: A response to Chagnon’s Noble Savages. Anthropological Theory, 15(4), 377-406. (This is one of many responses to Chagnon which is typical of the anthropologist’s position to cultural representation.)

Griaule, Marcel. 1938 [1948]. Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press (a fun informal and easy read of cosmology with daily life)

Hutchinson, Sharon E. 1996. Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State. Berkeley: University of California Press (highly recommended for pleasure reading)

Shankman, Paul. 2009. The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press (my first encounter to the harsh criticism against Mead that deserves to be read)

Van Beek, Walter E.A., Bedaux, R. M. A., Blier, S. P., Bouju, J., Crawford, P. I., Douglas, M., Lane, P., & Meillassoux, C. (1991). Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule [and Comments and Replies]. Current Anthropology, 32(2), 139–167. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743641

The ongoing draft and outline of our project are available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

The Abyssinian Journey by Marcel Griaule

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1991. Les Flambeurs d’hommes. Paris: Gallimard

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1935. The Abyssinian Journey (trans. E.G. Rich) London: J. Miles

Beginning: My faulty impression | Chapter One| Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapters Four and Five | Chapter Six (Part 1) | Chapter Six (Part 2)

Chapter Seven + Chapter Eight

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

Dear Readers,

It is never a popular to review in-depth any book. The downward trajectory of readers statistics follow what we already know from any TV series of any kind—the numbers fall off a cliff. I am sharing out loud what Iam seeing. Hence, we already know why the churn is so high and so many of our favourite series are cancelled, just like that.

Yet, if you are continuing to read this, I appreciate your commitment and patience. I am learning just as much as you are about a country I hardly know, much less its past. This is the reality of learning; none of it might be flashy or make sense now, but the pay off is down the line. I am almost sure all the time.

We´re halfway to the Lenten season marking 25 more days before Palm Sunday and Easter. I am getting used to the meatless one meal a day though one still struggles daily. That is the way.

Onward,

Melanie

Life in Addiet, Gojjam Country is working out nicely for French ethnographer, Marcel Griaule and his colleague, Marcel Larget. The year is 1929 and Griaule is beginning the French fieldwork tradition in anthropology. Once merely a rational project, collections are now starting to be animated from its context in the field. Their connection to the governor Ras Hailou of Gojjam Country in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) has paid off with access to court priests, painters, artists, and doctors who offered them information. They are in the moment of settlement, thus, the novel becomes ethnographic, like what we saw in an eerie moment of execution in the princely court.

Riding to Lake Tana

It does not suffice for the reader of any novel to simply stay under the canvas of the tent, or for Griaule to do so. Hence, the expedition continues to look for other examples of churches elsewhere and drawings found in them. They were thwarted from visiting Bégamder since Hailou warned them that the governor there mistreated two European diplomats and their wives. Instead, Hailou prepared a light caraven for them to visit Lake Tana.

They moved first to Abbaye d´Eau, then to a place with no water source before reaching Gong-Michel. It is here that we read of an account of the men transferring charcoal tracing from a deteriorating church-temple for their collection. Though the resident resisted it, it was only through the authority of the Ras Hailou through his chamberlain Mon Soleil that they relented. Such is the nature of their collection disclosed in these pages.

As I sit here beside my picture window, I feel the afternoon heat of the sun strike me and I could feel the desert heat that Griaule´s expedition undergoes especially as they stop in the oasis as they head north.

As happens every time when one has toiled for days in waterless and joyless districts, the immediate borders of the banks seemed a paradise of freshness, verdure and the like…anyone can realise them by walking in the dunes for a week, under a sun as heavy as a rock, and coming out suddenly on an oasis.

Griaule, p. 182

They have arrived at Lake Tana. At Gong-Michel, water was drawn by lying on rocks on your side and stretching your arm inside a deep hole with a jar to draw out the water. Not so at Lake Tana, you would have to wade until it reached your chest to draw water. What Griaule found along the shore was disgusting.

Walking along this hospitable shore, it was found to be full of filth; the lake also was covered with refuse of all sorts, human and otherwise, with swollen bodies of small mammals and birds, rushes and limp flowers. It was a collection of sewage. The women went to draw water beyond this latrine thirty meters broad which was a frieze along the banks. The laziest stayed near the bank, pushed aside the putrefying stuff and plunged the jar.

The Tana is the reservoir of the Nile, its water tank and cesspool. There one begins to comprehend the mystery of the fecundation of the whole Egyptian system by the rise of the river.

Griaule, p. 182-183

This disabuses the reader from imagining a pristine lake. The locals living in the area are not naturally environmental and problems plague a common resource such as the source of the Nile.

Eaters of the Hippos

After pitching their tent at the mouth of river, Griaule and his expedition encountered the Wohitos, also speaking Amharic, who have come, not on the behest of the royal chamberlain Mon Soleil or Ras Hailou but a chance encounter. The Wohitos came to hunt hippopotamuses on the river using a gun but also paralysing them with poisoned arrows. However, it takes many arrows and a long wait, sometimes days or nights to find a wounded beast by the river beds. Hence, the preference for the gun.

Like any good researcher, Griaule was interested to learn more about how this was done. Thus, he arranged for the next morning a trip aboard two reed boats (tanqwa) which Griaule himself cleaned it to ensure that the boat was of sound quality before boarding it. One cannot be too sure!

It was neither a canoe nor a raft, but a careful assemblage of dry reeds, which overlapped each other. The two ends were held by lashings of palm fibre,but while the bow ended in a sort of roll which slid along on the level of the water, the stern turned up vertically.

Griaule, p. 185

This watercraft measures five yards and twenty inches wide at its bulkiest part. For a chase, they used a narrower craft than this. With an oarman in the bow and another on the stern, Griaule and Larget sat at the middle and sailed through the gulf of the Bord du Lackuntile they entered a narrow channel bounded by thick vegetation. They moved slowly through the network of canals until they reached clumbs of papyrus and hipopotamus grass. The dung of the hippos looked like anthills. They reached the island called the Head of the Nile and this was the junction in which the canals turned into rapids. They carried the tanqwas on their heads until they found a gentler current. Once they reached the rocky inlets, the landscape was filled with a multitude of waterfowls.

After selecting an area, the Wohito became motionless and started to sing in the extinct Wohito language, naming the special parts of the hippopotamus. He was convinced of its efficacy and tapped their reed poles to check that nothing was underneath them to capsize them.

Suddenly, a hundred yards away, six spots were sighted and it raised to become a whole head then quickly disappeared. At fifty yards, there were eight hippopotamus heads appeared in a line to the hunters.

There are three males and five females. One is with young; three small ones are coming behind.

The singer enthusiastically sang expecting the bounty of meat for the winter. The hippos moved closer at twenty yards, displaying their open Yet, Griaule and Larget did not shoot and neither did the Wohitos. They were supernatural beings, remarked the Wohitos. They came so near because they were drawn to the music of their fathers, they intoned.

No hippopotamus was killed.

I rank the hippopotamus hunt as the second most entertaining event in this entire book. The next few events find the expedition visiting churches, documenting the paintings and visiting other neighbourhood localities.

It is clear that nothing else is happening. Griaule and Larget are ready to go home. Food is one indication that you have had it.

Some people get used to native cooking; to the rancid cakes, the excess of pimiento, to the smoky smell and the unspeakable butter. Others make loyal attempts, craning their necks at the passage of the bowl of food, cleverly spacing out mouthfuls and ending sooner or later by vomiting out the whole.

The two travellers belonged to the latter category.

Everyone to his taste.

Griaule, p. 213

Aside from the food, money was depleted. The expedition had spent a total of fifteen hundred francs on food and they withheld further outlay for future expenses. France had also not received any news from the expedition for four months. It the Prince who offered a caravan with guards and muleteers. Griaule felt his gifts cancelled out the cost of the court´s outlay and so he accepted. So they trudged back to Addis-Ababa, with a horse and mules dying along the way in their twentieth day marching back.

The Departure Trope

It was a grand send-off with the Prince summoning himself on a white mule and thousands at his behest. Before departure, he asked Griaule to send a letter to Minister Poincare and a gold cup which has not been made. This meant that couriers would accompany the already burgeoning mass of people with them. Their departure is a grand exit full of gifts of animals for the museum and for Griaule. The trumpet sounded their departure and finally the crowd receded as the expedition left Addiet on to Addis Ababa.

The journey is a bookend to the suffering at the beginning of the trip—sixteen fully loaded mules delivering the triumph of the research; the final meals of potatoes that were replaced by the detested cabbage. The expedition was shedding guards and animals with the chamberlain Mon-Soleil instructing the peasant how to care for a dying mule. Griaule was annoyed as to include it in his entry.

It was as if the animals were also tired, as wounds stink from the packs and the lashings around their girths and pustules swelling. The jackals keep close smelling the mules and howling by day and night. They have not crossed the Nile and the mules were weakening. Griaule was hungry and dreaming of food. No grass or barley and no fowl for the people. They had to unpack and repack them as the mules climbed the hills. It was desperate until locusts attacked and covered the plain into a buzzing black blanket. Now the crew had snacks, even the monkeys feasted. But it came too late for the eagles, the partridge, the toucan, even the monkeys from indigestion. Griaule and Larget could no longer keep the native cakes in their stomachs. They still had a hundred and five or ten kilometres more from the field of Ellelle to Addis.

The last stage involved Griaule walking beside the animals and ensuring that basketry items destined for the Trocadero would reach home. As they approached nearer and nearer to the capital, Griaule gained more and more energy and joy and even hallucinating a French tart from the sun at the plateau. They were going at an average speed of eight kilometers an hour. They encountered a tornado, light rain and rested at Souloulta. Griaule needed to lie on his back to ease the sun burn. No drinkable water after a storm, turning a brook yellow. At least it was the late afternoon with the sun waning but the approaching night dangerous from the hyenas at a distance.

At the final stages, they were delusional from hunger, exhaustion, and dreams of food.

The two men (Kabbada, Griaule´s Mohammedan guard accompanying him) awaited a miracle. At heart one is always waiting for a miracle. One is always thinking that he is going to turn the corner of the road and enter a life of splendour and ease. Great fatigue and great hunger resemble each other as sisters with intoxication by alcohol, as far as their influence on the imagination in the beginning is concerned.

Griaule, p. 244

They encountered two travelers and traded money for their two mules. Initially frightened, they scrambled to pick up the coins tossed on the ground. Within an hour´s travel to the hill of Entoto, the ascent was arduous and the descent was equally interminable.

Suddenly, lights flashed before them, like Jesus Christ.

Griaule saw a reddish brown beard—saved by the French Legation.

The traveller went on his way and reached the Legation. They took him from the saddle, undressed him, cut off his boots from his feet stuck to the leather with blood, and put him into a hot bath, where he fainted, with the idea that he was no longer of any importance.

Then he went to the table. He emptied a tureen of soup and was brought other things. And bread! Fresh bread, well raised, bread for a king, the bread of a dream, impossible bread.

Then, still with that idea that it had absolutely no sort of importance, he wept before the servants.

Griaule, p. 246

Apparently, Griaule and his guard went ahead and fresh mules were sent to the expedition. It would be four days later that Larget descended the hill of Entoto. Only two of the mules survived from the original sixteen. Larget arrived with a monkey in his pocket surrounded by servants. He tipped his hat to Griaule, who responded in kind. At last, it was the end of their campaign.

The tension broke with a trumpet blasting sounds of joy at the return. Kabbada shouts for joy.

And so Griaule writes a dramatic finish, even with more flair than when he started at the crossing of the Nile. He borrows from Cavalry, at near death and starvation towards the finish. Half dead he reached the Legation and was revived by the comforts of Western life—a warm bath, soup, and real bread. It drove an adult man to tears. I am unsure whether Griaule exaggerated his account because Larget seemed fine upon his return. He could be describing his inner turmoil and death. Nevertheless, the end marks the creation of heroes who will cross again the width of Africa from Dakar to Djibouti in 1931 told in our next French work, Phantom of Africa by Michel Leiris.

Round Up

The final chapters of Marcel Griaule´s account highlights one last interesting ethonographic encounter with the Wohitos, the eaters of hippopotamus. In contrast to their objective of visiting churches and collecting rubbings of church art and drawings, they make a supernatural encounter in the wild. A song summons the hippos close and yet the Europeans and the Wohitos did not kill them. Something moved them and will remain unexplained. It is uncanny that they attribute the spiritual in nature but never in their numerous visits in churches. Not once.

The departure trope provides an appropriate heightened capstone for the expedition—much suffering for the cause of science, yet triumphant in the end. Despite the deaths and near starvation, the fieldwork proved to be fruitful and signalled the success of the ethnographic project for France and anthropology. There are precious items collected for research and display. They remain difficult to digitally access but they are there in the archives.

This account demonstrates what an ethnographic project looks like without any interpretation by Griaule. It was a notation of facts, though filtered, the reader still does not grasp what was truly happening. Without the insight of the researcher, we the reader only sees a description but never the meaning. An objective reality does not exist and knowledge suffers as a result.

Further Reading:

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Engelke, Matthew. 2008. The Objects of Evidence. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14: S1-S21. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00489.x (click the title to read the full paper on JSTOR)

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press (see Chapter Three)

Kuipers, Joel. 2013. Evidence and Authority in Ethnographic and Linguistic Perspective. Annual Review of Anthropology. 42:399-413. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145615 (open access)

The ongoing draft and outline of our project are available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

The Abyssinian Journey by Marcel Griaule

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1991. Les Flambeurs d’hommes. Paris: Gallimard

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1935. The Abyssinian Journey (trans. E.G. Rich) London: J. Miles

Beginning: My faulty impression | Chapter One| Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapters Four and Five | Chapter Six (Part 1)

Chapter Six (Part 2)

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

The court of the Prince, son of the governor Ras Hailou of Gojjam Country in Abyssinia (Ethiopia), is all summoned.1 The Dwarf Court of Justice is what I call the importance of the sacred in matters of adjudication in Gojjam. The figure of the dwarf or the court jester as the literal seat in the proceedings manifests the divine and material power of the Prince.

Every travel account needs a sensational account. After all, the public must buy books. And this is Marcel Griaule’s first fieldwork whale. Now, we are ready to begin.

The Prisoner’s Examination

The criminal, no longer assumed to be innocent in this account, after all, he was caught red-handed shooting at the Prince and falling into the bosom of the tree he was atop. Unsurprisingly, he received heavy blows when he was pushed towards the dais of the Prince.

The man bore a heavy stone on his neck; he had chains on his wrists, which joined, on the one hand, an iron collar, and, onthe other, rings on his feet which were bound together by a single link. He bent towards the bed the austerely solemn head of the Jew of the Passion; his head was haloed with long crisp hair dressed straight on his head in the ancient mode of true warriors and hunters. He had the bright complexion which the Abyssinians call red.

Griaule, p. 158

The stream of spectators at times struck the prisoner, who had to jump forward in order not to fall. Slowly, with short steps which made the rivets rattle, as he approached the Prince. The crowd surged to ogle, breaking the reed doors and tearing a folding door loose. Griaule saw a “white crowd like a raft in the sea.” The hall was hushed.

The examination was conducted by a magistrate but the prisoner would only look at the Prince as he responded.

Who are you?

Dog!

Whose son are you?

Dog!

Where do you come from?

Dog!

And on and on, the prisoner continued to respond with ‘dog’ as answers as he faced only the Prince. The guards forced him to bend his neck.

By the Trinity, stop your abuse and answer!

Dog!

Driven by frustration, the magistrate “gasped for breath and no longer closed his mouth after a question.” It was into this that the prisoner spat into the magistrate’s mouth before he looked the Prince. The magistrate intoned

Slayer of Kings! Disturber of customs! You have broken the luck of the country!

Dog!

And so the questioning continued with no answers. Griaule could not track what was happening as the prisoner spat sideways, his answers whispered, then violently retorted, until his resignation to his fate. To which he answered his final, “dog!” before capitulating to the process.

You shall have my soul, said the accused gently.

And so the useless dance between the magistrate and prisoner continued with Griaule describing the scene as one of a high-strung magistrate and a placid criminal. The roles were now reversed.

The crowd thought the magistrate silly while the elders, wrote Griaule, couldn’t help but wonder how the head of the prisoner still remained. In the meantime, there’s a lot of drama among the crowd, with one almost falling atop a pile of bones, as the people occupied all the spots to view and hear the spectacle.

The magistrate, we now understand is an orator of magnitude. The adolescents were used to poetry from the court. The military was used to the merriment and jokes of the violin players. This time they were floored. Perhaps it was the “archaic and pedantic forms of the language” or the “internal plurals, unusual feminines and frequentives.” On top of this, the praise to the Prince, everyone knew was just skillful calculation on his part. It all ends with his final sentencing,

Death by fire, in muslin.

Death Watch

The sentence was unusual. It is usually only given to those who committed regicide. The eunuchs stopped the noise. The Prince was not yet the king and the kung was not dead. The Queen Mother tried to dissuade her son the previous night against this sentence that only his father could receive. Yet, the Prince refused to budge from his decision—I shall be king one day, he replied. And so everyone else around them, the bakers, the guards, and the servants all deigned to ignore the conversation.

