Anthropological Theory

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Book Review: Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance

Aris Anagnostopoulos
Anthropological Theory 2005; 5; 84
DOI: 10.1177/1463499605051076
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Anthropological Theory
Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com
Vol 5(1): 8490
10.1177/1463499605051076

Book reviews

Carlo Ginzburg. 2002. Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance. (trans. Martin Ryle
and Kate Soper). London, New York: Verso. pp. xv + 261. ISBN: (hbk) 1 85984 637 8.
Price: 20.
Carlo Ginzburgs trajectory as a historian gradually brings him closer to a pure history
of ideas. This aspect of his work, evident in his earlier, microhistorical studies, dominates this collection of nine essays focusing on the theme of distance. Ginzburgs intellectual history is engaging and original at its best, speculative at its worst, but always
imaginative and thought-provoking. Ginzburg has a unique way of thinking with
history, rather than thinking about it. At close inspection, his essays are not merely expositions of the evolution, or transfer of ideas from one epoch to the next, but a constant
elaboration on the theme of continuity and similarity and its historical deployment.
Ginzburg is in fact more concerned with pragmatic, rather than morphological, continuities: he seeks instances of direct textual transmissions, of hidden textual allusions
within other texts, of influences and echoes of earlier ideas. However, for him, contact
is not the only means of cultural transmission. As he himself asks in the second essay of
this volume, are convergences in representations and ideas to be accounted for in terms
of the universal characteristics of the sign and the image? Or are they related to a specific
cultural milieu and if so, which milieu? (p. 70).
Ginzburgs answer, albeit oblique, tends toward the latter. For him, however, the
notion of cultural milieu implies a much longer duration than the temporally curtailed
specificity it carries in anthropological usage. He is therefore able to identify long-term
similarities and continuities that most anthropologists would be reluctant to consider in
the first place, for example: our own culture has a quite special relationship,
compounded of both distance and derivation, with the culture of the Greeks (p. 71) or:
The function attributed in the Christian world to the relics of the saints must have led
to deep changes in our attitude toward images (p. 72). Most anthropologists would
object to Ginzburgs use of the collective our; yet the value of Ginzburgs approach is
that he demands a closer examination of accepted western intellectual givens, their
variety, their interconnections, and their historical transmutations.
The articles bear witness to the consistency of Ginzburgs scholarly method. He begins
by identifying morphological similarities between ideas, practices and texts, and then
pursues these similarities in an attempt to establish real connections. In this respect, his
work is a reflection on similarity and difference. On a much deeper level, it is also a
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Book reviews

dialectic between the universal and the circumstantial which Ginzburg is reluctant to
resolve in favour of the one or the other. Ginsburgs historical-anthropological concerns
can be read as a call to re-examine current anthropological preconceptions about
historical depth. In fact, as Ginzburg asserts throughout this work, temporal proximity
is not directly analogous to cultural similarity. In the essay on Distance and Perspective, he discusses the implications of this insight by tracing the evolution of the western
historical consciousness of transcendence from Saint Augustines attempt to accommodate the Old Testament with the New. In the same essay, he fleshes out the implications
of spatial metaphors, such as perspective and point of view, in western historical
thinking. In the following essay, called To Kill a Chinese Mandarin, the theme of
temporal and spatial distance is again reconsidered as a factor in the production of moral
sentiments.
What is remarkable about Ginzburg the writer is the unity between his method and
his delivery. In the first essay, Making it Strange, Ginzburg invites us to think about
current issues by rendering them unfamiliar, by taking wild detours through history and
showing their bewildering ancestry. The device of de-familiarization has a long literary
history, and Ginzburg applies it successfully in this collection of essays. This unity of
content and form makes this book instructive to anthropologists, especially as a response
to recent debates surrounding ethnographic writing. It is Ginzburgs expertise in rendering the familiar strange and the strange familiar which is also the hallmark of
anthropological writing.
For all its strengths, however, this collection of essays demonstrates the dangers of
adhering too closely to a textual conception of culture. The limitations of text may lead
one to over-interpret textual sources, or, worse still, utterances. The last essay of the
volume invites the reader to consider this issue using an exchange between Ginzburg
and Gian Franco Svidercoschi on the interpretation of a verbal slip made by Pope John
Paul II in a reconciliatory speech to the Jewish community in 1986. Ginzburg observes
that the Popes reference to the Jews as elder brothers echoes a passage in St Paul that
prophesises that the Jews (the elder brother) shall be servants to Christians (the younger).
The position of this essay at the conclusion of the collection serves as a reminder to the
reader of the limits of close textual interpretation, and the importance of cultural context
and circumstance.
Aris Anagnostopoulos
University of Kent, Canterbury
[email: aa65@ukc.ac.uk]

Roland Littlewood. 2002. Pathologies of the West: An Anthropology of Mental Illness in

Europe and America. London, New York: Continuum. pp. xvi + 286. ISBN: (hbk) 0
8264 5815 7, (pbk) 0 8264 5816 5. Price: 65, 25.
This book argues that an ambiguity between the naturalistic experience of constraint
by uncontrollable events and the personalistic experience of intentionality legitimates
many psychological disorders. The culture-bound syndromes are examples of a
communitys dilemmas and should neither be treated as oddities nor dismissed
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