Rat Worship and Taboo in Mayhew's London

Abstract

HENRY MAYHEW POINTEDLY IDENTIFIES his pioneering work of urban sociology, London Labour and the London Poor, with the still embryonic discipline of anthropology. Each civilized or settled has generally some wandering horde intermingled with, and in measure preying upon, he declares on his first page, citing various ethnographic authorities and claiming that his study of the nomadic tribe of London's street folk will illustrate laws of primitive life and personality the world over.' Understandably, writers on Mayhew have given no more than passing notice to his claims to be an anthropologist,2 since the proposition about the interrelations of the civilized and the primitive seems never significantly developed, despite few references to it later on. Yet it turns out to be central to the argument of London Labour after all, at deeper level of analysis than its original formulation would lead to expect. Its focus is that constellation of superstitious ideas of uncleanness, contagion, and the forbidden known in ethnography by the Polynesian word for it, taboo. When anthropology emerged as true science of culture in the 1860s and afterward, as well as in its germinating phase of the preceding few decades, the phenomenon of taboo in Polynesia and elsewhere constituted of its chief topics of research. Franz Steiner suggests why: calling the problem of taboo in ethnography a Victorian invention, he remarks that Victorian society was itself one of the most taboo-minded and taboo-ridden societies on record.3 He does not elaborate the pregnant hint that the Victorians studied taboo in primitive society as an oblique means of learning how their own was organized, and he bypasses the crucial issue of the degree to which Victorian cultural taboos in fact were continuous with, not merely reminiscent of, the fantastical religious systems of primitive societies. We shall address these questions concretely in what follows, looking at them through the eyes of text that strikingly-if with only partial lucidity-enacts the circular processes that may propel all ethnographic investigation. Steiner's guess that the Victorians figured their own society and their own communal obsessions in their reports on (for example) the Polynesians turns out to be very specifically confirmed in London Labour and the London Poor. This is just the schema that would be anticipated on theoretical grounds by Roy Wagner, who argues that even the most rigorously empirical field study in anthropology is bound to proceed through reflexive invention of culture, that is,