02 Elias y Goody Cdebate

Anthropological Theory

Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications(London, Thousand Oaks, CA

and New Delhi)Vol 2(4): 413–420

[1463-4996(200212)2:4;413–420;029505]

413

Some comments onJack Goody’s ‘Elias andthe anthropologicaltradition’1

Eric DunningUniversity of Leicester

As a former pupil of Norbert Elias and later a collaborator with him,2 I appreciate havingbeen given this opportunity to reply to Jack Goody’s thought-provoking essay on ‘Eliasand the Anthropological Tradition’. I have known Jack for some four or five years nowand have long been an admirer of his work.3 I think, though, that he has got Elias wrongand, at the end of this essay, after trying to demonstrate some of the ways in which thatis so, I shall offer some thoughts on how an eminent scholar such as Jack Goody can beso mistaken. In an attempt to avoid being seen as having misrepresented ProfessorGoody, I shall quote fairly liberally from his text. I shall similarly use quotations fromElias to enable readers to judge whether it is Jack Goody or I who is closer to a correctrepresentation and interpretation of Elias.

Early in his essay, Jack Goody recounts how he met Elias in Ghana in the early 1960sand formed an impression of him as ‘somewhat isolated from what went on around him’.He appeared, says Jack Goody, ‘the very opposite of an ethnographer’. Goody nextproceeds to write:

I believe my impressions are fully supported by looking at [Elias’s] autobiographicalaccount of his experiences in [Ghana] and of his encounter with what he referred toas Naturvolk.4 The term is significant since it refers to those who have yet to undergo‘the civilizing process’. They are nearer to nature and to the expression of man’s bio-logical nature.

With his training in philosophy, medicine and sociology, Elias never pretended to bean ethnographer. Those who knew him well, moreover, will, I am sure, agree that, despiteconveying an impression of professorial absent-mindedness, he was profoundly reality-orientated in his work. More importantly, Elias never used the concept of a civilizingprocess in the way that Jack Goody so rightly criticizes here. There is, Elias wrote, ‘nozero-point of civilization’, no ‘absolutely uncivilized human individual or society’.Civilizing processes – the term is at one level a synonym for the more standard terms

04 ANT 2-4 Dunning (JB/D) 5/11/02 9:51 am Page 413

www.sagepublications.com

‘socialization’ and ‘acculturation’ – are and always have been a human universal, a con-sequence of the biological evolution of Homo sapiens as a social species dependent oncognitive and emotional learning.5 It goes without saying, of course, that just as indi-vidual civilizing processes vary from individual to individual, group to group and societyto society, societal civilizing processes similarly vary considerably over space and time.

It follows from the foregoing argument that Elias never referred to the people ofGhana as a Naturvolk. This is Jack Goody’s projection onto Elias’s text of a notion withwhich the latter disagreed as profoundly as any modern anthropologist would. That thisis the case will, I hope, start to emerge from some of the answers which Elias gave in aninterview published in Reflections on a Life (1994) about his time in Ghana:

Q: And where did you find the primitive culture you were looking for?

A: I would not use the word ‘primitive’; I do not like it – ‘simpler’ is the right word,in the sense of ‘less differentiated’.6

Q: Much of what you say about Africa makes us think of children.

A: In that case you misunderstand how different it is . . . With regard to such anexperience there are two attitudes, both of which I consider wrong. The first is – theusual colonialist attitude: that we are more rational, more advanced, and that theyare simply more irrational, more childish. In a word, we are better. The secondattitude, just as wrong, stresses how much better it is to give free rein to one’s feelingsand affects. It is indeed more colourful and easy to romanticize. My own attitude is,I think, distinct from both. I see quite clearly that our way of life is only possiblebecause our physical safety is incomparably greater than theirs. If we lived in similarinsecurity, we too would seek the help of invisible powers. (Elias, 1994: 68–71)

Whilst I would not suggest that Elias was necessarily right in everything he said here,I do insist that his arguments cannot be reasonably construed as implying commitmentto some crude idea of a totally uncivilized Naturvolk.7

Jack Goody next tells us that, whilst at the University of Ghana, Elias tried to get ridof anthropology on the grounds that ‘Africa should not be left to the anthropologistswho had failed to understand its particular strangeness’. He wanted to replace it withsociology, says Goody. Likewise, in the Sociology Department at Leicester, which Eliashad helped to set up, there was, according to Goody, ‘effectively no element of anthro-pology in its curriculum’. Furthermore:

His book on ‘What is Society?’ has virtually no reference to anthropologists, exceptto Levi-Strauss in relation to the Whorf hypothesis and to Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer. Ifanthropologists in Britain neglected Elias, it was perhaps partly because he neglectedthem and showed little interest in the range of society with which they were mainlydealing and which his universalizing hypotheses might have expected him to include.

