In the summer of 1643, fearing for his son's safety in the face of the Civil War violence then swirling around Oxford, John Aubrey's father summoned him home from his beloved university to the family estate at Broadchalke, in the south of Wiltshire. Young John languished in rustic isolation for three long years; he describes his sojourn in the country as “a most sad life to me … not to have the benefitt of an ingeniose Conversation.” For Aubrey, whose company was widely valued in his later life for his skill and grace as a conversationalist, it was a special hardship to have “none but Servants and rustiques” – he terms the local inhabitants “Indigenae, or Aborigines” – with whom to converse (Aubrey 1847 [1969]: 11).

Back some thirteen years and many life changes ago, we had an idea. Both of us had been thinking about questions of performance, how the enactment of discursive, bodily, and material forms in performative settings produces and transforms people and social relations. But we were unsatisfied with the ability of our own work and other frameworks with which we were familiar to capture the richness of events that we witnessed and the broad political, social, and historical questions that they raised. In particular, the way that friends George and Silvianita López, Francisco Pérez, or José Antonio Pérez used performances as political tools in challenging racism and nation-states seemed to be much more sophisticated than any framework we could muster in accounting for it. Sharing discomfort with received categories of language, aesthetics, culture, tradition, and other truths that generally seemed to be held to be self-evident, we had the vague feeling that some sort of magic act had been performed long before our time that transformed certain problematic categories into supposedly universal features of the world around us. While we saw our scholarly work as part of a progressive political project, we were not satisfied with our efforts to tie theorizing and analysis to struggles to challenge social inequality and structures of oppression.

At first we agreed to organize a conference.

For writers who like to tell the story of modernity in terms of a powerful rupture that took place in the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon provides a compelling point of departure. Not given to modest claims, Bacon entitled one of his works (published in 1620) the Novum Organum, seeking to pull the mantle off Aristotle's Organon (1949) and to displace “ancient philosophy” and the way it was used in colleges and universities of the day as a basis for inquiry, thereby establishing his own claim to fashion knowledge “anew from the very foundations” (1860b: 52). Bacon played a key role in the invention of nature, in the carving out of a domain that excluded humans and simultaneously seemed to be made just for them – to harness and control for their own mental and material progress. Providing a social and philosophical charter for experimental work, Bacon argued that nature tends to hide or obscure some of “her” properties; it is accordingly best to observe nature “under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and molded” (1860b: 246). Experiments are thus needed to isolate the property in question and to force nature to reveal “her” secrets; the role of sense data could be limited to judging the results of the experiment.

We began this book by aligning ourselves with Dipesh Chakrabarty's (1992, 2000) and Partha Chatterjee's (1993) project of “provincializing ‘Europe’,” of exploring how categories and relations tied to particular places and times came to be elevated to the status of universals and then used in representing – and dominating – the rest of the world. Our goal has been to open up a new range of insights regarding how Europe got deprovincialized. We have tried to show that constructions of language (meaning both ideologies of language and metadiscursive regimes) and tradition played a central role in creating the modernist project.

When language becomes the focus for telling the story of modernity we can see clearly that what got deprovincialized was not a set of actually existing social forms, European or otherwise. Locke did not take European views of language or modes of speaking and writing and elevate them to the status of universals. He rather targeted the ways of thinking about language espoused by such advocates of modernity as Bacon and his fellow members of the Royal Society, received discursive practices (associated with the Scholastics), and ways of speaking he attributed to the poor, merchants, and women as the central obstacle to modernity. Locke labeled a broad range of ways that language could be used – expressively, poetically, rhetorically, reflectively, persuasively – as the enemies of conceptual and political order.

Social life in fin-de-siècle America placed many social scientists and social thinkers in an intellectual and political bind. They believed, on the one hand, in the power of modernity to produce a more enlightened and rational world, one in which freedom and democracy dominated. On the other hand, however, they were deeply concerned with the effects of modernity and industrial capitalism on contemporary society (see Ross 1991). Industrialization was often seen as having disrupted close-knit communities and pressed workers into impoverished urban quarters. The Jim Crow era was reversing the gains made by African Americans during Reconstruction. Crass exploitation of workers, especially immigrants and African Americans, elicited concerns that went beyond a politics of moral sentiment – it raised the specter of class warfare and socialist revolution. Some social scientists came to the conclusion that it was necessary to think beyond the nation-state and actually existing structures of inequality, and cosmopolitan imaginaries were woven into the theoretical foundations laid by a number of influential figures.

One of the most important of these was Franz Boas, a German immigrant of Jewish descent. George Stocking (1968: 149) points to the roots of Boas's liberalism in the lasting impact of the ideals of the Revolution of 1848 on many German intellectuals. Personal, scientific, and political goals merged in the form of a quest for truth that would ideally free humanity from the shackles of dogma.

