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by Edward Jayne
written sometime during the early nineties

Too often our primary task on the job is to misuse our professional responsibilities just as much as possible toward ends quite the opposite of what we think. Doctors, for example, perpetuate ill health, psychiatrists aggravate neuroses, and lawyers stretch the law to the limit short of breaking it. To continue the list, architects design buildings to make us uncomfortable, engineers modernize products to accelerate their planned obsolescence, and corporations manufacture goods that prove to be worthless almost as soon as they are on the market. Journalists ignore genuine news, and politicians maximize their electoral popularity to benefit special interests at the expense of the electorate. Artists uglify visual experience; musicians do the same with sound; and choreographers with the body. Historians avoid history, education professors don't educate, and philosophers don't have much of a personal philosophy, much less any appetite for the breadth of inquiry that typified earlier ventures in philosophy. Speaking as an English professor, I can attest that we in our particular field teach students to write without style and to deal with literature as a tedious chore clouded by bizarre critical distractions.

Anthropologists are among the very worst of the lot, for they have entirely diverted their energies from the comparative investigation of primitive cultures toward the exposure and better control of primitivism in modern civilization, as first recommended by Edward Tylor, to something entirely different--the study of each culture's unique authenticity in its adjustment to its particular circumstances as if there are otherwise no qualitative distinctions to be made. From this relativist contraint has been drawn the dubious assumption, which I label the Anthropologist's Fallacy, that all cultures are basically equal. And from this assumption educational authorities have drawn the no less dubious corollary that cultural diversity can be given greater emphasis in our college offerings at the expense of our traditional curriculum without incurring any particular qualitative losses.

To what extent has the Anthropologist's Fallacy played a role in our colleges today? To an extraordinary degree, as demonstrated by the intensified pursuit of cultural diversity, the widespread animosity against Eurocentric tradition, and, in support of these, the sustained nationwide effort to shift our school and college curriculums to give greater emphasis to other cultures. As expressed in the most recent curriculum reform package for my own particular university, two courses emphasizing cultural diversity have been added to our core curriculum requirements, and all professors assigned to teach these courses were to have been required, as stated in the curriculum plan, to "explore limitations of the Western view of modernization, in light of the counterviews to see that Westernization is not the only view of the future." This directive did not come from anybody in the anthropology department, but it expressed a pervasive academic bias ultimately traceable to anthropology's relativist bias, and it had sufficient support that it could only be eliminated from the curriculum package at the faculty senate meeting in which the entire package finally came to a vote. Nobody had the courage to suggest that the future prospects of non-western cultures to be celebrated in our university are for the most part bleak. For, in fact, as projected by Paul Kennedy and many others, only the Eurocentric nations--plus China, India, Japan, and its so-called tigers --stand much of a chance for improving their circumstances through at least the first half of the twenty-first century. Contrary to the wording of the rejected resolution, the rest of the non-western world can probably anticipate extraordinary deprivation into the indefinite future. If non-western cultures are to be taught on our campuses, it will have to be for other reasons than their superior prospects for surviving the next century.

My point here is that uncompromising multiculturalism would have imposed unacceptable guidelines justified by the fashionable appeal of the Anthropologist's Fallacy. Here the mission of anthropology to misuse its expertise, comparable to those of law, medicine, and engineering, seems to have spread by a kind of "academic diffusion" into other departments as well, bearing consequences a good deal more harmful to fields immersed in Eurocentric tradition--history, English, the foreign languages, etc.--than to anthropology itself. And with consequences more destructive than many of our colleagues realize. As with everybody else, anthropology might be permitted to play out its self-denial with relative peace of mind in its own particular sandbox, but when sand is thrown in the eyes of others as well, a reassessment of anthropology's self-destructive achievement seems appropriate.

The pioneers who created the field of anthropology in the mid-to-late nineteenth century were entirely dedicated to a comparative approach based on evolutionist principles, since they assumed there had been a gradual advancement from primitive societies to modern civilization. Both Herbert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan had declared their commitment to evolutionism before Darwin's Origin of the Species was published in 1859, and with the publication of Darwin's book they rejoiced in the possibilities of a grand unified theory based on the principles of biological and sociological evolution. Morgan expressed his faith in evolutionist principles in the very first two sentences of his classic text, Ancient Society (1877):

The latest investigations respecting the early condition of the human race, are tending to the conclusion that mankind commenced their career at the bottom of the scale and worked their way up from savagery to civilization through the slow accumulations of experimental knowledge.

As it is undeniable that portions of the human family have existed in a state of savagery, other portions in a state of barbarism, and still other portions in a state of civilization, it seems equally so that these three distinct conditions are connected with each other in a natural as well as necessary sequence of progress 1.

Edward B. Tylor, another major figure in the early development of anthropology, more gracefully declared this evolutionary perspective to be the primary goal of anthropology as a science in his major work, Anthropology (1881):

On the whole it appears that wherever there are found elaborate arts, abstruse knowledge, complex institutions, these are results of gradual development from an earlier, simpler, and ruder state of life. No stage of civilization comes into existence spontaneously, but grows or is developed out of the stage before it. This is the great principle which every scholar must lay firm hold of, if he intends to understand either the world he lives in or the history of the past 2. [italics in the original]

Morgan and Tylor's evolutionary perspective seemed self-evident, and it initiated the study of culture to determine the patterns of growth that occurred as primitive societies evolved into intermediate (or barbaric) societies, then the many relatively isolated civilizations that have grown and declined throughout the world over the last five millenia, and finally the Eurocentric global civilization that seemed to occupy an obviously dominant position by the late nineteenth century.

However, influenced by Galton's theory of eugenics, the evolutionary approach to anthropology shifted by the first decade or two of the twentieth century to a patently racist emphasis that linked racial types with particular stages in the development of culture. Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard best exemplified the trend in the United States, and probably its most significant scientific contribution was Ellsworth Huntington's Civilization and Climate, published in 1915, whose current neglect seems undeserved 3. Friedrich Engels's use of Morgan in formulating his theory of social evolution in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) salvaged evolutionism for the anthropologists with radical leanings, but for liberals opposed to both Eurocentric chauvinism and the radical movement that flourished preceding World War I, it seemed absolutely necessary that the entire evolutionary approach be dismantled in the field of anthropology.