The final sentence was not a surprise. The ordainer already prepared the braziers in the “hot house,” a hut with a low opening used by the Prince during colder winter mornings. There, a large kettle is boiling a malodorous liquid stirred by two Goum slaves wearing corded white cotten around their loins. They were stirring in bright yellow wax, perhaps beeswax, as honey dripped. Occasionally, they licked their fingers. Finally, they unspooled thin muslin cloths, white almost cheesecloth or drape quality, into the kettle to have the wax set on it. This will be the muslin that would be wrapped around the prisoner.

The prisoner, fully naked, was knocked out cold as the six eunuchs prepared the condemmed man.

With the muslin, from which scales of wax still dripped, they wrapped both legs separately, being careful to leave the top of the mid-thigh free. In this way they avoided for the patient the unbearable pain which would have prevented his holding himself erect…The body was less easy to dress; it had to be raised every time so as to pass the ball around…for only the eyes and nose in his face were free; the rest of the head had disappeared under several layers of the bands…The hollow of the neck had been entirely filled, and the rolls went around the trunk, imprisoning the arms in the mass…They placed him upright, and he remained in that position.

Griaule, p. 166

Griaule likened this to a suit of armour in the Middle Ages or an armless Michelin man. They marched him as the prisoner broke the rolls by his knees. At the cenre of the counicl stood the Prince surrounded by his dignitaries. The prisoner stood before the Prince and behind him is a large circle of fire lighted by cedar. The people smelled the perfume of honey from the human candle.

Heat, the Prince shouted.

Two eunuchs shoved the man into the poor man’s fire and stepped away to watch. One of the Whites (I am unsure whether it is Griaule or his colleague Marcel Larget) fainted at the sight. Everyone else—the Prince, the dignitaries, Wouddie, the dwarf, breathed short breaths through their mouths.

Griaule described the layers of smell and sound in the hall. Though he was enmeshed in honey, Griaule knew that this was the poorer quality of honey, “thrown regretfully by the tax into the government jars” smelling of eucalyptus and euphorbia-candelabra. It smells of burnt honey. Still, it is honey, he attested, gathered from the warmer valleys between sycamore trees. It contrasts with the stench of sweat and rancid butter applied on the hair of the people. You can hear the criminal shriek in spite of the gag sounding like hyenas feasting on the carcass. The honoured guards surrounding the fire poked him, as a precaution, with their lances to keep him in the pyre. Both shouting and competing, resulting in canceling out the noise. In the end, the smell turned into what Griaule describes as a “peaceful odour of a church where a hundred women have offered virgin wax candles.” But without any redemption. This eventually will be replaced with the smell of roasted meat, hence the baying of the dogs. It made Griaule think of “the great feasts of meat around the fires of St. John.”

Spectacle of Lies or Truth

There’s something about the execution that pricks the mob. The guards and spectators were feverish with battle, honouring the Prince and the crowd jostling to view the macabre display of dying and death.

The crowd had become one group. They bruised the feet with unintentional blows of the butt and might have done it intentionally and no one would have said anything. Everyone was beside himself. The themes shouted rose on a foundation of murmurs which breathed impatience, rancour, and the grudges of a whole unlucky people; everyone wanted to be in the centre and go around that glorified and still-smoking corpse.

Griaule, p. 173

And so in the final fumes of the burning, functionaries displayed their allegiance to the Prince, hoping to catch his attention. The loudest praise was obviously performance.

Writing this as if it is true, to the extent that this happened, maybe not in Griaule’s time, this incident would probably sear into the eyes of the French reader. It has been a long time since France had a public execution. Michel Foucault in his Discipline and Punish, a study on penal power of the state, traced the outlaw of public executions on April 1848. That was the last time that public punishment was made visible to the public. This gaze has since been transferred to the trial. Foucault argues that in the concealment of the actual sentencing, the state washes itself clean of the penalty of justice and criminality by condemming man. Thus, it is the reverse, by making it very public and celebrated that power (and brutality) is established with the reigning monarch.

It is unsurprising that Griaule chose to include this account despite its questionable provenance. He ultimately borrows what power and shock that it produces to not just record the details of the justice system but also to garner attention to the research project. Perhaps, Vincent Debane, in his book Far Afield, was correct. It is so mundane out in the field that it is almost necessary to include such a tale.

Round Up

The most impressive piece here is the three layers of smell of death by fire. It is a pretty good use of the senses to record the unfolding drama. Of course, I am skating around the horrible corporal punishment of a human. Though convicted of an actual crime, it still is shocking to witness a sentence we all clamour for—death to a fellow man.

Punishment’s stark description whets the appetite for the macabre by the reading public. I can tell you going through most of the chapters—nothing is happening. Without this, the entire novel is pretty bland unless you are interested in Abyssinia. In all my readings, I had never before encountered a similar account. Hence, it is unsurprising that this was questioned for its veracity. Like the modern tabloids, the travel account requires a jolt for its readers. And we all secretly relish reading true crime and horror. I know I am. Travel accounts are no different. Selling literary travel books require a sensation. This is it. Can you smell the honey?

Further Reading:

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Engelke, Matthew. 2008. The Objects of Evidence. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14: S1-S21. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00489.x (click the title to read the full paper on JSTOR)

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press (see Chapter Three)

Foucault, Michel. 1977 [1995]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Translated by Alan Sheridan). New York: Random House

Kuipers, Joel. 2013. Evidence and Authority in Ethnographic and Linguistic Perspective. Annual Review of Anthropology. 42:399-413. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145615 (open access)

The ongoing draft and outline of our project are available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

The Abyssinian Journey by Marcel Griaule

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1991. Les Flambeurs d’hommes. Paris: Gallimard

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1935. The Abyssinian Journey (trans. E.G. Rich) London: J. Miles

Beginning: My faulty impression | Chapter One| Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapters Four and Five

Chapter Six

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

This is the controversial truth chapter that French anthropology researcher, Vincent Debane, railed against Marcel Griaule. Debane mentioned that Chapter Six, Death in Muslin did not happen. Well, in my first post on Abyssinia, I pointed out that this incident did not happen during Griaule’s trip. It seems that this story was recounted of an actual incident based on Jacques Mercier’s, fellow contemporary French anthropologist of Ethiopia, investigation into Griaule’s research. In the footnote to Far Afield, Debane wrote that Mercier attested that historians accepted the truth of the incident and it was attributed to Menelik1 and how he punished a rebel Bezzabeh.

As Debane argues, since nothing seems to happen in the field, this chapter gives you a big splash of an incident in an otherwise mundane situation. Plus, the readers lapped this up, this was serialised in the public press as part of the book promotion.

What is this incident?

One of the hallmarks of a travel account are some lurid tales of fantasy: of cannibalism, crime, or the weird. This classifies as one. It reminds us that this is not just a scientific project by Marcel Griaule and Marcel Larget, but also a self awareness to the French public’s interests and for the expedition’s future funding.

Chapter Six is the last account of field research (settlement) in Gojjam country, Abyssinia. In the remaining chapters, the expedition slowly travels back to Addis Ababa to conclude their journey. This makes the chapter the significant penultimate account of court life in Gojjam. It is a display of what constitutes as justice and the ceremonies of punishment to crime. Contrary to what Debane and Mercier have shared about the truth of this incident, in the monograph, it is written as if it was an eyewitness account. The characters from the ceremonial feast return here.

Inciting Incident

We find ourselves back inside the palace in Addiet. Griaule describes a small palace, an outcome of improper construction by the peasants instead of the governor’s masons. It was something bizarre because this was the provisional capital and where power was exercised, observes Griaule.

Despite this size, hundreds of men with arms flooded the palace grounds alongside peasants garbed in white cotton togas. Everyone was there on the second day to witness the sentencing of a man who fired at the Prince, the son of the governor, Ras Hailou. Previously, the Prince was out in the yard of the storehouses with the dignitaries and workers.

Favourites on foot sustained his thighs and passed their arms behind his loins, with their faces turned towards the sky so as the better to follow his words. All seemed taking nonchalant poses while they relieved him of his own weight. The umbrella-carrier achieved unbelievable feats of balance, as he was nearly always separated from his master by petitioners.

Griaule, p. 148

Suddenly, a shot rang out from the top of the trunk of a tree that the cortege was passing.

It detached some bells from the collar of the princely mule, rubbed the pubis of a favourite, buried itself in the loins of the buckle-bearer, came out and pierced the clay on the level with his foot.

Griaule, p. 149

The guards responded with a volley of shots that felled a monkey and the guard who both dropped into the well of the hollow trunk, screaming, “by my death! by my death! by my death!” Groups of men were trying to climb the try and fish the perpetrator from the hollowed trunk. They were figuring out how to get the man out.

Meanwhile, the Prince, closely surrounded by his courtiers and faithful, “silently and with all the speed” return to the palace. He traveled by the shortest route with a troop of soldiers from Tigre which were the source of jealousy by the Gojjamites.

The Dwarf: the stool of justice

The next day we find the court dwarf, Wouddie, rushing to attend the proceedings.

Taking the short cut by the church, the governor’s dwarf went to the palace of the provisional capital; he passed over the loose stones of the still practicable fords, waving his short arms to keep his balance. He was followed by a servant who carried his rich apparel in an ox-hideand sheltered his hair under a flap of his toga.

Griaule, p. 153

Even more humiliating, he had to wait for his servant to catch up so he can cross the ford at Chigaz. Only until he was carried on the shoulders was he able to continue. Though he was diminuitive, those around him in the palace accorded a degree of caution and awe. Wouddie held a baton taller than himself while his hand pointing on the ground looked ridiculous.

No one thought of smiling at this for no one knows what sorcery souls enveloped in such a body conceal.

In the scale of human values the dwarf is the first corporeal manifestation of the passage from the invisible to the ordinary world; princes are well aware of this, so they cover the little men with honours and use them in the execution of their evil designs.

Griaule, p. 154

Wouddie is important in the ceremonial execution of the accused. Not only they play the court jester, the Prince dispenses justice literally at their head. Wouddie entered the council hall with a circular wall and pointed roof with two niches opposite each other. There were two beds within one of the niches: one lower one in front of the higher one designated for the Prince. The area was decorated with wollen rugs and imported embroidered cushions.

The crowd slowly massed the hall lighted with only candles and oil lamps. Wouddie had to jostle to get through, “make room…make way…pray…wider!” He was hustled through and berated for being tardy eventhough the bed of the Prince was still empty. Upon reaching the ‘throne, ’

With furtive gestures he assumed the silk smock with its green and white stripes, and the red cloak chasuble with gilt edges and flaps which fell down on his belly like the bosons of a woman of fifteen pregnancies.

Griaule, p. 156

Once settled, he called the Head of the Treasury, Gabra Kidane, much to the latter’s annoyance, for he was busy on account of the use of precious objects for the ceremony.

Where is it? cried Wouddie

Gabra Kidane advanced towards bed without answering, inserted his staff in a crack in the leather strips and stuck with the stock on an invisible lump which gave out a hollow sound. Without saying a word Wouddie sank down again and found what he was seeking.

It was the golden chair! It was a stool with gilded four legs and a hollowed out seat. This was where kings and all his predecessors sat to judge the criminal. Wouddie sat waiting.

Wouddie would not have long to wait. The swish of togas could be heard behind the beds. These were the heads of the guards of eunuchs “with their hair dressed high spread out in vacant places.” They were displays of authority with pufffed chests and lightly greased chins and necks. Everyone knew they aimed well and fired easily so no one sought to criticise them.

Enter the Prince after them. He was heavy, tall, both hands on the arms of his men. His black cape wide open revealing the red lining. He looked like the bateleur eagle, writes Griaule.

The Prince climbed on the lower bed and sat in the chair, which sank down on the dwarf’s skull. (The Prince is literally sitting on top of him!) Now justice is ready to be served.

Part 2: Next Week

Round Up

Disputes around the veracity of this chapter does not detract from the detailed account of the dispensation of justice. From among his chapters, this and the ceremonial feast constitute the only interesting account in his expedition. I am not surprised if Griaule, indeed, had to include this story to spice things up a bit.

What a story it was.

We’re presented with an unclear source of the hullaballoo with a guard atop a tree shooting at the Prince, but missing him. He fell and would soon be in the hands of the court. In the meantime, it appears that justice sits atop the golden stool literally on the court dwarf Wouddie. Though little is explained in the monograph, the figure of the dwarf is supernatural and endows the ceremonial dispensation with authority.

I cannot get my head wrapped around the dwarf carrying the entire scales of justice literally on his head! Sit on that for a while.

Further Reading:

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Engelke, Matthew. 2008. The Objects of Evidence. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14: S1-S21. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00489.x (click the title to read the full paper on JSTOR)

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press (see Chapter Three)

Kuipers, Joel. 2013. Evidence and Authority in Ethnographic and Linguistic Perspective. Annual Review of Anthropology. 42:399-413. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145615 (open access)

The ongoing draft and outline of our project are available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

The Abyssinian Journey by Marcel Griaule

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1991. Les Flambeurs d’hommes. Paris: Gallimard

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1935. The Abyssinian Journey (trans. E.G. Rich) London: J. Miles

Beginning: My faulty impression | Chapter One| Chapter Two | Chapter Three

Chapters Four and Five

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall use these tropes to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers of anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

Our idea of evidence and truth as objective or some disembodied thing is not the same in anthropology. Much of writing and ethnography is embodied for both the researcher and the informant. Hence, evidence is intimately inscribed into the modes of authority of the bodies and identities of these individuals. It is useful to know this so we understand why Marcel Griaule, with forty mules and untold group of carriers, trudge for months to find the Ras Hailou, the governor. For it is with him that sole political and social authority rests and thereby access to what Griaule believes is the fountain of concealed knowledge in Abyssinia.

Recap

Last week, we were finally treated to an account of ethnographic holism as a result of finally pausing from the movement expected in a travel account. Holism is when we get a total picture of a culture based on disparate elements such as accounts of belief systems, types of decoration, dietary preferences, entertainment, food and other impressions from the travel, like the churches and priests previously encountered. We finally got an impression of Abyssinia's culture through its ceremonial feast. This place north was the culmination of Marcel Griaule and his forty mule expedition’s travel from Abbaye-de-Marc or Däbrä Marḳos, the capital of Gojam Country in Abyssinia, to pass Lake Tana and finally meet Ras Hailou, the governor.

Settlement and Field Routines

The travel account finally becomes a brief account of his field research. Though he was clearly feted as an honoured guest and deserved a large banquet from Ras Hailou, he resided outside of the palace grounds in a campground.

At last, we have a pause in movement and settlement begins as Griaule proceeds to establish his routine. They wake at dawn to study churches and investigate the clergy and finish by noon and avoid the burning sun. Their afternoon remains busy

The afternoon was passed under the tent in the reception of men of all classes bringing information, the buying and translating of manuscripts, and the conduct of enquiries entrusted to letters. When the sun was not too strong, there were visits to the peasants. At the end of the day the Ras came to camp and talked for hours.

Both Ras Hailou and Griaule built their relationship at a distance. Funnily enough, we read that the Ras and Griaule spied each other using spyglasses and would sometimes catch each other looking over what was happening in either encampment.

Monsieigneur, this morning I saw great agitation at your place; I thought you must be ill.

I heard a shot in your direction; I looked through the glass, but you were not in danger.

Griaule, p. 114

What a sight that must be! And so the dance goes between the two—one an informer, one a researcher; one a Prince, and the other an ordinary non-subject. Power and positions are constantly switching—one after the other. Griaule remains in an enviable position since “floods of people put themselves at the foreigner’s disposal for work” to please the Ras. The informants came into the tent with information.

By nighttime, work is not done, with more desk work to the delight of the anthropologists. It was only late at night that photographs were processed.

By this regime the domestic servants and the mules were on their knees.

Griaule, p. 114

Witchcraft: Unlocking the Culture Key

With settlement, you get the sense that finally Griaule is happier, busy with collecting, and figuring out everyday puzzles. A glaring crevasse is the presence of Abola Negous, a towering presence in Griaule’s passage up north. He discovered its vital importance because the Ras refused to speak about it when asked. This tickled Griaule’s sensors and convinced him that his investigation into Gojjam religion would bore fruit.

But explorers have a God.

Griaule, p. 114

Lo and behold, it came in the person of the head of the expedition logisitcs, Edjigou. When you cannot gain something directly, as it often happens, an incident becomes a way in hidden knowledge.

Edjigou suddenly stormed in the tent announcing the death of a priest, a semi-relative, as Griaule understood. This seemingly untimely passing released a torrent of reaction: he scalped a large bird and brought it at their doorstep and he coudn’t sleep on account of the noise from the animals and monkeys. To ease his worries, he was taken to the country with his Lebel rifle and belt of cartridges. Luckily, he encountered no one and avoided any altercation.

