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From Anthropology to Social Theory

Presenting a ground-breaking revitalisation of contemporary social theory,

this book revisits the rise of the modern world to reopen the dialogue between
anthropology and sociology. Using concepts developed by a series of ‘maver-
ick’ anthropologists who were systematically marginalised as their ideas fell
outside the standard academic canon, such as Arnold van Gennep, Marcel
Mauss, Paul Radin, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Gregory Bateson, the authors
argue that such concepts are necessary for understanding better the rise and
dynamics of the modern world, including the development of the social
sciences, in particular sociology and anthropology. Concepts discussed
include liminality, imitation, schismogenesis and trickster, which provide an
anthropological ‘toolkit’ for readers to develop innovative understandings of
the underlying power mechanisms of globalised modernity. Aimed at gradu-
ate students and researchers, the book is clearly structured. Part I introduces
the ‘maverick’ anthropologists, while Part II applies the maverick tool-kit to
revisit the history of sociological thought and the question of modernity.

arpad szakolczai is Professor of Sociology at University College Cork.

His recent books include Comedy and the Public Sphere (2013), Permanent
Liminality and Modernity (2017), and Walking into the Void: A Historical
Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking (with Agnes Horvath,
2018).
bjørn thomassen is Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and
Business at Roskilde Universitet, Denmark. His book Liminality and the
Modern: Living Through the In-Between (2014) paved the way for novel
understandings and applications of the liminality concept.
From Anthropology to Social
Theory
Rethinking the Social Sciences

Arpad Szakolczai
University College Cork, Ireland

Bjørn Thomassen
Roskilde Universitet, Denmark
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108423809
DOI: 10.1017/9781108529426
© Arpad Szakolczai and Bjorn Thomassen 2019
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2019
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-108-42380-9 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-108-43838-4 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

Introduction: Rethinking Social Theory with Anthropology page 1

Part I Maverick Anthropologists 21

1 Arnold van Gennep: Liminal Rites and the Rhythms of Life 23
2 Gabriel Tarde and René Girard: Imitation and the Foundations of
Social Life 44
3 Marcel Mauss: From Sacrifice to Gift-Giving or Revisiting
Foundations 65
4 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Colin Turnbull: Participation, Experience
and Home 90
5 Paul Radin: The Trickster 124
6 Gregory Bateson and Johan Huizinga: Schismogenesis and Play 150
7 Victor Turner: Liminal Experiences as the Grounding of Social
Theory 176

Part II Rethinking Modernity and Its Sociology 197

8 A Reflexive Political Anthropology of Sociology 199
9 A Reflexive Political Anthropology of Modernity 230
Conclusion 256

References 261
Index 279

v
 Introduction
Rethinking Social Theory with Anthropology

In this book we wish to reopen the dialogue between anthropology and social
theory. We aim to revitalise the social sciences by renewing social theory
through anthropology. So do we pretend to offer another fresh start? Another
unprecedented effort to question all received wisdom? Another new and
improved social theory? This is not really our intention; or, rather, this is just
what we would not like to do. Our aim is rather the opposite: to problematise
the very idea of generating a radical break, the urge to escape current problems
in thinking by running further forward. Instead, we suggest a renewal of
thinking by explicitly calling for a look backward, and a return to the basics
via concepts developed by a series of ‘maverick anthropologists’ to be dis-
cussed in the following chapters. Such concepts, we argue, are helpful or even
necessary for understanding better the rise and the dynamics of the modern
world, including the development of the social sciences, in particular sociology
and anthropology.
But in what exact ways can anthropology contribute towards social
theory that have not already been explored? Has not everything been said
that needs to be said? Alas, no. For sure, in the post-war period social
theory drew much inspiration from anthropological and linguistic theories
that came to underpin the structuralist paradigm, much via the work of
Lévi-Strauss. The inspiration continued most directly via Bourdieu’s
famous critique of structuralism, leading to a process approach (Bourdieu
1977). During the 1960s and ’70s anthropology had itself become deeply
influenced by theoretical currents developed elsewhere in the social
sciences, as in psychological approaches, neo-Marxism and world system
theory. From the 1980s anthropology went through a long period of self-
reflexivity and ‘crisis of representation’, in some cases leading to a com-
plete abandoning of the very idea of theorising. This went alongside a long
and sustained critique of ‘classical’ or ‘traditional’ anthropology and its
alleged lack of ‘reflexivity’. It also – once again – involved a search for
inspiration from outside the discipline, which now came mostly from
(literary) deconstructivism, postmodernism in philosophy and various
branches of critical theory.

1
2 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

Taken together, these developments still seem to frame the current situation,
where possible dialogues between anthropology and social theory mostly
became restrained to questions of methodology: anthropology and the ‘ethno-
graphic method’ (used by almost everyone in the social sciences today) repre-
sents a ‘view from below’ or through the prism of the ‘other’ and a concern
with meaning-formation, subjectivity and practice. It is this view that, for
example, sustains the argument in Ortner’s (2006) book, Anthropology and
Social Theory. Anthropology can provide the kind of ‘thick description’ that no
one else can offer.
The elevated status of anthropology within the social sciences has led to very
little engagement with the theoretical luggage and the history of concept
formation that emerged from within the discipline of anthropology, from its
early beginnings up through the twentieth century. We wish to turn this
perception on its head: the ‘anthropological method’ based on participation
and direct and sustained human interaction was indeed never just an anthro-
pological privilege, but belongs just as much to sociology (as evident in the
work of Simmel or Tarde and the Chicago school of sociology) and to the wider
interpretative social sciences inspired by experiential methodologies, from
Dilthey onwards (Rabinow and Sullivan 1987). The fieldwork approach is no
secret mystery; it belongs to everyone, and anthropologists need not worry so
much about it. At the same time, and contrary to common wisdom, anthropol-
ogy has much to offer exactly as concerns theory formation. It is our argument
that anthropological insights represent conceptual and theoretical perspectives
of fundamental relevance to social theory, perspectives which have so far
remained peripheral to the dialogue between anthropology and social theory,
but even within the history of anthropology and anthropological theory itself.
The need to revitalise the social sciences, and in particular social theory,
implies that there is something wrong with it. In our view there is indeed
something quite seriously, fundamentally and even foundationally wrong
with social theory, even with the very idea of a social ‘science’, as it came to
be understood, much connected to the academic institutionalisation of the
social sciences. Without going into detail, let us indicate the nature of the
problems we are facing, in order then to situate what this book tries to put on
offer.

The State of the Art in Social Theory

In order to indicate what is wrong today with social theory, let us cast a quick
look at the ‘manifesto’ or ‘mission statement’ of contemporary social theory
through the 2017 Sociology Catalogue by Polity Press. It might seem an
anecdotal entry to the debate, but the catalogue is indeed a paradigmatic
example of the current state of affairs. The authors represented, and their
 Introduction: Rethinking Social Theory with Anthropology 3

main ideas, are the ones that fill the pages of our textbooks and social theory
course syllabi around the world. Polity was established in 1984 by Anthony
Giddens, one of the central figures of sociology and social theory for almost
half a century and the first professor of sociology in Cambridge. After the first
few pages devoted to textbooks, pp. 5–19 of the 50-page catalogue are devoted
to social theory, including new books by some of the most influential social
theorists over the last couple of decades, presented as ‘new and improved’
theories.
These start by presenting, and prominently, the most problematic aspects of
our reality as the bright new future, offering hope. This is the message of the
very first entry, introducing a May 2017 book by Jeffrey Alexander, one of the
main figures of social theory for four decades, entitled The Drama of Social
Life. The central claim of Alexander is that it is wrong to argue that modernity
‘suppressed authenticity’, given that we as ‘social actors’ can indeed play and
perform social dramas (Sociology Catalogue: 5). As we shall see, Victor Turner
indeed invoked the notion of social drama, and the concept is certainly not
without potential. However, one genuine problem of our days, aggravated by
social media, is exactly the fact that we are constantly induced to ‘sponta-
neously’ playact in our everyday life (see Chapter 6 on play); but this is
presented, through a strange turn of the screw, as a liberating achievement by
Alexander. Calling for playing ‘dramas’ as a solution to a world, where 11–13-
year-old kids wired to social media call the turbulences caused by risky online
behaviour ‘dramas’, courts irresponsibility.
The catalogue continues with a sheer celebration of nihilism, irony and the
void. An example is a new book by Lacan, in which the celebrated postmodern
post-Freudian star ‘amuses himself, improvises, and lets himself go’
(Sociology Catalogue: 13). Such a mode of behaving is appropriate for a
Commedia dell’arte actor, except that even they practised hard to look relaxed
– but this is the wrong way to pursue for a serious academic, especially if these
talks are given in the Sainte-Anne hospital, a mental asylum where Michel
Foucault also worked as an intern – and who would never have given seminars
by ‘letting himself go’, especially not there. A similarly thorough nihilism
exudes from a new book of Alain Badiou, Black, and its celebrating the void, or
‘pitch dark’, by taking the readers ‘on a trip through the private theatre of his
mind’, combining ‘[m]usic, painting, politics, sex, and metaphysics’, and in
this way making black, or the (non-)colour of the void, ‘more luminous than it
has ever been’ (15).
Such flirting with the ‘public sphere’ through theatricality and the void, two
closely connected non-things, mostly serves to produce a smoke to hide the
frightening emptiness and lack of originality behind the ‘new’ entries. Thus, on
the second page of the social theory section, Slavoj Žižek boldly raises the flag
of ‘back to Marx’, confidently proclaiming that through a ‘fresh, radical
4 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

reinterpretation of Marxism’ we can meet the challenges of the day, thus ‘lay
[ing] the foundations for a new emancipatory politics’ (Sociology Catalogue:
6). Is this really what we need today? Another widely acclaimed contemporary
social theorist, Axel Honneth, even manages to surpass this, by offering us
nothing else than The Idea of Socialism (11) as a means of redemption. In her
blurb Judith Butler acts a willing cheerleader: through the book Honneth
‘makes a unique and compelling case for renewing the utopian impulse of the
early Marx in the context of the present’, demonstrating nothing less than ‘how
the ideal of socialism can orient our thought and action in the contemporary
political world’.
The rejuvenated revolutionary impulse is combined with the inciting of the
young, luring them – here again with Badiou, but now with his The True Life –
into the belief that they, the youth, stand ‘on the brink of a new world’; they thus
need not feel ‘constrained by the old prejudices and hierarchical ideas of the
past’, need not follow the ‘paths already mapped out to them’; rather, they can
truly ‘create something new’ and ‘propose a different direction’ (Sociology
Catalogue: 15). One should only go out on a Thursday night in any university
town, and find out for oneself exactly how much our ‘youth’ needs courageous
and frank advice about not being ‘condemned to obey social customs’ – unless
by ‘social customs’ Badiou means binge drinking and mindless sex; but his
other entry, Black, published just a few months before, had already shown that
this is likely not what he had in mind. But there is a world outside university
students, though avant-garde intellectuals, rarely having children, hardly know
about it. Young teenagers, way before being 15, not to say 18, are not simply on
the brink but fully inside a ‘brave new world’, with smartphones giving them
infinite access to visual sex, even online dating, not simply as a possibility
but, even worse, as a new norm by peer-group pressure – with predictable
consequences for maturation and mental health.
Apart from Marx, socialism, theatrical play and sex, the vanguard theoreti-
cians unsurprisingly return to critique as a way to solve the crisis and saveguard
democracy, autonomy and freedom (Sociology Catalogue: 5–6, 14). This is an
omnipresent concern, and it almost seems to go without saying that we must
cherish such values. But exactly this concern has repeatedly proven mean-
ingless, if not positively counterproductive, and just like Marxism, points
towards a problem to tackle rather than a value to cherish.
The value of critique is reasserted, together with polemics, by Lacan
(Sociology Catalogue: 13) – two activities that Foucault found problematic
decades ago, much connected to Foucault’s problematisation of our Marxist
and Freudian legacies. As if to make up for this, Polity offers another attempt at
erasing, denigrating and intellectually besmirching Foucault, in a book outright
associating him with neoliberalism, posing the innocent-looking question
‘Could Foucault have been seduced by neoliberalism?’ (12). The question
 Introduction: Rethinking Social Theory with Anthropology 5

hardly makes any sense, as neoliberalism in the sense in which we understand it

today is a phenomenon that came to dominance in the 1990s, while Foucault
died in 1984; and whatever he could have meant by neoliberalism in his 1979
lectures cannot be judged as if it meant the same thing as for us today.1
Having lost the spirit of Foucault, we can quickly move beyond him. Thus in
May 2017 we are offered another set of essays by Habermas, entitled
Postmetaphysical Thinking II (Sociology Catalogue: 10). After post-industri-
alism, post-materialism, post-modernism, post-Fordism and post-secularism,
to name only a few,2 one would think only a new titan from the end of the world
would come up with another ‘post’ term. Jürgen Habermas, in person, pro-
claimed on the same page by Ronald Dworkin ‘the world’s most famous living
philosopher’ is ready to blow our mind off with a stunning peace of originality,
arguing that the real answer to ‘the crisis of metaphysics’ is in ‘“postmetaphy-
sical thinking”’ – a statement that gives new depth to tautological reasoning;
just before making us privy to the earth-shaking admission that ‘philosophy
does not have a privileged access to the truth’ (10).
Another recent book by Habermas, The Lure of Technocracy (Sociology
Catalogue: 10), claims to offer EU leaders ‘a way out of the current economic
and political crisis, should they choose to follow it’. It takes quite some guts to
pretend to be able to solve such questions from a philosophical armchair
position. The cover image of the book is quite revealing here, as the fingers
of a hand, moving with strings the stars below, were probably conceived for the
EU leaders trying to manipulate member countries; but it can easily be applied
to the pretence of Habermas, a would-be philosopher-king, trying to pull the
strings by which the ‘stars’, or the leaders, of the EU can be moved – though in
Plato’s Laws (644D-5C) it was the demiurge who was moving humans as
puppets, on a golden string, and not the ‘philosopher-king’.
The most problematic but also most telling aspect of what the catalogue puts
on offer is how its flagship figures pretend to stand above the common lot of
mankind, recycling standard claims about ‘populism’ and ‘conservativism’,
recalling university managers who cannot stop talking about how ordinary
academics are ‘conservative’, meaning that they keep wanting to read and
write books and teach students, instead of jumping onto the bandwagon of
the more and more recent innovations championed by PR, HR and IT offices.
Thus, we are facing The Great Regression, argue a series of thinkers in a new
edited collection, including, among others, Arjun Appadurai, Nancy Fraser,
Donatella della Porta and Slavoj Žižek (how could he be left out?). Thus, the
same vanguard intellectuals who with their one hand extol the ‘people’, alpha
1
Evidently enough, Foucault basically meant the German ‘mixed economy’ of the immediate
post–World War II period.
2
There was even a conference held in Amsterdam entitled ‘The Post prefixes’, 31 August–1
September 2017.
6 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

and omega of political life in principle, with their other hand deprecate them as
just another bunch of xenophobic nationalists, making an ‘unprecedented
assault on the liberal values and ideals associated with cosmopolitanism and
globalisation’ (Sociology Catalogue: 6). Would the real people please stand up!
In fact, they are already standing, and in various ways – though, we should say,
they would be much better walking (Horvath and Szakolczai 2018a); except
when they sit in front of the television, listening to various modes of liberal and
cosmopolitan brainwashing; or, even worse, when they change the channel and,
adding insult to injury, become captivated by anti-liberal anti-cosmopolitan
brainwashing. Welcome to the ‘cacophony of critique’ (Boland 2018).
It is sad to notice, given the importance of his previous works and the esteem
we had towards him as a person, that Zygmunt Bauman takes up a prominent
place in illustrating what is problematic with social theory. To begin with, p. 9
contains six books by him, five of which were published between February
2016 and January 2017 (he died on 9 January 2017). Two of the books belong to
the ‘liquid’ series, a term which has its own importance, as a modality of
liminality, a term Bauman helped to bring into sociology; the ‘liquidity’,
however, which was supposed to identify a problem or a challenge, has
increasingly become not simply a slogan, but a justification of the present as
void of stable reference points, resigning to the inevitability of a development
which eliminates the very possibility of a meaningful life – offering further
support for social engineering.
Thus, in Babel, it is claimed that the very values and principles that guided
‘our behaviour and our lifestyles’ so far ‘must be radically revised because they
no longer seem suited to our experience of a world of flux’ (Sociology
Catalogue: 9). But what principles and modes of behaviour is Bauman talking
about? Of the ‘modern’, in contrast to the ‘postmodern’, or the ‘fluid-modern’?
We have to escape the values of the ‘previous’ modernity, as the ‘new’
modernity requires something else, always something ‘new’ and ‘improved’?
Or – and this is the more likely and sinister element of the idea – ‘we’ have to
give up more and more of what we always believed in, and respected, as
fundamental features of any meaningful existence, because they are no longer
compatible with the ever new manias of modernity; old-fashioned and unten-
able ideas, such as doing something meaningful, and not being resigned to the
idea that the horizon for our children is that, with a bit of luck, they can obtain a
zero-hour contract in a call centre?
Thus, the only meaningful answer to this ‘modernity without restraint’
(Voegelin 2000) is to measure it up to something stable, which inevitably
includes a respect for the past – not some kind of idealisation of a definite
past as an unattainable golden age, but standing firm against the winds of
change and looking for measure, meaning and sober judgment in something
concrete. Unfortunately, this is exactly what Bauman explicitly rejects, in his
 Introduction: Rethinking Social Theory with Anthropology 7

last, sole-authored, and thus inevitably testament-like book, Retrotopia, which

is a bashing of the past as comparable to utopian thinking. What Bauman fails
to consider is that the past actually is. Whatever happened and existed always
remains present, and it is this presence that cannot be liquefied and thus
liquidated, as it remains stable forever. This was the great teaching of the
communist experience: that people simply refused to accept the wholesale
destruction of their past by the regime, no matter what its promises were. It is
revealing that in autumn 1989, when things were not yet fully decided, the
collapse of the Ceausescu regime in Romania was sparked by the effort of the
communist authorities to destroy some cemeteries in ethnic Hungarian areas.
While the much-suffering citizens so far had accepted or put up with everything
the communists did with their lives, they simply refused to accept the destruc-
tion of their dead. It is quite sad that Bauman, who really should have known
better, came to ignore this experience at the end of his long and productive life.
What Polity offers as social theory in 2017 is clearly a representative
collection. It indeed represents something, even simply presents it: the utopian
impulse of Marxism that can always be rejuvenated towards a finally realised
socialism, liquification of the past in a constantly faster-moving present, post-
meta-post ideologies, inciting youth with an invitation to transgress the thresh-
old into a brave new world loosened from restricting norms, a relentless
insisting on the Enlightenment values of autonomy and freedom to safeguard
our liberal democracy. This is indeed a catalogue; a sort of war damage report
of the most serious problems that plague our times. What we need is not a brand
new social theory, as any step forward from here would just exacerbate the
situation. We simply cannot go on like this. What we need is a proper stock-
taking of this cul de sac, and a reassertion of what went lost along the road.