The primary champion of the cause against evolutionism, Franz Boas, came to the United States in 1889 as a German-Jewish immigrant physicist-turned-geographer-turned-anthropologist who was unalterably opposed to racism throughout his entire life, probably to a certain extent resulting from his sense of alienation as a Jew. In the words of Marvin Harris, "Boas was a member of an immigrant minority, who as an individual was obviously unprepared to concede the superiority of the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant intellectual and business elites 4." Others in his position might have projected their dissatisfaction by resorting to personal acts of generosity or by playing an activistic role in support of appropriate causes, for example the integrationist movement. Boas, however, did something far more remarkable--he played the central role in transforming an entire science, anthropology, from its predominantly racist perspective into one that was absolutely anti-racist. And for this purpose his defense extended to all non-European cultures, not merely blacks. His first major work addressed to a general audience, The Mind of the Primitive Man (1911)--also, arguably, the first important published attack on racism--rejected both racism and evolutionism by emphasizing their unavoidable linkage, as may be observed in his stark juxtaposition of two categorical assertions in the second paragraph of his Preface to the 1938 edition:

There is no fundamental difference in the ways of thinking of primitive and civilized man. A close connection between race and personality has never been established 5.

Here the two taboos seem to be symbiotic in the sense that the acceptance of one automatically leads to the acceptance of the other. Like a pair of ruffians looking for a fight, their paired interdictions flaunt their respective negatives, no and never, as if to defy contradiction. And, indeed, nobody successfully took up the challenge, though Boas's book in its German edition was among those burned at Hitlers' orders in 1933. Appropriately, Boas's last words when he died in 1943, a decade later, emphasized the need for eternal vigilance against racism 6.

Boas produced a massive output of scholarship throughout his career (there are over six hundred items in his personal bibliography), and he was enormously influential in the field of anthropology through the impact of both his own work and the work of his many disciples, including Kroeber, Lowie, Sapir, Goldenweiser, Radin, Benedict, Mead, Henry, and Montagu. According to Kroeber, "Boas "found anthropology a playfield and jousting ground for opinion: he left it a science, pluralistic but critical 7." How, exactly, did Boas do this? Again, according to Kroeber:

Tirelessly he [Boas] pulled down the various schemes of origins and "evolutionistic" stages, of quasi-spontaneous generatings out of the "nature" of the mind of man; he pulled down racism as an explanation of cultural differences; he denied environmental determinism; unitary as well as Kulturkreis determinism by diffusion--in short, all simpliste [sic] determinations. (p. 146)

In other words, Boas reinvented anthropology by imposing a variety of disciplinary constraints that restricted the scope of its investigation exclusively to the empirical investigation of culture--as much as possible, specific cultures. He did not augment anthropology with any concepts or principles that steered it in the direction he wanted; instead, he framed the standards by which what he wanted to avoid had to be subtracted.

It might be said, in fact, that the principal feature of Boas's approach was an exhaustive pre-Linnean gathering of empirical data to eliminate any possibility whatsoever of making unfavorable comparisons at the expense of primitive cultures. Field work predominated, as well as the vigorous rejection of generalizations to which exceptions could be found. Empiricism was taken to its limit to prevent unwarranted conclusions from being drawn, for the discovery of exceptions supposedly precluded unwarranted generalizations, as opposed to the empirical approaches in other scientific fields that either calculated these exceptions on a statistical basis or sought out the precise reason for their status as exceptions. Boas claimed to look forward to when broad generalizations could be drawn, but only after all the field work had been completed. However, the task of gathering data seemed endless, as, for example, in his own exhaustive lifelong research upon the Kwakiutl Indians that was never brought to the point at which he felt he could risk drawing any significant conclusions.

Avoidances were fully as important to Boas's approach as the data he pursued, and I can briefly propose here what seem to have been the principal avoidances of his approach, which I label for obvious mnemonic purposes the BOAS CONSTRICTORS:

1. Against qualitative comparisons.
2. Against "premature" generalizations.
3. Against evolutionary explanations.
4. Against environmental explanations.
5. Against innate psychological explanations.
6. Against racial explanations.

Marxism, for example, could be rejected as an evolutionary theory of economics linked by Engels with Morgan's evolutionary theory of culture, and the Freudian unconscious and Jungian archetypes could be rejected as the stuff of innate psychological theories. Weather and geographical environment could also be excluded (except in Boas's very first study of Eskimos), and as much as possible, the principles of evolution could be replaced with cultural history by emphasizing the dynamics of cultural diffusion. All of these connections might have existed, but Boas discouraged their investigation in order to establish anthropology's credentials as a science with a territory exclusively its own. Boundaries might have been fuzzy, but all the worthier of stringent efforts to define them. What was left for anthropologists was culture--the accumulation of customs, skills, and information transmitted in social groupings independent of any and all extraneous variables. Boas and others around him could let themselves occasionally hazard broader theoretical speculation, but only in a limited manner, and without lifting the ban for others. Berthold Laufer's enthusiastic promotion of this approach in a review article published in 1918 illustrates the extent to which these constraints could be taken, in the words of Marvin Harris, toward "the nadir of the negativism and antiscientism which was associated with historical particularism":

The theory of cultural evolution, to my mind the most inane, sterile, and pernicious theory ever conceived in the history of science (a cheap toy for the amusement of big children), is duly disparaged. . . . Culture cannot be forced into the straitjacket of any theory whatever it may be, nor can it be reduced to chemical or mathematical formulae. Nature has no laws, so culture has none. It as vast and as free as the ocean, throwing its waves and currents in all directions. . . . All that the practical investigator can hope for, at least for the present, is to study each cultural phenomenon as exactly as possible in its geographical distribution, its historical development and its relation or association with other kindred ideas. The more theories will be smashed, the more new facts will be established, the better for the progress of our science 8. Here it was obvious that most of the theoretical scaffolding for Morgan and Tylor had been junked. All that was left was an uncompromising vision of sheer empiricism to prevent anybody from drawing unpleasant generalizations that might bridge the gap with other theories of social behavior.

By the late 1940s evolutionism was resurrected once again, but this time divested of racist speculation. Leslie White, the leader of the anthropologists making this effort, probably undertook this task because of his own experience both as a graduate student of three major Boasians--Goldenweiser, Fay-Cooper Cole and Edward Sapir--and as an intellectual who was later exposed to Morgan's work when he taught at Buffalo near Iroquois sites treated by Morgan, and whose curiosity about Marxism (and thus possibly Engels's use of Morgan) had led to his trip to the Soviet Union as early as 1929. However, White excluded Engels's theory from his study of cultural evolution, and he seems to have kept entirely free and clear of the American communist movement 9. Instead, he updated Morgan's approach in his own book, The Evolution of Culture (1959), and respectfully republished Morgan's Ancient Society with his own introductory comments in 1964. White also engaged in vigorous polemics upon cultural relativism with both Kroeber and Lowie, the two principal disciples of Boas still alive at the time, and in his 1963 10 monograph, The Ethnography and Ethnology of Franz Boas, White published a scathing assessment of Boas's personal contribution to the field of anthropology 11.

