by Hjorleifur R. Jonsson
During the long dark ages of British colonial rule (that is, dark for anyone on the receiving end of that rule), “the bush” was a common and dismissive British English term for the sticks, places in the colonies that showed no sign of urban sophistication or of upper-class English standards of daily life and manners. My direct reference for the term is an old article titled Shakespeare in the Bush. An American woman anthropologist, Laura Bohannan, was on her way to Africa to do field research in the late 1940s. She was told by some British people about the inferiority and ignorance of people in the African tribal zone. They, for instance, had no knowledge of Shakespeare, that to the Brits was an unquestioned measure of (high) culture. Bohannan tried this issue out in the field, reading to people from Hamlet and explaining things as she went along. Soon the locals started to get more vocal and began explaining things back to her from their own perspective. The drama of Hamlet was a very different thing when seen from the perspective of some Tiv people in Nigeria.
My aim is not to convert readers to anthropology’s ethnographic particularism, that each culture may be its own world of meaning. Rather, I am skeptical of the apparent Ancient Greek slant in the many interesting discussions of isonomia that appear in the previous issues of this journal. Greyson Ruback states that from a liberal angle, the Greek isos means “fair or impartial” and nomos is derived from the verb “to manage” or “to give what is due.” He also points out that the term appears in Herodotus as a contrast to oligarchy and monarchy. However, the discussion in the journal so far, including that of F.A. Hayek’s revival of the term isonomia, pulls in different and at times contradictory directions. In my reading, the attraction of the term evokes some combination of liberty and equality, which certainly have had considerable currency in democratic EuroAmerican societies for quite some time.
There is nothing wrong with knowing some examples from Ancient Greece. But there is good reason to suspend the Renaissance notion that Greece was the exclusive fountain of European cultures and politics – and as such a lesson for the rest of the world – and to opt instead for a more balanced and comparative perspective. My inspiration is the work of ethnologists from the 1920s and ‘30s; strikingly comparative works such as The Gift by French ethnologist Marcel Mauss and Homo Ludens by Dutch medieval historian Johan Huizinga.
This is not the place to examine their arguments or analyses. Rather, I simply call attention to these works for their novel international and multilingual perspective, that replaced the earlier focus on Ancient Greece and Rome and a brief Heliocentric Western academic fascination with Ancient Egypt. Both Mauss and Huizinga drew examples from a range of places. Huizinga cited materials from ancient Scandinavia, the Far East, and the Pacific Islands, and demonstrated considerable familiarity with languages such as Old Norse, Hindi, Sanskrit, and Fijian. He also drew on cases from Europe, Vietnam, and Ancient China. Mauss similarly drew examples from across the world, relying in part on Old Norse, and indigenous languages of the Pacific Islands and of the Northwest Coast of Canada and the USA.
Both scholars were familiar with Latin and Greek and used examples from Ancient Rome and Greece, too. Their international scholarly perspective may only be noticeable because it has long expired and nowadays seems odd. In the wake of the Second World War, academic internationalism and the attendant indiscriminate multilingualism were out. English became the predominant or even exclusive language of international scholarship, while French, German and Spanish largely shrank to national academic fields. It no longer seemed compelling to Western scholars with international academic pretensions to have some command of Old Norse, Fijian, Tlinglit, Arabic, Sanskrit, Hindi, and Chinese as a check on their analyses. Anthropologists shifted from the previous comparative ethnological focus and toward the ethnographic alternative. Each scholar came to focus on an ethnic group and wrote in terms of unique languages and ethnically specific cultures. Comparisons shifted toward the lines practiced and popularized by Margaret Mead, that each people (Samoans, Balinese, Tchambuli, Arapesh, etc.) had a particular way with social life, gender relations, and the like. The ethnographic mode contributed to anthropological specialization and at the same time to anthropology’s growing isolation from other Western academic discourses.
There was no apparent relationship between the ostensible “bush” of anthropological specialization (the tribal zone) on the one hand and the mostly-democratic politics of modern societies on the other. That is, until some people with enough restless curiosity, linguistic skill, and a comparative perspective started to reexamine the issue. David Graeber and David Wengrow draw on French-language materials about Jesuit and traveler encounters with indigenous peoples of North America in the seventeenth century. They show that the European philosophical and political critique of hierarchy and inequality, such as in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was strongly indebted to an indigenous North American critique of French social conventions and expectations – “about religion, politics, health and sexual life.” The indigenous populations were accustomed to reasoned debate and offered grounded critique of the French in terms of their own indigenous North American notions of generosity, liberty, and mutual aid.
