LATEST BOOK
The Tribal
Imagination
Civilization and the Savage Mind
Harvard University Press – Spring 2011
ISBN 978-0-674-05901-6, $29.95, 432 pages
Is the savage in us our friend or our enemy?
Or both?
Can we make the enemy our friend?
Can we stop making the friend our enemy?
CONSIDER:
Is history coming to an end, or just getting more interesting?
Have we a human right to vengeance, or to arrange our children’s marriages?
What exactly is the freedom that we love so much?
Should we only marry cousins?
Is sectarianism inevitable?
Have we got the right Ten Commandments?
Was the real love triangle in Camelot between three knights?
What do Helen of Troy and Grendel’s mother have in common?
What do Seinfeld and Swinburne have in common?
Why do we rhyme poetry?
Was incest really the crime of Oedipus?
Why do we want time to end?
Can seafood sustain civilization?
What can the descendants of Adam tell us about democracy in Iraq?
Are cultural studies and fascism cousins under the skin?
Can we write our own script for the future, or is the past still guiding the pen?
Is the world flat, or is it full of tribal bumps?
Is human nature itself fundamentally tribal?
Freud feared that “the burden of civilization” might be too great, that repression of our instincts was like a dam ready to burst, and we were always ready to slip into savagery. Lévi-Strauss reassured us that the savage mind was universal and basically rational; our civilized minds were the same as their savage counterparts, we just gave them more to do. They both were right. But behind them stands Darwin. The savage in us is the residue of millions of years of evolution, and it got us where we are. But the savage mind evolved to deal with a world totally different from the world transformed by the miracle of modern industrial society.
It remains an open question whether the mind geared to living in small tribes can sustain the hugely complex world it has itself created so incredibly recently in evolutionary time. For world-renowned anthropologist Robin Fox the role of evolutionary science is not so much to explain what we do but to explain what we do at our peril. We take the world we know too much for granted; we must shock ourselves into seeing how recent and fragile it is.
In a sweeping survey of highly varied case histories, laced with the wit and elegance for which he has been often praised, Robin Fox considers our chronomyopic perceptions of time; the human part of human rights; tribalism and democracy; taboo and morals in the Torah; animal dispersion and human sectarianism; incest in literature from Osiris to Nabokov; the male bond in the epics; poetry, memory, and the brain; the origins of civilization; social evolution and the meaning of the tribes; the vicissitudes of folk culture; and the mythic and rational elements in the evolution of thought. He considers the possibility of a true family of man with a scientific basis in human genetic unity. In trying to run our complex and expensive societies we are faced with the perennial appeal of tribalism – our continuing struggle with the maintenance of open societies in the face of our profoundly tribal human needs, and our need to draw on that very tribalism to survive. There is a balance if we can work it out. Time is short.
The Oath of the Horatii. Jacques-Louis David, (1784) (Paris – Louvre)
The Horatii, an aristocratic family at the height of Roman “civilization,” (669 BC) in their beautiful palace with their robes and armor take their blood oath on their swords to fight the Roman enemies from Alba Longa to the death. They will do this in a ritual duel with three brothers of the Curiatii family of Alba. Their women and children sit off to the side neglected and ignored. It is the epitome of male-bonding ritual, with the father, Horatius, and his three sons binding themselves to die if needed for the sake of their cause: the salvation of the city. The grandmother, in black, hugs the children.
One of the women, their sister Camilla (in white) is engaged to one of the Curiatii, and another, Sabina (in brown) is a sister of the Curiatii married to one of the sons. The Horatii brothers win their fight but two are killed. The remaining brother returns home and finds Camilla cursing Rome for the death of her fiancé. He instantly kills his sister for her impiety. For David this represented the triumph of selfless duty to the state over selfish loyalty to spouses, family and clan. Originally he was going to paint the killing of the Curiatii sister (the sketches exist) but changed his mind thinking it might just send the wrong message. For us it represents the ongoing battle of conflicting duties between kin and strangers, and kin and the state, that is one of our basic themes.
The story is in Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita (From the Foundation of the City. Circa 25 AD)
Cochiti Indian Ceremony (c. 1888) photo by F. R. Loomis
Compare the Horatii with the Cochiti Indians of New Mexico - the “savages” in their primitive surroundings, are engaged in a peaceful “rain dance” ceremony in which all sexes and ages cooperate. It has beauty, order and grace, and is done for the benefit of all mankind. (“We all wear cotton,” the cacique told me as an example, “we must make it rain wherever they grow cotton.”) Note that it has rained during the dance – a sign of blessing. There is however the cross of Christian “civilization” hovering over them on the mission gateway. The Cochiti dance before the church to honor its god while honoring their own.
Note the almost naked Koshare – the “sacred clown,” on the far right in front of the older men singing and drumming. The drum represents thunder. The women wear “tablitas” on their heads with the stylized cloud design. The gourd rattles and the men’s long hair (crowned with Mexican macaw feathers) symbolize rain. Children of both sexes as young as three take a full part in the daylong ceremony where the two “moieties” – Pumpkin and Turquoise, the two halves of the tribe, dance alternately. The meaning of the long pole with its feathers and fox skins waved over the heads of the dancers is a tribal secret. It’s handling, like the drumming of the hollow-log drums, is in the hands of a specialized cult. The so-called clowns – the other group is the Kwirena, organize and manage the dances in alternate years. They are the Rio Grande Pueblo version of the “mudheads” of Zuni. The dances I saw in the late 1950s differed in no detail from this picture in the 1880s. Some of the older people recognized themselves in Loomis’s photos.