Here, in this brief and generally overlooked monograph, White effectively documented circumstances in the career of Boas that should have somewhat undermined his prestige as the father of modern anthropology: (a) Boas's somewhat limited experience in the field--33 1/2 months altogether throughout his entire career in performing field work as an anthropologist (pp. 9-10), (b) his slavish dependence on two Kwakiutl observers, George Hunt and Henry Tate, from whom over four thousand pages of descriptive writings were apparently published under his own name but without any significant additions of his own (pp. 30-33, 55, 63-64), (c) his failure as a participant-observer, especially in depicting the lower classes of Indian tribes (pp. 49, 59), (d) his inaccurate explanation of Kwakiutl potlatches despite his extensive investigation (p. 56), (e) his inability to recognize the simplest pattern of ambilateral lineage in the Kwakiutl tribes despite his repeated observations of of coincidental matrilineal and patrilineal patterns (pp. 52-54, 66-67), (f) his occasional assertions of proof that were essentially absurd (pp. 41-43), (g) his empty historical reconstructions (p. 43), and (h) his hostile attitude toward other anthropologists except his disciples, whom he obviously favored by quoting extensively (p. 68). White admired Boas's extraordinary accumulation of empirical data and his professional authority--but he found nothing scientific in his work based on procedures taken for granted in other fields, for example the testing of hypotheses and, I might add, the use of statistics (invented by Galton, ironically) to deal with exceptions from the factor analysis of separate variables.

White was embroiled in a variety of controversies regarding his evolutionary approach, and his monograph attacking Boas did not reach a large audience, so Boas's reputation survived White's onslaught substantially intact. Granted, evolutionism was once again almost respectable, but the cultural relativism advocated by Boas also survived, if without the total authority it once enjoyed. More important, the Boas Constrictors listed above have mostly retained their effectiveness as professional taboos for almost everybody in the field of cultural anthropology. Not only are the prohibited issues both unthought and undiscussed, but even their exclusion is excluded from consideration 12. A hiatus, or theoretical black hole, suffuses what had once upon a time been the primary concern of anthropology. Evolutionary differences remain suspect, and the issue of race continues to be an anathema. Moreover, Eurocentric civilization continues to be seen as an alien world whose many liabilities justify the investigation of supposedly primitive cultures 13 as alternatives at least as attractive to the enlightened scholar.

The continuing dominance of cultural relativism may be seen, for example, in the influential post-structuralist manifesto, "Anti-Anti-Relativism" (1984), in which the American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, once again treats relativism as anthropology's appropriate perspective for dealing with primitive culture. Most of Geertz's text is devoted to the rejection of a variety of arguments critical of relativism on the anaerobic principle that one refutes them simply by mentioning them--for example, the arguments that relativism makes everything significant, hence insignificant (265), that relativism leaves no room for criticism (p. 266), that its attack on racism has led to an inverted racism and the derogation of Western culture (p. 271), and that an uncritical devotion to relativism fosters both mindless tolerance and mindless intolerance, both ideological promiscuity and ideological monomania, and both egalitarian hypocrisy and egalitarian simplisticism (p. 267)--as if these particular pairings automatically cancel each other out--which they don't. Mindless tolerance in one sphere, for example, can lead to mindless intolerance in another, as can an ideological monomania in one sphere lead to ideological promiscuity in others.

According to Geertz, the extraordinary versatility of social behavior demands a relativist approach in defining it, and the large variety of reductionist theories for explaining it on a presumably non-cultural basis primarily serve to betray its protean elusiveness: "the sin [i.e., human nature] may be one," Geertz declares, "but the salvations are many," in the sense that a great variety of "foundationalist" theories (Freudian, Jungian, Marxist, etc.) have been formulated to try to reduce the variability of human nature to a basic context-independent formulation (p. 268). Geertz argues that this anti-relativist bias is rooted in the anxious pursuit of "something steadfast: Reality reached, Reason saved from drowning." In other words, the western mind incessantly seeks security in a safe "foundationalist" perspective of human consciousness, as opposed to the way "the other half" [i.e., the populace of other cultures] both behaves and thinks (p. 273).

Geertz therefore applauds the theoretical insouciance of cultural relativists in accepting the inevitability of social variation. He rejoices in anthropology's historic "emphasis on difference, diversity, oddity, discontinuity, incommensurability, [and] uniqueness," (p. 267), and for this reason he boasts that "anthropology has played, in our day, a vanguard role" (p. 275). More specifically, he argues:

It has been the office of others to reassure; ours [as anthropologists] to unsettle. Australopithicenes, Tricksters, Clicks, Megaliths--we hawk the anomalous, peddle the strange. Merchants of astonishment. We have, no doubt, on occasion moved too far in this direction and transformed idiosyncrasies into puzzles, puzzles into mysteries, and mysteries into humbug. But such an affection for what doesn't fit and won't comport, reality out of place, has connected us to the leading theme of the cultural history of "Modern Times." For that history has indeed consisted of one field of thought after another having to discover how to live on without the certainties that launched it. (p. 275)

More than anybody else, Geertz argues, anthropologists have demonstrated "that the norms of reason were not fixed in Greece, the evolution of morality not consummated in England" (p. 275). For, claims Geertz in his final kicker, morality cannot be located beyond culture or knowledge beyond both" (p. 276).

Ancient Greece, no less! And modern England, and everything between. The entirety of western civilization is lumped together by Geertz as having been afflicted with obsessive rationality and the worship of knowledge. Here there is clear affinity with Boas, for Geertz's attack is just what Boas might have wished for a post-structuralist redefinition of anthropology despite relatively superficial differences that can be justified by the different audiences they addressed. In contrast to Boas, Geertz delights in drawing comparisons between primitive culture and civilization, if only to praise the irrationality and "otherness" that might be offensive to the western mind. Boas had proscribed comparisons favorable to western civilization, but Geertz resorts to comparisons to argue that western civilization's compulsive pursuit of rationality very likely puts it a notch inferior to other cultures free of this compulsion, and that anthropology's recognition of this deficiency puts it in the "vanguard" of all the sciences and disciplines that have in recent years been deprived of their most cherished basic assumptions. There is also an obvious difference in rhetorical styles, Boas having devoted his career to the laborious accumulation of scientific data, as opposed to Geertz's relatively cavalier attitude toward the uses of field work. Boas had also sought to make his ideas absolutely lucid to the reader, whereas Geertz, like others in the post-structuralist movement, revels in the intuitive magic of cryptic and elliptical pronouncements, perhaps to suggest that the irrationality he seeks in primitive culture also plays a modest role in his own discourse.

Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that the primary objective of the two--Boas and Geertz--remains essentially identical--the rejection of all explanations of society that might suggest the inferiority of primitive culture to western civilization. In other words, Geertz, like most everybody else in the field of anthropology, continues to do his tortuous dance as a modern-day Laocoon entangled with Boas Constrictors--the implicit avoidances that limit anthropology to the study of culture. All the putatively spurious foundationalist theories that Geertz lists, for example, as false "salvations" (Marxism, psychoanalysis, ecology, neurology, developmental theory, display-and-imprint ethology, generative linguistics, experimental psychology, artificial intelligence research, ploy and counterploy microsociology, etc.), are categorized in this context as rationalist perspectives that cannot begin to explain the diversity of human behavior achieved in primitive societies (p. 268). Off limits these theories remain, new additions to the simpler and more basic list of constrictors imposed eight decades earlier by Boas. And as taboos they serve the same purpose, the tendentious denial of any kind of evolutionary advancement from inferior social structures to modern civilization, granted its myriad imperfections.

What seems more obvious today than ever before, however--at least to those still able to acknowledge the emperor's lack of clothing (for he does hang out)--is that primitive culture--what's left of it--is presently in very dire straits, that obvious qualitative differences can in fact be observed between different cultures, that western civilization, for all its major problems, is in fact better equipped in countless ways to less advanced non-western cultures, and that too much of the cultural authenticity celebrated by anthropologists turns out, given half a chance, to mask a virulent style of reactionary chauvinism at the very brink of fascism, as may be observed throughout the second and third worlds from the Balkans (Serbs, Croats, etc.) to southeast Asia and beyond. Moreover, the many tin-pot dictatorships and military juntas that abound in the non-western world today must be recognized for what they are, the tattered remnants of cultures that could not rise to the challenge of dealing with both the benefits and liabilities of western civilization. Western imperialism partly explains their difficulties, but just as important has been the ineffectiveness of these cultures in adjusting to the social and technological challenges with which they have been confronted--for example the population explosion resulting from vaccinations and the political disruption resulting from the ready availability of modern weaponry.

How many tribes are left in Africa that do not fit the description of severe deprivation? What Arab nations have adequately dispersed their oil revenues among their populations? How many Eskimos can be found who have escaped the ravages of alcoholism? Where in the Indian subcontinent, or in Latin America, or in the Indonesian archipelago, is life better than it was thirty years ago? If Europe and North America are experiencing severe disruptions right now, as they are, these disruptions seem almost trivial compared to the catastrophic upheaval now taking place in the underdeveloped nations inclusive of what's left of all the cultures that Boas, Geertz and their many friends and colleagues in the field of anthropology have so aggressively promoted with righteous zeal. Like endangered species, these cultures are disintegrating right before our eyes, and a very major source of their problem is, quite frankly, their inability to adjust to the problems with which they are confronted. No absolute and clearly defined foundationalist standard is needed to perceive this situation, simply the perception that they are falling apart, and that they are neither primitive nor civilized right now, but an ungodly mixture of the two that is very probably sinking into irreversible poverty. If there has been any evolution in their development, it went sideways for a while, but then sloped into now what has very decidedly become a downward trajectory. Where may be found the glorious irrational "other" praised by Geertz? How can our Boas constrictionists continue praising primitivism to the skies on one hand while imploring, demanding, that something be done to relieve the misery of non-western societies on the other?

What are the traits of primitivism that one may reject out of hand as being unacceptable by civilized standards? What floor effect may be imposed in the judgment of "primitive" behavior based on nothing more than the standard of human revulsion? Obviously to be included would be slavery, cannibalism, both animal and human sacrifice, black magic, and gratuitous acts of homicide linked with magic, the power of shamans, etc. The mistreatment of women is also an important yardstick, as evidenced by anatomical disfigurement, female circumcision, polygamy, child marriages, female infanticide, divorce laws entirely favorable to husbands, and the social acceptance of beating and killing wives for one reason or another, for example as punishment for infidelity or to join their deceased husbands in funeral ceremonies. I would suggest that two or more of these practices necessarily indicate an unacceptable level of primitivism, and everything else--every custom and superstition--to be observed in societies that encourage these practices may be judged on a comparable basis--period! No excuses--everything is linked, benign practices contaminated by the excesses they accompany.

Many problems have likewise plagued societies that have advanced beyond primitivism without attaining full status in western civilization, and here again a floor effect may be discerned for such problems as inefficiency, filth, corruption, and thievery that is either out of control or suppressed only by the visible presence of troops and police on the streets. A rapid succession of brutal totalitarian dictators is also symptomatic, as is the evidence of catastrophic decline from earlier times, for example during the colonial administration of foreign governments or when the export industry was more prosperous. Buildings are delapidated, garbage and empty plastic water containers are strewn everywhere; beggars and half-starved urchins swarm visitors from abroad; young men from the countryside hang around with nothing to do. There is no effective planning; extreme wealth exists side-by-side with extreme poverty; and too many individuals energetically protest their integrity while engaging in practices obviously harmful to others. The list could go on, and it is fully as deserving of empirical study as any of the presumably authentic primitive customs featured by Boas's generation of anthropologists. Granted, the problem may also be observed in presumably civilized communities--and more today than ever before--but not to the same extent as in many hundreds of third-world communities. For the pattern seems pretty much the same throughout the underdeveloped world.

What exactly are the principal advances that differentiate western civilization (inclusive of Japan and other oriental nations linked with it) from less advanced cultural patterns? Here anthropologists have offered some excellent suggestions, but, as far as I can tell, without having adequately fathomed the extent to which the developments crucial to the advancement of civilization interact with each other on a cumulative basis. Clusters (or groupings) of modification are needed, and if there is insufficient interplay among particular causes within these clusters, the entire process is jeopardized, as seems to have been the case, for example, with the Soviet Union. White's theory emphasizing the use of energy also seems valuable, as does the Marxist theory of labor, Tainter's theory of optimal productivity, and Kroeber's theory, derived from Alfred Weber and others, emphasizing the technological advances acquired by cultural diffusion 14. Energy might be considered to subsume labor, but human labor and the circumstances that maximize its genuine productivity are of crucial importance in initiating the development of both energy sources and the needed technology. A society that acquires by cultural diffusion the other two but lacks the means to develop their potential for its own purposes will eventually suffer the consequences. The best combination therefore seems to be a clustering of these four variables, and perhaps others as well. They all overlap: each plays a role, and each may be quantified to help determine the relative advancement of any particular society from primitive culture to civilization.

