The Tribal Imagination is in several ways a strange book, though not on that account necessarily an unattractive one. Robin Fox is a veteran American anthropologist — he states he’s been a member of the anthropology department of Rutgers University for 43 years. But his interests are far wider than his chosen academic field, and these are amply represented in this book. Yet in essence this is a book without a theme, though the reason for it isn’t in any way hard to find.
We’re told on the book’s cover that what it’s going to be about is the continuing presence of ancient tribal impulses in the modern technical world, summoning up images of territorial soccer violence and rampant males seething under the cloak of monogamous matrimony. But instead of this you find yourself reading chapters on the 19th century British poet Charles Algernon Swinburne, on Wagner’s operas, and on the importance of rhyme and metrics in verse.
There are, it’s true, also chapters on incest and on seafood eating — more an anthropologist’s territory, you would think. But however hard you try to locate a main theme it invariably proves elusive.
The reason, though, is obvious once you hit on it, as you do as soon as you start to consult the notes. Virtually every chapter of The Tribal Imagination is an extended version of an academic article Fox has published elsewhere over the past 10 or so years.
This doesn’t make for a dull book, however, but instead for a rather endearing one. Here is a veteran writer and thinker sounding off on a huge variety of subjects, ranging from why monarchy may not be such a bad form of government after all to why James Cameron’s Avatar exemplifies an important anthropological thesis.
Old men forget, and they also repeat themselves, probably because they’ve forgotten that they’ve said this or that before. But they also have a huge amount of lived experience and, in Fox’s case, of reading and traveling, to draw on. The outcome is that a book like this, ragbag though in many respects it undoubtedly is, is almost certain to contain a great deal of interest. In some ways here is a garrulous old man wagging his finger and adopting some unfashionable intellectual positions, but there’s also present here an authoritative anthropologist surveying a wide range of knowledge and delivering some trenchant judgments on it.
Fox says he hopes his colleagues will find things of interest in the book, but that the main audience he’s aiming at is the general reader. I’m no anthropologist, but my suspicion is that most of his colleagues will have heard Fox expatiate on his favorite topics many times before. Incest, for example, has long been one of the areas he’s specialized in, and from what he writes it’s clear that he takes a defiantly skeptical position on the issue of whether incest taboos are culturally constructed. His view is that most people would prefer not to engage in sexual relations with members of their immediate family if they can find a relative stranger instead, but that many also tend not too look too far afield, compromising with marriage to a cousin (almost obligatory, he claims, in some areas of modern Iraq). But Fox being Fox, the discussion doesn’t stop there but extends, in a way his fellow anthropologists must surely find unusual to say the least, to marriage to cousins in Victorian fiction and the brother-sister relationship central to Wagner’s Ring cycle.
It’s perhaps unfair to Fox to say there’s no unifying theme here. He, certainly, would like us to see it was the interaction between the “miracle” (modern technological civilization) and the “drumbeat” (ancient human instincts). And of course it’s entirely wrong to expect these “drumbeats” to be brutal in nature — Fox’s lifetime has included the remarkable decade when it was taken for granted that our ancient ancestors were far more peaceful, mystically inclined and attuned to cosmic significances than we are, and there are clear signs in his book that he himself has not been uninfluenced by such attitudes.
But the charm of this book (a work that, it must be said, can also be infuriating on alternate pages) lies in this very eclectic approach. And one impression that does come over very strongly is what a charismatic teacher Fox must surely be.
For myself, I enjoyed his chapter on Swinburne as much as any. Fox writes that he carries around with him a two-volume edition of his complete poetry, and indeed he came near to converting me to the view that Swinburne is indeed what his youthful acolytes claimed he was in his heyday: the most daringly sensuous poet, as well as the most skilled verse technician, in the language. Fox speaks of his “post-adolescent female students shrieking with excitement” at some Swinburne lines, and doubtlessly he has shocked many more, in the church-going US, with the anti-Christian line (one of many), “Thou hast conquered, O pale Gallilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath.”
Fox unsurprisingly states he’s a member of no sect or academic tendency, disliking all orthodoxies.
It comes as no surprise, then, to read him mocking the “tenured English professors” operating in “self-congratulatory cliques” who promote formless modern verse to those who prefer rap, hip-hop, or country and western — in other words “anything with meter and rhyme.”
There’s plenty of more conventional anthropological material as well — carbon dating, excavations, an investigation into the origins of the Bible’s 10 commandments (in their different versions, including not seething a kid in its mothers’ milk). But the real attraction of this work lies in the refusal of the author to consider himself an amateur in any field, or even to consider the concept of amateurism a valid one at all. In an age of specialization, this is something to be very grateful for.
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