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UNDERSTANDING THE PAST TO SPEAK THE PRESENTImperial anthropology and critical historiography

Patricia Lorenzoni

When entering this project as a student of the history of ideas, it was to do a historical study

on the Occident’s meeting with the non-Occidental world and non-Occidental cultures. Inthis, I choose to focus on the category of the savage, still a century ago used as a scientific

category in anthropology. This text contains some theoretical reflections on my studies. The

paper starts with some remarks on the texts of my main object of study, James George Frazer,and the understanding of these texts. Thereafter I wish to discuss the possibilities of a critical

historiography when dealing with texts interweaved with colonial history and imperialism.The works of, among others Walter Mignolo, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Johannes Fabian has

been of importance for me.

Consulting a popular Swedish dictionary on the word savage (vild) you may get anumber of alternatives; such adjectives as “primitive”, “barbarian”, “uncivilised”,

“uncultured”, “raw”, “brutal”, “bestial”, and “inhuman”.1 In this list of synonyms we find thetraces of a long tradition of Occidental thinking on the savage. These synonyms contain

everything between Ota Benga, the short Congolese with sharpened teeth who was exhibited

with the apes at an American zoo in the beginning of the 20th century and who eventuallycommitted suicide, to Mr Hyde, the sophisticated and civilized Dr Jekyll’s darker side in

Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous story from 1886. The savage terrifies and fascinates.My work considers the notion of the savage around the turn of the 19th century in one

of the Occident’s most expansive states, the British. More specifically, I study the notion of

the savage among the anthropologists of this time, the first generation in Britain to make ofanthropology an academic discipline. One of the most widely read anthropologists was the

Cambridge fellow James George Frazer, who’s life-work The Golden Bough became

enormously popular and is known for its influence on English modernist literature. With hissuggestive tales of human sacrifice and executed gods, in the colonized world as well as on

the European countryside, he seemed to uncover in human nature a darkness that lay under

1 The examples are taken from Ord för ord: svenska synonymer och uttryck, 4th ed. (Stockholm: Norsteds,1992).

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the thin crust of civilization. Frazer did in the area of scholarship what Stevenson, in The

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, did in fiction.2

However, these narratives about the savage are also articulated in times of military

conquest and violence. Anthropology was one of the disciplines producing knowledge on new

territories and their resources; as did for example botany, zoology and geology. The worldwas gathered and exhibited, in print and through material objects, in museums, gardens and

grandiose world fairs. The Golden Bough inscribes itself in this tradition of exhibiting thesavage, in popular and spectacular as well as in disciplined pedagogic form. Reading Frazer is

like stepping in to a museum of the old kind, inhabited by ancient objects frozen in time,

locked up in glass stands. The reader is guided through an enormous collection ofethnographic observations and accounts, the macabre and grotesque often given special

attention in the text.

THE TEXT AND THE COLLECTOR

it is essential that a period of collection should precede a period of generalization. Not until great

masses of observations have been accumulated and classified do the general laws which prevade

them begin to appear on the surface. Now anthropology in general and the history of institutions in

particular are still in the collecting stage.3

It is no coincident that Frazer was active during the years, which in the history of

anthropology has been known as the “museum age”; the last decades of the 19th century, andthe first of the 20th.4 During a time when anthropology still tentatively sought to establish

itself as an academic discipline, the museums became the most important employer for

anthropologists. Ethnographic museums hived off from museums of natural history. Differentobjects were collected, remains as well as artefacts. Although Frazer is a man of texts, he is

also part of the same collecting culture. He collects human customs. The principle of

organization is the same as in many of the contemporary museums; the customs are sortedaccording to an evolutionary time axis. 2 For the relation between Frazer and modernist literature, see Robert Fraser, ed., Sir James Frazer and theLiterary Imagination (Macmillan, 1990).3 James George Frazer, Man, God & Immortality: Thoughts on Human Progress (New York: Macmillan, 1927)p. 30.4 Ira Jacknis, "Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitation of the Museum Method of Anthropology," in Objectsand Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. J Stocking, Jr, History of Anthropology(Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 75.

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In the world of the museum, it is the exhibit stand that delimits the object, which is

ordered into a specific logic. The exhibition seems to offer an intimacy between observer andexhibited object, but at the same time the gap between the two is maintained. That which the

objects are supposed to represent is out of reach, the glass wall and the frozenness of the

moment is in between. The museum tour is a walk among examples. In the traditional naturalhistory museum one finds stands with hundreds of noctuids or colibris. In the mammal cabinet

in proper order canines, felines, monotremes. In Frazer’s texts one wanders in a similar wayamong cut off objects, with the pagination and the index as guide. We can start at the

entrance, in the preface; or we can at once head for the room we are specifically interested in,

maybe the room for tabooed food, or why not the cabinet of tree spirits? Or, we can beginwith the violent ritual that works as starting-point as well as point of gravitation for the plot in

The Golden Bough.

The Golden Bough

The still glassy lake that sleeps

Beneath Aricia’s trees–

Those trees in whose dim shadow

The ghastly priest doth reign,

The priest who slew the slayer,

And shall himself be slain.5

As anthropologist, Frazer is today almost forgotten. Second-hand bookshops frequently place

The Golden Bough on the same shelf as occultism and new age-literature. Frazer would havedefended himself against such a classification. He saw himself as an advocate of reason

against superstition and ignorance, irrationality and religion. Ironically it is mainly by interestin occultism and magic the reader of later times has been drawn to Frazer. The popular culture

connection, frequently used in horror stories and movies, between ethnographic study and the

dark and occult, is explored already in H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories. In these, references toFrazer are associated with exploration of a darkness verging on madness.6 The Golden Bough

plays a similar role where it lays on the bedside table of Coppola’s late 20th century Kurtz in

5 Poem by Lord Macaulay, quoted in James George Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, 3rd ed.,vol. 1:1, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: Macmillan and Co, 1911) p. 1.6 H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu," in The Haunter of the Dark, Omnibus (London, Glasgow: GraftonBooks, 1985), p. 64., H. P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in the Darkness," in The Haunter of the Dark, Omnibus(London, Glasgow: Grafton Books, 1985), p. 164.

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Apocalypse Now. Frazer’s eager collecting of illustrative examples in the service of reason,

have come to illustrate horror beyond reason’s reach.The first edition of The Golden Bough was published in 1890, but the work wasn’t

completed till the publication of the third edition, printed in twelve volumes between 1911

and 1915. Thus, Frazer worked with The Golden Bough for over 25 years. Still after thecompletion of the third edition, he continued to collect examples. In 1936 he had gathered

enough completing, illustrative facts to put a supplement together, titled Aftermath. Inaddition to this he wrote several other works, all of the same collecting character.7

For Frazer, what is important is the example as such. The source is never subject to

analysis. The difference in working with Ovid or a missionary account, Genesis or a militaryreport, seem to him a small one. What interest him are the myths, rites and traditions

contained in the texts. These facts are considered solid. Hypotheses, he says in the preface to

the second edition, “are necessary but often temporary bridges built to connect isolated facts”.And further:

If my light bridges should sooner or later break down or be superseded by more solid structures, I

hope that my book may still have its utility and its interest as a repertory of facts.8

In his writing, Frazer worked with a sense of style that won the readers of his time. Critics

note his ”charm of style”, that he writes ”evidently con amore”.9 Despite the fact that nearly

all his books threaten to be overflowed by examples, they are carried by a distinct dramaturgy,The Golden Bough, no less.

