One ideal of early anthropology
was that long-term ethnographic research could fully map the social structure
and meanings of a specific cultural space. The ethnographer could then give total
context for any individual action or social practice, and thus interpret such with
a capacity beyond either naïve outsider or self-interested insider. While the
realism of this ideal would be progressively deconstructed over time, it spawned
a durable holism that recognized the deep interconnection of
all material and symbolic contexts.
This holistic aspiration has been
recurrently challenged as anthropologists came to recognize the often global
interconnections and engagements which permeated the presumed isolation of even
“remote” cultural spaces. Anthropology turned to increasingly complex social
theories to try and reconcile the way in which its empirical subject became unmoored
from static spaces and times, and eventually encompassed the most intensely internationalized
settings. As a result great concern emerged for the practice of interpretation far
removed from the methodological confidence of anthropology’s pioneering works.
And the treacherous pitfalls of writing across stark asymmetries in power, often about
people unable to equally represent themselves, even inspired claims that modern anthropology
had paralyzed itself through a fetishization of the personal act of writing
itself.
It is much more difficult to
delineate the general trend of history as discipline, even at this high level
of generality. Certainly, interpretation is at the core of archival research,
and debates over sources and their meanings have roiled history as an academic
practice. No self-critical historian treats their textual sources as a direct
portal into the soul of their subject, and the focus of much graduate
historical training is the general education required to provide context for documentary interpretation.
But I would advance that the
anthropological engagement with history reflects a much greater uncertainty
about interpretation, as well as a general theoretical concern with how time
itself is structured as a social practice. In my own turn from ethnography to
history, I felt this disciplinary anxiety acutely as I tried to
reconstruct the creation of a cultural ideology, what I call American legal
internationalism, that was formed in spaces both fully transnational and only
lightly touched by global forces. Moreover, this ideology was premised on
cross-cultural interpretations of the character of foreign peoples and their legal
institutions. A further complication was that the driving force of this
ideology was literal lawyer-missionaries who carried with them a presumption
that their own good intentions would positively impact another society.
One highly influential book in my
process of wrestling with these issues was Fredrik Barth’s Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, which theorized about how social identities were formed and
reformed through increasingly intense interactions with social “outsiders.” Moreover,
in the context of law such cross-cultural judgments had been central to
patterns of degradation and subjection in pre-modern empires and modern
imperialism alike. This trepidation led me to the writings of the recently
passed Tzvetan Todorov, who in his The Morals of History grappled with the
ethics of practicing history, especially when intimately tied to cross-cultural
engagements.
No episode in the development of
historical anthropology outlines these tensions better than the controversy
over the arrival and death of James Cook in Hawai’i . In barest form, Cook arrived in Hawai’i for the third
time in 1779 during the indigenous Hawaiians celebration of the god Lono. A
month later, Cook was killed while attempting to take the local king ransom,
and then ritually preserved. The details in-between and their meaning became
the grist for one of the public controversies in modern anthropology between
Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere.
I read Sahlins alongside Paul Cohen’s seminal Discovering History in China,
which was part of a foundational reframing of the Sino-Western encounter from
one where Chinese society was a passive recipient of outside influence to a
proactive interpreter. Cohen’s intervention helped me reject a great many of
the popular narratives of Sino-American history, but also made me realize that unearthing
the subjective world of those whose writings I was interpreting in the was the
critical link missing from so many debates on the structure and causalities of
Sino-American legal interaction.
Yet, the renewed confidence I
drew from these works was the very object of criticism advanced by Gananath
Obeyesekere in his 1992 assault on Sahlin’s work, The Apotheosis of CaptainCook. The crux of Obeyesekere’s argument is that Sahlin’s was destructively
mistaken in his view that the Hawaiians considered Cook a manifestation of the
God Lono. Obeyesekere argued
that all people, regardless of cultural context, deployed a “practical
rationality” which would never have conflated Cook with a deity. Further, Obeyesekere
argued that his experience as a post-colonial Sri Lankan rendered him immune to
implicit ethnocentrism which infected Sahlin’s interpretation of the relevant
archival sources.
