Marilyn Strathern—Out Of Context

Marilyn Strathern
Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology
(1987)

[254] Malinowski...insisted that practices were to be related to other practices—that exchanges of food and valuables at marriage ceremonies, for instance, were intelligible in the light of local rules of inheritance or land tenure. To account for such ceremonies in the Trobriands, Malinowski turned not to practices found in other cultures but to other aspects of this one culture. The rest is well known—that this led to a view of individual societies as entities to be interpreted in their own terms, so that both practices and beliefs were to be analysed as intrinsic to a specific social context; that societies so identified were seen as organic wholes, later as systems and structures; and that the comparative enterprise which modern anthropologists set themselves thus became the comparison of distinct systems.

...

Although there is still some debate over Frazer's own arguments, as frequently as not they are condemned by his style. Rather than addressing the issue of historical residues or the comparability of beliefs, the modern anthropologist tends to object to Frazer's narrative structure. His work is criticised for being too literary. It is also criticised for treating events, behaviour, dogma, rites out of context. "Frazerian anthropology" is a synonym for undisciplined raids on ethnographic data without respect for their internal integrity, for the way they fit together as parts of a system or have meaning for the

[255]

actors.

...

[256] "The instrument for the detection of savagery under civilisation is the comparative method, which, applied to the human mind, enables us to trace man's intellectual and moral evolution"... Was it this labelling of contemporary practices as survivals which constituted much of the fascination which Frazer had in his time? Would his readers have applied "the detection of savagery under civilisation" to themselves?

My note says:
(“Comparative” as against a militant non-transferability that insists on placing everything in a/its context. Hence “Malinowski and his colleagues [instancing the “context”-bound tendency??] put forward the same proposition but in reverse: the detection of civilisation under savagery.”)

Footnote to p. 256:

15. Goodenough (I970:I05) [Description and Comparison in Cultural Anth.] writes that the problem of ethnography is how to produce a description that satisfactorily represents "what one needs to know to play the game acceptably by the standards of those who already know how to play it." This implies an enormous willingness on the part of the reader to compare standards.

My note says:
Worth filing away re: any purported “ethnographies” of music and musicians, which probably involve defining technical factors out of “the game” from the start.

[260] "It is always highly desirable that the fieldworker should rid himself of the notion that there is something altogether extraordinary about the situation he is observing"... And how many anthropological courses begin with the adage that the anthropologist's job is to make sense out of what is first presented as strange, to render beliefs and acts in terms of their taken-for-granted status in the context of people's lives. Jarvie's complaint is that after the first or second exposure to this revelation, the repetition becomes boring.

..

[269] "Global village" is an interesting fiction. Few anthropologists can have actually studied a village that was not riven by conflicting social interests. Indeed, the English village I know best was radically divided between those residents who thought it was a village and those who did not.

[emailed to self, 23 May 2022]