The starting-point of the book is its sole pictorial illustration – a reproduction ofWilliam Turner’s painting with the same name as the book. “Who does not know Turner’s

picture of the Golden Bough?” are the opening words.10 With this reference to Turner’s

portrayal of the cult of Diana at the lake of Nemi in the old Latium, the keynote to the work isgiven. The painting mediates an idyllic atmosphere, but already with the poem quoted above,

7 Reviewers comments on these books as collections and collections of illustrations. Frazers inability to slowdown in the listing of illustrative exmaples is also frequently commented on. See for example Morris Jastrow Jr.,"Review of Folk-Lore in the Old Testament: Studies in Comparative Religion. Legend, and Law by J. G. Frazer1918," The American Historical Review 24, no. 4 (1919). och J. Irving Manatt, "Review of Pausania'sDescription of Greece," The American Historical Review 4, no. 1 (1898).. Compare also H. J. Fleure’smemorandum for the centenary of Frazer’s birth, where he is characterized precisely as a collector. H. J. Fleure,"James George Frazer," Man 54 (1954)..8 Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings p. xix-xx.9 Jastrow Jr., "Review of Folk-Lore in the Old Testament: Studies in Comparative Religion. Legend, and Law byJ. G. Frazer 1918," p. 656-58.10 Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings p. 1.

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Frazer states that in this idyll a dark and violent element is hidden. This violence is the

gravitation point of the work through the different editions.11 Frazer depicts the succession riteof the Nemi priest as in an instant transporting the reader from a bright classic civilization, to

a dark and savage past.

In the sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far

into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he

kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He

was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him

and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary.12

Frazer asks how such a custom may be explained. Let us ask why it has to be explained. ForFrazer, it seems obvious for each and everyone, for:

No one will probably deny that such a custom savours of a barbarous age, and, surviving into

imperial times, stands out in striking isolation from the polished Italian society of the day, like a

primaeval rock rising from a smooth-shaven lawn.13

In the quest for an answer and an explanation Frazer is led over the world to gather examplesand illustrations reminding of this recurrent priestly murder at Nemi. The Golden Bough is

inhabited by executed kings, human sacrifice and anthropophagic rituals. But with the

enthusiasm of the collector, we also find long lists of tabooed mother-in-laws, tabooed foodsand rain charms. Nothing in the world of the savage is too far-fetched to examine in relation

to the Nemi murder.

To take possession of the world

11 Marc Maganaro shows how Frazer uses certain themes as magnets attracting a wide variety of topics for himto discuss. Marc Manganaro, Myth. Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority (New Haven & London: YaleUniversity Press, 1992) p. 56. Accordingly, The Golden Bough deals with anything from tabooed mother-in-lawsto anthropophagic rituals to processions of saints in French villages to European beliefs in trolls and fairies. Butit is also clear that what is in the centre of the work, is the violence, and Frazer’s conception of it as a temporalanomaly when appearing as in Nemi.12 Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings p. 8-9.13 Ibid. p. 10.

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Frazer is the ultimate pack rat: fossil by fossil he builds a museum of relics that, so the rhetoric

implies, contains all body part and hence contains all possible explanations. If it holds multiple,

contradictory theories, then very well; it is large, it contains contradictions.14

Frazer’s texts carry several ambivalences. The rationalistic ambition occasionally drowns in

the suggestive atmosphere. His biographer, Robert Ackerman, talks about a dreamlike logic,

where any subject can at any time transform itself into any other, metamorphose according tovague patterns of associations. The enormous amounts of “evidence” Frazer alleges for a

specific thesis seem often to have but vague connections to each other.15 Reading turns into adreamlike journey into otherness.16 In this, there are similarities to a practice of showing the

outsides of what is regarded as civilized, controlled and disciplined, as mystified, exotic and

slightly threatening. These dichotomies are present in museums as well as zoological gardensand live exhibitions of savages of the time, but also in horror cabinets and panopticon

shows.17

Collections that became systematized according to scientific norms partly had their

roots in the collections of curios from the 17th century. During the 18th and 19th centuries

collecting was disciplined, the aim of the collection turning to be more and more articulated inpedagogic and scientific terms. The purpose to inspire awe and surprise, however, remained.

During the Enlightenment these feelings were often regarded as a stimulus to deeperknowledge, but they had to be controlled. The aim to educate the visitor with time grew more

significant, and meantime the phenomenon of collecting and exhibiting expanded greatly.

During the 19th century many new museums opened their gates, under both public and privatearrangement.18

In these new museums it was, though, still the curious and the spectacular that attracted

the visitors. But the educative aim also meant that exhibitions were consciously ordered inways as to convey messages of evolution and social change, human difference and natural

14 Manganaro, Myth. Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority p. 24.15 Robert Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press,1987) p. 99. See also Manganaro, who comments on Ackerman by comparing Frazer’s narrative to a “Lacanianfantasy”. Manganaro, Myth. Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority p. 21.16 Compare to the description of the museum in James Clifford, "Objects and Selves – an Afterword," in Objectsand Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. J Stocking, Jr, History of Anthropology(Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).17 Raymond Corbey, "Ethnographic Showcases, 1870-1930," Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 3 (1993): p. 340.18 Lewis Pyenson and Susan Sheets-Pyenson, Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprisesand Sensibilities (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999) p. 128-9.

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hierarchies.19 To secure the authority of the collection, authenticity, regardless if the objects

were natural objects or artefacts, was of main importance. The object could be a copy, aplaster cast etc. But the form on which it was based carried its authenticity.

Frazer’s constant references to eyewitness accounts, work in the same way. Here the

illusion of intimacy between observer and object is secured. The object has been torn from itssocial contexts and recontextualized in the order of the anthropological show. The Golden

Bough announces itself to deal with the evolution of savage mind. Every custom, everyobservation, can be placed somewhere in this evolutionary scheme. The collected objects are

placed in an order creating an illusion of a true representation of the world.20 While the

collection of curios emphasised the spectacular, the extreme, the curious, objects in themodern museum are ordered in a scientific discourse claiming objectivity and

representability. They are isolated from their historical and social relations and reduced to

metonyms; a mask becomes a whole culture, a taboo represents a whole religion. In thisillusion of true representation, those power relations imbedded in the sole transportation of the

object to the glass case and the their classification, are hidden.21

Like the museum finding itself in the tension between the spectacular and the scientific,

The Golden Bough balances on the line between the poetic, literate and enchanting on the one

side, and the rationalistic, systematic, scientific on the other. A review of the first edition inthe Edinburgh Review 1890 compares Frazer with an oriental story-teller, that provides every

story with an end demanding an explanation in the form of another story.22 The poetic and themystic are here activated in an orientalistic Arabian Nights-fantasy.

