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The Guru and the Conjurer: Transactions in Knowledge and the Shaping of Culture in

Southeast Asia and Melanesia


Author(s): Fredrik Barth
Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Dec., 1990), pp. 640-653
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2803658
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THE GURU AND THE CONJURER:

TRANSACTIONS IN KNOWLEDGE AND THE SHAPING OF

CULTURE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA AND MELANESIA

FREDRIK BARTH

University of Oslo & Emory University

Differences between traditions of knowledge are illuminated by comparing the transactions in


edge by which they are reproduced. Whereas the adept in Melanesia initiates novices, the Guru of the
great Asian traditions teaches disciples. The initiator is constrained by Melanesian ideas of loss entailed
in downward conversions of value, whereas the Guru obtains merit from giving supremely valued
enlightenment for modest material returns. Finally, the initiator manipulates iconic knowledge in a regim
of secrecy, whilst the Guru must verbalize his knowledge, and enhance its mass so as not to lose status
by running out of maternals. These contrastive binds and pressures generate deep differences in the form,
scale and distribution of knowledge in Southeast Asia and Melanesia, with profound historic effects on
their cultures, even where similar substantive ideas are embraced.

I
In his Huxley Memorial Lecture of thirty years ago, Firth (1959) rightly observed that
Thomas Henry Huxley is primarily famed for his work as a zoologist, rather than as
an anthropologist. Yet in terms of a broader tradition of scholarship I would urge that
he provides contemporary social anthropology with an ideal and a challenge. Huxley's
genius lay in his willingness to abandon an established framework ofimmobile, ordered
knowledge for the tentative and incomplete, but dynamic, paradigm offered by Darwin.
But having embraced its vision mainly on the basis of intuition, he proceeded to apply
rigorous scholarship and creative imagination to the task of re-casting received bio-
logical wisdom in its new and unproven terms. It would be a fitting tribute to him
today if we could take a small step in the same direction for our conception of cultural
and social phenomena.
I shall try to do so through the comparison of two great ethnographic regions -
Southeast Asia and Melanesia. Let me begin very concretely with materials from two
areas, in northern Bali and in Inner New Guinea, based on fieldwork in each area,
and then build up my analysis from the insights these materials may provide.
I came to Bali after New Guinea, and readily saw the contrast we have been taught
to expect: from the neolithic jungles of New Guinea I had arrived in a literate, great
civilization, with plough and cereal agriculture, markets, temples, and courts. Clearly,
Bali lies at the eastern end of Kroeber's great Oikumene of Old World Civilizations.
A kind of cultural Wallace Line separates it to the East from the nearby, and physically
in many ways similar, regions of Melanesia.

Man (N.S.) 25, 640-53


* Huxley Memorial Lecture, 1989

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FREDRIK BARTH 641

Then, watching a cremation on one sticky, tropical day, the sound of exploding
bamboos suddenly transported me back to New Guinea, and a sense ofthe undercurrent
of Melanesian features welled up in me: Bali as an animated and animistic world; with
people whose interpersonal morality is governed by fears of sorcery; with a deep
dependence on close ancestors and elaborate ancestor worship for personal welfare and
agricultural fertility; and troubled by the idea of a loose connexion between soul and
body and the consequent danger of soul-loss. Conversely, I was reminded of particular,
overtly Indian, images and concepts that crop up here and there in New Guinea, such
as the idea of cycles or ages of history; or that of the fontanelle as a door for spiritual
communication.
Ever since trait distribution and diffusionism were demolished as defensible scholar-
ship, anthropology has stood without any methodology for such comparisons, or for
systematic regional work in general. We have nothing like the animal geography that
underwrites the zoologists' Wallace Line, or the geological mapping that identifies the
Caledonian Shield. The stress on in-depth contextual knowledge - on which social
anthropology is rightly based - results in a myopic localism, so that we can only
compare places and cultures in terms of highly abstracted and partial structures. Inad-
vertently, these comparisons then become framed by the simple stereotypes which the
place-names evoke: Bali; Inner New Guinea. That is not good enough. How might
we do better, and start building a social anthropology which could inform regional
and historical syntheses, and thereby achieve the dynamic character needed to give an
account of variable and changing humanity? In the present case: if my intuition is
correct that Bali and New Guinea share many similar ideas and cultural impulses -
then how could that be demonstrated? And if it is so, why then do they look so
different? What might be the social and cultural processes behind a history that fashions
such different social and cultural forms from related ideas, images and elements?
We need a springboard to start asking such questions with any effect, a perspective
which allows us to address and unite a wide range of themes in our discipline in one
theoretical framework. The one I would favour builds on the ideas of a Sociology of
Knowledge, which would illuminate the way ideas are shaped by the social milieu in
which they develop. But we need to transform that into an 'Anthropology of Knowl-
edge', capable of handling esoteric cultural materials and a broad range of social
organizations, so as to depict the conditions of creativity of those who cultivate
knowledge, and the forms which follow.
Thus, when I recently tried to analyse the processes of cultural reproduction and
creativity in an area of New Guinea (cf. Barth 1987), I focused on the importance of
secrecy and mystery in those traditions, and stressed the effects which such an orientation
has on the interactions of initiators and novices, and thereby on the cultural forms that
are produced in that interaction. The basic idea which people in this part of New
Guinea embrace seems to be that the value of knowledge is enhanced by veiling it
and sharing it with as few as possible. From this principle, I felt I could derive a range
of consequences for the direction of their creativity, and the contents of their cultural
traditions.
Moving to Bali, I met a very different view when a Balinese Muslim teacher, Guru
Ali Akbar, explained to me the premiss which he embraces. 'There is', he said, 'no
merit from even the deepest religious knowledge unless you teach it'. We see here two
opposed principles, two modes of managing knowledge in social interaction. Where

