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Anthropological Theory-2005-Sahlins-5-30 Structural work How microhistories become macrohistories and vice ...
 
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//-->Anthropological Theoryhttp://ant.sagepub.com/Structural work : How microhistories become macrohistories and vice versaMarshall SahlinsAnthropological Theory2005 5: 5DOI: 10.1177/1463499605050866The online version of this article can be found at:http://ant.sagepub.com/content/5/1/5Published by:http://www.sagepublications.comAdditional services and information forAnthropological Theorycan be found at:Email Alerts:http://ant.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsSubscriptions:http://ant.sagepub.com/subscriptionsReprints:http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navPermissions:http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navCitations:http://ant.sagepub.com/content/5/1/5.refs.html>>Version of Record- Feb 25, 2005What is This?Downloaded fromant.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012Anthropological TheoryCopyright © 2005 SAGE Publications(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)www.sagepublications.comVol 5(1): 5–3010.1177/1463499605050866Structural workHow microhistories become macrohistoriesand vice versaMarshall SahlinsUniversity of Chicago, USAAbstractThe structural-cum-symbolic amplification of minor differences: how small-scale,interpersonal or factional disputes are turned into large-scale struggles betweennations, kingdoms or their totalized like – thus making macrohistories out ofmicrohistories and vice versa. The phenomenon depends on structural relays ofvarious sorts that endow the opposing local parties with collective identities and theopposing collectives with local or interpersonal sentiments. In the occurrence, thesmall-scale struggles are transformed into abstract and irreconcilable causes-to-die-for,their outcome depending now on the larger correlation of forces. The discussionfocuses on three ethnographic/historical examples: the recent Elián Gonzalez affair inthe US; the nationalization of peasant disputes in the Cerdanya, Catalonia during the17th to 19th centuries; and civil strife in Corcyra and other Greek city-states duringthe Peloponnesian War. The last was an important source of Hobbes’s idea of the stateof nature. It shows that it takes a lot of culture to make a state of nature.Key WordsCerdanya • complementary schismogenesis • Corcyra • Elián Gonzalez • humannature • macrohistories • microhistories • Peloponnesian War • segmentary relativity •the state of nature • transvaluationThe most wonderful things are brought about in many instances by means the mostabsurd and ridiculous; in the most ridiculous modes; and apparently by the mostcontemptible implements.Edmund Burke,Reflections on the Revolution in FranceThe Politicians have long observed that the greatest Events may often be traced tothe most trivial Causes, and that a petty Competition or casual Friendship, thePrudence of a Slave, or the Garrulity of a Woman[!!] have hindered or promoted themost important Schemes, and hastened or retarded the Revolutions of Empire.Samuel Johnson,The Rambler5Downloaded fromant.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 5(1)Early in 1841, the irascible British Consul in Honolulu, Richard Charlton, fired off oneof his habitual letters of complaint to the Governor of O’ahu. ‘Sir,’ he wrote, ‘I have thehonor to inform you that some person or persons are building a wall near the end of thebowling alley belonging to Mrs Mary Dowsett, thereby injuring her property and violat-ing the treaty between Great Britain and the Sandwich Islands’ (BCP, 8 February 1841).Most absurd and ridiculous, as Edmund Burke might have judged, Mr Charlton’s letteris thereby all the more suggestive of the general theme of this article: how small issuesare turned into Big Events; or in somewhat more technical lingo, the structural-cum-symbolic amplification of minor differences. The focus is on the historical dynamics bywhich relatively trivial disputes over local matters (such as the trespass complaint of MrCharlton) get articulated with greater political and ideological differences (as betweenBritain and the Sandwich Islands), and are thus promoted into conflicts of world-historical significance. Critically in play are the structural relays between lower andhigher levels of sociocultural order, as in the Honolulu case between the relationships ofneighbors and the relationships of states. Higher-level oppositions are interpolated inlower-level conflicts, and vice versa, in this way compounding the animosities of eachby the differences of the other. By nationalizing the personal relations in the case of MrsDowsett’s bowling alley, and thereby personalizing the national relations, the Britishconsul hoped to create an international showdown – or at least dissuade some