To the ambivalence between the scientific and the spectacular in Frazer, is added the

fact that he belonged to a generation of anthropologists who depended, to a large extent, on areading public outside the academic world. The circle of professional anthropologist readers

was still small, the positions for anthropologists within the universities few, and when Frazereventually got a professor’s chair in Liverpool, it was an unsalaried position more of a sign of

honour. He also felt a strong dislike of lecturing, even further strengthening his dependence

19 Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 108.20 Clifford, "Objects and Selves – an Afterword," p. 239.21 Ibid. On the significance of the material objects for the establishment of academic anthropology, and theacquisition of such objects, see also Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in theExploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)..22 The Reviewer is quoted in Manganaro, Myth. Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority p. 22.

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on the reading public.23 In relation to his reader he reasons like a good detective-story writer,

keen on not revealing the final plot in advance.24 Robert Ackerman says of him that

he always believed it to be not merely his right but his obligation to combine the raw data into a

pleasing whole. He always understood anthropology to be the science of mankind, which meant

that it ought to be accessible to any educated reader. His were the literary imperatives of an

eighteenth-century historian – to present his materials in an engaging manner, to delight as well as

to instruct.25

However, there is more at stake in the practices of collecting. In the relation between objectsand observers there are aspects of power imbedded. The collecting is a possessive practice,

expanding greatly with the expansion of empire. The immaterial collecting of Frazer works inthis way also. It allows him to order the world according to his own logic. With the same

strategies used in contemporary museums, he attracts the attention of his public by startling

the reader. The Golden Bough builds up a tension between estrangement and familiarity, inthe frequent comparisons between the seemingly familiar on the European countryside and

the deeply alien in the interior of Africa, between the accepted cultural heritage of classictexts and the savage world of Australia.26 As Frazer rips the societies he meets in his sources

into small pieces and reduces them to lists of customs sorted after evolutionary hierarchies, he

makes himself master over this world. James Clifford claims that this practice of takingpossession of the world by collecting, is a specific Occidental trait:

the notion that this gathering involves the accumulation of possessions, the idea that identity is a

kind of wealth (of objects, knowledge, etc.) is surely not universal. [---] In the West [...] collecting

has long been a strategy for the deployment of a possessive self, culture, and authenticity.27

According to Clifford, already in the behaviour of children collecting favourite toys, shells orstones, we can recognize this practice.

23 Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work p. 188. See also Robert Fraser, The Making of the Golden Bough:The Origins and Growth of an Argument (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990) p. 128.24 In corresponance with his publisher Macmillan, quoted in Fraser, The Making of the Golden Bough: TheOrigins and Growth of an Argument p. 54.25 Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work p. 238. See also Manganaro, Myth. Rhetoric, and the Voice ofAuthority p. 47. for a discussion on these double functions .26 Manganaro, Myth. Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority p. 45.27 Clifford, "Objects and Selves – an Afterword," p. 238.

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In these small rituals we observe the channelling of obsession, an exercise in how to make the

world one’s own, to gather things around oneself tastefully, appropriately. The inclusions in all

collections reflect wider cultural rules, of rational taxonomy, of gender, of aesthetics. An

excessive, sometimes even rapacious need to have is transformed into rule-governed, meaningful

desire. Thus the self which must possess, but cannot have it all, learns to select, order, classify in

hierarchies – to make “good” collections.28

As an antithesis to collecting, stands the notion of the savage’s relationship to objects, to thefetishes. The fetish is a recurrent image in anthropological works of the time.29 Originally a

Portuguese designation on African religious artefacts, the functions of which the Europeans

had very vague ideas, the fetish soon became a widely used metaphor. Marx uses it in Das

Kapital already in 1867, and Freud takes it up in psychoanalytic terminology.30 While the

collecting I have discussed so far is possessive, is a question of power over the objects, the

fetish is the object that has power over the human being. The savage lacks the capacity to takepossession over the objects, the objects take possession over the savage. In using the fetish as

metaphor, Marx and Freud give their versions of modernity’s tendency to depict what isconceived of as irrational, as a throwback to savage ways, thus echoing Frazer’s interpretation

of the Nemi priest succession.

This dichotomization between the modern observer and the savage observed, carrieswith it a strong objectification of the observed peoples. They become things, vaguely

distinguishable from museum artefacts, people reduced to frozen objects in the same way asthe mask in the glass stand. Nowhere is this objectification so apparent as when Frazer, in his

installation lecture in Liverpool 1908, complains over the extinction of savage peoples as a

devastation of the archives, and argues for the need to make “permanent copies [---] of theseprecious monuments before they are destroyed”. It is no longer even human beings dying.31

28 Ibid. Frazer’s collecting was not entirely immaterial, though. His private library seem to have been enormous,and according to his wife it was of uttermost importance for him to have all of his references immediately athand. Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work p. 144.29 Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa p. 103-05. For Frazer onfetishism see for example Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings p. 349.30 Aleksander Motturi, Filosofi vid mörkrets hjärta: Wittgenstein, Frazer och vildarna (Göteborg: Glänta, 2003)p. 8.31 James George Frazer, "The Scope of Social Anthropology," in Psyche's Task: A Discourse Concerning theInfluence of Superstition on the Growth of Instiutions (London: Macmillan and co, 1920), p. 174-75. Aspects ofthis objectification are discussed in Motturi, p. 35-38. For a discussion on the collecting of human bodies andtheir remains, see also Patricia Lorenzoni, "Mänskliga kvarlevor och levande döda: om att visa vildar somvetenskap och som spektakel," in Vetenskapshistoriska uppsatser, ed. Aant Elzinga and Ingemar Nilsson,Arachne (Göteborg: Institutionen för idéhistoria och vetenskapsteroi, Göteborgs Universitet, 2004).

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THE SAVAGE, FRAZER AND THE EMBARRASSMENTWhy take departure in Frazer in a study of the savage category? Are there not more relevantthinkers, more relevant anthropologists? Robert Ackerman opens up his biography with the

statement: “Frazer is an embarrassment”. He points out that Frazer was a better writer and had

more readers than any other English-writing anthropologist at the time. Still, he is missing inevery professionally accepted anthropological pedigree.32 Other evolutionary anthropologists

have been honoured with recognition, while Frazer seems hopelessly belonging to a lessflattering past. He became a representative for everything later generations of anthropologists

wished to distance themselves from; almost unlimited metaphysical speculations in the light

of the study lamp and without any real experience of the world he was describing. One of themost frequently repeated anecdotes on Frazer is his conversation with William James. Frazer

was asked if he had ever met any of the savages he described. His answer is supposed to have

been: Heaven forbid!33

However, there are reasons to stand slightly sceptical to the message conveyed in such

anecdotes. The self-image of anthropology has included a historical break, symbolized by thebreak-through of Malinowski and his fieldwork method. The strings of continuity that goes

from early, by evolutionism and racism marked anthropology, and professionalized

anthropology after Malinowski, are exiled to the dominions of the partly repressed.34 WhenFrazer is remembered with respect today, it is mainly for his influence on English modernist

literature. T. S. Eliot, in The Waste Land from 1922, was one of those who acknowledged agreat debt to The Golden Bough.35

