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Edwin Ardener’s Prophetic Vision
Michael Herzfeld
Edwin Ardener’s was a prophetic voice in precisely the sense of prophecy that
he lays out in these pages. Yet it was also muted, to use a term to which his
thought gave new precision, by an academic politics that, today more than ever,
risks surrendering to pseudo-populist calls for greater simplicity, less theory, and
more “relevance”—all claims that would have prompted Ardener to ask what
ideological and other motivations lie behind attributions of triviality and obscurantism. Ardener’s style of argument was never either gratuitously trivial
or deliberately obscure. Nevertheless, his attacks on the absurdity of a clearcut division between the material and the symbolic (he insisted that there was
“no distinction between the material and the ideal,” p. 184) must have made
his insights seem fundamentally unpalatable and even dangerous to those of
positivistic bent.
Those battles continue today, and his voice is as deeply needed as ever. To
an extent far greater than that noted by his three distinguished former students whose essays grace the present collection, Ardener anticipated numerous
central issues in the social sciences today. His “blank banners” speak to the
“hidden transcripts” celebrated in the work of James C. Scott (1990), while the
“muted” discourses of “englobing” marginals offers a way around the limitations of the more bludgeon-like concept of “resistance.” His recognition that
anthropologists are as liable to the fear of categorical contamination as any
remote non-European population extends and amplifies Mary Douglas’s (1966)
original analyses of pollution and taboo and lucidly foreshadow her own later
attention to “modern” institutions (e.g., Douglas 1986). And he saw, long before
Johannes Fabian (1983) braved the ire of established scholars, how anthropological ways of representing cultural “others” as “synchronic unities” (p. 254,
n. 13) are exercises in the pre-emptive, ideological manipulation of time that
Fabian calls “allochronism.” He also anticipated (p. 156) Fabian’s important
rediscovery of the evolutionist bias that persisted in the work of evolutionism’s
most ardent critics, the functionalists. Moreover, although not the first to work
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in a European society, Ardener also quietly inserted himself into that genealogy through his work on Gaelic culture and thereby furthered the newly-begun
process of weaning the discipline from a deeply rooted exoticism (although his
musings on the idea of remoteness also temper the current thrust to dismiss all
studies of rural and tribal societies as irrelevant to the fashionable focus on modernity). Only these many years after his death has Europeanist ethnography
perhaps at last begun to realize what he clearly had already seen as its potential
to illuminate the Eurocentric biases of the discipline itself.
Even at what were superficially, at least, his most structuralist moments, Ardener never embraced received wisdoms uncritically. Thus, his elaboration of the
distinction between paradigmatic structures and the syntagmatic chains of events
that give them existential reality permits a way out of the structuralists’ rationalistic universalism—a stance that renders Lévi-Strauss’s thought, in particular,
speculative and programmatic rather than empirical and ethnographic. Ardener’s
move permits us to see such underlying structures as both particular to specific
social groups and yet also subject to re-elaboration, change, and border-crossing—a far more flexible instrument than Lévi-Strauss’s grand vision could entertain. Here Ardener’s profound knowledge of the history of linguistics also freed
him from a slavish dependence on the thought of Saussure and from a too-easy
acceptance of others’ invocation of that reconstructed old master.
For this reason, too, he was equipped to engage with American and British
socio-linguistics and the ethnography of speaking. He did so, moreover, long
before most of his local colleagues saw fit to look with anything other than
amused condescension on the importance of language as a cultural instrument,
finding in the pursuit of such unlikely topics as etymology, not only a basis for
the critique of anthropological terminology, but also a source of traces that, as
J.L. Austin [1971:99–100] similarly foresaw, could point us back in the direction
of reading sedimented significance in the inchoate (those blank banners again!).
He listened carefully for the “muted” voices of groups disenfranchised in their
home societies and in anthropology alike.
