The Relevance of Primitive Religion

Extract

It is not easy for someone who is not a professional anthropologist to read a work of social anthropology. The difficulty is of a quite special kind: it is not merely the difficulty someone who is not a botanist may find in reading a study of plant morphology, or someone who is not a theologian in reading a discussion of the instrumental causality of the sacraments. The difficulty is the problem of human relevance. These people about whom the anthropologist is writing are human beings: the detail of their activities should be humanly intelligible; and yet, on the one hand these activities in their detail are often meaningless and sometimes disgusting, and on the other, without a sympathetic grasp of the detail the whole work of interpretation and synthesis offered by the anthropologist would become meaningless in its turn. And the anthropologist has nothing to refer to but the information he himself gives us in his book: he has usually no imaginative literature, for instance, no common body of experience to which to appeal.

If this is a difficulty for the common reader, it is also a difficulty for the anthropologist himself, one which he frequently fails to solve. Sometimes he may seek experiential resemblances in the form of archetypal patterns, and some of these archetypes are undoubtedly genuine; for instance, Professor Evans-Pritchard refers to the social (the human) significance, manifested in Nuer ritual, of the fact of the bilateral symmetry of the human body; and we are all of us familiar enough with the difference between left and right not to be particularly disconcerted by examples of this in societies with which we are not familiar. Or again, we can sympathize readily with the polar opposition in Nuer thought between the above and the below.