Facing the Abola Negous in his journey, he held his hat and shouted abuse in his Galla tongue at the mountain. Griaule grabbed the blabbing Edjigou to stop him. When he finally recovered his senses, Edjigou took off his hat and there Griaule found tufts of white feathers, the scalp of the corbivau, a common type of corvid found in Ethiopia that has a white feathered neck. The parallels were not lost on Griaule as Abyssinian clerics have a white turbaned head. Cutting off the crown of the corbivau is a preventive act against the witchcraft cast by the living spirits of the Abola Negous. Though the bird was destined to be part of the museum, killing the bird was deemed urgent by Edjigou in this instance.

Upon a more formal deposition, Griaule found that Edjigou was haunted three days earlier by “swarms of devils, genii of the water and the air, and other subtleties submissive to the far-seeing authority of the Living Spirit of Abola Negous.”

Griaule has found his object, the key

This incident proved ultimately to be the origin of an investigation fruitful for angelology, mythology, the history of religions and diverse other knowledge disdainfully hidden from the public by the erudite.

…But by making a sacrifice to the customs of edrudition, here is a place to direct cataracts on air-tight publications.

Griaule, p. 177 & 118

This incident pushed Griaule to finally taking a trip to the cavern of Abba Goureza or Père Colobe in the Qotat area of the Bachibbal Mountains as the month of the Guennbote1 arrives.

The series of events that follow is a series of confusing events in the grotto in the caves. Families, the head of the Church, old men, all about a hundred men gathered around to perform a ritual. Later on, the death of a soldier called Juge was mentioned but mysteriously Griaule could not figure out why he was clambering up the mouth of the cave for hours and mysteriously shot himself by the chin with his Mauser and died. He was not fondly remembered as he was a troublemaker, ate during fasts, and spoke rudely to the clergy. Such death climbing is considered a suicide so people could not mourn. In its place, guns were fired, but without repercussions such as maiming a dog. The rebels even come to visit and steal cereals. And so it goes, the disconnected stories from the ever increase of the people gathered around Abba Goureza.

The cavern area becomes a temporary encampment with two honey mead tents serving alcohol and women serving the sexual needs of the soldiers. Mountain muscians performed to the delight of the crowd. It appeared to be a time of temporary unity and forgiveness as rebels were pardoned and given millet. The tensions between the Prince’s taxation, as represented by Alaqa Gourkan, the Prince’s advisor seemed to dissipate as the events close with very little to show for it. Not wealth, power or influence for himself.

The Making of an Anthropological Object

At this point in the journey, we see a convergence over Griaule’s interest in myths and its guardians and what he encounters in the field. He felt that knowledge, the key to understanding Abyssinia, was concealed to him. Now, he has some inroads of confirmation that the truth resides in investigating specialists myths from clerics. In the process, he is creating the anthropological object, in this case, myths and secret knowledge as the key feature of Abyssinian culture. Interestingly, Griaule is convinced that they resided within ritual and religious specialists.

He is not entirely wrong here. When we speak of evidence, we refer to one who is in authority. They are inseperable. Joel Kuipers says,

evidence and authority are not inherently opposed but rather inseparably intertwined.

Kuipers, p. 400

It is clear from Griaule that it is by seeking those in the highest echelons of the clergy and politics (Ras Hailou, rather than the daughter), he is providing evidence and reliable witnesses to practice. It is something that Griaule remains unwavering in his field research. Unwittingly, by writing on these, Abyssinian culture is reified through these myths. Gojjam will forever be associated with their clergy—rightly or wrongly. The politics of evidence and truth is something we shall return to again.

Round Up

Finally, the travel journey is over. Griaule and Larget establish their field site and now proceed with the work of anthropology—studying, collecting, and interviewing people. This requires settlement and we transition from a travel/adventure to the business of interpretation. Though brief, we get a sense that finally the expedition is achieving its goal.

More importantly, these two chapters lead Griaule to confirm that his interest in the myths of Gojjam would unlock his understanding of Abyssinian culture. The discovery of the keyword—witchcraft, is for Griaule a peek into hidden or concealed knowledge. It is this dedication that as a reader, we see how Griaule creates Abyssinian culture in the text. The reliance on specialist ritual practitioners as guardians of culture will lead Griaule to focus on them throughout his career. It is the hallmark of the science of anthropology.

Further Reading:

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Engelke, Matthew. 2008. The Objects of Evidence. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14: S1-S21. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00489.x (click the title to read the full paper on JSTOR)

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press (see Chapter Three)

Kuipers, Joel. 2013. Evidence and Authority in Ethnographic and Linguistic Perspective. Annual Review Anthropology. 42:399-413. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145615 (open access)

The ongoing draft and outline of our project is available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

The Abyssinian Journey by Marcel Griaule

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1991. Les Flambeurs d’hommes. Paris: Gallimard

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1935. The Abyssinian Journey (trans. E.G. Rich) London: J. Miles

Chapters Three and Four

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall be using these tropes as a way to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers in anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

What is truth and how is it represented?

We now reach the point that The Abyssinian Journey moves into ethnographic observation and interpretation. We are feted with how Marcel Griaule’s arduous trek hauling equipment, people, and mules through Gojam Country in Abyssinia chose to bring the reader the truth about the culture of hospitality.

From Ritual Truth

The capital of Gojam Country in Abyssinia, Abbaye-de-Marc or Däbrä Marḳos, finally opened up in view to the expedition of Marcel Griaule and Marcel Larget, with at least forty mules trailing them in 1929.

The scene must be remarkable for them to note in contrast to their trek through the Nile and the mountains, but they were now greeted by a barely forested town, save for eucalyptus trees. Everything else, Griaule observed, was used for cooking and building the residences. This in itself brings the vaunted resource of the cakes of dung for fuel readily available to the villagers.

Griaule set out to meet Ras Hailou, the governor and second only to the Emperor Haile Selassie I, to establish his fieldsite in the town and to meet his renown priestly court, but he would be disappointed yet again. They were forewarned by the functionaries sitting by a tree that only the Princess Épi-de-la-Vierge, daughter of Ras Hailou, was tasked to greet the visitors. This was only the first of two disappointments he had.1

The Ras went up north (no clear reason was given) with his army. “The governor had gone on an expedition of six days’ march and sent nothing except orders in relation to the inner care of his house.” Nothing about Griaule’s request. Thus, Griaule was left to endure a banquet to honour him rather than continue on his journey. This was his second disappointment, but for the reader, we finally get some description of what this ceremonial banquet was.

Twelve ushers in white togas, with staffs entered as if from the corners, striking the barrels of their guns; an official with a surly face, dressed in a soutane of green and white velvet and a black hood-chasuble with four flaps edged with gold, offered the Princesses’ compliments. He held on his stomach, like a huge navel, a curcular buckler of buff skin, pricked with gold. He leaned on his gun which he carried turned to the ground. He effaced himself to leave a place for twenty young dignitaries, crowned with lions’ manes, with long smocks of honour and velvet hoods, who wore their cartridges across their breasts. They formed the advance guard of the festivity, placed in column of fours with broke up the hubbub before the foreigners.

Griaule, p. 78

Unfortunately, Griaule later inferred from the young age of the participants and the overheard remarks from his entourage that these people were impostors, wearing the garb of warriors who had done heroic deeds.

With their stolen plumes!

Their sabres to flatten flies on the meat!

And their smocks without merit!

Griaule, p. 79

This led to Griaule’s extreme frustration. He no longer described what followed. Instead, he offered his own insight into what constitutes the truth and, therefore, recorded only what is authentic.

One felt that regular service was non-existent and that everything had been sacrified to appearances. Without a doubt the governor had given to his daughter formal instructions that the foreigners should have an unforgettable vision of the strength of the country. But what was to be done in a capital without a regular army, where a hundred and fifty officials could sacrely manage the most pressing business, except to decide for an honourable make-believe?

Apart from the ordainer and some others, the actors in this moving comedy were only personages of the moment.

The European (Griaule speaking of himself in the third person) was furious in the depths of his heart, because he could no longer verify from the ethnological point of view certain details which interested him.

Griaule, pp. 80-81

Another fake. One can almost understand why Griaule approached his research as an initiant, as James Clifford, a preeminent anthropologist who evaluated Griaule’s works, rather than in a more dialogical manner. Within the context of an initiation, an initiate receives and interprets a specialised body of knowledge that becomes revelatory. The truth emerges, but only by drilling through it. Griaule was on a mission to identify that specialist and had little patience for performance, though his life's work involved theatricality, games, and masks.

In the meantime, the lull rendered the group bored in Abbaye-de-Marc with little action aside from the honourable ceremonies. The banquet hall was massive and could accommodate five hundred people. The kitchens had a thatched roof blackened with smoke, surrounded by pottery, and sheds of wood and dung for fuel.

At fine ceremonies they gave out underdone meats, white and grey cakes and plates of sauces, enough to feed the entire region of Damot for ten ordinary days.

Griaule, p. 81

Aside from a description of the palace grounds and school, Griaule discontinued any further elaboration of the Princess’s ceremonial banquet. Instead, with little happening, Griaule provoked a reversal of norms by attempting to exit the palace through a service gate designated for women only. This unleashed horror and vexation among the palace servants and his entourage. Shame would potentially be cast on Griaule, but also on everyone else there. His attempt could be methodologically useful, but the benefits of revealing the truth or norms would only come further in time when he settles in, rather than in the immediate present.

To Interpretive Truth

Despite the requests of the Princess, Griaule was adamant to proceed north to the governor’s camp in Dembetcha. It was only a couple of hours away and the neighbouring city presented itself with shrubs that concealed the dwellings.

Their first encounter was less sight but the smell of incense that followed the togas of the priestly court in the churches and its vicinity. Apparently, the Prince (the title of the governor) retained community members to record and praise him on sheep parchment. Most notably, the town was anchored by the Church of the Assumption, which was the location of the royal tomb. Griaule inhaled the overwhelming myrrh that staunched the smell of the dead. Inside, reed baskets of bone were stored willy-nilly. They were accompanied by a monk assigned by the prior for their visit around the necropolis.

We are entering Golgotha.

The monk regaled the guests with the genealogy of the father of the present Prince—stories of miracles, sexual tales about serpents penetrating women, and about Abbo, the hairy saint of Abyssinia. This short account is a peek into an early interest of Griaule in matters of myths and beliefs, and his goal of uncovering the seat of wisdom hidden within monks and priests.

So, the caravan continues across recently burnt land. “The country was vacant for God’s new intentions,” Griaule intoned as the site of ash and smoke greeted them. A lone bare tree stood amid a sea of ashes.

Finally, oh finally, they reach the end: Lake Tana with Mount Abola Negous in the distance, said to be only a few hours from the temporary capital of the governor. The emissaries greeted them and walked towards the Mount, and within two hours, the governor’s five hundred-strong army met and announced their arrival with heavy gun blasts. They have arrived in Addiet.

Griaule and Larget were accompanied to the ‘tent of state’ in which the Ras greeted them in an Italian salute. The room is decorated with carpets, and at the centre of the tent is a green table laden with champagne and two crystal cups! Nothing traditional here. Clearly, this set Abyssinia in the politics of its day when the threat of war and Italy was interested in the country. Griaule was not concealing this. Yet, he focuses on documenting as much of its history as possible.

He describes the palace of Addiet as part of a set of government buildings in ethnographic detail.

along a clay ridge facing Mount Abola Negous, dropping gently to the valley of the Chigaz, which was striped with irrigation canals. As was fitting, they were enclosed in a double square, one hundred and eighty metres a side, exactly oriented. The principal entrance was towards the west, a practice ordinarily used only in churches.

Griaule, p. 94

The palace grounds were only populated by women—servants, slaves, and courtesans, with only the armed males for protection. But it was Sunday, and the banquet hall would have rotations of men eating from three to eight o’clock. People basked in the proximity to the Prince.

If one let one’s gaze wander among the higher masses of the edifice, one had the impression of living in a time which was very ancient in the world’s history; the foreigners made no mistake by remaining silent in this magnificent excitement. They were seated at the right of the Prince, before a table covered with astonishing foods which were the admiration of their individual servants, a punishment to their stomachs and the boundless admiration for the palace cooks.

Griaule, p. 97

The palace was part of Griaule’s mission to document and experience the real Abyssinia. Oh, for sure, the palace was magnificent as Griaule describes the fresh canvases of paintings from Abbaye-d’Or attached to the palace pillars. Servants brought piles of grey or brown millet cakes, quarters of raw meat for the guests to slice off and small decanters of hydromel or honey mead. Unlike the previous banquet, this time, Griaule proceeds to narrate in detail about the meal, having agreed with the Prince at the beginning that no change should be done during the banquet ritual and presentations remained plain. This was as it was. In other words, what authentic Abyssinia looked like.

For the first time, we read in detail how food was allocated and received by guests according to rules and the identity of a “tyrannous genie” that possessed them.

The man possessed by the genie Gragne eats everything except mutton; the man possessed by the genie Parole eats only goat and fowl. Those possessed by the genie Deho-Derg only eat lentils, chick-peas and raised bread. On the other hand, men possessed by the genie Bresieur, also called l’Epée-Housssine, the the genie Magal, or the genie Dira-Koto, and the female genie Dengata, can eat everything, on condition that they wear a toga with a red band.

As a result each of the guests had to be treated with individual attention.

Griaule, p. 100

This, as understood by Griaule, produced a peace to the spirit world and therefore, in the social world. The respect towards the spirit required a measured awareness of movements and gestures that could untowardly agitate them. The Prince, he said, ate slowly and dominated both the spirit and the earthly world, unlike the other individuals. This set him off from the mere mortals.

The highlight of the feast was the appearance of “Monsieur Ababa,” paid by the Ras five thalers to appear and perform the entertainment of a court jester. His persona as a man dressed in women's clothes, called by Griaule the court hermaphrodite. Just like the jester, he jeered at the Prince and insulted him—providing a caricature of the Prince and his holdings, the management of royal property, his tax on the coffee, his fears of his eldest son dispossessing him, the politics of prestige in Addiet, and a whole litany of criticism about his rule na policies. All in poetry, embedded in song played on the violin, and stomped in time to the beat. Only a court jester could speak so forthrightly about what everyone was thinking.

We hear for the first time that Griaule and Larget feel so alone and lost, not having understood the full meaning of the gestures, emotions, and songs heard. With the banquet entertainment unfinished and the last of the arguments heard, Griaule and Larget surreptitiously exited the affair and feigned disinterest with the food.

Round Up

From movement, we approach a brief pause in this travel account. We have two narrations of two different banquets. As my anthropology supervisors remarked to me at different points in my training, something is always happening somewhere. That is to say, everything is data. But in this case, Marcel Griaule negotiated for an ethnographic truth and pursued it. We have little documentation of what happened in Abbaye-de-Marc at Princess Epi’s banquet, but we must nonetheless trust Griaule that it was simply feigned theatricality, unlike the one at Addiet with the Ras himself. (For all we know, they may be similar except for grandeur). This is ethnographic authority. Here, we are finally feted with an extensive discussion of an authentic feast. We have a taste of ethnographic details on feasting and rituals of reversal between the Prince and his court jester. We have no way of knowing or comparing between the two, but we are trusting Griaule to lead us into deeper Abyssinian knowledge. However, if everything is data, faking it is important data as well. I am sure it would be in his notes, but nonetheless uninteresting to the reader who demands authenticity.

Is both equally authentic? If so, are we in agreement with the scale of authenticity chosen by Griaule by virtue of the authority of Ras Hailou?

Further Reading:

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Dorst, J. (2010). On the Porch and in the Room: Threshold Moments and other Ethnographic Tropes in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In: Blinder, C. (eds) New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230111868_3 (Open Access)

The ongoing draft of our classics is available on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

The Abyssinian Journey by Marcel Griaule

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1991. Les Flambeurs d’hommes. Paris: Gallimard

Griaule, Marcel. (1929) 1935. The Abyssinian Journey (trans. E.G. Rich) London: J. Miles

Chapter Two

================

The Book Review Guideposts: The Rhetorical Sandwich

While reading early modern ethnographies or monographs, I shall be using these tropes as a way to evaluate and appreciate the literary and scientific work of the forefathers in anthropology.

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

Before they even emerged from the Nile River, after a perilous crossing in our previous post, the expedition of Marcel Griaule and his colleague Marcel Lancet, was halted by the emissaries of Gojjam’s ruler Ras Hailou. Griaule was on his initial survey and materials collection journey into Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1929. He was on his way to meet Ras Hailou and negotiate for long-term field research in the area.

The expedition was ceremoniously greeted by a troop wading in the water,

But an unexpected spectacle appeared in the stream: a troop of motionless men, only their heads and shoulders visible, waiting, guns in the air, for the European; he was making his way with his servants a little way behind the greater part of the mules. The men had the correct bearing of functionaries. All brandished the same model of Mausers; all wore their hair very long and coiled around their heads. Something sure and fatal emerged from their immobility; they were in ranks, solid as pilework. The saddle trappings of a richly caparisoned mule floating on the water; the owner had respectfully descended into five feet of water to honour the great foreigner, to salute him in the name of the reigning Prince on the farther shore, and to ask him, by a refinement of politeness, to display his passports.

