General
male, for example) as well as their sons. In subsa-
haran African societies, in contrast, intensive agricul-
ture and complex stratification systems were absent,
as was diverging devolution. Instead marriage fi-
nance often involved true bridewealth exchanges,
with gifts moving around from family to family, with
no endowment of daughters with property that
would be merged with that of their husbands into a
“conjugal fund” (as in Eurasia).
What has Goody added to his argument and evi-
dence with the current work? Primarily he has intro-
duced here evidence on a wide range of Eurasian
societies to bolster his case. In the process, he also
presents interesting information on regional and so-
cial-class variations in several of the regions he dis-
cusses. He uses these to show, in part, that there is a
recurring tendency for higher classes to emphasize
direct dowries, arranged marriages, and restrictions
on divorce and remarriage, while lower classes are
more likely to be characterized by indirect dowries
and greater freedom of mate choice, divorce, and
remarriage. He implies that some past contrasts
drawn between European and Asian family systems
have been based on misleading comparisons of the
“apples” of ordinary European families with the
“oranges” of elite families in Asia.
Goody also uses this volume to demonstrate his
prodigious reading of ethnographic and historical
works on a wide range of societies, a reading that
enables him to present generally well-informed dis-
cussions of topics normally discussed only by regional
specialists. Along the way a large number of tangents
are pursued--discussions of polyandry in Tibet, Na-
yar “non-marriage” in India, and brother-sister incest
in ancient Egypt, to mention only a few. Some of
these discussions range so far from the central ques-
tions of this book and add so relatively little to the
previous literature on these topics that some readers
will wish that Cambridge University Press had de-
parted from its usual hands-off editorial policy.
Goody’s arguments might have been better served by
a briefer and more tightly focused discussion that
avoided pursuing every possible interesting tangent.
In the end, how convincing is Goody’s central set of
claims? Frankly, I feel he presented his case more
effectively in Bridewealth and Dowry twenty years ago.
One element added in the present volume is a more
polemical treatment of opposing points of view, and
this treatment weakens the force of his arguments.
Goody quite correctly criticizes earlier authors who
drew too sharp and ethnocentric a divide between the
supposedly enlightened family patterns of the West,
with its relative freedom for women and youth au-
tonomy, and the “primitive” East, with its patriarchal
family forms and quasi-purchase and incorporation
of brides from other families. In the process,how-
ever, he largely ignores more recent comparative
treatments, such as those by John Hajnal (“Two
Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation Sys-
tem,” Population and Development Review, 8 [1982],
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1209
449-94) and Alan MacFarlane (Marriage and Love in
England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300-l 840 [ 1986]),
that document genuine differences in family forms in
premodern times between Western European societ-
ies and Asian ones. Goody portrays opposing argu-
ments in straw-man form, and in the process he goes
too far in claiming that there was not much difference
between family forms in major regions of Eurasia.
I submit that this is not an instance in which one
side is right and the other is wrong. Rather, Goody
and his opponents both have important points to
make. The family patterns of subsaharan Africa and
Eurasia in general are qualitatively very different, as
Goody claims. Within the major regions of preindus-
trial Eurasia, however, there were also major con-
trasts in family patterns (roughly between northwest
Europe and other parts of Eurasia) that could also be
considered qualitative, rather than simply quantita-
tive (contra Goody). Stressing one set of differences
does not require that one belittle the other, as Goody
tends to do.
Despite the criticisms offered here, this book is not
a work to be dismissed or ignored. Even those who do
not subscribe entirely to Goody’s position will find
much to provoke their thoughts in this work. Even
specialists on the particular areas he deals with will
find that his outsider’s perspective and broad erudi-
tion produce many comments and insights that may
alter the way they think about the society on which
they specialize. Goody, even when not at his most
persuasive, is always well worth reading.
MARTIN KING WHYTE
University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor
WOLF LEPENIES. Melancholy and Society. Translated by
JEREMY GAINES and DORIS JONES. Foreword by Ju-
DITH N. SHKLAR. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press. 1992. Pp. xvi, 253. $39.95.
Wolf Lepenies is a distinguished historian and sociol-
ogist, but one may question whether the appearance
in translation of his first book, Melancholic und Gesell-
schaft (1969), over twenty years after its initial publi-
cation, serves much purpose. Deploying a dazzling
parade of learning in the traditional German aca-
demic manner, Lepenies takes it on himself to write
the social history of boredom, juxtaposing ennui
against its opposite yet double, utopianism. In this
endeavor, Lepenies obviously aspired to create a lofty
work of cultural history in the tradition that extends
from Karl Mannheim to Michel Foucault, an intellec-
tual heritage to which he makes devoted reference.
But the outcome is a volume encumbered with schol-
arly allusions in which the parts are greater than the
whole.