Other, more specific activities that cluster with these in the advancement of civilization include agriculture, transportation, communications, capital accumulation (Marx's surplus value) and the "velocity" of investment capital in funding ventures of one sort or another. Also to be included, unfortunately, are ample hegemonic power, the military capacity to maintain this power, and, in a more positive vein, if with equally destructive impact for many societies, medical technology, since a population explosion can undermine an otherwise healthy social context in every other respect. All of these benefits may be quantified, and any chart measuring their improvement for those societies that progress from primitivism to civilization would inevitably disclose enormous growth, if with varying patterns of advancement, from paleolithic styles of social adjustment to what we have today. A discernible growth pattern can be hypothetically projected for all early civilizations (for example the Sumerians and Mayans), and a much sharper exponential growth pattern has necessarily occurred in the advancement of western civilization over the past five centuries. Particular nations (e.g. Spain and Italy) might have suffered major declines at one time or another, but their losses have been offset by the gains of others, and the cumulative growth pattern of Eurocentric civilization as a whole has continued to expand. In primitive and underdeveloped third world societies, on the other hand, the patterns of growth have been altogether negligible except for patchwork acquisitions by cultural diffusion that are just as likely as not to have produced severe dislocations.

But to this economic base must be affixed a cultural and intellectual superstructure that is every bit as important. Technology depends on both scientific inquiry and an all-purpose reservoir of mental discipline (described by Max Weber as the Protestant Ethic). Without an ample work force of skillful workers among the public at large, and without the means and encouragement to pursue the systematic inquiry of apparently useless issues typical of pure science, Eurocentric civilization would not have evolved. The entrenched ignorance typical of third-world societies (and the third-world portions of our own society) is not conducive to impressive technological advances. For it is civilization that has brought us almost all of our innovations. Almost five thousand years ago the ancient Sumerians gave us writing, the potter's wheel, wheeled vehicles, the yoke, canals, and sailboats; and almost two and a half thousand years ago ancient Greece systematized science, logic, and mathematics, as well as having provided us with tragedy, history, rhetoric and political theory entirely beyond the purview of primitive cultures. Relatively speaking, there seems to have been a falling off in innovations during the Alexandrian period, the Roman empire, and the Dark Ages that followed, but with the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation science and technology resumed their expansion and quickly advanced to entirely new levels of achievement. Technology benefitted science, science technology, and both have also depended on the other variables already listed, especially the accumulation and ready availability of wealth adequate to support scientific inquiry.

No less important has been our skeptical tradition. All versions of the hallowed virtue of belief, religious and otherwise, have thrived in every society--the most primitive as well as the most advanced. Almost everybody is fully capable of belief, including three-year old children, schizophrenics, and senile alcoholics. According to Bertrand Russell, belief is "pre-intellectual, and can be displayed in the behavior of animals . . . [and] on occasion, [in] a purely bodily state." 15 True, religious belief might reinforce an orderly human society, as Radcliffe-Brown maintains, but this maintenance of the "orderly" that utterly predominates in primitive culture is necessarily offset by a substantial dose of skepticism in those civilizations whose growth depends on what might be described as productive destabilization additional to their maintenance of social cohesion 16. Steady-state maintenance predominates in primitive societies, and of course it also plays a major role in civilization; on the other hand, change is what actually brings the improvements linked with civilization.

It is accordingly not belief, but disbelief (or skepticism), even as the very tiniest catalyst, that plays the more useful role in the advancement of civilization, since the capacity for disbelief encourages dissatisfaction with the status quo and the quest for something better. This unique benefit may be traced to exactly one source: the skeptical tradition that began with Protagoras, Socrates, Pyrrho, Arcesilaus, and Carneades of ancient Greece, that was summarized by Cicero and Sextus Empiricus, and that gained its renaissance with Bacon, Gassendi, Hume, and everybody that followed. Random instances of skepticism in primitive societies were documented by Paul Radin in Primitive Man as Philosopher, but these were limited to doubts about the motives and adequacy of their gods, not their very existence 17. For example, the Amazulu tribe of East Africa described by Radin treated their amatongo ancestor gods as having been treacherous and untrustworthy, but not as figments of their imagination. Nor do the proverbs and maxims of primitive tribes listed by Radin fill the bill as examples of skepticism. Until exceptions can be found, we may assume the growth of skepticism as a systematic theory of philosophy has been strictly limited to western civilization alone. Here, then, we find the missing link (or smoking gun), the "fundamental difference in the ways of thinking of primitive and civilized man" that Boas claimed does not exist. The difference is plain: primitive people are consummate believers; in contrast, civilized people possess a residue of belief, but they are also skeptical--and the more skeptical, the more civilized.

Skepticism has been closely linked with the history of science as the systematic investigation of empirical data to confirm one's doubts of established beliefs and theories. In fact, the testing of hypothesies typical of the scientific method brings skepticism into the very procedures used by science to sort out hypotheses possibly at odds with received assumptions. Skepticism is also needed to provide the intellectual milieu crucial to the advancement of science, for science languishes once deprived of a milieu tolerant of nonconformism. On the other hand, the bloodthirsty inquisitors during the Middle Ages and seventeenth century were certainly confident of their beliefs. Primitive shamans are likewise confident of their beliefs, but one hopes the anthropologists who observe their mummery and incantations possess at least a spark of doubt about the alternative validity of their irrational "otherness" in exercising this particular capacity.

In contrast to primitive religion, the institution of Christianity has likewise evolved in response to this skeptical tradition, extending from Saint Augustine's effort to cope with his own doubts to Saint Thomas Aquinas's synthesis of Catholicism with the tenets of Aristotelian philosophy. Later came the Protestant movement more tolerant of scientific discovery, as compared to the fideistic use of skepticism ("we can't be sure, therefore we must believe") by Catholicism to buttress its authority, and still later the current acceptance of agnosticism and atheism among the educated community. As Comte proposed, western civilization has encompassed the entire transition from animism to polytheism, the belief in a personal god, theology, metaphysics, epistemology and ontology, and finally the scientific method, though of course the advancement has not always advanced in this sequence, and it has been with considerable overlapping. Indeed, animists may be found today, for example in New York City, but the difference between these and the animists of, say, New Guinea, is that they are aware of other levels of religious belief and adjust their pretensions accordingly.

Also a byproduct of the skeptical tradition has been a very lively history of philosophy extending from Thales and all the rest of the pre-Socratic philosophers to the many schools of philosophy active today. Nothing like this may be found in the study of primitive cultures. Also traceable to the skeptical tradition has been the substitution of secular law for the divine authority of both church and state, and with this has come an emphasis upon the authority of elected legislators in making laws and of the courts in both using and interpreting them, leading to the development of modern parliamentary democracy, again without any precedent in the seductive "otherness" of primitive culture. Moreover, modern citizens comfortably attuned to civilization have internalized the law as an inner-directed capacity for self-judgment of obvious benefit in coping with modern society's increased vertical and horizontal mobility. Liberated from the clan and extended family, they have divided their attention between the nuclear family (hence the potential importance of the Oedipus complex) and their political responsibility as citizens of the state. Instead of posturing from an exaggerated sense of personal pride linked with their clan identity, these citizens tone down the naive pretensions to be observed in less advanced societies, aware that their status and obligations under an established system of laws both provides their safety from others and imposes constraints on them for the protection of others.

