The Saving Lie by F. G. Bailey

Author:F. G. Bailey [Bailey, F. G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology
ISBN: 9780812201185
Google: JmIUBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2013-03-01T02:53:43+00:00

1. There are other more practical benefits, too. Evans-Pritchard, in the manner of anthropologists of his day, was eager to undo the common notion, prevalent also among scholars of an earlier generation, that the mentality of the “primitive” was, in a fundamental way, different from and inferior to that of the “civilized” person. The Nuer can be read as an apologia designed to make its readers respect the Nuer people, and at least to understand their way of life, even if they cannot admire it. Models that are elegant and internally coherent are more convincing than those that leave loose ends, and therefore they are useful for putting across a message.

2. Lienhardt writes that Evans-Pritchard “was really gratified that the pyramid of the prophet Deng Kur (killed, and his pyramid partly blown up, by a punitive force) could still be clearly seen across the plain from Akobo to Malakal, outlasting the administration which had tried to destroy it” (1974, 303). Deng Kur was the son of the prophet who built the pyramid.

3. Prophets, however, are intellectually domesticated in Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of Nuer religious ideas. See 1956, 303–10. Outside that frame of reference, they perfectly exemplified the old Adam: “The ascetic and abnormal element in the prophetic personality would seem to have been mixed up with personal ambition, a striving after renown, power, and riches, a combination which made the prophets outstanding figures in Nuerland” (1956, 307).

4. Leach presents these ideas with the air of one shattering illusions, but they are familiar enough, and surely less challenging than is his unbounded extension of the term ritual, usually reserved for sacred or mystical matters, to cover all forms of prestation.

Prestation, briefly mentioned earlier, is a form of giving or exchanging in which the thing given counts for less than the message about relative status conveyed by the giving. I will return in Part III to prestations and to their opposite, transactions, which are exchanges not involved with status.

5. Leach, in a later book, predicated structure also as a “by-product of the sum of many individual actions, of which the participants are neither wholly conscious nor wholly unaware” and “a social fact in the same sense as a suicide rate is a social fact” (1961, 300). In other words, the choices that people make between alternative structures can, at least in theory, be summarized as a statistical norm in a natural-system model. Logically that must be the case. But when actors justify what they do by appealing to such a norm (“Everyone does it!” or “We should do what we always do!”) the norm that they invoke has the form of a statistical actuality but in fact is a saving lie presented as a claim. Leach is saying that under the saving lies there is an objective “reality.” I agree; but, to the extent that it is unknown to the actors, it cannot influence the strategic choices that they make. I will come back to this question later; see “Conceptualizing Structure” in Chapter 8 and Part III, note 2.

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