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Alan Macfarlane is a professor of anthropology at Cambridge, and he has a granddaughter Lily, aged seven. He has written these letters for her to read when she is 17, and I hope she finds them less confusing than I do. His purpose, he says, is to tell her what human beings are really like, and to demonstrate how odd, anthropologically speaking, she and everything she believes in are. At 17, she will be a young woman with an individual identity and legal rights. She will consider herself the equal of any man, and will be free to choose her own husband, job, religion and political affiliation. In all these respects, her grandfather admonishes her, she will be highly untypical. In most other cultures throughout the world she would have been married already and probably have several children. Her inferiority to men would be obvious and unquestioned. She would have no legal rights. Her husband would have been chosen for her. Her childhood from the age of five would have been spent slaving in the fields, and she would be sick almost all the time, suffering from septic sores, coughs, diarrhoea and intestinal worms, if nothing worse.
No doubt Lily will accept the sad truth of all this. But what will surely strike her as strange is that her grandpa believes these other cultures, with their horrible injustices and cruelties, are just as good as her own western culture. He is not, she will know, a cruel man. He maintains that rearing animals for food is equivalent to “cannibalism”. He even worries about the propriety of killing slugs in the garden. Yet his anthropological training has convinced him that all human cultures are equally “valid”, and none is “intrinsically morally better” than any other. Ideals such as democracy, equality before the law and human rights are just “local traditions”, developed in Britain and America, and there is no reason to prefer them to their opposites, which are far commoner worldwide.
Lily will, I think, be especially surprised by her grandpa’s favourable estimate of witchcraft. Most human societies today believe in witchcraft, he tells her, and it is “intellectually and socially attractive”. Its advantage is that, when misfortune happens to you, you can identify whose bad magic is responsible and punish or kill them. The alternative is to believe that misfortune is just misfortune, which is “unsatisfactory”, compared to torturing and killing a witch. Lily may notice that, elsewhere in the book, he grows indignant about the thousands of innocent people who were hanged and burned as witches in 16th-century Europe, and he likens this to America’s current “witch-hunt” against the so-called “axis of evil”, of which he disapproves. Yet if believing in and hunting down witches is such a good idea, it is hard to see what he is complaining about. Further, it is clear from the parts of the book where he writes about western science that he thinks scientific research is the only true path to “reliable knowledge”, and knows that witchcraft is an illusion. So how can it be intellectually attractive? It is all very muddling.
Lily will learn from the book that in most other cultures in the world she would have no individual identity, but would exist only as a member of a family group. Loyalty to family would be paramount, and would far outweigh western superstitions such as justice and the rule of law. If she were brought before a court she would naturally lie to protect family members. She would expect jobs and privileges in the family’s control to be distributed within the family, not outside. In the West, this is what we call “corruption”. But for Macfarlane that is a very parochial view. Globally, corruption is the dominant practice. True, it leads to a breakdown of state control. But the functions that we expect the police and courts to fulfil are carried out in other cultures, Macfarlane explains, by criminal gangs. In Russia, India, southern Italy and elsewhere, mafia-style organisations “provide the assurances and security that the state cannot provide”. Nor, Macfarlane assures us, are they as bad as they are painted. They may sometimes have to resort to murder, but more often a mere gesture, such as killing your favourite pet and leaving it on your pillow, will be enough to persuade you to accept their authority.
I imagine Lily may find this upsetting, and at the least she will surely want to ask grandpa why our western culture is not morally better than one where criminals run the justice system. She may inquire, too, how his accounts of tribal customs among the Yoruba of Nigeria, the Yanomamo of Venezuela, and other exotic peoples, are meant to affect her own conduct. In almost all the world’s cultures outside England and America, he says, it is considered reasonable for a man to strike his wife, and unreasonable for her to strike back. Suppose (which heaven forbid) Lily were to marry a man who beat her. Should she reflect that this is an almost universal practice and refrain from retaliating, or should she, at the risk of being anthropologically incorrect, kick him in the crutch? Her grandpa is of no help in resolving such dilemmas. As an anthropologist he is, it seems, disqualified from making any useful judgments at all, and the most he can tell her is that some people think one thing and some another.
I suspect, however, that seven-year-old Lily will already be shrewd enough to see through his posture of academic impartiality. Whatever he says, she is unlikely to believe that he considers his own views no more important than those of a Nigerian Yoruba, or of the eco-friendly, witch-hunting Nepalese villagers among whom he has lived while pursuing anthropological research. His pride in being a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and walking on the lawns, from which the common people are debarred, is patent even to readers of this book. His advice to Lily to visit his website, where she will find “lectures I’ve given and television films I’ve been in” does not suggest a shrunken ego. He extols the English for inventing and exporting democratic politics, religious toleration and equality before the law, which would make no sense if one culture were really no better than another.
In the past, he believes, the backbone of English liberty were the independent “yeomen”, to whom he feels some affinity, living as he does in a 17th-century yeoman’s house, and he advises modern readers that they will find the archetypal English yeoman in J R R Tolkien’s depiction of Bilbo Baggins, Frodo and their friends. It may come as a surprise to Lily that her academic grandpa is a hobbit at heart. But at least Bilbo, waging his war on terror against the evil Mordor, would have had no truck with anthropological blah about the equal validity of all cultures.
MEMORY MAN
Macfarlane has some poignant ambitions for his letters to Lily: “I want it to be a companion on future mental walks. Together we can explore the world in a continuing conversation long after I am old or dead . . . I would like to continue our walks through the woods, over the hills, along the rivers and through gardens and museums.”
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Letters to the future