(See Charles H. Lange, Cochiti: A New Mexico Pueblo Past and Present. Austin: Texas University Press, 1959. See Robin Fox, The Keresan Bridge: A Problem in Pueblo Ethnology, 1967, and Encounter with Anthropology – look under “Books”.
The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind
CONTENTS
Prologue: The Miracle and the Drumbeats
Chapter 1: Time Out of Mind: Tribal Tempo and Civilized Temporality
Chapter 2: The Human in Human Rights: Tribal Needs and Civilized Ideals
Chapter 3: The Kindness of Strangers: Tribalism and the Trials of Democracy
Chapter 4: Sects and Evolution: Tribal Splits and Creedal Schisms
Chapter 5: Which Ten Commandments? Tribal Taboo and Priestly Morality
Chapter 6: Incest and In-laws: Tribal Norms and Civilized Narratives
Chapter 7: Forbidden Partners: Tribal Themes in Modern Literature
Chapter 8: In the Company of Men: Tribal Bonds in the Warrior Epics
Chapter 9: Playing by the Rules: Savage Rhythms and Civilized Rhymes
Chapter 10: Seafood and Civilization: From Tribal to Complex Society
Chapter 11: The Route to Civilization: From Tribal to Political Society
Chapter 12: Open Societies and Closed Minds: Tribalism versus Civilization
Chapter 13: The Old Adam and The Last Man: Taming the Savage Mind
Epilogue: The Dream Man
Appendix: Transitional Time at the Edge of Chaos
ROBIN FOX, anthropologist, poet and essayist, is University Professor of Social Theory at Rutgers University where in 1967 he founded the Department of Anthropology, recently ranked in the top ten in the country. Born in 1934 in the UK, he was educated at the London School of Economics, Harvard and Stanford, and did fieldwork among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, Irish crofters on Tory Island, and Macaque monkeys in Bermuda and the Caribbean. For twelve years he was Director of Research for the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation with Lionel Tiger, with whom he wrote The Imperial Animal. He has written and edited seventeen books, including The Red Lamp of Incest, The Tory Islanders and Kinship and Marriage, the most widely read anthropology text in the world. His poems and secular prose (mostly satirical) appear in The Passionate Mind, reflecting his interest in sailing, bullfighting, language, music and college football. The story of his first forty years appeared as Participant Observer. He is currently working on Gulf Coast archaeology, translations of Ovid, and Shakespeare’s education.
Photo: John Lapham and Charles Reina
Prepublication comments on: The Tribal Imagination
“Written with his usual flair and vigor, and with a poet’s feel for language, The Tribal Imagination represents the culminating achievement of anthropology’s most distinguished, erudite, and intellectually adventurous representative. It is a landmark in evolutionary social science, an original contribution to literary history and analysis, and also — last but not least — a handsome tribute to Charles Darwin at this commemorative time. Its appearance should be a significant publishing event.”
Roger Sandall, School of Philosophical and Historical Enquiry, University of Sydney, author of The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays.
“The Tribal Imagination manages to be erudite and logical yet engaging and entertaining at the same time. The intellectual pace of the book is the cognitive equivalent of being smacked by waves at the beach.”
Steven Faraone, Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience and Physiology, and Director of Medical Genetics Research, SUNY Upstate Medical University.
Author of: Straight Talk About Your Child’s Mental Health. Co-author of: The Genetics of Mood Disorders; The Genetics of Mental Disorders; Schizophrenia: The Facts.
“The Tribal Imagination addresses what is probably the most significant theoretical and epistemological problem confronting the social sciences: the integration of human nature within their conceptual frameworks. It seeks to establish human nature’s imprint in a wide variety of domains, many of which are considered immune to the evolutionary perspective, e.g. literature, poetry and history.
It is written by someone whose background and perspective are unique in the field. Only Robin Fox could have written such a book because only he occupies the corresponding niche. Indeed I do not know of anybody else who can make use of evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology to enlighten classical literature and poetry, who can carry out what one would a priori describe as reductionist analyses of some of the highest forms of human symbolic activity, and yet do so without in the slightest bit lessening the richness of these phenomena.
The book is an elegant demonstration that human nature is omnipresent in the symbolic realm and that knowing about this is the best way to make sense not only of humankind’s unity but of its diversity as well.”
Bernard Chapais, Professor of Anthropology, Université de Montréal, author of Primeval Kinship: How Pair Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society.
“In The Tribal Imagination, Robin Fox brings to bear stunning insights from his wide knowledge of human societies and the philosophers, poets, and thinkers who have tried to understand them. He casts brilliant light not just on the human historical experience, but on contemporary issues from Iraq to human rights as well.”
Francis Fukuyama, Professor of Public Policy, Johns Hopkins University, author of The End of History and the Last Man, The Great Disruption, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
“One of our most prolific and brilliant anthropologists has done it again. Marriage rules of simple societies, the rise of civilization, modern international politics, and literary examples ranging from the Bible and Greek mythology to Shakespeare and children's rhymes are all grist for Robin Fox's mill, which grinds out a fine understanding of how human groups function, given the Darwinian imperatives operating in history, the dynamics of family relationships, and the possibilities and limitations of the human brain.”
Melvin Konner, Professor of Anthropology and Medicine, Emory University, author of The Evolution of Childhood, The Tangled Wing, Becoming a Doctor.