Anthropological Theory

http://ant.sagepub.com Elias and the anthropological tradition

J. R. Goody Anthropological Theory 2002; 2; 401 DOI: 10.1177/14634990260620512 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ant.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/4/401

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Anthropological Theory
Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 2(4): 401412 [1463-4996(200212)2:4;401412;029504]

Elias and the anthropological tradition

Jack Goody University of Cambridge, UK

Abstract The impressive work of Norbert Elias displays little knowledge of other cultures nor of anthropology in general. But it does promote a comparative method along the lines of Marx and Weber, and this served to encourage such studies in the social sciences, methods which had been rejected by many anthropologists in the 20th century. Elias was interested not only in comparison but in long-term historical change and in what he called sociogenesis. The civilizing process is described as having its genesis in the European Renaissance with the increased part played by the state and the disappearance of feudal structures. It is argued that he arbitrarily selects certain aspects of manners, neglects the growth (or continuation) of violence and fails to take account of the conscience collective operating in simpler societies, let alone developments in other post-Bronze Age societies. Manners he treats largely in psychological terms of the advance of the highly generalized notion of self-restraint, in which he tries to use Freud for historical purposes. But without precise measurements these questions of mentality are too problematic to be examined by texts alone, without direct observation. Key Words comparative study Elias eurocentric Ghana manners mentality naturvolk psychological history self-restraint

I intended to write an article on Elias thinking that I could stress the contribution made to cultural history and comparative studies, two ventures in which I had been engaged and which recent anthropology had neglected. But turning back to Elias major text, I felt I needed to comment on its message and method from the standpoint of anthropology, a subject that was not always appreciated by Elias. While that is of little importance from the standpoint of his signicant work on European historical sociology, it does help to throw some light on the question of the universality of his theories and certain evolutionist or developmental assumptions behind his approach.
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A recent invitation to a conference on Elias mentions his encounter with the other and the blurb for the 1994 edition of his book The Civilizing Process refers to his research in Ghana. His consideration of the other is relevant to his attitude towards ourselves and to our culture as well as to the major change he saw as taking place in the civilizing process. I have written of my meeting with Elias in Africa when he was Professor of Sociology of the University of Ghana (Legon). I got the impression that he knew very little about the continent and its people, and had read almost nothing on the subject. Like most European sociologists, he had a Weberian view of traditional societies which had to be radically distinguished from modern ones, in social organization and in psychological outlook. In Ghana he was more concerned with the latter, but in a rather old-fashioned way. He seemed to think it possible to gain an understanding of such matters by chatting to students and employees, and through his collection of African sculptures, purchased from itinerant Hausa traders who frequented the residential area of the University around sunset. Otherwise he made a rare visit to a village by car. He was somewhat isolated from what went on around him. From my point of view, and I emphasize this was a personal impression, he was the very opposite of an ethnographer, at least of Africa and of other cultures. I believe my impressions are fully supported by looking at his autobiographical account of his experiences in that country and of his encounter with what he referred to as naturvolk (Elias, 1994b; Goody, forthcoming). The term is signicant since it refers to those who have yet to undergo the civilizing process. They are nearer to nature and to the expression of mans biological nature. Such ignorance of and distance from the local scene as this conception implied was not characteristic of Elias alone but was noticeable in other expatriate teachers in the social sciences in Africa who came from the dominant European sociological tradition. When Elias came to the sociology department, in which the degree was based on that for the London School of Economics, he tried to get rid of anthropology. His grounds were that Africa should not be left to the anthropologists who had failed to understand its particular strangeness. He desired to replace anthropology by sociology. He felt the latter could do much better, perhaps through a community study such as he had carried out in England, rather than through intensive eldwork. But he did not publish the results of any such survey and the work of others, including Busias survey of Takoradi, suggests that such an approach has its limitations (Busia, 1950). In any case, as far as the curriculum was