That quality emerges most famously in his work on what he rather slyly called
“the problem of women.” Although a man (and conscious that this might be
problematic for the debate), he also anticipated much feminist work in anthropology with his justly famous pair of essays on this topic, opening up questions
of hegemony that went far beyond gender to highlight concealed but extremely
powerful structures that oppress and exclude in many domains of social life.
Like many feminists since his time, he saw the exclusion of women as both
unjust in its intentions and effects and symptomatic of these larger hierarchies.
He expressed a sympathetic understanding of the fact that many of his female
colleagues were no more willing than men to probe these inequalities. But he
could also rarely resist the opportunity for gentle irony; when he describes Bakweri women performing a men’s ritual as “dames in an order of chivalry or girls
at Roedean [a famous English high school] . . . performing a male scenario” (p.
85), it seems not unreasonable to suspect that he hoped some of those female
colleagues might spot their own foibles in that ethnographic mirror.
His rare ability to see the common humanity of scholar and subject also
meant that he saw his informants as engaged in theory-building operations,
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both constrained by such social boundaries as those of gender and class. In
this, Ardener anticipates the practice theorists’ later recognition of all human
beings’ capacity to theorize their social situations, but without the implicit reservation in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977: 18) rather condescending nod to “semi-theoretical dispositions,” and without Anthony Giddens’s (1991) curious insistence
on a fixed historical moment for the emergence of modernity. Indeed, Ardener
offers a refreshingly ironic view of modernist claims to totalizing collective
achievement and originality (pp. 192–193); he goes on to show how the modernist project, more recently dissected by Scott (1998) in his exploration of the
modernist state, encompasses the architectural functionalism of Le Corbusier
and the anthropological functionalism of Malinowski alike (p. 199), but also
that it perpetuated some of the very biases that it claimed to have eradicated.
That critical perspective allowed Ardener to challenge the comforting boundary that modernism places between itself and the exotic. In particular, he recognized the continuity between local and so-called scientific knowledge (p. 140)
in a way that uncannily foreshadowed the elegant demonstration of this point
by Akhil Gupta (1998). Most important of all, perhaps, is the way in which his
willingness to grapple with the inchoate and the implicit prefigures (a blank
banner in its own right?) much of the present, practice-based concern with “indeterminacy”—what he called, in the context of theory-building, “admirable
provisionality.” In that sense, he rejected the false legibility that, Scott assures
us, is the dominant goal of modernist statecraft, and that Ardener himself identified as the positivists’ strange disregard for inconvenient or inchoate facts.
Ardener was not uninterested in systems, but saw them as products of contingency rather than as pre-existing verities. He was thus a practice theorist, and a
theoretical practitioner, literally (if I may so put it) avant la lettre.
If Ardener had done nothing more than anticipate a great deal of modern
theory, the present collection would have deserved the investment of a reprint
edition. There is much to be learned from pondering paths rediscovered or
ideas reinvented. My hope, however, is that this publishing event will achieve
something much more significant still: a long-overdue recognition that Ardener
not only forged ahead of today’s mainstream but bequeathed a legacy of ideas
that can regenerate and redirect anthropological thought today.
Among the conceptual challenges he still poses for anthropology, his recasting of the peculiar relationship between anthropology and linguistics remains
both prophetic and salutary. Virtually alone among British social anthropologists of his time, although with an increasing coterie of followers today, he saw
that language was a more than a necessary field skill and more, too, than simply
the “classificatory terminology” so beloved of structuralists and componential
analysts alike. Moreover, because he remained firmly committed to a social
anthropological perspective, he avoided the tendency, powerfully emergent in
American scholarship at that time, to cocoon the anthropological discipline in
the trappings of a separate “subfield” and so, unintentionally but destructively,
to shield the study of linguistic and other cultural dynamics from productive
mutual engagement.
He also anticipated the trend toward a more reflexive idiom of anthropology.
