GOODY Elias and The Anthropological Tradition

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
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
Additional services and information for Anthropological Theory can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://ant.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://ant.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
Downloaded from http://ant.sagepub.com by Eleonora Ravenna on September 30, 2008

03 ANT 2-4 Goody (JB/D) 5/11/02 9:51 am Page 401
Anthropological Theory
Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications

(London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
Vol 2(4): 401–412
[1463-4996(200212)2:4;401–412;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 significant 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.
401
ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 2(4)
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 significant since it refers to those who have yet to undergo ‘the civilizing
process’. They are nearer to nature and to the expression of man’s biological nature. Such
ignorance of and distance from the local scene as this conception implied was not charac-
teristic 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 fieldwork. But he did not publish the
results of any such survey and the work of others, including Busia’s 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-Pritchard’s 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 exemplified in the works
of Marx and above all of Max Weber; for he worked with Alfred Weber and had joined
402
GOODY Elias and the anthropological tradition
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 advan-
tage 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 develop-
ment 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 first monograph to what extent a notion of ‘progress’ is
intrinsic to his concept of civilization, of centralization and the internalization of con-
straints 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, influenced as it was by anthropology more than
by sociology (though Herbert Spencer and the legal historians drew on both fields). 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 anthro-
pologists who followed in the 1920s and above all the 1930s. Under the influence of
Malinowski and to a lesser extent of Radcliffe-Brown, the thrust of anthropological
enquiry turned to direct observations and enquiries in the field 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-to-
one 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 justified on the
grounds that neighbouring societies had much in common, which made the comparison
403
more valid and more acceptable. The most systematic of these studies were Schapera’s
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 fieldwork.
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 profitable comparison as well as to satisfy curiosity about their neighbours,
and perhaps to lend support to or confirm 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 contem-
porary 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 main-
tained) for certain definite 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 Année sociologique (which the British adopted in other
sociological respects).
There were other scholars influenced 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 influence on anthropologists
in France, following publication of a translation of his study of pre-capitalist social for-
mations, 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 influenced by
Marxist ideas.
Weber had less influence, 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 sociology’s
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 first of these.
404
Weber had some effect in encouraging a comparative approach. In the first 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 review-
ing many anthropological works for Année sociologique; his collaborators and students
such as Mauss, Hertz, Fauconnet, Bouglé, Douté and others made thoughtful contri-
butions to ethnographic research even if they did not themselves engage in fieldwork to
any notable extent. Such a wide interest was very limited in the German sociological tra-
dition from which Elias emerged. More stimulating was Weber’s major problematic and
the way he tried to test his suggested answer cross-culturally. From the broadest perspec-
tive 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 qualified Elias for a ninth
place (though there are many other candidates) because of his statements about Europe’s
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 Weber’s 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 concen-
trates 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 sacrifices, rituals, scanty clothing but
greater directness. With Weber, as with Elias, the focus came firmly 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 fieldworking 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 person-
ality 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
405
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 unspecific ‘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 confines 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 women’s 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 specific 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 find 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 mis-
leading. There is little doubt that Elias equated the childhood of the race with the child-
hood 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
406
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 struc-
ture 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 differenti-
ated 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 civiliz-
ing 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’, encom-
passing 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’. ‘Corre-
sponding 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 psycho-
logical interdependence, producing permanent self-control (more complex super-egos),
he sees this in turn as related to punctuality, to the development of chronometric tech-
niques 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 gratification, in such societies, associated
with the reckoning of time. But that often involves external controls as much, or more
407
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 differ-
entiation 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 dis-
cussed, 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-Bruhl’s
‘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 concen-
trates 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 flee 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 self-
control, 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 fit 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 develop-
ment 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,
408
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 refinement 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 find 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 man’s conscious-
ness. 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 civiliz-
ation’. The note refers to comments by Ginsberg, Montaigne and Freud about social
influences on behaviour but which give no support whatsoever to the idea of a pro-
gression 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, every-
thing 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 firmer 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 cer-
tainly 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, figuration), 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
409
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 reflection and whose self-awareness
have reached the stage at which people are in a position not only to think but to be con-
scious of themselves, and to reflect 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 reflexivity 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 figurations formed by people, and of the
people forming these figurations’ (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 difficult 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), flattering 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 com-
plicated 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 paral-
lels 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 confined 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 specific 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’.
410
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’ dis-
cussion of ‘structuration’, Bourdieu’s of ‘habitus’, Radcliffe-Brown’s structure and
function. I believe it to be the same with most discussions of culture and society, and it
applies to Elias’ notion of ‘figuration’. The use of some of these concepts has occasion-
ally served to redirect research activities but at a more profound level they have been
singularly unprofitable, 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 fieldwork. I would argue that one cannot neglect them for that reason but
should use the results of fieldwork to improve comparison and historical reconstruction.
We are accustomed to the reports of fieldworkers whose efforts, when not confined 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 fieldwork 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 fieldwork 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 defined), or even to imply the
existence of such general differences, there is really no alternative to systematic com-
parisons. In a recent book Pomeranz acknowledges that much of classical social theory
has been Eurocentric but argues that ‘the alternative favoured by some current “post-
modernist” scholars abandoning cross-cultural comparison altogether and focussing
almost exclusively on exposing the contingency, particularity, and perhaps unknowabil-
ity 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 Korte’s forthcoming work on Elias’ letters to Rene König, 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
411
scholars (including other distinguished contributors) on Europe’s 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: 724–47.
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. (1981–2) [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) Reflections 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 John’s College. He carried out fieldwork 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 flowers and on other cultural topics. Address: St John’s College, Cambridge CB2 1TP,
England. [email: jrg1@hermes.cam.ac.uk]
412

GOODY Elias and The Anthropological Tradition

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

GOODY Elias and The Anthropological Tradition

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Anthropological Theory

Elias and the anthropological tradition

The online version of this article can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://ant.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Downloaded from http://ant.sagepub.com by Eleonora Ravenna on September 30, 2008

Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications

Elias and the

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 2(4)