August 21, 2012
Lately I have been going through my papers, by which I mean correspondence, lecture notes, and readings, during the years 1976 to 1982. Stuck inside this correspondence was a paper written by Jack Goody, a deservedly renowned British anthropologist. The paper was actually published in 1991, although I found it among my earlier documents.
Goody’s paper is called, “Towards a Room with a View: A Personal Account of Contributions to Local Knowledge, Theory, and Research in Fieldwork and Comparative Studies,” in the Annual Reviews of Anthropology 1991, 20: 1-23. To my mind, which had taken a historical turn in the 1980s, his paper is most exciting for the following reason. Goody describes how in June 1942 he was captured by the German army at Tobruk and was a prisoner of war in various prison camps in Italy and Germany (p. 2). The times then re-awakened his interests in history and comparison.
Goody mentioned that Europe lived under the shadow of continental fascism and there followed for his generation “six and a half years of life under arms …” (p.3). His topical interests took turns as well toward cults, ritual, religion and “English medieval literature, to which (he) was directed partly by the interpretative notes of T. S. Elliot’s The Waste Land” (p. 15). Now comes the most interesting part of his descriptions for me. He wrote:
In prisoner-of-war camp in Germany I had been fortunate to find a copy of Frazer’s The Golden Bough in their library as well as E. K. Chambers’s study of The Medieval Stage and other similar works much influenced by earlier anthropology.
Fascinating, but hardly “fortunate,” because of course the Nazi paradigm, especially that of the SS, was constructed from myths, sagas, and legends, especially medieval ones, often carefully solicited and collected by anthropologists and philosophers, like Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss and Martin Heidegger, among many others. The paper that I gave at the conference in France, October 2011, details the SS paradigm and those who enhanced and used it. At any rate, the Nazis interpreted medieval sagas as personal witness accounts and thus as specific historical expressions of specific peoples.
Further on Goody wrote,
“Just as in my ethnological work in the region I saw an element of ‘history’ in legend and genealogy, so too I saw some intellectual quest in myth, with the important level of meaning located in the actor domain rather than purely in the deep structure posited by those who tended to see the surface meaning as 'absurd’ and fantastic…” (p. 15).
Significant here had he but known it, is that he came close to understanding the National Socialist worldview and specifically something about its construction. Nazism was based on myths wherein its ideologists found their “intellectual quest” that carried “explicit” and “implicit meaning to the actors” (p. 15). -- Amazingly, the Nazis had put something of themselves on the book shelves of their prisoner-of-war camps.
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| Grenoble, France, Conference Dinner Oct 2012 |
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