More specifically—and in ways that probably influenced my own work (e.g.,
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Herzfeld 1987) more than I realized at the time—he saw that anthropology
itself was a cultural artifact, and that Mary Douglas’s (1966) insights into the
fear of categorical confusion could therefore be usefully deployed to understand
why some anthropologists shied away from “cultural relativism” (p. 11). Today,
a very similar fear appears to grip the exponents of various public ideologies
of ethnic, religious, and scientific purity—exponents for whom anthropology
itself has become a dangerous source of “anomaly” in this sense. Perhaps some
such as yet unrealized critique was another of Ardener’s own blank banners;
his writing is not overtly political in the more obvious sense of that term, yet it
is deeply imbued with a fundamentally political determination to root out the
residue of older ethnocentrisms at the core of a discipline too prematurely convinced that it had already cleansed itself. Especially with the greater specificity
that hindsight can now lend our reading of Ardener’s work, this campaign is as
worth pursuing in our own time as it was in his.
Ardener was not against statistics or science, as Malcolm Chapman points
out in his very useful introductory essay; he was, however, locked in a fierce
battle against scientism. He saw that the indeterminacy of human action—note
the etymologically erudite and sociologically elegant rejection of “behaviour”
as the relevant term here—introduced anomaly into the most rule-governed
domains of social activity, leaving analysts in what, with delicious irony, he calls
the “scientifically undignified position” (p. 48) of having to consult the circumstantial in preference to the definitional. Here, clearly, the attention of such
linguistic philosophers as Austin and Wittgenstein to the conceptual priority
of use over reference was a significant influence, one that we can see especially
well explored in the work, cited by Ardener, of another of his students, the late
Malcolm Crick (1976).
Ardener’s own statistical work on demography had led him to a critical (and
indeed almost Whorfian) understanding of the impact of categorical choices—
such as the implication of the term “population”—on the meanings that analysts
attributed to statistical information. One cannot really understand such events
as the Biafra conflict without taking into account the prior processes of reification whereby ethnic identities gained salience. In those processes, colonial statisticians had played a key role. The close attention Ardener paid the semantic
lability of ethnic labels was more than a display of linguistic erudition. Like
Whorf, he was a practical person; and, again, like Whorf, he saw clearly that the
choice of terminology played a determining role in the direction of future action, whether in the immediate environment of social life or on the world stage
of wars and nation-building.
This critical perspective on the use of language had profound implications
for Ardener’s battle to achieve some form of cooperation between demography and the kind of social anthropology that he respected and practised. He
saw this, too, as a practical matter, calling for considerable caution in the face
of apparent methodological progress. His observation (p. 117) that improvements in statistical method actually concealed or refigured the local realities
they were intended to address, for example, has urgent implications for the
current passion for reducing human experience to market surveys. Here again,
Ardener’s work represents more than a present-day version of Da Vinci’s flying
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machine—a clever idea that was never translated into material action. To the
contrary, it offers a template, to use another of his favoured terms, for a political
critique of the rhetoric of “excellence” that Marilyn Strathern and others have
attacked under the label of “audit culture” (Strathern, ed., 2000). Indeed, it is
hard to imagine that he would not have participated, with his familiar stance of
delicate gusto, in that important work of social criticism.
His appreciation of the relationship between language and other forms of
social action is central to any understanding of his critical labour. For him,
terminology was the surface realization of a larger difficulty: the tendency of
social science to ignore its own cultural entailments in pursuit of an entirely
spurious notion of objectivity. Most notably in his remarks on the effects on ethnographic reporting of the fact that in many societies it was primarily men who
offered commentary on the roles and attitudes of both men and women—the
key effect of which was to occlude the actual opinions of the women—he saw
the social practices of the people studied and the scholarly habits of those who
did the studying as liable to mutual reinforcement. Thus, claims to objective
knowledge were made possible by creating a categorical separation between
ethnographer and subject and thereby obscuring the collaborative relationship
and the real insights that it generates.
For Ardener, therefore, “admirable provisionality” was the only acceptable
alternative—a stance that made of every categorical certainty a semiotic worthy of critical attention in itself. It was not a stance calculated to gain the affection of those for whom crunching numbers was sufficiently scientific on its
own merits. But it is one that honesty should compel us to adopt today if we
are serious in our claims of recognizing indeterminacy as a key aspect of the
human condition.
