Progress and regress
by M. Stewart
In his 2005 scholarly book, Theories of Mythology, Eric Csapo discusses, among many other things, the Victorian assumptions of one of the world's leading writers on the subject, Scottish anthropologist James Frazer (1854-1941). Frazer's great work, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, is a classic in the field.
I find Csapo's discussion of Frazer particular interesting in light of current American political, social, and cultural conflicts. The following excerpt is from page 51 of Theories of Mythology. NOTE: Frazer's is not a world view that Csapo necessarily supports.
. . . Frazer constructs an image of society which essentially maps the hierarchy of mental and moral development, extracted from the evolutionary timeline, onto each and every society. Society, it seems, never moves forward together in step, but one has to distinguish a progressive and regressive sector in every culture.
There is a cultural elite, which is the repository of conscious and purposive thought, and there is the ignorant mass, which is the repository of primitive ideas, which would even readily revert to the savagery of a previous age if it were not firmly controlled by the cultural elite. Indeed, the masses do periodically in times of stress reverse the direction of human progress. Evolution and progress might be arrested and reversed even in Western society, if the regressive element is not strictly contained.
[Quoting Frazer] "It is probably not too much to say that the hope of progress -- moral and intellectual as well as material -- in the future is bound up with the fortunes of science, and that every obstacle placed in the way of scientific discovery is a wrong to humanity."
This regressive element still carries about in its collective head the fossils of past theories and practices, without really needing, within their dim collective intellect, to entertain any consciousness of their original meaning and function. Here is Victorian anthropology's internal other, the social counterpart of the savage, whose existence . . . is necessary to the whole enterprise of comparative self-definition.
In his 2005 scholarly book, Theories of Mythology, Eric Csapo discusses, among many other things, the Victorian assumptions of one of the world's leading writers on the subject, Scottish anthropologist James Frazer (1854-1941). Frazer's great work, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, is a classic in the field.
I find Csapo's discussion of Frazer particular interesting in light of current American political, social, and cultural conflicts. The following excerpt is from page 51 of Theories of Mythology. NOTE: Frazer's is not a world view that Csapo necessarily supports.
. . . Frazer constructs an image of society which essentially maps the hierarchy of mental and moral development, extracted from the evolutionary timeline, onto each and every society. Society, it seems, never moves forward together in step, but one has to distinguish a progressive and regressive sector in every culture.
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| Sir James Frazer |
There is a cultural elite, which is the repository of conscious and purposive thought, and there is the ignorant mass, which is the repository of primitive ideas, which would even readily revert to the savagery of a previous age if it were not firmly controlled by the cultural elite. Indeed, the masses do periodically in times of stress reverse the direction of human progress. Evolution and progress might be arrested and reversed even in Western society, if the regressive element is not strictly contained.
[Quoting Frazer] "It is probably not too much to say that the hope of progress -- moral and intellectual as well as material -- in the future is bound up with the fortunes of science, and that every obstacle placed in the way of scientific discovery is a wrong to humanity."
This regressive element still carries about in its collective head the fossils of past theories and practices, without really needing, within their dim collective intellect, to entertain any consciousness of their original meaning and function. Here is Victorian anthropology's internal other, the social counterpart of the savage, whose existence . . . is necessary to the whole enterprise of comparative self-definition.
posted by M. | 5:38 AM
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