Amid the tremendous outcry at the Casey Report into Britain’s grooming gangs, some common refrains have emerged. Many are indignant, rightly, but also puzzled. One thing I’ve noticed a lot of people saying on Twitter is, “Why did nobody in the Pakistani community speak out?” This has been going on for decades. Why did wives, mothers, daughters, sisters and aunts — not to mention fathers, brothers, sons and uncles — not only stand by and do nothing, but actively conspire to hide and excuse the rapes and abuse and even the murder of young girls, simply because they were white and British?
I’ve seen various explanations advanced, from the peculiarities of cousin-marriage among South Asians to certain doctrines from the Quran, like the reprehensible “What the right hand possesses” (ma malakat aymanukum), which justifies, in no uncertain terms, the taking of sex slaves from among the women of non-Muslim groups.
There’s probably some truth to all of these suggestions. But it’s also easy to forget a very simple anthropological fact in the scramble for understanding. It’s an unsettling fact, too. This is just what people do and always have done. It’s actually normal. In expecting people to behave otherwise, we’re the exception, the oddities — not them.
For the vast majority of human history, in the vast majority of human societies, individuals have had no obligations whatsoever to the out-group — to anybody who doesn’t belong to the tribe, as it were. And I really mean that: no obligations whatsoever. You don’t have to help other people if they’re not from your tribe. You don’t have to be nice to them. Whatever things you have to do for your parents and siblings and your fellow clan members, by virtue of their being your parents, siblings and fellow clan members, go totally out the window when an outsider rocks up, unannounced, at your chabono (that’s an Amazonian hut, by the way).
Evans-Pritchard’s presuppositions about the basic duties of individuals to one another weren’t basic at all
Indeed, in many societies throughout history, deceiving and generally outfoxing members of other tribes has been elevated to an art, and considered something admirable and to be celebrated, especially if you’re talking about longstanding rivals, like those chaps from across the river who wear their hair or penis-slings on the opposite side or paint their faces white instead of yellow.
As a former anthropologist, I know this is something my fellow practitioners used to learn fairly early on in their encounters with foreign tribes (most anthropologists these days stay much closer to home and study things like refugee theatre companies and activist sex workers, tribes with which they share a much closer kinship). Perhaps the most famous example of this learning process comes from E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer (1940), a study of a group of Nilotic pastoralists who roamed South Sudan with their cattle.
Returning to Nuerland in 1931, after an abortive attempt to contact his objects the year before, Evans-Pritchard finally arrived, with the help of the American mission at Nasser, at a cattle camp on the Nyading river. There the mild-mannered, Oxford-educated Catholic quickly discovered the local cowherds were in no mood to carry his bags or entertain his questions about their social structure.
He writes: “Nuer are expert at sabotaging an inquiry and until one has resided with them for some weeks they steadfastly stultify all efforts to elicit the simplest facts and to elucidate the most innocent practices.”
Evans-Pritchard provides a vivid example of this “paralysing” behaviour, in the form of a typical dialogue between himself and a Nuer man named Cuol.
I: Who are you?
Cuol: A man.
I: What is your name?
Cuol: Do you want to know my name?
I: Yes.
Cuol: Do you want to know my name?
I: Yes, you have come to visit me in my tent and I would like to know who you are.
Cuol: All right. I am Cuol, what is your name?
I: My name is Pritchard.
Cuol: What is your father’s name?
I: My father’s name is also Pritchard.
Cuol: No, that cannot be true. You cannot have the same name as your father.
I: It is the name of my lineage. What is the name of your lineage?
Cuol: Do you want to know the name of my lineage?
I: Yes.
Cuol: What will you do with it if I tell you? Will you take it to your country?
I: I don’t want to do anything with it. I just want to know it since I am living at your camp.
Cuol: Oh, well we are Lou.
I: I did not ask the name of your tribe. I know that. I am asking you the name of your lineage.
Cuol: Why do you want to know the name of my lineage?
I: I don’t want to know it.
Cuol: Then why do you ask me for it? Give me some tobacco.
Evans-Pritchard called this infuriating game and its effects on his state of mind, “Nuerosis.” Very droll. “I have obtained in Zandeland [another area he did fieldwork] more information in a few days than I obtained in Nuerland in as many weeks,” he adds.
The anthropologist was only really treated with a measure of respect, and his inquiries answered in good faith, when he started to become a member of the community and be “accepted as such.” This coincided with his acquiring “a few cattle,” which were the most precious commodity a Nuer man could own and the idiom through which every aspect of Nuer life was understood.
There’s a very serious point here. What Evans-Pritchard discovered, in his encounter with these very alien people, was that even his presuppositions about sociality and the basic duties of individuals to one another — the commitment to speak the truth foremost — weren’t basic at all. The Nuer simply felt no obligation to him, as an outsider, not to lie. Unless, perhaps, it could get them some tobacco or other useful Western items, and even then Evans-Pritchard had no way to be sure they really were telling the truth and not just spinning him a line to get what they wanted.
One of anthropology’s great cautionary tales involves the American anthropologist Margaret Mead. Mead travelled to Samoa in the 1920s and described in her book Coming of Age in Samoa a society totally free of the Western world’s sexual taboos, to its great benefit. The book captivated Western audiences and seemed to suggest a happy alternative to our damaging complexes and hangups, a world of joyful love and sex without guilt and shame — until it was revealed, decades later, by Derek Freeman, that Mead’s informants had been systematically lying to her about their sexual lives because she was an outsider and a woman. The whole thing was a dream. Mead’s Samoa didn’t exist and never had.
Critics of liberalism and multiculturalism, especially critics of the postmodern variety, see them both as a kind of Western imperialism, whilst denying that they are such. These people are right. Presented as neutral political and interpretive frames that allow the world’s great multitude of peoples to live happily side by side and “be who they really are” in peace and harmony, liberalism and multiculturalism are nothing of the sort. They smuggle in values, not least of all a commitment to moral universalism, to individual over group, to law over custom, that are utterly partial in their origin and force, and to which the vast majority of people throughout history have not subscribed and probably couldn’t even if they wanted to.
The multicultural experiment forced on Britain and other Western nations by their ruling classes is not a genuine encounter with the Other. It’s a dangerous fantasy, a delusion of shared humanity that ends in disaster. We’ve been told these people are just like us, though they may wear a different skin colour and worship a different god — but they’re not. Just how different they are is a lesson our rulers still have yet to learn, if they even care to learn it at all, but one tens of thousands of young white girls will never be able to forget.
