Bongo's Aesthetics

[Paul Nightingale]

I'm not too familiar with the stuff on historicism, although the references
to Smith and Boas echo what I am familiar with. Evolutionism was an
Enlightenment concept, although perfectibility might take different forms.
In the C19th both Darwin and Marx made use of it. In Britain Whig
historiography attempted to show that Britain avoided revolutionary change
because a sound Parliamentary democracy had evolved over hundreds of years.
In the 1950s, the American economist Rostow attempted a similar argument to
promote Western (ie US) democracy as the model for newly-independent (ie
post-colonial) states in the developing world. Be like us, don't be tempted
by communism, there are no short cuts.

In a global economy based on colonialism, anthropology was the attempt to
make sense of cultural differences, that is, think globally, outside what we
know as here. Clearly (inevitably?) much of it was ethnocentric, and might
have been used to justify colonialism as a mission to civilise. Antropology,
even when radical, might have a conservative dimension. One example I am
familiar with is that of Margaret Mead, whose work demonstrated that
gendered behaviour was a social construct and not determined by biological
differences. However, her descriptions of 'primitive' cultures is also a
vehicle for her dissatisfaction with modern US society (she shared TS
Eliot's distaste for mass society). So even when talking about 'them' she
was talking about 'us' and harking back to a better society before the
machine age.

Nostalgia locates a golden age somewhere in the past, close enough to recall
without being so close it is recognisable as now. This is certainly
Porpentine's position. His reluctance to acknowledge that Alexandria is "no
conceivable Europe" (113) is realpolitik as ethnocentric myopia. Difficult
to know how much the young Pynchon knew about, or was interested in, global
politics. But he was a careful reader. The spy novels he cites as a source
were another way of thinking globally. And his reference to the "idealised
colonial Englishman" (113) echoes (to me, anyway) a similar description in
Heart of Darkness, from which he might also have borrowed the idea of going
native (114) and the journey into some kind of otherness (the train to
Cairo).