Review: [Untitled]

Reviewed Work(s):
Regarder, Ecouter, Lire. by Claude Levi-Strauss
Alfred Gell

Man, New Series, Vol. 29, No. 3. (Sep., 1994), pp. 723-725.

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 BOOK REVIEWS
one's own society are represented (in Africa,
says Kramer, by means of the ancestors), the
features are abstract, ideal, or superindividual.
Representation of differentiation, occurring by
means of what is outside social values, will
often be highly particular, singling out discrete
signifiers such as the red fez or by means of re-
alistic portraiture. In an interesting digression
he suggests also that the 'other' may be seen as
innocent (both guiltless and amoral); hence
mimetic assumption of otherness is redemp-
tive and also enlightening of a dark sphere
within oneself.
For Kramer, unifying and diversifying repre-
sentational needs and practices (phrased as 'ab-
stract equality' and 'playful differentiation' or
as 'abstraction' and 'empathy') are both charac-
teristic of every society Hence the only ty-
pological element of his exercise at the level of
society itself is the comparison of acephalous,
homogenizing societies with stratified, hetero-
geneous ones regarding their sources of cul-
tural others.
The book does not appear to be directly in-
formed by fieldwork, though Kramer mentions
a stay in East Africa. Instead he relies on a wide
range of sources, at times uncritically, but usu-
ally with great illumination. The striking cover
photo is drawn from M. J. Field. For the Eng-
lish-speaking reader the volume serves as a
useful introduction to German work, but the
author shows an equal facility with the litera-
ture in English, moving with ease from Asante
and Tallensi across to the Shona, to coastal East
Africa, to the zar region, to Hausa, Tonga,
Pende and Cokwe, and back to coastal West
Africa. Kramer is able to sustain a series of
richly informed interpretations throughout,
discussing, for example, contrasts between pos-
session and conversion, possession and Sufi
mystical ecstasy, possession and masquerades.
I fully concur with Kramer's conclusion that
the 'unity [of masquerades and spirit posses-
sion cults] lies not in some function, but rather
in their representational character and their
concept of reality ... they are always both more
and less than therapy, art, entertainment, social
criticism, profession, fashion, or ethnography'
(p. 240). However, Kramer's view retains a
structuralist distance and necessarily omits a
full elucidation of the multiple relations in any
given context or the sort of case material that
would show how the codes are put into play in
actual practice.
More significantly, by omitting real people
from his analysis and conflating collective and
individual processes, Kramer risks opposing his
ideal types too stringently. His modern selves
are creative, self-reflecting agents, whereas
Africans absorb, are impassioned. But the jump
from images of selfhood to selfhood itself is a
large one. There is an easier shift than he sup-
poses between being possessed by an authorita-
tive hero and a pleasure-seeking 'stranger;' in
many instances these are not distinct 'cults' but
moments of alternate practice or phases in the
careers of individual hosts. In the end, posses-
sion is constituted by a particular combination
of both passion and action, introjection and
~rojection;like artistic practice it can be self-
enlarging and enhancing. Spirit mediums too
can reach what psychoanalysts call insight.
Effective mediums are highly self-aware and
capable of astute character judgements of oth-
ers. Where Kramer refers to techne and
episteme we might wish to add a third category,
phronesis, that is, moral action .
MICHAEL LAMBEK
University of Toronto
LEVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE.Regarder, icouter; lire. 189
pp., illus., col. plates. Paris: Plon, 1993.
120F
Reliable intelligence from Paris, corrupted per-
haps by time's trick of merging the files of
memory and fantasy, have provided me with a
now unshakable conception of the working en-
vironment enjoyed by Professor Evi-Strauss.
According to my image, Uvi-Strauss's study is
located at the heart of an ultra-modern build-
ing composed entirely of glass, not just the
windows and internal partitions being of trans-
parent material, but also the floors and ceilings,
as in the perspex models created by architects.
In the surrounding ofices, the great anthro-
pologist's intellectual offspring beaver away at
their bulky theses and their polished, articulate,
essays. Through the wall, floor and ceiling of
his ofice, L6vi-Strauss can observe them at
their labours, and they, also, may glance up (or
down, sideways etc.) and draw inspiration
from a glimpse of his flashing spectacles and
scholar's crown of snowy hair. H e is the spider
and the great glass building is his web, convey-
ing to him, via its subtle vibrations, a myriad of
worlds, past, present and to come.
I dare say that the real circumstances sur-
rounding the composition of the book Regarder;
iiouter; lire were a good deal more prosaic than I
imagine; but I draw some reassurance from the
fact that the image of the spider, in exactly the
metaphoric aspect needed to confirm my
speculation, duly surfaces on p. 93. Here the
eighteenth-century musicologist, Michel-Paul-
Guy de Chabanon, is cited to the effect that the
philosopher of art must be a spider, transmit-
ting from art to art, from poetry to music to
painting - that is, from thread to thread of the
great web comprising all the arts - the vibra-
tions of sensibility which each, though sepa-
rate, has in common with all the others.
