Wittgenstein vs J.G. Frazer in recent anthropology
Palmié’s critique of Wittgenstein’s critique of Frazer, and James’s commentary
Stephan Palmié wrote:
The following translator’s notes need to be prefaced by the disclaimer that I am neither a philosopher nor an intellectual historian, but an anthropologist. Hence the title of this contribution [‘Translation is Not Explanation’], which aims to gesture toward a set of problems peculiar to my discipline since at least the last decades of the twentieth century. Putting matters in Wittgensteinian terms, the question is this: Is it even possible to translate the language games constitutive of other forms of life into those we find ourselves immersed in? At what cost do we attempt to override their incommensurabilities? And what, for that matter, are the entailments of such attempts at translation? What are its politics, and what are its consequences for both the language of origin and target? …
… In his Remarks on Frazer, Wittgenstein opposed a now bygone tendency in my discipline to rationalize—according to metropolitan European standards of reason—what used to be called “ostensibly irrational beliefs” and practices in the non-Western world, or Europe’s own peasant periphery. What he opposed was the moment of “explanation” that aimed to reduce other forms of life and their associated language games to—perhaps historically explicable, but nonetheless erroneous—category mistakes. But, of course, Wittgenstein did so intuitively, neither being acquainted with the history of the discipline Frazer stood for, nor understanding the transformations it was undergoing all the while that he penned his Remarks. …
… Frazer has been summarily dismissed by practically all of his successors. Different from Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), which retained its status as a foundational (though otherwise increasingly irrelevant) text for Anglophone anthropology, Frazer’s Golden Bough is now, at best, regarded as a footnote to a phase of the development of the discipline—and an unfortunate one at that. This phase came to an end with the emergence of genuinely fieldwork-based anthropological theorizing under W. H. R. Rivers, Alfred Cort Haddon, Arthur M. Hocart, Malinowski, and others in Great Britain, and with the vigorous attacks launched in the United States by Franz Boas against pseudo-evolutionary speculation from 1896 onward.
If Frazer had been the priest king of the “science of man” that Tylor inaugurated in the Victorian period, soon after Prince Edward assumed the throne, Frazer’s eventual successors had begun to prowl the sacred grove at Cambridge, swords in hands. Though Malinowski (himself once a protege of Frazer) paid tribute to him (Malinowski 1948) toward the end of both of their lives (Frazer predeceased Malinowski by a year in 1941), there was no question that the so-called “comparative method” against which Boas (1896) had begun to rail more than a generation earlier, and which formed the cornerstone of Frazer’s enterprise, was no longer a subject of debate. By the 1930s, at the latest, it had become irrelevant to the ways in which Anglophone anthropology, on both sides of the Atlantic, conceived of its own tasks and future.
Frazer’s grand scheme of deriving universally valid developmental sequences from indiscriminate raids on uncontextualized ethnographica from across the globe now was perceived as the last—however grandiose—instantiation of a “method” that had driven comparative philology as it emerged from the eighteenth century onward [and] exerted its influence upon Charles Darwin …
… There is no shortage of autopsies of Frazer’s project … it was not until the aftermath of the Writing Culture moment of the mid-1980s that scholars … began to appreciate how Frazer’s emplotment of humanity’s differential “rise to civilization” recurred to narrative forms different in degree, but not so much kind, that were flourishing in the discipline of their day and age. Putting the matter bluntly, what had been the “persuasive fictions” of anthropology in, say 1900, had stopped being persuasive by the 1930s. What is more, they had become unpalatable to the discipline as the kind of “just-so stories” that had once seemed to underwrite the discipline’s social function in an age of (however anxious) Victorian liberal progressivism. By the 1980s, however, the affinities between Frazerian styles of exposition, and, say, the no less poetically driven self-referential accounts of [e.g. Malinowski or Evans-Pritchard] were rife for exploration and comparison. This, we should note, was not because a resurgence of idiographic inscriptivism—however “thick”—might have gotten the better of residual nomothetic impulses still lingering in anthropology. On the contrary, perhaps, it was because its last great attempt at positivistic universalism—Claude Lévi-Strauss’s positing of elementary structures of the human mind—had given way to a poststructuralist hermeneutics of suspicion to end all hermeneutics of suspicion. …
… However much Wittgenstein polemicized against scientism in his later years, and however much he may have been partisan to Oswald Spengler’s gloomy ruminations about Occidental Modernity as a civilization in decline: the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) can only be assimilated to “postmodern” epistemic sensibilities (in our discipline or elsewhere) by a considerable stretch of the imagination.