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642 FREDRIK BARTH

the New Guinea priest in a mystery cult, like a conjurer, tries to withhold the essential
truths from his audience even while he initiates them as novices, the task of the Guru
is to lay bare that essence. The implication of this contrast is the major theme of my
paper: hence its title.
For Guru All Akbar and his fellow villagers the essential Guru was epitomized by
his teacher Haji Maxfuz, who had expired about fifteen years before my arrival. From
his mountain slope village in northern Bali, Maxfuz went as a young man to study in
Lombok, then Java, and finally Mecca. There he ended up teaching Shafi law in the
Masjid-i-Haram itself for three years before returning home to become Imam of his
native village. 'He always taught!' the villagers told me. 'If he saw or heard someone
in the village lane doing wrong, he would immediately stop, and teach and explain
and instruct him ... One word from Maxfuz Guru, and everybody listened'. Thus the
Guru's activities involved study and travel, with cumulative learning and a harvest of
knowledge from a wide region, in the process contributing to shared standards and
intellectual cosmopolitanism; followed by teaching and instruction of the public, and
of a cadre of disciples as potential successors - in other words, an active and intended
cultural reproduction through a systematic and perpetual activity as educator. No such
discourse takes place in traditional New Guinea. There, persons who hold exceptional
knowledge do not teach, though they employ their knowledge to lead public ritual
and also to initiate novices. In their management of knowledge they pulsate between
long periods of secrecy and brief frenzies of stage-managed revelations, where they
make mysteries immanent - but not necessarily understandable - to a congregation or
a handful of overwhelmed novices.
Rather than entering into a discussion ofvariations and intermediate or mixed forms,
we achieve more in a brief compass by drawing the essential contrast between two
ideal types.1 Let me focus initially on the respective roles of these two contrasting
statuses. These are social roles, culturally constructed on syndromes of premisses and
concepts. The Guru realizes himself by reproducing knowledge, the initiator by
hedging it. Their role injunctions entail entirely different demands on how their
knowledge must be husbanded. The Guru must provide continuously: he should explain,
instruct, know and exemplify, and thereby he implants elements from a prolific tradition
in the minds of pupils and public. The initiator guards treasured secrets until the
climactic day when he must create a performance, a drama which transforms the
novices.

II
The contrast should be emphasized, because of its formative consequences. The two
roles propel a multiplicity of actors to do quite different things, and take quite different
things into consideration. I wish to demonstrate the cumulative effects of such different
role performances on the very traditions that are being transmitted. Note that my
argument does not seek to show how native concepts 'reflect' or 'represent' a structure.
Nor does it merely identify alternative ways in which the functional requirements of
cultural reproduction are being handled. I am trying to expose the wellsprings of two
basically different informational economies, by identifying the pressures that direct the
intellectual efforts of incumbents of these two very different roles.
First, the initiator. The elements of an initiation are composed of the key objects
and acts of the community's ritual and religion, that is, the essehtial sacred knowledge

