La Pensée Cyclique (6)—Primitive Classification

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series about Marcel Granet, "La Pensée Cyclique"
One year ago on Round and Square (9 April 2011)—Exilic Response: Introduction

[a] Classified RF

This series is dedicated to understanding one of the most fascinating intellects of the twentieth century, Marcel Granet (1884-1940). In an earlier era, he might have been considered (at least by bibliophiles studying tomes ranging from De l'esprit des lois to 呂氏春秋 between the world wars) the most interesting man in the world. For me, he is every bit of that (as we say back home). Granet's range of interests in social theory and Chinese literature were profound, catholic, and engrossing. I hope that (whether you are interested in French, social theory, or Chinese) you will give Monsieur Granet a little bit of your attention. The material is not simple, by any means, but it is an ideal way to grasp how knowledge really works.

Primitive Classification

All human thought is consummately social—social in its origins, social in its representations, and social in the very public-ness of it. I paraphrase the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz,[1] but the idea is Durkheimian to the core. And Maussian. How do we “think” through gift exchange? We act first and reason later, although that is not precisely it. We think and act in union—in communion—with a set of social connections and obligations that create thought, rather than the other way around. Total social phenomena are not the results of reason and reflection, and they can never be understood as mere reflections of individual minds. Groups “think and act” differently than individuals, and, the Année sociologique school was devoted to showing precisely the manner in which such social thought and action takes place.

[b] Circular RF

Emile Durkheim, arguing against philosophical and psychological traditions that gave little sense of humans acting in concert, more than occasionally used rhetoric instead of evidence to persuade, sometimes to the detriment of his own account. Durkheim has often been accused of attacking individualistic and “psychologistic” explanations and promoting sociological ones to such an extent that he needlessly overplays and simplifies what is already a quite powerful argument. It is as though the pressure of fighting against John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer (not to mention Sir James Frazer and other twentieth century writers) created a rhetorical attack mode that was as likely to weaken Durkheim’s overall argument as strengthen it.[2]

An excellent example of both the strengths and weaknesses of the Année sociologique school can be seen in the study that Durkheim co-authored with his nephew Marcel Mauss, “De quelques formes primitives de classification"—Primitive Classification.[3] To begin, it shows the deeply collaborative nature of a group of scholars committed to articulating the nature of social processes. It was not only uncle and nephew who contributed such work, but many other scholars working together on ideas that have provided a great deal of intellectual energy to later generations of anthropologists and sociologists. Indeed, Marcel Mauss himself was an indefatigable collaborator who wrote many works with other authors and finished the works of authors who died in World War I.

[c] Classification RF

The question that Durkheim and Mauss sought to answer in Primitive Classification is the first of its kind in sociology, for no previous work addressed itself to why people classify things as they classify themselves—“to isolate classification as an aspect of culture to which sociological enquiry should be directed."[4] Durkheim would later use the foundation of this study in his magnum opus on religious thought, and it provides a great insight into the manner in which thinkers in the Année sociologique tradition dealt with total social phenomena.[5] 

The work contains all of the weaknesses of Durkheim’s adamant rhetoric, however, and that can bee seen on both the first and last pages, where psychology is the enemy and sociology a savior. Note in particular the vagueness and simplicity surrounding words used to describe individual themes and the energy and strength with those surrounding the social.[6] 
          The discoveries of contemporary psychology have thrown into prominence 
          the frequent illusion that we regard certain mental operations as simple and 
          elementary when they are really very complex. We now know what a  
          multiplicity of elements make up the mechanism by virtue of which we 
          construct, project, and localize in space our representations of the tangible 
          world. But this operation of dissociation has been only very rarely applied as 
          yet to operations which are properly speaking logical.  

[d] Sorted RF

The faculties of definition, deduction, and induction are generally considered as immediately given in the constitution of individual understanding…It is thought that there have been no important changes except in the way of employing them; that in their essential features they have been fully formed as long as mankind has existed. It has not even been imagined that they might have been formed by a painful combination of elements borrowed from extremely different sources, quite foreign to logic, and laboriously organized. And this conception of the matter was not at all surprising so long as the development of logical faculties was thought to belong simply to individual psychology, so long as no one had the idea of seeing in these methods of scientific thought veritable social institutions whose origin sociology alone can retrace and explain.[7] 

The tone is set in the quotation above, and their point is made clear in the remainder of the introduction, even though they assert that they shall not prejudge the solution. For tens of pages Durkheim and Mauss painstakingly refer to ethnological reports from Australia, the Zuni and Sioux, and even China. At the heart of it all, they assert that ideas are the outgrowth of society—that the way we represent the world and divide it into categories is grounded in how we interact with something a great deal larger than ourselves. It is a powerful idea that led many thinkers to apply it to their own sources. Let's take a look at two key conclusions.

[e] Thought RF

Society was not simply a model which classificatory thought followed; it was its own divisions which served as divisions for the system of classifications. The first logical categories were social categories; the first classes of things were classes of men, into which these things were integrated.[8] 

Not only the external form of classes, but also the relations uniting them to each other, are of social origin.  It is because human groups fit one into another—the sub-clan into the clan, the clan into the moiety, the moiety into the tribe—that groups of things are ordered in the same way. Their regular diminution in span, from genus to species, species to variety, as so on, comes from the equally diminishing extent presented by social groups as one leaves the largest and oldest and approaches the more recent and more derivative. And if the totality of things is conceived as a single system, this is because society itself is seen in the same way.  It is a whole, or rather it is the unique whole to which everything is related. Thus logical hierarchy is only another aspect of social hierarchy, and the unity of knowledge is nothing else than the very unity of the collectivity, extended to the universe.[9]

***  ***

Flawed though the reasoning and evidence is in Primitive Classification,[10] Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss sought to show the very connection between thought and social ties. One can immediately see its potential (which goes far beyond the actual case that Durkheim and Mauss made for Chinese classification) for the study of Chinese society and thought, and the core ideas of yin-yang alternation. Marcel Granet’s only direct acknowledgment of Primitive Classification is somewhat surprising, however.  In a note contained in the introduction to his masterwork, La pensée chinoise, Granet cites the pages on China as a significant date in Chinese studies: 

          Le principe de leur découverte se trouve dans le mémoire sur les 
          classifications primitives qu’ont publie Durkheim et Mauss ; j’ai plaisir à la 
          dire—et peut-être n’est-il pas sans intérêt d’ajouter : bien que peu de 
          spécialistes les aient citées, les quelques pages de ce mémoire qui ont trait 
          à la Chine devaient marquer une date dans l’histoire des études sinologiques.[11]

[f] Crowntable RF

It is difficult to see any direct relevance of the account of Chinese classification found in Primitive Classification to Granet’s work, but the theoretical orientation—indeed, the “problem” of classification itself—was of enormous interest to Granet. One can see very clearly the impact of the essay on Granet’s studies of language, matrimonial customs, and left-right distinctions in his early essays.[12] Its influence on La pensée chinoise is enormous.

As with many of the works of the Année sociologique school, the arguments and the evidence were more than occasionally flawed. The wealth of ideas and fresh perspectives, however, opened new interpretive worlds for scholars who knew the languages, texts, and cultural traditions of their areas far better than Durkheim did his ethnographic materials. Indeed, if one reads Primitive Classification in the context of Granet’s complete body of work, especially La pensée chinoise, it is as if Granet were to say to his friend (Mauss) and mentor (Durkheim), “your twists and moves were all wrong, but you nailed the landing.”  

Notes

[1] Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 360.

[2] On this point, Professor Edward Shils notes that there is a “hyper-collectivism” in Durkheim’s thought that induced him to take on rivals that were muddy, but already beaten.  By continually refuting the arguments of nineteenth century adversaries, Durkheim begins to be tainted by their arguments.  “You wrestle with a pig, you get dirty.” [Seminar notes, 1987].

[3] “De quelques formes primitives de classification: contribution à l’étude de représentations collectives,” Année sociologique, Vol. VI (1901-1902): 1-72.

[4] Marcel Mauss and Emile Durkheim, Primitive Classification [Translated with an introduction by Rodney Needham]. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), xl. 

[5] Rodney Needham writes in the introduction to Primitive Classification that “Social anthropology in Britain…has been inspired by certain general ideas, subtly derived from the early French sociologists, which have had a theoretical influence, and much of the progress is to be attributed to them. Primitive Classification, xliii.

[6] The last paragraph of text is even more grandiloquent, but for the rather weak final sentence.  Referring to individualistic treatments of the classificatory function, the text concludes: “As soon as they are posed in sociological terms, all these questions, so long debated by metaphysicians and psychologists, will at last be liberated from the tautologies in which they have languished.  At least, this is a new way which deserves to be tried."

[7] Primitive Classification, 3.

[8] Primitive Classification, 82.

[9] Primitive Classification, 83-84.

[10] Rodney Needham provides a full catalogue of logical errors and even sloppy scholarship in his introduction to the English translation of the work.  He remained a strong proponent of the work, however. 
[11] Marcel Granet, La pensée chinoise (Paris: Albin Michel, 1934), 485.

[12] This was published as: Marcel Granet, Etudes sociologiques sur la chine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), 1953.

Bibliography
Durkheim, Emile and Marcel Mauss. Primitive Classification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Granet, Marcel. Etudes sociologiques sur la Chinese. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953.
Granet, Marcel. La pensée chinoise. Paris: Albin Michel, 1934.

[g] Organized RF