The title of Elias’s book is What is Sociology?, a fact which may help to explain therelative lack of references in it to anthropologists. More importantly, in the 1950s and1960s anthropologists in this country were part of an academic establishment with a

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 2(4)

414


firm footing at Oxford and Cambridge where they resisted the introduction of sociology.If I am right, it was mainly their view of Elias not only as a sociologist but also as aGerman-born outsider which led them (along with most sociologists) to ignore his work.At least, that is how some of us at Leicester perceived it at the time.

More importantly still, it is simply untrue that the Leicester Department in the 1960shad effectively no element of anthropology in its curriculum. The second-year courseon Empirical Sociology contained a substantial anthropological component and twoanthropologists, Tanya Baker (who left after one or two years) and Percy Cohen, wereappointed to the staff. They were ably assisted by Peter Duncan, Tony Giddens and SamiZubaida, all taught by Peter Worsley at Hull, and by Geoff Hurd and Terry Johnson,two Leicester graduates who followed Elias and Neustadt, the Head of the LeicesterDepartment, to Ghana. Few British Sociology Departments in that period can haveboasted comparable competence in teaching about the kinds of societies regarding whichanthropologists used, not without justification, to claim a particular expertise.

Related to this, whilst I do not doubt that Elias tried to get rid of anthropology at theUniversity of Ghana, I do doubt that his grounds for this would have rested in a notionof the failure of anthropologists to understand Africa’s ‘particular strangeness’. It wouldhave been more in line with his thinking to have argued against them because he believedthat they treated less differentiated societies as self-contained, static ‘systems’ and ignoredtheir historical, colonial and wider world contexts. This suggestion is consistent with thefact that the highly successful first-year course that Elias taught at Leicester arguablyanticipated by 10 or so years the notion of the three worlds of development laterpopularized by writers such as Irving Louis Horowitz (1966). Elias divided the worldinto ‘Type A’, ‘Type B’ and ‘Type C’ societies, and the United Nations Yearbooks formedthe basic resource for this part of his course.8 I have now reached a point where I candiscuss what I regard as the core of Jack Goody’s critique.

According to Jack Goody, Elias belonged to the ‘Weberian tradition’. His centralquestion in The Civilizing Process, says Goody, concerned

. . . precisely how this process had emerged in modern times and had been internal-ized by the actors as a set of constraints. His problematic is not identical to Weber’sbut it is related. He is asking not why capitalism arose exclusively in the West butwhy the civilizing process did. True, he never puts it quite as directly as Weber . . .but in fact his major work concentrates entirely upon Europe and the developmentof the civilizing process in the period following the Renaissance. This he sees as mani-fested in increasing self-restraint, in the internalization of controls over affect, whichhe contrasts explicitly with what took place in the Middle Ages (such as uncontrolledbouts of drinking) and in simpler societies among the ‘naturvolk’, as in Ghana, withtheir sacrifices, rituals, scanty clothing but greater directness.

Jack Goody’s misunderstandings here stem in part from the mistranslation of Elias’stitles and sub-titles in the first English editions of The Civilizing Process. Elias’s sub-titlefor Volume I, for example, was not ‘The History of Manners’ but ‘Changes in the Behav-iour of the Secular Upper Classes in the West’, a sub-title which shows that Elias’s studyis explicitly ‘Euro-centred’, not ‘Euro-centric’ as Jack Goody implies. Nevertheless, eventhough Über den Prozess der Zivilisation is focused explicitly on the West, Elias does offer

DUNNING Some comments on Jack Goody’s article

415


some observations on non-western societies, some of the most interesting on ImperialChina. For example, after citing W.M. Macleod (1931) on what, given their size andthe means of transport available to them, appear to scholars today to be the remarkablestability and cohesion of the Inca and Chinese empires, Elias went on to suggest theneed for a detailed ‘structural-historical analysis’ of the interplay of centrifugal andcentripetal tendencies in these empires. He then outlined the following hypotheses aboutthe Chinese case. What he wrote is worth citing at length:

The Chinese form of centralisation, compared to that developed in Europe, is certainlyvery peculiar. Here the warrior class was eradicated relatively early and very radicallyby a strong central authority. This eradication . . . however it happened . . . is con-nected with two main peculiarities of the Chinese social structure: the passing ofcontrol of the land into the hands of the peasants (which we encounter in the earlywestern period only in a very few places, for example, Sweden) and the manning of thegovernmental apparatus by a bureaucracy always recruited in part from the peasantsthemselves and at any rate wholly pacified. Mediated by this hierarchy, courtly formsof civilisation penetrate deep into the lower classes of the people: they take root, trans-formed in many ways, in the code of behaviour of the village. And what has so oftenbeen called the unwarlike character of the Chinese people is not the expression of somenatural disposition. It results from the fact that the class from which the people drewmany of their models through constant contact, was for centuries no longer a warriorclass, a nobility, but a peaceful and scholarly officialdom. It is primarily their situationand function which is expressed in the fact that in the traditional Chinese scale of values. . . unlike the Japanese . . . military activity and prowess hold no very high place.Different as the Chinese way to centralisation was to that in the West in detail, there-fore, the foundation of the cohesion of larger dominions in both cases was theelimination of freely competing warriors or landowners. (Elias, 2000: 540)

This passage is illustrative of the fact-orientation of Elias’s work and how it is repletewith testable propositions for comparative research. It is accordingly a pity that, like somany of Elias’s critics, Jack Goody has reacted on the whole dismissively to words like‘civilizing process’ without scouring Elias’s text for propositions such as the one justquoted about the part played by the elimination of freely competing warrior landownersin the interrelated processes of ‘civilization’ and state-centralization. It is, I think, worthpointing out in this connection that, as long as they were based on solidly documented,adequately theorized historical research, Elias would not have rejected claims to havediscovered other routes to state-centralization and civilization. He was not, that is, dog-matically wedded to some crude notion of unilinearity.

Elias’s central concern, Jack Goody tells us, was with the background of what incommon speech relates to the change from ‘barbarity’ to ‘civilization’, not in the sensethe terms have been used by prehistorians but referring to changes in the control ofinternal (and external) behaviour. Goody fails to mention Elias’s discussion of the con-ceptual issues raised in this connection, a discussion in sociology of knowledge termswhich shows the influence on Elias of his Habilitation supervisor, Karl Mannheim. Thisis a crucial omission and helps to explain why Goody thinks it is relevant to discuss theimplications of Nazism for Elias’s theory in the following terms:


416


. . . towards the end of his life, Elias turned to consider the most dramatic phase, therise of Nazism (or more broadly Fascism), which some consider should have had itsplace in any account of the overall changes in human society. He now sees the Naziperiod as a process of ‘decivilization’, of ‘regression’, but that seems to avoid the mainissue. Such activity and the Fascist ideologies in Germany and Italy, like the WorldWars, are surely an intrinsic part of contemporary society, of the development thathas led to our present situation, and not some kind of ‘regression’, a social equival-ent of Freudian psychological processes.

The idea that Elias only began to consider Nazism towards the end of his life is wrong.He published an essay on the sociology of German anti-Semitism as early as 19299 and,as one might expect of a scholar who wrote Über den Prozess der Zivilisation in enforcedexile in the 1930s, the events then occurring in his native land were at the forefront ofhis mind in choosing to write on a topic such as violence and civilization. That this wasthe case will hopefully become clearer through a resumé of Elias’s discussion of basicconcepts. So will the fact that what German historians have called their country’s Son-derweg (special path) was already an issue of central concern for Elias in the 1930s.10

Elias started Über den Prozess der Zivilisation by observing that ‘civilization’ is such anall-embracing term that it is difficult to define. Its function is easier to discern. ‘Civiliz-ation’ is a concept, he wrote, which has come to express the self-consciousness of theWest (Elias, 2000: 6). It is a usage which lacks any connotation of process. It expressesthe self-confidence of the dominant groups in the late 18th, 19th and early 20th-centuryWest that their own civilization was complete and that it was their mission to ‘civilize’both the ‘barbaric’ lands which they had conquered and the ‘masses’ in their ownsocieties over whom they ruled. Originally, however, ‘civilization’ had been a term associ-ated with moderate social critique. It was first used by the Physiocrats as part of a protestagainst absolute rule. For them, it had connotations of progress and social reform. Theyhad derived it from civilité, the word used since the 16th century to describe courtlybehaviour, partly to distinguish the latter from the more rough and ready standards ofmedieval nobles which had been signified by the term courtoisie. This terminological,conceptual and social development occurred primarily in France, Elias suggested,because French society began to undergo processes of state-formation and unificationearly on and because the French court was more open to bourgeois outsiders than itscounterparts in Germany.

