On the Allure of Buddhist Relics

Abstract

FOR ALMOST A HUNDRED YEARS CULTURAL anthropologists have been carrying on a lively and oftentimes rancorous debate over the issue of how natives think. Do primitives, to resort to the early but now unfashionable term, apprehend and reflect upon the world in a fundamentally different way than do we moderns? Does it make sense to talk of or, less contentiously, of divergent rationalities? In an attempt to characterize the thinking of so-called primitive peoples as recorded in the ethnographic literature available at the time, Lucien Levy-Bruhl posited a prelogical kind of thinking that does not abide by the law of noncontradiction.1 According to Levy-Bruhl, primitive mentality does not clearly distinguish between subject and object, such that primitives perceive themselves in participation with the world. To the primitive, the world is not composed of lifeless natural objects; rather, since everything that exists possesses mystic properties, and these properties, from their very nature, are much more important than the attributes of which our senses inform us, the difference between animate and inanimate things is not of the same interest to primitive mentality as it is to our own.2 Levy-Bruhl's thesis was subjected to considerable criticism soon after it appeared, and to this day his work tends to be summarily dismissed for its supposed ethnocentrism. Levy-Bruhl himself went to great lengths to clarify and qualify his thesis in his later writings. He insisted, for example, that what he called primitive rationality is not characteristic of primitives alone, but is rather a universal mode of thought that can and does coexist with logical thinking. Indeed, the charge of ethnocentrism is largely misleading; Levy-Bruhl was, if anything, an early champion of cultural relativism in the social sciences.3 No matter what one's opinion of Levy-Bruhl's thesis, the issues he raised could not be ignored. It would no longer be possible to simply assume, as did Edward Tylor, James Frazer, and other early comparativists, that primitives are essentially no different from ourselves-that the gap between primitive and modern societies is merely the product of the relative gap in factual knowledge and scientific knowhow. Levy-Bruhl raised the possibility that different peoples conceptualize in different ways: Primitives see with eyes like ours, but they do not perceive with the same minds.4 Ironically, later generations of anthropologists, many of whom held Levy-