 724 BOOK REVIEWS
The spider-like sensitivity to even the faint-
est perturbations of meaning is a distinguishing
characteristic of this new book by Uvi-Strauss,
as it has been of all his previous ones. But Re-
gardet; tcoutet; lire is also a new departure in that
it is, for the most part, concerned with the his-
tory of aesthetic ideas. The occupants of the
other inter-visible cells in the great glass build-
ing are not incarnate anthropologists of today,
but an array o f (French) ghosts. Many of them
are famous ghosts, but not all o f them -
Chabanon's name has not been heard much
since his time, nor that of the here-disinterred
Abbe Batteux. These forgotten men discourse
in these pages with Diderot, Rousseau, Rameau
- and Uvi-Strauss.
The theme of the ghostly conversation is,
necessarily, structuralism, because it is Uvi-
Strauss who sets the conversation in motion,
and, in a sense, the objective here is to achieve,
for structuralism, the task which theologians
long since set themselves in the interrogation
of the Old Testament in the light of the New,
i.e. the identification of prefigurations, antici-
pating Christian revelation. But it would be
truer to say that Ltvi-Strauss's objective is to
efface himself in history, rather than to adver-
tise his importance to it. The discovery of pre-
figurations of structuralism in the aesthetics of
the enlightenment is a means of ageing, pati-
nating, thought which might otherwise seem
to pretend to the false virtue of novelty The
aim is to deny the progressiveness or cumula-
tiveness of the history of ideas, and instead
confirm only the perennial character of struc-
tural analysis. Thus, a once famous harmonic
transition in Rameau's opera Castor et Pollux is
made audible again as a moment in which
Rameau applies a structural grid to the dying
fall in the 'Chorus of Spartans' in Act 2, such
that it becomes the harmonic bass-note for the
subsequent aria sung by Telaire. This froze the
blood of eighteenth-century listeners in a way
it never can ours, used as we are to much more
startling modulations. Yet LCvi-Strauss's point
is that in fundamental respects, we have not,
we cannot, progress beyond this point, because
the architectonic employed by Rameau instan-
tiates the total possibility inherent in musical
language.
Here Chabanon, proto-structuralist, enters
the scene, debating with Rousseau as to the
possibility of an independent musical language,
divorced from words and recognizable narra-
tive in a way the latter believed impossible.
Chabanon proposes a relational theory of
music (the note is nothing, the relation be-
tween notes everything) which clearly invites
comparison with what LCvi-Strauss later said
about the arbitrary elements comprising
myths. Jackobson had his eighteenth-century
avatars, but they wrote music-criticism rather
than linguistics, their phonemes were notes on
a stave. Thus the circular (or spiral) character
of the history of ideas is revealed. Diderot and
the shadowy AbbC Batteux extend the argu-
ment in the direction o f an encompassing syn-
aesthesia, a visual music, giving rise, later, to at-
tempts to construct keyboard instruments
generating colours rather than pitches. A very
heady flux o f famous and not-so-famous
names flits across the page. O n e chapter intro-
duces us to Poussin, Wind, Diderot, Bacon,
Chardin; the next (unexpectedly devoted to
fractals) Kant, Mandelbrot, Delacroix, Balzac,
and Charles Rosen on Beethoven.
I would identify, if pressed, three predomi-
nant themes in this very diverse collection of
ideas. The most superficially apparent theme is
the one I have mentioned: i.e. the investigation
of the precursors of structuralism, or more
generally a preoccupation with the signifying
power of relations, in French aesthetics, espe-
cially of the eighteenth century The second
theme is the relationship between different
kinds of art: music, painting and writing, and
the nature of the structural analogies between
forms communicated by different sensory and
intellectual media. The key analysis here is a
discussion of the well-known poem by
Rimbaud which begins / A noir, E blanc, I rouge,
U vert, 0 bleu, voyelles / Je dirai quelque jours vos
naissances latenter ... / -a poem which had always
seemed destined for the Uvi-Strauss treatment
and which here triumphantly receives it.
But content aside - and there is much more
in this packed book than I have space to de-
-
scribe there is a third theme, for which the
author is only indirectly responsible, but which
will probably be uppermost in the mind of
most of his readers. That theme is the position
of LCvi-Strauss himself in the history of ideas.