By comparison with France and Britain, Germany emerged as a unified nation-staterelatively late. The members of its French-speaking court circles were more localized,highly socially exclusive and contemptuous of the German language. In that context,‘civilization’ became for bourgeois intellectuals – the first national middle class inGermany – a term which signified superficiality, ceremony and politeness in contrastwith the inner depth and solidity which they regarded as their own principal virtues.They expressed the latter through the term Kultur. The antithesis in Germany betweenZivilisation and Kultur was solidified when the country became nationally unified in thesecond half of the 19th century and when, correspondingly, the power of bourgeois (andworking class) strata – including now larger commercial and industrial segments – grew.This residue of ambivalence towards ‘civilization’ and all it signified was further strength-ened when the First World War was fought against Germany in its name. In that way,


417


a degree of disdain for ‘civilization’ became for a while a prominent strand in Germany’sspecific brand of nationalism. Independently of whether and how far it is right or wrong,Elias’s analysis is, as one can see, far removed from the crude ideas of which Jack Goodyis justly critical. The same holds good, in my opinion, regarding Elias’s 1930s analysisof the Sonderweg and the analysis he developed after the Second World War of the ‘break-down of civilization’ in the Weimar Republic and the correlative rise of the Nazis (Elias,1989; 1996).

According to Elias, the linguistic and cultural diversity of the German-speakingpeoples in the Middle Ages and the size of the territory they occupied made state-unifi-cation more difficult for them than it was for their more homogeneous French andEnglish contemporaries who occupied smaller territories (Elias, 1939; 2000: 261–7).When the Germans did unify in the 19th century, it was through war and under theaegis of the militaristic Prussians, a process which led military models to predominateamong the formerly humanistic middle classes. Such ‘militarization’ was accompaniedby ‘barbarization’, processes which help to explain Germany’s key role in triggering theFirst World War. In the crises which followed Germany’s loss of the war, a profusion ofparamilitary and terrorist groups – the Freikorps, the Sturmabteilungen (SA), Konsul –arose and de-stabilized the Weimar Republic. In that context, the state lost its violence-monopoly and a breakdown of civilization was superimposed on the already occurringprocesses of militarization and barbarization (Elias, 1996). Elias certainly used theconcept of regression in this connection but he used it, as one can see, in a strictly testablesociological sense.

Assuming that my interpretation of Elias is substantially accurate, how can one explainhow an eminent scholar such as Jack Goody gets so much of it wrong? A clue is, I think,provided by the fact that I first began to hear counter-arguments to Elias of the kind JackGoody puts forward here from both anthropologists and sociologists in the 1950s, someof them as distinguished as Jack.The fact that such arguments have endured for more than40 years suggests that we are dealing with a set of deeply-held beliefs – perhaps even anideology – shared by sociologists and anthropologists who were born in the first decadesof the 20th century and who lived through and in some cases had direct experience of oneor both of the world wars, the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. In a word, they learnedto be suspicious of and reacted against anything that smacked of ideas such as ‘progress’and western ‘superiority’. Possibly working in the same direction and perhaps most evidentin the early writings of Talcott Parsons was the implicit idea that nation-states areenduring, harmonious systems (Parsons, 1951) which do not need to be studied histori-cally or developmentally because ideas of ‘social evolution’ have fallen foul of the‘evolution of ideas’ (Parsons, 1937). So deeply entrenched did these sorts of ideas andattitudes become that many anthropologist and sociologist members of these generationshave been unable to see the pathbreaking originality of Elias’s synthesis and the fact thathe produced an empirically based testable theory which transcends or circumvents mostof their objections. It is not, of course, a ‘theory of everything’. As Elias himself madeclear, it merely constitutes a partial breakthrough relative to earlier theories.

Notes1 I would have thought it wrong for Jack Goody to write as if there were a single

anthropological tradition. Surely there are several such traditions, one of them, as


418


embodied in the work of Leslie White (1959), Julian Steward (1955) and the earlywork of Sahlins and Service, in some ways similar to the work of Elias.

2 The principal fruit of our collaboration was Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisurein the Civilising Process, 1986.

3 I met Jack Goody at Conferences held in Paris by L’Entretien Franklin, a body ofwhich we both became Directors. I suspect that it may have been our French col-leagues’ manifest interest in and admiration for Elias’s work, together with theEliasian papers given in that context by Stephen Mennell, Jason Hughes and myself,which may have stimulated Jack Goody’s interest in Elias in the first place.

4 I have followed the German convention here of always starting nouns with a capitalletter. Strictly speaking, Jack Goody should have used the singular form ‘a Natur-volk’ here, or the plural, ‘Naturvölker’.

