When one turns to art these issues become, if anything, even more pointed, for the debate over whether it is an applicable category in “non-Western” or “pre-Modern” contexts has, even when compared to similar debates concerning “religion,” “science,” “ideology,” or “law,” been peculiarly unrelenting. It has also been peculiarly unproductive. Whatever you want to call a cave wall crowded with overlapping images of transfixed animals, a temple tower shaped to a phallus, a feathered shield, a calligraphic scroll, or a tattooed face, you still have the phenomenon to deal with, as well as perhaps the sense that to add kula exchange or the Domesday Book would be to spoil the series. The question is not whether art (or anything else) is universal; it is whether one can talk about West African carving, New Guinea palm-leaf painting, quattrocento picture making, and Moroccan versifying in such a way as to cause them to shed some sort of light on one another.
The essay in which I tried to do exactly this, “Art as a Cultural System,” was delivered at Johns Hopkins University as part of a wildly multidiscipli-nary symposium—Maurice Mandlebaum, Paul de Man, and Alan Dundes to Umberto Eco, Thomas Sebeok, and Roman Jakobson—on “semiotics” (the occasion being a commemoration of Charles Peirce, whom the University had at one time fired), with the result that I was almost as much concerned with how not to talk about such things—in terms of some sort of mechanical formalism—as I was with developing my own approach. In particular, the identification of semiotics, in the general sense of the science of signs, with structuralism seemed to me important to resist. (Structuralism, as a sort of high-tech rationalism, seems to me important to resist in general.) And so I employed my cases—Robert Fans Thompson’s analysis of Yoruba line, Anthony Forge’s of Abelam color, Michael Baxandall’s of Renaissance composition, and my own of Moroccan rhetoric—to suggest that the social contextualization of such “signifiers” is a more useful way to comprehend how they signify, and what, than is forcing them into schematic paradigms or stripping them down to abstract rule systems that supposedly “generate” them. What enables us to talk about them usefully together is that they all inscribe a communal sensibility, present locally to locals a local turn of mind.
Like common sense—or religion or law or even, though it is, given our predilections, a touchier matter, science—art is neither some transcendent phenomenon variously disguised in different cultures nor a notion so thoroughly culture-bound as to be useless beyond Europe. Not only Sweeney’s Law (“I gotta use words when I talk to ya”) but the simple fact that thinking of Noh plays and operas, or Shalako and L’Oiseau de feut in relation to one another seems a more profitable thing to do than to think of any of them in relation to canoe building or the Code Civil (though, remembering Zen and motorcycle maintenance, one ought not to be too sure) suggest that radical culturalism will get us nowhere. And the impossibility of collapsing these so very different things into one another at any but the most abstract, and vacuous, levels—“objects of beauty,” “affective presences,” “expressive forms”—suggests that a universalist tack is hardly more promising. The reshaping of categories (ours and other people’s—think of “taboo”) so that they can reach beyond the contexts in which they originally arose and took their meaning so as to locate affinities and mark differences is a great part of what “translation” comes to in anthropology. It is—think of what it has done to “family,” “caste,” “market,” or “state”—a great part of what anthropology comes to.
The following essay, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma,” written for a volume honoring the theoretical sociologist Edward Shils, focuses on one such usefully tortured category—along with “alienation,” “ego,” “anomie,” and, of course, “culture,” among the most useful and the most tortured in all social science—namely, “charisma.” Originally charisma was a Christian theological term having to do with a God-given capacity to perform miracles; later it was adapted by Max Weber as a label for the I-Am-The-Man type of leadership grown all too familiar in our century. Most recently, however, an excessive currency has obscured its genealogy and taken the political edge off it almost altogether, transforming it into an up-market synonym for celebrity, popularity, glamour, or sex appeal. In “Centers” I attempt to restore both the genealogy and the edge by comparing royal progresses in more or less Protestant late-Tudor England, more or less Hindu late-Majapahit Java, and more or less Muslim late-Alawite Morocco.
The juxtaposition of Elizabeth’s tours through her realm as an allegorical representation of Chastity, Peace, or Safety at Sea, Hayam Wuruk’s parades through his as the incarnation of the Sun and the Moon Shining Over the Earth-Circle, and Mulay Hasan’s expeditions through his as the material expression of Divine Will seeks, like the similarly eccentric juxtapositions in the earlier essays, to attain what generality it can by orchestrating contrasts rather than isolating regularities or abstracting types. It is analogy that informs, or is supposed to, in this sort of anthropologizing, and it is upon the capacity of theoretical ideas to set up effective analogies that their value depends. And it is this kind of analogy between, here, the cult of a Virgin Queen, of a God King, and of a Commander of the Faithful, that the concept of charisma, training our attention on the witchery of power, enables us to construct.
All this is perhaps acceptable enough for traditional monarchies, where the symbolics of domination are so elaborate and egregious; whether extending the comparison to modern states, as I do in a rather hurried and anecdotal conclusion, strains the analogy beyond reasonable bounds is a more difficult question. One may doubt that high politics have been completely demystified in such states, even that they ever will be. But the general issue that is raised by considering the matter against so panoramic a comparative background—how far a mode of analysis designed to apply to the long ago or far away can be applied to ourselves—nevertheless remains. The De Voto Problem is all too real: what, save impressionism and self-parody, plus a certain amount of ideological axe grinding, might come from anthropological discussions of modern culture?
In the final two essays—or, more accurately, an essay and a three-part mini-treatise—I turn to this problem. “The Way We Think Now” was originally given as a bicentennial address to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences under the general theme “Unity and Diversity: The Life of the Mind,” as a sort of dialectical counterpoint to one given by the artificial intelligencer Herbert Simon. Taking the charge to heart this time, and thinking about what Simon would be likely to say, I distinguished between two reasonably different approaches to the study of human “thought” currently in vogue: a unific one, which conceives of it as a psychological process, person-bounded and law governed, and a pluralistic one, which conceives of it as a collective product, culturally coded and historically constructed—thought in the head, thought in the world. Rather than trying to adjudicate between them (in their radical forms—Chomsky and Whorf—neither seems especially plausible), I first traced the tension between them as it developed in anthropology—“primitive thought,” “conceptual relativism,” and all that—to become a driving, and often enough a distorting, force in ethnological theory. Then, turning again to notions of interpretation, translation, disarrayed genres, and analogic comparison, I sought to show that the enormous diversity of modern thought as we in fact find it around us in every form from poems to equations must be acknowledged if we are to understand anything at all about the Life of the Mind, and that this can be accomplished without prejudice to the idea that human thinking has its own constraints and its own constancies.
To do this, to produce a description of modern thought that can account for the fact that such assorted enterprises as herpetology, kinship theory, fiction writing, psychoanalysis, differential topology, fluid dynamics, iconol-ogy, and econometrics can form for us any category at all, it is necessary to see them as social activities in a social world. The various disciplines and quasi-disciplines