But in his time, the anthropologist Frazer met a wide recognition, if not without

objections. With the publication of The Golden Bough in 1890 he had quickly become anauthority. At this time, the gathering of disconnected examples typical for the comparative

method had wide acceptance, established as it had been by the grand authorities of

32 Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work p. 1.33 Motturi, Filosofi vid mörkrets hjärta: Wittgenstein, Frazer och vildarna p. 44. Fraser, however, claims theanecdote is probably a myth. Robert Fraser, "The Face beneath the Text: Sir James Frazer in His Time," in SirJames Frazer and the Literary Imagination: Essays in Affinity and Influence, ed. Robert Fraser (London:Macmillan, 1990), p. 4. Regardless if Frazer ever uttered the famous words or not, James’ characterization ofhim in a letter from 1900 is rather entertaining. Frazer is described in amused but benevolent terms as a naïve,innocent child, practically adopted by his much more vigorous wife. Further, James writes: ”He, after Tylor, isthe greatest authority now in England on the religious ideas and superstitions of primitive peoples, and he knowsnothing of psychical research and thinks that trances, etc., of savage soothsayers, oracles and the like are allfeigned! Verily science is amusing!” Quoted in Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work p. 175.34 Manganaro, Myth. Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority p. 15. Manganaro also points out how an increasinglywide critique of evolutionism and the comparative method existent already before the breakthrough ofMalinowski, is concealed, p. 19.35 For Eliot and The Golden Bough, see Ibid. ch. 2.

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anthropology, such as Tylor and McLennan. Furthermore, Frazer had stylistic qualities his

predecessors lacked.36 But he was also a person actively engaged in supporting younger, field-working anthropologists, among others Malinowski. Although he in periods of financial

troubles had to race his expenses writing, he also received several honours. In 1899 Oxford

gave him an honorary doctorate, in 1907 he was offered the first British chair in socialanthropology in Liverpool.37 During the years after World War I he also received several

honours and was in 1920 both knighted and elected into the Royal Society.38 As late as 1927he is, in the anthropological journal Man, spoken of as a man whose name will go to history

together with Darwin’s; two pioneers in gathering and systematizing in their respectively

field.39 In The American Historical Review 1919 one can read:

the world will probably never produce another Frazer, able to cover the entire vast field, with the

sure touch of the master throughout40

When anthropologists wrote reviews of later editions of his works, the objections were morenumerous.41 Already at the beginning of the 20th century his authority was referred to lesser

by anthropologists and more by authors, poets, artists, and not least, occultists of all kinds.

However, Frazer made an impression on other areas as well. Freud was inspired by his work,and quotes him frequently in Totem und Tabu (1912-1913). Ackerman claims that when the

first volumes of the third edition went to print in 1911, it was in the very last moment for such

a work.42 The speculative and highly literary work of Frazer was regarded every time as lessscientific, and after World War II he was more and more cleared away from accepted

tradition.43

It is clear from several introductive works on the history of anthropology, that Frazer’s

theoretical importance for later anthropology is regarded as small, even in comparison to

36 Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work p. 100. See also E. W. Brabrook’s, president of TheAnthropological Institute, judgement in 1896: ”Mr. Frazer’s ’Golden Bough,’ constitute a more considerableaddition to anthropological knowledge than any which have appeared in England since the classical works ofTylor, Lubbock and McLellan [sic].” E. W. Brabrook, "Anniversary Address," Journal of the AnthropologicalInstitute of Great Britain and Ireland 25 (1896): p. 395.37 Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work p. 162.38 Ibid. p. 260, 88-9.39 "Anthropological Notes," Man 27 (1927): p. 80.40 Jastrow Jr., "Review of Folk-Lore in the Old Testament: Studies in Comparative Religion. Legend, and Lawby J. G. Frazer 1918," p. 659.41 Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work p. 170.42 Robert Ackerman, "Frazer on Myth and Ritual," Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 1 (1975): p. 133-4.43 Fraser, The Making of the Golden Bough: The Origins and Growth of an Argument p. 203-4. See alsoManganaro, Myth. Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority p. 54.

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other evolutionists.44 It is not unusual to find references to Frazerian anthropology in modern

anthropological works used as a kind of insult, as when Stanely Jeyaraja Tambiah talks of“lingering traces of a Frazerian hangover”.45 His work is often depicted as the last grandiose

monument of an evolutionary anthropology already outdated.46

Maybe Frazer’s anthropology has not survived as theory, but the notions and categoriessignificant in his world, are not that far away today. Aleksander Motturi characterizes this as a

“repeated and nuanced oblivion”. Frazer is, claims Motturi in a discussion on anthropologicalphilosophy, present in his absence. Notions and ideas from the tradition he worked in are

scattered in a discourse unwilling to acknowledge it, and Frazer’s influence is repressed or

reduced to a few distinctions and concepts. This repression is the reason to why there islacking an adequate historical contextualisation of Frazer’s work.47

If anthropology wants to forget, Frazer’s importance is more frequently acknowledged

in studies of literature. Most scholarship that has been produced on Frazer is in this area.However, these studies do not focus on what was a main interest and category for Frazer

himself, namely the savage. In Frazer’s days, the savage was already an old category inOccidental thinking, but being transformed and rearticulated within the matrix of imperialistic

expansion and its ideological needs. Of significance here is the legitimizing role of the

civilizing mission, which Rudyard Kipling summed up as the white man’s burden.Literature studies on Frazer tend to uplift the unique in his authorship. This gives a

direction contrary to the one I seek in my studies. Frazer’s popularity was due to his ability togive extra life and colour to the already well known and established, the drama building up

Occidental self-image in times of imperial expansion. I use him as the prism through which to

study the category of the savage in the British imperial context. The relevance lies in the needto dig into the oblivions Motturi is speaking of, to examine notions of savagery and

civilization that has kept its urgency in Occidental self-image long after isolated persons likeFrazer have been rejected as Eurocentric and unscientific. Walter Mignolo advocates a critical

44 See for example Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen, A History of Anthropology (London: PlutoPress, 2001)., or R. Jon McGee and Richard L. Warms, Anthropological Theory: An Introductory Histroy(McGraw-Hill, 2004)., the latter in which Frazer is reduced to footnotes.45 Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Culture, Thought, and Social Action: An Anthropological Perspective (CambridgeMass. & London: Harvard University Press, 1985) p. 18. Sea also Gillian Feeley-Harnik, "Issues in DivineKingship," Anuual Review of Anthropology 14 (1985): p. 275,. for the notion of Frazer as the authority quicklyturning into an embarrassment.46 Hylland Eriksen and Nielsen, A History of Anthropology.is an example of this.47 Motturi, Filosofi vid mörkrets hjärta: Wittgenstein, Frazer och vildarna p. 18.

