Judging Primitive Cultures

...Nor are these difficult essays helped by a writing style clotted with interjections and parenthetical phrases...

...In Zogoma, south of Lake Chad, entertainment consisted of watching criminals flog each other...

...Kasongo's father had been buried on the bodies of 100 living women...

...A problem with relativism is not always avoided here...

...Snakes and insects also took a toll...

...They looked back to the age of Renaissance men rather than forward to our own fragmented time...

...He is more interested in the process by which one arrives at an understanding of another culture, or, as he puts it: "The trick is to figure out what the devil they think they are up to...

...Those who did not die of lockjaw or fever risked stepping on poisoned spikes buried under the carpet of rotting leaves by pygmy tribesmen...

...The explorers were Romantics of the purest stripe, miniature Byrons ready to endure anything from killer bees to 135-degree days for the sake of a reputation...

...Burton did not lack for examples of inhuman treatment...

...Nonetheless, in Africa Explored we catch a glimpse of the reason that well-intentioned men became conquerors, and, at the very least, the chamber of horrors contained in this book can be offered in support of the view that values are not merely relative...

...From Dahomey he wrote with disappointment to a friend: "At Benin...

...On the other hand, anthropologists are very good at getting us to see the contingency of our own institutions-and Geertz is a good anthropologist...

...At other times he says that doing anthropology is similar to analyzing a poem...

...Interesttngly, Clifford Geertz, one of America's leading anthropologists, confronts exactly the problem raised by Africa Explored in an essay from his new collection, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology (Basic Books, 244 pp., $18.50...

...in fact, no more futile exercise is recorded in these pages than the missionary work of Li vingstone and others...

...Almost nine months after starting up the river, the marchers emerged from the forest, and still they had to battle hostile natives to reach their goal...

...He is satisfied to accept the explorers' own Hillaryesque explanations that Africa was there, ready to bestow fame and glory on anyonecapable of conquering h.AfricaExploredisforlhose whosimplyenjoyafluidlywritten, exciting story...

...King Kasongo in eastern Zaire used live women for furniture, and hideously mutilated his subjects "simply for caprice...

...At least two of these adventurers, it should be mentioned, were women...

...Nor are motivation or psychology his concerns...

...Crossing it proved to be a prolonged torture of deprivation and death...

...The arguments can be elusive, slippery, and occasionally one is not entirely sure that Geertz is communicating what he wants to communicate...

...The seaman proceeds to thank his lucky stars that he was born into a "civilized" culture, and to extol the blessings of imperialism...

...The sins of imperialism are many, and much can be said for the argument, made by Conrad among others, that the attempt to compel rectitude across cultures only corrupts everyone involved...

...At Jacoba, also in Nigeria, anyone who complained of sickness was promptly killed and eaten...

...Quite sensibly, the natives puzzled over why their visitors would want to leave the comforts of their homes for the godforsaken wilds of Africa...

...As Hibbert indicates, the barbarity he describes frequently required thecomplici ty of the victims, who would not have comprehended outside interference (no eloquent yearnings for the ideals of the French or American revolutions here...

...Although numerous tribes behaved with kindness and nobility, many others across the continent engaged in the most savage acts...

...Though they were dreamers, the Europeans were an uncommonly capable breed, skilled in a variety of crafts...

...his neck was covered with blisters and his face so swollen that he could hardly open his eyes...

...OncehewasinEthiopia, these talents helped him to win friends in high places and to survive both the inevitable dangers and excruciating boredom...

...For his part, Geertz talks around the incident without reaching anything that the non-specialist would call a conclusion...

...within three days, 47 of them had perished...

...Altogether, the expedition lasted nearly three years and cost the lives of three-quarters of its men...

...Master of 27 languages, he made his way to Mecca before turning his attention to Africa, where he discovered Lake Tanganyika...

...In some ways the Europeans seem almost as foreign to us as the often outlandish Africans...

...Still, for the layman willing to take the trouble, Local Knowledgebas real rewards-Inthediscussionsof art, common sense and political ritual...

...This can be a bit frustrating to a reader who has just finished learning about roasted babies and demands moral certainty, but one comes to appreciate what Geertz is about...