The skeptical tradition has likewise fostered a conflict between church and state, then between conservative and progressive parties within the state, and finally, at about the time of the French Revolution, between left and right political ideologies. Our entire intellectual milieu today derives from this matrix of disbelief, and it influences everything we read, hear on the radio, and see on television. Inevitably, we take sides, jump from one bandwagon to the next depending on what we are able to glean from all the information that inundates us from breakfast to bedtime. Some of us run ourselves ragged just to make sure we are somewhat on top of the issues--something primitive man has been able to neglect both in primitive society and among the more regressive elements of our own.

But the evolution of western civilization has not distinguished itself by skepticism alone. Just as important on a complementary basis have been its architectonic skills, skepticism perhaps having been rooted in the ability to perceive exceptions and these architectonic skills in the ability to make combinations. Plato and Aristotle's complementary philosophies may both be treated as having been remarkable theoretical systems that were proposed in response to the skepticism of the pre-Socratic philosophers. Though obviously delayed, the metaphysics of Plotinus, St. Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas may also be judged on the same basis, as can the metaphysics of Kant and Hegel, the political economy of Marx, Engels, and their followers, the empirical logic of John Stuart Mill, and the logical empiricism of Russell, Carnap, and Popper. Not to overlook Darwin's theory of evolution, Faraday's study of electricity and Maxwell's equations that set the stage for Einstein's theory of relativity. Also impressive for their structural grandeur, if with no clear connection with skepticism, have been the extraordinary Gothic cathedrals, the great palaces and gardens of Europe (why haven't primitive cultures even come up with their own versions of public gardens?), and the remarkable universities and educational systems throughout Europe.

The music in the western tradition may similarly be traced from Gregorian chants to Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Bartok in an evolution that discloses extraordinary advances in auditory contextual sophistication! How may non-western music be compared favorably--or compared at all? Here I am not echoing Boas's demand, but suggesting a qualitative hiatus between the primitive and the civilized that almost exceeds measurement. Comparisons cannot be limited to melody and rhythm (whose primary cranial receptor seems to be in the brain stem), but should also include harmonics, dissonance, counterpoint, instrumentation, interpretation, and, last but not least, thematic development--the ingredient that infuses architectonics into the auditory experience of music. There are two entirely different categories of music--classical and folk--and when a composer such as Dvorak or Bartok borrows from folk tradition to bring into the classical idiom, the difference achieved is plain to all: clay has been thrown, glazed, and baked into porcelain elegance.

This gap between folk and classical expressiveness is also true of the history of plastic arts, which can be traced from our Egyptian and Babylonian forebears to Phidias, Giotto, Picasso, and their successors in the New York school. Again, art evolved, so there is little comparison with folk and primitive art, though of course both of these inspired such artists as Picasso and Giacometti almost as much as the can of tomato soup inspired Andy Warhol. Back in 1961, E.H. Gombrich traced art's evolution from schematic primitivism typical of non-western cultures through the sequence of aesthetic breakthroughs that were achieved solely in the context of western art, and his analysis seems no less pertinent today than before 18.

And finally the domain of literature, in which Aristotle's emphasis upon unity of action has substantially established the most important watershed between western and non-western works of fiction. Despite the best efforts of Levi-Strauss and Vladimir Propp to prove otherwise, non-western narratives, even in quest stories, suffer from the tendency of going both everywhere and nowhere at the same time, or of starting nowhere and ending up nowhere. A carnivalistic extravagance of voices might be featured, but nothing really happens--there is no change from one state of affairs to another that is substantially its opposite, for example from unrequited love to marriage, or from youth to maturity. Moreover, the conflict of non-western narratives is not internalized effectively, so obstructors or "bad guys" must be defeated, while the possibility of obstructive or harmful tendencies must be ignored in sympathetic characters--the so-called good guys. In non-western fiction simple victory is emphasized, as opposed to the many extraordinary stories of personal choice offered by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky--and Joyce, Mann, and Bellow. Even for Homer there was an intricate unity of action, and this unity was internalized with Greek tragedy, where it has remained ever since in serious works of fiction. True, Aristotle subordinated characterization to plot, but depth of characterization soon became the battlefield for plot, and there it has remained for serious literature in the western tradition.

Also differentiating Eurocentric from non-western fiction are the author's capacity for irony, ambiguity, and the metaphoric displacement of signification from words to images and symbols--not to overlook the author's verbal skill in couching and providing a context for the simpler language used by the characters. Even skepticism plays its role (described by Conrad as "the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth--the way of art and salvation"), though as a perspective to be answered and brought under control by the use of literary form 19. All of this happens in Eurocentric literature, and it can be judged accordingly. To treat non-western works of fiction as being of comparable value, one must impose new and more specific constrictors by focussing one's critical interpretation upon the story alone as an expression of its social context. But this is simply not enough. When there is nothing much to explicate except social relevance, one may reasonably conclude that nothing much is happening of literary value.

Throughout its evolution Eurocentric literature seems to have been what might be described as an extremely sensitive "leading indicator" of the advancement of civilization, for extraordinary writers more often than not crop up during periods of extraordinary prosperity for society as a whole, as for example happened with the ancient Athenians, Imperial Romans, Renaissance Florentines, and the English from Elizabethan times through World War I. The remarkable expressive capacity of authors from these periods of history stands in stark contrast to the prose style of authors from relatively deprived circumstances, most obviously, for example, from primitive and marginal non-western societies. Moreover, the expressive freedom of our major Eurocentric authors tends to encourage cultural diffusion, since it discloses the benefits of our circumstances to others who are obviously less privileged. Our major authors do not exploit or batter down readers from other societies, but offer a "window" letting them observe for themselves what they are missing in life. Essentially the same issue was debated back in the thirties, when the so-called Zhdanovite (or "vulgar") Marxists mistakenly promoted socialist realism by worker-authors as better and more "relevant" literary inspiration (i.e., propaganda) than the Eurocentric classics. Granted, the Zhdanovites linked victimology with class struggle rather than the deprivation of cultural minorities and non-western societies, but the issue was virtually the same, and that the entire movement collapsed by 1940 augurs similar vulnerability for the non-western fetishism now in vogue. As during the 30s, the stories of cultural minorities overcoming their victimization that are so fashionable today are almost entirely ignored by individuals they presumably address--who continue to prefer westerns, mysteries, science fiction, horror stories, pornography, etc.--and instead serve to justify the self-flagellation of the elitist claque of pc-constrictionists gathered in our universities. Meanwhile, the so-called "classics" continue to teach both the emergent middle classes and individuals of other societies to aspire for something better--more often than not by joining the system, but, when the system fails, by working to impose improvements. This has been explained by the classical Marxist theory of Lukacs, Marcuse, and others, and it substantially differs from the post-structuralist ideology that emerged during the Reagan decade--the hand-wringing and fist-shaking sentimentality that guarantees a decent academic sinecure without at all rocking the boat.

