> My failings as an anthropologist and scholar (and there are many)  
> are nonetheless pretty much a matter of public record, since my  
> publications as an anthropologist from forty years ago through the  
> present are in the public domain and accessible. As for 'every  
> anthropologist knows', this reminds me of Leonard Cohen's song,  
> 'Everybody knows' ... What every fieldwork anthropologist should  
> know is that  in doing fieldwork one enters as best one can,  
> wherever and whenever openings occur, and that this can be quite  
> uncertain and haphazard. The intention is to be as holistic as one  
> is able. This fits well with aspects of complexity theory, and  
> Deleuze understood (perhaps against his desire) somewhat in these  
> terms. And, the process works best in terms of discovering knowledge  
> when it is (again) abductive. To come to fieldwork with a theory is  
> likely to reproduce that theory, and contributions to knowledge are  
> likely small, even as reputations may swell.

Harris called himself a cultural materialist. He was an ecological  
determinist, convinced that he was doing science. His logic of  
analysis was indebted to Marx, not a failing except when taken on by  
anthropologists and others to turn cultural complexity into cultural  
simplicity. He did correlation and confuted this with relationships of  
causation, mixing up modes of reasoning in dangerous ways. (Neither  
Bateson nor Deleuze did causational analysis, with good reason).  
Harris did provide food for thought. He also provided downright  
silliness, as in his Aztec human sacrifice/cannibalism/protein  
hypothesis. He never related to ritual and cosmology (which interest  
me) in their own right, as cultural phenomena, because he was an  
economistic functionalist for whom these phenomena could only be  
representation. His History of Anthropological Theory expounds the  
broad narrowness of his theorizing and is closed to any other  
understandings, and so is quite useless unless one espouses his  
perspective. Calling him simple-minded is not shameful to me - I use  
the same term to refer to dialecticians and functionalists and other  
reductionists whose sense of the systemic is overly constricted by the  
parameters of closure that they use.

Harris had a vision and did his best to expound this, regardless of  
its failings. So too did Levi-Strauss. I said early on in this thread  
that I am not a structuralist, that I am anti-dualism, and that I  
don't believe in anthropology as science. I also pointed to Alfonso  
Ortiz's The Tewa World as an example of how a people might  
conceptualize their universe in more dualist Levi-Straussian terms.  
This is an example of Deleuzian potentiality. Have a look, before you  
jump to conclusions. Its a very large universe.

Levi-Strauss had a great vision, not in his thinking on the formal  
properties of kinship and exchange, but in his thinking on myth. Its  
not my vision, I don't espouse it, but its scope of broad  
connectivities and specific 'transformations' (in his terms) are well  
worth considering. Its not my vision, and when I analyze South Indian  
Saiva myth, I don't turn to Levi-Strauss. Such a turning would be  
completely misplaced, at odds with the dynamics of South Indian  
cosmologies, able only to distort them.

The single greatest book written on India by an anthropologist - Homo  
Hierarchicus, by Louis Dumont - was written by a structuralist, his  
own brand of structuralism but a structuralist nonetheless. Its  
greatness is again in its vision, its encompassment, its synthesis. I  
think Dumont could have accomplished his synthesis without using  
structuralism, yet it was structuralism that gave him the push to do  
what he did. Dumont's vision, of course, extends to his analysis to  
Europe and the rise there of individualism (Homo Equalis) - From  
Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (and  
Dumont argues that Marx
's universal theorizing was thoroughly rooted in European  
individualism). The two books should be read together.

I am, by the way, not quite a stranger to South India with stints of  
anthropological fieldwork (in Tirupati and Vizianagaram) in my later  
years that for reasons of health had to be kept shorter. Still, best  
not to jump to conclusions ... at least not too quickly.

Don Handelman

*
*
Film-Philosophy salon
After hitting 'reply' please always delete the text of the message you are replying to.
To leave, send the message: leave film-philosophy to: [log in to unmask]
Or visit: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy.html
For help email: [log in to unmask], not the salon.
*
Film-Philosophy online: http://www.film-philosophy.com
Contact: [log in to unmask]
**