Moving Behind the State of the Art

Let us stress it again: we are not claiming that ‘everything’ is wrong, requiring a
fresh start – an approach that in our reading is simply deprived of any meaning.
What we do claim is that certain highly problematic ideas and methods have
become systematically and deeply institutionalised at the heart of our disci-
plines. Without excising them thinking cannot move forward, but remains
blocked and disabled, repeating, like a broken disk, the same old clichés. A
basic impasse of thinking is perceptible not only in the social sciences; we only
have to mention the manner in which the same old commonplaces of liberalism,
socialism and nationalism are repeated, generation after generation, as pur-
ported solutions to the problems they themselves generated. This impasse, we
argue, can be traced back to the blockage of thinking that is characteristic of the
way the social sciences became institutionalised, a point to which we will
return in Chapter 8.
8 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

A crucial element of this impasse is indeed the obsession with the ‘new’, the
idea that somehow it is possible and desirable to cancel and get rid of the entire
past, everything that belongs to ‘tradition’, paving the way for a new arrange-
ment that offers, on the basis of a void and tabula rasa, a new social order of
free and equal ‘citizens’, moving forward together and forever, on the path of
progress and development, through the growth of knowledge and enlighten-
ment, sharing the benefits of science and technology through the free market
and the open public sphere, available actually or potentially to everyone – while
leaving this ‘potentiality’ open to interpretation.
This mentality is not just a marginal feature of some kind of utopianism, but
indeed the way mainstream modernity imagines and presents itself, since the
successive and mutually reinforcing stages of the scientific revolution, the
Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, Manchester
economics and so on. Social theory has, despite several rounds of reflexivity,
failed to gain the necessary distance to modernity.
The situation, actually, is even worse. Pointing out the problems with
‘modernity’ usually entails a critique of modernity, thus, paradoxically, indi-
cating another break, calling for a ‘new’ and ‘improved’ version of ‘critical
theory’.3 Such an idea, a version of ‘hyper-modernity’ (Szakolczai 2017a),
actually cements the case of modernity by proclaiming any dissent from the
permanent escape forward, into the ‘finally’ and ‘really’ new and redemptive,
as being conservative, reactionary, traditionalist and ultimately simply absurd,
as the benefits of modernity, again whether actual or potential, in terms of
increased knowledge, living standards, life expectancy, democratic openness
and so on, presumably or evidently simply cannot be called into question.
Let us be explicit here. We find the term ‘critical theory’, but even the very
idea of ‘thinking critically’, extremely problematic. Of course, we do not
propose to accept and never question any kind of intellectual dogmatism –
this whole book is a testimony against it. However, it takes quite a lot of effort
to be able to offer a ‘critical’ remark to any major thinker. Anthropology
students are to a striking extent taught to be ‘critical’ about existing approaches
in the social sciences and ‘critical’ indeed also with respect to previous
approaches within their own discipline. We are often quite struck how our
colleagues ask introductory sociology students to write a ‘critical essay’ about
Weber or Foucault, when they hardly have a clue what Weber or Foucault were
writing about. Often enough, what they really mean is to criticise these master
thinkers from the perspective of (sometimes openly ideological) positions they
have invited the students to engage in class. Simultaneously teaching our
students to be ‘self-critical’ is in a sense even worse, risking to produce a

3
On the paradox of critique, see Baehr (forthcoming), Boland (2013, 2018), Kilminster (2011) and
Szakolczai (2012).
 Introduction: Rethinking Social Theory with Anthropology 9

split mind, as one can hardly say something and be critical of it at the same
time. Genuine ‘self-criticism’ means what the thinkers discussed in this book
practised, returning over and again to their earlier ideas, not only polishing
them, but in an honestly searching manner, reflexively trying to move deeper
into the problem that animated their search.
However, ‘critical theory’ tries to do something more, and ultimately impos-
sible: to build an entire theory on the basis of a ‘critique’ – which, of course,
amounts to the old problem of Samson pulling himself by his own hair; or the
search for an Archimedean point of the universe. ‘Critical theory’, as the
history of German university philosophy shows, has often meant to attack
anybody outside your own ‘theoretical position’ in the name of an absolute
truth (whether transcendental or socio-politico-ideological), and at the same
time promote this position with the most ruthless possible political means,
betraying collegiality and even friendship, within the university hierarchy. The
Frankfurt school has created a legacy also in this sense. Of course, many
contemporary critical theorists openly express their hesitance towards univer-
sal values, but then insist on the belief that critique can expose repression and
social injustice and thereby help to make the world not a better but at the least a
‘less bad’ place to live. And who would not agree to critique injustice? And yet,
even such a starting point is problematic, as it works from a double negation:
the desire to eliminate something negative.
So, what do we mean by moving ‘behind’ the state of the art, as in a
backward movement? The task is not to resurrect a mode of living and thinking
that has disappeared, as this would certainly not make sense. It is, rather, to
return to the basics, to the fundamental concerns of human existence. In our
reading, this was what motivated the great, classic figures of sociology and
social theory, about a century ago: how such foundational issues must be re-
thought, given the challenge of modernity – given that modernity came to
challenge exactly such basic matters, the very tissue of meaningful social
existence. Far from simply running forward with modernity, in an unthinking
and unquestioning manner, the basics must be rethought anew; but this also
means that it cannot ignore or reject past thinking about such basics. Rather, it
must involve a joint rethinking and renewal of such modes of thinking without
reducing such an exercise to syncretic or synthetic eclecticism.
The self-understanding of modernity as a radical break and the modern
search for the ever new produced a particularly confusing situation in sociol-
ogy. If the modern world is something radically different, and is always
changing, then sociology, especially social theory, must follow this and change
continually, reflecting the ever new aspects of modern life, while at the same
time also respecting the motto of ‘thinking for yourself’, producing the at
once objective (as the world changes) and subjective (as one must continuously
reinvent oneself) imperative of basically rewriting everything every decade or
10 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

even year. This of course is impossible, and would result in a total cacophony,
except for the unity provided by the canonisation of a watered-down version of
the three classic founding fathers, and a certain mutual respect among the
various ‘schools’ of independent would-be master-thinkers, who sort of recog-
nise themselves in the manner of the churches during the early Reformation, in
order to stop the generation of further schisms. Thus, in this way, the radical
differences between the main classic figures, and in particular between the
modernising and non-modernising classics are denied, in the name of a pur-
ported canon, while the similarity behind the seemingly radically different
contemporary modernising approaches is denied.
So do we question that modernity inaugurated a break? Not at all. The rise of
the modern world indeed marks a break, but understood as a crisis – the crisis of
Europe (a civilisation) – and not as an autonomous and legitimate critique
of anything that has ever happened or existed anywhere in the past. Modernity
as a crisis is also a revelation, as it revealed, or rendered visible, whatever was
invisible as hidden, the underlying fabric of social and human existence. This
was as much of a threat as an opportunity: a threat to the continuity of normal
human existence, but also an opportunity for better understanding its stakes,
and indeed to overcome long-standing entrapments.
Such an opportunity was perceived by some of the most important figures of
social theory in the past centuries; but it was this same opportunity that was
betrayed or used in an opportunistic manner by the various prophets of mod-
ernity – whether as official high priests of modernisation, or as critiques of
officialdom in the name of further revolutionary potentials. The aim of our
book is also to show how and why this happened, and with what effects – in
thought, but by implication, also in real life – and to indicate how a genuine
opportunity can be regained and the codified and canonised errors rectified.

On the Interpenetrating Realities of Social Theory and Political

History
This book is an engagement with intellectual history. However, we argue that
this history runs parallel with the social and political history of modernity:
mirrors this history, intersects with it, carries forwards and at times emphasises
and brings forth some of the most problematic tendencies of modernity. In other
words, this book will try to present a more thorough understanding of the
interpenetration of reality and thought in moments of deep crisis with the help
of anthropological concepts. Before further introducing the actual, substantive
concepts and ideas to be treated in the following chapters, we need to provide a
few further methodological specifications that sustain the analysis to follow.
First of all, concerning the interaction between political history and social
theory in moments of crisis, we have to introduce two central, interrelated
 Introduction: Rethinking Social Theory with Anthropology 11

methodological perspectives, namely ‘effective history’ and the ‘iterative

embedding of thought’. The first has been identified by Nietzsche and
Foucault as central for the ‘genealogical method’, but was arguably also central
for the way Nietzsche was read and used by Weber, Elias, Voegelin or
Koselleck, among others. What it means is that, instead of an evolutionary or
teleological interpretation of history as progressing through a series of stages,
the eventual political, economic and cultural structures and institutions of
society are effectively shaped by the events of history – not all or any events
equally, but in particular the events and moments of significant liminal crises.
While in itself the argument would seem obvious, such a reading risks
ignoring the fact that the foregoing paragraph identified crises as the crucial
instances in making history, while people everywhere, and obviously for good
reasons, rather like to forget crises. Let us offer a trivial but hopefully illuminat-
ing example. No family ever celebrates the resolution of a marital crisis as a great
family holiday – though it is evident that the successful survival of a family unit
depends on such solutions, and to a large extent is based on the arrangements
created by such solutions. History is always read backwards, from the present,
and the very existence of the present is – to some extent justly – interpreted as a
proof of success. Thus, for a happy life, history – with its crises – has to be
forgotten.
From this still rather self-evident observation (which, though, is simply
incompatible with the principles of an evolutionary reading of history) we
can move to a next level of interpretation through the concept ‘historiogenesis’
as developed by Eric Voegelin. This term is not very well known, even by
scholars otherwise familiar with the work of Voegelin. This neglect is in radical
contrast with the huge importance Voegelin himself attributed to the discovery
of the concept.4 The central idea of historiogenesis is that political communities
evidently can cope with the weight of the past only by arranging the events in an
unbroken linear line, magnifying them in direct proportion to the distance from
their present. The example that suggested this idea to Voegelin was the
Sumerian list of kings; and its significance is ensured by the parallels with
our current, dominant historiogenetic construction: the modern myth of pro-
gress. Historical work provides us with another excellent illustration of
Voegelin’s concept: archaeological research has shown that the Parian
Marble, inscribed in 264/3 BC, gives a stunningly precise account of the events
of archaic history, back to ancient Mycenae, but is highly inaccurate concerning
the events of the Dark Age (c. 1200–850 BC) (Snodgrass 1971: 13–15).
However, even this bias has a system in it: the events of the true Dark Age
are simply ignored, forgotten or suppressed; while the events of the last century
or so before the ‘Greek Renaissance’, or the period of new revival starting

4
For details, see Szakolczai (2003, 2017c).
12 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

around the middle of eighth century BC, are simply extrapolated over the Dark
Centuries, in order to fill the gap.
The second perspective, ‘iterative embeddedness’, is the complementary of
‘effective history’ in the field of the history of thought. Though working in the
opposite direction, it can be considered as a generalisation of ‘historiogenesis’.
While ‘effective history’ shifts attention to the way history actually produced
structures, layers of traditions and institutions building upon each other, reor-
ganised – occasionally quite drastically – in periods of crisis, ‘iterative
embeddedness’ captures how the actual ‘vision’ of such effective history is
increasingly impaired by successive layers of historical interpretation that also
build upon each other, creating an ever thickening ‘glass’ that renders events
increasingly opaque.
Let us try to illustrate the point. We are now in the twenty-first century; so
we would like to interpret the thirteenth century no longer through the optic
of the twentieth century, now obsolete, but through the ‘true’ optic which
presumably our own century finally discovers, of course avoiding the trap of
merely substituting the optic (or prejudices) of the twentieth century with
those of the twenty-first. However, even further, the twentieth century itself
did not see the thirteenth century through its own eyes, but already filtered
through the eyes of the nineteenth century, which furthermore took over and
to a large extent took for granted the optics of the eighteenth century, and so
on, until we arrive to the interpretation of the thirteenth century through the
fourteenth century, which was already inevitably biased, as it did not con-
sider the thirteenth on its own right, through the optic of its effective history,
the problems or crises it encountered and to which it attempted to give an
answer, rather through looking backward from its own end. ‘Centuries’
should not be understood in a mechanical sense, rather as successive
historical periods, themselves defined by the crises undergone that punctuate
history, in the analogy of the difference between a cohort and a generation.
This is not to deny that historical knowledge can actually progress. Archival,
archaeological and other research can bring forth new evidence. However, it
is also clear that memories get dimmer; that eyewitnesses die; that it is not
possible to record historical events much after they took place; and that
recording, re-recording and preservation is the work of individuals who
make selection on the basis of certain criteria of the enormous amount of
evidence (events, facts, memories, etc.) faced by them.
What matters most is the combination and effective outcome of these ele-
ments and circumstances. History is built up from below and moves forwards.
In the actual sequence of events and the results they produce a central role is
played by situations of crisis – the deeper the crisis, the larger the impact on
emerging structures and subsequent life. The interpretation and understanding
of history, however, just as much driven by the ‘nature of things’, moves
 Introduction: Rethinking Social Theory with Anthropology 13

backwards, from the present into the past. As Kierkegaard said, ‘Life can only
be understood backwards . . . but it must be lived forwards’ (1997 [1843]).
Vision becomes increasingly opaque the more distant are the events one tries
to recall and penetrate. The manner in which memory is preserved and trans-
mitted tries to downplay the significance of moments of crises, which produced
the present, which is never disinterested at the very heart of its being, so
contemporary interpretation is bound to misunderstand the exact reasons that
gave rise to its own emergence as a historical phenomenon. Using the cate-
gories of Nietzsche’s (2010) path-breaking second ‘untimely meditation’, On
the Use and Abuse of History for Life, the first bias is characteristic of monu-
mental history, or the way the past is represented by the normative institutions
of the present, while the second of ‘critical history’, or the historiography
characteristic of academic institutions.5 However, history is not just as an
academic discipline, as all academic disciplines have their own monumental
history, narrating the emergence of the canon of their own discipline, present-
ing just as many biases and problems as the ‘monumental histories’ of political
or social institutions.
The link between history and truth is for sure a delicate issue for any
community. As we have seen in the example of the family, occasionally the
very survival of human communities depends on the fact that they do not want
to know ‘the full truth, nothing but the full truth’. However – and here we must
be resolute and traditional – science is different, it must be different: it should
be concerned with the full truth, especially concerning its own history and
theoretical canon. However, in an academic discipline, just as in any human
community, we are dealing with human beings, often quite frail and sensitive
human beings, whose beliefs and deep convictions must be personally
respected; and where – due to the inevitably personal nature of the transmission
of knowledge, one of the cardinal points of academic education – criticism of
the ‘canon’ is particularly delicate. However, the ‘care for truth’ (Foucault), or
the ethical imperative of truth-telling,6 is inseparable from the core of any
serious intellectual undertaking. Truth is not our ‘business’, but our life; even
with respect to our most cherished beliefs, including our very selves. Thus,
while the aim of this book is not reckless critique at any price, a Quixotic fight
against any authority of the past, labelled as idols, it will apply the best
methodological tools available for a proper reading of history to reconstruct
the history of sociological thought, and through this reading also try to give a
better understanding of the current situation of the modern global world.

