Sounding, Historically, Anthropology’s Current Crisis

Abstract

Sounding, Historically, Anthropology’s Current Crisis Richard Handler A. Elisabeth Reichel. Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 430 pp. A. Elisabeth Reichel’s meticulously researched and relentlessly argued study is one among several publications resulting from a collaborative project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and focused on “cultural, poetic, and medial alterity” in the work of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead.1 Like the larger project, Reichel’s book analyzes how these anthropologists described and conceptualized cultural alterity in alternative genres (poetry, film, ethnography), in the process often commenting in one medium (written language) on other media (music, film). Reichel asks how generic and medial alterity reflected or even contributed to the anthropologists’ models of cultural alterity. Her answers lead to her most important argument concerning the degree to which Boasian anthropology continued to rely on some central assumptions of the socio-evolutionary theory it challenged. Reichel frames her analysis with essays by George Stocking on “the dark-skinned savage” (1968) and “the dualism of the anthropological tradition” (1989), Michel-Rolph Trouillot on “the savage slot” (1991), as well as Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other (1983). In Stocking’s account, both romanticism-primitivism and Enlightenment progressivism haunted Boasian anthropology. At times, Boasian anthropologists romanticized [End Page 185] so-called primitive peoples as “genuine cultures” (Sapir 1924) that presented a healthy contrast to what they saw as the ills of modernity. At other times, they celebrated modern rationality and science even as they mourned what they saw as the inevitable disappearance of their discipline’s object. How, Reichel prompts us to ask, could the anthropology of any school or period escape these tensions, dependent as it has been on Trouillot’s savage slot (encompassing the dual image of the savage as noble and ignoble) and Fabian’s allochronism (the placement of the primitive in a time antecedent to the present) to establish the reality of the phenomenal object that warranted its existence? Also central to Reichel’s analysis is work in sound studies and intermedial studies, areas of research more developed in Europe and Canada than in the United States. Reichel notes that mid-20th century forerunners of contemporary sound studies—who sought to reassert orality’s value in the face of the dominance of the visual in modern culture—were nonetheless ensnared by the kind of noble/ignoble dichotomy that has marked anthropology’s conceptualization of the primitive. They entertained, in her terms, both “sonophilic” and “sonophobic” approaches to sound (35). Sonophilic theorists praised the immediacy of sound and the way it immerses hearers in direct experience in contrast to their contention that sight, especially in “literate” cultures, distances people from that experience. Sonophobic theorists reversed the polarity, imagining people in oral cultures imprisoned in (and sometimes terrified by) sensory immediacy in contrast to the detached, rational observers of visual cultures. Subsequent work in sound studies has tried to transcend that dichotomy by paying attention to the cultural construction and evaluation of acoustic phenomena across time and space without treating any particular relationship of sound to other sensory modes as given in nature or predictable in terms of any purported developmental laws.2 The sonic and intermedial sensibilities of Sapir, Mead, and Benedict, however, were underpinned by the philia/phobia dichotomy that marked early sound studies, which, as Reichel finds, is especially evident in their poetry. Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives includes a 62-page appendix listing “the complete poetry” of the three anthropologists along with “publication details and archival locations” of this corpus that consists of more than 400 published and 600 unpublished poems (6). This is itself a substantial scholarly accomplishment, but it is merely the prelude [End Page 186] to Reichel’s main contribution, which she describes as “the first sustained study” of these anthropologists’ poetry (5). By this, she means that she has brought to bear the methods of literary studies, including “close reading” and “new historicism” (24), to analyze the poems both as discrete literary objects and in relation to the historical conditions of their production. Reichel contrasts her approach with that of the...