In his most comprehensive treatise on the relationship of poetry to culture in the course of human history, the great German philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), pays tribute to those scholars of ancient poetry who most inspired his own work: “especially and above all, I want to cite only Blackwell's Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer …, Wood's Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer …, Blair's Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian” (SW 8: 341n.). The writings of these critical precursors, and Lowth as well, with whom Herder was also closely familiar, had a profound shaping influence on Herder's thought: his understanding of the radical interrelationship of language, poetry, and history, his conception of oral tradition as the touchstone of cultural continuity, his valorization of immediacy and presence in performance, and his recognition of the affecting power of significant form. Herder's debt to the British philological tradition will be clear in the pages that follow, but it was his own great intellectual achievement to render the ideas of his forebears into a metadiscursively founded theory of culture, society, and history, a magisterial synthesis that has served as one of the cornerstones of the project of modernity for the past two hundred years. Building upon Blair's recognition of oral transmission as the engine of textual continuity between ancient bardic song and contemporary oral poetry in the formation of national epic, Herder created a conception of tradition as constitutive of vernacular literature and national identity.

Herder shook the linguistic foundations of the modernist project laid out by Locke. Herder sought to undermine the purifying practices that Locke had used to construct language as an autonomous domain, to sever its links to society and tradition. For Herder, not only was language intrinsically social, but linguistic differences and commonalities provided the prime means of defining families, communities, regions, and nations. While a purified language formed, for Locke, an obligatory passage point along the road to modernity, Herder saw modernity as a threat to language, potentially depriving it of social, political, and affective force. While Locke saw tradition, which he deemed to be extraneous to language, as a key source of social servitude, error, epistemological uncertainty, and, ultimately, conflict, Herder regarded it as the source of social order and political strength. At the same time that Locke's program for language was based on a universalistic rationality, Herder sought to reprovincialize language, asking it to give up cosmopolitan claims to universality, to transcend indexical claims to identities, communities, places, and times.

Even in the heyday of romantic nationalism, however, Locke's linguistic modernity did not simply go away. Herder thus presented modern subjects with something of a dilemma. As for Locke, language provided him with a key means of defining modernity. And language ideologies and practices played a crucial role in the very different modernity that Herder sought to construct, one that peopled territories with national citizens and the globe with nation-states, as Benedict Anderson (1991) suggests.

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793–1864) is accorded by intellectual historians a status similar to that of the Grimms, his close contemporaries, as a founding ancestor of folklore and anthropology. A. I. Hallowell has observed that “Historically viewed, Schoolcraft was a pioneer in the collection of the folklore of any non-literate people anywhere in the world” (1946: 137); Rosemary Zumwalt has called him “the first scholar of American Indian culture to collect and analyze a large body of Indian folklore” (1978: 44); and W. K. McNeil credits him with being “the man generally recognized as the father of American folklore and anthropology” (1992: 1). As with the Grimms, critics are divided or ambivalent concerning the scholarly validity of Schoolcraft's work. Some, like Stith Thompson, are strongly negative: “Ultimately, the scientific value of his work is marred by the manner in which he reshaped the stories to suit his own literary taste. Several of his tales, indeed, are distorted almost beyond recognition” (1929: xv; see also Thompson 1922). The vocabulary and rhetoric here are strikingly similar to some of the assessments of the Grimms cited in our earlier discussion. Others, like Zumwalt and William Clements, author of an illuminating study of Schoolcraft's textual practices, credit many of Schoolcraft's pronounced methodological principles, but fault him for his lack of adherence to those principles in practice (Zumwalt 1978: 49; Clements 1996: 117).

Introduction

Hume's paradoxical query, posed in 1757 and often quoted in histories of eighteenth-century Scotland, expresses well the deep ambivalence of mid-eighteenth-century Scottish intellectuals towards their political condition, their language, and their literature. While Hume's own writings contributed in no small measure to Scotland's – and especially Edinburgh's – literary and philosophical reputation as “a hotbed of genius,” he was also closely involved in the production, publication, and promotion of a series of literary works that followed soon after he penned the above observations and that did indeed mark Scotland as the nation “most distinguish'd for Literature in Europe.” Between 1760 and 1763, James Macpherson offered to an increasingly receptive public three volumes of translations from the Gaelic poetry of Ossian, a third-century Celtic bard: Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760), Fingal (1762), and Temora (1763); these three works were collected in two volumes in 1765, under the title The Works of Ossian, The Son of Fingal, Translated from the Galic Language by James Macpherson (1765).

Introduction

Francis Bacon has a secure place in the pantheon consecrated by intellectual historians to the makers of modernity. As we have discussed in Chapter 2, Bacon's bold heralding of the charter for his Natural Philosophy insistently proclaims the need for a decisive break with the past if the quest for genuine knowledge is to be placed on its proper course. An essential part of Bacon's scientific program, we recall, is the necessity of direct experience and the exercise of individual reason in the pursuit of true knowledge, and the concomitant distrust of traditional authority, mediated by texts and testimonies: “First, then, away with antiquities, and citation or testimonies of authors, and also with disputes and controversies and differing opinions – everything, in short, which is philological” (Bacon 1968 [1857–74] IV: 254). By oft-cited pronouncements such as these, Bacon created – or portrayed himself as creating – the kind of gap between the past and the present that is constitutive of the advent of modernity, in this instance between a supernaturalist worldview resting on traditional authority and a naturalist worldview resting upon the exercise of reason.

In the preceding pages, we have traced some of the linguistic inflections of Bacon's proclaimed epistemic break in science, and followed them as they were extended and transformed through the work of John Locke and others.