5
Given this, it should not surprise that representatives of the third type, antiquarian history,
including local historians and collectors of odd historical curiosities, occasionally produced
works of considerable interests, ignored by the other two, officially more sanctioned accounts.
6
See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, No. 344; for Foucault on parrhesia, see Foucault (2001, 2010,
2011); Szakolczai (2003).
14 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

Anthropology as the Royal Road

Such reconstructive-restorative renewal might take several paths. The one we
have selected focuses on social and cultural anthropology; we even call this a
‘royal’ road.
There are a number of reasons behind our choice. Anthropology is
particularly close to sociology, both in subject matter and disciplinary
history. Anthropology, just like sociology, deals with social life, certainly
not the isolated human being. The academic institutionalisation of sociol-
ogy and anthropology also went hand in hand. However, the central
significance of anthropology for social theory lies not so much in its
closeness to sociology, but rather in its distance from the central concern
of sociology, the direct study of modernity, and thus the perspective it
offers for seeing modernity through a new prism, in a different light. The
idea can perhaps be best introduced through parallels to history. If sociol-
ogy is a discipline focusing on the study of the modern world – and its
emergence evidently supports such a claim – then nothing is further from
its main concerns than history, as this deals with past civilisations, or the
non-modern in time; and anthropology, as it deals with other cultures, or
the non-modern in space. Yet, as it is well known, the most important
classics, founding figures of sociology devoted a special attention, even the
greatest part of their most mature work to history and/or anthropology. This
can be interpreted as a quite conscious concern to map the contemporary
modern world with the help of a contrast offered by what is distant in time
or space.
Thus, in a certain way, we try to do nothing else than take up and move
forward the efforts of the most classic of sociologists, Max Weber and Émile
Durkheim – or rather, for reasons that will become evident throughout the
book, Weber and Marcel Mauss. However, the manner in which we will focus
on anthropology will be substantially different from the approaches of the
classics and their followers. In order to render this difference evident, we try
to use a sharp terminology, which eventually will be smoothened, but at this
moment it is important to render clear the shift in perspective. While past
efforts to use anthropological studies for illuminating the modern world took
some evidence from non-modern non-European settings, but interpreted them
through the prism of modern concepts and approaches, our aim is rather to shed
new light on basic features of the modern world through a set of conceptual
tools developed in anthropology.
At one level, the idea might seem simple enough, almost trivial. Yet, it does
not take much effort to realise the quite radical implications – outright sub-
versive for the ‘modern episteme’, as Foucault rightly perceived. While in our
age it is easy to argue about a certain equivalence in the normative values of
 Introduction: Rethinking Social Theory with Anthropology 15

different cultures across the globe, the situation is different if we turn to the
taken for granted values of ‘rational’ thinking and social ‘science’.
One has to be very careful and precise here. We do not want to open, at this
point, a general, ideological debate about ‘rationality’ and ‘science’, and their
relation to Western culture. The point is much simpler, and twice ‘empirical’. It
concerns the plain fact that, in a most taken for granted manner, anthropolo-
gists, just as any modern social scientist, approach their ‘objects’ of study with
a ready-made set of conceptual tools developed inside modern Western think-
ing, for analysing the characteristics of modern Western life. The idea to do the
contrary is at best considered a thought experiment, of the kind ‘what would the
Martians think about us?’, but even then concerned with the presumed peculia-
rities of our own preconceptions, and not a way of developing, outside the
standard categories of modern Western social science, a set of tools for under-
standing social life.
Becoming even more concrete, moving to the second level of the ‘empirical’,
the difficulty of such a radical inversion of perspective can be illustrated
through the fate encountered by those thinkers who did so in the past, especially
in the early days of the academic institutionalisation of anthropology. These
figures, from would-be founders of the discipline, and of concrete academic
departments, became rather outsiders, or maverick anthropologists, in the
original meaning of the term: figures who refused to be ‘branded’ or classified
within existing approaches. Our book argues for the centrality of their ideas
and visions, still mostly untapped sources for renewing the ailing field of
contemporary social theory.

Introducing the ‘Maverick Anthropologists’

The book has a simple structure. Part I (Chapters 1–7) introduces the ‘maverick
anthropologists’, while Part II applies the maverick tool-kit, revisiting the
history of sociological thought (Chapter 8) and the question of modernity
(Chapter 9).
We are aware of the challenges involved in rethinking modernity through
anthropology. There are indeed good reasons to be hesitant and careful as we
move from ethnography into the heart of social theorising about the modern
condition. As also argued by Faubian (2000), anthropology has repeatedly been
used by social theorists as a construction of alterity, a platform from where to
think ‘the Other’ of modernity. Such a use of the ‘primitive’ goes back to
central traditions in European philosophy and thinking – back to the
Enlightenment, even to seventeenth century contract theory – and its need of
the exotic Other as a negative or positive reference point. Anthropology has
served to sustain various incompatible views of the ‘human’ or of ‘human
nature’, to fantasise about an ‘original state’ of human affairs or ‘state of
16 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

nature’ (Kuper 1988). Far from belonging only to Hobbes or Rousseau,

Romanticism or speculative philosophy, this construction of alterity has been
perpetuated within the allegedly most empirical and ‘objective’ traditions in
social theory, including functionalism and Marxism. As we have discussed
more in detail elsewhere, some of the most problematic such usages of the
‘primitive’ to construct theories of modern rationality can indeed be located in
the approaches not only of Durkheim and Marx or Freud, but evenly so in the
theory building in Parsons and Habermas, who both start off from a constructed
state of primitive ‘undifferentiation’ (see Thomassen 2010, 2012c, 2013a),
against which modern reason can be measured. While Lévi-Strauss – much
like Durkheim – operated inversely, searching for the universal laws of reason
in ‘naked man’ (1981), in societies ‘reduced to their simplest expression’, the
underlying premise remains. Injecting ‘primitive society’ with universal rea-
son, or differentiating ourselves from the same ‘primitives’ through that reason
which they do not possess, ultimately amounts to the same ‘modernist’ opera-
tion. Such is not our project.
Dialogues between anthropology and social theory have tended to developed
within and between the dominant paradigms of the twentieth century: evolu-
tionism, functionalism, structuralism, (post)Marxism, symbolic interaction-
ism, post-structuralism and post-modernism. While this is not surprising, it
limits the scopes of the debate and for a very simple reason: the anthropologists
who came up with genuinely novel ideas and concepts were exactly the ones
who reacted strongly against those dominant paradigms and whose works
cannot be understood within them. This was even the case of Marcel Mauss,
to provide just one conspicuous example. Mauss is widely recognised as a
crucial figure in anthropology, but he is all too often placed as an in-between
figure between Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, making up a triumvirate defining
the ‘French anthropological school’. This standard account of a Durkheim/
Mauss/Lévi-Strauss trilogy encapsulates Mauss’s work in functionalism and
structuralism, a decoding which prevents a real engagement with Mauss’s work
and its relevance for social theory.
The concepts to be discussed in this book were in fact not introduced by the
most famous or dominant anthropologists. They were ideas sparked from an
encounter between the Western visitor and a non-Western cultural context,
which in a few but significant cases led anthropologists to the conclusion that
the language they had been given to think with was limited if not entirely
erroneous. They therefore had to move their analysis outside the dominant
intellectual paradigms. These anthropologists all somehow engaged in ‘uni-
versalities’ and made in fact very daring arguments; at the same time – and this
is essential to stress – they went up against any superficial usage of the
ethnographic record. They strongly and flatly rejected the idea that all primitive
societies were simply ‘the same’, just as they rejected the idea that members of
 Introduction: Rethinking Social Theory with Anthropology 17

such societies were without any degree of ‘individuality’ (this in fact had
already been Arnold van Gennep’s main charge against Durkheim, as we
shall see in Chapter 1) or that they were ‘undifferentiated’. In other words,
without engaging with the hopeless project of pressing all cultures into pre-
conceived theoretical schemes, categories or evolutionary utopias, they took
their analysis to the level of cultural foundations, shared predicaments of
humanity – and this is something quite different. We use the word ‘foundations’
in conscious distinction from ‘origins’. And rather than trying to erect devel-
opmental schemes based on substantial features or cultural or mental properties
(or lack of these), the comparison they proposed had to do with shared forms.
The authors to be discussed in this book belong to this category of thinkers.
They each in their own way made contributions that we can still tap from and
together represent elements towards a base from where to build new bridges
from anthropology to social theory. What we want to pursue here is the
necessity of a reflexive historical sociology to be accompanied by what one
might call, with a perhaps slightly clumsy formulation, a ‘reflexive anthropo-
logical sociology’ (or, putting the stress on the approach we are developing
since some time, with Agnes Horvath, Harald Wydra and others, ‘reflexive
political anthropology’): a social theory inspired by anthropological insights.
This means, well within a Weberian perspective, that the particularity of the
modern project can be rendered visible by stepping temporally and spatially
outside modernity: there can be no theory without history. However, while it is
becoming increasingly recognised – indeed, mainstream – that social theory
needs history, back to the axial age and beyond, the possible role of anthro-
pology in theorising modernity seems far less obvious, and in a sense this is a
debate which is only starting to emerge. That role goes much beyond simply
representing a view from ‘below’, a politically correct appreciation of cultural
diversity, or a taste for the exotic and marginal. It involves, we argue, attention
towards key theoretical concepts developed within anthropology that uniquely
facilitate a proper understanding of the modern world and some of its under-
lying dynamics.
Our engagement with intellectual history therefore works towards a purpose:
the building up of an anthropologically inspired conceptual tool-kit for social
theory. Which concepts? For such a purpose one cannot rely on ‘objective’
importance, as assessed by the general history of the discipline, as it is exactly
such taken for granted judgments, based on the accepted, canonical history of
sociology and anthropology that we wish to question; but it certainly cannot be
a matter of subjective preference or simply utility. Rather, the central anthro-
pologically based concepts of the book will be taken over from some of the
most important classical but non-mainstream figures of anthropology – a
criterion that almost seems a contradictio in adjectio. It is necessary to add a
few more words about the approach to be followed.
18 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

We propose to use concepts developed in anthropology, for the study of non-

modern, non-Western or non-European societies, in order to better understand
the history of European social theory, also in its interpenetration and entangle-
ment with effective political history. However, evidently, anthropology is also
part of modern academic discourse, its central concepts being developed by
modern Western intellectuals or theorists, educated exactly on the principles
whose singularity the book tries to identify, in order to move beyond them. The
solution would seem – and this is what is embraced by much of contemporary
post-colonial studies – simply to dismiss ‘Eurocentric’ modern Western
science altogether, and rely only on ‘native’ narratives and modes of theorising.
Such a default position, however, leads to a logic of tabula rasa that no self-
respecting academic discipline or discourse can or should accept; a simple
mirroring of the dominant intellectual mood, captured by the term ‘political
correctness’, which only replaces the previous tone of assertive Western super-
iority with the current fashion of self-flagellation and self-hatred, not much – if
any – less dangerous than the previous triumphalism. While post-colonialism
in many ways was a necessary reaction, the variety of approaches that have
denounced the ethnocentric (male) bias of Western thinking often fail to
confront the underlying problem. The problem is not at all ‘ethnocentrism’
but rather modernocentrism: the deeper ways in which our thinking about the
world has become entrapped in the very language of modernity. The problem is
not ‘Europe’ or even the ‘West’; the problem is modernity.
What we argue here should in no manner be perceived as a dismissal of the
manifold contributions offered by anthropologists during the past century or so,
quite the contrary. Irrespective of the various trends and tendencies within
anthropological theory, anthropologists have continued to produce ethnogra-
phies of intrinsic importance towards a better understanding of the world in
which we live. In terms of theoretical grounding, the dominant approaches of
twentieth-century anthropology should of course also be handled very care-
fully, including the various ‘critical’ approaches and those that dominate the
present, including the so-called ‘ontological turn’. Writers belonging to this
latter direction have long since recognised the futile tendency to simply dismiss
whatever could be classified as ‘past anthropology’. In the words of Holbraad
and Pedersen (2017: 8), the ontological turn is not a dismissal of the past but
rather a way to release ‘in their fullest forms potentials that have always been at
the heart of the discipline’s intellectual history’. We agree with this statement,
but we find the ‘heart’ of the discipline’s intellectual history elsewhere. Rather
than working through the main traditions of French, British and American
anthropology, we here focus on thinkers who for some reason came to realise
the limits of these dominant paradigms and thus started to pursue a different –
and in our view more promising – path of understanding. This would consider-
ably interfere with the reception of their works, even hinder their academic
 Introduction: Rethinking Social Theory with Anthropology 19

career. Thus, we indeed wish the revalorise the potential of existing traditions
within the French, British and American anthropology – not, however, through
the figures who institutionalised the discipline, but through figures who devel-
oped a hesitant or even oppositional stance towards this very institutionalisa-
tion and the main ideas and approaches underpinning it. The maverick
genealogy we present here is not one that has been attempted before. It is not
based on a final or exhaustive account or list of thinkers; far from it. But we
have singled out for discussion figures who we consider most important for the
main purpose of this book: to rethink social theory.
In order to present a consistent and compelling scenario, the presence of four
key elements in identifying the maverick anthropologists will be emphasised.
First, the dissenting figures will not simply be ‘anybody’ who happened to
‘criticise’ the mainstream, but persons having belonged to the heart of the dis-
ciplinary tradition, often part of its very first lines. Second, each of them had a first-
hand experience of recognising the shortcomings, even the utter irrelevance or
untenable nature of the – rather quite recent – academic ‘tradition’ into which they
were educated and which up until a certain point they simply took for granted.
Third, they would have to actually face, or at least fear, from the inside, a negative
reaction not simply to their dissent, but outright a presumed betrayal, and thus
actually live through a marginalisation, in extreme cases a complete exile from the
discipline, or an internal withdrawal. Fourth and finally – and this will require a
much more careful substantiation – the way in which their thought developed,
realising precisely the problem of the ‘modernocentric’ worldview in which they
were trained, would have to represent a return to some of the central tenets of the
non-modern tradition of European thought, even of classical thought or spirituality
in general, including the main non-European ‘spiritual’ traditions of humankind.
Perhaps surprisingly, this also involved a return to Greek philosophy, Plato in
particular (Szakolczai 2019). It is no coincidence whatsoever that the thinkers
discussed in this book all came to see their life-work as related to a deeper
understanding of spirituality. This was the case for Arnold van Gennep, Gabriel
Tarde and René Girard, Marcel Mauss, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Colin Turnbull, Paul
Radin, Gregory Bateson, Johan Huizinga and Victor Turner – the main thinkers to
be discussed in this book, and to whom we can now turn.
Part I

Maverick Anthropologists
1 Arnold van Gennep
Liminal Rites and the Rhythms of Life

Life itself means to separate and to be reunited, to change form and condition,
to die and to be reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait and to rest, and then to
begin acting again, but in a different way. And there are always new thresh-
olds to cross: the threshold of summer and winter, of a season or a year, of a
month or of a night; the thresholds of birth, adolescence, maturity and old age;
the threshold of death and that of the afterlife – for those who believe in it.
Arnold van Gennep, Rites of Passage, 189–90

We start this book by engaging the ideas of a truly ‘maverick anthropologist’,

one of the most overlooked social scientists of the twentieth century, the French
anthropologist Arnold van Gennep. Van Gennep was one of Émile Durkheim’s
fiercest opponents. His early critique of Durkheim, coming from within the
French anthropology of religion, is important in and by itself. We shall briefly
recap the main points of van Gennep’s incisive criticism of Durkheim. As we
have gone into detail on these debates elsewhere (Thomassen 2009, 2012b,
2016, 2017c), however, the main focus of this chapter will be on van Gennep’s
positive contribution towards establishing methodological foundations for the
then emerging social sciences. By revisiting van Gennep’s life-work we wish to
emphasise his ‘organic’ or even ‘cosmic’ understanding of social rhythms and
the sequential ‘logic’ within which liminal rites had their place. Importantly,
van Gennep’s cosmic ‘vision’ for the social sciences also meant that while he
indeed stressed the formative role of liminal periods, he carefully avoided any
celebration of liminality or boundary breaking, indicating instead a careful
balancing act between change/movement and stability/order within the orders
of reality – not unlike Gabriel Tarde, to be discussed in Chapter 2. As we will
also show, this fine-grained approach either fell into oblivion or was seriously
distorted in later receptions of van Gennep’s work, especially within French
sociology and anthropology. A recovery and revalorisation of van Gennep is
therefore important in two ways: it indicates something problematic in the
standard narrative of bridge-builders from anthropology to social theory (work-
ing through the Durkheim/Lévi-Strauss/Bourdieu ‘canon’) while offering a
different starting point towards a different kind of dialogue.

