Sad Stories of the Death of Kings

摘要

It is no secret that professional anthropologists have shown little interest in generative anthropology. At our annual meeting in Los Angeles in 2013, we were honoured to hear a plenary address from the distinguished anthropologist and Africanist Jean-Loup Amselle. Though his talk was extremely interesting, Amselle did not at any point discuss the core premises of generative anthropology. In hindsight, the audience should not have been surprised by this reluctance to address the originary hypothesis. In his major anthropological work, Mestizo Logics, Amselle flatly rejects the idea that origins are important: “The analysis. . . of ‘mestizo logics’ allows one to escape the question of origin and to hypothesize an infinite regression. It is no longer a question of asking which came first, the segmentary or the state, paganism or Islam, the oral or the written, but to postulate an originary syncretism, a mixture whose parts remain indissociable.”[1] Evidently, in mainstream anthropological circles, the fear of recreating the naive evolutionism of nineteenth-century anthropology is still very much alive. As Ernest Gellner colourfully puts it, after Malinowski slew the king of anthropology James George Frazer (whose theory of the dying god was once so influential), there has been little talk among anthropologists about the tragic origins of the state in the death of the scapegoat king.