guy frombuilding a wall.These structural relays indeed work both ways, dialogically synthesizing micro-histories with macrohistories, whence their power of amplifying lesser into greaterconflicts. For in giving collective identities to local relationships, and local identities tocollective relationships, they also give to each the interests and sentiments of the other.Collective subjects such as nations, ‘imagined’ as they may be, take on the flesh-and-blood qualities of real-life subjects – injured Britannia will be played by Mrs MaryDowsett – and are accordingly acted out in interpersonal dramas, with all their atten-dant feelings and emotions. Yet if abstract collective entities are thus substantialized inacting persons, the concerns of these persons become correspondingly abstract. Endowedwith collective identities, the real-life subjects thereby put at issue the larger political andideological differences they are authorized to represent. That wall encroaching on MrsDowsett’s bowling alley is now imposing on the sovereignty and good will of the BritishEmpire. Note that the abstraction does not dissolve the original contention but on thecontrary makes it all the more intractable. Thus overheated and overdetermined bygreater causes, parochial discords may escalate into fateful events.But nothing of the sort happened in the case of Mrs Dowsett, for several reasons. Onewas the historical infelicity of the property dispute. The injury done to the Haole ladycould not upset either the foreign or the local people of Honolulu. Whether as inter-personal melodrama or the evocation of national grievances of longer memory, it wasnot a good metaphor. Besides, the greater forces whose intervention was being evoked,Great Britain and the Sandwich Islands, were not themselves in a state of contention.Fifteen years earlier Mr Charlton’s complaint would have been somewhat less absurd. Asan Englishman and a merchant, he was then aligned with the Hawaiian king in a struggleagainst a set of usurping pious chiefs, who for their part had made the American mission-aries the priests of their own pretensions to rule. Moreover, this conjuncture did haveconsiderable historical resonance. The link between Britain and the Hawaiian kingship6Downloaded fromant.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012SAHLINS Structural workgoes back to the advent of Captain Cook, whose (purported) remains continued toritually sanctify the rule of the famous Kamehameha, father of the king in Mr Charlton’stime – even as the governor to whom Mr Charlton addressed his letter was a memberof the same anti-royal faction that succeeded in stripping Kamehameha’s heirs of theirsovereign authority. Imposing the oppositions of England versus America and merchantsversus missionaries on the conflict between the Hawaiian king and his ambitious chiefs,this dust-up of the 1820s in the Sandwich Islands could serve as a good illustration ofthe dynamics of structural amplification. But like Mr Charlton’s complaint, this is anold story and already well told two or three times (Kirch and M. Sahlins, 1992;Mykkänen, 2003).1Here I offer instead a few equally revelatory incidents.They are, in order: the recent affair of the Cuban refugee child Elián Gonzalez in theUnited States, the agrarian disputes of Catalan peasants in the Cerdanya in the 17ththrough the 19th centuries, and the civil strife in Greek city-states during the Pelopon-nesian War. The last discussion will be the longest, as I take the opportunity to addresssome high-flying issues raised in Thucydides’ analysis of factional conflict. Indeed all ofthe cases, although they may not be familiar ethnographically, will bring to anthropo-logical mind certain structural dynamics that have had a considerable theoretical run inthe discipline: notably, thesegmentary relativityfamously described by Evans-Pritchard(1940: 135 f.), thecomplementary schismogenesisof Gregory Bateson (1935, 1958: 175 f.,265 f.), and the processes Stanley Tambiah (1996: 192–3, 257–8) has more recentlyidentified astransvaluationandparochialization.THE ICONIZATION OF ELIÁNOne of the most interesting things about the Elián case to me was how it changedfrom a very small issue into a wide community-based problem. Initially, it was reallyolder Cuban-American exiles that were fighting this war. Eventually, it was youngerCuban-Americans from all social classes . . . This started really as another ‘bosarito’,another young rafter. And it ended being an epic of the community and the nationat large. The dynamics of that process are fascinating. (PBS Frontline, 2001 –Damian Fernandez)There was nothing at all ridiculous about the way the Cuban community of Miami madethe shipwrecked Elián Gonzalez quite literally a poster child, turning the family conflictover custody of the child into an international incident involving American and Cubanofficials at the highest level of government. As