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FREDRIK BARTH 643

of the culture. I have tried elsewhere (Barth 1975; 1987) to communicate something
of the power and sophistication of the tradition of knowledge transmitted through the
male initiations of the Ok peoples of Inner New Guinea. Using secrecy as their means,
they conjure forth a subtle experience of mystery; and by manipulating concrete
symbols they construct a complex and moving tradition of knowledge. The initiator
must command this body of knowledge, and know which items belong in the particular
step of the initiation he is performing. But his task is to put this knowledge to use and
affect the novices by its force, not simply to explicate the knowledge to them. To this
purpose, he reveals secrets by manipulating concrete symbols; but he also performs
covert operations, and secret rites before and after his sessions with the novices, so as
to achieve the intended results (see Barth 1975: chs 3-10, 24). More than merely
transmitting knowledge to novices, he should be able to stage-manage a spellbinding
performance. If the meanings of the symbols do not come across to the novices, it is
enough that they remain enigmatic, so the sense of important secrets is reinforced.
What is required of him is to produce an exemplar of a sacred performance, with as
much nerve and power to evoke as possible. The novices are supposed to be transformed
by the rite itself, not by what has been transmitted to them of the knowledge it contains.
The task of a Guru, on the contrary, is to instruct, clarify and educate in his relation
with his audience, so that his disciples learn from him, in a personal and enduring
relationship. In contrast to the initiator, who can persist in an interminable oscillation
between revealing and hiding, the Guru's task is done once he has successfully trans-
mitted his message. His first requirement, then, is that he must not run out of materials:
a Guru lasts only so long as he has more to teach. Elegance in performance is far less
important. Secondly, his different statements at various times must be, or appear to
be, consistent. If he contradicts himself, or if his store of knowledge is exhausted, he
is quickly eclipsed by rivals or pupils. These pressures should indeed be realities familiar
enough to academics.
Unlike the initiator, the Guru strengthens his performance
a) by the sheer mass of knowledge he commands;
b) by replenishing it with more items: borrowing from accessible colleagues,
extending his competence to more sectors;
c) by creativity: inventing elaborations, involutions or refinements;
d) or by subdividing knowledge into increments, introducing requirements that
ration out the teachings in smaller portions, making a longer and slower course
of studies. Nor will he be unfamiliar with
e) strategies of mystifying, complicating and interposing an elaborate ceremonial
language of honorific or technical terms; but these have a somewhat different
purpose from the mystifications ofthe conjurer; they serve primarily to lengthen
and enhance the relationship between Guru and pupil, and to exclude outsiders
from the circle of disciples.
The phenomena I adduce in these gross terms are not, of course, new discoveries.
The novelty lies in the kind of modelling I am favouring, and the kinds of connexions
that thereby spring to attention. Scholars of religion have discussed similar materials
in terms of the functions of an instituted priesthood, or have applied the concept of
charisma and discussed the problems of its institutionalization. Others have emphasized
literacy. Weber's and Merton's analyses of vocations and professions take us a major
step further, as do modern studies of the sociology of science, in alerting us to the

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644 FREDRIK BARTH

various ways in which professional knowledge is controlled and sanctioned. These


points refer to the different ways in which knowledge is conceived in different cultur
as property, wealth, power, a precondition for membership in a circle, or as a technical
precondition for effective action. But I am arguing that it is by focusing directly on
the sociology of the transactions over knowledge that we go to the core and identify the
dynamo that generates these conceptions, institutions and expressions, and thus avoid
the all-too-common exercise of merely coining names for phenomena which remain
unexplained.

III
Let me pursue further the implications of this very simple model of the Guru, to show
the marginally transforming effects his activities can have on the very tradition of
knowledge which he is practising. To visualize these entailments, we should contrast
this tradition of knowledge with those of Melanesia, and not with an idealized vision
of the sciences of the West.
1. A Guru is required to talk to his audience. What might be the effects of this
verbalization, as compared to the more heavily non-verbal, embedded per-
formances of initiators? Inevitably, the two modes of articulation cultivate
basically different ways of knowing. The novices who participate in an initiation
are changed by having taken part - it is knowing by seeing, being there, being
acted upon. A Guru's teaching, his words and reflections, are by contrast
radically decontextualized - the pupil does not need to have been there, or to
have done it - he only needs to understand it and remember it. This also
individualizes the knowledge: it becomes available to the single person's
memory in a different way, as verbal information you can internalize, carry
with you, retrieve and reproduce and share in a later incident of communication
with someone else. You do not need the co-operation of other knowing persons
to re-create it, as does an initiator.
2. The knowledge taught by the Guru is worked over and becomes logically
integrated in the process of explication and conversation. This is quite different
from the kind of consistency and integration that arises from function and use:
for example, the implicit structures underlying practice like the grammar of a
spoken language, or the patterns embedded in the rights and duties that obtain
between kin in a community, which anthropologists abstract as a kinship system.
Guru-taught knowledge becomes, on the contrary, 'logically' integrated by the
efforts of Gurus and their critics to apply explicit and conscious premisses of
their own making: the main relevance of their statements is to other statements,
not to action. Such Guru-managed knowledge is free to develop into the most
extraordinary scholasticism. But it certainly encourages and cultivates a vastly
elaborated production of cultural forms and expressions. We see this in the
contrast between the gross mass of cultural imagery that is turned out in Bali,
compared to even the richest cultural centres in New Guinea.
3. I also find it plausible that characteristic and heavy pressures are placed on pupils
and disciples. They are enrolled in the Guru's own project, and will be en-
couraged to develop a self-elevating conscience, a constantly demanding
conception or ideal of self cast in the image of the Guru's teachings.

