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Transcript
108
REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES
the intellectual history of totalitarian ideology. His central thesis is that modern
totalitarianism with its secret police, show trials, public confessions and executions treats dissent in the same way as the Inquisition criminalized thought and
punished heresy. Further back still, Versluis indicts the early church for building
a power structure on firm doctrines backed by the anti-heresiological rhetoric
of Tertullian, Epiphanius and Irenaeus against the gnostics and other mystical
currents.
Versluis identifies several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political philosophers as the linkage between the Inquisition’s maintenance of doctrine for
social order and the ravages of modern totalitarian regimes. Joseph de Maistre
and Juan Donoso Cortés upheld a Catholic theocracy as the best antidote
to liberalism, individualism and modernity. The ideas of Georges Sorel and
Charles Maurras further trace the transformation of Catholic social order into
a closed political religion defined by its enemies: Jews, freemasons and Protestants. The Third Reich jurist Carl Schmitt sought a reunification of the mythic
and spiritual with public life in German National Socialism. Significantly
for Versluis’s thesis, Schmitt saw early modern esotericism (Rosicrucians, illuminates,
pietists) as symptoms of fragmentation, while endorsing Tertullian’s attack upon
the Gnostics. Later chapters consider the terror, criminality and mass murder of
communist regimes; Norman Cohn’s thesis of the political construction of
demonology as a strategy to annihilate the imagined sedition of witches, Jews
and freemasons; and the conspiracy theories of late twentieth-century American
evangelism.
The practice of totalitarianism, theocracy and ‘ideocracy’ in various regimes
across the Middle East and East Asia certainly challenges Versluis’s historical
thesis that modern totalitarianism has its origins in Christian dogmatism, let
alone a European institution. Nor is it true that the Inquisition acted as an
agent of mass slaughter on the scale of Nazism, Stalinism and the Khmer
Rouge. But Versluis’s work is a study not so much in history as in spirituality,
as evidenced by his later sections discussing Berdyaev and Boehme’s views on
the origins of evil. Versluis seeks to defend the dissident, the gnostic, mystic and
theosopher against orthodoxy, while exposing the secular millenarianism and
demonology that totalitarianism invokes to mobilize support. Versluis sees
orthodoxy imposing its dogmas and staffed by an idea-serving class (‘ideocracy’)
as a denial of spirituality and even transcendence. In this remarkable survey he
has laid bare the dualist dynamic of political authority that seeks to suppress all
dissent.
University of Exeter
NICHOLAS GOODRICK-CLARKE
Empires, Nations, and Natives. Anthropology and State-Making. Edited by Benoît
de l’Estoile, Federico Neiburg and Lygia Sigaud. Duke University Press. 2006.
viii + 340pp. £15.95.
Anthropology is an acutely contested discipline. Historically, it was popularly
identified with the classification of human groups described by outsiders as in
some way ‘primitive’. In the 1970s and 1980s it became commonplace to accuse
its early to mid-twentieth-century practitioners of having been ‘handmaidens of
colonialism’, serving the interests of colonial administration by building up a
fund of knowledge about dependent peoples. In this reading of events, British,
© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.
GENERAL
109
French, Portuguese and other European anthropological surveys became part of
the colonial project, inextricably tied to empire because it was colonial penetration that made their research possible. Conversely, in the post-colonial, postcold war world, disgruntled governments and advocates of a purist, non-applied
approach to social science have attacked politically engaged anthropologists,
especially in Latin America, for their tendency to identify with the grievances of
those that they study, typically the urban poor, peasant cultivators, or indigenous peoples threatened by the advance of industrial capitalism. More fundamentally still, some critics have questioned by what right anthropologists can
claim either to define individuals or societies as ‘indigenous’ or to delimit the
territorial boundaries and economic interests of a particular tribal or clan group.
Not surprisingly, social anthropology, whether practised in a colonial setting or
within the developing world, has rarely been seen as apolitical, impartial or
scientifically ‘objective’.
The very breadth and variety of accusations levelled against them drove
numerous social and cultural anthropologists in Europe and beyond to reflect at
length on the utility and purpose of their research. Their arguments are revisited
in this collection of essays, a welcome addition to the growing volume of work
that tackles the connections between colonialism and the social sciences.
