Circumstantial Deliveries

By Rodney Needham

University of California Press

Copyright © 1982 Rodney Needham
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520043898
Rehearsal

Capital truths are to be narrowly eyed, collateral lapses and circumstantial deliveries not to be too strictly sifted. And if the substantial subject be well forged out, we need not examine the sparks which irregularly fly from it.
Sir Thomas Browne

I

The essays that follow have a common character in that they all implicate what I take to be central notions in the comparative interpretation of human experience. It is not by way of collateral lapses that these matters recur in one essay after another. Their intrinsic importance, rather, is displayed by the very fact that disquisitions on various topics should converge, as the examination probes deeper, on a common set of concerns.

The general premise is that social facts may be revealingly analyzed by reference to characteristic features in polythetic combination. Underlying such features, it is contended, are certain primary factors of experience which form the elementary constituents of culture. Among these relatively steady agents are synthetic complexes recognizable as archetypes. In addition, there are in any form of civilization, as in the life of any individual, more idiosyncratic affective representations which here I call paradigmatic or exemplary scenes.

Some of the terms just adduced, critical as they are, may call for some explanation.

The notion of "characteristic features" is taken from Wittgenstein, who uses it to refer to likenesses that are more or less connected with certain things in question; the features may occur sporadically and in different combinations, or they may even disappear from the constitution of a thing of a given kind; their incidence is literally incidental, not essential. Thus there are characteristic features among the class of events described as wishing; and in the sphere of more patently social facts there are characteristic features of marriage or of a descent group, though none of them is essential to the recognition of either institution. By contrast, when Wittgenstein looks for what is usually taken to be definitive, in the sense of an attribute common to all members of a given class, he writes instead of a "specific" feature. In the classification of social facts, anthropologists have usually employed specific features in their definitions of institutions, and this procedure has entailed grave disadvantages in the framing of comparative propositions. The effect can be brought out by the explication of another analytical contrast.

The distinction between characteristic and specific features is solidary with that between "polythetic" and "monothetic" classification. Much has been written on this topic, and I have elsewhere drawn out its implications for the study of social facts, but the crux of the matter can be stated briefly. In the traditional definition of a class in western philosophy, and also in dictionary definitions, the members of a class share at least one feature in common; it is by virtue of this point of resemblance that the individuals belong to, or constitute, the class. This procedure has been termed monothetic classification. The conception has clear advantages in the exact sciences, so that the class of photons for example can be unambiguously defined; also, the princi-

ple of substitution comes into play, so that what is asserted about one photon can be taken to hold for any other photon. But in the comparative study of social forms, typically, the features in question are semantic discriminations, and these do not possess the autonomous character of natural facts. Characteristically, the members of a class of social facts may share no feature in common; things are classed together by having each a preponderance of the defining features, but there is no single essential feature that is common to all, and any missing feature can be different for each member of the class. This is true of the classificatory concepts of other civilizations, as represented in their lexical discriminations, as well as of those which are more or less deliberately devised by anthropologists. This mode of classification has been termed polythetic, and its recognition has had trenchant consequences, both descriptive and theoretical, for comparativism. Further implications are traced in the chapters that follow.

The "primary factors" which are described as forming the elementary constituents of culture correspond to aspects of thought and imagination, as exhibited in cultural traditions, which appear to have a universal distribution in world ethnography. These factors of experience are heterogeneous; they include sensory perceptions such as texture or color, and abstractions such as number or binary opposition. Also, they vary greatly in the meanings that they are made to carry; and there are no necessary connections among them such as would compose them into systems. In regarding these factors as primary, the idea is that they may play in forms of consciousness a part similar to that of ultimate predicates in epistemology. Nevertheless, they are not strictly primary, in the sense of being absolutely elementary, for as semantic vehicles they are more or less synthetic products of other phenomena, both cerebral and traditional.

Hence they are not ultimate particulars of the kind that a thorough-going reductionism might seek, and their isolation constitutes a transitional or provisional phase in comparative analysis. They will be found further treated in my Primordial Characters and especially in Chapter 1, below.

As for "archetypes," these have been extensively resorted to throughout ancient philosophy, medieval mysticism, and modern depth psychology. Rather than open the way to some of the usual objections and qualifications, I do not offer a prior definition but shall leave the present acceptation of this idea to emerge from the uses that it serves in the investigations that follow.

Illustrations of what are introduced here as "paradigmatic scenes" will be found in Chapter 4.

This array of ideas goes far, to the extent that the cogency of each is admitted, toward the formulation of a comparative method which, in a sere but accurate description, will integrate global characteristics of collective representations with innate vectors of individual cerebration. In combination, they subtend remarkable similarities of ideation, imagination, and organization among what are otherwise very divergent and idiocratic forms of social life.

II

A few more particular comments on the individual essays may help the reader to approach them in a suitable frame of expectation and forbearance.

"Essential Perplexities" was an inaugural lecture at Oxford. It is reproduced here slightly altered and after the deletion of the local allusions that were called for by the occasion. It is a schematic statement of certain consequences of the view that a critical task of social anthropology is to chart the limits of human understanding. Some of the points of

research or method adumbrated in it are developed in the succeeding essays.

"Physiological Symbols" takes up the topic of symbolic elements and examines the possibility of accounting for certain of them by reference to the physiology of the human body. The positive suggestions made the substance of an address delivered...