{"id":3129,"date":"2020-02-10T15:21:05","date_gmt":"2020-02-10T20:21:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/?p=3129"},"modified":"2020-09-24T00:48:07","modified_gmt":"2020-09-24T04:48:07","slug":"totems-of-our-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/2020\/02\/10\/totems-of-our-lives\/","title":{"rendered":"Totems of Our Lives"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh<\/a><\/p>\n

BOOK THE FIRST: Chapter the twelfth. \u00a0Of the CIVIL STATE.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

This chapter\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0subject is \u201c[t]hat part of the nation which . \u00a0. includes all orders of men, from the highest nobleman to the meanest peasant.\u201d \u00a0(p. 384) \u00a0Blackstone\u2019s method consists of listing the hierarchy of titles and ranks available in 18th Century Britain, along with brief descriptions of their origins, privileges and customary duties. \u00a0Partly because my reading coincided with the death of the great philosophical anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the chapter put me in mind of the elaborate clan and kinship diagrams reproduced in some ethnographic accounts of traditional societies. \u00a0 My first thought was that earls and marquesses are the turtle and kingfisher totems of the British monarchy. \u00a0Then it occurred to me that on Levi-Strauss\u2019s theory, the really telling thing was my own view that Blackstone\u2019s world was exotic.<\/p>\n

Levi-Strauss\u2019s great insight was that totemism was a modern fiction \u2014 a way to define modernity, in fact, as different from (and better than) aboriginal cultures. \u00a0According to Levi Strauss, \u201cprimitive\u201d people\u2019s \u00a0supposed belief in a direct, natural relationship between clans and their animal totems was \u201cthe projection outside our own universe, as though by a kind of exorcism, of mental attitudes\u201d judged incompatible with modern thought. \u00a0Totemism<\/em>\u00a0(tr. Rodney Needham, Beacon 1963) at 3. \u00a0From this perspective, the theory of totemism revealed less about the culture being interpreted than the interpreting scholars, who sought \u201cconsciously or unconsciously, and under the guise of scientific objectivity,\u201d to make the people studied \u201cmore\u00a0different<\/em>\u00a0than they really are.\u201d\u00a0Id.<\/em>\u00a0at 1. \u00a0Basically, Levi-Strauss\u00a0taught us to put the flash quotes around the word \u201cprimitive.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Rather than distinguishing primitive mentalities, he saw totemic patterns and rituals as expressions of an underlying common structure of all human thought \u2014 traditional and modern, alike.<\/p>\n

Now, I look at Blackstone\u2019s typology of British civil society, and its emphasis on ritual and formal hierarchy seem stilted, \u201cold fashioned,\u201d and at odds with fluid contemporary American society. Moreover, I am quick to ascribe to the practitioners of this \u201ctraditional\u201d social hierarchy an inability to look beyond or through its internal boundaries. \u00a0When I read Blackstone\u2019s descriptions of the various degrees of nobility that articulate the 18th century British state, I imagine that the citizens who \u00a0either are or are not the dukes, earls, knights and peasants do not perceive the contingency of those categories. \u00a0I imagine that the society they describe is at once more artificial than ours and more natural from the perspective of the people who live in it. \u00a0But thinking of Levi-Strauss, I can see the totemism at work in my first impressions.<\/p>\n

How different really is Blackstone\u2019s place-for-everyone-and-everyone-in-his-place approach? \u00a0Consider, for example, the way \u00a0academic credentials have come to denominate the different ranks of professional life today. \u00a0We may think academic letters stand for more substantial, experiential differences than the degrees of nobility Blackstone describes. \u00a0After all, academic degrees are not inherited. \u00a0But a glance at the demographics of who receives the JDs, LLMs, BAs, BSs, MBAs, PhDs, and MDs in our world reveals that family history plays a large part in who receives these rankings. \u00a0About 8 in 10 Americans whose parents hold college degrees enroll in college after high school, compared with only about half the kids whose parents didn\u2019t finish college, and less than 4 in 10 kids of \u00a0parents who didn\u2019t finish high school. \u00a0National Center for Education Statistics.<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0Of course that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that our system is the same as the British social hierarchy Blackstone described \u2014 or that it is comparably hierarchical. \u00a0But after Levi Strauss, it\u2019s possible to see in\u00a0this chapter<\/a>\u00a0of the Commentaries a system that is not diametrically different from our own avowedly egalitarian society, and to see that our own world is limned with elaborate categorical structures that divide and define subgroups and our individual identities within them. \u00a0How about the dizzying array of credit statuses assigned through the various combinations of gold, platinum, and black, \u201ccenturion\u201d and \u201cpreferred rewards\u201d cards and memberships and their connections with the numeric credit scores that sort us according to our power to buy stuff \u2014 from groceries to houses. \u00a0Isn\u2019t this network \u00a0every bit as intricate as the framework of \u201coriginal . . . several degrees of nobility\u201d (p. 388) and \u201cnames of\u00a0dignity\u201d\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0(p. 393) that structured British citizens\u2019 relationships with land, castles and manors?<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, \u00a0the Commentaries suggest that 18th century British subjects, and certainly \u00a0Blackstone himself, regarded their categorical assignments as something other than transparent indicia of intrinsic nobility. \u00a0Blackstone makes the designations of nobility sound decidedly positivistic, not to say completely arbitrary. \u00a0 He explains, for instance, that new peers are created by the king\u2019s conferral of documents and that existing nobles \u201cmust suppose either a writ or a patent made to their ancestors; though by length of time it is lost.\u201d \u00a0(p. 388) \u00a0There is also quite a detailed discussion of the relative merits of acquiring a peerage through a writ (includes heirs \u201cwithout any words to that purport\u201d) versus a patent (subject is enobled even if he never takes his seat in the House of Lords). \u00a0(pp. 388-89) You get the feeling Blackstone views British titles as reflecting innate characterological superiority to about the same extent that we perceive academic credentials today as reflecting a pure intellectual meritocracy and those daily mail offers of exploding APRs as indicating some kind of objective credit worthiness.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, in case you doubt that things like credit cards meaningfully structure social mobility beyond an individual\u2019s access to borrowed cash, consider that most hotels will not accept guests who do not have credit cards. \u00a0Ostensibly a way to protect against guests who raid the minibar and then abscond without paying for those exorbitantly overpriced smoked almonds, the credit card prerequisite serves as a defacto social filter. \u00a0This was brought forcefully home to me when a national organization I worked for organized a conference to which we invited local advocates, some of whom had no credit cards. \u00a0It was quite an undertaking to get the hotel to accept these effectively untitled folks, even with an organization willing to guarantee any excess room charges with its own AmEx gold card. \u00a0They might leave home, but they certainly weren\u2019t going to be staying anywhere overnight without it.<\/p>\n

Reading Blackstone in the month Levi-Strauss left the planet, then, I am more than ever inclined to see the myriad available \u00a0licenses, ratings, degrees and credentials as constituting rather than reflecting our social, economic and legal relationships and individual identities. Remember those AmEx commercials that began with some celebrity asking \u201cDo you know me\u201d? and ended with the star\u2019s name printed on plastic? \u00a0Finally, re-reading one of the appreciations printed around Levi-Strauss\u2019s death, I was struck with its applicability to Blackstone and the Commentaries\u2019 approach to the common law: \u00a0As the novelist J.M.G. Le Clezio said of Levi Strauss, \u201cHe expressed in his books the beauty and intelligibility of myths.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n