Griaule, pp. 42-43

Threshold crossings are important tropes to tell the story of how the ethnographers gain access to their field sites. In most cases, the actual negotiations and payments for entry are concealed, including those who enter the field as a stranger, student, or child-eyed curious individual, as is common in contemporary approaches. This is contrary to the approach of Griaule, a military-trained navigator, who is described by anthropologist James Clifford as someone aware of the power dynamics in uncovering facts and truth from his interlocutors. Griaule does not pretend to be meek, but rather goes toe to toe to meet his goals. In this case, he accedes to the dance of ceremony to establish his credentials and greater influence over Ras Hailous’s emissaries. I can almost chuckle at his description that exuded the exotic, only to remind the reader with the mundane reality of the passport.

“How did you pass the dry season?” asked the European, who did not deem it fit to dismount from his mule.

The first muleteer blew imperturbably on his trumpet.

“Well, thanks be to the Trinity. My master the Honourable Governor of Godjam has ordered me to say to you that you are on your own soil, from the middle of the Nile.”

“May God give him long life. Doubtless he has been warned of my arrival by his cousin King Tafari?”

As he spoke the European drew from a saddle-bag a passport, bearing the King’s arms. The Infant Mon Soleil—that was the messenger’s name—passed his hat to a servant without turning and out of deference took the paper in both hands. He bowed and looked at the seal.

“I do not know this writing,” he said.

“What! you do not know how to read Abyssinian? or recognise the King’s seal? while a foreigner like me…Give it to me and I will read it to you. Keep still, oaf! sad the White to the trumpeter, who was doing nothing.

“I beg your pardon, Lord, I know how to read, but here you are with my Master the Honoured Ras Hailou, governor of Godjam, that is to say at home. I do not know the Master of the other bank.”

“Then—who warned the Ras of my arrival?”

“The hotelkeeper Guiliz, of Addis, who recommended you highly.”

“Blow!” said the White to the trumpeter, restraining a strong desire to laugh…

and they went forward to the back with shots punctuating the sounds of the trumpet.

The leading beasts already had their flanks free…the group of Franks in their turn reached the fine sand which announced the shore. When the feet of the leader of the Europeans were out of the water, the trumpet gave its final call. The last shot was fired by Edjigou [the expedition lead organiser], who brought up the rear; then he put his gun on his shoulder, his hat on his head…

Griaule, pp. 44-45

And so, the expedition crosses its first threshold of many through Gojjam. However, another hilarity ensues to let us know that these people are not separated from the real world of the urban centre.

Entering Thresholds

The dilemma of an anthropologist writing as a traveller is that all of his accounts are of appraising doorways, openings and entryways—without piercing any depth. And if any depth is demanded, then John Dorst, American folklorist and ethnographer, demonstrates the moral dilemma the situation presents. He argues that a form of double victimisation inadvertently occurs when someone who peeks into and documents the lives of others—just like in ethnographic travel accounts.

Walker Evans went on leave from the Farm Security Administration to continue to document the impoverished conditions of farmers during the Depression Era, originally for Fortune Magazine with writer James Agee. Their work focused on three White sharecropper families: Floyd Burroughs, William Edward Fields, and Frank Tengle in Hale County and Perry County, Alabama. The final product is now the American classic, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a photographic book published in 1941. What is interesting about their work is that Dorst observed the same dilemma in entering new fields. The scene greeted us from the edge of the Nile echoes the power and status inequality with Evans and Agee.

As the landlord begins to bludgeon everyone with disrespectful vulgarities, we quickly realize that Agee and Evans are the intended and captive audience at a small, self-aggrandizing performance of “easy familiarity” between master and subordinate, coded as manly sexual banter. In a classic colonialist maneuver, the landlord directs his questions at the sharecropper foreman, even though the persons asked about are there at hand. The scene is thick with layers of victimization. The most acute for Agee, no doubt, is finding himself trapped in the role of victimizer—the humiliated—but also unavoidably humiliating spectator at a coerced performance. “In a perversion of self-torture,” he confesses, “I played my part through” (FM, 28). He could hardly do otherwise.

Dorst, p. 46

This entry into the field begins from a wider lens of environment, to community, narrowing to the houses and individual—growing closer and tensions simmering up close.

We have much to learn about the travails of such exercises, as it is similar to the Abyssinian Journey of getting closer and closer to the heart of the matter. Like Evans’ camera, Griaule intrudes in his quest for social facts that will hold the key to Abyssinian culture.

Circles of Entry Frame: The Ritualised Negotiations

The expedition has yet to reach its destination. Our lens is still large as we move ever closer, but never getting there as we travel on hooves.

Contrary to Choa [country], where the caravan had met few groups of people on the route from the Doubbar River and the plateau of Djarso, Godjam presented a road full of life. To the right and the left groups of houses appeared like black mushrooms on the hills. Each large pointed roof was surrounded by a small family of modest cones where the household gathered. Great heaps of dung formed marks, and surrounded by thorns, made the site of parks for the cows. Over all hung the smell of smoke, sour milk and badly fermented dough, which told much about the cuisine of the high plateaux. From a certain point of view humanity may be divided into two groups: the civilisation of fresh butter and the civilisation of rancid butter. The Abyssinian is firmly fixed in the latter category.

Griaule, p. 47

Can you smell that?

The caravan of people and animals trudges towards the plateau of St. Jean Venteux, along the ravine of La Betchett. The air endured gusts of whirlwinds and baboons can be spotted on the hills. Nothing to entertain the group except the happenings among the crew and sudden appearances of interlopers that were ritually dealt with by Edjigou, the expedition leader. They camped at two o’clock, “…for they had enough of marching, of stumbling through the clumps, and pushing the rumps of mules towards an end constantly moved on into infinity by the indefatigable White men.”

Our expedition enters into a ritualised negotiation over food. Unlike the trope of establishing kinship over food and drink, we see Edjigou haggle for food and payment. Nourishment for the visitors will not come easily.

What? For honour? And then?

Yes! The tax for honour!

Honour for honour, and you are a dirty mule.”

What, a dirty mule! I am the guardian of the tent. What have you brought in your toga, a snake or a sacred vase? Look no one needs anything here. The food tax is expected. The chief of the country is about to blow his trumpet to assemble the cakes.

I know. Then don’t you see that by depriving myself I brought ten eggs for your master? For honour?

Griaule, p. 65

The expedition was negotiating for a cake tax. What this cake is unclear, but it is much valued as status and desired food, “…be sure to that he has come to honour the stranger with ten rotten eggs and to insult him if they are not paid for with a dear cake! Get out, worthless one! Your eggs are too poor.”

After a time, this ritualised argument brought forth a ceremonial response delivered by a cortege led by a chief (unknown what kind of chief this was, as Abyssinia had multiple chiefs and sub-chiefs) and his aggafari or orderly, accompanied by his small aggafari or his son. They were followed by a train of women carrying baskets of cake on their heads, covered with red cloth to deflect the envious eye. Behind the women were two slaves carrying poultry and dragging a he-goat by the horns, as described by Griaule. This display excited the camp, who had not eaten properly, “We have all eaten together in the deserts and planted pickets. We were brought up among the pack lashings.” Yet, the negotiations were not over but were just beginning again.

Then the chief had the first basket brought forward; the bearer, a woman, placed it on the ground and showed a pretty face pretending embarassment; she made gestures to say to the aggafari:

“Fifty ordinary cakes!”

…Three other women made the same deposit.

“Four hundred ordinary cakes,” said the chief to the interpreter.

“Four hundred ordinary cakes,” the interpreter repeated in French.

“Receive them!” said the White man to his men.

It was the same with fifty excellent cakes and for twenty particularly excellent cakes made from wheat flour.

“For my table!” said the White out of politeness.

Griaule p. 69

The members proceeded to count the cakes, but obviously, much of the actual count was a lie: “one hundred and seventy two!”

“What! One hundred and seventy-two? He said four hundred!”

“There are a hundred and seventy-two!”

“By St. George!”

“George! The two hundred and twenty-eight lacking are for honour [tax]!”

p. 69

This litany of grumbling continued to the acceptance of the animals to be slaughtered. The ten chickens were deemed to be too thin; the goat’s horns were remarked as “tough as leather.” All these were begrudingly accepted in practice. Finally, the exchange was capped with two beeswax candles, which Griaule happily accepted, “Finally…there are the ethnological objects. And he placed them carefully in a box destined for distant museums.”

All is well now that the expedition is well fed (except with some stolen cartridges owing to sleeping night guards). Still, the capital is elusive and nowhere near. That is how slow a thirty-pack mule caravan moves through the landscape. Though the expedition dealt with squabbles and logistics nightmares, this encampment offered Griaule a moment of peace to work.

Fatigue brought the European back to himself. He had made everyone get out of his tent, and was seated on his bed, with his hand in the precious saddle-bag which contained the precious notes of the day that he must classify at the canteen office; he did not have the courage. His head was filled with a thousand facts, with the names of a thousand plants, with a thousand orders to be given, with a thousand enquiries which must not be forgotten. He would have liked to enjoy this evening in peace and throw himself naked into a pool.

p. 73

In one brief confession, we peek at the state of Griaule. We forget the trope of entering into the field and revert to the mental exhaustion that characterises the demands of documentation and the failures to do so daily.

Round Up

We continue the journey of Marcel Griaule as he enters his field site. However, the expedition has yet to reach the capital of Abbaye-de-Marc, but we encounter the trope of entrance into the field site. Unlike the violence on one end or the kinship on the other for the field workers, we encounter ritualised negotiations. Griaule does not conceal his meekness here but understands the ceremonial aggressiveness required to feed his troop properly. And so the dance begins, the lie, deceit and acceptance, with both sides appearing to win and satisfied. It is interesting that, though a foreigner enters, there is also an opportunity to exercise resistance and agency for the residents under the rule of their king.

I am inspired by John Dorst’s observation of troublesome entries and thresholds that define ethnography. We have yet to reach the narrowed lens, and I expect to do so in the next chapter.

Further Reading:

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Dorst, J. (2010). On the Porch and in the Room: Threshold Moments and other Ethnographic Tropes in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In: Blinder, C. (eds) New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230111868_3 (Open Access)

The ongoing draft of our classics can be found on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

One of the ways to distinguish early modern and contemporary works, and even travellers and ethnographers, is their opening chapters. It is one of the most analysed pieces in ethnographic writing that will decide whether the reader will accept what follows as the author’s moral and scholarly authority of what he or she has seen and understood of another culture.

I want to approach my re-reading of Marcel Griaule’s The Abyssinian Journey, and all the successive monographs, using what I call the Rhetorical Sandwich. So far, the ingredients are:

1. The Opening Trope

2. Writing using referentiality (realist) or evocative (literary)

3. The chapters are written as parts of the whole (holism)

4. The Closing Trope

These categories increase in scope or depth as I continue my studies.

The Search for Ras Hailou

In a travel book, no long-term settlement is expected. This is what we read from Marcel Griaule’s The Abyssinian Journey. It is a series of openings into the heart of Godjam country in which Griaule sought to penetrate and unlock its culture. Prior to leaving Paris, he challenged the prevailing status quo by choosing to study a Christian group.1 The cabinets of objects at the Trocadero were static information gleaned from secondary sources such as travel, government, and missionary accounts. Fieldwork as a basis of information source was fairly new in the emerging French anthropology discipline. It would hopefully bring the collection back to life and back to the people through a new science of man. This new science relies on the collection of multiple social facts, producing a holistic picture of Abyssinian culture.2 Thus, at the instigation of his teachers led by Marcel Mauss in 1928, Griaule, with his colleague Marcel Lancet, set out on his first trip in 1929 to what would become his lifetime research site of Abyssinia or Ethiopia.

The Abyssinian Journey is a work on a search to meet Ras Hailou or Ras Hailu, then the influential ruler and successor of Godjam country or territory, a vassal state for the Emperor Haile Selassie I.3 The title ras pertains to the highest ranking aristocrat: the equivalent of duke, governor or marshall (see Sbacchi 1977). He would become the access point by which the expedition could locate a suitable place to settle and study the religion and myth of the area through his royal court of priests and scholars. Hence, his travel book is a series of entry points towards a northerly direction terminating in Lake Tana (Lake Dembea in the map) beginning from the south from Addis Ababa, passing through the (Blue) Nile River towards the North.

The Entry Frame: The Conqueror

Marcel Griaule’s expedition is contrary to the typical approaches done in Anglo-American anthropology: as a stranger, student or child who is trying to learn. Rather, James Clifford in his research on Marcel Griaule show him as running his expedition in a military fashion. This is unsurprising because Griaule’s first job was in the Air Force as an aerial spotter and navigator. This helps us to understand how he writes but also approaches his research project. No wonder, Clifford describes him as one that relies on visual observation to collate social facts—”without depending on uncertain oral collaboration, and could provide the edge needed to provoke, control, and verify confessional discourses.” (133)

Instead, to uncover the facts, one must be an interrogator

Griaule's tactics are varied; but they have in common an active, aggressive posture not unlike the judicial process of "interrogation" (1952:542, 547) "The role of the person sniffing out social facts is often comparable to that of a detective or examining magistrate. The fact is the crime, the interlocutor the guilty party; all the society's members are accomplices" (1957:59). He is fascinated by the tactics of oral inquiry, the play of truth and falsehood that can lead into "labyrinths" that are "organized." Like a psychoanalyst, he begins to see patterns of resistance, forgetfulness, and omission not as mere obstacles, but as signs of a deeper structuring of the truth...

Clifford, p p. 137-138

He sees himself more like a detective using the French juridical language of juge d'instruction, or establishing the facts of a case in order to determine the truth of the matter. This means, as we proceed to his Abyssinian Journey, nothing is construed as performance or concealment. It is naked exposure of the power necessary to navigate through a landscape embedded in the ongoing colonial and racial politics in the region. “…The investigator must break through initial defenses and dissimulations.” (Clifford 1983: 137)

This severe persona makes sense with his dramatic crossing of the Nile.

The Nile Crossing

Now it makes sense to read the chapters in Griaule’s entry into Godjam society as a military figure who must control to get things done and get pass the artifice of the surface. This means Griaule’s persistence—to the point of insensitivity, rudeness, and racism becomes bedgrudingly admirable for the reader as he recounts the dangerous crossing of the Nile.

The White man (Griaule) had a completely different outlook. To him a river is a river—a reason for care about the baggage and a pretext for verifying the loads. To him the main problems are the strength of the current and the depth of the ford.

Assuredly the man of the caravan is anxious for several days in advance, and asks travellers coming int he opposite direction about the depth of the water. But the European says:

“The water comes up to the breast? Excellent! Then the photographic plates will be alright.”

While the man of the caravan repeats literally the words of the traveller:

“The Nile takes one at the breast.”

And he remains thoughtful, for one disposes of his life only once, and it is impossible to begin over again after the spirits of the river have taken you and shared your person.

Then comes a series of clumsy compromises; some shout and others grit their teeth; the leader of the caravan manages to delay as much as possible the dread hour of the crossing,mean while the European wants to gain time, which is nothing,…

Griaule, pp. 25-26

Frankly, I don’t know why Griaule would portray himself negatively. Yet, it was his brutal honesty that makes his later ethnographic authority plausible. He was not afraid to show the realities and hardships of running an expedition including recalcitrant yet resigned natives running at least forty pack mules through dangerous territory. This all made for dramatic reading.

There is something to be said about his transparency about the field conditions (or his dramatic exaggerations for the reader). The crossing is a dangerous affair. Panic is the enemy. For the reader, it is all ripe for imagination.

Two men sank, killed by kicks from animals which only wanted to do their best. The master of the caravan whose toga had rolled around the leg of a horse, cut the girths of the animal which was carrying him along. A little blood bubbled in the water, for the knife was two-edged, and it is difficult to be precise when cutting close to the belly of a lean horse…

…But the powers of the valley had no pity on men who invoked above all the names of recent gods; with an even speed the reef of living or half-dead flesh floated towards the distant line of crocodiles which the guards on both banks were hunting with shots that lost themselves in the sands. Bodies which drifted against the rocks were seized by energetic hands; at bends in the river horses and men were cast up safe and sound, certain of them with their loads and all with their guns (death is better than to let go of a gun!); togas dragging in the direft were drawn towards the bank by the marching sticks of the soldiers. All that floated between the two waters followed its own destiny.

The whole of the last part of the event was lost to the Europeans—it happened too far away to the south.

Griaule, p. 35

And so the honest European conqueror manages to traverse the most dangerous natural crossing towards his clear destination, Abbaye-de-Marc, the capital of Godjam Country.

Round Up

Having learned about the rhetorical sandwich used by ethnographic monographs, it is now easier for me to return back to Marcel Griaule’s Abyssinian Journey. I now have a frame to place what’s happening (but mostly, nothing is happening but a bunch of entries) and to situate the travel book. The crossing of the Nile in the first chapter proves to be my most favourite, so far, as it encapsulates all the inequalities, the physical danger, the difference in world perspectives among the players into the best introductory read. I am slowly understanding how to read, perhaps enjoy, and assess an early modern monograph.