To be sure, Wittgenstein appears to go to considerable length in reprovincializing the universalistic pretensions of Frazer’s scholarship—such as when he charges that all that Frazer’s explanations achieve is to make exotic practices “plausible to people who think like him” in presenting “all these practices, in the end, so to speak, as foolishness” (#1) or based on “false physics, or as the case may be, false medicine, technology, etc.” (#15). Or when he accuses Frazer of a “narrowness of spiritual life” that precludes him from “grasping a life different from the English one of his time” and of imagining “a priest who is not basically an English parson of our times, with all his stupidity and shallowness” (#12). Or again, when he calls Frazer “far more savage than most of his savages, for these savages will not be as far removed from an understanding of spiritual matters as an Englishman of the twentieth century” (#19).
But these vituperative attacks on Frazer’s often smug ethnocentrism, or Wittgenstein’s disparagement of Frazer’s rationalization of magic and religion as bastard science as simply arising from “the stupid superstition of our time” (#13) hardly amount to a coherent argument.
Nor does Wittgenstein’s alighting on Frazer’s “tone”—we might say, poetics of exposition—present a sustained critique, such as when he writes that “Frazer begins by telling us the story of the King of the Woods at Nemi” so as to show “that something strange and terrible is happening here” (#2). … But, as we shall see, what Wittgenstein has in mind is not at all the kind of vicarious frisson Frazer’s reveling in bizarre exotica may well have produced among his contemporary late Victorian and Edwardian lay audiences …
… A different matter is Wittgenstein’s dismissal of Frazer’s historicizing “explanations” of ostensibly obscure ritual practices “in the form of a hypothesis concerning temporal development” (#20) as inadequate to what Wittgenstein variously calls the “inner nature,” “spirit,” “depth,” or even “mystery” of such practices—and it gets us closer not only to Wittgenstein’s apparent concerns in the Remarks but also to a set of controversies within anthropology to which they have been often thought to speak. I refer here to the longstanding debate between proponents of what E. E. Evans-Pritchard called “intellectualist” approaches toward ritual, and those often labeled “symbolist”. The particulars of the theoretical divide marked by these terms—which found its most poignant expression in the “rationality debate” of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Hollis and Lukes 1982) in which a Wittgensteinian (Peter Winch) played a considerable role—are well known, and need not be rehearsed here at any length. Standing in the tradition of Tylor and Frazer, intellectualist approaches found their culmination with Robin Horton’s (e.g., 1967, 1982) contributions to a view of “African traditional thought” as a system of “explanation, prediction and control,” and John Skorupski’s (1976) summary defense of the broadly “theoretical” nature of the beliefs underlying ritual action, and their origin “out of a need to understand and control the natural environment”.
It is this type of approach to ritual that appears to bear the brunt of Wittgenstein’s critique:
One could begin a book on anthropology in this way: when one observes the life and behavior of humans all over the earth, one sees that apart from the kinds of behavior, one could call animal, the intake of food, etcetera, etcetera, humans also carry out actions that bear a peculiar character, and might be called ritual actions. But then again it is nonsense to go on and say that the characteristic feature of these actions is that they spring from erroneous notions about the physics of things. (#15)
But surely, the “symbolist” alternative, harking back to … Émile Durkheim and largely prevailing in twentieth-century British Social Anthropology, appears alien to Wittgenstein’s thinking as well. Characteristic of the tenor of the work of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Edmund Leach, Mary Douglas, John Beattie and others, one of the earlier statements of this position occurs in the Introduction to Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s collection African Political Systems:
Members of an African society feel their unity and perceive their common interest in symbols, and it is their attachment to these symbols which more than anything else gives their society cohesion and persistence. . . . To explain these symbols sociologically, they have to be translated into terms of social function and the social structure they serve to maintain. Africans have no objective knowledge of the forces determining their social organization and actuating their social behavior. Yet they would be unable to carry on their collective life if they could not think and feel about the interests which actuate them, the institutions by means of which they organize collective action, and the structure of the groups into which they are organized. (Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, African Political Systems, Oxford University Press 1940, pp. 17–18)
Hence the importance of “sacred symbols, which reflect the social system, endow it with mystical values which evoke acceptance of the social order that goes far beyond the obedience exacted by the secular sanction of force” (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940: 17–18). This is so because the “African does not see beyond the symbols; it might well be held that if he understood their objective meaning, they would lose the power they have over him” (1940: 18).