23
24 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

Into the Life-Work of Arnold van Gennep

Arnold van Gennep was born as Charles-Arnold Kurr van Gennep on 23 April
1873 in Ludwigsburg, Württemberg.1 When he was 6 years old his parents
separated and van Gennep moved with his mother to Lyons, France, where his
mother married a French doctor. He thus became extremely independent and
difficult in school – winning prizes but showing poor conduct – and eventually
breaking away from his family, which opposed his marriage to a beautiful
woman without a dowry. Independence also marked his academic career,
contributing to his marginalisation by the Durkheim school, but helping him
to persist and produce, without an academic position, a most significant, even
foundational, life-work. In 1892, van Gennep moved to Paris and enrolled at
L’École des langues orientales to study Arabic, and at L’École pratique des
hautes études to study general linguistics and Egyptology; in addition, he had a
passion for prehistory, a field that was just emerging at that time, surrounded
with heated controversies. At L’École pratique he also enrolled for lectures at
Sciences religieuses, where he studied primitive religion and Islamic culture.
Here he came into contact with Antoine Meillet, the linguist and member of the
Durkheim circle, and Marcel Mauss, who was just one year older than van
Gennep. Van Gennep graduated in 1896 from L’École des langues orientales,
and began a career as a translator. One of his first translations, in 1898, was Sir
James George Frazer’s immensely influential book on totemism.2 Translation
would remain van Gennep’s main source of income for much of his life.
After a four-year stay in Russian Poland from 1897 to 1901, van Gennep
returned to Paris. From 1901 to 1908, he was employed full-time as head of
translations at the French Ministry of Agriculture. His linguistic skills were, by
then, second to none. In an article from 1927, discussing the use of the
subconscious in the study of living languages, he purports to master eighteen
languages plus a number of their dialects, including Arabic, Finnish, and
several Slavic languages (Belmont 1979: 7).3 Van Gennep’s formal career

1
This and the following section draw on Thomassen (2014), especially chapters 1–3; see also
Thomassen (2016) and Szakolczai (2013c).
2
Durkheim had himself hoped to be in charge of that important translation. In the spring of 1898,
while Mauss was in London to study the British school of anthropology, Durkheim asked him to
approach Frazer with this translation in mind – but it was too late, for the young van Gennep had
already been offered the job (with A. Dirr). On 10 May 1898, Durkheim writes, seemingly rather
annoyed, to Mauss: ‘My project to have Totemism translated has gone down the drain. . . . You
can tell Frazer that my intention was to have it translated’ (Durkheim 1998: 136–7, our
translation). There is some likelihood that this is the first time that Durkheim ever stumbled on
the name of Arnold van Gennep (in the letter to Mauss he refers to the ‘two translators’ of Frazer
without mentioning their names).
3
As discussed by Belmont (1979: 7–9), in this same article van Gennep presents a remarkable
homemade theory of language learning. The first rule is to focus on the sounds and rhythms of a
language, training the ear, and then exercising one’s muscles in trying to imitate sounds and
intonations, before moving on to the grammar, here starting out with the absolutely invariable
 Arnold van Gennep: Liminal Rites and the Rhythms of Life 25

was now unfolding outside of academia. In addition to his ministerial position,

he kept on translating and editing. For more than thirty years, from 1906 to
1939, he edited the section ‘Ethnographie-Folklore-Religions-Préhistoire’ in
Mercure de France.
Van Gennep studied sciences religieuses with Léon Marillier at L’École
pratique, becoming part of that handful of young people who were later to
become Durkheim’s collaborators, among them Mauss, Henri Hubert, and Paul
Fauconnet. On Marillier’s sudden death in 1901, Mauss became van Gennep’s
teacher and mentor. In 1903, Mauss proofread and thoroughly annotated van
Gennep’s thesis on taboo and totemism in Madagascar. Van Gennep’s interests
during the first decade of the twentieth century developed alongside those of
the Durkheimians, and included the classical topics of totemism, taboo, the
origins and nature of religion, magic, classification systems and the relationship
between myth and ritual.
In 1904 van Gennep published his thesis, Tabou et totémisme à Madagascar:
étude descriptive et théorique. The book is dedicated to the memory of Léon
Marillier, and in its preface van Gennep reserves his final thanks for ‘mon ami
Marcel Mauss’ (van Gennep 1904: 2). Van Gennep here analysed totemism as a
social system of classification, taking its role far beyond the narrow field of
religion. In 1906 he published his second book, Mythes et légendes d’Australie,
in which he openly exposed the problems in Durkheim’s work. In 1909 he
published Rites of Passage, the work that was to become his post-mortem claim
to fame. Herein, Van Gennep proposed a conceptual classification of all exist-
ing rites. He distinguished between rites that mark the passage of an individual
or social group from one status to another from those that mark transitions in
the passage of time (e.g. harvest, new year), whereupon he went on to explore
‘the basis of characteristic patterns in the order of ceremonies’ (van Gennep
1960: 10). Stressing the importance of transitions in any society, van Gennep
singled out rites of passage as a special category consisting of three sub-
categories: rites of separation, transition rites and rites of incorporation. Van
Gennep called the middle stage in a rite of passage a liminal period (1960: 11).
He called transition rites liminal rites, and he called rites of incorporation
postliminal rites. The sequential structure of rites is van Gennep’s central
theoretical innovation. Far from proclaiming originality, however, he was
rather perplexed about why no one before had realised this simple fact, with
Robert Hertz, the most important of Mauss’s students, being acknowledged as

elements and then progressing to the variable ones. Words, then, must be learned, not from their
meaning, but from their roots; in this way, any word summoned brings with it the whole linguistic
cluster to which it belongs, whereas any direct reference to the meaning in the appropriation of a
word will close the learner off from the larger semantic matrix from whence that meaning
emerges. One discerns, behind these rules, much of van Gennep’s method. In fact, for him they
were probably more or less the same thing.
26 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

the sole predecessor. The ritual pattern was apparently universal: all societies
use rites to demarcate transitions. Van Gennep himself considered the book his
breakthrough, resulting from an ‘inner illumination’ (Belmont 1979: 58). The
conceptual framework guided everything he wrote thereafter; we will return to
the concept of liminality in all subsequent chapters, stressing its vitalness for
social theory.
In 1908, during his writing of Rites de passage, van Gennep decided to quit his
job at the Ministry and dedicate himself wholeheartedly to academia, founding
the scientific journal Revue des études ethnographiques et sociologiques, in
which he would publish frequently while serving as its director. Also in 1908,
he published a book on Homeric poetry (La question d’Homère) and the first
volume of Religions, mæurs et légendes: Essais d’ethnographie et de linguis-
tique, a collection of essays on religion, myth and ritual. In 1909 the second
volume of Religions, mæurs et légendes was released, and the flow of Van
Gennep’s articles, reviews and translations continued. The bibliography com-
piled by his daughter lists a total of 437 publications (K. van Gennep 1964).
In 1910 van Gennep published La formation des légends, his seventh book. It
was followed by two books in 1911: Les Demi-savants4 and the third volume of
Religions, mæurs et légendes. Van Gennep had, by then, become deeply
engaged with general epistemological and methodological issues. Before
World War I he published a series of programmatic articles wherein he
denounced problems in contemporary ‘scientific’ approaches, starting to for-
mulate a methodological platform for the social sciences that he christened
‘biological sociology’. In the same period (1910–11) he also carried out two
rounds of ethnographic fieldwork in Algeria (see Sibeud 2004). Although this
project – to study art forms – was only partially successful, several lengthy
publications resulted from it, not least of which is his 1914 book En Algérie.
Despite his productivity, van Gennep never passed the threshold into French
academia. Following unsuccessful candidatures at the Collège de France in
1907, 1909 and 1911 he decided to go abroad (Belmont 1979: 11). In 1912 he
was offered the first (and only) academic position he ever held, as Chair in
Swiss Ethnography at the University of Neuchâtel. On his arrival, he started to
plan a founding event for the European social sciences: the major international
conference held at Neuchâtel in the summer of 1914, weeks before the outbreak
of World War I. More than 600 social scientists attended this, the biggest-ever
networking event for European social scientists until then – and probably one
of the most significant such events ever, bridging across the social sciences.
Topics discussed included basic terminological and methodological issues, as
4
This book was introduced and translated into English by Needham and published by Kegan and
Paul in 1967 as The Semi-Scholars. The book is a bitingly sarcastic description of the social
sciences losing themselves in blindfolded specialisation. After Rites of Passage in 1960 and The
Semi-Scholars in 1967, no further works of van Gennep have been translated into English.
 Arnold van Gennep: Liminal Rites and the Rhythms of Life 27

well as attempts to delineate boundaries with neighbouring disciplines. The

goals of the conference were explicitly programmatic: what should the social
sciences look like, which tasks should we set ourselves, and how are they to be
carried out? Marcel Mauss was part of the French delegation and presented a
paper on taboo among the Baronga (Zerilli 1998a). Durkheim did not show up,
but he likely received a detailed synopsis from Mauss, who was then working
on a plan for ethnographic studies in France.
In October 1915 van Gennep was expelled from Switzerland because of
his criticism of the Swiss government and its pro-German attitudes.
Unable to get an academic job in France, he was recalled by Raymond
Poincaré (cousin of the famous physicist and mathematician Henri
Poincaré) to a post in the French Foreign Office. Still he continued to
advance his academic work. He wrote several pieces on the war, in a style
that comes close to the war-writings of Mauss. He managed only to finish
the first of a planned three-volume series on nationalism, published in
1922, and anticipating an anthropological approach to the question of
borders and boundaries as differentiating factors of cultural identity, later
to be taken up by Fredrik Barth and others. On 24 January 1921, at the
age of 47, Arnold van Gennep became Docteur ès Lettres at the Sorbonne.
He presented two works for the title: his book from 1920 on totemism
(L’état actuel du problème totémique) and Rites de passage. He received a
mention très honourable (Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, to be discussed in Chapter
4, was on the committee). These books are, arguably, two of the most
substantial contributions ever presented for a Docteur title in France. Van
Gennep’s book on totemism paved the way for Claude Lévi-Strauss’s
approach to totemic classification (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 35–6), and can
indeed be considered a precursor to a ‘structural’ understanding of religion
and society (Senn 1974; but see later for qualifications); Rites de passage,
presented as a ‘minor’, is easily one of the most important anthropology
books ever written.
In 1922, van Gennep was invited to give a lecture tour in the United States
and Canada. This forced him to quit his job at the Ministry, the last salaried full-
time position he would ever hold. There seem to be no accounts testifying to his
impact in America. Van Gennep actually did break another record for the time,
as he delivered eighty-six lectures within a few months, practically one per day
across the entire continent. On his return from America he fell ill, after which
he decided to give up academic ambitions and settle down with his wife as a
chicken-breeder in southern France. Yet his questioning mind could not rest,
and within a year he returned to Paris. Van Gennep now turned to folklore, a
discipline that he single-handedly built up over the next three decades, working
unsalaried and alone in his home apartment in Bourg-la-Reine until his death in
28 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

1957. Without ever holding an academic position in France, van Gennep would
become known as the father of French folklore.5

Van Gennep’s Critique of Durkheim

In retrospect it is difficult to explain Van Gennep’s failure to land a job.
However, his opposition to Durkheim certainly played a major role (see
Thomassen 2016, on which this section draws; see also Zumwalt 1982). In
his 1906 book Mythes et légendes van Gennep seriously questioned the adopted
analytical procedure by which Durkheim positioned the Arunta (an Australian
clan society) at a certain level or stage of ‘development’, creating an analytical
short-cut to the question of ‘origins’. Whenever Durkheim recognised a
change, over time, or between groups (in kinship affiliations, for example),
he systematically prevented any real account of such a transformation, relegat-
ing it simply to the ‘general needs of society’ (Van Gennep 1906: xxv). There
was no grounding epistemology to tell us what such a ‘society’ is to be able to
‘have’ such needs. Durkheim operated a peculiar kind of ‘métaphysique socio-
logique’ (xxiv), positing a metaphysical abstraction at the core of his argument,
and then artificially ‘animating’ it (xxv). As van Gennep rather provocatively
said, this is to resolve a problem without having even managed to pose it as a
problem (xxv).
However, in the context of this critique, he also raises the stakes. What is
lurking behind Durkheim’s problematic collectivism is something even more
problematic, and reaches far beyond Australian kinship classification:
We have seen how M. Durkheim explains social modifications by the ‘needs of society’
without indicating either the why or the where of those needs, and without justifying
how exactly a ‘society’, however small, may have ‘needs’ in the first place. It is by an
identical process of animation that they speak to us of ‘the call of the fatherland’, or ‘the
voice of the race’. M. Durkheim anthropomorphizes, even if this is what he pretends to
defend himself from. (xxxv, emphasis in the original, our translation)

According to van Gennep, Durkheim’s sociology was flawed not just at the
theoretical level; the entire epistemology upon which it built bore resemblances
to and could serve to justify other and much more serious political essential-
isms. This was a recognition that Mauss would take up in his analysis of the
Bolsheviks (we will return to this point in Chapter 3). Van Gennep was of

5
Arnold van Gennep’s name did not disappear entirely from the radar. In the 1920s, Mauss and his
collaborators finally got the Institut d’ethnologie established. For its first group of students, the
Institute offered, in addition to the regular courses (more than half of which were taught by
Mauss on ‘Instructions in Descriptive Ethnography’), a series of four ‘open lectures’. Two of
those open lectures were taught by Arnold van Gennep, on the ‘geographical method of folklore’
(Fournier 2006: 238). It is the only testimony we have of van Gennep teaching a class in France,
narrowly confined within the field of ‘folklore’.
 Arnold van Gennep: Liminal Rites and the Rhythms of Life 29

course not implying that Durkheim was racist or nationalist according to any
direct or simplistic meaning of those terms. Durkheim had strongly condemned
racism and anti-Semitism, and certainly not only because of his own Jewish
background. Something else was at stake, and it concerned the appreciation of
concrete living human beings, acting within the limits of their social and
physical environments.
Van Gennep continued his critical engagement with Durkheim’s work, most
conspicuously in his review of Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
Elementary Forms is composed of two parts; one is general-theoretical, and
the other is monographic. The latter, begins van Gennep, is the weaker part. Van
Gennep states quite bluntly that Durkheim demonstrates a complete lack of
critical stance towards the sources, which were collected by traders, police
agents and priests, and that he naively accepts their veracity. Durkheim over-
states the theoretical potential of single facts and interprets freely from dubious
data. Durkheim falsely attributes this ‘fictional’ procedure as the ‘German’
method.6 The data and the whole procedure are simply unreliable:
In ten years, his entire systematization of the Australian material will have been utterly
rejected, along with the multiple generalizations constructed on the flimsiest foundation
of ethnographic facts I have ever observed. The idea he has extracted from this ensemble
of primitive man and ‘simple’ societies is simply misguided. (van Gennep 2017: 577)

Here of course, one could legitimately tender a defence of Durkheim: does

his theoretical attempt not deserve to be taken seriously, irrespective of the
flawed empirical material? Van Gennep agrees that Durkheim’s general the-
ories on religion deserve to be considered in their own right, and are in fact full
of ‘solid truths’ (van Gennep 2017: 577). Yet, when Durkheim moves on to
suggest his own theory (on the origins of totemic beliefs), no real theory is ever
proposed. Durkheim proposes to see totemism as representing an anonymous
and impersonal ‘force’. This explains absolutely nothing. It also misrecognises
what van Gennep had specified as the essentially ‘energetic’ nature of religious
conceptions (Mauss would again pick this up later).
Durkheim, says van Gennep, claims to have established the ‘foundations of
society’ from a single religious institution (totemism), without realising that
this was just one very specific type of classification, peculiar to this not-so-
simple society. The Australian Aborigines simply cannot be posited as a ‘first’
or ‘elementary’ building block upon which one can erect an entire edifice. The
Aborigines (here again the Arunta) have complex matrimonial rules and
totemic beliefs and practices; they simply cannot be taken to represent some
kind of Ursprung.
6
As we will discuss later, Durkheim had had a crucial stay in Germany in 1885–86, and liked to
see himself as the transmitter of German empiricism and neo-Kantianism to the French
universities.
30 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

In his insistence to throw in all stakes on the collective level, Durkheim

categorically neglects the action of single, living individuals in the formation of
institutions and beliefs: the very process and production that lies behind the
telling of myths and acting out of rituals is annulled.7 Even in the most
‘primitive’ societies, van Gennep insists, individuals do act. Durkheim dreams
of assigning society a natural reality, with its own laws of necessity, in a world
devoid of concrete human beings. For the purposes of his theoretical construct,
Durkheim artificially reduced Australian society to a ‘mono-cellular organ-
ism’, devoid of agency. Durkheim possesses only a metaphysic and scholastic
understanding of the world; he constructs reality from preconceived words and
concepts: ‘Having no feel for life, no feel for biology or ethnography, he
transforms living phenomena and beings (vivants) into scientifically desiccated
plants arranged as in a herbarium’ (van Gennep 2017: 578).
It is not simply that the data are wrong; it is not the flawed methodology; it is
not even the circular, redundant theoretical style that is at issue: the problem,
says van Gennep, is that Durkheim lacks a feel for life.

Failed Receptions: Arnold van Gennep and French Social Theory

Though van Gennep’s strong opposition to Durkheim and the Durkhemian
school certainly helps to explain his failure to establish himself within French
academia, this does not suffice to explain why van Gennep’s works were not
incorporated in subsequent developments within French anthropology and
sociology. This is a complex story, but it can best be approached by considering
the employment of van Gennep by the two most central figures in French social
thought throughout the twentieth century, indeed the two anthropologists
whose works more than any other inspired developments within social theory:
Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Bourdieu. The third figure to discuss in this
context is of course Marcel Mauss and how he ‘dealt with’ and to some extent
incorporated van Gennep’s contributions in his own work – but to that we shall
return in Chapter 3.
For both Lévi-Strauss and Bourdieu, the work of Arnold van Gennep should
have occupied a particularly salient position, as it touched on the core ideas and
the core empirical research areas of their own agendas. However, the way in
which these two flagship figures took up van Gennep remained extremely
partial and with an ultimately distorting effect.