Sahlins responded to Obeyesekere’s
critique in his 1995 How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, For Example,
where he reasserted that his work was meant to deconstruct cultural myths, and
that he could do so even as anoutsider to Hawai’i . These books inspired a series of
well known review essays, most notably culminating in Clifford Geertz’s piece “Culture War.”
I will set aside the finer details
of this debate to emphasis that Geertz’s title revealed how the resonance of
debate was never centrally tied to the archival evidence per se, but to the authority of
various positions of interpretation. The archival basis for decisively
concluding what the Hawaiians did or did not think of Cook, or even if there
was a single indigenous position on the matter, is still thin and drawn
primarily (for both sides) from the journals of Cook’s sailors. As an empirical
matter, the issue of deifying foreigners has precedents elsewhere, some of
which were highly inflected by notions of European superiority. At the same
time, the critical study of “cargo cults” by make clear that
magical reasoning is not a practice reserved solely for pre-modern peoples. But the meaning of such episodes, and often the very real contemporary implications of these meanings,
was deemed by many anthropologists more important than the truth of the past. A
position far less common, I would argue, among historians.
In my own work, I struggled with the
fact that I had a decided interest in the truth of what impacts did or did not
arise from the subjective intentions of my lawyer-missionaries and
missionary-lawyers. However, I also came to realize that the cultural ideology
of American legal internationalism was in fact grounded almost purely in the
interpretation of their actions back in the United States . It was not
surprising for me to learn that American missionaries to Hawai’i specifically criticized narratives
of Cook’s deification in their own anti-British self-presentation as
noncolonial agents. Similarly, the fact that the American common law had little
discernible impact on Chinese legal institutions and practices before 1949 was
almost completely orthogonal to the maintenance of the idea for the broad
American public that the Chinese people were consensually emulating the
American legal and political example.
Perhaps this context made some of
my interpretive confidence easier, as I was writing about relatively powerful
actors in relationship to their home society, and my own home society at that. Anthropologists
continue to struggle with the complexity of understanding and writing about
transnational spaces, especially when so few places are genuinely isolated from
globalization. The flipside of this is the increasingly wide access to contemporary
and archival sources of writings on Western societies by outsiders. Laura Nader’s
recent What the Rest Think of the West: Since 600 AD, is a collection of such accounts. Included is the telling account of Liang Qichao, seminal Chinese
intellectual and reformer, upon his visit to the United
States and realization that American
legal practice was far removed from its missionary presentation in china. In summary terms, and an
argument I will return to a later post, the Sino-American encounter was never
resolved so decidedly in the favor of American actors.
All of which returns me to the idea that empathy is central
to interpretation, archival or ethnographic. I have to admit I do not see
this as a purely humanistic enterprise, but one that is productive in the
scientific sense. Still, understanding the subjective intent of an author is still a far cry from understanding the impact of their writings, or actions, in the wider world. In this way, the holistic ideal of anthropology drives both the direction
and self-criticism I feel when I engage with archival sources. I find this especially
so in legal history, where so many actors produce documents through acts of
highly strategic and self-aware self-representation, and have the ability to both
consume and respond to contemporary challenges to their work. I felt this many
times in the development of my extended case studies of Frank Goodnow and
Roscoe Pound, where prior studies took too narrow of view of their social
worlds, or too strictly interpreted their writings as true representations of
their inner thoughts. Perhaps this is why biography is still so popular in
legal history, as it is the antithesis of the often motivated interpretation
found in moments of legal practice and scholarship.
Ultimately, I feel much of the anthropological questioning
has, for myself, been salutary. Wherever anthropology may go as it struggles
with its own academic practice, I see much of legal history increasingly embracing
the explanatory power of social and cultural history which anthropological
theory informed/informs. But as I contrasted some of my own conclusions with
the differences or omissions in the extant histories of American
internationalism, legal or otherwise, I came to see many of the same issues
recurrent. A lack of contextualizing legal sources, especially elite legal
sources, within broader social history – commonly paired with a singular view
of legal actors through their roles in legal institutions.
It is this question of differences and omissions that I will
address in my next post, “Functionalism and Synthetic History.” As I had a very
specific question in mind when I wrote Futility, and a decidedly not
post-modern desire to tell a causal story, my history ended up looking into arenas
generally unsynthesized with legal history, such as religious history, or
over-synthesized, such as diplomatic history.