Ritual enacts these symbols, puts them into social circulation, so to say, and feeds them back into the collective order they serve to maintain, endowing it with experiential consistency. There is thus nothing right or wrong, truthful or mistaken, about ritual action (or the sets of beliefs associated with it), as long as we subscribe to the Durkheimian move to see “society” as both subject and object of religious behavior, and are willing to accept indigenous justification for such practices as secondary elaborations of systemic—and systemically necessary— forms of méconnaissance [misunderstanding or misrecognition].
But this clearly is not what Wittgenstein has in mind, either—unless one wanted to expand his elaborations on “language games” in the Philosophical Investigations and elsewhere, beyond the rather unclear sociological implications they or the notion of “forms of life” seem to carry. Is religion a language game among others? Is science? And are their “grammars” compatible, as the intellectualist tradition has held? Given how vague Wittgenstein remained on such matters, the exegetical pendulum has swung both ways. Still, even on Wittgenstein’s own view, a rigged game, once its rules are revealed to the disadvantaged player, simply turns into a different game, but remains a game nonetheless—and does not reveal the “real state of matters” (i.e., no game at all, whatever that might be taken to mean). “False physics” and “false social theory” may thus merely be two sides of the same coin, and though Wittgenstein never really seems to have bothered about the kind of anthropology bodying forth from Oxford during his lifetime, it is sufficiently clear that he might not have had much sympathy with it. To be sure, there appears to be some overlap between Wittgenstein’s thinking and the distinction between “instrumental” and “expressive” action, as it came to be elaborated in British Social Anthropology from Malinowski onward, and a good deal of Wittgenstein scholarship has focused on it. But while Wittgenstein might have agreed … that the distinction between these two modalities of ritual behavior had long been artificially overdrawn—he would nevertheless have insisted that an explanation of the persistence of magical practices regarded as goal-directed by the actors themselves should not be sought in the “latent” functions … of such rituals:
The same savage who, apparently in order to kill his enemy, pierces an image of him, really builds his hut out of wood, and carves his arrows skillfully and not in effigy. (#10)
Thus, instrumental orientations in magical behavior are not to be confused with inadequate knowledge of natural phenomena:
Frazer says it is very hard to discover the error in magic—and this is why it persists for so long—because, for example, a conjuration intended to bring rain will sooner or later appear as effective. But then it is strange that, after all, the people would not hit upon the fact that it will rain sooner or later anyway. (#2, cf. #31)
Although A. J. Ayer (1986) dealt a blow to this argument by suggesting that if rain ceremonies were to be performed faithfully before the start of each and every rainy season, no one could be presumed to know the difference, Wittgenstein wants to take the argument in a different direction:
Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of a loved one. This is obviously not based on a belief that it will have a definite effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at some satisfaction, and does achieve it, too. Or rather, it does not aim at anything, we act in this way and then feel satisfied. (#9)
More sharply:
How misleading Frazer’s explanations are becomes clear, I think, from the fact that one could very well invent primitive practices oneself, and it would only be by chance if they were not actually to be found elsewhere. That is, the principle according to which these practices are ordered is a much more general one than [it appears] in Frazer’s explanation, and it exists in our own soul, so that we could think up all the possibilities ourselves. (#13)
And so he does throughout much of the Remarks, confronting Frazer’s casuistry with rites that one might just as well “make up” oneself—and then might find confirmed in the ethnographic literature on some or the other corner of the world (or not—which, in fact, would not matter as long as such practices could be imagined; and imagined as persisting because they “correspond to a general inclination among the people” [#45] who would continue to enact them):
We can thus readily imagine that, for instance, the king of a tribe becomes visible for no one, but also that every member of the tribe is obliged to see him. The latter will then certainly not occur in a manner more or less left to chance; instead, he will be shown to the people. Perhaps no one will be allowed to touch him, or perhaps they will be compelled to touch him. Think how after Schubert’s death his brother cut Schubert’s scores into small pieces and gave to his favorite pupils these pieces of a few bars. As a gesture of piety, this action is just as comprehensible as that of preserving the scores untouched and accessible to no one. And if Schubert’s brother had burned the scores, this could still be understood as a gesture of piety. The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) is what characterizes piety. (#13)
In all of this, Wittgenstein refuses “explanation”, and not just of the historicizing kind that he finds so objectionable in Frazer’s work on the rex nemorenis:
If one sets the phrase “majesty of death” next to the story of the priest king of Nemi, one sees that they are one and the same. The life of the priest king represents what is meant by that phrase. Whoever is gripped by the [idea of] majesty of death can express this through just such a life. —Of course, this is also not an explanation, it just puts one symbol for another. Or one ceremony for another. (#5)
The “majesty of death”—just like fire, sex and procreation, the change of seasons, the anthropomorphic shape of our shadow, political power, and so forth—ultimately is a matter that continues to arouse human affect, though it does so in locally and historically variable cultural forms. In the end: “One can only resort to description here, and say: such is human life” (#3), thus recurring to the multiplicity of language-mediated “life forms” natural to what Wittgenstein calls the existential (i.e., cultural) condition of a “ceremonial animal”.