Further Reading:

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Salvadore, M. (2010). The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306-1458. Journal of World History, 21(4), 593–627. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41060852

Salvadore, M. 2017. The African Prester John and the Birth of the Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402-1555. Oxon: Routledge (see Introduction to why Ethiopia became Christian)

Sbacchi, A. (1977). Italy and the Treatment of the Ethiopian Aristocracy, 1937-1940. The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 10(2), 209–241. https://doi.org/10.2307/217347

The ongoing draft of our classics can be found on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

My confusion about Marcel Griaule’s literary/scientific work, The Abyssinian Journey, stems from my inexperience in reading the second book genre of the early modern period in anthropological writing. I have set out to mitigate this. My training in anthropology did not pay attention to writing until late, let alone how to read.

However, I read voraciously when I was directly affiliated with the university. I enjoyed both required readings and those that I discovered from browsing the stacks. (I am still trying to remember a yellow book on Orality and Textuality that, for the life of me, I could not verify the exact title despite looking at my old syllabus and browsing online for years on end now). I had acquired my knowledge of what an ethnography was just by reading—until I discovered the second literary ethnography books.

I will have to correct my previous error in arguing that only the French had their second literary tomes. The Anglo school also had its own, especially in the early 20th century, except these were largely derided or ignored, unlike their French counterparts (see Wheeler’s Traveler’s Tales for some of the works). This shifted with the publications in 1986 of Writing Culture edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, and Anthropology as Cultural Critique, by George E. Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer. It was a time when the U.S. was coming to terms with its Latin America and Asia political meddling. The totalitarian hypercapitalism is yet to wield its ugly fangs and we are a few years away from the fall of the U.S.S.R. Yet, this period ushered in a reckoning of the scientific project of anthropology. Can we ever represent another group? Who gets to speak? How must we write? The answers either put you in the scientific camp or the humanities camp in anthropology. The late 20th century introduced us to a third camp that puts forward an intensified activist position in the metropole that shifted from the largely faraway locations of the ethnographic project. The other is now here.

Writing and reading, though, are twin transformation projects. It is the reader and the act of reading that tends to be forgotten in this conversation. Anthropologist Kevin K. Birth, provides an insightful critique of the two books and highlights what they have forgotten—the reader. The mistake in subverting the scientific or realist mode of writing, he says, is the audience. Birth calls the postmodern project “insensitive writing.”

…the ethical problems of ethnographic representation are not dispelled, but displaced onto readers.

Birth, p. 550, Reading and the Righting of Writing Ethnographies

In other words, if the experimental text is not understood, then something must be terribly wrong with the readers. And they must be changed. Such an extreme position is the exception since contemporary ethnographies today, after forty years, still follow a similar form.

Why is that?

A Reader’s Frame

The audience or the reader is hardwired to understand the information flow, in what Gregory Bateson, anthropologist and psychiatrist, writing Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, aptly calls “frames.” It is an unconscious psychological form of metacommunication by which the audience or reader parses information. He explains that this is borrowed not just from psychology but also from set theory in mathematics, in which dots are connected by a line. Rather than a line, humans perceive the connection of concepts, ideas, or relationships by way of a framing device. Messages with similar meaningful actions are placed within a frame. This creates a “logic of classification.”

…the messages enclosed within the imaginary line are defined as members of a class by virtue of their sharing common premises or mutual relevance.

Bateson, p. 188 Steps to an Ecology of the Mind

Interestingly, the way the mind does logic classification is binary: “this is play” or “is this play?” Though Bateson applies his hypothesis towards psychotherapy, Birth finds it useful to examine why new forms of writing confuse readers. It simply does not fit the frame. “This is fact” or “is this fact?” New and old forms of writing may become obscure because it contradicts the psychological frames of readers.

Since I was used to reading ethnographies, I had unconsciously acquired some of the framing devices that make the text legible.

Rhetoric and Tropes in Ethnographic Writing

Any idea set to paper inevitably has to use rhetorical devices to communicate. Rhetoric, defined by George Marcus of the Writing Culture school, “is the characteristic manner in which a text’s language and organization convinces its readers of the truth, or at least the credibility of its claims.” We are talking about creating the ethnographic authority through the use of literary devices, more commonly known as tropes. These are recognisable characteristics and features that recur and trigger recognition and meaning from the readers.

Birth and Marcus both point to historian Hayden White’s (1973) Metahistory as a foundation work to understand the tropes used in historical writing. White disabuses the assumption of fact in the historical narrative and instead proposes that the reader, but also the writer, understand the underlying structure, style and devices employed that render the text as realist, poetic, or mythical. Though a similar work is not available in anthropology, which is surprising in itself, White’s piercing analysis of the tropes used in historical writing is helpful to understand how information is transferred, translated, and interpreted from the (auto)biographical body of the researcher, the field notes, to a monograph. This book in itself deserves close reading.

White enjoins the historian/ethnographer to create the frame.

…the historian must first prefigure as a possible object of knowledge the whole set of events reported in the documents. This prefigurative act is poetic inasmuch as it is precognitive and precritical in the economy of the historian's own consciousness. It is also poetic insofar as it is constitutive of the structure that will subsequently be imaged in the verbal model offered by the historian as a representation and explanation of "what really happened" in the past. But it is constitutive not only of a domain which the historian can treat as a possible object of (mental) perception. It is also constitutive of the concepts he will use to identify the objects that inhabit that domain and to characterize the kinds of relationships they can sustain with one another.

p. 30-31, Metahistory

He considers this prefiguring decision by the researcher as a poetic choice. Hence, he says, the choices make the claim closer to moral and aesthetic, with epistemology to be discussed at a later period. This is because a researcher must render these ideas around four figurative tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. White defines them as such,

In Metaphor (literally, "transfer"), for example, phenomena can be characterized in terms of their similarity to, and difference from, one another, in the manner of analogy or simile, as in the phrase "my love, a rose/'. Through Metonymy (literally, "name change"), the name of a part of a thing may be substituted for the name of the whole, as in the phrase "fifty sail" when what is indicated is "fifty ships." With Synecdoche, which is regarded by some theorists as a form of Metonymy, a phenomenon can be characterized by using the part to symbolize some quality presumed to inhere in the totality, as in the expression "He is all heart," Through Irony, finally, entities can be characterized by way of negating on the figurative level what is positively affirmed on the literal level. The figures of the manifestly absurd expression (catachresis), such as "blind mouths," and of explicit paradox (oxymoron), such as "cold passion," can be taken as emblems of this trope.

p. 34, Metahistory

These are the linguistic devices that are available during the writing process.

For ethnographers, they must create a conventional monograph frame that includes the moral assessment that we previously discussed, and also a balance between description and specific argumentation (usually referring to the big questions in the discipline, such as how we got here, how different or alike we are, among others). Marcus helpfully outlines other recognisable features of a monograph,

…a sense of the conditions of the fieldwork; of everyday life (Malinowski’s imponderabilia); of micro-process (an implicit validation of participant observation); of holism (a form of portraiture integrated with the pursuit of particular claims); and of translation across cultural and linguistic boundaries (the broad, contextual exegesis of indigenous terms and concepts.)

Marcus, p. 509, Rhetoric and the Ethnographic Genre

His general description of a monograph already includes some of the rhetorical tropes that establish authority, credibility, and “being there.”

• opening trope - how the ethnographer enters the field

• referentiality or evocation style - the decision to use referentiality refers to statements that can be judged as true or false, versus an absence of any prefigured control or organisation by the author

• holism and parts approach - these include uses of micro/macro presentation of events to represent the entire society (e.g. ritual) or self-referential use of the text chapters of the book

• closure trope - the decision to conclude with coherence or open-endedness

What we have here are explicit criteria and guideposts to judge a monograph for its authority and the ability to communicate to the reader the truth of what the anthropologist or traveler has seen. Can we then contrast and measure this against the early French anthropology and literary double books?

Round Up

Any confusion in the reading of early modern realist or even experimental contemporary ethnographies results from the inability of the writer to match the psychological and narrative frame of the reader. Gregory Bateson calls this frame the binary logic of classification that enables the reader/audience to put within an imaginary boundary a relationship of concepts, objects, ideas, things, etc. and exclude all other outside of it. In doing so, a reader can judge whether “this is fact” or assess “is this fact.” You can substitute any word, but the premise remains the same: it allows the reader to unlock the meaning of the text. This frame contains multiple rhetorical tropes that influence yet also produce a poetic quality to scholarly writing (including what would be conventionally recognised as science). Hayden White wrote an influential assessment of historiography that can be applied to ethnographic writing. He offers four tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony as literary devices that are commonly used to frame a text.

In anthropology, the conventional monograph frame consists of fieldwork conditions, narration of everyday life, parts/wholes description or coherence, and keyword concept explanation. This very structure itself uses rhetorical tropes to convince the reader of the truth value of the project. These include putting together the parts into a cohesive whole (from a realist approach) or not (an experimental approach); the poetics of entering and concluding the field; and the participation in everyday life. It is these features that provide us with contrasting guideposts to assess an anthropologist’s traveler account.

Further Reading:

Bateson, Gregory. [1972] 2000. A Theory of Play and Fantasy. In Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press. pp. 177-193

Birth, K. K. (1990). Reading and the Righting of Writing Ethnographies [Review of Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography; Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences, by J. Clifford, G. E. Marcus, & Michael M. J. Fischer]. American Ethnologist, 17(3), 549–557. http://www.jstor.org/stable/644861

Clifford, Jameas and George E. Marcus. (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography; Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Berkeley: University of California Press

Marcus, G. E. (1980). Rhetoric and the Ethnographic Genre in Anthropological Research. Current Anthropology, 21(4), 507–510. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2742067

Rumsey, A. (2004). Ethnographic Macro-Tropes and Anthropological Theory. Anthropological Theory, 4(3), 267-298. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499604045565 (Original work published 2004)

Wheeler, V. (1986). Travelers' tales: Observations on the travel book and ethnography. Anthropological Quarterly, 52-63.

White, Hayden. (1973). Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

The ongoing draft of our classics can be found on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

Email me your recommendations: frontalobe.substack@gmail.com

In reading Marcel Griaule’s literary scientific work, The Abyssinian Journey, I was presented with a multitude of problems with truth-telling, documentation, and fiction—similar problems with travel writing as entertainment and communication. At the time of its publication in 1934, it was one of the ways it reached the general French public, who were hungry to learn more about its colonies and African art and culture.

I interrupt my reading to ask, what was I missing? There are challenges to comprehending early 20th century travel accounts and early ethnographic monographs. The contemporary reader exists in a world vastly different in taste, speed, and time perception. Yet the yearning for exploration, travel and seeing through different eyes remains the same. I was confronted with a different kind of reading, writing, and perception. This demands learning how to read such tomes again.

If ethnographic authority is about “being there,” what is the difference between the two? As I found out, there are more similarities than what anthropologists are willing to admit.

Shared Legacies

Much of the examination of ethnographic writing flourished during the 1980s and early 2000s1 with the advent of James Clifford’s Writing Culture and the questioning of the kind of monograph writing in the Anglo world. James Clifford embarked on research into ethnographic historiography and provoked conversations into anthropological authority, writing, the political economy, and post-colonial projects. This has since transformed the discipline for the next couple of decades. Though it has remained what I perceive as a niche avenue open to fluent English speakers and tenured senior faculty, it has, more importantly, moved the needle of anthropology closer to the humanities—or at least acknowledged, the necessity of the literary into scientific writing.

Mary Louise Pratt and Valerie Wheeler, female anthropologists who were part of the writing culture cohort, put the ethnographic monograph within the travel writing genre or its successor to the early modern travel writing. In doing so, it is easier to subject the monograph to critique and also to be understood.

Anthropologists stand to gain from looking themselves as writing inside as outside the discursive traditions that precede them; inside as well as outside the histories of contact on which they follow.

Pratt, p. 49 Fieldwork in Common Places

Ethnography, then, can be thought of as travellers’ accounts. It shares a lot of the same autobiographical references, the fictions, and aims to document what it is like “being there.” Both require straddling the subjective (literary) and the objective (description). How ethnography does it what makes the subtle difference.

The tempo of moral assessment

It is in writing that makes the anthropological object or the emergence of the place as in travel accounts. Abyssinia, is what Marcel Griaule, a French anthropologist who embarked on his first fieldwork there for five months from January to June 1929, wanted to emerge from its pages—a depiction of classical and quintessential Ethiopia, according to Vincent Debane, a French anthropology historian. I remarked previously how difficult and droll the text was for my contemporary sensibilities. However, Griaule’s initial foray served as the bedrock of his scientific documentation and subsequent extended studies on African art and religion.

My confusion stems from my unawareness of how to read or separate a work that was an adventure travel account, yet also what is supposed to be a part of Griaule’s scientific expedition. The key distinguishing concept here is moral assessment.

Moral assessment is the core distinction of the monograph around which other writing elements circulate. This is what Alfred Louch (1966), a philosopher who examined the dilemma of the nature of describing human action. His position is even more extreme in that he says that ethnography can never be a science of man because any observation of human action is one written within a moral ecology. The difference between a traveler and a scholar, he says, is that a traveler applies his moral judgement on what he sees while the anthropologist makes a moral assessment only after all the details are available and presented (161). This is essentially the weakness of the descriptive project and one in which anthropologists attempt to remove as many subjective elements from it as possible.

The inherent disciplinal awareness of this moral ecology results in anthropology deliberately tampering with its relationship to several elements: time, tempo, and movement—to achieve a kind of rigour for comparison and abstraction. Across all these elements, the common strategy is to slow down.

The tendency of an anthropologist is to stop and settle. The creation of the field site is necessary to locate the parameters of observation. To morally assess is to dwell, the opposite of travelling and constant movement.2 For Valerie Wheeler, cultural relativism develops when an anthropologist holds back time and stays put.3

…to exorcise the demon of judgement, one must be willing to accept infanticide, homicide, even cannibalism as ordinary.

Wheeler, p. 58 Travelers’ Tales

Ordinariness comes from a kind of bounded study of a specific place that generates an eternal ethnographic present—a form, a stillness necessary to render fleeting impressions into abstraction. It is useful to think of the travel/monograph difference as another sensory allegory of the hot and cold. Since memory is fleeting, a travel account is best written “hot” when momentum benefits from recency. The opposite is demanded from a monograph,

…revision and extended publication may wait, while the heat cools and events fade.

Wheeler, p. 56 Travelers’ Tales

The displacement of tempo is necessary to achieve an autobiographical experience that becomes slowly anonymous. Though the account relies on heightened sensory description of place and space,4 the anthropologist deigns to reduce, slow down, and achieve distance, rendering extraordinary accounts into the ordinary—an amoral transformation exercise. In its place, there are multiple identities or “lies”, as qualitative researcher Gary Alan Fine (1993) honestly calls them, that replace this anonymous body. You have the choice of the kindly ethnographer, the friendly ethnographer, and the honest ethnographer, among others (none of these are true, anyway). In Griaule’s case, he does not even attempt to pretend; it is clear who he is in his account—the White Man, the European, all to emphasise the power inequalities and pressures in the region, though he did not say it. Though Griaule is present in his travel account, this will be erased in his subsequent scholarly work.

This transformation process is the manufacturing of “ethnographic fictions” essential to create a monograph distinct from a traveling account. These are what Wheeler describes as commonplace devices when anthropologists use “typifications, pseudonyms, composite individuals and events” (59) within the text. This affects truthfulness, and by this standard, Vincent Debane’s accusation that Griaule wrote fiction in his chapter of an execution in Chapter Six in The Abyssinian Journey, does not hold (because Griaule switched identities and actual events).

If anthropology makes its object through ethnography, it is easy to classify the monograph as almost fiction. The erasure and reversal of tempo, of identities, of actualities, and of temperature, serve the one significant contribution that makes this truly a social science: the moral assessment of another social reality.

This does not necessarily make reading the early French anthropology double books easier. But having some initial guideposts in how to read ethnographies make early modern travel accounts legible. My opinion of Griaule’s work may be changing now. Next week, we’ll examine the common tropes in ethnography.

Round Up

You can choose whether you want to put the ethnographic monograph under the travel writing genre or subsume travel writing under ethnography. What is clear is that the monograph is a form of travel writing. However, the difference lies in the moral assessment of the people and culture encountered. With movement, it is easier to perceive moral judgement with brief vignettes compared to long-term settlement.

Anthropologists counter the tendency to judge by reversing the flow of travel—by dwelling, staying, cooling down and delaying writing. The distillation of specific events and people, including the authors themselves, into abstract form is part of this reversal. The result is a specific genre of writing that is deemed scholarly.

Further Reading:

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Debaene, Vincent. 2014. Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science & Literature (Trans. Justin Izzo). Chicago: Chicago University Press (see Chapter 7)

Fine, Gary Alan. 1993. TEN LIES OF ETHNOGRAPHY: Moral Dilemmas of Field Research: Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 22(3), 267-294. https://doi.org/10.1177/089124193022003001 (Original work published 1993)

Hastrup, Kristen. 1992. Anthropological Visions: Some Notes on Visual and Textual Authority. in Peter Ian Crawford and David Turton, eds. Film as Ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 8-25.

Pratt, Mary Louise. 1986. "Fieldwork in Common Places". Writing Culture, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 27-50. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520946286-004

Wheeler, V. (1986). Travelers' tales: Observations on the travel book and ethnography. Anthropological Quarterly, 52-63.