7
In fact, the telling of myths is probably one of those activities that actually require individual
originality and impetus. Myths, like songs, poems and most art forms, simply cannot be produced
by collectivities. They are reproduced by collectivities – but that is a completely different matter.
 Arnold van Gennep: Liminal Rites and the Rhythms of Life 31

Claude Lévi-Strauss and Arnold van Gennep

Lévi-Strauss was introduced to the name of Arnold van Gennep via the teach-
ing of Marcel Mauss. In the light of the possible influences of van Gennep on
Mauss to be discussed in the text that follows, this should not surprise. It was
indeed a surprise to most readers, however, when Lévi-Strauss (1963) set off
his famous discussion of Totemism with reference to the work of van Gennep,
rather than that of Durkheim. By referring to van Gennep, Lévi-Strauss prob-
ably helped to kindle the interest in van Gennep among Lévi-Strauss’s British
followers, who had taken the Durkheim–Mauss–Lévi-Strauss trilogy for
granted. It was Rodney Needham who translated Totemism from French into
English. Needham may have sensed a certain affinity with van Gennep, as he
had dedicated much of his time translating the most important works in French
into English – just as van Gennep had spent a good deal of his career translating
from English into French. Needham’s discovery of van Gennep happened in a
period during which British anthropologists were increasingly looking across
the Channel for inspiration. Needham and Leach, supported by Evans-
Pritchard, inspired the translation of the most important classic works of
French anthropology written by figures such as Marcel Mauss, Robert Hertz,
Hubert and Mauss and of course Durkheim. It was also Needham who later
translated and introduced van Gennep’s ‘The Semi-Scholars’ in 1967; and he
was also the academic ‘mentor’ of another maverick anthropologist to be
discussed later in this book, Colin Turnbull.
The work by van Gennep that interested Lévi-Strauss was not Rites de
passage, but instead van Gennep’s work on totemism, in particular L’état
actuel du problème totémique, van Gennep’s main thesis for his doctorate of
letters, published in 1920.8 Totemism (published in French in 1962) is a key
work in Lévi-Strauss’s oeuvre. His approach to totemism represents a further
grounding of his structuralist approach, earlier exposed in The Elementary
Structures of Kinship and then developed in a series of publications. Lévi-
Strauss refers to van Gennep five times in Totemism (1963). The first three
references (4, 11, 12) are negative, as Lévi-Strauss claims that van Gennep had
misinterpreted Franz Boas. However, in chapter 2, ‘Australian Nominalism’,
where Lévi-Strauss moves closer to the present in his ‘literature review’,
starting to formulate his own understanding of the subject matter, Arnold van
Gennep’s book from 1920 serves as the starting point of discussion – and a
reference to it literally opens the chapter. The complex matters that surround

8
In this book van Gennep reiterates why and how totemism, as a product of human ingenuity, is
both a complex and an extremely varied phenomenon. Therefore, he says (and with evident
reference to Durkheim), ‘to explain it with verbal formulas such as collective thought, totemic
mode of thought, socialization of affective values, is to retrogress to the days of phlogiston, if not
to those of virtus dormitiva’ (as in Belmont 1979: 30).
32 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

marriage rules and their connection to totemic classification are shortly pre-
sented, before Lévi-Strauss states that ‘the rationale behind these rules has been
well explained by Arnold van Gennep’ (35). The quotation that follows is one
of the longest in the book, and it gives full space to van Gennep’s interpretation
that exogamy fundamentally serves to establish a matrimonial interchange
through the generations. This interchange, van Gennep says (quoted in Lévi-
Strauss 1963: 35–6), ‘is the more complicated in proportion with the age of the
society and the increasing number of its segments, an alternating mingling in
which exogamy ensures regularity and periodical return’. Lévi-Strauss then
states explicitly that this interpretation is also his own, as it coincides with what
he had argued in his Elementary Structures of Kinship.
In the standard literature on Lévi-Strauss, it is repeatedly stated that he was
inspired by Durkheim and (especially) A. R. Radcliffe-Brown in his discussion
of totemism, while van Gennep is rarely even mentioned. Lévi-Strauss expli-
citly says that he considers van Gennep’s interpretation from 1920 superior to
anything that Radcliffe-Brown may have argued, even in his late writings
(Lévi-Strauss 1963: 36). Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of Durkheim amounts to a
categorical rejection. Durkheim’s theory of totemism ‘starts with an urge, and
ends with a recourse to sentiment’ (70–71).
Lévi-Strauss clearly saw van Gennep as a better starting point than
Durkheim. Edmund Leach adopted this stance as well. In his overview essay
on ritual, Leach concluded that ‘van Gennep’s schema has proved more useful
than Durkheim’s (1968: 522). Lévi-Strauss’s recognition of van Gennep is not
strange, for van Gennep always insisted that ceremonial patterns should be
examined as wholes and that comparison should be based on similarities in
structure rather than on content. So why, granted these facts, did this not lead to
a more general reappraisal of Arnold van Gennep, after all?
First of all, Lévi-Strauss’s recognition of van Gennep remained extremely
partial and biased. Why, asks Lévi-Strauss, should men have come to symbo-
lise their clan affiliations by signs? Here Lévi-Strauss flatly rejects what he
dismissively talks about as Durkheim’s ‘affective theory of the sacred’:
Durkheim’s theory of the collective origin of the sacred, like those which we have just
criticized, rests on a petitio principii; it is not present emotions, felt at gatherings and
ceremonies, which engender or perpetuate the rites, but ritual activity which arouses the
emotions. Far from the religious idea being born of ‘effervescent social surroundings,
and of this very effervescence,’ they presuppose it. (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 71)
This was not unlike what van Gennep had argued in his earlier critiques.
Durkheim’s ‘theory’ is nothing but a hopeless tautology. However, Lévi-
Strauss does not refer back to van Gennep’s crucial critiques of Durkheim,
van Gennep’s book from 1920 being the only one cited. Via Lévi-Strauss also
van Gennep’s work was wrongly inserted into an-ism where it ultimately does
 Arnold van Gennep: Liminal Rites and the Rhythms of Life 33

not belong. We say ‘ultimately’, because there are indeed strong ‘structuralist’
elements in van Gennep’s work. However, the drowning of the individual at the
altar of abstract structures so evident in Lévi-Strauss is anathema to van
Gennep and his insistence on ‘living facts’. Lévi-Strauss had no place for the
transformative potentials of rites of passage. In fact, Lévi-Strauss had little
place for rituals as such: it was via a study of myth that anthropologists could
discover the ‘laws of logic that govern the world of mind’, ‘common to all
subjects of whatever kind’ (the words are from the Comte quote that Lévi-
Strauss chose to preface the book). The denigration of ritual studies only served
to sever the non-reception of van Gennep’s work and its potential.

Pierre Bourdieu and Arnold van Gennep: Yet Another Missed

Opportunity
For any book, such as this, that wishes to build bridges from anthropology
to social theory, Bourdieu remains a pivotal figure to discuss. In our read-
ing, however, Bourdieu’s approach presents some serious limits. Some of
these limits are visible indeed in his treatment of van Gennep. Potentially,
Pierre Bourdieu’s work stands in closer proximity to Arnold van Gennep
than to any other social scientist in the world. The claim can be sustained at
three levels.
First, in terms of disciplines, although Bourdieu started out in philosophy,
from an early age his work straddled the same three main disciplines that van
Gennep worked within: folklore, anthropology and sociology. As regards
French folklore, van Gennep was unquestionably the founding figure.
Second, in terms of empirical research, Bourdieu’s focus overlapped in
crucial ways with that of van Gennep. Much of his early empirical work
draws on rural French folklore, while he also engaged fieldwork in Northern
Algeria – exactly the two main regions where van Gennep gathered his ethno-
graphic material. Even in his Sociologie de l’Algérie, Bourdieu makes no
mention of van Gennep’s book from 1914, En Algérie. The omission (contin-
ued in all subsequent publications on the Algerian material) is all the more
noteworthy, as Bourdieu’s discussion of Kabyle culture and mentality comes
somewhat close to the by far longest chapter of van Gennep’s book, e.g. his
reflexive discussion of ‘la mentalité indigène’ (van Gennep 1914: 107–94).
Engaging with van Gennep might have prevented Bourdieu from reiterating the
stark Durkheimian dichotomy between supposedly homogeneous versus dif-
ferentiated societies (a temptation that van Gennep recognises but then avoids).
It also would not have been irrelevant for Bourdieu to engage van Gennep’s
discussion of the French colonial influence on ‘traditional’ culture and social
organisation, a theme in Bourdieu’s work from the late 1950s. Van Gennep’s
analysis of the disruptive effects of the French presence actually resonates quite
34 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

well with what Bourdieu had to argue. Furthermore, in his work on Algeria (as
elsewhere), Bourdieu ventures into comparative considerations between the
Kabyle and the Southern French rural cultures (including the socio-economic
transformations underway in his native Béarn) – a comparison repeatedly taken
up also by van Gennep (including references, in particular, to his ‘adopted
home region’, Savoy).
Third, even in terms of thematic and theoretical focus, the overlaps are quite
significant. Bourdieu paid great attention to the symbolic aspects of language
use, ritual exchange and gender differentiation – crucial themes in van
Gennep’s work. Here one can mention Bourdieu’s famous analysis of
‘The Kabyle house or the world reversed’. Spatial arrangements, structurally
organised symbolic spaces and binary oppositional worldviews were some of
van Gennep’s core interests. One could also mention van Gennep’s analysis of
language and ‘dialects’ in France, another shared theme with Bourdieu. On
these and so many other matters, Bourdieu largely disregarded van Gennep’s
work. He does mention van Gennep now and again, but there is no recognition
or substantial discussion to be found. One conspicuous example is in
Bourdieu’s famous discussion of the religious field (Bourdieu 1971). On page
327 of ‘Genèse et structure du champ religieux’, Bourdieu loosely refers to van
Gennep’s Manuel de folklore français contemporain, saying that this work is
full of examples of the exchange that takes place between rural and ecclesias-
tical culture. However, in the long sentence in which Bourdieu makes this
reference, use is made of terms (in inverted commas as if direct quotes) which
are not those of van Gennep. The work of van Gennep is not even in the
bibliography. As the Manuel is a multi-volume work, it is rather difficult to
guess what Bourdieu is actually drawing on here – if anything at all, because at
the end of the sentence a bibliographical reference is indeed made, but to Le
Goff and Bergeron. Bourdieu’s essay on religion is one of the most widely
quoted essays in the field; it has nothing of van Gennep’s ethnographic rigour,
and strikingly little to offer also at the conceptual level, trying to blend Marx,
Durkheim and Weber, while problematically invoking here his notion of ‘field’
to demarcate a universalistic object of study (religion as such).
When Bourdieu does mention van Gennep more explicitly, he gets it ser-
iously wrong. One place where van Gennep is invoked is in Bourdieu’s short
book on Masculine Domination, remarkably thin on ethnographic data.
Bourdieu builds his more general observations on his Kabyle fieldwork mate-
rial from the 1960s, yet arguing that the larger conclusions speak to and
exemplify larger Mediterranean and indeed European patterns. Bourdieu jus-
tifies choosing the ‘particular case’ of Kabylia by pointing out that ‘the cultural
tradition that has been maintained there constitutes a paradigmatic realization
of the Mediterranean tradition’, and that ‘the whole European cultural domain
undeniably shares in that tradition’. This ‘undeniably’ is a risky claim, but
 Arnold van Gennep: Liminal Rites and the Rhythms of Life 35

Bourdieu sustains it with reference to ‘a comparison of the rituals observed in

Kabylia with those collected by Arnold Van Gennep in early twentieth-century
France’ (Bourdieu 2001: 6). This, however, is exactly the way in which van
Gennep’s framework and meticulous work on ritual cannot be used; while van
Gennep detects a ritual pattern which he claims universal, he consciously
rejects any universalisation concerning the substance or the social effects
created by such rituals – which is what Bourdieu is inferring. Arnold van
Gennep would have flatly rejected Bourdieu’s claim that ‘the canonical form’
of the masculine/feminine oppositions are found among the Kabyle (56). He
would have agreed that such oppositions can be found in many different forms,
but as to their content, one would have to be empirical and concrete, inferring
only from the ethnographic detail. Bourdieu does not specify the supposed
ways in which the Kabyle material displays identical features to van Gennep’s
collected material. Even further, Bourdieu refers to van Gennep’s material as
belonging exclusively to France, whereas in fact van Gennep drew on a much
wider base for cultural comparison – including his own fieldwork in Algeria! In
short, Bourdieu uses van Gennep to universalise in a manner incompatible with
van Gennep.
A second occasion on which Bourdieu did have a chance to discuss van
Gennep’s work took place in 1981, when a workshop was organised in
Neuchâtel, in recognition of Arnold van Gennep’s pivotal role for Swiss
folklore and ethnology. An edited volume (Centlivres and Hainard 1986) was
published as a follow-up to that conference, with a collection of papers from a
narrow group of van Gennep experts. This included Nicole Belmont, van
Gennep’s biographer. Pierre Bourdieu was present at the workshop and gave
a paper on the social powers at play in rites of passage. The ceremonial and
symbolic aspects of power always played a huge role in Bourdieu’s writings, so
a juxtaposition between his approach and that of Arnold van Gennep promised
well. The paper was published as ‘Les rites comme actes d’institution’ in Actes
de la recherche en sciences sociales (Bourdieu 1982) and reprinted in Ce que
parler veut dire. The article was then translated into English as ‘Rites of
Institution’ and published as a chapter in Language and Symbolic Power
(Bourdieu 1992: 117–26). It is one of Bourdieu’s most frequently read and
quoted papers – and in theory a celebration of van Gennep’s life-work.
This could have been a turning point in the reception of van Gennep,
for Bourdieu was establishing himself in that period as one of the major
figures in contemporary sociology, bridging his anthropological concern
with practice with main concerns of social theory, trying to move beyond
structuralism. If there ever was a chance that van Gennep could have
made it into the social theoretical canon, this was it. This was not what
happened; quite the contrary. Should any curious sociologists have
wanted to go further into detail with what van Gennep had actually
36 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

written, Bourdieu (1992: 117) warned them off from the outset with these
opening lines:
With the notion of rites of passage, Arnold van Gennep named, indeed described a social
phenomenon of great importance. I do not believe that he did much more . . . In fact, it
seems to me that in order to develop the theory of rites of passage any further, one has to
ask the questions that this theory does not raise, and in particular those regarding the
social function of ritual and the social significance of the boundaries or limits which the
ritual allows one to pass over or transgress in a lawful way. (italics in the original)
Bourdieu then moves on to suggest the term ‘rites of institution’ to replace
‘rites of passage’, as this would serve to identify the social and institutional
aspect of such rites, and in particular, the way in which they primarily – in
Bourdieu’s reading – serve as power vectors for those who hold knowledge and
hence function as mechanisms of social exclusion. This is the real importance
of such rituals, says Bourdieu, much more so than the cultural inclusion
aspects, which allegedly was the only interest held by van Gennep. Here
Bourdieu simply repeated what institutionalised French academia, since
Durkheim, had decided on as a verdict, namely that van Gennep had nothing
theoretical to offer, and that to take his concepts anywhere, one would now
need to ask all the questions that van Gennep had failed to address. It also
repeated the absurd claim that van Gennep was unable to say anything about the
collective level. In fact, Bourdieu makes no further mention of van Gennep in
the analysis that follows. There is no sign whatsoever that Bourdieu had
actually read van Gennep in any great detail; in fact, it is probably one of the
most curious and most problematic ‘Festschrift’ papers written in the history of
sociology, as there is not a single sign of recognition of the person who in
theory is commemorated.
If Bourdieu had actually bothered to engage with van Gennep’s work, he
would have discovered that van Gennep’s entire approach was eminently
directed towards those social dimensions that Bourdieu would feel he has to
reinvent well over half a century later. In chapter VI, ‘Initiation Rites’, the by
far longest chapter in Rites of Passage, van Gennep paid close attention exactly
to how rites of passage simultaneously bring together and set apart. This is
because for van Gennep, in contrast to Durkheim, rituals are essentially linked
to processes of differentiation (or ‘distinction’, as Bourdieu would have it). He
analyses this process, for example, with respect to gender differentiation
(another blind spot in Durkheim’s theory). How groups and subgroups use
rites of passage to set themselves apart is an omnipresent theme in van Gennep.
In fact, the examples that van Gennep invoke in this chapter are surprisingly
clear-cut examples of exactly that dimension which Bourdieu declares absent:
rites of passage into secret societies, ordinations of priests or magicians, the
enthroning of a king, the consecration of monks and nuns, or of sacred
 Arnold van Gennep: Liminal Rites and the Rhythms of Life 37

prostitutes (van Gennep 1960: 65). On page 113 van Gennep anticipates
Bourdieu’s entire argument: ‘The counterpart of initiation rites are the rites of
banishment, expulsion and excommunication – essentially rites of separation
and de-sanctification. . .. ’ Those rites, says van Gennep, are essentially about
the setting apart of objects or persons.
Everything that is valid in Bourdieu’s conceptualisation is already there
in van Gennep, at least embryonically. In his own approach to rites,
Bourdieu himself ends up on a rather dull and deceptive mixture of
Durkhemian functionalism and a Marxist-inspired reductionist reading of
rites as mystification or ‘naturalisation’ of power (Bourdieu 1992: 126).
Durkheim is even positively invoked as having theorised the creation of the
out-of-ordinary in ritualisation (123). Rather than paying homage to Arnold
van Gennep, engaging with his work from within and taking seriously
Victor Turner’s elaboration which then had reached its mature stage,
Bourdieu trashes van Gennep’s fine-grained analytical framework into the
dustbin of intellectual history, armed with Marx and Durkheim. He then
reduces rites to the social structure they serve to maintain. It is quite an
astonishing example of theoretical retrogression.
Many sociologists will know the name of van Gennep only via Pierre
Bourdieu’s superficial dismissal. This echoes the sociological non-memory of
Gabriel Tarde, whose claim to fame was until recently attributed to having been
Durkheim’s opponent. We need to return to the real spirit of van Gennep’s
work.

Towards a Revalorisation: Arnold van Gennep’s Vision for the

Social Sciences
It is not enough to recognise Arnold van Gennep as an extremely important
critic of Durkheim. We need to understand that this critique evolved in tandem
with van Gennep’s own attempt to establish foundations for the social sciences.
Contrary to what one may read in the various encyclopaedia entrances, where
van Gennep is often depicted as a scholar without theoretical ambitions, van
Gennep actually did have a project. Sure enough, it was not a project that could
be boiled down to single theoretical formulas or easily defined methodological
‘rules’, as in Durkheim.
Arnold van Gennep’s larger anthropological project is not widely known,
and that is certainly also due to the fact that it shipwrecked. Van Gennep never
became a founder of anthropology. But he did try. In many ways the project
shared affinities with that of Durkheim and his students. Van Gennep wanted to
create an empirical social science focussed on the systematic, in-depth study of
material and symbolic culture among living peoples. To establish such a terrain,
van Gennep found it necessary to free ethnology and ethnography from
38 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

physical anthropology, and also from the study of history, or ‘cette manie
orrible de subordonner l’étude du présent à celle du passé’ (van Gennep quoted
in Zerilli 1998b: 152). For van Gennep, as for Durkheim, cultural and social
practices could not be derived from their historical ‘origin’ but had to be placed
in their present reality.
Like other writers of his generation, van Gennep also saw definition, classi-
fication and systematic comparison as crucial. He paid an almost manic atten-
tion to ethnographic facts. A new social science had to be both systematic and
empirical. Like Durkheim and Mauss, van Gennep lamented that the social
sciences still needed a sound methodology that would give them the prestige of
the natural sciences. This, in our reading, is a problematic starting point, as the
desire for a universalistic social science is problematic from the outset.
However, the way in which van Gennep qualified his search for a ‘rigorous
science’ merits attention, as it moves outside the neo-Kantian entrapment.