Here, at the latest, it ought to be clear that ideological criticism was not the “game” Wittgenstein was after. He rejected Frazerian intellectualism, and certainly would have rejected later anthropological symbolist or expressivist explanations. Instead, he appears to be opting for a resolutely nonreductionist account of humanity as an inescapably “ritualizing” species (whether it be the “instinct” to hit the ground with a stick upon a mishap, kissing the picture of a loved one, devising rituals such as the rites of succession at the sacred grove of Nemi, or routinized courses of action that insinuate their association with human sacrifice). This notion of an essential human propensity to ritualize is one that Wittgenstein undergirds by a characteristic call for a methodology that he opposes to “explanation” (in the case at hand, he means genetic explanations a la Frazer, but the case is easily extendable to “symbolist” ones as well), and that may have meant to constitute part and parcel of what is often called his “therapeutic” project to cure thought of the maladies—that is, philosophical problems—inflicted upon it by a “bewitchment of language” (Philosophical Investigations §109). …
Wendy James wrote:
The anthropologist today can draw inspiration from both James Frazer and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Both seek to grasp in some way a common human sensibility by moving from ethnographic or historical texts about strange practices to “myself”, a feeling, thinking person of today responding to the world: what I feel, how I reason, how I react to danger, to anger, and so forth. However, no one lives, feels, or speaks alone. Of course our discipline would be the poorer without the work of these writers. But as anthropologists, we need to transpose what they have offered us into the inescapably social context of human life—that is, of social interaction, of the processes of shared experience and the mutual creation of “meanings” through participatory action. …
The mass of cases presented by Frazer concerning the world’s “magical” practices relating to kingship, fire, food, sacrifice, birth, illness, blood, death, and so on provides an invaluable resource, despite his own somewhat blinkered search for a clear evolutionary process from magic, through religion, to science. Frazer’s massive demonstration of similarity between reports of beliefs and practices from around the world is indeed sufficient to impinge upon ourselves and our imaginations as much as their “magic” might be supposed to have impinged on supposedly “prerational” peoples. Perhaps it was the very scale of his ethnographic comparisons that helped stimulate Wittgenstein’s own reflections on the significance of the material—for its ability to provoke us all into recognizing “ourselves” in it.
My Own Perspective: As an anthropologist who once undervalued, even scorned, Frazer and his works, I have come around to appreciating him more positively. …
… In due course, I decided to leave aside the complications that came with the term “ritual” in favor of the phrase “The Ceremonial Animal”, which I believe was first suggested by Wittgenstein in #15 of the Remarks under discussion here, and adopt it as the title of my own general book on anthropology (2003) …
… Frazer’s monumental work of comparative ethnography, while dealing in large part with tribal or at least rural communities wholly or predominantly innocent of writing, is derived almost entirely from written sources. And while it is true that some of his written sources were firsthand letters from missionaries or travelers (along with occasional live conversations with them on their return), he almost never referred to the live communications of the tribes in question as being part of what he was investigating—let alone those of his own social world. Neither Frazer nor Wittgenstein deal with this basic issue about language that faces the fieldworking anthropologist. In the field, the anthropologist is immersed in the to-and-fro life of the oral, gestural, and art-like languages of social communication. This is so not only in nonliterate communities but also in highly literate ones, too. This “oral culture” is the past world in which Frazer locates “magic”, and through the clear explanatory possibilities of written historical analysis it finds its legacy even today.
The Sources:
Stephan Palmié, ‘Chapter 1: Translation is Not Explanation: Remarks on the Intellectual History and Context of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’, in Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Mythology in Our Language: Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, Translated by Stephan Palmié, Edited by Giovanni da Col and Stephan Palmié, Hau Books, University of Chicago Press 2018
Wendy James, ‘Chapter 6: Wittgenstein Exercise’ in Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Mythology in Our Language: Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, Translated by Stephan Palmié, Edited by Giovanni da Col and Stephan Palmié, Hau Books, University of Chicago Press 2018
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.