216 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST 193, 19911

The Small Ruminant CRSP is represented in papers by Jamtgaard, who shows how sec- ondary data collected by a Peruvian agency were analyzed to identify target groups of pas- toralists, and by McCorkle, who introduces the concept of “veterinary anthropology” based on data from Peru.

In the last section, several agricultural sci- entists give comments on their views of social science contributions. Their views reinforce the disturbing ambivalence that runs through the preceding papers of a social science that is still very self-conscious about its role. Several of the agricultural scientists indicate that so- cial science should be viewed as a service to the production sciences, recalling DeWalt’s

contention in his paper that anthropology is only “half-way there”; that is, our service functions are appreciated, but we do not set the agenda.

While several papers express a concern about the professional status of social scien- tists in development, there is little mention of how these development social scientists can contribute either to the alleviation of poverty, or to the generation of theory. The papers as- sembled here point “half-way” to the solution. The contributions that social scientists have made are well documented. What is still miss- ing is a vision of a development social science integrating culture and society into the devel- opment agenda.

General/Theoretical Anthropology

The Attraction of Opposites: Thought and Society in the Dualistic Mode. David May- bury-Lewis and Uri Almagor, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989. 377 pp. n.p. (paper).

TERENCE TURNER University of Chicago

The general interest of dual social and cul- tural structures for anthropological theory lies in the way they foreground the significance of form as an aspect of social and cultural phe- nomena. The apparent formal arbitrariness of moiety systems seems inconsistent with their widespread occurrence, which appears to point to some powerful, nonarbitrary motiva- tion of the form itself. Hence the fascination that dualistic systems have exercised for an- thropological theorists over the past 100 years. The essence of the challenge that these sys- tems pose is to account for their dual forms in terms of specific relations to their social and symbolic contents (in a word, their structure), yet to frame these accounts in terms suffi- ciently general to apply to all instances of the tY Pe.

This book fails to meet this challenge, but its failure is instructive. T h e volume as a whole falls into two parts. One is devoted to specific ethnographic analyses and consists of 12 studies of par t icular moiety systems, dyarchic regimes, and binary symbolic classi- fications by anthropologists who have studied them in the field. The other part is devoted to programmatic theoretical discussion of the na- ture ofdual social and symbolic structures and comprises the editors’ introductory essays, the theoretical portions of their ethnographic

chapters, and an epilogue contributed by S. N. Eisenstadt that attempts to incorporate the anthropological discussion within a more gen- eral framework of sociological theory. Most of the specific studies are excellent, but few at- tempt theoretical generalizations extending beyond their specific cases or regions. Many of them deserve extended discussion in their own right, but this would be impossible in a review of this length. I shall therefore concentrate on the general-theoretical part of the book.

The theoretical introductions by the two ed- itors have little in common and are in some re- spects overtly contradictory. The essence of the difference is that Almagor focuses on so- ciological content without problematizing normative or symbolic form (i.e., dualism per se), while Maybury-Lewis focuses on dualistic form to the exclusion, for practical purposes, of the relevance of sociological content.

Almagor, rightly concerned that defining the notion of dual organization simply on the basis of “ a n y . . . use of binary opposi- tion . . . would dilute the concept beyond use- fulness” (p. 144), attempts to delimit the con- cept by constructing a checklist of specific so- ciological and cultural ways in which dual fea- tures must manifest themselves for a case to qualify as a “dual organization.” This list is derived in its main features from Eisenstadt’s sociological categories, which are more fully adumbrated in the latter’s concluding state- ment. The basic problem with his checklist is that it does not address why the forms should be dual in the first place. Another serious drawback is that Almagor and Eisenstadt deal only with the functional and political aspects ofdual social systems; their treatment thus ex-

GENERA LITHEORETICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 217

cludes consideration of the structural proper- ties of binary symbolic constructs in their own right. They thus implicitly exclude several of the contributions to the volume, not to men- tion Maybury-Lewis’s entire theoretical dis- cussion.