Van Gennep’s Rhythmic Social Science

To some extent van Gennep was indeed a child of French positivism. One
central aspect of positivism has to do with the need for clear-cut categories and
classification: the world must be divided up if we are to make sense of it. Van
Gennep undeniably operates with divisions and categories. Rites of Passage is
in fact about categories and classifications. In his foreword, van Gennep starts
by saying that it is high time to classify the vast number of rites that previous
studies have discussed but never managed to present systematically; and this
classification that must be ‘consistent with the progress of science’ (van
Gennep 1960: xxv). The opening chapter is entitled ‘Classement de rites’.
Towards this aim van Gennep introduces four basic oppositional distinctions,
between sympathetic and contagious rites, direct and indirect rites, positive and
negative rites and animistic and dynamistic rites. Almost like a mathematician
he can then deduce that there are ‘sixteen possible ways of classifying any
single rite’.
Here again, however, we have to be careful. Van Gennep did not operate with
categorisation and classification in a spirit of naïve positivism; and he fully
understood that to analyse we must not only separate but also appreciate the
larger whole. Van Gennep’s understanding of social phenomena is complex,
dynamic and energetic. It is for example true that van Gennep accepted the
dichotomy between sacred and secular. This distinction was crucial for both
Robertson Smith and Durkheim, and Durkheim’s theory of religion would not
be possible without it. However, unlike Durkheim, van Gennep does not
understand the sacred as an absolute term. ‘Sacredness as an attribute is not
absolute; it is brought into play by the nature of particular situations’ (van
Gennep 1960: 12). Sacrality is both relational and mobile. It does not exist in
 Arnold van Gennep: Liminal Rites and the Rhythms of Life 39

fixed spaces or predefined moments. Sacrality depends on the activity per-

formed, on the people observing this activity and on the point or moment in
time of the activity. People are sacred or secular relative to their situation and
relative to the where and when in their passage from one place or position to
another.
The kind of movement that is so essential to van Gennep relates to the
‘rhythms’ that exist in the different orders of reality. Gennep refused to
radically separate the study of society from ‘nature’. This is best captured by
a careful understanding of the last sentence of van Gennep’s famous book:
Finally, the series of human transitions has, among some peoples, been linked to the
celestial passages, the revolutions of the planets, and the phases of the moon. It is indeed
a cosmic conception that relates the stages of human existence to those of plant and
animal life and, by a sort of pre-scientific divination, joins them to the great rhythms of
the universe.9
Here again the contrast with Durkheim is categorical. For Durkheim, human
beings bestow order on the universe via social classifications of their own
making, a clearly neo-Kantian position which Durkheim, in the Introduction to
Elementary Forms, even tries to extend towards an empirical/social grounding
of knowledge per se. In contrast, in Rites of Passage Van Gennep grounded the
similarities in ceremonies in the very fact of transition.
According to van Gennep (1960: 3), ‘The universe itself is governed by a
periodicity which has repercussions on human life, with stages and transitions,
movements forward, and periods of relative inactivity’. This coincides per-
fectly with Tarde’s discussion of regularity and repetition, to be discussed in the
next chapter. As stressed by Hochner (in press), ‘The rhythms of the universe
are rhythms that have social corollaries.’
In no way was van Gennep trying to reduce the social world to that of nature;
there is no hint of sociobiology. However, in van Gennep’s reading, scientists
of the nineteenth century had become overtly distanced from reality. They had
started to adopt a language that had lost directness in relation to the world that
surrounds us and of which we are a part. Van Gennep was searching for a
science that could allow us to return to life, just as Dilthey and Simmel were
arguing at the same time in Germany. Van Gennep’s own approach was
extremely methodical and concrete, and yet always linked to a larger picture,
in full awareness of the complexity and ‘relatedness’ of the single ‘items’ he
picked up for discussion. Van Gennep passionately believed in science, but he
was sceptical about certain usages of scientific positivism. The ‘biology’ or
‘biological sociology’ to which van Gennep referred was not simply allusive to
the authority and objectivity of natural science but rather indicative of the
9
In his own copy he eventually capitalised this last word into ‘Universe’ (van Gennep 1981:
addendum).
40 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

importance of direct observation and engagement with concrete life-worlds.

Van Gennep wanted social scientists to deal with living facts, rather than with
‘dead’ and abstract facts. In fact, a more precise translation of van Gennep’s
faits naissants might be ‘facts in their emergence’, or ‘things’ or ‘events’ in
their moment of ‘coming into being’.
Van Gennep refused to see sociology, folklore and ethnography as radically
separate disciplines. For him they were a single discipline with a shared
methodology. It is within this horizon of genuine life science that the work of
van Gennep belongs – as does the concept of liminality. A reappraisal of van
Gennep’s thought can in crucial ways assist contemporary Tardean-inspired
debates to rethink our epistemology. Van Gennep’s ultimate relevance is that
his work needs to be revalorised as a stepping stone towards a genuine science
of life or living experience, much in the spirit of the very last writing which
Foucault published, the French version of his 1978 Introduction to
Canguilhem’s On the Normal and the Pathological, entitled ‘Life: experience
and science’.10 This relates to the question of limits.

Boundaries, Limits and the ‘Pivoting of the Sacred’

In Rites of Passage van Gennep presents rites of passage in universalistic terms.
‘The life of an individual in any society is a series of passages from one age to
another and from one occupation to another’ (van Gennep 1960: 2-3, our
italics). The opening sentence of the book starts with ‘Each larger society. . . ’
(société générale). Yet in the following paragraphs, van Gennep operates a
broad distinction between ‘modern’ societies and ‘less civilised’ ones (1) (we
would of course use different terms today). What characterises ‘modern
society’ is that, since the Renaissance, the variety and strength of social
divisions have been greatly reduced, so that the secular/sacred division remains
as the only salient one, while in ‘less civilised’ societies one can note, says van
Gennep, ‘an ever-increasing domination of the secular by the sacred’ (2). The
secular/sacred divide does not disappear in the passage to modernity, quite the
contrary: this divide, instead, gains higher significance compared to other
societies in which many types of passages between groups and between posi-
tions belong to the sacred realm. So, as the first sentence of the book continues,
at ‘lower levels of civilisation’, ‘the differences among groups become accen-
tuated and their autonomy increases’ (1). The second sentence of the book
continues: “In contrast, the only clearly marked social division remaining in
modern society is that which distinguishes between the secular and the reli-
gious worlds – between the profane and the sacred ” (1). The secular/sacred

10
It thus fits well with the kind of anthropological ‘vitalism’ promoted by Rabinow (Rabinow
2008; Rabinow and Caduff 2006), using jointly Foucault and Canguilhem.
 Arnold van Gennep: Liminal Rites and the Rhythms of Life 41

divide for van Gennep is not the same in various societies across time and
space. Pressing the point, one could say that the secular/sacred divide as an
absolute is peculiar to Western modernity and cannot therefore be taken as a
given.
Although we cannot here pursue the argument in full detail, van Gennep
actually provides us with a different entry to the understanding of ‘secu-
larisation’ as a process. As seen by van Gennep, such a process is not
primarily about what happens to ‘belief’, but involves something much
more fundamental, touching the basic question of limits and what happens
to passage experiences across boundaries. From a van Gennep-inspired
understanding, secularisation can be defined as the de-sacralisation of
boundary-crossing. What is secularised is not science or political rule;
what is secularised is, at the deepest level, the movement between posi-
tions in space or time that is ‘freed’ from social conventions or ritualisa-
tion. This would imply that the very importance of such changes in
people’s lives is downgraded, devalued or simply dismissed. The examples
of passage experiences and rites invoked by van Gennep himself are
extremely illuminating in this regard: how to incorporate strangers; the
loss of virginity; divorce experiences; movement between public and
private spheres (crossing the threshold of the door of the household); the
movement from villages into war zones; or the movement between village
and market places (van Gennep 1960: 17–18).
The main quality of a boundary is its sanctity. That is why such limits need to
be symbolised by members of a society, from the portals of a household to the
landmarks between larger territorial units. The installation of such limit-sym-
bols is always accompanied by rites of consecration (Gazit, in press). For van
Gennep this is crucial. The sacrality of space rests on a necessary recognition of
boundaries, and the rites and taboos surrounding such boundaries. This also
explains the crucial role played by what van Gennep calls ‘guardians of the
threshold’ (gardiens du seuil), such as Hermes in Greek mythology or Janus,
the two-faced Roman god of warfare, who was also deity of doors and
thresholds.
Scholars often refer back to van Gennep’s classification of preliminal,
liminal and postliminal rites – this is his claim to fame, after all. Van Gennep
recognised the transformative potential of rituals via the liminal. Liminality is
indeed an irreplaceable term for the analysis of transition and social and
political transformation (Szakolczai 2003, 2009a, 2014a, 2017a, 2017b;
Thomassen 2010, 2012, 2013a, 2014a; see also the 2009 conference in
Cambridge on liminality, published in International Political Anthropology,
vol. 2, no. 1.). Decisive events and ideas tend to take shape in figurations that
are both spatially and temporally liminal. We will return to this point in the
chapters that follow.
42 Part I: Maverick Anthropologists

However, it is crucial to remember that van Gennep distils this classi-

fication and introduces the notion of the liminal in the sections of a
chapter on the territorial passage called ‘the sacred zones’ and ‘the
sanctity of a passage’ (Les divinités du passage). It is also in this precise
context that van Gennep introduces another notion which is absolutely
crucial if we want to understand the place of the liminal in the wider
terminology he elaborated: the ‘pivoting of the sacred’. In his handwritten
notes to his own manuscript, van Gennep wrote ‘bivalence’ in the margins
of the text, but without erasing ‘pivotement’, as if to render more clear
what he meant by pivoting. So, it seems, we are dealing with a double
movement. Van Gennep writes that the ‘“magic circles” pivot’. But this is
more than a circular movement. Although van Gennep never made such a
discussion explicit, the kind of temporality that he captured here – his
rhythmic framework – is indeed different from the temporality inherent to
modernity: a temporality anchored in a narrative of revolution (as a radical
break with the past) and evolution (as a continuous progress towards still
higher forms). Van Gennep was sceptical about both. He did not endorse
evolutionism, found little use in theories of ‘origin’, and was highly
critical of the idea of revolution as an event that could suddenly replace
what had existed previously, installing a new social order. Van Gennep’s
temporality is different; and it was a temporality that he recognised as
given. Sure, everything moves, but the world is not a chaos. Change is
constant but within a larger order of sequences. Change and stability are
not categorical opposites but poles of the same ordered system, with its
inbuilt rhythms of birth, death and regeneration (see again Hochner, in
press). It is in this sense that the ‘pivoting’ is also a ‘bivalence’.
The double stress on the materiality of the limit and movement is vital
to van Gennep’s entire approach. Human life always takes place in-
between the bounds of the ‘given’, the natural, cultural and social restrict-
ing conditions and the unbound and unlimited freedom beyond the limit.
For van Gennep this indeed is a universal condition: to know about the
limits that surround personal and social existence. Van Gennep’s theory
does not essentialise the boundary; unlike Lévi-Strauss he is not fixating
the mind in a universal structure of rigid laws. Change is inherent to the
structure. Movement is part of ‘order’ in his cosmic vision. In rites of
passage human beings touch the ‘prohibited’ land of unbound freedom and
danger. The pivoting of the sacred emerges in the constant movement
between the limit and the limitless and of the familiar and the foreign;
social life, conceived as such, is a constant movement of sanctification,
de-sanctification and re-sanctification of the boundaries that are necessary
to render human and social life both possible and meaningful.
 Arnold van Gennep: Liminal Rites and the Rhythms of Life 43

This ultimately also concerns the boundary of the single human person, the
skin that demarcates the inside/outside of the self/other relation. Upholding this
boundary while being aware of its relative nature (no man is an island) is
necessary for human integrity. Modernity, in a sense, is the breaking of the
rhythms underlying the pivoting of the sacred: it is a constant breaking of
boundaries, with no ritual of reincorporation. It is a celebration of the limitless
and a siding with the foreign over the familiar. The question then concerns the
modalities of this operation. About this, van Gennep had little to say. But he
helped us to pose the question.
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 overboard and then hauled him out of the water,
exactly as if he were a fish. This Jonah-like ruse
apparently induced appetite, for “soon after
trout, or sillock, would begin to nibble.”
The comparative ethnologist detects in all
these cases an attempt to establish direct
relations between the hunter or the fisher and his
quarry. Primitive man in search for food
frequently seeks to establish an impalpable but in
his eyes very serviceable connection between
himself and the object of his quest by working a
likeness of his desired prey.
Such a likeness, according to the doctrine that
a simulacrum is actively en rapport with that
AN ALASKAN which it represents, bestows on its possessor
power over the original—“l’auteur ou le
HOOK WITH possesseur d’une image peut influencer ce qu’elle
A WIZARD’S représente.”[44] The cases are simply the
HEAD. commonplaces of homœpathic or imitative magic.
[45]
From E. Krause’s
Vorgeschichtliche
Fischereigeräte,
We find that just as the savage attempts to
fig. 345. appease the ghosts of men he has slain, so he
essays to propitiate the spirits of the animals and
fish he has killed: for this purpose elaborate
ceremonies of propitiation are widely observed.[46] Of similar
character and intent are the taboos observed by fishermen before
the season opens, and the purifications performed on returning with
their booty.
Magic, exercised not so much to propitiate as to avoid offending
some power—in the following instance the element of water—
originated the rule (existent among the Eskimos fifty years ago) that
forbade during the salmon season any water being boiled in a
house, because “this is bad for the fishing.” Frazer suggests that the
Commandment in Exodus xxxiv. 26, “Not to seethe a kid in its
mother’s milk,” embodies a like illustration.[47]
From carvings, whether executed for purposes of amusement or
of magic, and from specimens found in the débris of the stations, we
derive our knowledge of the earliest implements and methods
employed in Perigord and elsewhere for taking fish.
A study of these warrants, to my mind, the conclusion that only
two weapons can be traceably attributed to Palæolithic Man. First
and pre-eminent the Spear (or Harpoon with its various congeners)
with possibly adjustable flint-heads, and second, but to a far less
extent, the Gorge, or as it has been better termed, “the bait-holder.”
Of a Troglodyte Net no representation exists, no specimen
survives. The absence of an actual specimen can perhaps be
explained by the perishable nature of the fibres or wythes used for
its construction.
The undeniable survival of pieces of Nets among the lake
dwellers seems somewhat to negative the explanation.[48] But these
may have survived because of the presence, while those of the
Palæolithic Age may have perished because of the absence of some
preservative power in the substance in which they were embedded.
The absence from the latter and the presence in the former
débris of Net sinkers, etc., strongly, if not conclusively, corroborate
Broca’s conclusion that the Cave men of the Vézère Valley and
elsewhere were strangers to the Net.
We possess, in my opinion, no evidence of Hooks (as distinct
from Gorges) or of anything resembling Hooks proper—viz. hooks
made out of one piece, recurved, and with sharpened ends—being
used by the Old Stone Man.
De Mortillet, it is true, writing in 1867,[49] states that “hooks
belonging to the reindeer epoch have been found in the Caves of
Dordogne. Along with those of the simple form (the gorges) others
were met with of much more perfect shape.” In his later work (op.
cit.) of 1890 he contents himself with claiming the existence of a
hook, but of very primitive type, “a small piece of bone tapered at
either end”—in fact, nothing more than the Gorge.[50]
S. Reinach, again, instances “three fish-hooks,” but whittles them
away till they become “two sharp points more in the nature of a
gorge.”[51] Osborne, commenting on the numerous pigmy flints
discovered in the Tardenoisian débris, writes that “it would appear
that a large number of these were adapted for insertion in small
harpoons, or that those of the grooved form might even have been
used as fish-hooks.”[52] With the opinion of Christy (co-explorer with
Lartet of La Madelaine) that those pointed bone rods or gorges “may
have formed part of fish-hooks, having been tied to other bones or
sticks obliquely,”[53] the evidence in favour of the Hook practically
finishes.
The case, I venture to maintain, breaks down. And this, too, in
spite of the view expressed and the evidence adduced by so eminent
an authority as Abbé H. Breuil, and in spite of the gravure de
Fontarnaud figurant un poisson mordant (?)—the query is Breuil’s—à
l’hameçon. The gravure fails to convince, chiefly because les
hameçons figured do not recurve in the proper sense. They seem to
be more in the nature of gorges curved back and much improved in
the course of generations.[54]
The evolution of the primitive gorge, in particular those with ends
slightly curved, into a double fish-hook was, I suggest, probably an
easy process, more especially with the discovery of the adaptability
of bronze. But these gorges can never be properly termed hooks.
 BONE GORGE OR BAITHOLDERS.
1. From La Madelaine. 2. From La Madelaine, grooved for attaching the line.
3 and 4. From Santa Cruz, California. The slight curving of 3 may be possibly
the first step towards the more rounded gorge, and eventually the bent hook.