Ardener was an original and provocative thinker. His anthropology not only
anticipated some present concerns, but actually addressed them in ways I have
tried to sketch in this brief prefatory note. Whether we will revert to the language of syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures may be dubious, but the critical attention that he drew to the distinction between event and programme should
remain in the forefront of analytical concerns. So, too, should our entailment
in the forces that have often obscured that distinction. If we want to practise
reflexivity, turning to Ardener’s legacy of guidance is a good place to begin.
I would like, in that spirit, to conclude in a somewhat personal vein. I was
not, strictly speaking, an Ardener student, except in the sense that in those days
virtually all of the students at the Institute of Social Anthropology at Oxford
went to his lectures and tried to absorb his complex and humane view of the
discipline. But I might never have had a career as an anthropologist without his
benign recognition (or so it was related to me) that, while my undergraduate
career had been disastrous, I might be worth admitting to the Institute since
I had meanwhile managed to pursue my research interests in language and
symbolism despite that initial discouragement. Was this prophecy? If so, was
it prophecy in the sense that I understand Ardener to mean by that term—an
ability to identify in the inchoate (and I was all of that!) something that might
eventually take on a more identifiable meaning? Was his intervention, and the
intellectual excitement to which it led me, a prophecy of only the self-fulfilling
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sort? It would be unprofitably self-indulgent to speculate further about this, but
I mention it because, in a very concrete but characteristically indirect way, Ardener’s insights touched my life and intellectual development as few others have
done, even while his influence often seemed nebulous and inchoate at the time;
and because I suspect, and hope, that the re-publication of this book will allow
many others to benefit from his radical understanding of the human condition
in the same, productively roundabout way. His intellectual and personal generosity, which in these pages he extended with striking consistency to at least one
distinguished detractor of his work, was as great as his intellectual originality.
Interest in Ardener’s ideas has waxed and waned over the years, as it did in
his lifetime. He sometimes seemed unnecessarily obscure, apparently wrapping
his ideas in an unfamiliar algebra of neologisms and puns that were themselves
gold-mines of insight. His soft, self-effacing mannerisms masked sharply ironic
jabs at the self-important and the portentous: good fun, but perhaps, given the
forces he was attempting to confront, a provisionally self-defeating combination
of gentle ivory-tower erudition and provocative challenge. Today, I suspect, he
has become easier to read than in the past; this, it must be said, is partly because
his students—including the three who contributed to the original publication
of this book—have been both personally loyal and intellectually stimulating in
their promotion of his ideas and have demonstrated some of the rich possibilities of those ideas in their own work.
Beyond doubt, the internationalization of the discipline and its radical engagement with the limits of positivistic social theory has also created a more
receptive atmosphere for Ardener’s thinking, while global politics may have
made his message of ironic critique increasingly urgent. This new edition will
allow a new and more receptive audience to come to grips with Ardener’s distinctive mode of analysis and understanding, bringing it more clearly into the
mainstream of anthropological thought not only as a historical contribution but
also, and especially, as a source of new reflections. The intellectual bequest of a
brilliant and compassionate human being surely deserves no less; and the world
has sore need of the quizzical honesty that is the enduring trademark of Edwin
Ardener’s life and work.
R E F E R E N CE S
Austin, J.L. 1971[1956–57]. A Plea for Excuses. In Colyn Lyas, ed., Philosophy and Linguistics (London: Macmillan), pp. 79–101.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Crick, Malcolm. 1976. Explorations in Language and Meaning: Towards a Semantic Anthropology.
New York: John Wiley/Halsted.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Purity and Taboo. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
———. 1986. How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Edwin Ardener’s Prophetic Vision xiii
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity.
Gupta, Akhil. 1998. Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham: Duke University Press.
Herzfeld, Michael. 1987. Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the
Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
———. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have
Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Strathern, Marilyn, ed. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Ethics, Accountability,
and the Academy. London: Routledge.