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FREDRIK BARTH 645

Wikan has explored how Balinese mould their own consciousness by what they
call ngabe keneh, 'guiding the feeling-thought'. This involves controlling and shaping
one's own impulses, thoughts and acts in terms ofideals ofbalance and positive thinking,
and is regarded as a necessity for every person, if one is to achieve a happy and socially
responsible life (Wikan 1989). Its practice is thus incumbent on all, and conceptually
independent of any particular relations to Gurus. Yet, I am struck by how compatible
the mode of conception is with the kinds of knowledge epitomized and reproduced
by Gurus, and find it plausible to see it as a precipitate of their teaching activities over
the generations. Certainly, moral discourse is incomparably richer in Bali than in the
communities I have known in New Guinea.
Perhaps I need to emphasize that being a Guru must not be thought to propel one
to practise the pure ideals of the Enlightenment. First, we should note that Gurus
among Balinese Muslims are also regarded as the quintessential wizards; their knowledge
gives mystical power and their curse of a disciple is as dangerous and devastating as a
mother's curse of her child. These powers are distinguished, both by Gurus and by
the lay public, as a separable and dark aspect of their knowledge; but also the more
orthodox side of their scholarship is pursued along less than purely rationalist lines. I
have noted that it certainly does not entail the use of Occam's razor, but rather
encourages elaborations and involutions. It likewise need not entail an empirical
orientation, whereby knowledge is falsified through confrontation with observed
reality. And as powerfully as it motivates the accumulation and elaboration of knowl-
edge so as to have something to teach, it also motivates a search for other ways by
which the Guru can secure his position on something more lasting than superior
mastery of knowledge. The question of how he can best stabilize his position of
authority will always be a nagging, existential question for every Guru.
Ubiquitously, one solution adopted is to model the Guru-disciple relation on that
of fathers and children. Indeed, Balinese Muslims speak in terms of a perpetual debt
which demands the same kind of respect for Father, Guru and God. Bali-Hindus
likewise use the father-child idiom in their relations to Brahmin priests, as well as to
the variety of sages, healers, advisors and teachers to whom they can apply the term
Guru.2 Bali-Hindus also entertain the idea that deep religious knowledge should only
be cultivated late in the normal person's life, and that systematic religious studies are
dangerous unless authorized, and easily lead to insanity. This most conveniently
enhances the position of Gurus by delaying the ascent of their successors. Indeed,
efforts to regulate access to knowledge by requiring authorization, and various forms
of legitimation, often go hand-in-hand with the strongest imperative of teaching and
learning. This is most striking in materials I am finding in Bhutan, where I have recently
begun fieldwork.

IV
Bhutan is a thoroughly Buddhist country, and Buddhist philosophy and cosmology
define a life-project which is fundamentally structured on the Guru-disciple relation-
ship. Each person's goal, according to this philosophy, should be the unrelenting search,
through myriad reincamations, for enlightenment and liberation, with the ultimate
Guru - the Lord Buddha and other Bodhisattvas - as the supreme teacher and example.
In the Mahayana/Tibetan monasticism practised in Bhutan, this highly individual
path through study and meditation to salvation is bound into tight institutional

