I once worked with a two-man start-up that had already gotten through the prototype stage and even had happy customers. Their software product could literally have revolutionized database management. But, it didnt and wont. The two boys…

“When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?” is “one of the oldest known English Rhymes and can be dated to the English Peasant Revolt of 1381.”

For those who might be interested, more can be found at rhymes.org.uk.

I took the liberty of cross-posting your blog entry on anthro-L, where it has stimulated an interesting discussion. My latest entry is as follows:

——————
On 1/21/07, Richard Wilsnack wrote:

> For example, if one compares pre-Civil War
> and post-Civil War southern states, were there more (and more severe)
> interpersonal confrontations over insults, unjust demands, ridicule,
> etc. after the War? If
> the evidence is contrary, can anyone offer a hypothesis why?
>

Richard,

I have never seen anything like the quantitative evidence you seek. I
have, however, read a superb piece of American history, _Affairs of
Honor: National Politics in the New Republic_ by Joanne B. Freeman,
which documents exhaustively the obsession of the founders and their
immediate successors with personal honor, an obsession that led, among
other things, to the Hamilton-Burr duel and the creation of the
manners still sometimes enforced in the U.S. Congress, e.g., the
description in speeches on the floor of both houses of someone the
speaker thoroughly detests as “The Honorable….”

Still, there is something in what you say. Cultures that make a big
deal of honor often embrace legendary figures that exhibit what
literary historian Ivan Morris, writing about Japan, labels “the
nobility of failure.” The great exemplars of honor are not the tyrants
who force their will on others, but those who suffer defeat and may
sacrifice their lives rather than surrender their sense of who they
are.

Going back to Dustin’s remarks, however, I think he has largely missed
the point of what McCracken is saying, in his rush to provide examples
of joking and carnivalesque behavior. To anyone who ever read Gluckman
or Turner, it is commonplace that these are examples of temporary
release and inversion of status hierarchies that, once the joke or
carnival are over, return to the status quo. McCracken is specifically
concerned with subordinates who feel, rightly or wrongly, that the
superior has gone too far, and, at certain historically significant
moments, gone so far as to justify revolution. See, for example, the
rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence.

We may see revolution in terms of equality vs. hierarchy and, in the
manner of Whig history, point to historical precedents, e.g., the
Lollard’s chant, “When Adam spun and Eve span, who, then, was the
gentleman?” But, for example, both Magna Carta and the Declaration of
Independence were signed by men who were not rejecting hierarchy per
se but rather insisting on hierarchy that included the degree of
freedom to which they themselves felt entitled. Arguably, if the
portrait of the founders that Joanne Freeman paints is accurate, a
punctilious sense of personal honor and the respect due to it, were
far more powerful drivers of the American revolution than the utopian
demand for equality that played a far greater role in the French and
Russian revolutions.

For those who retain an interest in such things, the Manchester School
anthropologists distinguished theoretically between ritual, rebellion,
and revolution. Where

ritual=joking, carnival, initiation ceremonies, etc., in which
everyday hierarchical distinctions are temporarily suspended or
inverted.

rebellion=political conflict that results in changing the people in
power without altering the basic hierarchies in question: “The king is
dead. Long live the new king.” The dynastic cycle of imperial China is
perhaps the greatest single example.

revolution=political conflict that radically changes the hierarchical
structures in place before the revolution; so that new authorities
take power within a system that has, in some respects, fundamentally
changed, e.g. by transforming the House of Lords and the Commons in the
British system into the Senate and House in the American system, with
Senators now elected and the Lords’ former role as a supreme court
removed to a separate judiciary.

From this perspective, the question, when does touchiness get serious
becomes a series of two questions: When does ritual become rebellion?
And when does rebellion become revolution? Two thresholds, not one;
like ice becoming water becoming steam. Our social physics remains
pretty primitive if all we can imagine is eqalitarian gas and
hierarchical stone, neglecting all the liquids that organize the one
and wear down the other.

Cheers,

John
————————-

It has, serendipitously, led to my being asked if I would contribute 7,000 words to a SAGE press reference work on 21st Century Anthropology. Thanks so much for the stimulus.

touchiness in our colourful internet should be an interesting research topic.

This situation is similar to the use of irony or sarcasm (words meaning the opposite of their usual meanings) in English — only someone who knows the culture deeply can apprehend what is really being expressed here. In other words, we should be careful not to assume that there is only the one idiom for expressing one’s self-hood.

All cultures are equally predisposed toward liberty or else only the West is – surely this is a false dichotomy. It seems intuitive that there are certain cultural traits (individualism, ambition/achievement glorification, history of oppression by foreign culture) that are conducive to fostering an inclination towards liberty and that cultures may have these in greater or lesser extents?