A Passionate Ethnography
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING A Passionate Ethnography By Stanley Edgar Hyman Here is Geòrgie Ross, a skinny, sad, and crosseyed little four-year-old. He walks around the house sucking his thumb and...
...If Geòrgie is underfed...
...Nightmare" is the pathogenic fear that every culture has, in Henry's view...
...To use a metaphor from economics, a person who is pathologically insulated has no imports, is incapable of exports, and has lost his gold reserve...
...Here is Mr...
...Henry pummels the reader with exclamation points...
...Henry is a personality-in-culture anthropologist, he has been working on this book for many years, and he lived with the Rosses for a week...
...the kinship system, the value system, the religion...
...Here we are all infected: the critics of the culture no less than the rest...
...Henry uses many of Veblen's terms, and is centrally indebted to him...
...Quilby, he is the human consequence of "dynamic obsolescence," that necessary servant of technological drivenness...
...Despite its faults, I believe Culture Against Man to be right in its basic contention: that our miseries are the logical consequences of our institutions...
...The Rosses ignore him, underfeed him, and neglect him...
...Culture Against Man is "social criticism...
...Loving Geòrgie is a value, and the Rosses respond only to drives...
...Related to this is "lack of a property ceiling" (an institution found in various forms in many primitive cultures), which produces the "feverish" quality of our civilization and infects our human relations...
...The emotional parsimony of the Rosses is pathogenic for Geòrgie, and even if he does not become insane he will have a hard life...
...But the Rosses would not be the way they are in a better culture, nor would Rosemont exist or be necessary...
...this book is "a passionate ethnography...
...the nightmare of the Pilagâ Indians is sorcery and ours is the Soviet Union...
...The criticisms of Fromm and Riesman, who believe that something can be done about it, or of Goodman and Macdonald, who believe that an enclave of some sort can escape the general contagion, seem like popguns in comparison...
...The reality is that "Rosemont is a private institution run for profit...
...These things, too, properly reflect the culture...
...As for Mr...
...Let us return to individuals and see the consequences...
...if he does manage to urinate into a urinal, he is just as apt to empty it under his bed...
...Finally, Henry's prose does not challenge Thoreau's...
...He makes patronizing references to "the little man," "little people" (the immortal rejoinder was made by Joseph Mitchell in a prefatory note to McSorley's Wonderful Saloon: "They are as big as you are, whoever you are...
...that our culture is deranged and deranging...
...the Rosses send Geòrgie to bed, then gobble the dessert...
...When the family goes out to a restaurant they do not order for Geòrgie...
...Rosemont seems the very Vestibule of Hell...
...The significance of these cases of misery is Henry's argument—and the book is one long argument—that they are not unfortunate accidents but the logical consequences of our culture...
...One is advertising, the principal agency in unhinging the impulse control system and making our values, even our words, "soft and shapeless...
...He is a Veblen pickled half a century more sour, a Thoreau who has found Waiden Pond a sea of urine...
...Monetization" is the replacement of traditional human values by pecuniary values, the process that Carlyle and Marx saw at work more than a century ago...
...Henry in his introduction disclaims any attempt to write "an objective description of America...
...The disgusting hypocrisy of the people who run Rosemont, boasting to the interviewer of their love for the old people, of their kindness and generosity—"practice of the Golden Rule, just like the good Lord intended"—is learned from the sanctimonious hyperbole of advertising, and accurately mirrors its falsehoods...
...In short, Culture Against Man is a crude book...
...of a Teen Town for lonely adolescents, "misery once more makes its contribution to the gross national product, for the $1.00 admission and the Coca-Cola and ice cream consumed are calculated in the GNP...
...He is addicted to the shotgun charge, the proliferation of terms (he even has something called "gasoline spirituality"), the glib generalization...
...Ross is overfed...
...Impulse release" is its consequence, an unhinging of the traditional impulse control system in order to create more desires, which industry can then satisfy...
...When he talks, validly, of the warps produced by our hysterical fear of the Soviet Union, he seems to feel that his case is stronger if he adds that it has "undermined our gold reserves," a subject beyond his competence...
...Quilby roughly, and the other patients, following their example, slap him, punch him, and beat him...
...Henry makes a constant comparison of the United States with primitive cultures, never to our credit...
...In paraphrasing its theory, I have inevitably made Henry's thought seem more systematic and coherent than it is...