Not that all these evolutionary patterns of advancement--both skeptical and architectonic--may be expected to have occurred in all the many civilizations that have existed in the history of mankind. The isolated American civilizations (Olmac, Mayan, Chacoan, etc.) were limited to relatively primitive attainments, as were the Chou and Harappan civilizations of Asia. The unique and remarkable achievement of western civilization--nowadays described as being Eurocentric--is that it grew as it spread from ancient societies to the level of development it has achieved today, inclusive of all the wars, depressions, and dislocations we have learned to take for granted. From the Sumerians and Babylonians at the eastern end of the great fertile crescent to the Egyptians at its western end emerged both the Greek and Jewish cultures that have had such a profound impact upon future trends, then Roman civilization, the European renaissance, and modern European achievements inclusive of the United States, Canada, and Australia. Arab scholarship played its crucial role in preserving Greek advances, and today Japan and its satellites are moving very rapidly to play an ascendent role in this tradition, and with China not very far behind (after its first two bouts with westernization: nineteenth century imperialism and the twentieth century's Maoist version of Marxism). One hopes these societies can maintain their earlier cultures, but without diminishing their ability to absorb and transform for their own purposes what they can learn from the Platos, Newtons, Mozarts, and Michaelangelos of the western tradition.

As opposed to primitive culture--in fact all culture with a static identity--western civilization has featured growth and expansion through what might be described as creative destabilization. As with the dynamics of capitalist accumulation argued by Marx, western civilization (more inclusive than capitalism) has thrived by relentlessly imposing a measured dose of disruption upon fixed cultural practices, and western history, fiction, and poetry have essentially told the story of this expanding pattern of disruption. Primitive culture and certain regressive portions of civilized societies have resisted this addiction to change, and often with fierce intensity, but western civilization has nevertheless transfigured itself as the agent and medium of change, as documented by its many accomplishments, and with at least the vague recognition of the inevitability that its growth ultimately brings decline. Spengler's romantic vision of civilization's ultimate demise has amply proven to be justified time and again, as recently documented by Joseph Tainter's excellent study, The Collapse of Complex Societies. And Toynbee's notion that the source of its decline may be traced to its inadequate response to a major crisis of one sort or another seems no less valid, if with the caveat that time and again western civilization has been confronted with such crises, and that the collapse of one particular society (e.g., Greece in the fourth and third centuries, B.C., and Spain in the seventeenth century) has been offset by the flowering of adjacent societies. This pattern of alternative hegemonies has been successfully documented by Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of Great Empires for the history of Europe over the last four centuries, and I am confident Kennedy's analysis could be extended back to the earliest origins of civilization.

Once primitive culture might have been able to stand aside and watch civilization blaze and expire in its own ashes. But no longer, for the social destabilization produced by western civilization has engulfed the entire globe, and only those societies fully attuned to coping with this destabilization--i.e., those at the forefront of civilization--can be expected to survive. Like the drunken driver too limber to be seriously hurt by his accidents, Eurocentric civilization has reached the stage whereby it is more of a threat to others than itself at every level of performance. Once it was primarily a threat to others through its imperialist conquests; now simply its trade, its withdrawn trade, its medical and agricultural technology, and the example it provides in social amenities bear a lethal impact. Today, Eurocentric civilization itself seems to be in serious trouble--perhaps more serious than ever before--but the problems it has brought are exponentially more dangerous to cultures whose core identities are presumably beyond its reach--cultures and subcultures that might be romantically celebrated by proponents of cultural diversity, but that totally lack the means to deal with warfare, the population explosion, anarchistic liberationist movements led by greedy war lords, etc. As so effectively documented by Paul Kennedy in his most recent book, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, these cultures are in far more serious difficulties than anybody else 20. Paradoxically, the Eurocentric advances that have provided us with the benefits we enjoy at the cost of numerous extraordinary dislocations seem to give us a substantially better chance of surviving these dislocations than anybody else.

For the culture historian, the benefits of the arrangement seem to be the extraordinary achievements that document its advances. The major books, events, and monuments that trace its forward progress through history have themselves been among its foremost victories. They have not simply been lifeless artifacts--they themselves have brought to focus and helped to enact the changes they record and illustrate. As T.S. Eliot explained in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," if in an somewhat different light than intended here, these works have altered our tradition by their participation in it, and this alteration both reflected and bore its impact upon the process as a whole. They actually provided the intellectual battlefield for the competitive ideas of their times--and on their battlefields they themselves fought the skirmishes and produced the results they celebrate. The glory of western civilization is that its primary accomplishments--victories, if you will--may thus be resurrected simply by experiencing them once again on the page, in the music, at the museum, and in the classroom. Beethoven, for example, was at the cutting edge of what transpired in the early nineteenth century, and his music restores to life this cultural battlefield for anybody who listens to his compositions, as does the poetry of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Keats--Wordsworth, for example, by having reinvented nature to escape politics, and Keats by having rejected everything "romantic" except his sheer polyphonic verbal luxuriance. We can turn to the works of these poets, or of any of the other major poets in the grand history of western literature, as unique prophets, or architects, in the forward progress of civilization. Their intrinsic ability cannot be disregarded, but they also fulfilled themselves appropriate to what needed to be said at the time to advance beyond what had already been said. The reader actually joins western civilization by sharing in their accomplishments--not as if their works stand aloof as classics that reaffirm the highest values of civilization--as if what they wrote must be appreciated as individual specimens of genius in traditional culture's fixed mosaic of grand achievements--but as feats each of which was in the very process of doing something new, of breaking ground, like the tens of millions of other such feats and innovations that have carried our civilization forward to what we know today. This is why the countless imitations of Wordsworth and Keats toward the end of the nineteenth century were too late to participate in what they celebrated. The battles they reenacted had already been fought and won, so poetry floundered in romantic nostalgia until it was resurrected by Pound, Eliot, and their contemporaries, who then suffered the same problem with their subsequent imitators. But this is nothing like this historic interplay to be found in primitive culture, for the latter has been without any particular cutting edge. An oral tradition has necessarily put each new achievement entirely on par with everything that preceded it. Poetry comes and goes--nothing happens beyond what had already been established. Only when it does can civilization be observed to manifest itself.