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646 FREDRIK BARTH

regulation by a system controlling authorization: only senior lamas can give the wang
empowerment/blessing that secures you merit from your studies; and only they provide
the lung authorization and directives that open the path for learning, and should precede
every phase of study. Thus all religious teaching, although it is based on sacred written
texts, is regulated as a hierarchical process of handing knowledge down from individual
Gurus to disciples. This order is embodied in the routines of teaching in every
monastery: the Abbott lectures to the Head teachers, the Head teachers repeat and
explain to the monks, the monks pass the message on to the monk pupils. For every
segment of knowledge, the 'lineage' of teachers who have passed it on must be recited
and learned by the pupil, to legitimate the possession and vouch for the authenticity
of the knowledge.
Again, this may seem to have its analogue in the ownership and 'copyright' to
knowledge so widely found in Melanesia; and I would suggest that this copyrighting
aspect makes it welcome and helpful for teachers who sense their position is precarious.
But it occurs in a very different context of premisses from its Melanesian parallels. The
overt weight in Bhutan is placed not on limitation and erititlement, but on authen-
tication, and on the need to facilitate teaching and learning, so as better to pass on
knowledge.
Thus, the 'lineage' of teachers which goes with every chapter of knowledge should
ideally trace its source right back to the Lord Buddha himself Fortunately, the doctrine
of reincarnation allows such 2,500-year lineages to be drastically shortened, since
tracing the source to a known reincarnation allows you to jump the generations back
to the first life of the Guru in question. There is also an extensive mythology about
rediscovering the texts of ancient sages, found in lakes and caves by more recent saints
and mystics. The truly authoritative source for all traditions is, in Bhutan, a certain
Guru Rimpoche, who brought Buddhism to Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan from a place
known in classical texts as Uddiyana, and who was himself a reincarnation of the Lord
Buddha. To my particular delight, this Guru Rimpoche - 'Precious Teacher' - seems
to be a verified historical person, Padmasambhava, who came from the valley of Swat
in the eighth century, and carried the then living Buddhism - which I have seen in
Swat only as ancient, crumbling stupas - and transplanted it to Tibet and Bhutan.
There is not a trace of that vast body of knowledge which was early tantric Buddhism
in Swat today, where I, some years ago, collected quite other spiritual genealogies from
the present saints and scholars there, linking them from pupil to teacher back to other
sources again: Muslim scholars and sages in Bukhara, Samarkand and Iraq.
There is a breathtaking lesson here: whole, complex traditions of knowledge seem
to be carried by single persons. Not only Guru Rimpoche: at other points in history,
other sages - Naropa out of India, Chinese pilgrims into China - have performed
similar feats (cf. Snellgrove & Richardson 1968). But from my argument it would
follow that only through the teaching activities of Gurus could such bodies of knowl-
edge become capsulated, individualized and transportable. Thus could Tantric
Buddhism be carried by a handful of Gurus such as Padmasambhava to be grafted on
to other social roots in the Eastern Himalayas. Only because it had been shaped in this
verbalized, taught form was it possible for it to be removed to Bhutan, so that it now
lives on there, a thousand years after it disappeared in Swat where it had been formed.
Note the distances, and the size of the regions over which these complex cultural
systems were transported by solitary Gurus: from Swat to Bhutan through the High

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FREDRIK BARTH 647

Himalayas is about as far as from Central New Guinea to Vanuatu, or in Africa from
the Ashanti to the Ituri Forest or from Nuerland to Dar es Salaam. It is not that persons
may not, in all probability, have travelled such distances also in pre-colonial Africa or
in island Melanesia. But where Gurus did not flourish, individual movements could
never have had such cultural consequences. The initiator is linked to his context, and
his knowledge is untransportable except to immediately neighbouring groups, or
through the movements of whole populations.
This model may provide the key to that remarkable historical penetration of Indian
civilization into Southeast Asia, which involved neither conquest nor large-scale
population movement. It permeated the region with Sanskrit words and concepts at
least as thoroughly as Latin ever permeated northern Europe (cf. Gonda 1952 for an
impressive documentation of this legacy). It carried philosophy, medicine, religions
and a multitude ofideas into the archipelago, so that today you can attend a performance
of the Hindu epic Ramayana in Bali, as far from where it was authored as is Norway.
Half a millennium later, Muslim scholars in the same Guru tradition effected a similar
penetration into the same area by basically the same means - reaching right into that
little village on the northern slope of the mountains of Bali, where I picked it up.