The ongoing draft of our classics can be found on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

In our last post, Oliver Sacks was being vilified in the press for scientific fraud. Without the literary science tradition in the Anglo world, it is easy to simply attribute inconsistencies and masking to fraud. Sacks, upon further examination, overtly empathised with his patients. Thus, in treating them, he was healing himself. This is the benefit of examining the evolution of the French tradition of the double books in anthropological writing— one literary, one scientific.

I want to contrast an Anglo case with a French one.1 In this case, it was serendipitous that I discovered that Marcel Griaule offers a similar comparison in his work The Abyssinian Journey. Vincent Debane, a French anthropology historian, in his work Far Afield, called out Griaule for his fictional twist of truth in Chapter Six, Death in Muslin. The account of the death of an assasin of the ras Hailu or the high chieftain by way of torture. Debane recounts that this fictional dramatisation is not necessarily false, as attested by Jacques Mercier, another anthropologist of Ethiopia, who verified much of Griaule’s work in Ethiopia. Mercier reported that this event was a distortion of Menelik’s punishment of a rebel named Bezzebeh.2 Nonetheless, this literary flourishing does not come as a lightning bolt in the scholarly community. Rather, it is a characteristic of literary non-fiction.

Griaule unfortunately did not have the luck to discover such an evocative document [in his initial foray into Ethiopia]. Lacking this, he went on to invent one, and in order to restore the singular character of the Abyssinian nation, to invent his own Ethiopian chronicle.

Debane, p. 159 Far Afield

The document that Debane describes here is one that brings to life the science of objects and knowledge (musée vivant). Rather, this heightened account, in what would be a rather dusty tome of travel, gave it some pizazz and buzz as Debane recounts the success of the travel account following its publication in 1934. It was reprinted forty-two times and translated into English, German, and Czech. Debane also argues that the jury lobbying by Paul Rivet and Peter Rivière, the former is the founder of the Institute of Ethnologie (1926) and Musée de l’Homme (1937) and the latter an Oxford professor of Amazonia, resulted in the work receiving the Prix Gringoire in 1935.

It is clear that Vincent Debane does NOT like this book at all as an exemplary example of what a good second book is in literary anthropology. For him, it fails as a human document (document humain) or at least a form of scientific work. Never mind the fictional account of that chapter.

There is thus hardly any doubt that Les Flambeurs d’hommes is not a good scholarly text. What would it have needed to become one? Something else entirely, it seems: first-person narration, dates, places, names, footnotes; in short, submission to the minimum requirements for transitivity and communicability.

Debane, p. 170 Far Afield

To a certain extent, I agree. Debane wails against the absence of any photography accompanying the original French text as a form of verification. This was surprisingly not the case in the English translations, which contained about sixteen photographic plates. That is fortunate because otherwise, I was lost. There is no attempt at structure or explanation to the reader. As a non-Africanist, I had no idea of my bearings or who the important persons were or what they were doing there. And I do not think that Griaule himself wanted to do so. This is a travel account in contrast to his scholarly work of Silhouettes et graffiti abyssins (1933) and Jeux et divertissements abyssins (1935) which were part of the salvage ethnographic collection imperative at the time.

The point at this juncture is to collect, to observe and not to interpret. That is perhaps left to the reader. Thus, what we have are impressions, following journal account writing, of what might have been interesting to note for a particular day or moment. And yet, this is not exactly a journal account since we are left with too little information and contextual information to piece together (e.g. no dates, specific places, time, or why it was important).

This is partly the reason why Griaule’s book has dropped into obscurity in the Anglo reading list. For Debane, there are three important criteria that this work failed:

Is anything of the atmosphere of classical Ethiopian society expressed in the text? (This is the part of the question that, if not literary, is at least rhetorical.) Is the impression the reader receives actually valid? (This is the scientific question concerning “evaluation.”) To the first question, which brings up the efficacy of communication, it is difficult to respond. Upon reading Les Flambeurs d’hommes, do we have the feeling that we have grasped a particular collective “spirit” or mentality? Perhaps vaguely.

Debane, p. 167

There is still something of value in this work that remains interesting for a general reader.

Why it remains interesting (Chapters 1- 3)

Unlike the Sacks problem (or I should say the Anglo problem), Griaule makes no qualms about who he is (a white, male colonist researcher), how he conducts some of his interactions, and what his first fieldwork impressions in Ethiopia alongside his coworker Marcel Larget. Though not wholly transparent, the conditions of that time were plain to see.

In the evening there was a long discussion about the descent by the Europeans and the head of the caravan. If there had been pistols near, the discussion would have ended badly. The case was the inexplicable impatience of the foreigner to enter diabolic regions, without listening to the complaints of the men of the caravan who continued disrespectfully to dip their fingers in a pot of stew. Exhausted, at the end of his arguments, the White Man [Griaule writing about himself in the third person] shouted:

“You promised me to cross on Wednesday. If we don’t cross on Wednesday, we shall be delayed three days, as it is not permitted to go down on Thursday or Friday.”

“When one can defer a misfortune for three days,” said one of the natives, “one thanks God and sits down!”

Whereupon the White man dealt blows, which were not returned, for a White is always a man of the government and it is sure to bring trouble if one touches him.

Griaule, pp. 24-25

For a modern reader, the blatant sins of colonialism are plain to see. It remains to be seen whether this is particular to the French or not. But there’s another register here that an outsider such as Griaule highlights as he takes his reader to experience—the supernatural and physical dangers of crossing the river Nile and leaving the border of the country towards a new land. He does not remark on this further.

The level of information and data increases as you read through the chapter which keeps me going. Some snippets of everyday life take you with his frustrations.

Fatigue brought the European back to himself. He had made everyone get out of his tent, and was seated on this bed, with his hand in the prcious saddle-bag which contained the precious notes of the day that he must classify at the canteen office; he did not have the courage. His head was filled with a thousand facts with the names of a thousand plants, with a thousand orders to be given, with a thousand enquiries which must be not be forgotten. He would have liked to enjoy this evening in peace and throw himself naked into a pool.

Griaule pp. 72-73

The facts that he is so worried about do not reach the pages, nor his thoughts on the matter. All we get are snippets of information about what he sees, but never an explanation of what is happening.

Postscript (February 19, 2026)

My difficulty in my initial reading of Griaule’s Abyssinian Journey led me to study how best to approach a travel and a monograph. I looked into the two genres and how to read an ethnography, which greatly helped me to refine my approach to reading his work. I had since re-read the book with the fresher eyes of a student and examined it using the tropes and rhetoric common in the writing of a monograph. I gained a better appreciation of the subtleties of his field research style, the work, and newfound discoveries about Abyssinian culture. Follow the chapters read along beginning here, followed by the succeeding chapters here and here.

Round Up

The difficulty in reviewing the first three chapters to this work is that it resists any form or narrative structure. It is almost as if the modern reader like myself is unfamiliar with the point of a travel account, if not for harvesting any historical information and data within. There is no modern enticement of come and visit so-and-so. It is to entertain and to take the reader there with the author without necessarily an denouement. It is a time where television does not exist nor other means of on demand distribution. It is difficult.

Since this is my first reading of a second book in French anthropology, I myself struggle to place this in a context that makes it relevant to the anthropological practice. Yet, I find some literary entertainment in its pages. His writing (in translation) is engaging and highly descriptive and takes you to a time that no longer exists.

Further Reading:

Clifford, James. 1983. Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology Volume 1. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 121-156.

Debaene, Vincent. 2014. Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science & Literature (Trans. Justin Izzo). Chicago: Chicago University Press (see Chapter 7)

The ongoing draft of our classics can be found on our main page.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

The rise of science in French anthropology during the early 20th century saw the erasure of the classical Palais du Trocadéro from Paris’ cultural skyline. In its place is the neoclassical edifice that is now the Musée de l’Homme, a new approach to modern museology and the study of man. Though expunged from science, the French ethnographic literary writing tradition can never flee from literature’s clutches. It is what makes the French tradition exceptional and useful if we talk about ‘truth/s.’

There has been a collapse of differentiation of truth produced by literature and science. Once defined in French as a holistic body of knowledge gained through mental processes, res literaria or literature has since extended its truth-telling by engaging in life itself. It is from this exuberance and totality that science carved out its own contours to go the opposite way—the elimination of the product of an imagined mind and heart to focus on a strict empiricism and objectivity. But now both objectives merged. Both fields strive to communicate what calls the “living document” because ultimately literature is the study of life itself.1 This stance is similar to the terms also used by early French writers and anthropologists: “human document” (document humain) and the “living museum” (Musée vivant). According to Vincent Debaene, French anthropology historian, the former refers not just documenting life while also creating an object that remains human even if life has been snatched from its context and stilled on paper. Similarly, a living museum is only possible when the general public can access it and use it for self-reflection.2 Across the three terms, it is clear that literature crosses over with science. It documents reality but also allows for a particular organised reality conducive to scientific thought and information.

When literature-science is forcefully separated, the result is what is happening with Oliver Sacks—a neurologist/physician and writer who inhabited the pains of his patients. His case serves to contrast the Anglo tradition of separation with the French tradition of fusing literature and science. It was timely when shared a report that Oliver Sacks fabricated data in his work. I immediately thought, this is exactly the kind of data neuroses that is the effect of having only a single form of legitimate delivery—science writing. Is it really data fabrication or a literary work that included the physician’s empathy in treating and reporting about his patients?

The Case of Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks pioneered medical humanities—a field I am unfamiliar with, but crosses over to anthropology quite nicely—a holistic study of healing that does not only view the patient through his pathologies or disease. It is a view of treatment of a person and this may require music or art and a thorough understanding and documentation of their life histories.

Today, Oliver Sacks, who passed away in 2015, is now haunted by the potential misrepresentation of his research due to public access of his personal journals and letters. The New Yorker headline reads from Rachel Aviv, “Oliver Sacks Puts Himself into His Case Studies. What was the Cost? Aviv was given access to several journals and letters, the specifics of what these materials are unclear. After all, Sacks is a prolific writer—from personal letters, diaries, essays, and everything in between. He had amassed over 650 notebooks and journals, wrote approximately 35,000 letters to friends, family, and fans, had written over 16 manuscripts for books, and documented patient histories that span decades.3 These will not be available to the general public until 2028 when the entire collection is unveiled at the New York Public Library.

Though his letters and missives were deeply personal, he never threw them out. He wrote as he thought. His ideas emerge during writing. Kate Edgar, his editor for decades, describes their ferocious off the cuff writing/editing process as “combat editing” in which she sat beside him as he typed and responded to her editing requests by retyping and consequently, in some instances, produce a totally new draft altogether. He wrote his journals and typed manuscripts as seeds for his ideas and books but mostly to become a “Galileo of the inward”—to excavate his internal struggles and release them. Writing was therapy. He could have asked these to be burned knowing what lurked within these pages. But he did not. It is now for all the world to see a haunted genius.

The New Yorker highlighted his repressed homosexuality and the psychoanalytical training he delved into. Born in 1933, it was the time when homosexuality was a criminal act. His sexual identity, in itself, is not very interesting to me or something for public consumption. However, Aviv postulates that this is the reason why Sacks started to inhabit his patients and therefore, attribute things that did not happen. “It is not merely or wholly a projection—nor (as I have sometimes, ingeniously-disingenuously, maintained) a mere ‘sensitization’ of what I know so well in myself. But (if you will) a sort of autobiography.” It is particularly startling for Leonard L., played by Robert de Niro in the 1990 film Awakenings, who suffered from encephalitis lethargica that rendered him catatonic since childhood. After treating him with L-Dopa, in two weeks, he started to respond. When asked by Sacks,

‘What’s it like being the way you are? What would you compare it to?’ He spelled out the following answer: ‘Caged. Deprived. Like Rilke’s panther.’

It turns out Leonard did not say this.

Rather, it was Sacks himself who identified with Leonard’s state of mind and his own repressed sexuality and frustrations. Aviv found out from the letter of Sacks to a friend (unnamed in the article) that he felt like, “Rilke’s image of the caged panther, stupefied, dying, behind bars” as he was writing his first book, Migraines. Furthermore, Aviv revealed that Leonard L. wrote an autobiography (this work is unpublished but are notes and private documents) describing a life opposite of the clean cut version by Sacks. Leonard was never a recluse but one who was active, even sexually feral as Aviv described two instances of rape that he instigated in his childhood. Aviv is convinced that Sacks whitewashed this from Leonard’s profile and the heightened sexual memories emerging from L-Dopa. She ascribes this as a reflection of his own need to remain an ‘ideal’ person/patient. Indeed, the publication of the book Awakenings coincided with his own Great Awakening (coming out) when his mother passed away. She vehemently disapproved of Sacks’ sexuality. Thus, from the article, Leonard and Sacks appears to have become quite interchangeable. Leonard’s treatment ultimately failed since L-Dopa unleashed “egotistical power” in Leonard’s words and aroused (including sexually) other patients to the point that Leonard needed to be imprisoned to keep himself and others safe. This led to Sacks tapering off and/or terminating L-Dopa treatment for other patients.4

It was not only that but the accusation that Sacks failed to put into context the gay-rights movement and the Stonewall riots of 1969 is part of that whitewashing that kept the story in a clinical bubble, a suspension of time—similar to the effect of the ethnographic present.5 What we have is a picture of Leonard in a white patient gown—safe and agreeable. Did it endear him to readers? Very much so. Does it matter that he played an active role in child sexual assault to his illness? Perhaps not.

Fake Data or Empathy?

According to Kate Edgar, Sacks’ editor, Awakenings was not a breakthrough in the medical community. However, it electrified the general public and the literary community, winning the Hawthornden Prize in 1974. I accidentally read the first few chapters of Awakenings from a copy found in a co-working space two years ago. I was immediately taken into the world of Leonard. I deeply regret not stealing the book and bringing it home with me (after all, it was just used as a display). It was effective emotional writing.

Indeed, I do not think that Sacks separated himself from his patients. Or he even endeavoured to do so. In fact, he needed to remain a doctor-person in order to treat the patient-person, who in this case, have been relegated to decades of silence and internal imprisonment. Everyone gave up. Sacks did not. It was because he saw himself in his patients that he risked using L-Dopa used in Parkinson’s to treat these patients. In anthropology, we usually say that Sacks entered the native’s point of view, he has become the native. Is it time to move out? Sacks did not have that option.

The problem is that Anglo science do not allow for the double books—a documentary approach and a literary work of the same subject—a style that the French still had as part of their arsenal. Based on Sacks’ series of letter with different individuals, we can trace how he thought about publishing his findings. He wrote to his parents on July 30, 1969, asking about their recent holiday to Malta. Though he was not able to vacation himself, he waxes lyrical about the idea of a trip to the islands and recommends D.H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia—"full of exquisite description of little hill-towns and people.” Instead, Sacks is on another trip of discovery that rivals The Voyage of the Beagle by his bed stand—his patients responded to his experimental drug treatment.

I used to be the idlest person who has ever lived: but now I seem to live for work. The last three months would have turn out to have been, I suspect, the most interesting and productive in my entire life: what I started, reluctantly, a trial of just another drug, has proved an almost incredible tool for a dissection of a vast range of human behaviour, from the most primitive postural reflexes to the most complex psychotic reactions. I have been too busy with the daily discovery of new things, and their immediate meanings, to be able to do much reading and writing. This is one of the essential reasons why I must come back and write for a month.

I have a material for three monographs and about twenty papers: the three monographs I see my way of combining into a single book—it will be a whopper, I could not condense my material and thoughts into less than about 500 pages (its title and substance will be something like: “Coercion, Compulsion, and Compunction: A clinical study of primitive and forced behaviour in post-encephalitic Parkinsonism and psychosis, and its treatment and its modification by L-Dopa”). My case histories alone, which will constitute the first third of the book will occupy about 150 pages—say, 15 minutes of minutely-detailed histories of ten pages each…

This scientific document never saw the light of day. Instead, he decided to publish these data into a literary form, his French version of a second book. He abandoned his original experiment of a 90 day double blind trial of levadopa among a group of patients with encephalitis because the results were so “spectacular!” He could not in good conscience continue the placebos and thereby placed everyone under the same medication. As a result, he decided to focus on personal histories.

Thus what was originally conceived as a limited 90 day experiment was transformed instead into an historical experience: a story, in effect, of life for these patients as it had been before levodopa, and as it was changed, and as it was to become, after starting treatment with levodopa. Thus I was impelled, willy nilly, to a presentation of case histories or biographies for no “orthodox” presentation, in terms of numbers, series, grading of effects, etc, could have conveyed the historical reality of the experience. In August 1969, then, I wrote the first nine case histories, or “stories, “of Awakenings.

Letter to the Editor of the British Medical Journal, p. 1969

Ironically, his fame upon the publication of Awakenings did not translate to acceptance from his peers. Sacks himself could not publish in any of the scientific journals even if he switched writing style or format.