Maybury-Lewis’s approach is inclusive where Almagor’s is exclusive, clearly exempli- fying, in the latter’s terms, the “dilution” of the concept of dual organization “beyond use- fulness.” Maybury-Lewis focuses on concep- tual and psychological factors where Almagor seeks to limit the discussion to sociological function. He maintains that moieties, binary symbolic classifications, and other dual social and conceptual structures are to be under- stood as so many instances of a tendency to “harmonize” opposites or “contending forces” so as to create “perpetual equilib- rium.” The “opposites” assume their binary character in the first place as a reflection of the dual form in which many “facts of this world” appear in perception (e.g., light/dark, female/ male). In premodern societies, these binary perceptual gestalten are elaborated into dual- istic social institutions and religious systems in response to an innate psychological fear that, left to themselves, they will become “antipa- thies.” Maybury-Lewis’s argument, then, proceeds from the positivist derivation of dual conceptual forms as reflections of extrasocial “facts,” to the idealist derivation ofdual social institutions from “dualistic thinking,” to the psychological motivation of dual institutions and concepts by putatively universal psycho- logical needs for avoiding conflict and ensur- ing “equilibrium.”

This eufunctional rationale sits oddly atop a collection of studies-many of which dem- onstrate how dual social organizations serve as channels for the struggle for dominance be- tween contending groups, or the imposition of domination by one group upon another, thus intrinsically entailing conflict, instability, and irreversible historical change. These studies tend rather to bear out LCvi-Strauss’s point (dismissed or ignored by both editors in their cursory references to his work) that dualistic structures, whether social or purely symbolic, must be understood as devices for the imposi- tion of hierarchy-with all the consequences that entails for historical instability and con- flict-rather than as forms of balanced reci- procity for the production of “perpetual equi- librium” or stability for its own sake.

Both editors’ avoidance of serious engage- ment with LCvi-Strauss’s ideas exemplifies their more general failure to engage with the ideas on binary structures, moiety systems, and other forms of dual organization devel-

oped in the structuralist tradition in both lin- guistics and anthropology over the last 50 years. That they should neither cite this liter- ature nor betray any awareness of its essential ideas is little short of astounding in a work that purports to present a general synthesis of an- thropological thought on this subject. Various works from this cumulative theoretical dis- course are cited, and in a few cases critically discussed, by other contributors to the volume (e.g., Fox on Dumont, pp. 51-53), which makes the silence of the editors all the more resonant.

Particularly glaring is the absence ofany at- tempt to confront Dumont’s critique of the ideas of Needham and his followers on the na- ture of symbolic polarities and dual classifi- cation, to which Maybury-Lewis remains close in essential respects despite a couple of dissenting references to Needham’s work (Du- mont, “The Anthropological Community and Ideology,” in Essays on Individualism, Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1986). As Dumont has cogently argued, the attempt to derive dual or- ganization or symbolic polarity from percep- tual or logical oppositions can account for nei- ther of the essential features of these phenom- ena: that they are asymmetrically valued and that they are conceived to form a totality. As I have previously argued, the validity of Du- mont’s critique (which applies directly to Maybury-Lewis’s formulation) is not affected by the problematic features of his own concep- tions of dualism and hierarchy as evaluated by structuralist and Marxist criteria (Turner, “Dual Opposition, Hierarchy, and Value: Moiety Structure and Symbolic Polarity in Central Brazil and Elsewhere,” in Dtflerences, Valeurs, Hierarchie, EHESS, 1984).

The hierarchical aspect of dual structures is inseparable from their essential complexity as constructs of multiple binary relations. Here again the original insights of LCvi-Strauss con- verge with the contributions of linguistic structuralists like Jakobson and Troubetzkoy to the effect that dualistic structures, from phonemic oppositions to moiety systems, are complex constructs of a special kind. The de- fining feature of the type is that the overtly presented form of opposition presupposes, or is constituted in relation to, another relation or dimension ofopposition that does not overt- ly appear. The terms of this latter, covert op- position are selected and recombined to form the overt opposition by taking the dominant term of the covert relation as the substance of both terms of the overt opposition; the latter thus appear, in respect of their recruitment or original derivation, homogeneous and sym- metrical. At the same time, the contrastive re-

218 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [93, 19911

lation in which these terms stand is defined as asymmetrical, in a manner corresponding to the unequal, hierarchical relation between the heterogeneous terms of the underlying, covert relation. The identity of both terms of the overt opposition defines them as constituting a single whole or totality, within which the hi- erarchical relation of asymmetrical contrast they simultaneously represent is uniformly (symmetrically) inculcated within the whole social or cosmic universe they define.