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historiography, one that “understands the past to speak the present”.48 The ambition to do this

is ever present in my reading of Frazer and the anthropology of imperial times.

Understanding, identification and the intimacy of the unpleasant – or, Was Frazer aracist?When presenting my work in different contexts, I have noted how a certain question reoccur.This question concerns the possible racism of Frazer. There seem to be some need to place the

old anthropologist somewhere in relation to this emotionally and ideologically charged

concept. Was he a racist?Or, is the question of relevance?

It has highlighted some problems that have occupied me in my reading of Frazer and of

other professional or amateur anthropologists from this time. It is also a question contained,implicitly or explicitly, in many studies concerning the history of anthropology. The term,

racist, seems to call upon an almost automatic deprecation, raising questions about thepossibility to understand what one feels the need to deprecate.

I find it difficult to give any other answer than yes to the question if Frazer was a racist

(although his universalistic view on mankind has been taken to prove the opposite). Frazer’stime was eagerly occupied with race as a biological category, with racial differences between

peoples. But race was only one of several biological categories from which difference wasunderstood. Differences between ethnic groups were biologized, but so were differences in

sex and class. Many discussions on the definition of racism today, focus on the question if

race has to bee understood biologically or not in order to be able to talk about racism. DuringFrazer’s days the biological character of race was taken for granted. Of course, one could

claim, Frazer was a racist. He lived and worked within a decidedly racist frame ofunderstanding. This is also reflected in his many ambivalent discussions on difference as to be

understood qualitatively or quantitatively.49

Now, saying that Frazer was a racist seems to imply disapproval. Saying he was a racistbecause he lived and worked in racist times seems on the other hand somewhat apologetic.

What kind of ethical position can one take in relation to the past one as a historian is workingwith? In studies on the history of anthropology, or studies on Frazer, there is often a strong 48 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization (TheUniversity of Michigan Press, 1995) p. xii.49 Motturi has a thorough discussion on the ambiguities of Frazer’s “non|racism”, Motturi, Filosofi vid mörkretshjärta: Wittgenstein, Frazer och vildarna p. 30-5.

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tendency of identification with the object studied.50 Perhaps this is not to surprise, when

academy writes its own history. And are there not theoretical traditions where identification toa certain extent is seen as prerequisite to reach any understanding at all? However, is it not an

ethical and political problem that the historian in the majority of cases so more easily

identifies with the anthropologist than with the anthropologist’s objects of study?In this process of identification, the crucial points are those that imply guilt. Racism is

such a point. In a reading that strongly identifies with the object, the possible critical attemptis reduced to such points of guilt, easily defined and delimited. Ackerman’s way of reasoning

is typical in this respect. He comments on one of few passages where Frazer explicitly

speculates in racial differences. This is in Frazer’s claim about totemism as a trait of thedarker, less civilized races.51

In commenting upon this passage, Ackerman points out that the importance of evolution

once again has started to be acknowledged by anthropologists, after “perhaps thirty yearsduring which ‘evolution’ was virtually unmentionable (largely because it had been taken as

the key to all social phenomena in Frazer’s generation)”. However, the assertions on skincolour and levels of civilization, are described as “an uglier side” of Frazer’s reasoning, as

“the study of totemism, in Frazer’s eyes, leads to racist conclusions as well”.52 The racist

statements are here marked with an “as well”, indicating an aim to separate the valuable inFrazerian evolutionism from the morally reprehensible. But can this be done? Frazer’s

reasoning does not lead to racist conclusions, it is articulated within a racist framework ofunderstanding the world. Natural inequalities within nations and differences between races are

matters Frazer takes as much for granted as most of his contemporary colleagues. It is

constitutive for his evolutionist system.So, how significant are Frazer’s relatively few explicitly racist statements when

studying his texts? He works in a time when Britain expands over the world with animperialistic rhetoric and a self-imposed civilizing mission to justify. Frazer belongs to the

enthusiastic supporters of this project. His own work, he sees as aiming to “upgrade” the

savage in the eyes of civilized man. But this “defence” of the savage is not only articulatedfrom a Eurocentric position, but also a marked imperialistic one. Focusing on isolated

50 Fraser is the best example here. His accounts for Frazer’s studies of the Diana cult at Nemi is for the readerconfusing, as it is hard to distinguish from Fraser’s text what is a statement from Frazer and what comes fromFraser. Already in the first chapter, in writing that the priestly king at Nemi ”was a throwback to an age ofbarbarity and darkness”, he seem to have fused with the object of his own study. Fraser, The Making of theGolden Bough: The Origins and Growth of an Argument p. 9-10. See further p. 55.51 Quoted Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work p. 219.52 Ibid.

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statements like the one discussed above, conceals his participation in a system where racism

as well as evolutionism were integral parts in the maintenance of legitimacy for conquest anddominance. Frazer’s few racist statements can in this context be seen as petty details. That

they are so few reflect rather his lack of interest for biological matters than any kind of non-

racist position. What he thought in biological matters is less significant than the political andethical stands implicit in his reasoning on non-Occidental peoples.

What is at stake here is how one approaches the production of knowledge taking placein the imperial matrix. The racism that was part of Frazer’s frames of reference is basically

rejected today. The imperialistic design building up Frazer’s frames of reference is not

necessarily so. Reducing Frazer’s relation to imperialism, to a few points of racist prejudices,disarms any relevance a critical reading of Frazer could have for our age. Today’s intimacy

with the unpleasantness of the past is concealed.53

TO SPEAK ABOUT THE PAST

[The anthropologist] is only a student, a student of the past, who may perhaps tell

you a little, very little, of what has been, but who cannot, dare not tell you what

ought to be. Yet even the little that he can contribute to the elucidation of the past

may have its utility as well as its interest when it finally takes its place in that great

temple of science to which it is the ambition of every student to add a stone.54

Frazerian and evolutionary anthropology occupies itself with the past. Here lies a paradox, as

the object of study is normally coeval with the anthropologist. The anthropologist becomes

the one to study the past in the present. This is also how the cult of Diana at Nemi stands out.When Frazer’s attention is drawn to Nemi, it is by what he conceives of as a problem, a

discontinuity in history. How can, he asks, such a barbarous custom prevail in such a civilizedage and place? In the past of Nemi there seem to be two different ages. The roman, civilized

age, and a barbarian, dark and ancient

The past in the present is a constantly returning element in Frazer’s texts. The past andthe present take place at once, and the present is only granted the few. The savage object is

53 Compare also with Motturi, who discusses the way of conceptualizing difference as essential, rather than thequestion of biology, as significant, Motturi, filosofi vid mörkrets hjärta: Wittgenstein, Frazer och vildarna p.101.54 James George Frazer: Psyche’s Task and The Scope of Social Anthropology, Macmillan and co, London 1920,p. 161.

