Longer Views (58 page)

Somewhere, in the sciences, especially the human ones, we have to commit ourselves to objectivity. And, especially in the human ones, objectivity cannot be the same as disinterest. It must be a whole galaxy of attractions and repulsions, approvals and disapprovals, curiosities and disinterests, deployed in a context of self-critical checks and balances which, itself, must constantly be criticized as an abstract form capable of holding all these elements, and as specific elemental configurations. (Indeed, “objectivity” may well be the wrong word for it.) One of my commitments is that self-critical models are desirable things. I would even submit that cultures, be they Amerind or European or African or Indian or Chinese, are civilized to the extent that they possess them. Now “civilization” is only a small part of “culture.” Culture, in all its variety, is a desirable thing because, among other things, it provides a variety of material from which self-critical models can be made. Lévi-Strauss himself has pointed out that one purpose of anthropology is to provide a model with which to criticize our own culture. But an anthropological model that only provides a way of seeing
how other cultures are structurally similar to ours but literally erases all evidence pertaining to their differences, doesn't, in the long run, strike me as anthropologically very useful.

If other cultures are to teach us anything, and we are not merely to use them as Existential Others that, willy nilly, only prove our own prejudices either about them or ourselves, interpretative models that erase data about their real differences from us must be shunned.

My third example:

Some months ago, Edmund Leach, one of the major commentators on Lévi-Strauss, who has criticized many of Lévi-Strauss's findings and has also praised many of his methods, spent a lecture urging the rein-stitution of segregation between the sexes in Western universities. He proposed doing it in a humane way: “Women might be restricted to the study of medicine and architecture. Men would not be allowed to study these.” Man's providence, apparently, is to be everything else. He claimed to be aware that such segregation in the past had had its exploitative side. But he felt we should seriously look at primitive cultures with strict separation of the sexes in work and play for models of a reasonable solution to contemporary stresses.

My response to something like this is violent, unreasonable, and I stick by it: Then, for sanity's sake, restrict the study of anthropology to women too. It just
might
prevent such loathesome drivel!

Reasonably, all I can say is that modern anthropology takes place in such a pervading context of sexism that even minds as demonstrably brilliant as Lévi-Strauss's and Edmund Leach's have not escaped it. And that is a tragic indictment.

33. Confessions of a science-fiction writer: I have never read a whole novel by Philip K. Dick. And I have only been able to read three short stories by Brian Aldiss (and one I didn't read; I listened to) end to end. (I did read
most
of
Report on Probability A
.) On several separate occasions, I have bought some dozen books by each of them, piled them on my desk, and sat down with the prime intent of familiarizing myself with a substantial portion of their
oeuvres
.

It would be silly to offer this as the vaguest criticism of either Dick or Aldiss. It's merely an indication of idiosyncracies in my own interpretative context as far as reading goes.

At any rate, the prospect of Dick's and Aldiss's work is pleasant to contemplate. It is something I will simply have to grow into, as I grew into Stendahl and Auden, John Buscema and Joe Kubert, Robert Bresson and Stan Brackhage.

I'm making this note at a solitary lunch in a Camden Town Green
Restaurant. From the cassette recorder on the counter, Marinella, echoed by the chorus, asks plaintively again and again: “Pou paome? Pou paome?” Interesting that
the
question of our times emerges in so many languages, in so many media.

34. In the Glotolog foothills resides a highly refined culture much given to philosophical speculation.

Some facts about its language:

is the written sign for a word that translates, roughly, as “a light source.”

is the sign for a word that translates, roughly, as “rain.”

is the sign for a word that translates, very roughly, as “I see.”
,
,
are roughly [and respectively], “you see,” “he sees,” and “she sees.”) But I must repeat “roughly” so frequently because there
are
no real verbs in the Glotolog language in the English sense.

The relationship that various forms of
have to other Glotolog terms is modificational. In traditional Glotolog grammars (which are all written, traditionally, in English—in much the same way that traditional Latin grammars were written in Greek) they are called adjectives. “
” is a common (and grammatically correct) Glotolog sentence—given the weather, it is one of the
most
common Glotolog sentences, especially in the north. It would be used in just about any situation where an English speaker would say, “It's raining,” although there are some marked differences. “
” would also be used when you mean, literally, “I see the rain.” This is perhaps the place to make the point (made so clearly in chapter three of most standard Glotolog grammars),
always takes
, and usually the
is placed before it. The logic here is very simple: You can't see anything without a light source, and in Glotolog this situation is mirrored in the words;
without a
is simply considered grammatically incorrect. (
, however, does not take