W.G. Runciman

Anthropological method, as classically practised by Malinowski among the Trobriand Islanders, depends in the first instance on patient scrutiny of the details of the daily life of the community under study. But it depends also on the detection in, or behind, those details of what Malinowski himself called ‘the natives’ Weltanschauung’ – that is, the whole unspoken complex of myths, prejudices, values and assumptions through which they interpret the meaning of the world to themselves. It is not easy to do as well as Malinowski did (and he wasn’t perfect). It depends, not on compiling statistics or transcribing official documents or handing out questionnaires, but on knowing how to identify and dissect the archetypal codes and customs, the revealing turns of speech and manner, and the almost imperceptible nuances of life-style, by which the community defines itself in relation to its environment and its past. Where the anthropologist is working in an exotic and alien culture, the task, however daunting at the outset, is made much less so at the point of publication by the simple fact that the audience to whom the reported findings are addressed has no means of checking them against what the natives themselves might have to say. But where the fieldwork has been done in the anthropologist’s very own milieu for dissemination to, as well as about, the natives themselves, publication is a much more hazardous affair. How can you dare pretend to be telling it like it is if the natives are going to turn round and tell you it isn’t?

Ever since the Industrial Revolution and the first stirrings of socialist political theory, the intellectual protagonists of the Left have started with a twofold debating advantage over their opponents on the right. First of all, they have been able to present socialism as the repository of ideals to which all right-minded people can be presumed to subscribe. It may be that liberty, equality and fraternity can in some forms be carried to excess, and perhaps there comes a point beyond which they conflict with one another. But to be on the side of the poor and oppressed against the rich and powerful is almost by definition to be on the side of the good against the bad. The protagonists of the Right may retort, as they often have, that good will towards the poor and oppressed is not the peculiar prerogative of the Left and that the attempts of revolutionaries and doctrinaires to realise their high-sounding ends by their chosen means are likely to be self-defeating if not disastrous. But they are then confronted with the second advantage enjoyed by the Left – their ability to reiterate their long-proclaimed conviction that history is, in the end, on their side. Mistakes and setbacks there may have been, but time and again it can be shown what not only should be but has been achieved by organised political and industrial opposition from below to the owners and controllers of the economy and state. The arguments may not be conclusive. Such arguments seldom are. But they leave – or at least they used to leave – the spokesmen of the established order permanently on the defensive. To be sceptical of the goal of a more socially just society is – or at least used to be – to be cast either as a cynic and a defeatist or as a self-interested apologist for an all too palpably unequal distribution of rewards and powers.