State Systems of Settlement: Response to Crumley

Abstract

I thoroughly enjoyed the satirical piece by William Harmon in the December American Anthropologist (AA 78:797-811, 1977) and I look forward with considerable anticipation to the rest of the series (. .. the uses of social sciences by such related writers as W. B. Yeats, Archibald MacLeish, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams (p. 806). However, in this instance I am afraid the joke is on Harmon, who seems not to be aware that the great Anglican Dean of American ethnology actually was in his university days a poet of sorts. The following, I have it on good authority, was composed by Eliot in the spring of 1914 on the way back to his rooms after one of those Russell seminars in which he, Eliot, laid the groundwork for his middle years essays in mathematical anthropology. It is of particular interest to me as a biological anthropologist for its apparent focus on my subdiscipline (the contributions to ethnological theory which stimulated Harmon's risible fancy are of course well known; T. S. E.'s interests in physical anthropology remain so far uncelebrated). Ludwig Wittgenstein has suggested (personal communication cited by Siegfried Sassoon in Over the Parapets, Christmas 1916, or Swapping Yarns with the Foemen, an unpublished reminiscence) that what follows was originally part of a much longer work which Eliot intended to be read as a critique in depth of sociobiology. While I tend to agree with Harmon that Some poems remain incoherent no matter how you read them (p. 807), Wittgenstein's assertion is worth noting in view of the fact that the lines in question first appeared in 1915 (in He Wore Anthropologist Shoes, the Unsung Literary Side of T. S. Eliot, subsequently withdrawn from publication at Eliot's request). It is claimed by some that these lines contain Eliot's first reference to himself by that nickname he later employed to signal ethological loading of imagery. Whether the claim is valid or, indeed, whether the reference here is to himself, I cannot say. There seems no doubt that Burnt Norton is deliberately foreshadowed in the fifth line.