you will recall, five-year-old Elián was thesurvivor of an ill-fated attempt of a small party of Cubans to cross the Florida Straits inNovember 1999. The sinking of their unseaworthy vessel cost the life of Elián’s mother– who had been estranged from his father, still in Cuba. But it would take seven monthsof legal wrangling, public debate, mass demonstrations, and ultimately the armed inter-vention of US federal agents, to return Elián to Cuba and his father – over the strenu-ous objections of his relatives in Miami, the great majority of Cuban-Americans and acertain segment of the US public and Congress that thought an individual’s ‘right tofreedom’ more compelling than ‘family values’ any time. Since I have recently discussedthis story in print (although in a somewhat different context), I mention here only a fewdimensions most relevant to the way millions of Cuban and American citizens and their7Downloaded fromant.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 5(1)respective governments got involved in the child-custody dispute of an obscure and notaltogether reputable family (M. Sahlins, 2004).2Hurricane Elián confirms the point made in connection with Mrs Dowsett’s bowlingalley that not just any old story will do to whip up a collective hullabaloo. As in thepopular Latin Americantelenovelasthat likewise fold national issues into family melo-dramas, there needs to be a good old story, one with sufficient structural and historicaliconicity to evoke a widespread political response. Many a commentator in the US mediaremarked that if it had been Elián’s father who died and his mother who remained inCuba, he would have been repatriated immediately and without notice, as anything elsewould have been a blow against motherhood – proverbially one of the two greatestAmerican values, along with apple pie. But the pathos of a mother’s death and theensuing drama of love and spite among close kinsmen made Elián’s plight a readycommon ground of widespread empathy and sympathy – especially among Cubans, whowere all too familiar with narratives of extended families torn apart by immigration. TheGonzalez family could share this poignant history even with Fidel Castro, who once wona similar battle for the custody of his own son, and whose own nephew, US Represen-tative Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), figured prominently in the attempt to prevent Eliánfrom rejoining his father. Congressman Diaz-Balart gave Elián a Labrador puppy, amongthe other strenuous arguments he made to show the boy would be happier in America.Also well remembered was the notorious Operation Pedro Pan of 1960–1962, when over14,000 Cuban children between the ages of 6 and 16 were separated from their parentsand shipped to foster homes in the US. Organized by the Catholic Church in America,working in secret agreement with the US government, the operation was given impetusin Cuba by the circulation of rumors that Castro was going to take the children fromtheir parents for political indoctrination. According to Gabriel García Márquez (2000),among the ‘even crueler lies’ being broadcast about Cuba, apparently by the CIA, wasthat ‘the most appetizing children would be sent to Siberian slaughter houses to bereturned as canned meat’ – a cannibal refrain that was revived in Miami about Elián;indeed the US Congress heard sworn testimony from a Cuban-American that Castrowould eat Elián were he to be repatriated (Newsweek, 2000). That many of the PedroPan children – currently in their 40s and 50s, some never reunited with their parents –supported the cause of keeping Elián in America suggests that they could indeed be takenfrom their homes for political indoctrination.Elián’s youth was another felicitous aspect of the affair, given the aging political causesof the Cubans on the island and in America, now more than four decades removed fromtheir original fervor. Both the tired revolution in Cuba and the waning counter-revol-ution in Florida saw in Elián the opportunity to recuperate their increasingly uninter-ested young people. Both sides made Elián the focus of a politics of youth. All acrossCuba, schoolchildren were turned out for mass demonstrations demanding the returnof the ‘boy hero’. While Elián was in Miami, his empty school desk in Cuba was publi-cized as a symbol of perfidious capitalism; when he returned to Cuba, his empty schooldesk in Miami was publicized as a symbol of perfidious communism. As a prominentHavana newspaper put it, Elián ‘had been converted forever into a symbol of the crimesand injustices that imperialism is capable of committing against an innocent’ (MiamiHerald,2000a). The Cuban media in Miami put out endless variations on the refrainthat returning the boy to his father would only subject him to communist brutality –8Downloaded fromant.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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