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placed in a dim and distant past, and the study of it becomes part of the mapping of human

prehistory.There are, therefore, two ways of understanding time here. On the one hand, time sorts

events after their occurrence, after days, months, years. On the other hand, and here of

interest, it sorts the room and transcends the former day-to-day experiences of past andpresent. Space is temporalized. The canonical example is Hegel’s narrative on the journey of

history from east to west. But the temporalization of geography is widely spread.Walter Mignolo points out how spatial categories tend to be rearticulated in

chronological ones in the late 18th century. In the early modern conquests in the Americas,

the debate on the Amerindians dealt mainly with degrees of humaneness and the status oftheir souls. In the Catholic world it was established that the Amerindians where in fact

humans with a mortal soul, and that made them pagans, object for Christian mission. But

there were other parallel lines of reasoning, comparing Amerindians with children andimplying they were what the Europeans had once been. This use of a linear, Judeo-Christian

time as ordering principle for space, Mignolo traces back to the renaissance, but the idea findsits full breakthrough during the Enlightenment. In the secularistic 19th century, what was at

stake was not the immortality of the souls or religious confession, but rather, how far away

from the present, from Occidental civilization, the others where.55

This also meant that the savage and the ethnographer could be in the same geographical

room, but still be separated by nearly infinite spaces of time. Therefore, to understand thesavage, Frazer claims, one has to take into consideration the time of the savage. For Frazer,

this (magical) rationality is in savage time as reasonable as civilized rationality is in present

time.56 However, when these rationalities blend, through survivals from distant times, the paststands out as terrifying. Frazer’s suggestive description of the priest murder in Nemi is placed

in the same category as events in the Scottish Highlands where bloody rituals are carried outby only on the surface civilized Europeans.57 These phenomena, as well as the people

associated with them, are constructed as relics of a stage civilization is supposed to have left.

In this way time is used in order to clear out the undesirable from the present.Johannes Fabian talks about a politics of time, summed up in what he calls denial of

coevalness. This he defines as “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of 55 Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000) p. 86.. Walter D. Mignolo, "The Geopolitics ofKnowledge and the Colonial Difference," The South Atlantic Quartely 1, no. 101 (2002): p. 67.56 James George Frazer, "Psyche's Task: A Discourse Concerning the Influence of Superstition on the Growth ofInstitutions," in Psyche's Task and the Scope of Social Anthropology (London: Macmillan and Co, 1920 [1909]).57 Se for example Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings p. 236.

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anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse”.58

It is specifically anthropology Fabian is discussing, but the use of time as he describes it hasgrown in a historical and cultural context where it has been constitutive for Occidental self-

image in a wider sense.

The (im)possibilities of history

Western epistemology claims that it exclusively controls true knowledge, and thus is purportedly

supported by the evidence of what exists and what has happened. Only such an epistemology is

permitted to picture the future in terms of the present produced by the past in the right direction,

the direction of progress.

Having confused secularization with de-Christianization, we assume that we are

functioning within a culture that no longer owes anything to Christianity but its past, which has

been assumed and surpassed.59

The temporal categories that sort the present are part of our everyday experience. A project of

the Frazerian kind, to write one universal history over human evolution might today bedifficult, or at least not very credible. However, something similar happens every time we

speak of, for example, Talibans as “medieval” or simply talk of a phenomenon as eitherbefore its time, or already in its own time obsolete. With assistance of temporal categories we

sort out the unpleasant from an ideal present, and reproduce a teleological notion of history.

Time sorts and totalizes, orders the world after our desires. It allows us to expel presentphenomena to the past, or to cherish them as belonging to the (desirable) future. This also

means reproducing an implicit notion of universal history, where all voices not fitting into thetemporal framework are silenced. The Occident has in traditional historiography built upon a

mythic beginning in classic Greece. Worlds, cultures, civilizations outside win their place in

history when they have contact with, and significance for, this gravitation point for thehistorical consciousness.60 Northern Africa enters history in Hellenic times, sub-Saharan

Africa first through Occidental imperialism, the American continent was “discovered” in

58 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2002 [1983]) p. xl, 31.59 B. Jewsiewicki and V. Y. Mudimbe, "Africans' Memories and Contemporary History of Africa," in HistoryMaking in Africa, ed. V. Y. Mudimbe and B. Jewsiewicki (Wesleyan University, 1993), p. 6.60 See among others Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and BorderThinking p. 117.

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1492. Mexican Zapatista spokesperson Subcommandante Marcos speaks of a “kidnapped

history” in which the present defeat the past on its way to the future.61

The failure of the non-Occidental world to live up to what is conceived of as present,

becomes with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s word ”the ’failure’ of a history to keep an appointment

with its destiny”.62 Chakrabarty claims that “Europe” continues as the sovereign subject ofhistory, even when considering “Indian history”, “Chinese history” or “Kenyan history”. In a

peculiar way they all become variations of the master narrative of “European history”.63 Howshall one, as historian, speak (and write) and at the same time avoid inscribing oneself in this

universalist/excluding tradition, especially when one is actually writing “European history”?

Returning to Mignolo’s understanding the past to speak the present, he emphasizes theimportance of a critique of the monotopy of Occidental epistemology, that which has

regulated what has been and not been acceptable production of knowledge. He claims that

Occidental critical tradition has limited its critique to be articulated within modernity.Therefore it has reproduced the implicit assumption that outside of Occidental

philosophy/science/epistemology there is nothing. Such a critique can never be decolonizing.Rather it shows how a local place of articulation, when becoming universal, obtains the power

to control its own critique.64 The epistemological universalism is never questioned, the place

from which to speak is still given, and the critique is formulated from this place. Thedistinction and relation between subject and object never undergoes any radical renegotiation.

With the establishment of the harsh distinction between knowledging subject and objectof knowledge, the thought of a knowledging subject outside the one postulated by

modernity’s epistemological rationality is made impossible.65 Mignolo describes this

asymmetry in modernity’s monotopic epistemology thus:

Each term implies the other. Modernity, for example, implies West, reason, history, state, and

rationality. Rationality implies modernity, West, and so on. Each term is part of the enunciated, but

all of them are, at the same time, pervasively and invisibly the foundation of the classification

itself – that is, of the enunciation. What we have here is a different version of the coloniality of

power, since the second set of terms are part of the colonization of time within Europe itself and 61 Subcomandante Marcos, "Det upp och nedvända periskopet (eller minnet, en gömd nyckel)," in Från sydöstraMexicos underjordiska berg, ed. Erik Gustafsson (Stockholm: Manifest, 2001 [1998]), p.188.62 Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?,"Representations 0, no. 37 (Special issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories) (1992): p. 5.63 Ibid.: p. 1.64 Walter D. Mignolo, "The Enduring Enchantment: (or the Epistemic Privilege of Modernity and Where to Gofrom Here)," The South Atlantic Quartely Fall 2002 (2002): p. 948. See also Mignolo, "The Geopolitics ofKnowledge and the Colonial Difference."65 Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking p. 60.

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the colonization of space and time in the colonial world outside Europe. The terms in the

complementary side of the paradigm (tradition, ritual, myth, community, and emotion) also are

implied in each other. Colony, East, and tradition imply ritual, myth, community, and emotion.