concerned, the students strongly resisted this change, wanting to learn more about their own society and not only about western ones (which is of course where his own expertise lay).1 We can see the same trend in his work at Leicester. A new and large Department of Sociology, it had effectively no element of anthropology in its curriculum. His book on What is Society? has virtually no reference to anthropologists, except to Levi-Strauss in relation to the Whorf hypothesis and to Evans-Pritchards Nuer. If anthropologists in Britain neglected Elias, it was perhaps partly because he neglected them and showed little interest in the range of society with which they were mainly dealing and which his universalizing hypotheses might have expected him to include. The important achievement of Elias as far as anthropology is concerned lay elsewhere. He represented a continuation of the tradition of historical and comparative sociology, now rejected by many postmodernists, the tradition that was exemplied in the works of Marx and above all of Max Weber; for he worked with Alfred Weber and had joined
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the circle of Marianne Weber at Heidelberg, becoming an assistant to the sociologist Karl Mannheim, with whom he later met up again in London. And he applied that approach to the fascinating topic of manners. In the introduction that he added to the 1978 edition of The Civilizing Process, Elias brings out his theoretical and methodological interests. He is particularly concerned with the way in which the predominant type of sociology current in his day he refers mainly to Talcott Parsons had become a sociology of states and had set aside a consideration of problems of long-term social change, of the sociogenesis and development of social formations of all kinds (Elias, 1978: 190). That was the case, but Parsons saw an advantage in the synchronic analysis of social action. Indeed regarding diachronic analysis, the work of authors like Comte, Spencer, Marx and Hobhouse are dismissed by Elias himself partly on evidential grounds and partly because of an ideology that assumed development was always for the better, a movement in the direction of progress. Elias, rightly in my opinion, argues that we should set aside the ideology and attempt to improve the factual basis. But one problem with his study is that the factual base is restricted; nor is it clear in his rst monograph to what extent a notion of progress is intrinsic to his concept of civilization, of centralization and the internalization of constraints in the development of manners. There has been much discussion of the nature of Elias concepts of progress and of process and their relation to earlier notions of evolution and development, but in his major book he is certainly dealing with vectorial transformation over time, both of society and of the personality. In the 19th century the British tradition of comparative studies in the social sciences had taken a somewhat different turn, inuenced as it was by anthropology more than by sociology (though Herbert Spencer and the legal historians drew on both elds). That is to say, it concentrated not simply on European and to a lesser extent Eurasiatic societies, as the sociologists had done since their problematic always centred upon Europe and on questions of modernity and tradition, but it included in this purview the whole range of human experience and culture, especially in non-European societies. Their original focus was on the early and the other rather than on the modern and ourselves. These efforts produced a number of interesting results in terms of the history of human culture but they were largely set aside and discounted by the British anthropologists who followed in the 1920s and above all the 1930s. Under the inuence of Malinowski and to a lesser extent of Radcliffe-Brown, the thrust of anthropological enquiry turned to direct observations and enquiries in the eld in the manner classically described by Evans-Pritchard (1951). So large-scale ethnographic comparison took a back seat. But that did not eliminate the practice of comparison altogether, though the broad diachronic element disappeared. Fieldworking anthropologists recommended that their students do in-depth research in two communities. One-to-one comparison was an intrinsic feature of this programme. But so was another kind. Malinowski effectively worked only in the Trobriand Islands, but he was consistently drawn to compare Trobriand practices with those of Europe. He had no further controls; it was a one-toone comparison with his own society in order to query relevant aspects of the West. There was yet another type of comparison that was tacitly accepted, indeed actively promoted by some. This was regional comparison, an enquiry that was justied on the grounds that neighbouring societies had much in common, which made the comparison