5 Apart from the individual level, civilizing (and de-civilizing) processes take place,according to Elias, on what I like to call the societal, cultural area and global levels.

6 In The Constitution of Society (1984: 241), Anthony Giddens suggests contra Eliasthat: ‘(i) There is . . . no discernible correlation between linguistic complexity andthe level of material advancement of different societies; and (ii) . . . some features ofsocial activity found in oral cultures, such as those associated with kinship insti-tutions, are exceptionally complex.’ This misses the point for two reasons. The firstis that, whilst the languages of people in structurally simpler societies may be as ormore complex grammatically than the languages of people in structurally morecomplex societies, by virtue of their divisions of labour the latter have a greaternumber and variety of languages, e.g. those of the different occupational specialisms.The second reason is the fact that, in many simpler societies, kinship institutionsvirtually constitute the social totality.

7 Elias sought to avoid the charge of committing the ‘ontogeny reproduces phylogeny’fallacy through what he called the ‘sociogenetic ground-rule’. This holds that‘individuals, in their short history, pass once more through some of the processes thattheir society has traversed in its long history’ (2000: xi, 410). What Elias means isthat, in any society, in order to attain the standards set by adults, which have them-selves been attained in the course of the society’s history, individuals have to passthrough a personal civilizing process but not through each of the sequential stagesof their society’s civilizing process.

8 See my paper Working with Elias: Reminiscences of Elias’ View of the Sociology-Anthropology Interface delivered at the Conference on Elias and Anthropology,University of Metz, France, September 2002.

9 Norbert Elias, ‘Zur Soziologie des deutschen Antisemitismus’, Israelitisches Gemein-deblatt, 13 December 1929 – 11 Kislev 5690.

10 The discussion which follows involves a considerable oversimplification of a complexand data-rich analysis.

ReferencesElias, N. (1929) ‘Zur Soziologie des deutschen Antisemitismus’, Israelitisches

Geimeindeblatt, 13 December 1929(11 Kislev 5690).Elias, N. (1939) Über den Prozess der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und Psychogenetische

Untersuchungen. Basle: Haus zum Falken (2 vols).


419


Elias, N. (1978) What is Sociology? London: Hutchinson.Elias, N. (1989) Studien über die Deutschen: Machtkämpfe und Habitusentwicklung im

19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.Elias, N. (1994) Reflections on a Life. Cambridge: Polity.Elias, N. (1996) The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the

Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Cambridge: Polity.Elias, N. (2000) The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations

(revised, single integrated edition, edited by Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom andStephen Mennell). Oxford: Blackwell.

Elias, N. (2001) ‘On the Sociology of German Anti-Semitism’ (Introduction by EricDunning, Herman Korte and Stephen Mennell. English translation by EricDunning and Stephen Mennell), Journal of Classical Sociology 1 (2 September).

Elias, N. and E. Dunning (1986) Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in theCivilising Process. Oxford: Blackwell.

Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity.Horowitz, I.L. (1966) Three Worlds of Development: The Theory and Practice of

International Stratification. New York: Oxford University Press.Macleod, W.M. (1931) The Origin and History of Politics. New York. (Cited in Elias,

1939, 2000.)Parsons, T. (1937) The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press.Parsons, T. (1951) The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.Sahlins, M. and E.R. Service, eds (1960) Evolution and Culture. Ann Arbor: University

of Michigan Press.Steward, J. (1955) Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution.

Urbana: University of Illinois Press.White, L.A. (1959) The Evolution of Culture. New York: McGraw Hill.

ERIC DUNNING is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Leicester and Visiting Professor at

University College Dublin and the University of Ulster at Jordanstown. He studied sociology under Norbert

Elias at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, later coming to write Quest for Excitement (Blackwell,

1986) and several articles with Elias. Dunning’s main research interests are in sport and violence, and the

Holocaust. His latest books are Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence and Civilisation (Routledge,

1999), Handbook of Sport Studies (Sage, 2000) co-edited with Jay Coakley, and Fighting Fans: Football Hooli-

ganism as a World Phenomenon (University College Dublin Press, 2002), co-edited with Patrick Murphy and

Ivan Waddington. He is also co-author of Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players (Martin Robertson, 1979), The

Roots of Football Hooliganism (Routledge, 1988), Football on Trial (Routledge, 1990) and Sport and Leisure in

the Civilising Process (Macmillan, 1992). Address: University of Leicester, 14 Salisbury Road, Leicester, LE1

7QR, UK. [email: [email protected]]


420


Documents

02 Elias y Goody Cdebate