But, alas! I then found myself under pressure-an all too common academic pressure-to write proper articles and not simply letters. With much labour (because they went against the grain, so to speak) I put everything I could in an orthodox or conventional format-papers full of statistics and figures and tables and graphs-and submitted these to various medical and neurological journals. To my amazement and chagrin, none was accepted-some of them, indeed, elicited vehemently censorious, even violent, rejections, as if there were something intolerable in what I had written…

“What is happening?” I kept asking myself. Have I wandered off, become an aberration? Or has neurology itself fallen on evil days? Has it become reduced to the trivial? Is no one interested in phenomena any more? I felt, sadly, that I could no longer hope to publish or be published in medical journals, unless I betrayed my own clinical experience. Further, as clinical observation extended itself, and gave rise to considerations beyond the strictly clinical-human, scientific, existential, philosophical it became clearer that I would have to break out of a purely medical format, and find another one that, while remaining faithful to the clinical, could go beyond it and point to something larger and deeper…

I have always had to interfuse narration with meditation, embedding each, so to speak, in the other. Thus what was done in miniature in the letters to the Lancet and BMJ, this interfusion of case history and essay, was done at length and at leisure in Awakenings; and could never have been done within the format of any conventional article or book. Perhaps this is why, in 1973, Awakenings, while intriguing many non-medical readers, met the same cold reception from the profession as my articles had done earlier. There was not a single medical notice or review, only a disapproving or uncomprehending silence.

Letter to the Editor of the British Medical Journal, p. 1969

In suppressing the publication for varied reasons, we are now poorer in scientific discourse. Scientists who want to engage in his work for methodological errors or fraud can only refer to what effectively is Sacks’ second book or literary work. Or they would have to wait and wade through his papers in 2028.

Those who wish for precision will not get it. Those who want a story will get one, but will be disappointed to learn that Sacks employed an empathic approach to healing (i.e. lies of omission and deletion). Did the literary errors change the overall results? Perhaps or perhaps not, but ultimately, Oliver Sacks made the general public care and create a medical science that is humane.

This would have been a non-issue in the French scientific writing tradition. Moreover, Sacks would have had two versions or perhaps publishing his complete three volume monograph as originally planned for the scholars and interested public. What we have left are the Beth Abraham Hospital patients living out their short animated life under the care and pages in one work that Oliver Sacks cultivated.

(After Christmas, we’ll examine the Diary of Malinowski and its reception to the community). Read along.

Further Reading:

Debaene, Vincent. 2014. Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science & Literature (Trans. Justin Izzo). Chicago: Chicago University Press (see Chapter 2)

Edgar, Kate (ed.) 2024. Letters: Oliver Sacks. New York: Knopf Books (see correspondences from Chapter 5 prior to the publication of Awakenings)

Marriot, James. 2025 December 12. The Death of English Literature. Cultural Capital on Substack

Sacks, Oliver. 1983. The Origin of “Awakenings”. British Medical Journal (Clinical research ed.), 287(6409), 1968-1969.

Sanjek, R. (1991). The Ethnographic Present. Man, 26(4), 609–628. https://doi.org/10.2307/2803772

The ongoing draft of our classics can be found on our main page.

Round-Up

The case of Oliver Sacks is an example of the difference between the Anglo and the French writing tradition that impacts what truth is. Though literature plays a great part in transmitting a legible truth, the Anglo tradition distinguishes literary writing with scientific writing—assigning greater truth to the latter than the former.

Though literature also boasts of the study of humanity, science writing has clearly drawn its contours opposite of the product of the mind, away from res literaria. The consequences are clear for Oliver Sacks as he faces greater scrutiny from scattered unpublished writings. This would have been greatly averted in the French (anthropological science) tradition.

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If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

The French ethnographic monograph does not materialise without outlining its borders. The question during the time in 1878 was what was its contours? These forms follow curiously the repurposing and life of the Palais du Trocadéro. Once it was given to Paris after the 1878 Exposition Universelle, the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro ushered the promise of order from simply a jumbled series of cabinets of curiosities.

The task is overwhelming. It would first fall unto its first director, Ernest-Théodore Hamy a young anthropologist, who first defined the ethnographic description using the existing material culture from the museum collection. According to Trocadéro museum historian Alice Conklin, Hamy, like all the growing ethnographic museums in the Western world, pursued an understanding of humanity based on either a shared linear development or an explanation of variety (or sameness) based on geographical location and material culture. She said that the paradigm was usually a combination of both in various degrees.

What Hamy really wanted to do was to use ethnography to disprove the anthropology dominated then by what we know now as physical anthropology (but then called, quite confusingly, also ethnologie). During the 1860s and 1870s, Paul Broca spearheaded the popular use of anthropometry and racial science using cranial research to study mankind. Hamy disagreed with the aims and theory of racial science linking physical characteristics with cultural traits. Ethnography was Hamy’s solution.

Hamy set out to classify the objects which was already arranged by geographical location in the museum. He would identify, cross-check, and investigate all related information for every single object and produce a short description. All to potentially use for comparison or cautiously propose a common origin of humanity. This type of exacting and thorough description would define the practice of French ethnology (not to be confused with the racial science) and basic ethnographic writing.

Hamy’s initiative is what Conklin describes as a form of armchair ethnography. His project unfortunately is one where objects and information go to die in the vitrine of the museum. An attempt to reverse this and create a living and dynamic field ethnography comes in the second phase of the ethnology museum under the aegis of Paul Rivet and Marcel Mauss, one of the stalwarts of French anthropology, in 1928.

Meanwhile, the repurposed Palais, once glowed during the 1878 Exposition Universelle, became slowly, unfit for the new museological-anthropological project. Nobody liked the Trocadéro, not the visitors or the scholars. As Frederick Starr, an anthropologist from the Field Museum of Chicago noted in his visit to Europe in 1892,

The Trocadéro is a beautiful building, and the collections it contains are of great importance, but it is not adapted to their suitable display. Dr. Hamy has made the best of his circumstances, and his cases and wall trophies (usually an abomination in a museum, but here a necessity [for lack of space]) are true works of art.

Frederick Starr, from Conklin p. 39

The situation became more dire as the years progressed despite

• its greater role in training the first generation of practitioners with a new Institut d’ethnologie running simultaneously

• the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle

The Trocadéro did not receive any budget.1 The talents and network of its deputy, Georges Henri Rivière, armed staff with volunteers and rich patrons. Nevertheless, it remained inadequate. So much so that Marcel Mauss, described it as late as 1913 as

…a museum without light, without iron display cases, without security guards, without a catalogue, and even without a fixed inventory…

Mauss in Debaene, p. 29

Yet, it was here that the group by Alfred Métraux, Michel Griaule, and Jacques Soustelle, the first generation of trained professionals, worked under the “maze of somber galleries and gloomy showrooms,” as Soustelle described the state of the Trocadero in his work the Four Suns (Debaene 2014: 28).

If the scholars were frustrated, the public even more—the public did not visit and they wanted to change that. They wanted the working people inside during the evenings. Rivet negotiated the switch from Ministry of Fine Arts to the Ministry of Public Instruction to prioritise their new mandate towards public education and countering misinformation especially when it came to racial science. The lack of space, disorganisation, and missing framework were hampered by the state of the magnificent yet decaying Palais.

To bring the Trocadero and its collection back to life, Debaene argues that it must make sense to the public. Context is key. And so, Rivet and Mauss rearranged the cases, information, maps, documents to describe the peoples and their material culture. In doing so, their museum audience could apprehend a little of who these faraway people were/are—and Vincent Debeane, French anthropology historian, opines, that the objects no longer is lost to abstraction. They are alive.

It took two slow and expensive renovations as Rivet and his talented and savvy deputy, Rivière, and other heroic staff members, academics, and patrons made do and modernised within the confines of a neglected structure.

It was the Paris Council who notified the team in 1937 that a new Palais du Chaillot will finally rise from its ashes. The fair commissioners of the Exposition Universelle des Arts et Techniques that year wanted a grander esplanade to view the Champs du Mars and the Eiffel Tower (the crowning glory). This required eliminating the central auditorium which housed the American Hall collection that Rivet and his team refurbished. Having spent costly renovations and negotiations with patrons, the team was distraught but was promised a modern museum of their dreams.

There would be room in the Palais de Chaillot, as it was now to be called, for the transfer of Rivet’s anthropology laboratory, library, and osteological collections (still housed at the Muséum) as well as the Institut d’Ethnologie, not to mention the creation of much vaster storage areas; an expansion of exhibition space from 2000 to 4000–5000 square meters; a workroom for each department; a seminar room; a bigger disinfection laboratory (against the parasites that attacked the artifacts) and larger library, photothèque , and phonotèque ; a studio for recording; a cinémathèque / auditorium; a bookstore; and a café-bar.

Conklin, p. 134

It required the total erasure of the past monument and the triumph of a new modernity. Just like that, the past is launched into the future. One in which Serge Chermayeff, prominent modernist and humanist architect, observed was a retrogressive move that was one of the “most dismal architectural failures” of that period (Greenhalgh 1988: 168). I agree, wholeheartedly.

The Musée de l’Homme signalled the modern aspirations of the discipline on par with other leading ethnographic museums in Chicago, Washington D.C., the UK, Russia, and Sweden. Though looking at the triumph of machines and modernity with the lone Eiffel Tower looming over the cityscape, French anthropologists understood that without poetry, truth in ethnography cannot fully be conveyed.

Further Reading:

Conklin, Alice L. 2013. In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950. Ithaca: Cornell University Press

Debaene, Vincent. 2014. Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science & Literature (Trans. Justin Izzo). Chicago: Chicago University Press

Greenhalgh, Paul. 1988. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World’s Fairs, 1851-1951. Manchester: Manchester University Press

Rival, Laura. 2010. What Sort of Anthropologist was Paul Rivet? in Parkin, Robert and Anne de Sales (eds.) Out of the Study and Into the Field: Ethnographic Theory and Practice in French Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 125-150.

The ongoing draft of our classics can be found on our main page.

Round-Up

The contours of French ethnographic writing required the positivist museological documentation language of material culture. The Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro played an integral role when the Institut d’Ethnologie and Anthropology was moving as a separate discipline from the arts, natural history, and physical anthropology (then, racial science). It was a radical and tough job as the first curators Hamy and Rivet straddled training a new crop of ethnographers as well as managing a deteriorating museum infrastructure that is the Palais.

Ethnographic writing followed the discipline of museum data collection and inventory that becomes the hallmark of French ethnology (comparative research). However, public communication and education was a key change in the modern approach. It now had to keep the general audience in mind and not just scholars. This meant that displaying information is not enough. It had to be displayed in its full context with a geographic or human development approach.

When it comes to ethnographic writing training, the contours followed a strict museological approach as a way to distinguish the modern discipline from sensationalist and imagined writings from the past. The cabinets of curiosities cannot exist anymore. Thus, it is not a surprise that the Palais du Trocadéro was growing unfit for new use. Alas, its demise show the triumph of modernity. This is increasingly questioned when writing cannot simply rely on information.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. We are changing this now.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

The genealogy of French scientific writing is best understood from the transformation of its material form viewed from Paris, le metropole, the centre’s monuments to science. If you have ever been to Paris, you might have visited the Eiffel Tower at the Trocadero. I would not blame you if you totally missed the Musée d l’Homme that is on the right of the photo below. From a visual classicism and imagination to one of staid modern box form, this architectural evolution reflects a shared evolution of sciences across cultures and borders.

The Trocadéro Square once housed the lost monument that was the Palais du Trocadéro built in 1878 expressly for the Exposition Universelle. The concept of the World’s Fair is a fascinating subject and it originated in the most mundane activity—trade, or the lack of it. According to historian Paul Greenhalgh, the exposition itself is a way of seeing/displaying institutionalised by the Marquis d’Avèze and François de Neufchâteau, the Minister of the Interior. The former, an aristocrat surviving the Terror of the French Revolution, was a major shareholder of three of the former Royal now nationalised factories of Sèvres (ceramics), Les Gobelins (tapestries) and Les Savonneries (carpets). He needed to dispose stockpiled goods and for the new government, a way to present the progress of French industry. It was not only that goods were sold, but it was the deluge of people who visited the display at the forecourt of the Louvre that instilled confidence in Neufchâteau to use this as impetus to instill French competitiveness, principally against the English, but also internationally.

Thus, the exhibitionary aesthetic, a term used by historian Elizabeth Gralton, to describe the universal exposition is a continuation of what she calls as the Enlightenment ethic of classification, cataloguing, comprehensiveness of knowledge in a visual display. This is the cabinet of curiosities writ large, growing ever more lavish and spectacular in scale and in expense. The periods spanning 1851-1939, right before the outbreak of World War I, netted millions of visitors in different European and American cities. Paris itself had six Exposition Universelle—1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, 1900 and its last in 1937 before World War II, garnered four million at the beginning, reaching sixteen million in 1878 and peaking in 1900 at forty-eight million. This is a staggering number since the population of the entire country was only at thirty five million!

It is no wonder that a grand edifice, the Palais de Trocadéro, rose on Chaillot Hill. For anthropology, this was the most important landmark as a science of man was included alongside the arts, industry, and technology during the exposition and after.

Designed by the architect Gabriel Davioud (1823-1881), it housed the French pavilion during the exhibition and capped the sprawling 2700 square metres of exhibition space that stretched across the Seine linked by Pont d’Iena to the forecourt of the Military School (Champ du Mars) in what would be the site of the future Eiffel Tower.

The façade of the central core comprised of a semi-circle of giant arches, surmounted by a massive second storey in the form of a buttressed octagonal drum and cupola. Two Venetian towers flanked this and vast arcaded wings described a concave arc either side. The wings framed a garden and stepped fountain on the slope of the hill. The whole was intended to suggest the splendour of the French baroque, a previous age of power and confidence. In true conservative manner the creators of the Trocadéro reassured themselves of French standing by resorting to a distant and glorious past. It did its job well, for no innocent by-stander on the Chaillot Hill could have doubted they were in a country of importance and wealth.

Paul Greenhalgh, p. 117, Ephemeral Vistas

Behind the scenes, the 1878 exhibition echoed the rapid changes happening in the region. France lost the Prussian-Franco War in 1871 and its territories of Alsace and Lorraine; following the defeat, the short-lived Paris Commune insurrection sought to impose republican ideals to replace the monarchial-aristocrat dominant parliament. Add to this, Elizabeth Gralton, heralds this exhibition as the battle of the French soul as anthropology and the Catholic Church tussle over the evolution exhibitions during the fair. It is interesting that at this time, the separation between church and state has not been fully implemented. A lot is riding in the success of this exhibition (it never recovered its financial investment).

It was a new age wherein science would become the new religion alongside technology and progress.

Science writing is a strict delineation unlike the jumble of cabinets of an exposition such as a world’s fair. French intellectual historian Vincent Debaene calls it an emancipation from the term res literaria, the “letters” or “literature” to mean the broad knowledge of all things based on the activity of the mind. This definition has since been lost to history but during the time of Georges Cuvier, the father of biology and the director of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in 1793, science was in opposition to this. He sought to create a specific discipline out of a body of general knowledge. Hence, it made sense that the natural sciences would be further subdivided into other fields such as physics, chemistry, with natural history excluding minerals, for instance.

Cuvier, in his eulogy to a natural history colleague, Bernard Germain de Lacépède, given in 1826 outlined some of his ideas of what sciences should be

• a domain of expertise unavailable to the regular population

• the time-sensitive nature of science in which writing is perishable while literature is immutable

Science, by its nature, progresses every day, and there is no observer who cannot improve on the facts established by his predecessors, nor any naturalist who cannot perfect their methods. But great writers are nonetheless immortal.

Georges Cuvier 1826 in Debaene, p. 14

By the nature of its delimitation of its territory, science enters into its own particular historical moment, says Debaene. Of course, Cuvier received some pushback and as we know literature does have its own value judgement and criteria. And yet, it is the nature of time and how it affects the distinction between two genres of writing that is of great interest to us in our study of the monograph.

Paul Rivet, the founder of the Institute d’Ethnologie and the future director of the Musee de l’Homme, subscribes to a similar idea that ethnography should purge itself of any reference to the imagination, use methodological rigor, and a field reserved for trained professionals. Thus, the school of anthropology commenced in these institutes led by Rivet himself and Marcel Mauss, an important figure in French Anthropology. Simultaneously, a massive reorganisation took place that formalised professional training and classification in the muse. Since the end of the 1878 Exposition, the Third Republic was interested in an ethnography museum for political but also practical purposes as the Empire was expanding and collections from its colonies and expeditions were increasing. More interestingly, there was a massive public appetite for “primitive” art and tourism was exposing more people to cultures and museums abroad.

Without any existing clear framework in organising material culture in museums, French scientific writing about these cultures simultaneously lagged behind their continental and American peers who were vastly outspending and modernising their museums and practice.

The Trocadéro Palace edifice haunted the French anthropology development. It had to come down sooner than later.