The function of the hook is to establish a hold by penetration,

that of a gorge by resistance—once down, vestigia nulla retrorsum.
A shape with some but not too great curvature[55] would increase
such resistance, one with more would possibly give the additional
safeguard of penetration.
Meditation on this duplication of functions might lead an
enquiring mind to conclude that penetration alone might suffice for
what was required. Thus farther curve might be added for this
ostensible purpose, with the result that in time the hook supersedes
the gorge, to which it is superior in several respects, not least in
ease and speed of extraction from a fish when landed.
Small bone rods tapering towards both ends, and sometimes
grooved in the middle probably for attachment of a line, form the
gorges of the Caves. Their descendants or kinsmen found all the
world over vary in shape and material. But whether fashioned of
bone, or flake of flint, or of turtle-shell, with cocoa nut used as
trimmers, whether straight or curved at the ends, the purpose and
operation of one and all is the same—to be swallowed (buried in
bait) by the fish end first. The tightening of the line soon alters this
position into one crosswise in the stomach or gullet. Even at the
present time in some parts of England the needle, buried in a worm
when “sniggling” for eels, works successfully in similar fashion.
It is not possible here to discuss fully the various materials and
shapes of the first Hook proper. This (according to my view)
Neolithic, certainly post-Palæolithic,[56] creation developed doubtless
from the over-education of fish, a complaint possibly as rife then as
in our own day.
No writer, despite zealous endeavours, has succeeded in
determining which material—stone (rarely found), bone, shell, or
thorn[57] —was first employed for the purpose. On that which lay
readiest would probably be essayed the prentice hand of each
particular race. To dwellers near the shore the large supply and easy
adaptability of shells would of a surety appeal. These could be
fashioned so as to be used alone, or lashed with fibre to a piece of
wood or bone so as to form the bend, while the wood or bone
constituted the shank of the hook.[58]
Prehistoric Man often with a limited local supply was driven to
adopt and adapt any material which could be forced into his purpose
of a hook. To this cause has been ascribed one of the most
extraordinary hooks on record. This relic, now in the Berlin Museum,
of the lacustrine dwellers is formed out of the upper mandible of an
eagle, notched down to the base.
 But the most interesting natural fish-hook known to me (found in
Goodenough Island, New Guinea) is the thick upper joint of the hind
leg of an insect, Eurycantha latro, furnished, however, only by the
male, who is endowed with the long, stout recurved spur, suitable
for fishing. The leg joints and therefore the hooks got from them
(about 1⅝ inches long) are supplied ready made by Nature: they
merely require to be fastened to a tapered snood of twisted
vegetable matter for immediate employment.[59]
Where flints, shells, and horn were absent or, if present, were not
turned to account, an abundance of thorns with bend and point
ready made and with proved capacities of piercing and holding
would attract the notice and serve the purpose of the New Stone
Man. Such later on was the case in Babylon and Israel (in both of
which countries the primary sense of the word equalling hook
seems, according to some authorities, to have been thorn[60]), and
is the case even now with our fishermen in Essex and the Mohave
Indians in Arizona.[61]
 THE Eurycantha latro.
HOOK READY MADE FROM THE
SPUR OF Eurycantha latro.
See n. 1, p. 34.

The suggestion that the choice of material was generally

prompted by abundance or proximity of supply seems reasonable.
But it must not be pushed as far as the assumption (of which a
glance at the evidence as to material adduced by Joyce detects the
absurdity) that, because gold was very abundant in Columbia and
because gold fish-hooks have been unearthed in Cauca and
elsewhere, the primitive angler of that country employed gold as the
chief constituent of his hook![62]
Nor, again, is it possible for me to dwell on the evolution or in
some countries the possible pari passu development of the single
into the double hook (mentioned in England first in The Experienc’d
Angler of Venables, 1676), nor yet to trace the various stages by
which the simple bone or tusk hook of Wangen or Moosseedorf
blossomed out into the barbed metal hook of the Copper Age.[63]
The Spear-Harpoon and some points of reindeer horn alone
remain for consideration. Opinion is divided as to the nature and use
of these points. Some pronounce them mere arrow heads.[64]
Against this view leans the fact that, while they have been
recovered mainly from the French caves, no real proof as yet exists
of Palæolithic Man north of the Pyrenees being acquainted with the
bow. Paintings discovered in 1910 at Alpera in the south-east of
Spain show, however, men carrying and drawing bows, and arrows
with barbed points and feathered shafts, but no quivers. Northern
Man, if he did not paint, may well have employed, arrows, for
hunting scenes, in which they should figure, as at Minatada and
Alpera, are wanting in France.
Other writers maintain that these points were the armatures of
hunting spears, others, arguing from their easy detachment, that
they were the heads of fish-spears or harpoons. But this contrivance
seems far too complicated for our primitive piscator. No writer
proves conclusively what was the exact purpose of these points, or
whether, in fact, the fish-spears or harpoons had detachable heads.
E. Krause suggests that as the earliest fish-spears were of wood,
they readily lost or broke their points when striking rocks, etc.;
hence came bone and then flint points.[65]
 The Spear-Harpoon stands out as the one fishing weapon whose
existence is undeniable, whose employment is predominant. It is too
world-wide and too well-known to need lengthy description.
Reindeer-horn supplied in general the material of the earlier
heads, stag-horn of the later.[66] The heads tapered (like Eskimo and
other harpoon heads) to a point and were barbed (as the two
accompanying illustrations indicate) on both sides. They have
sometimes toward the lower end little eminences or knobs, and
sometimes barbs provided with incisions or grooves, which some
surmise held poison.

BROKEN HARPOON.
From Kent’s Cave.
 SINGLE DOUBLE DOUBLE BARBED
BARBED BARBED HARPOON.
HARPOON REINDEER Neolithic.
(Bruniquel). HARPOON From Sutz,
(La Madelaine). Switzerland.
Observe the hole
for attaching
the line.

The Harpoon makes its appearance in the middle or (according to

Osborne) early Magdalenian deposits. Its crudest form shows a
short, straight piece of bone, deeply grooved on one face, the ridges
and notches along one edge being the only indications of what later
developed into the recurved barbed points of the typical Harpoon.
These barbs or points, retroverted in such a manner as to hold their
place in the flesh of the fish, do not suddenly appear like an
inventive mutation, but very slowly evolve as their usefulness is
demonstrated by practice.
The shaft is very rarely perforated at the base for the attachment
of a line[67]; it is cylindrical (later flat) in form adapted to the
capture of large fish in streams. The harpoons may possibly have
been projected by means of the so-called propulseurs or dart
throwers, which resemble the Eskimo and Australian implements of
to-day.
Amidst the clash of opinion as to the exact use and method of
use of these weapons, my conclusion, admittedly incapable of
absolute proof, holds that the Palæolithic fisher owes to the hunter
the inception of the chief weapon of his equipment, the Spear-
Harpoon.
Paul Broca’s dictum[68] that Man hunted before he fished seems,
perhaps, despite Dall’s excavation of Eskimo débris,[69] to be borne
out by Troglodyte records both positive and negative. The Gorge or
bait-holder was employed by the hunter (according to some) even
earlier than by the fisher. Gorges have been from time immemorial
and still are in vogue in the Untersee for the capture of marine birds,
as is the case to-day with the Eskimos of Norton Sound.
From the chronicles of Rau, H. Philips, and others can be built a
Table of Generations, or the story of how the Hunting Spear begat
the Fishing Spear, which begat the Harpoon unilaterally barbed,
which in turn begat the Harpoon bilaterally barbed, until about the
tenth or twentieth generation—one is appalled at the amount of
Succession Duty which such degrees of descent would now involve!
—something begat the Rod.
 From this genealogical table I venture to dissent. I claim that the
hunting Spear, Protean in possibilities, was either itself the Rod, or
was, if “matre pulchra filia pulchrior” do not apply, at least the direct
parent of the primitive Rod. In the bigger hunting of our own
sorrowful day the same principle manifests itself, for the British
soldier in France often angled with his line attached to his bayoneted
rifle.
Many writers have attempted, some like de Mortillet with typical
French logic, some with none, to set down the sequential
development of fishing. As the Censor has not as yet banned free
expression of piscatorial opinions, I conclude this chapter with
essaying a scheme of reconstruction of my own.
First came fishing with the hand, la pêche à la main, which,
according to Abel Hovelacque, “est le mode le plus élémentaire et
certainement le moins productif.”[70] This method we may surmise
was first exercised on fish left half stranded in small pools by the
action of tides or floods, or on fish spawning in the shallow redds.
[71]

As la pêche à la main was the first to arrive, so was it the first to

cease from the functions of parentage or of fission, for with
“tickling,” described by Ælian as even in his day an ancient device,
further evolution of this method practically ended.[72]
Second came the hunting Spear, used originally on fish lying in
pools, small of size but of depth sufficient to prevent hand fishing,
and then, later, on fish elsewhere in a river. On the latter, especially
in the case of the salmon—in Pliny’s day still abundant in Aquitania,
which comprised the Loire and many Palæolithic cavernes—the
weapon, even if as bident or trident it had added unto itself a prong
or two, would frequently be found ineffective, owing to lack of
prehensility. Hence came about a modification, perhaps due either to
the happy chance of a spear on which a point or thorn had
inadvertently been left, or to the inventive faculty of some
Troglodyte Hardy.
 We later reach a Spear Harpoon with barbs on one side only,
whence “line upon line,” or rather barb upon barb, we attain unto
the later type, which had a barbed head so socketed as to come free
from the shaft (when the quarry has been struck) but made fast to
the head by a line for retrieving the fish. In due, if differing,
gradation we ultimately attain either unto the existing device of the
aboriginal Tsuŷ Hwan of Formosa, an arrow shaped like a trident
shot from but attached to a bow, or unto le dernier cri, our whaling
Harpoon shot from a gun.[73]
Third comes fishing with a line of some sort. This was devised
doubtless by some hungry but perforce merely meditative
Magdalenian observing how dropped morsels were seized by fish in
a pool, whose depth or environment set at naught both his hand and
his spear.
The problem how to reach and how to land them was eventually
solved by the method—happily christened by Sheringham,
“Entanglement by Appetite”—of fastening a gorge through or a thorn
holding some kind of bait to an animal sinew, a wythe, or a
hardened thong of one of the whip-like algæ. This wythe or what
not in the procession of the ages was (according to Pepys) to
betaper itself into the first English catgut line of 1667, and
(according to The Compleat Fisherman, London, 1724) into the first
silkworm line, and eventually into telerana and similar tenuities of
our day.
“Entanglement by Appetite,” of which a primitive form exists
among the Fuegians,[74] did literally “line upon line,” almost wythe
upon wythe multiply its seed, if not quite like the sand of the sea,
yet freely. Proofs of this fecundity exist in the varying and world-
wide forms of its issue. A strong family likeness enables us roughly
to divide these descendants into two classes.
The first (A) where (to quote our leading law case) “the human
element” is absent, as in night lining, or in “trimmering,” or in its
distant and nowadays probably illegal connection, the method of
live-baiting for pike with the aid of a goose or a duck, as set forth by
T. Barker with his customary gusto.[75]
The second (B) where “the human element” is present, as in
hand-lining and in its very latest descendant, invented for “big game
fishing” off Santa Catalina, viz. a line attached to a kite, which device
secures the required “skittering” along the surface and from wave to
wave of the flying fish-bait.[76] Even this very up-to-date device is
no new invention. In the Malayan Archipelago and many Melanesian
islands a kite has long been employed, sometimes as in the Solomon
group, with a hookless bait of a spider’s web, which, as wool with
eels, gets itself firmly entangled in the small teeth of the Gar fish.
[77]