Today, the rough division between civilization and the many cultures and sub-cultures that presumably resist its impact seems crude at best for the purpose of differentiating one society from another--Turkey, for example, as compared to Jordan or the Sudan. A better and more useful division is more likely to be found between groups, or between individuals. For example, a Samoan engineer who reads Shakespeare and Nietzsche, enjoys listening to Chopin, and keeps his religious doubts to himself might rate far higher as being civilized than an American sales representative who is entirely orthodox in his religious and patriotic beliefs and who devotes a large portion of his spare time to watching action movies and sports events on television. Both participate in western civilization, but the Samoan engineer would be closer to the cutting edge. Then again, the division between culture and civilization can be refined to differentiate tendencies inside the minds of individuals--for example Hitler, who used military technology to rebuild the German economy (both of which are features of civilization) by taking advantage of the public media (again a feature of civilization) to promote a regressive reassertion of cultural identity--Deutschland uber alles. Today, a large variety of quasi-fascist nationalist movements are likewise stressing their cultural identity, and for these, too, it seems possible to differentiate their use of civilization from the chauvinistic ends they pursue. But the division between culture and civilization can be recognized to penetrate every level of our identity (for example rock music's dependence on electronics, the use of television to watch formulaic movies, etc.) and may be finally perceived as a struggle between belief and skepticism, between inertia and change, between dumb habit and potential achievement.

So Morgan was correct that the process of civilization has been a "slow accumulation of experimental knowledge," if with greater accleration than Morgan realized, and Tylor was correct that it has been a "gradual development from an earlier, simpler, and ruder state of life." These particular truths survive the critique of Boas and his epigones, because they just happen to be true--in fact, blatantly obvious as documented by everything to be found in our museums, libraries and concert halls pertaining to the advancement of civilization to the level we enjoy today. Only through sheer wrong-headedness instilled with academic respectability can anybody claim otherwise. Granted, the current celebration of multi-culturalism can itself be treated as the most recent of the intellectual battlefields for our civilization, and, indeed, multicultural fiction can be explored and appreciated on this account both as a manifestation of culture and as civilization's latest preoccupation at the cutting edge. But it would be a terrible mistake to rank this experience higher than it deserves with the argument that it represents a basic cultural alternative to the entire process of civilization and all its previous battlefields, so that everything else can be ignored on the assumption that one's ample knowledge of primitive culture preempts the need to come to grips with civilization itself. No such easy solution presents itself. And in fact cultural diversity's moment of glory should also be judged relevant to its critique by others, for example Jacques Barzun's judgment that such current trends represent a "falling off" in civilization and that we might well be in the final stages of decline resulting from "the great emancipation promoted in the eighteenth century." 21 One needn't agree with Barzun's effort to blame the French Enlightenment for the falling off he describes to share his concern that, whatever the cause, something of the sort has been happening.

It is important to recognize that this compensatory enthusiasm is taking place exactly at the same time as the precipitous decline and fall of non-western societies celebrated for their diversity. For only western nations and non-western societies dependent on their business are doing well at this point--the rest are steadily falling into desperate levels of poverty. Contrary to multicultural aspirations, westernization's historic momentum continues to dominate our lives, since all of us in one way or another are both living and being devoured by the dislocations it imposes. This is not to say that alternative cultures have little to offer, or that what they offer is unworthy of study, but their appropriate study today, if relevant to future trends, should necessarily take into account their inadequacy relevant to the challenge posed by Eurocentric civilization both as a military threat and as a competitive social and economic system. Large numbers who live in non-western societies know what is happening, and many of them vote with their feet by migrating into the western nations and seeking full citizenship as soon as possible. For to paraphrase Stanley Fish (if relevant to a different issue), western civilization happens to be the only game in town--a bad game perhaps, but the only one that kept most of us at the table.

1. Lewis H. Morgan, Man and Society, ed. by Leslie A. White (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 12.

2. Edward B. Tylor, Anthropology (London, 1881), p. 20.

3. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1918); Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922), and The Revolt Against Civilization (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922); Ellsworth Huntington, Civilization and Climate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1915). A useful treatment of Boas's reaction against these and other evolutionists (though Huntington is inexplicably excluded from the discussion) may be found in the first four chapters of Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1984), pp. 3-61.

4. Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1968), p. 297.

5. Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man, rev. ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press), p. 17.

6. Harris, p. 292.

7. A. L. Kroeber, "The History and Present Orientation of Cultural Anthropology," in A. L. Kroeber, The Nature of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 146.

8."Review of R. H. Lowie's Culture and Ethnology," American Anthropologist, (1918) 20:87-91--quoted by Marvin Harris in The Rise of Anthropological Theory, pp. 293-94.

9. Harris, pp. 639-40.

10. Leslie A. White, The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1959).

11. Leslie A. White, The Ethnography and Ethnology of Franz Boas (Austin Texas: Bulletin Number 6 of the Texas Memorial Museum, April, 1963).

12. I discuss this double negative--the denial that denial is occurring--as an example of Negationsnegierung in chap. 7 of my book, Negative Poetics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992).

13. Clifford Geertz, "Anti Anti-Relativism," American Anthropologist, 86 (1984): 263-78.

14. See Leslie White, The Evolution of Culture, pp. 33-57; A. L. Kroeber, "Reality Culture and Value Culture," in The Nature of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 154-56; and Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 91-99. Tainter's analysis applies to the collapse of civilization, but it may easily be reversed to apply to the earlier process of growth. The many other theories of collapse surveyed by Tainter may also be reversed in this fashion.

15. Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd: 1948), p. 161.

16. Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown, "Religion and Society," in Structure and Function in Primitive Society (New York: The Free Press, 1952), pp. 153-77.

17. Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher (New York: Dover Publications, 1957), pp. 375-84. In Islam in Practice: Religious Beliefs in a Persian Village, by Reinhold Loeffler (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1988), chap. 14 is devoted to an interview with a "doubtful" (hence skeptical) man in a small village, but his doubts are very obviously limited to what he considers to be inappropriate interpretations of Islamic religion.

18. E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XXXV, 5, 1961).

19. A letter to Galsworthy, cited by Robert Penn Warren in "The Great Mirage," New and Selected Essays (New York: Random House, 1989), p. 152.

20. Paul Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 1993).

21. Jacques Barzun, "Toward the Twenty-First Century," in The Culture We Deserve (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), pp. 163, 167.