The relation between a pair of moieties or symbolic polarities such as left and right, in sum, is a construct of at least two intersecting dimensions of opposition, combining identity and contrast, symmetry and asymmetry. Each constituent opposition contributes to the con- struction of the other, so that neither-much less the total structure they jointly consti- tute-can be derived, as Maybury-Lewis would have it, as a direct reflection of some one-dimensional perceptual contrast like “light/dark.” The key constituent of “dualis- tic” social and cultural constructs, thus understood, is not “duality” per se, but the mediating relation between complementary dualities. As Seeger succinctly expresses in his contribution: “The issue is not how many things there are, but how they are ordered” (p. 202). Trying to explain dual organization as an instance of simple binary contrast is like trying to explain a stone building as an in- stance of stones.

In sum, the structuralist approach to dual structures seeks to understand both form and content in terms of an active, mediating set of relations between them. This mediating struc- ture of relations accordingly becomes the real object of analysis. From the standpoint of this approach, the fundamental shortcoming of both Maybury-Lewis’s and Almagor’s for- mulations is that they conceive the relation of form to content as one of direct, unmediated correspondence, in the positivist manner. For each, form thus becomes an epiphenomenon of content, the relation between them is not problematized, and, in the end, only content matters. What is at stake in these differences is the relative viability of dialectical, as op- posed to reductionist and positivist, ap- proaches to structural analysis.

A number of the case studies in this volume converge powerfully with the structuralist view that dual social and symbolic systems emerge as composite constructions of interde- pendent but distinct oppositions. The studies of Indonesian moiety and dyarchic systems (Fox, Traube, and Valeri); East African age- systems (Almagor, Hinnant, Lamphear, Spencer); Melanesian and North American

Northwest Coast moiety organizations (Tuzin, Rosman and Rubel); and Zuidema’s reconstruction of the Incan moiety system, drawing upon a recently rediscovered chroni- cle manuscript, all bring out this point in dif- ferent ways-not coincidentally, because they analyze the workings of dual systems in social and historical practice, rather than in the con- ceptual abstract. Maddock’s general review of the Australian data, however, follows May- bury-Lewis in arguing that the different forms of Aboriginal dual social organization repre- sent so many instances ofa common structural type, conceived as simple dyadic contrast. Maddock plaintively concludes that while suggestions that the germ of dual organization may be derived from elementary logical or perceptual oppositions “have an intuitive rightness about them. . . so far as anthropol- ogy goes, they leave one with an ‘end of the road’ feeling” (p. 95). Perhaps this represents an intuitive convergence, albeit in negative terms, with the practical consensus of the other case studies, which find their own ways around the dead end that Maddock correctly, if dimly, perceives. The two other studies ad- dress linguistic and logico-symbolic issues. Yengoyan contributes a lonely but pertinent argument for the relevance of linguistic theory and data. Seeger provides a valuable analysis of various modes of dual distinction, pointing out their different implications for social and conceptual organization in central Brazilian cultures.

Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History, and Political Economy. William Roseberry. New Brunswick, NJ: Rut- gers University Press, 1989. 286 pp. $38.00 (cloth), $14.00 (paper).

DONALD L. DONHAM Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences

Compared to the 1960s, the last decade saw a major realignment of positions within Amer- ican anthropology. Whereas before “materi- alists” interested in ecology and evolution saw themselves in opposition to “idealists” con- cerned with symbolic interpretation, by the 1980s many materialists began to insist upon the centrality of cultural interpretation for what they did. I n addition to blurring the boundary between the material and the cul- tural, new work increasingly questioned an- other opposition as well-that between “structure” and “history” (whether structure is understood in its functionalist or in its se-