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All Men are Intellectuals: A Disagreement between Friends
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2024
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My friend, Father Marcel Boivin, W.F., sent me a copy of his article ‘A Positive Approach to Taboo’ and asked for my comments. I wrote a somewhat sharp reply, which he received with his usual good nature, standing his ground, however, on the essential point of there being an essential difference between the scientific mentality and the taboo mentality. For me, this theory is, if not a taboo, at least a myth which is perhaps open to critical analysis; however, I feel I ought to sketch out my own way of seeing human thought in action. As Fr Boivin knows, I am neither a psychologist nor a philosopher nor a theologian, but a priest capable of, at any rate, preaching to peasants, children and seminarists, traditionally the three most taboo-ridden categories of mankind; I am also a social anthropologist, a profession whose initiates aspire to explain taboos scientifically, a claim which, if taboos and science are really of such utterly different orders, should mark us as sacred monsters of the quality of the pangolin of the Lele.
To understand human thought one needs to reflect on language. Dolphins, honey-bees and apes all transmit information to each other ; human language abstracts and generalizes, and can refer to what is absent, or past, or purely imaginary. It can therefore transmit far more than is transmitted through animal communication systems, and, for this purpose, language is structured by grammar and syntax. One can speak a language correctly without being able to explain the rules of grammar, but whenever a language is analysed it is found to have a set of rules which have a reasonable amount of consistency with each other.
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- Copyright © 1973 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
page 164 note 1 See Mary Douglas Purity and Danger Pelican Books, 1970, p. 202‐5.
page 164 note 2 For contemporary linguistics see Noel Minnis Linguistics at Large, Gollancz, 1971, particularly the essay ‘Language and Animal Signals’, by Claire and W. M. S. Russell.
page 165 note 1 Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, Routledge and Regan Paul.
page 165 note 2 See Monica Wilson, Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa, Oxford Univesity Press for International African Institute, 1957, pp. 6‐7.
page 166 note 1 Other examples of ritual and taboo used as boundary markers may be found in T. O. Beidelman, ‘Some Nuer notions of Nakedness, Nudity, and Sexuality’, Africa (London), 1968, pp. 113‐31; and Kirk Michael Endicott, An Analysis of Malay Magic, Oxford University Press.
page 166 note 2 I owe this point about the influence of technology on metaphor to Dr David O. Edge of the Department of Science Stuthes, Edinburgh University.
page 166 note 3 For the way in which a society may be understood by the study of particular roles, see Julian Pitt‐Rivers, People of the Sierra, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1954.
page 166 note 4 German word meaning ‘pattern’; associated with theory that we perceive objects as wholes, not as conglomerations of units.
page 166 note 5 See John Gay and Michael Cole, The Mew Mathematics and an Old Culture, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967, p. 82.
page 167 note 1 A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and Wishart, 1971, quoted by R. G. Willis, ‘Paradigms and Pollution’, Man, September 1972, pp. 369‐378.
page 167 note 2 See Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969, pp. 203ff.
page 167 note 3 Op. cit., pp. 299ff.
page 167 note 4 Op. cit., pp. 145ff.
page 167 note 5 Op. cit., pp. 348ff.
page 167 note 6 Op. cit., pp. 167‐170.
page 168 note 1 See V. W. Turner, Chihamba, Manchester University Press, 1964.
page 168 note 2 See V. W. Turner's essay on his friend and informant, Muchona, in The Forest of Symbols, Cornell University Press, 1969.
page 168 note 3 V. W. Turner argued that white, red, and black are universal symbols because based on bodily experience. In Chihamba he argues, if I take his meaning correctly, that an association between whiteness and death will push a ritual or the associated myth, which uses this association, into a certain recognizable shape, even if the moral values may vary from the joyful to the sinister via the comic. Whiteness would then seem to be something existing in the human drama, not simply projected on to it.
page 168 note 4 For the relevance of totemism to the identification of a given area among the Australian aborigines, see Nicholas Peterson, ‘Totenism yesterday’, in Man, March 1972, 12‐32.
page 168 note 5 See Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience, Oxford University Press, 1961, pp. 279‐288.
page 168 note 6 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago University Press (2nd edition), 1970.
page 168 note 7 Op. cit., p. 182.
page 168 note 8 Op, cit., p. 10.
page 168 note 9 Op. cit., p. 176.
page 169 note 1 S. B. Barnes, ‘Paradigms—scientific and social’, Man, March 1969, pp. 94‐102.
page 169 note 2 Op. cit., p. 99.
page 169 note 3 Op. cit., p. 102.
page 169 note 4 Op. cit., p. 99.
page 170 note 1 Op. cit., p. 101.
page 170 note 2 R. G. Willis, op. cit.
page 170 note 3 M. G. Marwick, ‘How real is the charmed circle in African and Western thought?’, Africa, 1973, pp. 59‐71.
page 170 note 4 R. G. Willis, op. cit., p. 371.
page 170 note 5 M. G. Marwick, op. cit., p. 70. ‘We find nothing surprising in the fact that the statements of government departments and of public or private corporations should be more concerned with what people will think of them than with the truth of the message they are trying to convey.’