Some of the indigenous peoples of North America had visited European countries, and many more had encountered the French and English at forts and through trade. In 1703, a Frenchman known as Lahontan (Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce Baron de Lahontan) published his book, Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled. It was made up of four conversations with a Wendat man named Kandiaronk who lived in the area between Lakes Huron and Michigan (and had also travelled to France). Kandiaronk offered sustained and persistent critique of French society, that was rather typical of what the French Jesuits and traders had faced from the indigenous populations in North America at the time.
Lahontan’s book of their conversations was translated from the French into several other European languages (Italian, Dutch, German, English) and it remained in print for more than a century. Such books exposed European readers to ideas that had been rather unthinkable at home. However, even when books of this sort were explicit about their sources in people from China, Persia, or from the Eastern Woodlands of North America, their non-European voices have generally been dismissed as instead the sock-puppets of their European writers.
There is a further reason to examine Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything. Their perusal of the archeological and ethnological record over the last 20 thousand years shows enormous variety and complexity, none of which supports the common notion that human societies were originally small, simple and egalitarian and only became large, complex and stratified with the “invention” of agriculture and the rise of cities and of the state. They show many cases of political experimentation, such as urbanization and complexity without any apparent centralization or state institutions and long before the supposed advent of agriculture. Also, they show that state-elements (sovereignty, police, death penalty, territoriality) have been present in even the smallest and most egalitarian societies. Instead of affirming notions of the directional and progressive move toward social and political complexity over time, they highlight social tendencies toward seasonal variation, that the same people could be egalitarian for one part of the year and then strongly hierarchical for another season.
Many of their examples from the archeological and ethnological record show considerably democratic tendencies in a range of places prior to and independent of Ancient Greek society. Thus, while I do not want to dismiss the focus on isonomia in Ancient Greece, it seems to me that the term and its common interpretation may preclude recognition of a much more common phenomenon. Michael Tomasello, an evolutionary psychologist and anthropologist, has made a strong case for the foundations of human cognition and sociality in patters of shared attention, shared intentionality, and mutualistic collaboration. Among the central elements are self-other equivalence and a third-person perspective that insists on fairness. The possibility of fashioning social orders that are rooted in fairness is thus not specific to the indigenous peoples of North America, to the Ancient Greeks, or to any other particular population. Instead, the possibility of what is called isonomia has been foundational to humankind for perhaps 100 thousand or even 400 thousand years, quite independent of the Greek-language reference to it. From that perspective, the relative absence of equality in human political formations is more puzzling than is its possible presence.
It is remarkably uncommon to see assertions of fundamental human equivalence past and present in contemporary writing, from academics or others. Most people may not see a reason to stretch their imagination that far. However, there is an interesting and compelling example from musician Keith Richards. In describing how he came to play the guitar in open tuning, he mentions that one of the six strings continually went out of tune so it was best to remove it:
The five-string took me back to the tribesmen of West Africa. They had a very similar instrument, kind of like a banjo … Always underneath [its tuning] was this one note that went through it. And you listen to some of the meticulous Mozart stuff and Vivaldi and you realize that they knew that too.
Here, finally, is the serious reason for my mention of “the bush”: Richards did not suggest that the composers performing in the esteemed halls of exclusive high culture across early modern Europe were necessarily unique, even if they may in our view be exceptionally accomplished. Instead, from his indiscriminate curiosity about music and from his travels he recognized that some of the artistry of celebrated Western composers and performers could equally be found among those he refers to as West African tribesmen. To him, there was just music and he knew enough to see the equivalence; what the unschooled but striking musicians in West Africa knew, Mozart and Vivaldi knew, too.
If this requires explanation then it is that many Western academics have a near-unconscious habit of seeing democracy as derived from Ancient Greece and then from the French and American Revolutions, while the pattern is much more widespread and ordinary. It is a similar story with the sources of certain celebrated music. What then of isonomia? I suggest that the potential lingers in any social order. Several ethnologists of old pointed to basic complexity and diversity; the same society may take various forms – some hierarchic, others egalitarian, some anchored to kinship or age, others to voluntary associations – depending on the activity at hand. Common expectations of the state as inherently hierarchical, oppressive, and exploitative assume that there is a singularity to “the state” whereas this may be far from the case.
