Absolutely relative

National Review, Sept 15, 1997 by Keith Windschuttle

Mr. Windschuttle is the author of, most recently, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past, from which this article is adapted. Copyright 1997 by Keith Windschuttle. Reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster, Inc.

MICHEL Foucault opens his book The Order of Things with a paragraph that has become one of his most famous. Foucault describes a passage from "a certain Chinese encyclopedia" that, he claims, breaks up all the ordered surfaces of our thoughts. By "our" thoughts, he means Western thought in the modern era. The encyclopedia divides animals into the following categories: "a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies." Foucault writes that, thanks to "the wonderment of this taxonomy," we can apprehend not only "the exotic charm of another system of thought" but also "the limitation of our own." What the taxonomy or form of classification reveals, says Foucault, is that "there would appear to be, then, at the other extremity of the earth we inhabit, a culture . . . that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to name, speak and think." The stark impossibility of our thinking in this way, Foucault says, demonstrates the existence of an entirely different system of rationality.

In May 1995 I gave a paper to a seminar in the Department of History at the University of Sydney, Australia. Although most of the postmodernists in the department declined to attend, they deputized one of their number, Alastair MacLachlan, to reply and, they hoped, to tear me apart. My respondent opened his remarks by citing Foucault and the Chinese taxonomy. Didn't I realize, he chided, that other cultures have such dramatically different conceptual schemes that traditional assumptions of Western historiography are inadequate for the task of understanding them?

There is, however, a problem rarely mentioned by those who cite the Chinese taxonomy as evidence for these claims. No Chinese encyclopedia has ever described animals under the classification listed by Foucault. In fact, there is no evidence that any Chinese person has ever thought about animals in this way. The taxonomy is fictitious. It is the invention of the Argentinian short-story writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges.

This revelation would in no way disturb the assumptions of the typical postmodernist thinker, who believes that the distinction between fact and fiction is arbitrary anyway. Foucault himself openly cites Borges as his source. The example is now so frequently cited in academic texts and debates that it is taken as a piece of credible evidence about non-Western cultures. It deserves to be seen, rather, as evidence of the degeneration of standards of argument in the Western academy.

THE American ethnographer Marshall Sahlins cites Foucault and the Chinese taxonomy as part of his case against his opponent Gananath Obeyesekere, in what has developed into the most hotly contested debate in anthropology of recent times. In his 1992 book, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, Obeyesekere denied the thesis of Sahlins that the natives of Hawaii in 1779 had regarded Captain James Cook as their returned god Lono. Obeyesekere claimed that the Hawaiians had too much "practical rationality" to mistake an Englishman, who wore strange clothes, spoke no Hawaiian, and knew nothing of their religious beliefs or practices, for one of their gods. In his 1995 book How "Natives" Think, Sahlins replied that Obeyesekere, although Sri Lankan, is captive to Western concepts, a man who cannot think outside this form of rationality and who imagines that Western thought constitutes the universal mind of humanity. However, says Sahlins, the existence of radically different systems of classification like that of the Chinese encyclopedia is evidence that different cultures order their perceptions in radically different ways.

Sahlins does not rely entirely on fictional evidence but also cites some findings by anthropologists. He gives the example of the Chewa people of Malawi, who classify certain mushrooms in the same group with game animals, rather than with plants, on the basis of the similarities of their flesh. For the Chewa, domestic ducks are not classified with birds, nor with wild ducks.

Unfortunately for Sahlins, it is not difficult to show that this more empirical type of evidence still provides no support for his claim. Let me give one simple example. I have in front of me a recent document from the National Heart Foundation of Australia. It contains a table classifying plant and animal products. It puts the following items into one group: skim milk, lean red meat, skinless chicken, fresh fish, egg whites, bread, pasta, all fruit and vegetables, legumes, water, tea, coffee, fruit juices. And it links the following together into a second group: coconut oil, butter, whole milk, fried meat, bacon, sausages, egg yolks, croissants, milkshakes, coffee whiteners.