Colony implies tradition, myth, and so on. But, contrary to the first set of terms in the paradigm,

none of them are part of the enunciation. They have all been relegated to the enunciated only.66

The critical project he lifts forward as an alternative to a critique from within modernity, isconnected to Chakrabarty’s call for a “provincialization” of Europe, that is, a dethronement of

Europe from its status as sovereign subject of history. But how provincialize Europe within an

academy articulated with the Occident’s universal normative status as condition? Chakrabartyseems pessimistic regarding the possibilities for a scholarly history to write a provincializing

history. This would mean

to look toward its own death by tracing that which resists and escapes the best human efforts at

translation across cultural and other semiotic systems, so that the world may once again be

imagined as radically heterogeneous. This, as I have said, is impossible within the knowledge

protocols of academic history, for the globality of academia is not independent of the globality that

the European modern has created.67

Mignolo claims the importance of writing from the intersections of modernity (giving as

example how the “Third World” contributes to modernity while at the same time modernity

produces the “Third World”), and through such intersections get away from narrativesincluding progress, evolution and points of arrival.68 The conceptual tool he uses is mainly the

distinction between local histories and global designs. A global design Mignolo defines as alocal history whose universality is made to be taken for granted. Christianity is the first local

history to transform into a global design for the modern/colonial world.69 Similarly,

evolutionism and Occidental notions of time can be regarded as such local histories,responding to specific local needs, inscribing themselves as universally valid global designs.70

The evolutionistic notion of a civilizing mission legitimizing imperial expansion points back

to early modern Christian mission and European expansion in the Americas. ThereforeMignolo also claims that in order to understand the modern/colonial world one should follow

66 Mignolo, "The Enduring Enchantment: (or the Epistemic Privilege of Modernity and Where to Go fromHere)," p. 939.67 Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?," p. 23.68 Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking p. 205.69 Ibid. p. 21, 65.70 Mignolo, "The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference," p. 69.

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the threads back to the 16th century and the expansive Christianity in Europe’s new

territories.71

Using the distinction between local histories and global designs, Mignolo points to a

way out of Chakrabarty’s dilemma within scholarly history writing. But this presupposes an

epistemological relocalization from the margins and outsides of Occidental modernity. Itrequires a kind of border thinking, not conforming itself in a, from local histories

disconnected, design with universal claims. A provincializing of Europe would thus be to”take it as one more local history, without forgetting (how could one) its hegemonic role in

the modern/colonial world system”.72

Observed and observersThat evolutionism is a local history implies that the objects of evolutionist anthropology arelocally constructed and responding to local needs. As such, their connection with the people

of flesh and blood they are supposed to represent, is vague. Therefore they must be studied inrelation to these local needs, the stereotype be related to the place from which the knowledge

on it is produced.73

However, evolutionism and its stories of the savage also form itself as a global designthat carries with it considerable political and material consequences for those said to represent

that category. Evolutionism as a global design takes form in relation to the imperialisticproject. Early anthropology is inseparably bound up with the colonial practices providing its

conditions, and whose legitimacy it contributes to. In early ethnographic reports the

connection between science and colonial politics is very clear. The writers of these reportswere in dissipating roles as collectors of scientific objects and data, as explorers, colonial

agents and administrators, and warlords. Fabian has with the example of the European“penetration” of Central Africa, showed how these many times conflicting roles placed these

early ethnographers in severe stress and personal conflicts. Their enterprise in the service of

the civilizing mission was deeply contradictory, and therefore, chaotic.74 Ethnographersfrequently entered into ambiguous relations with local people, seeing them according to their

Occidental frames of reference and notions on split and parted time. However, local people 71 Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking p. 61,146-7.72 Ibid. p. 211.73 Fernando Coronil, "Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories," CulturalAnthropology 11, no. 1 (1996): p. 56.74 Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa.

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were also active part in these relations, which meant that the notion of the savage was

constantly negotiated in ambiguous ways with the other’s responses, reactions andresistances.75 The participation of the other is necessary for the anthropological production of

knowledge, but it must be fitted where it does not always let itself be fitted. This tension

follows the production of knowledge from the fieldwork to the armchair.The category of the savage was used as tools to make sense of a contradictory project. It

was a category central in Occidental self-image as well as in legitimizing and justifying thepractices of European expansion. Fabian has shown how, in contrast to the myth of the

convinced, purposeful explorer, the explorations had to be constantly made sense of –

sometimes to severe costs.76 This sense-making he studies from the ethnographic field. Butthen, the sense-making continued in the metropoles, carried on by armchair anthropologists

such as Frazer.

The silences of history

what does not exist is in fact actively produced as nonexistent, that is, as a noncredible alternative

to what exists. [---The monoculture of linear time] produces nonexistence by describing as

backward whatever is assymetrical vis-à-vis whatever is declared forward. It is according to this

logic that western modernity produces the noncontemporaneity of the contemporaneous, and that

the idea of simultaneity conceals the asymmetries of the historical times that converge into it.77

When the past is used as a tool to clear out the non-coeval from the coeval, it becomes a

history rich on silences. There is a territorial character in Occidental epistemology, one that

constantly seeks to expand, to create frontlines. On the other side of the border lie the emptyspace, and the screaming silence. Like with de Sousa Santos’ sociology of absence quoted

above, the silence is not to be understood as lack of speech. Rather we can understand it as thestrategies used on histories that do not fit into the master narrative. But the silence is never

completely still. The chaotic and contradictory threatens to break through, like cracks in the

wall. 75 Compare Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham &London: Duke University Press, 1996) p. 24. Rony insists on the active part of the “savages” in earlyethnographic cinema, and emphasises this by consistently referring to them as performers, also when the filmsare labelled as documentaries.76 Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa p. 209.77 Santos. Boaventura de Sousa, The World Social Forum: Toward a Counter-Hegemonic Globalization(http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/bss/fsm.php, 2003 [cited 7/7 2003]).

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There are several critical moments in the past where the techniques of silence are more

clearly activated. One example pointed out by Mignolo is the Haitian revolution at the turn ofthe 18th century. For an example from Frazer’s own times one can look at the battle at

Ethiopic Adwa in 1896. These two events have in common that they fall into the category of

the unthinkable. When Haitian slaves demanded human and citizen rights, and did this partlyby using the same language as did the French revolutionaries, they acted like political subjects

and in consistency with the declarations of revolutionary France. With this, they also madethe inner contradiction of the revolutionary universalism acute. The battle at Adwa took place

in an Africa that had started to be divided between European states, with a popular metaphor

of the time, like a cake. This Africa was conceptualised as empty and desert, ready forpenetration and civilization. If African state-building was recognized by Europeans, it was

considered ancient and obsolete. However, in Adwa the largest colonial army until then ever

transferred from Europe to Africa was defeated. With the loss of Italy, Ethiopia managed tostay free from European rule during the colonial period. Battles such as those taking place in

Haiti and Adwa, have become non-events in world history. The unthinkable in them, is thatthe recognition of them as political actions would grant to the black Haitians or Ethiopians

their place in the presence, and accordingly their access to the future.78 The claim that the

civilizing subject gives the other access to the future is exactly what justifies imperialisticintervention. Thus, the unthinkable.