Notions of the state as oppressive often refer to the relationship of a national majority and internal minorities, as if there is anything predictable or uniform in such relations. I was trained to expect such inherent inequalities but over time my research has suggested otherwise. There are various studies that purport to show persistent inequality and incompatibility between Asian states and highland “tribal” groups. To the extent that such cases are empirically justified, they seem to all draw on episodes of political collapse (such as during wartime). Most such studies generalize from particular situations in China, Burma, or Thailand and toward the shape of that multi-ethnic region over many centuries.
However, when the expectation of persistent and predictable inequalities across ethnic lines is set aside then other historical patterns come to light. Examining archival and ethnohistorical sources on highland peoples such as Yao in southern China, Phunoy in northern Laos, and Lawa (Lua’) in northern Thailand, it turns out that courts (that we tend to identify as “the state”) cultivated political, economic, and ritual relations of reciprocal benefit with such highland peoples. There is no indication that the highlands were in any way marginal, socially or politically. It is especially telling that documents from this interethnic contact zone promise that the state will protect people from any bullying or abuse from state officials.
According to a Chinese/Mien-language document that defines the Yao people in relation to the Chinese state (and which seems to have been in circulation from the twelfth century and until the twentieth):
When [Yao people] meet [Chinese] people on the road, the people are not allowed to arrest them. When crossing by ferry they need not pay … The descendants of the twelve clans of the royal Yao may live in the mountains and forests and may move their families … They may enter villages to rest for the night. It is not permitted to interrogate them closely or to demand money from them. If any of these things occur, the descendants of the royal Yao are permitted to seize the culprit, haul him in and hand him over to the officials to punish the crime. The use of power to oppress the weak is not to be forgiven lightly.
A comparable document situating the highland Lua’ (Lawa) peoples toward the court of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand offers a similar guarantee against official abuse or bullying:
We forbid our ministers, village headmen and town chiefs, centurions, and borough heads, village headmen and local authorities, both present and future, to impress [the Lawa people’s] labor … We order the chief to care for the Lawa, we order the Lawa to care for the chief … When the people have disputes, let the leaders render impartial judgement according to the law.
Both these historical cases of relations across political and ethnic lines insist on some equivalence and are anchored to notions of justice. In these cases, “the state” does not appear as a predictable mechanism for expropriation, control, and oppression. Instead, it comes across as the guardian of security that explicitly prevents bullying and provides ordinary people with the means to recognize and respond to the illegitimacy of overbearing officials of whatever kind. The documents in question offer a rhetoric of equivalence that may resemble isonomia in the insistence that difference (of ethnicity, status, or residence) does not predictably imply any inequality or harm.
Analogous to the West African musicians that Keith Richards mentioned in relation to some famous classical-music composers, the Asian highlanders in the above examples have been as knowledgeable about and invested in politics as anyone else. Circumstantial evidence indicates that the Asian highland peoples have viewed themselves as separate from but equal to their lowland partners in economy and politics. That, in my view, is a clear indication of something akin to isonomia.
The old Greek concept calls attention to a certain phenomenon, and I have used that focus to suggest a broader relevance. My own research has been on history, politics, and ritual on certain ethnic frontiers in Southeast Asia. This material shows the recurring possibility (and practice) of equivalence across ethnic and other social lines. Various cases of the negotiation of diversity show that sameness has not been a precondition for equivalence or justice. In these cases, instead, people have taken difference as an invitation to social creativity toward reciprocal interest and benefit. To the extent that the notion of isonomia helps call attention to such political relations across difference past and present, I ignore the term’s uniquely-Greek reference and instead seek to highlight the common human need to, and potential for, work(ing) against inequality and injustice through deliberate social arrangements in always-particular circumstances.
The current interest in isonomia and related ideas and practices sits somewhere between a focus on what there is or has been and that which people would like to be the case (“theoretical forms that are held in high esteem”). The engagement with reality in relation to this term is a form of active prospecting for political solutions to ongoing problems. The issue is general but it must still always be addressed and shaped by individual people and groups through social interaction, in particular conditions and at specific historical moments:
Our purpose is to consider what form of political community is best of all for those who are most able to realize their ideal of life. We must therefore examine not only this [the perfect state] but other constitutions, both such as actually exist and any theoretical forms which are held in high esteem, so that what is good and useful may be brought to light … [We] only undertake this inquiry because all the constitutions which now exist are faulty (A1260).
Hjorleifur R. Jonsson is Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University. Send him mail.
Isonomia Quarterly 