...the kitchen stinks of urine...
...patients and bedding smeared with feces are ignored by the overworked and unconcerned staff...
...If you put together in one culture uncertainty and the scientific method, competitiveness and technical ingenuity, you get a strong new explosive compound which I shall call technological drivenness...
...Since he cannot produce and can only consume marginally, he must be discarded like an old icebox...
...The book has a hysterical tone (caught from the culture, Henry might properly observe...
...The institutional dynamics of American society are seen as the matrix of our bad human relations...
...His figures of speech are quite inept: "drives can become almost like cannibals hidden in a man's head or viscera...
...Quilby" are only two, if perhaps the two most dramatic, of hundreds of cases of human misery described by Jules Henry in Culture Against Man (Random House, 495 pp., $7.95...
...Sometimes he is restrained by being strapped to his bed...
...Ross bathes Geòrgie in Rinso (as though he were dirty laundry), does not rinse him off, and puts him in his crib afterwards without either covering him or kissing him good night...
...Finally there is "exploitation," a socioeconomic system that uses people up and drops them, setting the pattern for interpersonal relations...
...It is a bitter and a brutal vision, but no less true for that...
...you are drawn toward distant hills because you cannot sink roots in those on which you stand...
...Quilby is incontinent and disoriented...
...Georgie's mother ignores him because she is trying to hold her husband, so that Geòrgie is in competition with his father for her meagre affections...
...Georgie's older brother Joseph is a psychotic in an institution, and the Rosses are doing their best to make their younger son psychotic too...
...Of the second term, Henry writes...
...Quilby's tiny social security check, he is fed bad food in quantities just adequate to keep him alive...
...Another is "unbridled competition," which "increases monetization, saps values, and imperils the foundations of our society...
...he gets worse food and less of it than a prison would give him...
...The prognosis for Mr...
...Quilby makes so much of a mess feeding himself that an attendant feeds him—naturally, too fast...
...He calls himself "Geòrgie nobody," with great aptness, because his parents treat him as though he didn't exist, as though he were a phantom, and Geòrgie acquiesces in that role...
...Geòrgie Ross" and "Mr...
...It is the most fundamental and savage criticism of American civilization that I have ever read...
...Quilby is mobile, and when he approaches anyone else's bed he is driven away, lest he foul it...
...Everything is exaggerated: television advertising aimed at children "is terrifyingly reminiscent of another appeal to children over the heads of their parents: that of the Nazi Youth movement...
...But Mr...
...Henry writes heavily: "Is it not better that American children engage in productive play such as manipulating standard brands in miniature cans, than waste their time and energy in mindless games of jacks...
...Primitive cultures have institutions that would defend Geòrgie against his parents and compensate for their emotional parsimony, that would esteem and care for Mr...
...Quilby is easy: he will soon die...
...Henry has little of Veblen's logic...
...Geòrgie is hard to understand because his articulation is muddled...
...the old too are a private enterprise with minimal social regulation...
...The Rosses cannot be prevented from driving Geòrgie crazy, as they drove Joseph crazy, because "in our culture babies are a private enterprise," and a private enterprise with "minimal social regulation...
...The staff handles Mr...
...Henry sees four fundamental distortions in American culture, distortions which he calls "monetization," "technological drivenness," "impulse release," and "nightmare...
...Quilby's foulness only reflects Rosemont's: the aisles of the wards run rivers of urine...
...His irony is leaden...
...Quilby, a blind old psychotic pauper in the Rosemont home for the aged...
...It is a crude book of the utmost importance, however, like Uncle Tom's Cabin a century ago...
...Ross seems almost unaware of Georgie's existence...
...I have improved Culture Against Man by simplifying it...
...He walks around the house sucking his thumb and holding his penis...
...Sometimes Henry even forgets his anthropology, as when he says that tying up an old man is "a practice unknown in the world outside the 'developed nations' "—as though no primitive cultures exposed or killed their aged...
...Because Rosemont must make a profit on Mr...
...These distortions are embodied in, or created by, a number of institutions and non-institutions...
...cockroaches are hardly noticed...
...in our culture people "compete with one another for one another as industry competes for natural resources, for manufactured objects, and for consumers...
...He is an "obsolete" human being, worthless and expendable...
...Quilby: the extended family, the lineage, the clan...
...He is no political or economic thinker (nor am I, God knows...
Vol. 46 • November 1963 • No. 23