Occidental monotopic epistemology relegates how and by whom the world can benamed. The classificatory system created within a local history, but carried out in the world as

a global design, classifies the world on a global level as well. The namer is also part of the

classified, an object in the system. But there is only one place from which naming islegitimate. Dealing with silences by trying to do something about the lack of speech, do not

change the premises for the establishment of the place from which speaking is possible. WithChakrabarty’s words:

The antihistorical, antimodern subject, therefore, cannot speak itself as “theory” within the

knowledge procedures of the university even when these knowledge procedures acknowledge and

“document” its existence. Much like Spivak’s “subaltern” (or the anthropologist’s peasant who can

only have a quoted existence in a larger statement that belongs to the anthropologist alone), this

78 Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia: Updated Edition (Berkely/Los Angelse/London: University ofCalifornia Press, 2002) p. 97-101, Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges,and Border Thinking p. 248-9, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History(Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) ch. 3.

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subject can only be spoken of by the transition narrative that will always ultimately privilege the

modern (i.e., “Europe”).79

There is a strict line between the place from which something can be studied, and the place

that is studied. This line is not in itself challenged by projects in for example anthropology ofgoing back “home”, going native in urban milieus not formerly objects of anthropological

study. The place from which knowledge is produced is the same, even if it makes of itself an

object. The epistemology remains monotopic; if the content of the conversation is changed,the premises are not.80

Fabian points out in his critique of anthropology that the radical break with comparativeevolutionism within modern anthropology, has not implied that time has ceased to be in

function of marking difference. While projects like Frazer’s grandiose evolutionary scheme

has fallen into disrepute, there is according to Fabian still a strict division between the subjectthat studies and interprets, and the object that can only be interpreted. The anthropological

subject still places him/herself in another time than the object.81 The anthropological subjecthas the ability to transcend the different times, as he/she has access to the epistemological

place of articulation. The object can neither interpret him/herself or the anthropologist, in a

way considered reliable outside its own context – and sometimes not even in its own context.If the screaming silence is to talk, and, to connect to an earlier line of argument, Europe

be provincialized, not only must that which have not been part of canonical history be lifted

form the archives. Digging into silenced archives is important, but digging into the silences isalso to a large extent to identify such discursive strategies as have been used to reshape what

does not fit into the global design. The active and productive role of silence, the ways inwhich Occidental production of knowledge has used silence, must be made an object of study

as well. To connect to one more concrete historical silencing; when the Spaniards came to the

Americas and met peoples not using alphabetical writing, they drew the conclusion that theAmerindians where peoples without history. The ways, material and immaterial, in which

memory was recorded among Amerindian peoples were conceived of as incoherent andirrational. As history in the definition utilized by the Spaniards prerequisited the use of the

alphabet, they gave themselves the task to bring order in the past of Amerindian societies by

writing down the history they were not supposed to have. We have a tendency to regard

79 Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?," p. 19.80 See Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking p.304-6.81 Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object p. 18.

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writing as one of the guarantees for memory, but here it becomes clear how the alphabet, used

to rearticulate local memories into Occidental frames of knowledge, creates silence on localways of producing and conceiving knowledge. Other voices than the European alphabetical

was deprived of all credibility.82 The alphabet and the history it is used to write becomes an

imperialistic apparatus to control memory.A critique of the monotopic epistemology is not equivalent to cultural relativism. What

is at stake is not the fact that there are different ways of understanding and knowing, but how

one place of articulation is established as the one from which one can speak with claims on

universal validity. Imperialistic expansion brings this validity to global levels, effectively

concealing the locality of the place where it was once articulated, and the historicity of theneeds it was made to respond to.83

Localizing the blind spotsThe silence that is never still is like a point where the threads of the narrative do not cometogether, a blind spot in the field of vision. The persistent silences are guardians and

concealers of the inconsistencies, asymmetries and contradictions in the narrative.84

Blind spots are not an anomaly in the narrative, but a constitutive part of it. The modernproject has a bright side in emancipatory efforts connected to political and economical

reforms as well as technological and scientific progress. The less flattering darker side incoloniality is not an unfortunate side-effect, but an integral part of the same logical matrix that

includes what we have been taught to value as progress. The idea of political freedoms is one

of the supporting pillars of Occidental self-image. As one of the canonized texts in the historyof political ideas, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty from 1859 is still widely read and used to

inspire. However, the tension Mill does not solve, because it cannot be solved, is the onebetween freedom as a fundamental right, and freedom as something one has to qualify for.

The principle of liberty does not apply to

those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. [----]

Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be

their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, 82 Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking p. 258 f..Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization p. 127-8, 99.83 Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?," p. 20.84 Compare Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinkingp. 23.

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has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable

of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit

obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.85

In order to qualify for liberty one must show capacity to precisely that free and equal

exchange of views which is not possible to show in the unfree despotism. The cracks openingup in these contradictory stories stand out as blind spots. In reading travelogues from journeys

in Central Africa at the turn of the 19th century, Fabian identifies and examines the intrinsiccontradictions in the colonial project as well as the strategies to deal with these contradictions

within the genre of travel literature. To understand these stories one must address the concept

of rationality itself and its ability to present itself as above and outside historical contexts.Therefore, one has to interpret reading backwards, from the rationalizations – such as in the

civilizing mission – to that which created the need for these glorifying rationalizations.86

The way Fabian reads his texts bears similarities to “symptomatic” readings developed

in such fields as Marxism and psychoanalysis. Slavoj Zizek, in discussing Marx’ analysis of

the irrational moments in bourgeois society describes the symptom as “a particular element,which subverts its own universal foundation, a species subverting its own genus”. A

symptomatic reading “consists in detecting a point of breakdown heterogenous to a givenideological field and at the same time necessary for that field to achieve its closure, its

accomplished form”.87

Fabian emphasizes the constant need of the ethnographic observers to make sense of thechaotic situations in which they found themselves. We can see Frazer’s work back in

Cambridge as a continuation of this sense-making. Thus his work is directly related to thosewho, unlike himself, had actual physical contact with the “savages”. But there is more at stake

in Frazer’s sense-making than the savages in the colonies. His strong emphasis on folk-lore

and studies of European peasants, bears witness to the significance of understanding thepresent past at home in the meeting with the savage. We are back in the local, but in dramatic

times when Europe with increasing power reshapes itself as world centre. Frazer uses

violence as a starting-point for anthropology, and this is significant. The deep paradox ofimperial thinking of the savage is, that while violence is the main tool for carrying out the

civilizing mission, it is also denied and conceived of as a remnant of earlier stages of

85 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, on Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government, ed. H. B. Acton(1972) p. 78-9.86 Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa p. 4 -5.87 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London & New York: Verso, 1989) p. 21.

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development. The Occidental self-image is constantly rearticulating difference in defence of

likeness, and constantly rearticulating likeness in defence of its own universal position. Acritical historiography, as I understand it, must address Occidental universalism while

persistently connecting it to modernity’s darker side in coloniality, and its by violence marked

stories.

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