476 1 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
which the Balinese perceive and define individuals and
society. None of the anthropologists who have worked
in Israel (including not a few non-Israelis and non-Jews)
has ever attempted such a task. Has this engaged an-
thropologist, with her loves and aversions, succeeded
in it?
Having chosen to approach her project "outside the
boundaries of structured anthropological fieldwork" (p.
153), Dominguez ultimately concentrates on a few is-
sues, terms, events, attitudes, and discourses from
which she attempts to extract the essence of Israeli self-
hood and peoplehood. The method she adopts is remote
from that employed in most ethnographies. Articles in
Israel's English-language daily T h e Jerusalem Post, in
particular, but also other newspapers and a weekly mag-
azine form a main source of data. Public lectures and
discussions, performances, radio programs, and occa­
sional meetings with friends and their friends provide
the observational dimension of the study. Major subjects
for content analysis inhabit the chapters that evolve
from the public debates concerning the Jewishness of
Ethiopian immigrants, the relationship between tarbut
(culture) and moreshet (heritage)in public discourse as
evidence of continued Ashkenazi paternalism toward
Sephardim, the manifestations and interpretation of
adatiut (theIsraeli term for Jewish and often non-Jewish
ethnicity), and the Israelis' own representationlob­
jectification of Jews, Arabs, "goyim," and others. An­
other chapter examines the collective expression and
reaffirmation of Israeli society in the ritual domain.
Dominguez observes (mainly through the press) what
she had expected to represent the major ritual of a new
nation, the celebration of Yom Ha'atzma'ut (Israeli Inde-
pendence Day), and is impressed primarily by those
facets of it that suggest the uncertainty and scarcity of
institutionalized ritual. At the same time, she neglects
the better-rehearsed and more institutionalized facets of
the preceding day, Remembrance Day, the opening cele-
bration at the end of that day (see Handelman n.d.), and
the widespread practice of picnicking on Yom Ha'atz-
ma'ut.
I am not challenging Dominguez's evaluation of cer-
tain traits and phenomena in Israeli public discourse; on
the contrary, I agree with much of it. The book offers
insight on various issues concerning Israelis and Jews.
At the same time, however, I feel that it fails to capture
Israeli selfhood and peoplehood. The major problem is
its reliance on official and public discourse and on the
author's personal experiences, revelations, and contem-
plations at the expense of disciplined observations
aimed at discovering and interpreting experiences, be-
havior, beliefs, and moods shared by the people under
study. Dominguez overlooks, for example, a new ap­
proach in the study of Israeli representation that concen-
trates on observations of manifest sentiments and daily
modes of expression (e.g., Katriel 1986). The borrowing
of theoretical support from a wide variety of social sci-
ences and the discursive style of presentation further
remove the text from the traditional genre of ethno-
graphic writing. Except for the writer's personal engage-
ment, the text could be attributed to a sociologist or a
political scientist. The method and style have, however,
been deliberately chosen, and the results reflect the on-
going search by anthropologists for new means and
meanings in ethnographic writing. The effort invested in
that search may help reformulate our future models and
paradigms.
References Cited
B E N E D I C TR., 1946 The chrysanthemum and the sword: Pat-
terns of Iapanese culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
G E E R T Z , C. 1973 (1966)."Person, time, and conduct in Bali," in
The interpretation o f cultures, pp. 360-411. New York: Basic
Books.
H A N D E L M A D.n.d.
N, "State ceremonies of Israel: Remembrance
Day and Independence Day," in Models and mirrors: Towards
an anthropology of public events, pp. 191-233. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. In press.
KATRIEL, T. 1986. Talking straight: Dugri speech i n Israeli sabra
culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
SHOKEID, M. 1989. From the anthropologist's point of view:
Studying one's own tribe. Anthropology and Humanism Quar-
terly 4(1):23-28.
Heroes and Villains in the
Capture of "Primitive Art"
HOWARD MORPHY
Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford, England. 5 IV go
Primitive Art in Civilized Places. By Sally Price.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. 147 pp.
%15.95/$22.95
Primitive Art in Civilized Places doesn't quite live up to
the expectations created by its wonderfully ironic title.
Its brevity is part of the problem; Price cannot do justice
to the complexities of the topic she has chosen in the
space that she allows for it. It is certainly, however, a
book that cries out to be read, as an essay rather than as
an exhaustive study of its subject, and so read it is well
written, thought-provoking, at times controversial, and
thoroughly opinionated. It makes excellent serious read-
ing for a journey and will be extremely useful in making
students aware of the complexities of the issues in-
volved in the exhibition of, and appreciation of, non-
Western art.
The book is about the ways in which "primitive art"
has been captured for its release to Western audiences
and the various distortions and misconceptions that that
process has involved. Price covers most aspects of the
process, from writing to collecting to exhibiting, and she
directs a well-aimed salvo at the crude themlus division
that the idea of primitive art implies and has helped to
reproduce. Hers is a book of heroes and villains, a collo-
cation of preconceptions and stereotypes: on the one
side Edmund Carpenter, Raymond Firth, Pierre Bour-
dieu, cultural relativists, and possibly people who dress

badly, and on the other side Leonard Bernstein and other
universalist^,^^ connoisseurs, the journal African Arts,
and the wealthy Western tourists walking eight abreast
in "exotic" places. Here there is the occasional hint of
the smug self-righteousness of the anthropologist view-
ing the Western Other. Bernstein is condemned for using
the patronising phrase "with warmth and pride" when
introducing the "colored" artist Andre Watts to the con-
cert world, and Price uses his imputed paternalistic at-
titude to Watts to symbolise her belief that "univer-
sality"-the claim or perhaps the ideology that art
operates across cultural boundaries, that there are com-
monalities of human experience reflected in some uni-
versal language of art-is basically just another way in
which the West appropriates the Other. She may well be
right in the connotations that she gives to the use of the
word "pride" with reference to appreciation of "primi-
tive art" (p. z ~ )but
, she needs to present much more
evidence to justify her suspicions. Her reservations
about the concept of universality are almost certainly
correct, but it is too simple to condemn it as an implicit
assertion of Western superiority.
The book skims from topic to topic, bringing out well
the implicit evolutionary assumption behind theories
that associate primitive art with the psyche and basic
human drives, the erroneousness of theories that stereo-
type primitive art as expressing the dark side of human
nature, the iniquity of the anonymity of much non-
European art, the problem of commercialisation. The
pace is exhilarating, the touch is light, but every so often
one feels that if Price paused for reflection she might
find many of her own conclusions no less directed by
ideology than those she criticises. The most general
problem that she does not face is that there may ulti-
mately be an unresolvable contradiction or series of con-
tradictions between primitive art and civilised places.
The anonymity of the art is one example. Price criticises
the collector Vincent Price's statement that the artist in
communal societies chooses to "write himself out of his
creation," asking whether this is not our choice rather
than his. While in many cases of so-called primitive art
the anonymity of the art in museums does do violence to
the indigenous concept and status of the artist, it is too
easy to argue that anonymity is inherently a require-
ment of the Western concept of primitive art and not an
attribute of the works in context. Thus the anthropolo-
gist Maddock (1972:129), in a memorable phrase that
echoes Vincent Price's, argues that the Australian Ab-
origines routinely deny their own creativity (attributing
it to mythological beings). Maddock's statement has
more authority because he is an anthropologist, because
he is more specific, and because other anthropologists
working in the same area have found his idea a useful
one. But it is precisely the kind of statement that feeds
into the popular imagination and provides a reference
point for Western collectors of primitive "art." The rec-
ognition of the identity of the artist as an individual is
something that varies across cultures, and it may also
vary according to cultural context-the same work may
be attributed to a person in one context and not in an-
Volume 31, Number 4, August-October 1990 1 477
other. There clearly are many contexts in which individ-
ual agency is played down or unrecognised. Yet it may
always be the case, when works of art are sold anony-
mously in the context of the Western art market, that
the producer is disadvantaged-failing to get the recog-
nition conventionally accorded to an artist in that con-
text, in which such a premium is placed on individual
creativity. Naming the artist may, however, have the
important effect of contradicting the principle of ano-
nymity in the indigenous context. As anthropologists
have moved towards the creation of an art history of
African arts, recovering the names of artists whose
works have hitherto been exhibited as the anonymous
products of a culture, the art market has begun to value
the works of certain individual masters. The naming of
artists in museums and galleries may impose change on
the status of artist in the producing culture. Price's
generalisations need to be tested against the very cul-
tural and historical diversity that she recognises.
The contradictions of her position come out most
clearly in her discussion of tourist art, in which heroes
and villains come out on the same side. You can almost
hear the momentary expression of surprise issuing from
the paragraph concerned. Price cites approvingly Car-
penter's well-known arguments against Inuit soapstone
carvings, which seem to him affrontingly inauthentic,
imposed from the outside and reflecting European-
indeed Henry Moorean-rather than Inuit aesthetic
values. She goes on to note that "lamentations on the
disappearance of 'original' traditions can be found in the
writing of almost anyone concerned with the current
artistic production of Primitive people" (p. 79).The deal-
ers lament for different reasons, but they lament the
same things. And it is the dealers who are to blame,
since they are "responsible for marketing art objects be-
yond the domain of their intended home" (p. 79). It is
here that, as she says of Susan Vogel in a different con-
text, she "has allowed her slip to show" (p. 3 5 ) . The
concept of "tradition" is unexamined, the realities of the
articulation of Fourth World peoples within a world sys-
tem are not considered, the category "tourist art" is
taken for granted, the conditions proposed for equal ex-
change (an exchange between fully informed consenting
adults) are impossible to meet and deny the reality that
objects have histories and trajectories that transform
them (see Appadurai 1986), and subjective judgments
appear to influence the categorisation of works. What is
the intended home for a work of art in a transforming
world? Does the artist have to understand and be able to
operate in the world of the Museum of Modern Art be-
fore he or she can freely sell a work that will end up
there! The conditions of informed consent are almost by
definition difficult to meet in the Fourth World because
of the distance between the artist and the market, the
separation of the artist from the final audience, and
the intervention of the institutions that participate in
the Western process of defining and producing art. But
how strictly bounded is the category "Fourth World art-
ist," and how do people living today relate to such cate-
gories in the course of their lives? Fully informed con-
478 1 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
sent may involve a process of acculturation that leaves
the idea of producing "primitive" art far behind, or the
individual's cultural trajectory may be shaped by a wish
to produce works of art that will end up in Western
galleries. The cultural relativism that guides the writing
of this book blocks such questions, and it perpetuates
the themlus distinctions that make thinking about
them so difficult. Indeed the real issue, and the one that
will enable people to avoid being defined by the West as
particular kinds of producers of particular kinds of ob-
jects, may be the eradication of the erroneous category of
"primitive art" itself.
Price has set out to be provocative, to provide no tidy
answers but to address many issues, and she has cer-
tainly succeeded in that. She deliberately shifts between
an academic and a popular mode, and although that can
be a recipe for fudging and not fully developing argu-
ments it has made for a very readable book that in-
troduces new and relevant issues on almost every page.
References Cited
APPADURAI, A . 1986. The social life of things. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
M A D D O C K , K. 1972. The Australian Aborigines: A portrait of
their society. London: Allen Lane Press.
Language and Hierarchy
MARYON M C DONALD
Department of H u m a n Sciences, Brunel University,
Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, England. 4 v 90
Dominant Languages: Language and Hierarchy in
Britain and France. By R. D. Grillo. Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Where anything to do with language is concerned, 200
years of nationalism have drawn for us an enduring con-
ceptual map. Every country has its language. In Europe
and North America, we all know that. Moreover, a true
nation's language is not a mere lingua franca, which is
something that newer countries have. Rather, it is who
and what we are.
Two centuries of nationalism, which have spawned
and empowered such beliefs, have also driven the lin-
guistic labours necessary for the construction or inven-
tion of the languages which have been required to bear
the moral loads of national self-definition. Within na-
tional boundaries, forms of speech outside the standard
inevitably become, by definition, either barbarous or in-
herently deficient. Such has been the lasting legacy of
nationalism and linguistics. It looked as if there might
be a challenge to such ideas when sociolinguistics
emerged with force in the 1960s. However, this new lin-
guistics continued to work with many of the old fictions
of "language," merely revaluing the regional or periph-
eral and the lower-class. As the map of world power
changed, all languages became, in sociolinguistic theory,
equal. In practice, of course, they are not. The periphery
is not the centre and the lower class is not the dominant
class, and none has a "language" outside these relations
to which appeals of "equality" can be made.
Grillo's Dominant Languages trails only a little of the
more earnest idealism of post-1960s sociolinguistic rel-
ativism and has the great merit of trying seriously to
examine just how some forms of speech became domi-
nant and others deemed inferior and deficient. The au-
thor traces the history of many of the ideas about lan-
guage which are deeply entrenched in two of Europe's
oldest nations-Britain and France. This, it is hoped,
will then enable us to understand "the distribution
through the social hierarchy and the power structure of
what are usually thought of as several kinds of speech"
(p. 12). Dominant Languages is an ambitious and im-
pressive book. The eleven chapters deal with language,
nation, and nationalisms in Britain and France (chaps. 2­
s), with questions of immigrants and language in these
two countries (chaps. 6 and 7), with the relationships
between language and class in the two nations (chaps.8-
IO),and finally with the "elaborated-formal" discourses
now deemed to exist internationally in "any type of
'complex' industrial-scientific-bureaucratic" social or-
der (p. 220).
By far the most interesting, convincing, and well-
informed sections of the book are those dealing with
immigrants and language and those dealing with lan-
guage and class (i.e., chaps. 6-10). Grillo puts together a
very useful compendium of discussion and references on
those two issues and then makes his own part-national-
ist plea for "the legitimacy of heteogeneity" (p. 128).He
argues that support for immigrants' languages in the
education system, which both Britain and France now
practise to some extent, does not lead to the kind of
"pluralistic integration" which he, following others,
would seek; consideration of "immigrants' communica-
tive competence" in the dominant language is also es-
sential. Part of this consideration, however, should in-
volve reflection on the dominant language-speakers'
own assumptions about language. As Grillo points out:
"In East African cities many languages are spoken as
a matter of course, and people do not make as heavy
weather as we do of trying to understand someone else
speaking their language. The decoding of other people's
discourse, a task which we [the British] and the French
find so difficult, may be less of a problem than we think"
( P 50).
The "problem" of foreign and immigrant languages is
clearly tied in with the development of national lan-
guages, which Grillo discusses in earlier chapters, and
with the development of "standard" and "cultivated"
forms of these languages, which he goes on to consider
in more detail in relation to social class. The chapters
dealing with class and language difference contain a
masterly review of the literature on this topic, including
a clear outline of the theories of Basil Bernstein that goes
a long way towards disentangling some of the confusion
and misunderstanding generated in the I 970s and I 980s