Despite Lepenies’s penetrating insights, it is not
convincingly demonstrated that tedium truly has an
integral history of its own, certainly not one ade-
OCTOBER 1993
1210 Reviews of Books
quately elucidated by Lepenies’s rather rough-hewn
contextualization in terms of the vacuity of courtly
ritual and the impotence of bourgeois alienation. We
are conducted on an itinerary of dejection that leads
from Robert Burton in seventeenth-century Oxford
(oddly, on page 11, Burton’s magnum opus is called an
eighteenth-century work) through the palaces of
Louis XIII and the middle classes of the German
Enlightenment, up to Marcel Proust and Sigmund
Freud. But a fatal arbitrariness attends the inclusions
and omissions. Eighteenth-century London was
widely seen as the Mecca of depression, stimulating
the labeling of melancholy as The English Malady in
Dr. George Cheyne’s best seller of that name (1733).
But these themes receive not even a mention here.
And why only the most glancing references to the
Russia of Mikhail Lermontov or Anton Chekhov?
A cascade of quotations from the giants of Ger-
manic scholarship, interspersed with allusions to
S@ren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Albert
Camus, here serve in place of sustained analysis. And
many of Lepenies’s interpretations now seem dis-
tinctly dated. His listless sleepwalking Central Euro-
pean burghers hardly ring true in light of far more
robust (and convincingly documented) interpreta-
tions of the same cultural elite in Richard van Dul-
men’s Die Gesellschaft der AuJkliirer ( 1986), translated
as The Society of the Enlightenment (1992). After two
decades of “history of mentalites,” it is peculiar that
Lepenies has not chosen to furnish a revised edition
or at least add a new preface.
Following the bad habits of orthodox Germanic
scholarship, Lepenies’s text is also frequently obscure
and abstract. Paragraph after paragraph of murky
prose induces a certain boredom in the reader: “Uto-
pias such as Orwell’s [1984] . . . play off the partially
realized utopia against the envisioned utopia. They
overlook the fact that reality is hardly necessary in
order to perceive the utopian thrust involved, which
comes to light in the prohibitive rules to which the
utopians must submit; the planners of utopia forbid
them to be bored, owing to an awareness that bore-
dom is the result of the total plan; the planners
categorically demand demonstrative happiness be-
cause they know that the assertion of providing the
highest good for all can be proven only in formal
terms-without preventing the individual from try-
ing to withdraw into private spaces in which he can at
least indulge in unplanned and unmeasured mourn-
ing” (p. 95). Author and translators seem equally to
blame for this.
At bottom, two weaknesses render Lepenies’s un-
dertaking more striking in intention than successful
in execution. On the one hand, the work suffers from
a lack of conceptual precision. The terms melancholy,
monotony, Weltschmerr, boredom, ennui, apathy, and
neurasthenia are casually bandied around and all too
readily fuse with each other, without sufficient regard
for nuance -and the different functions they have
served (the gendered nature of the language of mel-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
ancholy is almost overlooked). On the other hand,
there is a lack of definition regarding what a history
of melancholy might be expected to reveal or resolve.
All too often, Lepenies rests content with bombarding
his readers with salvos of disparate references in
paragraphs that can leap from Galen via Schopen-
hauer to the Winnebagos. Such discussions, while
attesting his erudition, contribute little to our illumi-
nation.
Finally, the production standards of this volume
fall well below those customarily set by Harvard
University Press. Note, for instance, the glaring typo-
graphical monstrosity on page 55.
ROY PORTER
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine
JAMES R. GIBSON. Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China
Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast,
1785-l 841. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
1992. Pp. xiii, 422. $45.00.
This book by James R. Gibson represents the cap-
stone of his more than twenty-five years of industri-
ous exploration of the history of the Northwest Coast.
Through monographs and articles Gibson has
worked to broaden historians’ appreciation of the
complex political, economic, and social impact of the
fur trade on the North Pacific basin. The book is the
synthesis that pulls together Gibson’s years of study,
and as such it is a book that has long been needed and
was much anticipated.
Gibson’s narrative is comprehensive. Although the
focus is on the Northwest Coast of North America
and its native inhabitants, Gibson skillfully integrates
the trade’s impact on the entire Pacific basin. Not
surprisingly, Gibson concludes that of the diverse
peoples brought together by the Northwest Coast fur
trade the Indians were the most seriously affected.
Unlike in interior regions, however, European mer-
chants failed to establish numerous trading posts on
the coast. Without these nodes of Western influence
on the frontier, European colonization, missionary
work, and political control were retarded. Most of the
trade was conducted by roaming sailing ships, yet
European diseases, particularly smallpox and mea-
sles, devastated the independent-minded coastal peo-
ples. The fur trade also increased the importance of
slavery among the powerful and well-supplied coastal
Indians. Slave raiding by well-supplied Indians
helped to virtually depopulate areas inhabited by
more isolated peoples. Out of self-defense and eco-
nomic self-interest, inland Indians gradually adopted
the culture of their powerful coastal neighbors. Gib-
son also details the- way Euroamerican technology
enhanced Indian hunting and stimulated monumen-
tal art. “For the Northwest Coast Indians,” he writes,
“the trade was neither just destructive (‘looting’) nor
just constructive (‘enriching’) but both” (p. 269).
Although Gibson’s treatment of the Northwest
OCTOBER 1993