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more valid and more acceptable. The most systematic of these studies were Schaperas work on the political systems of the Southern Bantu (1956) and Richards analysis of matrilineal societies in Central Africa (1950); both were based on their own eldwork. In the same vein Evans-Pritchard promoted Nilotic studies and Fortes Voltaic ones, both encouraging their own students to work in those particular areas in order to further the possibility of protable comparison as well as to satisfy curiosity about their neighbours, and perhaps to lend support to or conrm their own studies. In both the restricted and the regional comparison there might be some treatment of change, especially if it was short-term and observable. But longer-term changes were of little explicit interest. So larger comparisons were abandoned by these scholars, as were ones involving a historical perspective. While they did not openly declare that history is bunk, many were worried by the use of conjectural history (or pseudo-history) by 19th-century anthropologists to account for the variations and distribution of human behaviour which they had perceived by their use of the comparative method. It was the case that scholars had used history to try and explain origins or sociogenesis in highly speculative ways that distracted from the search for explanations in terms of the interlocking of contemporary features (functional or structural). That interlocking of persons and institutions at one point in time was rightly seen as a perfectly valid form of analysis, as in biology; static was not considered to be failure of analysis but as useful (as Comte had maintained) for certain denite purposes. Indeed the choice between synchronic and diachronic analysis clearly depends upon the problem at which one is looking and cannot be determined in advance. Not all anthropologists everywhere were equally opposed to comparison. In France, Levi-Strauss and Dumont had few such inhibitions about wide-ranging comparison, in a sense carrying on the tradition of Anne sociologique (which the British adopted in other sociological respects). There were other scholars inuenced by the great sociologists of the past, Marx and Weber, who continued with comparative and historical questions. For them the central question was usually why did modernization (capitalism, industrialization) take place in Europe and not elsewhere? The work of Marx had most inuence on anthropologists in France, following publication of a translation of his study of pre-capitalist social formations, the discussion of the Asiatic mode of production and the re-analysis of his concepts by Althusser, especially in the work of Godelier, Meillassoux, Terray and others. In Britain the comparative and historical tradition was maintained, albeit on a regional basis, by Peter Worsley in The Trumpet Shall Sound writing on Melanesian cargo cults and by Kathleen Gough (1981) in her studies on south-west India, both inuenced by Marxist ideas. Weber had less inuence, except for his widely-read essay on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism translated by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, through whom his works were made known to an English-speaking audience. Elias adopts a very different stance from Parsons, whose approach he only sees as static (yet Parsons was also very much concerned with the links between the social and psychological systems). Like Weber he is interested in long-term changes and explores the reasons for sociologys abandonment of such investigation, linking this to changes in social processes. But he remains aware of the dangers the problem of evidence and the ideological bias associated with the idea of progress. Let me discuss the rst of these.
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Weber had some effect in encouraging a comparative approach. In the rst place his general sociology was of an abstract, classifying kind which led to some comparison, for example, in his discussion of forms of authority traditional, charismatic, bureaucratic rather as Durkheim did with his treatment of organic and mechanical social systems. However, this discussion was of limited value to anthropologists, as the notion of a single category of traditional authority was far too restrictive and did not correspond to what one found in practice. Traditional was simply a residual category for Weber and so too for Elias. In the second, while he was extremely knowledgeable about the major Eurasian civilizations, unlike Durkheim he knew virtually nothing of non-literate societies, and little enough of peasant ones. Durkheim on the other hand made an extensive study of native Australians for The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) as well as reviewing many anthropological works for Anne sociologique; his collaborators and students such as Mauss, Hertz, Fauconnet, Bougl, Dout and others made thoughtful contributions to ethnographic research even if they did not themselves engage in eldwork to any notable extent. Such a wide interest was very limited in the German sociological tradition from which Elias emerged. More stimulating was Webers major problematic and the way he tried to test his suggested answer cross-culturally. From the broadest perspective Elias original thesis adopts a similar approach to those discussed by Blaut in his Eight Eurocentric Historians (2000) among whom he includes Weber, White, Jones, Hall, Brenner, Mann, Diamond and Landes.2 This work would have qualied Elias for a ninth place (though there are many other candidates) because of his statements about Europes advantages in the civilizing process (and particularly in the internalization of restraint) without any review of