We cannot but reflect on this question because
this is a book which is not, for once, about
American Indians 'viewed from afar', but
about Diderot, Rousseau, Delacroix, Poussin -
the heroes of his own nation and its intellectual
traditions, and some of their obscurer contem-
poraries and successors. This move onto home
ground seems to signal a self-conscious recog-
nition of the historicity of Uvi-Strauss's own
life-work. The text itself only argues for even-
handedness between the intellectuals favoured
by history, and the obscure ones recognized as
prescient only in scholarly hindsight. Uvi-
Strauss seems modestly to position himself
nearer to Chabanon than to Diderot, present-
ing himself as an old fogey who was once a
young fogey in the ranks o f the surrealists (an
exchange of letters between IRvi-Strauss and
Andrt Breton is printed to bear this out). But
the reader is entitled to wonder whether this
 BOOK REVIEWS
parade o f conservatism and nothing-new-
under-the-sun-ism is not a dialectical ruse, a
way of keeping the ghosts quiet by disclaiming
any capacity to rouse them from their slum-
bers. We, after-comers, are entitled to see
things differently. The advent of Uvi-Strauss
onto the intellectual scene marks a discontinu-
ity, an eventful change of the kind which does
not occur in myth, only in history; and E v i -
Strauss, despite his cunning blandishments,
belongs to our century, not Diderot's. In other
words, Evi-Strauss, and who could reproach
him, is shamming dead. But the greatest pleas-
ure of this text filled with pleasures, is the dis-
covery that, after all, he is very much alive.
ALFREDGELL
London School ofEconomics -5Political Science
MOHDANISM D NOR. Zapin: folk dance of the
Malay world (SE Asian social Sci. Monogr.).
xxiv, 166 pp., illus., plates, maps, tables,
bibliogr. Singapore: Oxford Univ. Press,
1993. 225.00
As the author points out, Malaysian perform-
ing arts have been neglected compared to those
of other south-east Asian countries. Zapin is a
pan-Malay genre found in almost all of mari-
time south-east Asia except the Philippines,
and the study aims to explain what zapin is and
to bring Malay culture to centre stage.
The story is as follows: Zapin derives from
the zafana dance tradition of the Arabs of
Hadhramaut, southern Arabia, in which
groups of men danced at weddings. Migrations
from Hadhramaut to Malaysia resulted in a
Malay adaptation, Zapin Melayu, which 're-
fined' the movements of Zapin Arab in accord-
ance with south-east Asian aesthetics; in other
words, the movements became more con-
tained. During the 1930s, zapin dances were
used to represent court scenes in the popular
Bangsawan theatre, and choreographies for
pairs were innovated. Bangsawan performers
were recruited by the burgeoning Malay cin-
ema industry in the 1950s and performed zapin
dances as cinematic interludes. Shooting tech-
niques, such as overhead angles to show floor
patterns, resulted in virtuoso choreographic in-
novations and an increased public awareness of
zapin. Contemporary zapiri derives from the
impact of filmed representations; its contrasts
with the village variant is described in detail.
The study concludes with an all-too-brief con-
cluding chapter about the contemporary con-
texts for zapin performances, including 'mas-
sive' performances by hundreds of
schoolchildren, in the context of the develop-
ment of national Malay identity and culture.
The story of zapin's journey east and the
transformations it undergoes, particularly in its
725
refractions in the Malay cinema, will fascinate
anyone interested in the region, but the
author's claim that Zapin Melayu is a 'common
cultural denominator of the contemporary
nation-states of Malaysia, Indonesia and Singa-
pore' (p. 29) is less persuasive. In Indonesia, for
example, zapin may be widespread in Sumatra,
but it has not made the same impact on Indo-
nesian national culture as have the court and
village performance traditions of Java; the pan-
Malay thesis is somewhat unsubstantiated.
The author has focused on zapin and has re-
frained from developing the promising discus-
sion of zapin within the broader system of
dancehheatre forms in the region. His narra-
tive seems to invite the analysis of the relation-
ship between Islamic aesthetics and Malaysian
cultural politics, but this is not pursued. In-
deed, the dichotomy of Indianization and
Islamization which structures so many of the
discourses of performance in south-east Asia is
barely considered. Stylistically, the author has
chosen the path of authoritative simplicity, ab-
sorbing the voices of informants referred to
fleetingly in the notes, and takes a formal tone
which at times fails to d o justice to the liveli-
ness of his subject. Specification of variants
does not prevent a reification of zapin, which
could instead have become a means to generate
an understanding of the context for its contin-
ued and transforming practices and discourses.
This approach might have broader anthropo-
logical appeal, but as the 92-page written text is
followed by a 63-page set of Appendices of
musical transcriptions of zapin dances (without
lyrics) and Laban notations of zapin dance mo-
tives, it appears that the author is not aiming
for a general anthropological audience, but at
the regional specialist and the ethnomusicolo-
gist who will welcome the opportunity to learn
more about the permutations of a Malay per-
formance tradition, while at the same time
wondering if the ethnography of the perform-
ing arts is best served by studies which stick so
resolutely to a focus on a single form.
FELICIA HUGHESFREELAND
University College, Swansea
Biological Anthropology
ATTENBOROUGH. ROBERTD. & MICHAELI!
ALPERS(eds). Hunzan biology in Papua New
Guinea: the small cosmos (Res. Monogr.
hum. Pop. Biol. 10). xiy 427 pp., illus.,
maps, tables, bibliogrs. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992. f60.00
The present work deals with two sets of ques-
tions that are of major concern for the popula-
tions of Papua New Guinea (PNG). First, it