Review: Neglected Master: A. M. HocartAuthor(s): Thomas O. BeidelmanReviewed work(s):

Kings and Councillors: An Essay in the Comparative Anatomy of Human Society byArthur Maurice Hocart ; Rodney Needham

Source: Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Winter, 1972), pp. 311-316Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/202292Accessed: 30/11/2008 16:44

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Thomas 0. Beidelman

Neglected Master A. M. Hocart

Kings and Councillors: An Essay in the Comparative Anatomy of Human

Society. By Arthur Maurice Hocart, edited with an introduction by Rodney Needham (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, I970) 318 pp. $13.50

Hocart's profoundly original book was first published in Cairo in 1936, three years before his death. This new edition is most welcome to scholars who have admired Hocart's other writingsI but who have found it difficult to secure this work, perhaps his finest achievement. It is hoped that this reissue, with its long and admirable introduction by Needham, will help Hocart gain the deserved recognition he was denied in his lifetime.

One may approach this study from two perspectives: It may be regarded in terms of its place in the history of social anthropological thought, for although Hocart was never popular, he influenced import- ant contemporary scholars such as Needham, Sir Edward Evans- Pritchard, Edmund R. Leach, Louis Dumont, and Claude Lcvi-Strauss. More important, it may still be read in Hocart's own right, just as we still profit from re-reading Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Max Weber. Many of Hocart's most searching suggestions are still unex- plored, and his individualistic style and original method of exposition instill in the sympathetic reader a new perspective and fresh attitude of mind toward social issues. Whatever his faults, Hocart is never trivial in his choice of problems, and his writing is devoid of cant. His trenchant, allusive style encourages the diligent reader to engage him in an imagin- ary mental dialogue. In this, he is an ideal mentor for students aspiring toward mastery of comparative social anthropology. Thomas O. Beidelman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University. He is the author of Matrilineal Peoples of Eastern Tanzania (London, 1967) and The Kaguru (New York, 1971), and has published numerous articles on East African ethno- graphy. I A. M. Hocart, Kingship (London, 1927); The Progress of Man (London, I933); Kings and Councillors (Cairo, 1936); (trans. E. J. Levy andJ. Auboyer from English), Les Castes (Paris, 1938), published posthumously in English as Caste (London, I95o); (ed. Lord Raglan), The Life Giving Myth and Other Essays (London, I952), published posthumously; (ed. Lord Raglan), Social Origins (London, .1954), published posthumously; Rodney Needham, A Bibliography of Arthur Maurice Hocart (1883-1939) (Oxford, 1967).

312 [ THOMAS O. BEIDELMAN

The subject of Kings and Councillors is the origin and evolution of government, a topic of interest to any historian. Hocart's approach provides instruction in the relation between current anthropological structuralism and history. (He precedes Levi-Strauss in structural analy- sis by twenty years.) Hocart's problem involves three interdependent issues: (I) What kind of methodology may be used to get at the primary sources of an institution such as government? (2) What is the nature of these primary factors? (3) What can these factors disclose about the nature of man and society?

In Hocart's work, the comparative method (the study of various different societies) cannot be separated from historical problems. The former provides solutions not directly discernible by the latter. Hocart observes that one cannot apprehend the earliest stages of society by any direct method since there were no written records concerning the initiation of government. Furthermore, where ethnographic informa- tion dealing with a preliterate people suggests conditions similar to

precivilized stages of development elsewhere, even the processes re-

ported by the people themselves may demand further interpretation. For example, while conducting fieldwork in Fiji, Hocart found that the

royal clan was subdivided into four units forming two groups, one subordinate to the other in many respects. Local informants provided a

plausible historical account of how this had come about. However, further comparative research disclosed that a similar pattern was found

throughout this area of the Pacific, and even far beyond. The particular explanation provided by oral history may have been historically "true," but it did not suffice to explain structurally the necessity or tendency for

asymetrical, dualistic groups on such a broad geographic scale. With this in mind, Hocart writes: "The historian who trusts exclusively to records never reaches further back than incidents which look like the

beginning, but are really episodes in growth" (25), and "Absence of records means nothing: comparative evidence alone can decide" (24). For Hocart, it is these deeper levels of form or structure that must be accounted for, and the comparative method is the means for doing so:

"By comparing all the descendants or derivatives we can eliminate all the differences, leaving only what they have in common, and that is

presumably what they hold from the lost original" (I6). In his admirable introduction, Needham notes that Hocart sought

explanations for the universals in human behavior and society, and that two possible derivations of common custom have been perennially considered: diffusion from some initial source, and formative processes

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inherent in all societies due to the universal nature of all men and all societies. Hocart was keenly sensitive to both factors, but he clearly recognized that the former explanation ultimately required some consideration in terms of the second to which it would always be reduced. These issues remain central to all social anthropology.

For Hocart, as for Durkheim, societies must first be analyzed in detail within their own contexts; but this is only a preliminary analyti- cal stage leading to comparison abstracting out the more basic features of a society. The problem indicates the interdependence between intensive analyses of existing systems within a theoretical "present" (what A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Levi-Strauss would term synchronic analyses) and analyses of different societies in terms of space and time in order to discern their more basic features. Here, the problems of struc- ture and process are inextricably linked so that the works of social anthropologists and historians become nearly identical.

For Hocart, the comparative method is the master key to the basic issues raised by any serious study of society. He abjures the "shreds-and- patches approach" of Edward B. Tylor and James Frazer (currently exemplified by Levi-Strauss), discounting as useless any "composite picture made up of scattered fragments" (3). For him, "It is better to do a few societies thoroughly than a vast number superficially" (ibid.).

Hocart commences his examination of the origins of government by observing that "all the functions of government [are] discharged among peoples without government. .." (30). How then, he wonders, has it originated, and from what source? Through comparing the institutions of leadership in societies with government and in those without it, he comes to the conclusion that:

... ritual organization is vastly older than government, for it exists where there is no government and where none is needed. When how- ever society increases so much in complexity that a coordinating agency, a kind of nervous system, is required, that ritual organization will gradually take over this task. It is this evolution from ritual organi- zation to government that is to be roughly outlined in the following pages. [3 5]

Thus Hocart, like Durkheim and Mauss, is an idealist, seeking the funda- mental basis of society in terms of a system of existential ideas. These provide a cosmology by which men may order both their affairs with one another and their relations toward their external environment. In this sense, Hocart maintains that: "Temples are just as utilitarian as

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dams and canals, since they are necessary to prosperity..." (217). Ritual, then, is cosmology in action, and it is this cosmological frame of reference which all societies share, regardless of whether they have formal government or not:

Man is not a microcosm; he has to be made one in order that he may control the universe for prosperity. The ritual establishes an equivalence that was not there. If it were there already there would be no point in having a ritual; man would merely have to behave as he wished the world to behave, and there would be no needs of words, of altars, and other methods of effecting the identity. [69]

An awareness of cosmology and ritual as keys to the forms of society is even older than the works of W. Robertson Smith and Durk- heim, though these two masters provide the theoretical impetus for most contemporary research on this problem. Both Durkheim and Smith, like Hocart, were more preoccupied with the existential nature of ideas and their associated effect than they were with any materialistic bases of society. How can one account for the existential differences in the forms and underlying ideas exhibited by different societies, while these exist in similar environments ? There is an unbroken theoret- ical continuity starting with AdolfBastian's notions of the psychic unity of man, continuing with Durkheim's notions of fundamental forms of psychology accounting for the broader features of the conscience collec- tive, and concluding, at present, with Levi-Strauss' postulates about the fundamental structure of the human mind. These are useful and power- ful concepts when used with the caution of Hocart. On the one hand, he observes that "all rituals are but one at bottom, variations of a simple theme..." (237), and asks whether dualistic conceptualization "is traditional or innate in man, whether it is merely an old habit persisting age after age, or whether it does not lie deeper in human nature, as a law which it obeys in common with the rest of nature" (289). Hocart also states that ".. . we are trying to get at the inner meaning. If a distinction is to be made it must be based on the whole structure, be- cause the structure reflects the meaning . . ." (86). In these passages, Hocart parallels passages in late Durkheim and Mauss and in Levi- Strauss where, at levels of high abstraction, there is a congruency between certain existential aspects of society and nature itself. At this point, Hocart's theories assume some of the pantheistic metaphysics of the more philosophical speculations of French sociologists, even though, oddly, he, considering his mastery of French, never cites their work. On

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the other hand, unlike Levi-Strauss, Hocart "pulls himself short" and ironically cautions the reader about accepting his theories without further research, saying of his analytical tables: "Such diagrams how- ever introduce a definiteness of detail which is certainly not in our evidence" (29I).

Hocart's selection ofkingship as the focus for his study of the origins of government is based on his assumption that ritual (and hence cosmo- logy) is the fundamental feature of any society. The ritual or cosmologi- cal sides of kingship are obvious (witness the eloquent pre-battle soli- loquy of Henry V in Shakespeare's play) so that it is remarkable that few competent analyses of this institution have been undertaken by social anthropologists. Hocart's two works, Kings and Councillors and King- ship, remained, until recently, the most subtle and searching social anthropological studies of this problem.2 Despite his negative comments about historians, it is to them that we must look for analyses of compar- able quality. Thus, Bloch's classic study of medieval kingship and, more recently, the complementary works of Kantorowicz, provide insights strikingly similar to Hocart's.3

During his exegesis, Hocart provides numerous suggestive insights of the highest order. His analyses of ritual and preliterate systems of thought, terse and almost epigrammatic though they are, equal or sur- pass the most subtle analyses attained in the past decade, even though these current works rarely credit Hocart. In passing, Hocart also pro- vides valuable comments on the division of labor, the relation of cosmo- logy to hierarchization and centralization, and upon the origin of the city, not as an economic center but as a focal point for ritual ("Popula- tion first condenses round the centre of ritual, not round shops" [251], His comments on the social values of the division of labor parallel Durkheim and Mauss, though he cites neither: ". . . men divide them- themselves into two groups in order that they may impart life to one another, that they may intermarrry, compete with one another, make offerings to one another, and do to one another whatever is required by their theory of prosperity " (290), and "Specialization and centralization

2 An important exception is surely the brilliant analysis of Chinese imperial ritual provided by Durkheim's student, Marcel Granet, La Civilisation chinoise (Paris, 1929). Other recent studies are Henri Frankfort's excellent Kingship and the Gods (Chicago, I948), and Georges Dumezil, Mitra-Varuna: Essai sur deux representations indo-europeenes de la souverainete (Paris, 1948; 2nd ed.). 3 Marc Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges (Strasbourg, 1924), on which Hocart drew and, more recently, two volumes by Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies (Prince- ton, 1957) and Laudes Regiae (Berkeley, 1946).

3I6 | THOMAS O. BEIDELMAN

go hand in hand; they are the aspects of the same process. The more

specialized an organism becomes the more dependent it is on its neigh- bours, and the greater the number of specialists it has to cooperate with" (298).

As a final illustration of Hocart's subtlety of thought, I quote the

concluding passages from his book:

... conscious purpose precedes the adaptation of behaviour, and the adaptation of behaviour is followed by adaptation of structure. A community wants something . .. and the result of its action is to alter its organization. It is not indeed government that man wants, for how can he conceive of a government except by experience of it? It is life he wants,4 and in the effort to live he does one thing after another till he eventually finds himself governed, that is specialized into producers and into regulators of those producers. He does not want a priesthood or a civil service to control him; he wants to control nature for his own benefit; but in the pursuit of this aim he places some members of his

community into new functions which in turn produce a new type of man, no longer the all-round handy man, but the man who lives largely by thinking. The conscious purpose is the impulse that sets the whole machinery in motion with results that are not foreseen. [299]

Needham's detailed and provocative introduction is a model of its kind, consistent with his earlier superb editing of other anthropological classics-Robert Hertz, Durkheim and Mauss, Charles Staniland Wake and Arnold van Gennep. Yet two sections seem unnecessarily brief: (i) It would be useful if we could learn more of Hocart's intellec- tual background and secure some explanation for his odd, almost

perverse, neglect of those French sociologists who would have most served him theoretically, such as Durkheim, Mauss, Hertz, Celestin

Bougle, and Marcel Granet. Furthermore, some information on Hocart's fieldwork experiences in Fiji and Ceylon might clarify his

approach toward data. Perhaps, however, such information is unob- tainable. (2) Although Needham refers both to classical French socio-

logy and to the work of contemporary structuralists, a more extended discussion of Hocart's parallels and complementarity to such work would have helped readers less versed in this area to appreciate Hocart's distinctive achievement. The only other flaw in an otherwise admirable edition is that the original, inadequate index was not amended so that it

might prove more useful to scholars.

4 Needham skillfully defends Hocart's notions concerning the concept of "life" as an explanatory factor (xxxii-xxxv).