non-European material.3 Elias belonged to this Weberian tradition and his central question in The Civilizing Process (1978 [1939]) was precisely how this process had emerged in modern times and had been internalized by the actors as a set of constraints. His problematic is not identical to Webers but it is related. He is asking not why capitalism arose exclusively in the West but why the civilizing process did. True, he never puts it quite as directly as Weber (who at times also pursued a more nuanced argument), but in fact his major work concentrates entirely upon Europe and the development of the civilizing process in the period following the Renaissance. This he sees as manifested in increasing self-restraint, in the internalization of controls over affect, which he contrasts explicitly with what took place in the Middle Ages (such as uncontrolled bouts of drinking) and in simpler societies among the naturvolk, as in Ghana, with their sacrices, rituals, scanty clothing but greater directness. With Weber, as with Elias, the focus came rmly back to historical comparison, though talk of the naturvolk, and of the assumption of some ideal type of traditional society brought one perilously close to the speculative history of 19th-century anthropologists against whose procedures and results the eldworking anthropologists of the interwar period with their static observations had struggled so strongly and to much purpose. In his introduction to the 1968 German edition, Elias draws attention to the paucity of work on the structure and controls of human affects except for the more developed societies of today. His work concentrates on the long-term transformation of personality structure which he sees as related to long-term transformations of social structures (to state formation). He is concerned with the background of what in common speech relates to the change from barbarity to civilization, not in the sense the terms have
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been used by prehistorians but referring to changes in the control of internal (and external) behaviour. Elias appreciates the need for evidence and considers he has tackled this question, both with regard to social differentiation at the socio-political level (state controls) and to the relationship with long-term changes in affect control, the latter being manifest in experience (in the form of an advance in the threshold of shame and revulsion). The notion of such an advance is critical. Although he wishes to replace metaphysically dominated sociological theories of development with a more empirically based model, he rejects the notion of evolution in the nineteenth century sense or of unspecic social change in the 20th century one (1994: 184). He rather looks at social development in one of its manifestations, namely the process of state formation over several centuries together with the complementary process of advancing differentiation. He claims he is laying the foundation of an undogmatic, empirically based sociological theory of social process in general and of social development in particular (1994: 184). Social change (seen as structural) must be regarded as moving towards greater or less complexity over many generations (1994: 184). It is not easy to discuss the applicability of this theory to other contexts because of its generality. At the same time he connes the notion of state formation and civilization to the modern period in Europe. From a theoretical point of view such a purely European focus is unsustainable, especially as the process of state formation was discussed by other German writers (such as the anthropologist Robert Lowie) in a much wider context. Elias does not see every development as proceeding in a straight line. After the First World War, there was a relaxation in morals (1994: 153) but this was a very short recession which he claims did not affect the general trend. For instance, bathing costumes (and womens sport) presuppose a very high standard of drive control. Why does that observation apply to us and not to the scantier clothing of simpler societies? Indeed when one examines the problem of increasing constraints from a different angle, the notion of a general progression disappears, although there may have been changes towards stricter and laxer controls over time and place in specic spheres. Nevertheless, Elias asserts that the direction of the main movement . . . is the same for all kinds of behavior (1994: 154). Instincts are slowly and progressively suppressed. While this point of view is a commonplace in the West, it is not easy to nd any empirical support. Later on towards the end of his life, Elias turned to consider the most dramatic phase, the rise of Nazism (or more broadly Fascism), which some consider should have had its place in any account of the overall changes in human society. He now sees the Nazi period as a process of decivilization, of regression, but that seems to avoid the main issue. Such activity and the Fascist ideologies in Germany and Italy, like the World Wars, are surely an intrinsic part of contemporary society, of the development that has led to our present situation, and not some kind of regression, a social equivalent of Freudian psychological processes. That conception seems to relate to another, which it is now generally regarded as misleading. There is little doubt that Elias equated the childhood of the race with the childhood of the human being, the phylogenetic with the ontogenetic (although children did not go through all the phases of the civilizing process); the naturvolk or primitive needed to have his emotions and behaviour controlled, as was also the case with children who required disciplining in the same way (with fear being involved in both cases). But