Whether working at the behest of colonial governments to map the ethnographic distribution of subject populations or, more recently, compiling data
about the spoliation of cultures facing environmental devastation, all of the
anthropologists studied here were ipso facto at the cutting edge of externally
driven social change. The key question that this book addresses is the extent to
which these academics and fieldworkers were merely observers of that change or
catalysts of it. The answers provided vary temporally and regionally, ranging
over the European colonial empires, modern-day Latin America and apartheid
South Africa.
It is hard to read these essays without sympathizing with anthropologists
struggling to avoid excessive reliance on their sponsors and funding bodies,
usually government agencies with a vested interest in the outcome of their
research. In the colonial context, as Benoît de l’Estoile argues in a fascinating
study of French anthropologists at work in francophone Africa, anthropologists
walked a tightrope between providing information to colonial authorities and
compromising their academic integrity as dispassionate social scientists. Here, as
elsewhere, concern for the welfare native populations and eagerness to develop a
more scientific, bureaucratic style of colonial government made for an uneasy
alliance between colonial governments and anthropological fieldworkers from
the 1930s onwards. But, as Omar Ribeiro Thomaz’s essay suggests, it was in
Salazar’s Portugal that social anthropology was most clearly harnessed to the
interests of an authoritarian and acutely exploitative colonial regime.
It is difficult to do justice here to the originality of the chapters in this collection, but many of the most interesting essays tackle the extent to which anthropology has been used to help construct flattering images of national identity.
Here we see anthropology as the close cousin of history and the construction of
‘usable pasts’. This intersection between national identity and national – even
‘nationalist’ – anthropology is explored in chapters covering individual regimes
and governments (Salazarist Portugal, Vichy France, the wartime United
States), as well as in others describing countries that have built up distinctively
© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.
110
REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES
national anthropologies of their own (Mexico, Brazil, post-apartheid South
Africa, New Caledonia). The result is an indispensable survey of anthropology
as, in some places, a tool of state power and, in others, a searing critic of its
excesses.
University of Exeter
MARTIN THOMAS
Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies. By Herman Lebovics. Duke
University Press. 2006. xviii + 172pp. £13.95.
Refracting colonial experiences onto the political and cultural development
of imperialist nations is not an easy task, nor is it one that any historians have
successfully attempted. Yet, as Herman Lebovics demonstrates in this collection
of six of his previously published essays, working out the ways in which possession of an overseas empire transformed European societies from the seventeenth
century onwards has strong contemporary resonance at a time when debates
over supposed clashes between civilizations, the success or failure of multiculturalism, and the impact of globalization consume so much media attention.
These are big questions, and they take an ambitious breadth of vision to
address them. Yet the tragic irony that Lebovics addresses in this book is a simple
one. Centuries of colonial domination did not open the eyes of imperialists to
the cultural diversity of the peoples they governed, quite the reverse: imperialist
nations typically imposed exclusionary forms of government and differential
racial markers in order to entrench their own supremacy. The results were not
only felt at the colonial periphery in terms of discriminatory economic systems,
rights withheld, and freedoms denied. They were felt, too, within European
societies where Lebovics insists, with good reason, that possession of empire
poisoned the body politic. Here, too, we confront an obvious irony. The two
most successful and determined of Europe’s imperial powers – Britain and
France – were nations often held up as vanguards of liberality and democratic
government. It is this paradox between democratic development at home and
colonial oppression abroad that Lebovics explores.
Lest this be read as far too abstract and imprecise, the essays in Imperialism
and the Corruption of Democracies address several distinct areas in which empire
provoked some form of social, political or ethical degeneration in the societies
of the European imperialist nations. One relates to authoritarian colonial
administration and its corrosive effects on those who practised it in the field or
defended it at home. The point is illustrated beautifully in an essay that compares George Orwell’s famous short story ‘Shooting an Elephant’, recounting
his experience in the Burma police of the 1920s, with a lesser-known, derivative
account by a post-war French district officer, Raymond Gauthereau, of a similar, but probably invented, elephant hunt. In each case, the compulsion to shoot
the unfortunate animal derived from the pressure to conform to the archetypal
colonial authority figure, in Orwell’s case unwillingly, in Gauthereau’s less so.
From here the chapters move on to the worlds of art and academia. In discussions of the French filmmaker Jean Renoir and of the sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu, Lebovics demonstrates how liberal, egalitarian thinkers struggled to
come to terms with European colonialism. Renoir ultimately despaired of
French claims to republican universalism and colour-blindness. But Bourdieu,
much of whose ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in colonial Algeria,
© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.