Between Cultures. Jerrold Seigel
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changing one’s religious faith could not bridge the distance between cultures, because it did not address the pervasive contrasts in everyday behavior and the presuppositions about the world underlying them that bulked so large in cultural identity.
Burton’s objections to the missionary project rested on an additional ground, his conviction that core elements of Christianity fit badly with African life as it existed, especially in contrast with the other non-native religion that was expanding its presence on the continent during the nineteenth century, Islam. Muslim doctrine and ethics set itself against practices that constituted immediate and powerful barriers to moral and social advancement in Africa: “cannibalism and fetishism, the witch tortures, the poison ordeals and legal incest, the ‘customs’ [to be described below] and the murders of albinos, of twins.” That it left in place other objectionable things, “polygamy, domestic slavery, and the degradation of women,” was true, but abolishing them (as Christian missionaries desired) would have required a fundamental social restructuring. “Unlike Christianity,” as Dane Kennedy summarizes Burton’s view, “which left its converts socially deracinated and morally unmoored, [Islam] supplied them with a syncretist faith that accommodated itself to ancestral traditions while contributing a new social and ethical framework for meeting the wider world.”57 It was this cultural fit, not any theological consideration, that led Burton to see Islam’s influence there as positive, while Christianity’s was not.
Here as elsewhere, however, Burton’s ability to grasp such contrasts in cultural terms did not lead him to retreat from his emphasis on racial difference conceived biologically. The “first step in moral progress” Islam provided prepared “the African … for a steady onward career, as far as his faculties can take him.” Such a formula makes modern readers cringe, a reaction that is bound to be deepened in the face of two positions Burton took that were in accord with it. The first of these was his attitude toward slavery. In several writings he argued that slavery was an appropriate and justifiable condition in situations where people’s degree of social and intellectual development had not reached a sufficiently “civilized” level, and that Africans were still in the process of reaching such a point. Although no longer so justified as it had once been, slavery had until recently served as a vehicle of improvement, taking people out of situations whose isolated and undeveloped conditions offered few resources for bringing them to a higher plane of existence.58 The second notion Burton and his friends such as Hunt defended against Christian-inspired views (and those of the Ethnological Society) had to do with whether differing human groups were all branches of a single tree, or whether instead they descended from separate origins and lineages. Christianity, rooted in the Biblical idea of a single creation, entailed a monogenist view of humanity, a single point of human origin; but the Anthropological Society promoted polygenism, which traced differing groups to different evolutionary pathways, along which some had advanced farther than others. Few notions are more offensive to advocates of human equality today, and it is not easy for us to recognize the very different implications that the choice between the two notions carried. All the same, as Kennedy has recognized:
Burton’s embrace of a polygenist understanding of race was motivated not just by his belief in the separate genesis of Africans, but by his desire to defend their distinctive social practices and sense of cultural identity against extinction. He was most fervently outspoken in his advocacy of the polygenist position during his years in West Africa because it was there that the missionaries had made their most significant inroads against indigenous systems of behavior and belief. … What appears to us a paradox—the convergence of curiosity about other cultures as autonomous systems operating outside any absolute standards with the view of race as a biological fact whose various groupings are distinct, fixed, and hierarchically ordered—was entirely consistent and logical to Burton.59
The idea that cultural contrasts were rooted in racial difference firmed up the ground on which different ways of life could be granted independence against the homogenizing thrust of European and especially Christian claims to cultural universality.
It was this perspective that allowed Burton to arrive at some remarkable and even sympathetic understandings of practices often regarded as merely cruel and barbaric. Of these, few were looked on with greater horror by Westerners than the “customs” of the West African kingdom of Dahomey, the ritual acts by which groups of people were put to death to provide companions for a defunct king. Burton had listed the “customs” along with cannibalism and infanticide as among the most barbarous of African practices in his 1863 book Wanderings in West Africa. But the next year he was sent to Dahomey to try to put a stop to the practice, and once there he became convinced that it was too deeply rooted in native beliefs and loyalties to be abolished (a judgment that recalls his reports to Napier about intra-familial violence in Sind).
These beliefs and loyalties, moreover, were akin to some that underlay “civilized” practices: rather than “love of bloodshed,” what the executions expressed was “filial piety.” “The Dahoman, like the ancient Egyptian, holds this world to be his temporary lodging. His true home is Ku-to-men, Deadman’s Land. It is not a place of rewards and punishments, but a Hades for ghosts, a region of shades, where the King will rule for ever and where the slave will for ever serve. The idea is perpetually present to the popular mind.” When a king dies, he must be sent to Ku-to-men with a retinue of wives, ministers, friends, and servants; royal dignity required that the numbers be large, so that as many as two thousand people might be decapitated in the “grand customs” that followed a royal death. Smaller numbers were dispatched in the yearly echoes of the larger ritual. Sometimes these were carried out in order for the living to communicate with the dead. “The king, wishing to send a message to his father, summons a captive, carefully primes him with the subject of his errand … and strikes off his head. If an important word be casually omitted he repeats the operation.” The deaths were therefore vehicles of social connection, not a breaking of interpersonal bonds. “A Dahoman king neglecting these rites would be looked upon as the most impious of men.” For an outsider to argue that the practice should stop was bootless: “It may be compared without disrespect to memorialising the Vatican against masses for the dead.”60
Burton’s account of these practices—as well as of some others, involving female warriors and their complex sexuality—foreshadows that of more modern anthropologists, making clear that his positing of a biological basis for cultural difference did not impede—if anything it encouraged and enhanced—his ability to understand it in strictly cultural terms. His attention to the ways that apparently senseless forms of behavior give expression to coherent and pervasive systems of belief calls up a well-known comment of the highly (and rightly) esteemed anthropologist Clifford Geertz: “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs.”61 Burton did not rise to the level of Geertz’s metaphor, but he would easily have grasped its sense.
We need to recognize, however, that he offered such analyses in a somewhat different spirit from the cultural anthropology that has descended from Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas. Anthropologists in this tradition have been not just inquirers into cultures that are more compact and integrated (and to us more exotic) than the ones modern Westerners inhabit, but defenders of those other ways of life, against outside efforts to “improve” the lives of their members.62 Burton was also a defender of the cultures he sought to understand, the African ones toward which he felt some kind of instinctive unease no less than the Arab ones he spontaneously admired, but his attitude differed in one significant respect from that of modern anthropologists. The best way to describe this difference might be to say that he was more mindful than his successors that what Geertz describes as webs of meaning are also tissues of nonsense, or—perhaps it would be better to say—that it mattered more to him to make clear how fully permeable the boundary between cultural meaning and nonsense really is.
That he regarded “primitive” cultures as shot through with nonsense no less than with the meaning he identified in the Dahomey “customs” is already clear in his earlier writings on Africa. Burton was surely aware that such practices as killing or enslaving infants who cut their incisor teeth in the wrong order had some basis in shared beliefs and assumptions too, but the practice was no less to be condemned for that, and on some level this was