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as has often been pointed out, naturvolk have already been through a long process of socialization, of denaturing, and to see them as lacking in self-control is highly questionable. In acephalous societies without elaborate systems of authority there are possibly more internalized constraints, certainly reciprocal ones, which may of course take the form of negative reciprocity in the violence of vengeance and the feud. That he should later have learnt had he read the work on the Tallensi of Ghana undertaken by Fortes with his psychological and indeed psychoanalytic background. The change in the structure of affects is related by Elias to the change in the structure of society, in particular the shift from the free competition of feudal society to the monopolization of power by the monarchy, creating the courtly society. In a differentiated society that increased central control is seen as offering greater freedoms to its members, entailing a shift from external constraints to internal ones, though the logical basis of this transformation seems open to question. The process of what he calls state formation, the sociogenesis of the state, is analysed exclusively from the standpoint of western Europe, which is of course where he sees the civilizing process as taking place. (No African society was seen by him as having a state, though he lived within the shadow of the Kingdom of Asante.) His approach contrasts with that of Weber, who was concerned with the sociogenesis of capitalism (and the internalized religiously based constraints of Protestants) and discussed at great length the reasons why Asian societies did not, could not, give rise to capitalism. Nevertheless, the questions are linked together. What lends the civilizing process in the west its special and unique character, Elias writes, is that here the division of functions has attained a level, the monopolies of force and taxation a solidity, and interdependence and competition an extent, both in terms of physical space and of numbers of people, unequalled in world history (1994: 457). Could that really be said of the 16th century? In any case he does not examine the history of any other part of the world and if he did so, given his initial question, he might only have ended up like Weber in seeing Europe as unique, which of course it is bound to be, but the implication is that it is unique in respect of the factors leading to the civilizing process (or capitalism). Pomeranz has effectively queried these assumptions in a recent book (2000) and I would certainly do so as well (Goody, 1996). Western society, he asserts, developed from a network of interdependence, encompassing not only the oceans but arable regions of the earth (the expansion of Europe), creating a necessity for an attunement of human conduct over wider areas. Corresponding to it, too, is the strength of self-control and the permanence of compulsion, affect-inhibition and drive-control, which life at the centres of this network imposes (457). Having elaborated this relationship between terrestrial expansion and psychological interdependence, producing permanent self-control (more complex super-egos), he sees this in turn as related to punctuality, to the development of chronometric techniques and to the consciousness of time as well as to the development of money and other instruments of social integration. Those developments include the necessity to subordinate momentary effects to more distant goals (458), starting with the upper and middle classes. All this concerns western development and western societies, with their higher division of labour (459). Higher note, rather than more complex. There is certainly more planning, and hence delayed gratication, in such societies, associated with the reckoning of time. But that often involves external controls as much, or more
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than, internal ones. And we must not lose sight of the fact that apart from attunement, state formation led to violence within and without the boundaries. No need to consider naturvolk in this process but it is unacceptable that there is no reference to other urban societies, especially as this might have led him to query the notion of a special social personality structure in the West. The question he raises is whether the long-term changes in social systems, toward a higher level of social differentiation and integration (183), are accompanied by parallel changes in personality structures. The problem of long-term changes in affect and control structures of people constitutes an interesting question and is not one that anthropologists have much discussed, certainly in terms of affect and emotion though there has been considerable interest in social control, including internalized sanctions, the question of shame and guilt, and the relation of