Talal Asad's 1993 collection of essays on anthropology and fragments of Western history is one of those books that appears in the footnotes of every cool writer on society, politics, theology, etc. Well, maybe not in aaawll of them... In any case, no sooner had I got round to pulling it off the shelves, but another UL reader requested it back. Before it goes back later today to support some poor student, here are a few comments on the stimulating introduction. Of course I can't do it justice - so find it and read it...!
It has become a truism to say that most anthropologists in Britain and the United States were antievolutionist - and therefore relativist - in the the first half of the twentieth century. Some historians of the discipline have connected this to the general mood of disillusion with the idea of progress prevailing in the West after World War I. (21) Asad then points out that a considerable pedigree of British anthropologists do subscribe to the idea of higher and lower cultures, and assume this (when not arguing it) in their major works. Godfrey and Monica Wilson, Lucy Mair, Mary Douglas, Max Gluckman... The modern/nonmodern divide is integral to much of their work, and like other writers on the nonmodern world, anthropologists used a dual modality of historical time, which enabled them to represent events as at once contemporaneous and noncontemporaneous - and thus some conditions as more progressive than others (22-23).
Fascinating. Now I really want to study the historical ideas of progress, which has been on the to do list for a while. Notable among such ideas has to be Christian postmillennialism, of course, which is significant for a whole host of reasons. All you sceptical amillennialists out there, check out this short online book for a superb introduction to postmillennialism!
Back to Asad...
Perceptive comments on the use of teleological as an academic swearword. If the modernizing project is more than merely an accumulating narrative of India's past, if we understand it as the project of constructing "India" (an integrated totality defined according to progressive principles), which requires the continuous calculation of India's future, then teleology is precisely what that project must reflect. (A project is, after all, by definition teleological.) Which chimes in with a proverb of my own regarding the centrality of the will - "We never do anything we don't want to." (17) No doubt I'll get round to self-important waffling about that sometime soon, but in the meantime see what a proper thinker has said about a similar idea...
One does not have to subscribe to a full-blown Freudianism to see that instinctive reaction, the docile body, and the unconscious work, in their different ways, more pervasively and continuously than consciousness does. This is part of the reason why an agent's act is more (and less) than her consciousness of it. Another part has to do with the subsumability of her acts into the projects of other agents: beyond a certain point, an act no longer belongs exclusively to its initiator [what are the theological implications of this for divine sovereignty, I wonder?]. It is precisely because this fact is overlooked that the historical importance of consciousness is exaggerated in the the literature that takes consent and repression to the the two basic conditions of political domination. For the explain the latter in terms of these conditions, whether singly or in combination, is to ignore the politically more significant condition that has to do with the objective distribution of goods that allows or preculdes certain options. (15)
Lots to think about here. And this insight is one of the reasons why (to put is simply) I am still unwilling to swallow libertarian capitalism wholesale (despite the efficiencies rendered by wholesaling!) It's all very well to talk about the rewards of labour, the importance of personal responsibility and freedom from interference, but if Mr X already has 100 times as much as Mr Y there may be some problems ahead. Their relationship is not necessarily a simple symmetry of essentially autonomous wills. William Cavanaugh has thus criticised what he calls the unfreedom of the free market in this essay. The vital Old Covenant institution of the Jubilee is of extreme relavance here as it prevented the persistence of such disparities by the return of land to the family every 50 years. It is surprising, given their insistence and focus on Torah that the theonomists have not got all that much to say about this. (When I find what they do say, I may be proved wrong on this, but at the very least what theonomists think about Jubilee is not at the top of their credenda agenda.)
Back to Asad again...
Anthropology, then, appears to be involved in definitions of the West, while Western projects are transforming the (preliterate, precapitalist, premodern) peoples that ethnographers claim to represent. Both processes need to be studied systematically. To understand better the local peoples "entering" (or "resisting") modernity, anthropoogy must surely try to deepen its understanding of the West as something more than a threadbare ideology. To do this will include attempting to grasp its peculiar historicity, the mobile powers that have constructed its strctures, projects and desires. I argue that religion, in its positive and negative senses, is an essential part of that construction. (23-24) I can't wait...