Next arose, as snags and obnoxious branches in primitive days

abounded, and water bailiffs did not, the further crux, not quite
unknown even to-day, how to get the bait over the intervening
obstacles which the mere hand line was incapable of clearing, or
how to obtain the length necessary to place the bait properly before
the fish.[78]
The difficulty was in time overcome by attaching the tackle,
wythe, gorge, and bait to the hunting Spear. It is at this stage I
claim that the hunting Spear with wythe, gorge, and bait so attached
became, in fact for all purposes was, the original pole, or at any rate
was the immediate sire by a more springy sapling of what in the
procession of the ages was to attain unto the “tremendous,” if at
times unmastered, “majesty” of our modern Rod.
FISHING NET SPUN BY SPIDERS IN NEW GUINEA.
See n. 1, p. 43.
 Last of all, I suggest, though the evidence is conflicting, comes
fishing by Net. If Tylor,[79] Calderwood,[80] and others are correct in
their conjectures that our primitive piscator, when endeavouring to
catch by hand fish half stranded or spawning in small pools, blocked
any little exit by plaited twigs—wattling, according to C. F. Keary,
was one of the earliest prehistoric industries—or stones, that they
erected in fact the world’s first barrage, then must this ascendant or
Scotch cousin of the Net take precedence of the Spear and every
other artificial device.
Of the Net’s kith and kin are there not some scores specified in
the Onomasticon of Julius Pollux, or depicted in M. Dabry de
Thiersant’s Pisciculture en Chine? The Net was to beget a progeniem
to the Angler at any rate vitiosiorem, and (to drag in another tag)
almost like κυμάτων ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα.
Three of this big family stand out conspicuous by their diversity.
(A) The fairy-like Net—perhaps the most interesting because the
most incredible—made by Spiders and used by the Papuans.[81] (B)
The “Vimineous Weel” of Oppian. (C) The huge steel trawls, which
lately encompassed those ravening sharks of the sea, the German
submarines.
How the following device should be classed, I am not sure; it is
neither Spear, nor Hook, nor Net. But it deserves to be put on record
as an ingenious and successful species of fishing, employed by the
Cretans during the War.
According to Mr. J. D. Lawson, Fellow of Pembroke College,
Cambridge (to whom I am indebted for the account), the natives,
eager to recover the coal that ships while coaling dropped into the
sea, set out to fish for it. Since the coal could not swallow the bait,
they resolved that the bait should grip the coal. Having by means of
a rude spy-glass located the position of the mineral, they lowered
from a boat a cord to which an octopus—the larger the better—was
secured. As the fish detested the sensation of suspension, the
moment he touched bottom he clutched with all his tentacles any
solid object within reach, and while being drawn up clung to it with
might and main.
By this method of inverted fishing—whether a survival of “Minoan
Culture” or an adaptation from the East, where for many centuries
the octopus has been similarly used for catching fish—much coal and
much else was retrieved from the sea.
Note.—Since the above was written Th. Mainage
has published at Paris Les Religions de la
préhistoire. “Rites de Chasse” (ch. viii.) includes a
section on magic (pp. 326-342) and on religion (pp.
342-9), both dealing with fishing, etc., ancient and
modern. The sermon preached among the Hurons
to the fish recalls that of St. Anthony of Padua.
Mainage, on p. 344, fig. 188, gives an incised
design from Laugerie-Basse, which according to
him represents “Pêcheurs armés de filets (?).” The
design is as little convincing as the author by his
query seems convinced.
 INTRODUCTION
PART II
“Except to politicians, a decent definition is a help and a delight.”
Acting on this American dictum I start with two definitions, one
of Fishing and Angling, the other of Angling. The first we owe to that
past master of the art, Plato. Whether it come within the category of
“delight or help,” or whether he can endorse the verdict of
Theætetus as to its “satisfactory conclusion,” each reader must
decide.
Plato, using the method of elimination and incidentally more than
three pages of print, eventually arrives at the following definition of
Fishing and Angling:[82] “Then, now you and I have come to an
understanding, not only about the name of the Angler’s art, but
about the definition of the thing itself. One half of all Art was
acquisitive: one half of the acquisitive Art was conquest or taking by
force: half of this again was hunting, and half of hunting was
hunting animals: of this again the under half was fishing, and half of
fishing was striking: a part of striking was fishing with a barb, and
one half of this again (being the kind which strikes with a hook and
draws the fish from below upwards) is the Art we have been
seeking, and which from the nature of the operation is denoted
Angling or drawing up.”
Theætetus: “The result has been quite satisfactorily brought out.”
In search of a more helpful definition I turn to the English
Dictionaries. The N.E.D. (New English Dictionary, Oxford) gives
Fishing—“to catch, or try to catch fish”—wide enough for all our
purpose and for most of our performances! In their definitions of
Angling, Angle, etc., the majority of dictionaries disagree, but unite
in deriving Angle from the Aryan root, ANK = to bend, and
establishing the fishing term as the cousin of the awkward angles of
Euclid and of our youth. The N.E.D. in its definitions of ‘Angle’ (sb.),
of ‘Angle’ (vb.), of ‘Angler,’ or of ‘Angling,’ does not even agree with
itself.
Thus we find:
(A) “Angle (sb.), a fish hook: often in later use
extended to the line, or tackle, to which it is fastened, and
the Rod to which this is attached. See Book of St. Alban’s
(title of ed. 2), Treatyse perteynynge to Hawkynge,
Huntynge, and Fysshynge with an Angle.”
(B) “Angle (vb.), to use an angle: to fish with a hook
and bait.”
(C) “Angler, one who fishes with a hook and line.”
(D) “Angling, the action or art of fishing with a rod.”[83]
If A, B, C, which all differ, are accurate, D can hardly be so.
Further from A, B, C, we can deduce no correct definition of D.
Under D the N.E.D. imports as a necessary component part of
angling the presence of a rod, but I venture to think on insufficient
grounds. In the first quotation cited in support, “Fysshynge, callyd
Anglynge with a rodde,” the word “rodde,” if D hold good, must be
redundant or unnecessary. “Rodde” I hold to be an added word of
limitation, or description, as in “Fysshynge with an Angle.”
But since the dictionaries do hardly help—to some, indeed, they
smack of “the heinous crime of word-splitting”—and since the
importance (apart from etymological reasons) of possessing an
accurate and adequate definition presses, let us prostrate ourselves
before another oracle, the Law. But here too success scarcely
crowns our quest. The leading case, Barnard v. Roberts and
Williams, yields, Delphic-like, little light or leading.[84]
The facts, briefly stated, were: Roberts and Williams laid in a
private river two fishing lines; one end of the lines attached to two
pieces of wood driven into the ground made fast the lines, the other
end held hooks baited with worms, and a stone to keep the lines
under water. “The lines were left by the men, who subsequently
were found taking two fish off the hooks, and resetting the lines, of
which the keepers deprived them. The charge (under s. 24 of the
Larceny Act of 1861) ran of unlawfully, etc., taking fish otherwise
than by angling. The Justices of Bangor refused to commit, on the
ground that they were angling, and thus under the Act were
protected from damages or penalty for such angling.”
On appeal both sides cited Izaak Walton and other authors; both
quoted the N.E.D.—the appellant its definition of ‘Angling,’ i.e. fishing
with a rod, and the respondent that of ‘Angle’ (vb.), i.e. to fish with
hook and bait.
The three Judges, judge-like, disagreed in their reasons but
agreed in allowing the appeal, and disagreeing in their conceptions
of angling agreed in abstaining from any definition.
“In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed is king.” Mr. Justice
Phillimore was the least non-positive. He even committed himself to
the following: “He did not think that a rod must necessarily be part
of an angler’s outfit, but only a hook and line. He thought the human
element must be present, and that it was not sufficient when the
tackle was set once and for all, and then left.”
It is obvious from the above that, while the dictionaries are but
blind guides, the Law (if on this occasion not exactly “a hass”) fails
to elucidate what exactly constitutes Angling.
Dr. Henry van Dyke, the author of Little Rivers and other
fascinating books connected with fishing, suggests to me “Angling,
the art of fishing by hand with a hook and line, with or without a
rod.” I much prefer this to that of N.E.D., because of its greater
accuracy and of its inclusion of that really skilful method, hand-
lining. But for general convenience I adopt as the definition of
Angling “The action, or art, of fishing with a Rod.”
My Fishing from the Earliest Times treats of the Old Stone Men,
Egyptians, Assyrians, Chinese, Jews, Greeks, and Romans. The
amount of space allotted to the last two, compared with that
occupied by some of the other nations, may suggest the immortal
even if apocryphal chapter of “Snakes in Ireland.” “There are none.”
To any such criticisms I make answer that for nearly all our
knowledge as to the methods and tackle of fishing and varieties of
fish we are indebted to the Greeks and Romans, and in a smaller
degree to the Egyptians and Chinese.
Reasons of date, data, and dearth of paper prevent my using in
this book the material which I had collected on Indian, Persian, and
Japanese Fishing.
As regards India, while fishing by net falls well within my adopted
date (500 a.d.), that by hook and line—not necessarily Angling—
gains entrance by a short head, or a mere century.
Fish (matsya, apparently derived from the root mad and
signifying the inebriated) is down to c. 1000 b.c. only mentioned
once[85] in the Rigveda, X. 68, 8. In the next period—that of the
later Vedas and Brāhmanas—fish, but not methods of capture, find
frequent mention.
The Net (jāla) is first referred to in the Atharvaveda (not later
than 800 b.c.) but not in connection with fishing, while in the
Yajurveda (c. 800 b.c.) names for fishermen and a hook—baḍiša—
occur. The 139th Jātaka (c. 400 a.d.) contains the first allusion to
fishing with a line and hook.
References in Sanskrit poetry to the iron hook and bait probably
imply, though they fail to mention, the Rod. Passages in the epic
Mahābhārata, V. 1106 (c. 200 a.d.), in Kāmandaki’s aphoristic poetry
(c. 300-400 a.d.), in the Pancatantra, I. 208, “when women see a
man caught in the bonds of love, they draw him like a fish that has
followed the bait,” all suggest Angling.[86]
Fish legends, similes, stories—not always redounding to ichthyic
wisdom—meet us fairly frequently. Manu[87] is saved from the Flood
by a fish. Buddha[88] answers questions as to abstention from fish.
Wondrous fish occur: e.g. the Kar, “which knows to the scratch of a
needle’s point by how much the water in the Ocean shall increase,
by how much it is diminishing.”[89]
Stories, such as the recovery by a fish of Šakuntalā’s ring and the
consequent marriage of King Dushyanta; of Indra, the fearless slayer
of the serpent, whose death for defiling the bed of Ahalyâ was
compassed by fish;[90] of Adrikâ’s transformation into a fish and her
conception in that form of a child by King Uparicaras;[91] of The
Stupid and Two Clever Fishes;[92] of The Frog and The Two Fish,[93]
all these make pleasant if varied reading. But when we come to
methods of fishing, all variety vanishes. We are confronted with a
damnable monotony, a toujours perdrix. It is almost Net, or Nothing.
This holds true of the piscine tales even in the Arabian Nights,
e.g. The Fisherman and the Jinn, and The Fisherman and the ’Efreet.
The latter, however, possesses an unique interest: the fisherman
here, unlike his Greek and Roman poverty-stricken brethren, became
by means of his miraculous fish, “the wealthiest of the people of his
age, and his daughters continued to be the wives of princes”!
Evidence that fishing in India was of old and is now (the fishing
caste, I am told, ranks low) not highly regarded can be deduced
(inter alia) from its total omission in the Fourteen Sciences and the
Sixty-four Arts, which the Vātsyặyana Kāma Sūtra (not later than the
third century a.d.) promulgates for the education of children from
five to sixteen. Among the requisite Sciences gymnastics, dancing,
the playing of musical glasses, sword-stick, cock quail and ram
fighting, teaching parrots and starlings to sing, all these find
commendation, but fishing none!
As with India, so with Persia ancient and modern, toujours le
filet! Very many of the earliest prose works in modern Persian came
through the Pahlavi from the Sanskrit. Thus the three or four stories
—occasionally but wrongly regarded as of Persian origin—about fish
and fishing which are contained in the Anwār-i-Suhaili[94] can be
traced to The Fables of Bidpai, or The Pancatantra,[95] translated
from the Arabic version into Persian about 550 a.d.
In modern Persian (c. 1000 a.d.) poetry, lines allusive to fishing
dot themselves sparsely:[96] even in them the Net bulks biggest.
Hafiz (fourteenth century), however, gives us

“I have fallen into a Sea of Troubles, (presumably tears),

So that my Beloved may catch me with a Hook” (a curl of hair).

A passage in Arabic furnished hope of finding Angling oases in

the desert, but when in

“A fish whose jaw the gaff of Death had pierced,”

I found the word (saffūd) rendered gaff given by Richardson’s

Persian-Arabic Dictionary as “a roasting spit, a poker for the fire,” my
hope fled, for I quickly realised here an instance of anachronistic
translation, or the employment of fishing terms appropriate to
modern but inapplicable to ancient methods.[97]
I have come to the sad conclusion that the Persians ancient and
modern care not in general for fishing or angling, although the Gulf,
from which the ancient Sumerians garnered such splendid “harvest
of the sea,” washes their shores, and from their mountains descend
“fishful” streams. I have reached my conclusion for the following
reasons:—
(A) There is no word in the language which properly
expresses fish-hook. Arabic words, which strictly mean
grappling hooks, have been adopted or adapted. In
modern Arabic itself these words are not used for a fish-
hook: bâlûgh, a foreign term, prevails.
(B) In Persian, Arabic, and Turkish[98] the expression
to fish, literally translated, equals to hunt fish, and
 generally describes a man who makes his living by
netting, and selling fish.
(C) There is no word for fishing-rod in Wollaston’s
great English-Persian Dictionary.
(D) Proverbs are usually the offspring and embodiment
of the life and occupations of a nation. In both ancient
and modern Persian there is, as far as I know, but one
proverb—and that rather contemptful—allusive to fish or
fishing. It runs, “Thou shall not make a fish thine enemy,”
which probably signifies that no foe, however unlikely to
injure, can be despised.
(E) In the experiences related to me by the Rev. Dr. St.
Clair Tisdall, and by the late Sir Frank Lascelles, Netting
ousts Angling.
The former:[99] “’Though I have lived in Persia for many years
and have travelled through it from Sea to Sea, from the Persian Gulf
to the Caspian, I have never seen a fish-hook in a Persian’s hands.
In the districts I know best, the Net is the only weapon.”
The second, when our Minister at Teheran, on his first holiday
went a-fishing. Having caught on a likely stream before supper three
or four half-pound trout (I think), he anticipated next day pleasant
sport. With the very early morning came not Remorse, but the local
Sheikh to do his reverence and to make the customary present. “As I
have heard that His Great Excellency worked hard for a few fish last
night, my tribesmen have netted the river for the length of a
parasang, and I bring you plenty of fish.” Tableau! Hasty flight of Sir
Frank to another river, with like results!
Reasons both of date and data prevent my including the
Japanese, perhaps the most alert and adaptive sea-fishers in the
world. As their history before 500 a.d. must apparently be classed as
legendary, this nation eludes my chronological Net. Data on ancient
fishing, if existing, are either unknown[100] or as being derived from
China find place postea.[101]
I set the time limit of my book at roughly 500 a.d., so as to
include the last classical or quasi-classical piscatory poems viz. those
of Ausonius—notably ad Mosellam—in the fourth and of Sidonius in
the fifth century.
This date seems, indeed, a pre-ordained halting-place for three
reasons. First, the tackle of our day (though improved almost
beyond recognition in rod, winch, artificial bait, etc.) is merely the
lineal descendant of the Macedonian described by Ælian in the third
century a.d. Second, between Ælian and Dame Juliana’s Boke no
record, with two possible exceptions, of fishing with a fly exists.
Third, and more important, we possess no real continuous link
between the Angling literature of Rome down to the fifth century
and that which sprang up after the invention of printing some
thousand years later.
In the intervening centuries, it is true, books and manuscripts
were written (mainly by monks) which treated more or less of
fishing, but of Angling only incidentally.[102] They illustrate the
customs of fishermen, the natural history of fish, the making and
maintaining of vivaria or fish-ponds, rather than instruct or inform on
practical Fishing.
The most notable would, could we trace it, be “an old MS.
treatise on fishing, found among the remains of the valuable library
belonging to the Abbey of St. Bertin, at St. Omer. A paper on this
was read, a few years before 1855, at a society of antiquaries at
Arras. From its style, the MS. was supposed to have been written
about 1000 a.d., and to have been divided into twenty-two chapters.
The author’s main object was to prove that fishers had been
singularly favoured by Divine approbation; but appended to the MS.
was a full list of all river fish, the baits used for taking them, and the
suitable seasons for angling for each sort of fish.”
 For the existence of this work, vanished now for over sixty years,
we have only the authority of Robert Blakey.[103] But this, if it do
pass muster with Dr. Turrell, fails to satisfy Westwood and Satchell,
who describe his book on Angling as “a slipshod and negligent work,
devoid of all utility, a farrago of quotations incorrectly given, and of
so-called original passages, the vagueness and uncertainty of which
rob them of all weight and value. Mr. Blakey’s volume, it is but fair to
add, is redeemed from utter worthlessness by the excellent
bibliographical catalogue appended to it by the publisher!”[104]
The Geoponika, whether written or redacted by Cassianus Bassus
or Cassius Dionysius, or merely translated from a treatise by an
ancient Carthaginian author, treats generally of agriculture. The
twentieth book, however, deals with fish-ponds, fishing, and baits:
unlike the Roman writers on vivaria, who tell us nothing as to the
capture of the fish in them, the writer gives us instructive tips on
baits.
One infallible recipe in chap. xviii. for collecting the fish—on the
lines of Baiting the Swim—from its superstitious naïveté compels
quotation: “Get three limpets, and having taken out the fish therein,
inscribe on the shell the words, Ἰαώ Σαβαώθ, or ‘Jehovah, Lord of
Hosts’; you will immediately see the fish come to the same place in a
surprising manner.”[105] The two Greek words formed the so-called
Gnostic formula and occur frequently on amulets, etc. The
Geoponika adds immediately, “this name the Ichthyophagi use.”
About the fourteenth century a poem entitled De Vetula,
attributed to R. de Fournival, got translated or imitated by Jean
Lefevre. The fishing portion (68 lines) awakes our interest, as it
shows that “more than six hundred years ago, and probably two
hundred years before the date of The Boke of St. Albans, most of
the modern modes of fishing were practised; for instance, the worm,
the fly, the torch and spear, the night line, the eel-basket and fork,”
etc.
 This quotation from Westwood and Satchell might cause a casual
reader to suppose that (α) from De Vetula, written only some two
centuries before The Boke of St. Albans, we gain our first
information “of these modes of fishing,” and (β) that these were
“modern,” whereas Oppian had described them all, some thirteen
hundred years before The Boke of St. Albans saw light.
With the exception of de Fournival and the elusive MS. of Dom
Pichon,[106] which (written about 1420 but only rediscovered about
1853) probably stamps this monk as the first to practise artificial
hatching, the Continent produced practically nothing till the
appearance at Antwerp in 1492 of the first printed original book on
Fishing, which as regards printing precedes The Boke of St. Albans.
This little Flemish work by an unknown author contains twenty-
six chapters of a few lines, gives recipes for artificial baits, unguents,
and pastes, and in the last two pages notes the periods when certain
fish eat best. As its title sets out, it teaches “how one may catch
birds and fish with one’s hands, and also otherwise.”[107]
The earliest description of fishing in the English language meets
us in The Colloquy of Aelfric, a.d. 995, which Skeat first brought to
notice and first “Englished” in The Oldest English Treatise on Fishing.
[108] This takes the form of a short dialogue introduced into the
Colloquy written by Aelfric, Archbishop of Canterbury, for the
purpose of teaching his pupils Latin, and therefore written in Anglo-
Saxon with a Latin translation beneath. “It is arranged as a
conversation between the master and his pupil; the latter in turns
figuring as huntsman, fisherman, falconer.”
The length of the Colloquy, even of the fishing portion, prevents
inclusion here, but the pupil’s objection to fishing in the sea,
“because rowing is troublesome to me,” and to going a-whaling,
“because I had rather catch a fish I can kill than one that can, with
one stroke, kill both me and my comrades,” strikes me as well taken
and pertinent.
 A poem by Piers of Fulham, written about 1420 (the original MS.
of which can be seen at Trinity College, Cambridge) claims next our
notice. The author, judging from Hartshorne’s rendering, fully
justifies the description of him as a somewhat pessimistic angler. He
seems to have anticipated De Quincey’s “fishing is an unceasing
expectation and a perpetual disappointment.” He fully appreciated its
difficulties and disappointments, but clearly possessed some
sportsmanlike instincts, as the following, among other, verses
show[109]:—

“And ete the olde fishe, and leve the yonge,

Though they moore towgh be uppon the tonge.”

A Latin book Dialogus creaturarum optime moralizatus was

published in 1480; a translation about 1520 styles it The Dialogues
of Creatures Moralysed. This very rare work, which I have found fully
dealt with from an Angler’s point of view only by Dr. Turrell,
furnishes the earliest known illustration of an angler fishing with a
float.
Next in date, and last to be noticed here, comes the famous
Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle, printed at Westminster by
Wynkyn de Worde in 1496 as part of the second edition of The Boke
of St. Albans. Whether, as has been commonly supposed, Dame
Juliana Berners wrote it, or whether any such lady ever existed, are
points of controversy, but that The Treatyse was not an immaculate
conception, without parents or ancestors, can be reasonably proved
by its reference to earlier writers on fishing, and to its “these ben
the xii flies ye shall use” being introduced as a precept of practice
rather than a revelation of invention.
If few the forbears of what some term “not only the first angling
manual in England, but also the first practical work written in any
language,” its vitality and its prolific progeny admit of no doubt.
According to Mr. A. Lang (who accounts for the startling fact by the
increased number of people able to read owing to the spread of
education) no less than ten editions of The Boke were issued within
four years of publication, while Dr. Turrell limits himself to fourteen
undated editions between 1500 and 1596.
Whatever the number of the editions, the need for and the
vitality of The Treatyse is demonstrated by the fact that for over a
hundred years no new work on Angling was printed in England, and
between it and The Compleat Angler—a space of over one hundred
and fifty years—there occur but four books on the subject.[110] To its
prolific progeny, the Bibliotheca Piscatoria bears witness[111] in its
catalogue of some fifteen hundred authors and of countless books,
MSS. etc.
We owe, it is said, this voluminous literature to the geographical
position of England, which lends itself very favourably to the pursuit
of all kinds of fishing. Can we, also, flatteringly add the other factor
of Lacépède’s dictum, “Il y a cette différence entre la chasse et la
pêche, que cette dernière convient aux peuples les plus civilisés?”
But the pursuit of fishing did not prevail in early England or
Scotland. A passage in Bede (probably used by Henry of
Huntingdon), which has, I think, escaped the many-eyed net of our
fishing authors, testifies to its absence in the former.
St. Wilfrid (born 634) on his return from Friesland, where fishing
yielded the staple of food, met with such success in his mission to
the South Saxons that he not only converted them, “with all the
priests of the Idols,” but also—“which was a great relief unto
them”—taught them the craft of fishing, of which, save eeling, they
wotted naught. Collecting under the Saint’s order eel-nets where
they could, the first adventurers meritis sui patris Divina largitate
adjuti[112] enmeshed three hundred fishes, which they equally
divided between the poor, the net-owners, and themselves.
The Celtæ, with some exceptions such as the scomber-catching
Celtiberi, eschewed fish, probably from religious prejudices, which
owing to their adoration of the springs, rivers, and waters prevented
the eating of their denizens.
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