segmentary political systems to moral and jural solidarities which was raised by Durkheim (and only much later in the German tradition with its overwhelming concern with the state). The comparison and history of affect presents greater problems of evidence and documentation, at least in the absence of written sources; indeed, that situation throws some doubts on a dependence on the text alone for examining mentalities, and most anthropologists, discomforted by Levy-Bruhls primitive mentality, would tend to follow G.E.R. Lloyd in his extensive criticisms of such an approach. That is not to deny the possibility of long-term changes, possibly directional ones, at the level of affect, even if anthropologists more frequently take a relativistic or universalistic line about such topics (the unity of mankind), demanding a scepticism about such questions as the invention of love in 12th-century France or 18th-century England, the evidence for which depends entirely on the written record. In his discussion of the history of manners, for which he is best known, Elias concentrates upon a set of aspects of behaviour, the increasing use of tableware (especially the fork), of handkerchiefs, and so forth. Increasing consumption over this period, as well as elaboration in matters of dress and table manners, did see a series of changes in western cultures. But we need to ask two questions. Is it satisfactory simply to select these aspects and to disregard others which seem to go in a contrary sense where one needs to take account of the increase in warfare and violence, including those aspects that led to Elias himself having to ee his native Germany, as well as more unconstrained behaviour in the area of sex, of violations of property rights and other forms of criminal action? Concerning violence he claims that we see clearly how the compulsions arising directly from the threat of weapons and physical force gradually diminish, and how those forms of dependency which lead to the regulation of the affects in the form of selfcontrol, gradually increase (153). The proposition is highly questionable, at least at the level of society, taking into account the use and threat of weapons in the 20th century. Yet he claims that social facts t in with the general notion of increasing self-control. That thesis is vaguely based on ideas of naturvolk with their supposedly freer feelings, on the notion of a shift from (external) shame to (internal) guilt, on Freudian and similar visions of instinctive drives and impulses gradually being brought under control by society. Here Elias failure to seriously examine other cultures leads him into two kinds of problems. Firstly his sequence of development privileges western Europe and its development from feudal to courtly (of the 16th and 17th centuries) to bourgeois society. Secondly his vision totally underestimates the social constraints in the simpler societies,
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certainly with regard to sex, violence and other forms of interpersonal behaviour. The fact that primitives may go about scantily clad does not mean they do not have strongly felt internalized feelings of shame and embarrassment. That is to overinterpret, as I think he sometimes does, the material culture as an index of a psychological state. Love is seen in similarly questionable developmental terms. What we call love . . . that transformation of pleasure, that shade of feeling, that sublimation and renement of the affects (328) comes into being in the feudal society of the troubadours and is expressed in lyric poetry. He sees a text, indeed the genre, as expressing genuine feelings (though it could be used otherwise) and, in the words of C.S. Lewis, as an indicator of a new state of affairs. That we nd here a poetic genre new for Christian Europe there can be little doubt; but there is (as I have tried to show elsewhere) no evidence of new feelings, unless we mean by that new forms of expressing those feelings, and even here the newness of expression applies only to Christian Europe, not to an overall change in mans consciousness. There has been a misapplication of the notion of sociogenesis (see Goody, 1998). Sexuality, dealt with under a section headed changes in attitude towards relations between the sexes (138 ff.), is given a similar treatment. In accordance with his general view of the history of manners, Elias begins by claiming that the feeling of shame surrounding human sexual relations . . . changed considerably in the process of civilization. The note refers to comments by Ginsberg, Montaigne and Freud about social inuences on behaviour but which give no support whatsoever to the idea of a progression in notions of shame. That he sees in the views taken of Erasmus Colloquies in the 19th century; he has a different standard of shame from the later period and that difference is part of the civilizing process since at that time even among adults, everything pertaining to sexual life is concealed to a high degree and dismissed behind the scenes (146). Elias perceives a similar progression in respect of monogamous marriage which the Church had proclaimed early on in its history. But marriage takes on this strict form as a social institution binding on both sexes only at a later stage, when drives and impulses come under rmer and stricter