Part 2: Birth Pains and Looking Outward to other Anthropologies

Further Reading:

Conklin, Alice L. 2013. In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950. Ithaca: Cornell University Press

Debaene, Vincent. 2014. Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science & Literature (Trans. Justin Izzo). Chicago: Chicago University Press

Gralton, Elizabeth. 2013. A Battle for the French Soul: The Anthropological Exhibit at the 1878 Exposition Universelle. Journal of European Studies 43(3): 195-208. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047244113492294

_____2014. Lust of the Eyes: The Anti-Modern Critique of Visual Culture at the Paris Expositions Universelles, 1855-1900. In 18th George Rudé Seminar in French History (Vol. 5, pp. 71-81). H-France.

Greenhalgh, Paul. 1988. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World’s Fairs, 1851-1951. Manchester: Manchester University Press

The ongoing draft of our classics can be found on our main page.

Round-Up

The Trocadero Palace is a fine example of the struggle of modernising French anthropology/ethnography/ethnology. Born of the 1878 Exposition Universelle, the edifice encompassed the hope and aspiration of the French Empire as it was the first time that anthropology participated in the exhibition and the growing impetus to educate the general public. France was in a turbulent political and social period and the Exposition Universelle was a celebration of French industry but also its art and knowledge. The edifice was subsequently gifted to the city of Paris and consequently became the home of France’s Ethnography Museum. Due to financial and physical neglect and material overflow, the Trocadero reflected the state of French anthropology and museology. It was in tatters and in need of emergency intervention.

Contribute to my library access!

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed.

Re-read the previous post:

This is The Great Books Project in Anthropology. I am on a quest to rediscover the classics and their insights into the human condition as a salve to the contemporary technological, social, and political threats to our humanity. Lest we forget.

The anthropological monograph is a curious object—it is both a literary device and also a scientific product. It needs factual delivery, and yet, somehow, a shower of facts (or the lack of it) is not enough. This struggle between two forms is what ultimately affects its ethnographic authority, or the anthropologist’s ability to convey a form of truth about another culture.

As Clifford Geertz, in his reflection on the anthropologist as a writer, says,

The ability of anthropologists to get us to take what they say seriously has less to do with either a factual look or an air of conceptual elegance than it has with their capacity to convince us that what they say is a result of their having actually penetrated (or, if you prefer, been penetrated by) another form of life, of having, one way or another, truly “been there.” And that, persuading us that this offstage miracle has occurred, is where the writing comes in.

Clifford Geertz, pp. 4-5 Works and Lives The Anthropologist as Author

The ethnographic authority relies on the entanglement between who is writing and perhaps the type of prose he exercises to convince his readers that he was there. The facts emerge from writing. Reality springs from the relationship between the anthropologist and his/her readers. This lends almost to the necessity of a writer’s literary prose. Yet, the alchemy also relies on who he is.

This entanglement between the author and his text impacts the ethnographic authority of a monograph to convey or convince his reader that he was there.

Who is the Author?

Being there is a form of truth-telling that relies on the figure of the author. In the Western tradition, the author-text relationship has undergone several shifts throughout its history. Michel Foucault, in his archaeology of an author’s power, noticed the malleability between anonymity and attribution of a text. At an earlier period in human history, he writes that attribution to a literary piece, whether a narrative, story, epic, comedy or tragedy, is not as important as the text itself.

…their anonymity caused no difficulties since their ancientness, whether real or imagined, was regarded as a sufficient guarantee of their status.

Michel Foucault, p. 149, Who is an Author?

In contrast, scientific discourses required a name.

…those texts that we now would call scientific—those dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine, illnesses, natural sciences and geography—were accepted in the Middle Agels, and accepted as “true” when marked with the name of their author. “Hippocrates said”, “Pliny recounts”, were not really formulas of an argument based on authority; they were markers inserted in discourses that were supposed to be received as statements of demonstrated truth.

ibid.

In later periods, the author-function, as he calls it, would be reversed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Literary works swung towards attribution while scientific discourses became anonymised. Though Foucault’s bifurcation formulation is rather tenuous, I highlight it nonetheless because it points to the distinction between the literary form and the scientific form based on the strength of their attribution (or the lack of it). This all becomes moot in the development of property law, in which an author’s power is now subject to what Foucault calls “penal appropriation” (148). An author, once he attains his rights over reproduction and publication, is potentially subjected to punishment if his writing is deemed transgressive.

What we see is not a distinction between the literary and the scientific genres but a collapse in categories. An author, whether in literary or scientific forms, is imbued with the same truth-telling authority. It is possible to have and be a literary scientist.

On Writing: The American School Dilemma

The American school of thought never accepted a literary scientist, until perhaps much more recently, with limits. It has a more bifurcated approach to expressing fact, and this poses a greater challenge to the anthropologist. Clifford Geertz, writing on the anthropologist as author, says the challenge in writing as both a scientist and a creative is a tough one.

• How do you render the biographical notation into scientific facts?

The difficulty is that the oddity of constructing texts ostensibly scientific out of experiences broadly biographical, which is after all what ethnographers do, is thoroughly obscured.

Clifford Geertz, p. 10 Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author

It is this opaque writing process that is hidden from the reader and puts the anthropologist in an impossible position—whether writing scientifically or literary.

The first [scientific] brings charges of insensitivity of treating people as objects, of hearing the words but not the music, and, of course, ethnocentrism. The second [literary] brings charges of impressionism, of treating people as puppets, of hearing music that doesn’t exist, and, of course, of ethnocentrism.

ibid.

The anthropologist doesn’t win. And by straddling in between genres, he reduces his ethnographic authority of the truth. There is a way out of it, though.

On Writing: The French Solution

The French had it all figured out. They simply publish two books—one deemed for a scientific audience and the other for the general public. (This does not preclude one from reading the other.) Vincent Debaene, a French intellectual historian, uncovers a subtle relationship between ethnographic writing and the literary form in the French tradition. He argues that these books are in conversation with each other, eschewing any vertical hierarchy between the two works. Though not identical, the second books allow space for the flaws, blind spots, and limitations of the researcher or the study as he undertakes his work.

In this way, the dismissal of structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship should not have been done quite so abruptly if we had also read his Tristes Tropiques. The latter was never part of our required reading, although I have come across it. No one has adequately explained to me the unique trajectory of French anthropology, or the double reading required to flesh out the experiences of Lévi-Strauss. If this were an acceptable format, it would have been less controversial when Bronislaw Malinowski’s Diaries, the acclaimed father of fieldwork in the Anglo world, were published posthumously; he would have probably penned an autobiography that would have given us a greater flavour of the Trobriand Islands in his Argonauts of the Western Pacific.

This approach would likely also produce less angst and surprise in the discipline when knowledge and power became the key themes in the eighties. By then, ethnographic authority in the American school had completely come undone. It reached what Debaene calls

…the suspicious historicism that considers ethnography to be a misguided invention, an expression of latent ethnocentrism, or even a form of epistemic violence.1

Vincent Debaene, p. 9, Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science and Literature

Taken as a cross-section, the ethnographic authority of the monograph remains intact in the French school: it is still a subject to criticism, and enjoyed for its literary merits by the general public (and even wins prizes).

Further Reading:

Debaene, Vincent. 2014. Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science & Literature (Trans. Justin Izzo). Chicago: Chicago University Press

Foucault, Michel. 1979. Who is an Author? In J.V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, pp. 141-160. Ithaca: Cornell University Press

Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

The ongoing draft of our classics can be found on our main page.

Round-Up

The French School has proposed a veritable solution plaguing the ethnographic monograph in Anthropology: publish two books. One can follow the scientific style and the other the literary form. It is not a vertical relationship but rather a cross-section of the work, the author, and the context in which another culture is described. Both provide a greater understanding of the position of the researcher, the depth of the data presented, and his reflection on the field. It restores ethnographic authority and dismisses the accusation that the ethnographic monograph is an epistemic tool of violence.

More importantly, this makes the monograph accessible and enjoyable for its literary merits (Clifford Geertz would disagree with me on this).

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If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed.

Re-read the previous post:

If you are new here, we have just concluded reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Humanity. Unique among his peers, Graeber asked the big questions in anthropology—how did people organise themselves and what were the values and choices they made. Sadly, except for a few scholars, we have stopped boldly asking who we are, why we are different, and where we are headed. In lieu of a single book, I shall be exploring several books and themes in the course of interrogating the history of the discipline and creating a syllabus in anthropology that addresses the ideologies of our times.

Yes, I am jealous of the literary and humanities spring on Substack. It made me ask: do we even have Great Books in Anthropology, a standard list of classics that anyone can read?

Yes, we do. I firmly believe this.

Sadly, no. There is no standard list, even at the undergraduate level.

There was once, however. And I intend to uncover and re-discover them. There are classics in the discipline that have transcended the geographic locations and specific subject matter. At one time, we can talk and refer to a common body of works and debate about them—whether it is about the observer, the subject matter, or its historical context.

Often we forget to debate the big questions (or why we no longer ask them) that speaks more broadly to the human condition. After all, anthropology is the comparative study of humanity across time and space. Quite a large and bold remit! This is a reason to think about the role of the classics as the legacy of our present.

Today, I introduce the monograph and learn a key criterion that elevates it in the classics category: literary prose and clarity.

What is the ethnographic monograph?

Ethnography is a curious word in the discipline. It means a specific, systematic way of thinking, seeing, and reinterpreting another world that is distinctly anthropological. That is, the anthropological way of seeing is characterised by a position of advocating for cultural relativism (a neutral approach to what is good, bad, and bizarre) in combination with tempering your ethnocentrism (the observer’s culture is not necessarily superior to the observed) in order to see not just the parts but how to meaningfully connect the other world into a whole. This holistic viewpoint can only be achieved through an extended stay within the community, at least a year, and often continuously over the course of a lifetime, if one is lucky.

The product of curiousity and steadfast dedication to cultural description results in the ethnographic monograph. The monograph is a long-form written narrative that describes in intimate detail what makes a group or society tick. It is a ground-up analysis that does not usually agree with prepared hypotheses. That is its beauty. Depending on the researcher’s background and writing style, a monograph can be an eloquent literary tome or a dry textbook—or both, with everything in between.

Much of the truth relies on writing, composition, and the deftness of language use, which in the contemporary period, is English. Take, for instance, one of the classics in ethnographic writing, from Clifford Geertz (1926-2006), known for his crispness but also evocative language. Though not a full monograph, his most famous text is his work on understanding cockfighting in Bali. His opening salvo drew the general audience and not just scholars into the anthropologist’s world.

Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study. A small place, about five hundred people, and relatively remote, it was its own world. We were intruders, professional ones, and the villagers dealt with us as Balinese seem always to deal with people not part of their life who yet press themselves upon them: as though we were not there. For them, and to a degree for ourselves, we were nonpersons, spectres, invisible men.

Clifford Geertz, Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight

Contrast Geertz’s own fieldwork introspection with Margaret Mead’s introduction in Coming of Age in Samoa, written plainly for her American colleagues and yet speaking to the post-war anxieties that beset her general audience looking to science for answers.

During the last hundred years parents and teachers have ceased to take childhood and adolescence for granted. They have attempted to fit education to the needs of the child, rather than to press the child into an inflexible educational mould. To this new task they have been spurred by two forces, the growth of the science of psychology, and the difficulties and maladjustments of youth.

Psychology suggested that much might be gained by a knowledge of the way in which children developed, of the stages through which they passed, of what the adult world might reasonably expect of the baby of two months or the child of two years. And the fulminations of the pulpit, the loudly voiced laments of the conservative social philosopher, the records of juvenile courts and social agencies all suggested that something must be done with the period which science had named adolescence.

The spectacle of a younger generation diverging ever more widely from the standards and ideals of the past, cut adrift without the anchorage of respected home standards or group religious values, terrified the cautious reactionary, tempted the radical propagandist to missionary crusades among the defenceless youth, and worried the least thoughtful among us.

Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa

In her long first paragraph (spaced out here for readability), she nails the underlying anxiety of her generation and therefore underscores the importance of studying the American Samoa mothers. It seems that the cultural point of view has something to contribute to psychology. Indeed, now I want to read this in full.

The earliest form of writing in the discipline is less concerned with literary form than with its accuracy. Hence, the functional description serves to make cross-cultural comparison easier but also rich in details and depth.

Azande believe that some people are witches and can injure them in virtue of an inherent quality. A witch performs no rite, utters no spell, and possesses no medicines. An act of witchcraft is a psychic act. They believe also that sorcerers may do them ill by performing magic rites with bad medicines. Azande distinguish clearly between witches and sorcerers. Against both they employ diviners, oracles, and medicines. The relations between these beliefs and rites are the subject of this book.

E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande

One of the classics in anthropology, E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973), puts Africa, or the Azande of the Sudan, Congo, and the Central African Republic, into focus. His attempt to document and preserve knowledge about groups in the region during the colonial period remains extensive and unparalleled. So much so that scholars continue to debate him and his findings long after his death. It is only possible because of his meticulous collection and notations for all others that followed. His and others’ lead allowed for such critical re-readings to be possible that continue today.

If we go much earlier, E.B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture two-volume tome first published in 1871 on culture, was a bestseller, garnering up to three editions. He sets out the earlier core competency and shared goal in anthropology in his opening.

Chapter I. The Science of Culture.

Culture or Civilization—Its phenomena related accroding to definite Laws—Method of classification and discussion of the evidence—Connexion of successive stages of culture by Permanence, Modification, and Survival—Principal topics examined in the present work.

Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action. On the one hand, the uniformity which so largely pervades civilization may be ascribed, in great measure, to the uniform action of uniform causes; while on the other hand its various grades may be regarded as stages of development or evolution, each the outcome of previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping the history of the future. To the investigation of these two great principles in several departments of ethnography, with especial consideration of the civilization of the lower tribes as related to the civilization of the higher nations, the present volumes are devoted.

E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture Volume I

Tylor deftly sets out the nature of a (cultural) ethnographer:

• the observation of the elements of culture (anything that is transmitted)

• the use of these cultural elements to conclude on a general aspect of the human condition

• seek out patterns and causes, if any

• compare us/vs./them

Even accounting for the deletion of the primitive to modern progress point of view, this singular purpose of the discipline is no longer the consensus. We do not often talk about it much. Hence, other disciplines have taken the mantel up for us. We are afraid to generalise or put forth a universalisting position; for good reason, because anthropology is the science of exceptions. Somewhere, somehow there is an exception to our Western, urban, contemporary norm. Our job is to find it. How confident can we be of generalising?

Tylor sadly had been cancelled permanently by the time I was in graduate school and even much, much earlier than that. Considered old-fashioned, his linear view of human development from a primitive state to civilisation is now passé. Yet, we still view history in a linear fashion, though unspoken (thanks, Marx). However, not everything should be cancelled because he discussed a core point that remains important in the study of people—the search for order. Isn’t that what most disciplines are? To uncover human patterns in the past and in the present to predict the future? At least, that is what the social sciences and all forms of study want to achieve to a certain extent.

This is what I mean when I talk about re-reading the classic—to harvest the gems hidden in no longer read works. The monograph is recording certainty at a given point of time when all he sees at the onset is the chaotic, unpredictable, and disorder in human society and decision-making—a small record of a piece of time and place in which a specific practice solved real human problems. In a predictable yet expansive form of literary output, limited by medium and language structure, the monograph orders empirical observations and insights of human uncertainty into stability (though unintentional). That is the consequence of the medium.

More importantly, the monograph is a mirror to ourselves—the scholar, the reader, and Western culture, and Western values. This is the hidden and unspoken comparison that is under attack within the discipline.

What right does the West or anthropologist have in looking at another?

Is a monograph less valuable because of its context rather than its content?

Next week, we shall look at how to read monographs for the truth of a phenomena and why ethnographic authority is key to confidence.

Ongoing Great Books Draft Picks (criteria in progress)

1. Primitive Culture by E.B. Tylor (? more encyclopedic style)

2. Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead

3. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande by Evans-Pritchard

Great Books Criteria (Draft)

1. Literary prose and readability (less academic-lese)

2. Clarity, plain language, accessibility

3. Length of time in the field

4. Language fluency

5. Asks the big questions—how do people order their world?

6. how successful it is as a knowledge seed for future work in the area, field, or insight—foundational work

Further Reading:

Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1976. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press

Howell, Signe. (2018) 2023. “Ethnography”. In The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Felix Stein. Facsimile of the first edition in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Online: http://doi.org/10.29164/18ethno (highly reliable definition and discussion and the history of the discipline)

Mead, Margaret. 1928. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. New York: William Morrow & Company.

Tylor, Edward B. (1871) 1920. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom In Two Volumes (First Edition). London: John Murray, Albermarle Street. (encylopedic in breadth as is fashionable at the time)

Round-Up

An ethnographic monograph is a long-form narrative that advocates a (T)ruth based on collected empirical observations and more importantly, ‘being there.’ That is, it operates on the premise that an extended period of stay increases the accuracy and reliability of empirical observations. As a science, it advocates for a systematic form of data collection that adheres to principles of cultural relativism, reduction of ethnocentrism and holism. Altogether, this way of seeing and thinking produces ethnography.

If we are talking about my Great Books project, I have focused on one key criterion today that potentially elevates a work to a classic: literary prose and readability. By concentrating on the quality of content and writing, older works ignored and forgotten, reveals much on the human condition.

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Also, the book outline for: