Page 47 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

EDUARDO NEIVA

Rousseau’s influence over anthropology. When Marshall Sahlins (1977: 9)
said that Rousseau was the true ancestor of anthropology, he was just
reinforcing what Lévi-Strauss (1976: 33–43) had previously stated. For
Lévi-Strauss, Rousseau was the originator of an attitude without which
anthropology would be unthinkable.
Lévi-Strauss asserted that Rousseau did more than just adopt a dichotomy
excluding nature and culture. In itself, that would never be an original contri-
bution, because the segregation of mind and matter, reason and emotion, soul
and body has been an old and recurrent theme in the Western philosophical
tradition.
The whole point of Rousseau was to affirm a synthesis that transcended the
rift between human order and the natural world. He contended that under-
standing occurs only after the subject is free from his (or her) original position,
and begins to think of his (or her) self as an other. Then, the subject goes beyond
his (or her) intimate preconceptions. It is a cognitive attitude similar to the aims
of anthropological understanding; prejudices should be abandoned in favor of
a relativistic stance. The result is a sense of profound identity between me and
the other, my society and others, nature and culture, the sensible and the
intelligible, humanity and life (Lévi-Strauss 1976: 43).
Forceful as Lévi-Strauss’s assessment of Rousseau may be, it is also clear that
he sentimentalized the philosopher’s vision of the natural world. For Rousseau,
the distinction between nature and culture remained untouched. Animals were
radically alien to the basic principles of human social life; they could never have
enlightenment and freedom. According to Rousseau, only civil societies, where
human beings aggregated, could experience the sentiment of compassion.
Compassion would not be within the reach of animals. As with many thinkers
who secluded nature from culture, Rousseau moved in circles; he talked of
compassion as a condition of sociability, but it is in the midst of social inter-
action that compassion is possible. Human societies are a radical break from the
natural world. In Rousseau, anything that is part of the natural world was
completely left aside. The natural world ignores any kind of social contracts.
Civil society would have started from an act of territorial demarcation, yet
fundamentally different from the disputes in animal conflicts. Someone may
have declared ‘this is mine’, but society subsequently envisaged property as a
legitimate possession. What was an individual and solitary act became, from
then on, part of a socially shared convention. And convention will lead to the
acceptance of mutual rights for all members of the group. Nothing like that
could be accessible to animals. They would never grasp the notion of property,
nor of any other aspect of society. Animals do not possess the necessary light to
apprehend the proper laws of human groups. Likewise, Rousseau (1973), in Du
contrat social, disqualified natural force as the ground of judicial order. Political
power demanded another kind of authority, stemming from shared conven-
tions. Only conventions could legitimize authority. Sooner or later even the
most blatant despotism requires more than the exercise of force.

36