control. For only then are extramarital relationships for men really ostracised socially, or at least subject to absolute secrecy (150). This seems a very dubious assertion that perhaps held for the Victorian period in England but by no means everywhere even in Europe. Yet it is a problem he pursues in trying to establish his thesis: in the course of the civilising process the sexual drive, like many others, is subjected to ever stricter control and transformation (149). It may have been possible to make this assertion in the 1930s (though I myself have doubts), but after the 1960s it is hardly correct to claim a progression to ever stricter controls. Women have certainly experienced some liberation in this as in other spheres; men too are not more straight-laced than in Victorian times. Indeed Victorian England has to be looked upon as a special case of inhibition in this respect. What is problematic is not the interlocking of human beings in a wider perspective (society, culture, guration), nor the relationship of the individual to the social (as distinct from society) discussed by Durkheim and further analysed by Parsons in The Structure of Social Action (1937) which in my view Elias does not completely understand, or if understands does not take fully into account. The problem that is most worrying to anthropologists lies in the nature of the nexus between social structure and personality structure. It is how mental stages correspond to social ones, a question that lies at the heart
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of his problematic. No one would deny that there are such relationships. But it is possible to interpret those as too tightly structured, too closely drawn together. Elias writes of a conception of the relation between what is inside man and the external world that is found in the writings of all groups whose powers of reection and whose self-awareness have reached the stage at which people are in a position not only to think but to be conscious of themselves, and to reect on themselves as thinking beings (207). But what is this stage? It seems to assume the existence of a more primitive mentality and fails to look for particular social factors leading to this breakthrough, such as the power of the written word to promote reexivity of this kind (and the role of individuals and social groups that developed it, including philosophers and other intellectuals). Can we properly speak of a stage in the development of the gurations formed by people, and of the people forming these gurations (207)? That seems to be putting the problem at a too general, non-sociological level. Again, he sees the shift from a geocentric view of the world as resulting from an increased capacity in men for self-detachment in thought (208). That particular development (of the civilizing process) led to greater self-control by men. Many historians of science would put the relationship round the other way and offer explanations that did not require the notion of an autonomous civilizing process involved with great affect control, greater self-detachment. Indeed going to the roots of Elias hypothesis, it is difcult to accept the construction of a prima mobile which is not simply descriptive but causal a civilisation shift . . . that was taking place within man himself (209), attering as that may be to our own egos. Even granted there were directional changes in behaviour linked to centralization, why disregard what happened in other civilizations such as China? There too the development of manners, the use of intermediaries between food and mouth, the complicated rituals of greeting and of bodily cleanliness, of court constraint as contrasted with peasant directness as, for example, in the tea ceremony all this presents parallels to Europe at the time of the Renaissance that should have attracted his attention and led to geographical (cross-cultural) analyses rather than to one conned to Europe given the more general psychological thesis he was attempting to substantiate. Stick to Europe if you will, but not if you are making more general claims. And that Elias was doing, viewing in a Weberian fashion what was happening here in Europe as the unique path to modernity. I believe there is no excuse for this neglect of other civilized cultures in such a venture. Weber realized he had to take them into account, even though his western orientation did, in my view, get in the way of a correct evaluation of the material (see Goody, 1996). For example in a famous contribution Weber related the rise of capitalism to the Protestant ethic. But since then many articles have appeared, showing a similar spirit to have existed elsewhere (e.g. Amstutz, 1998). Elias did not even try to pursue this comparison. I have spoken primarily of the relevance of Elias and Weber for anthropological enquiry. There is also the question of theory. One is aware of the problem in the social sciences; the concepts one uses almost invariably have theoretical implications. Historians and others may see a term such as feudal as being theoretically neutral but it does in fact refer to a specic view of development in Europe and by implication (or even by direct usage) in the rest of the world. Such usages need to be examined critically and if necessary reconsidered. Elias does just this regarding civilization.
