PARTISAN REVIEW
473
graphic experience is necessarily structured as a quest and is subject to
the forms of the quest including the possibility, the necessity even, of
temptation and revelation. It
is
this quest structure which may help to
explain the anthropologist's - and his reader's - fascination with such
phenomena as initiation rites, shamanistic voyages, the secret, vision
quests, and ritual revelations. It is also this quest structure that inevitably
distorts the reality which is that of everyday life and which is in fact
the subject matter of anthropology. Life is not, except perhaps for the
most romantic, a quest. Social and cultural life are not necessarily struc–
tured around the possibility of inner, deep, profound, "heavy" meaning.
Such is the concern of the anthropologist, and again his reader, who are
the offspring of a deeply disillusioned society "in quest" of more mean–
ingful experience (provided, of course, that it is of easy access), the
offspring of a society whose revolutionaries are disillusioned after a few
ineffective gestures toward political change, whose mystics prefer the
instant mysticisms of the drug experience to years of disciplined medita–
tion, and whose neurotics prefer a weekend marathon to years on the
couch, the primal scream to affective insight.
Colin Turnbull belongs to that old breed of English anthropologists,
explorers, and travelers who live under the spell of the noble savage and
the belief in a world in which the virtues delineated by Aristotle, Cas–
tiglione, and other philosophers are still very much alive. His quest is
personal: the simple, loving life distant from the cold, alien and alienat–
ing, self-conscious and duplicitous life of industrial and postindustrial
society. He argues:
The smaller the society, the less emphasis there is on the formal
system, and the more there is on inter-personal and inter-group
relations, to which the system is subordinated. Security is seen in
terms of these relationships and so is survival. The result, which
appears so deceptively simple, is that hunters frequently display
those characteristics which we find so admirable in man: kindness,
generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion,
charity, and others.
He adds somewhat apologetically:
This sounds like a formidable list of virtues, and so it would be if
they
were
virtues, but for the hunter they are not. For the hunter
in his tiny, close-knit society, these are necessities for survival; with–
out them society would collapse.