...And his general antifor-malist approach has application beyond his specialty...

...His moral opposite, the self-righteous David Livingstone, declared that Burton's conduct could not "be spoken of without disgust...

...After leading a company of several hundred up the Congo River through modern-day Zaire, he came to a tropical rain forest where no white had ever set foot before...

...Subsisting on a diet of wild fruit, fungus, slugs, and ants, the expedition inched its way through the dense vegetation...

...He stops his narrative just when the power politics of imperialism began to erase the heroic feats of individuals...

...In the course of his journey, Stanley located the fabled Mountains of the Moon, mentioned by Ptolemy almost two millenia earlier, yet it is the cruel price that had to be paid in getting there that remains in memory...

...By far the strangest of the explorers was Richard Burton, the satanic Englishman with an unquenchable taste for the perverse and grotesque...

...Mechanical models borrowed from the physical sciences lose the richness, the depth, the complexity, the multidimensionality, the humanity...

...Examined close up, the exploration of Africa is a tale of amazing heroism and endurance overwhelmed by the grue-someness of Grand Guignol...

...Even so, he barely escaped death on his journey home across the Nubian Desert...

...Most, apparently, died in the attempt, and several who survived chose to return to Africa a second and third time, until their luck ran out...

...Itis an adolescent boy's book for adults...

...At one point, 52 sick and starving men had to be left behind...

...Already weakened by the painful ravages of a guinea worm in his leg, he was soon in agony from inflamed and bleeding feet...

...Geertz' comments on witchcraft enable us to grasp in a meaningful way a subject that lends itself to condescension...

...At Kouka, in modern Nigeria, slaves were forced to wrestle to the death, and any man caught drinking during the daylight hours of Ramadan was sentenced to 400 lashes...

...Nor can societies themselves be simplified according to some set of abstract rules or categories...

...Reading Christopher Hibbert's Africa Explored: Europeans in the Dark Continent, 1769-1889 (Norton, 336 pp., $17.50), one is fascinated by the monstrous sandstorms and repulsive parasites, the ritual sacrifices and mass castrations, not the arrival in Timbuktu or the mapping of the River Niger...

...To prepare himself, Bruce studied medicine, astronomy and several languages, and became an expert draughtsman, marksman and horseman...

...Not the least remarkable of them was the vain, irascible James Bruce, who opened the modern era of exploration with his three years of travels through Ethiopia in the second half of the 18th century...

...What is required is a means of interpretation that explains another culture in our terms without actually reducing it to our terms, and the method Geertz advocates has more in common with literary criticism than with physics or biology...

...Unsold slaves in themarket of Badagry, not far from Nigeria's present capital of Lagos, were^drowned to save the expense of upkeep...

...Hibbert does not bother about large issues...

...they crucified a fellow in honor of my coming-here nothing...

...Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination" centers on a report by a 19th-century Danish sea clerk who witnessed a Balinese funeral rite that featured the sacrificial deaths of three young women...

...A German exploring the area around what is now the Zaire-Sudan border watched an old woman and some children prepareadinnerof newborn infant, andhelatermet a king who was said to feast each day on roasted baby...

...Art, for instance, derives its significance from its context within the given society, not from its formal, "esthetic" properties (and therefore those people who walk around museums "responding" to primitive art can more likely be described as luxuriating in their own broad-mindedness...

...Like the late Alan Moorehead, author of two outstanding and recently reissued volumes, The Blue Nile and The White Nile, Hibbert takes for his subject the drama of the adventures themselves, and if he lacks Moorehead's vivid immediacy, he makes up for it in breadth...

...Geertz likes to call it a kind of translation...

...The phenomena of a culture, he never tires of repeating, can only be understood by relating them back to the culture itself...

...There is a fundamental and inevitable vagueness to all of this...

...Burton took special interest in the sexual habits of the natives, not always, it seems, with the distance of the scientific observer, and joked about the brutal customs he assiduously sought out...

...He covers the entire continent, whereas Moorehead concentrates on the search for the source of the Nile...

...The same village practiced human sacrifice...

...The King of Buganda, upon ascending the throne, had 30 of his brothers burned alive, while subjects who spoke too loudly in his presence were beheaded...