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GOODY Elias and the anthropological tradition

But there is another level of theory where such a re-examination has turned out to be less valuable. Here I refer to the kind of discussion embodied in Talcott Parsons The Structure of Social Action and subsequent works, on the supposedly systematic relations between sub-systems, though similar considerations apply to Anthony Giddens discussion of structuration, Bourdieus of habitus, Radcliffe-Browns structure and function. I believe it to be the same with most discussions of culture and society, and it applies to Elias notion of guration. The use of some of these concepts has occasionally served to redirect research activities but at a more profound level they have been singularly unprotable, a repetition of the obvious, a dilation on what nobody needed to know, a commentary on previous texts or abstract model building. We can usually do just as well, perhaps better, with the language of ordinary men. What the work of Weber and Elias has helped to keep alive is the interest in history and comparison. There must always be some problems in these two areas for a subject based on eldwork. I would argue that one cannot neglect them for that reason but should use the results of eldwork to improve comparison and historical reconstruction. We are accustomed to the reports of eldworkers whose efforts, when not conned to the recording and analysis of observations, tend to turn to gross comparison with their own cultures as a substitute for serious sociological enquiry. It is of little surprise that recent anthropology has failed to make a substantial contribution to understanding in the social sciences, indeed some of its practitioners have given up the attempt, rejecting the methodology of eldwork and relying on literary or philosophical intuition (see Latour, 2000). I do not wish to suggest that comparison is the only strategy anthropology can adopt. Clearly there is a place for those who wish to concentrate upon the Nuer or upon the wider frame of Nilotic studies. There may also be a place for a mode of enquiry that embraces neither intensive eldwork nor systematic comparison, though I myself would prefer to see this listed under a separate designation, perhaps philosophic anthropology as practised by Habermas is a possibility here. But if one wants to say something about the differences between certain types of society (however dened), or even to imply the existence of such general differences, there is really no alternative to systematic comparisons. In a recent book Pomeranz acknowledges that much of classical social theory has been Eurocentric but argues that the alternative favoured by some current postmodernist scholars abandoning cross-cultural comparison altogether and focussing almost exclusively on exposing the contingency, particularity, and perhaps unknowability of historical moments makes it impossible even to approach many of the most important questions in history (and in contemporary life). It seems much preferable instead to confront biased comparison by trying to produce better ones by seeing both sides of the comparison as deviations rather than as seeing one as the norm (Pomeranz, 2000: 8). That goal should remain an important aim for all the social sciences, and it is one with which the work of Weber and Elias urges us to engage.
Notes

1 See Kortes forthcoming work on Elias letters to Rene Knig, to which I am indebted. This general attitude is strongly reinforced by conversations with those who worked with Elias. 2 Some years ago I attended a seminar in Cambridge arranged by a number of these
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scholars (including other distinguished contributors) on Europes uniqueness in respect to capitalism. My own attempt to query this approach was not included in the published outcome. 3 As with many writers, there has been change over time. I am talking about the original work.
References

Amstutz, G. (1998) Shin Buddhism and Protestant Analogies with Christianity in the West, Comparative Studies in Society and History 40: 72447. Blaut, J.M. (2000) Eight Eurocentric Historians. New York: Guilford Press. Busia, K.A. (1950) Report on a Social Survey of Sekondi-Takoradi. London: Crown Agents. Elias, N. (19812) [1978, 1939] The Civilizing Process (Edmund Jephcott trs.). Oxford: Blackwell. Elias, N. (1994a) The Civilizing Process. Revised edition (Edmund Jephcott trs.). Oxford: Blackwell. Elias, N. (1994b) Reections on a Life (Edmund Jephcott trs.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1951) Social Anthropology. London: Routledge. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1966) The Position of Women in Primitive Societies and Other Essays in Social Anthropology. London: Faber & Faber. Goody, J. (1996) The East in the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, J. (1998) Food and Love. London: Verso. Goody, J. (forthcoming) The Civilising Process in Ghana. Gough, K. (1981) Rural Society in South-East India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Latour, B. (2000) Derrida Dreams about Le Shuttle. Review of E. Darian-Smith (Bridging Divides: The Channel Tunnel and English Legal Identity in the New Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press), Times Higher Educational Supplement 2/6/2000: 31. Lloyd, G.E.R. (1990) Demystifying Mentalities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parsons, T. (1937) The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press. Pomeranz, K. (2000) The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Richards, A.I. (1950) Some Types of Family Structure among the Central Bantu, in A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and C.D. Forde (eds) African Systems of Kinship and Marriage. London: Oxford University Press (For the International African Institute). Schapera, I. (1956) Government and Politics in Tribal Societies. London: C.A. Watts. Worsley, P. (1957) The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of Cargo Cults in Melanesia. London: MacGibbon & Kee.
JACK GOODY was William Wye Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and is now a Fellow of St Johns College. He carried out eldwork in Ghana among the Lo Dagaa and Gonja, and also carried out enquiries in Gujerat and South China. He has written more generally on kinship and family, on literacy, on food, on owers and on other cultural topics. Address: St Johns College, Cambridge CB2 1TP, England. [email: jrg1@hermes.cam.ac.uk]

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