V
To make such an account compelling, I need to show that the key features I have
highlighted in my two ethnographic vignettes of Gurus and initiators in two small
localities are indeed ubiquitous for the respective larger areas over which I generalize;
and I need to explore the dynamic that lends the activities of Gurus such formidable
powers of cultural penetration.
First to the latter point. Let me guard against any simple value imputation on my
part, that verbalized and expanding knowledge is somehow inherently superior to
knowledge which is iconically codified. I am merely concerned to expose how this
difference in capacity to proliferate and move has affected cultural distributions over
large areas. To do this properly, a systematic and comparative analysis would have to
be made of knowledge transactions in Southeast Asia and Melanesia. To explore the
most conspicuous consequences of such transactions in Southeast Asia, one would wish
to focus on the relations of Gurus as priests and lawyers to the Kings of the area. Today,
another variant of that same basic dynamic may be represented in the spread of Islamic
fundamentalism.
But let me rather work with the more modest forms of these transactions, which
the anthropologist more readily sees in vivo. They may well expose most clearly the
fundamental premisses in the cultural process. We find very many variants; but a highly
developed one is exemplified in the Muslim village in northern Bali where I worked.
There, every child is enrolled with a Guru of the parents' own free choice. This
establishes a life-long link, which however can be superseded by another such link in
later life. The Guru becomes teacher and father-confessor to the child. The child and
his parents on their part start giving nulungin - gifts, and free labour on the Guru's
fields. Whenever the two parties meet, the Guru gives barkat, blessing, to the disciple;
and the disciple offers respect and submission to his Guru. Among Hindus in northern
Bali, there is a similar emphasis on voluntary exchanges and gift relations between
Gurus, healers, wizards, etc., and their individual clients. These transactions are

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648 FREDRIK BARTH

independent of, but often parallel to, whatever institutional roles the same persons may
have as priests, respectively Imams, of congregations and communities.
Again, a vignette from my Muslim village: 'Haji Dahlan was famous in my childhood,
because he could give the complete Arabic texts, and then translate them into Balinese.
His madrassa was always full: he taught on the platform under his rice-barn ... and there
would be 60 or 80 pupils crowded together there... But after Maxfuz Guru came
home, he was able not only to translate, but to teach Arabic, really properly. Imam
Dahlan was good; but Haji Maxfuz was excellent, really superior'. And so people
crowded to him, and his influence, and income, grew. In the process, new ideas from
distant places penetrated the community.
In this conception of the Guru, we can readily recognize the influence of ubiquitous
Indian institutions and conceptions. Even more than Hindu Bali and the vast and
varied areas of western Indonesia and mainland Southeast Asia, India exhibits a con-
fusing exuberance of Gurus of diverse kinds, from pandits, sadhus and sannyasis to
swamis, babajis, fakirs and storytellers - one exemplar among which has recently been
vividly portrayed in Narayan (1989). But in an effort to create order in this living
diversity, we must not unthinkingly fall into a structural-functional routine by con-
structing a taxonomy, and then limit our thinking to its categories of formal statuses
and groups. I wish to grasp general features of the management and transmission of
knowledge, and the resulting informational economy of communities and regions, not
the structure of particular instituted relations. Most germane to my interests are the
analyses provided by Marriott, Inden and others, based on classical Indian texts, of
ubiquitous Indian ideas of personhood and hierarchy (see Marriott & Inden 1974;
1977).
Let me summarize briefly what they tell us. Indian concepts of personhood, they
point out, emphasize the cognitive non-duality of action and substance, law and nature.
Each kind of person in society embodies a characteristic code, and the actions enjoined
by these codes are thought to transform the substances in which they are embodied.
Both body and social identity are maintained by the same flow of substances, and if
these are appropriate to your code, they will give good results. What Westerners have
ineptly seen as a focus merely on avoiding pollution is more a matter of handling the
upward- and downward-flowing substances in conformity with your code.
Rank is expressed in a syntax involving value transformations and exchange. Giving
is valued over receiving, and different forms of prestation are differentially valued.
Knowledge is valued highest, as the essence of generative substance; whereas non-
generative substances, mixed substances, and residues - especially from lower persons
- are valued lowest. Most conspicuously in the occupational castes of India, the
respective 'codes of conduct' spell out transactional positions, and appropriate ways of
being.
Clearly, this same philosophical scheme is embodied in the conception of the Guru
that I have modelled. Thus, the Guru does the right thing and enhances his own rank
by giving freely of what is most precious - true knowledge - to the lower ranks. They,
on their part, gain merit from giving back grains, labour and respect: not as items in
a calibrated exchange, but as activity and prestations which are morally appropriate to
them.3
There are some substantive analogues to these Indian ideas in Melanesian conceptions
of bodily substance, purity and power - which may indeed reflect the substratum of

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FREDRIK BARTH 649

shared ideas to which I initially referred. But there is a fundamental contrast in the
conception of social relations between the Indian world and Melanesia. In Melanesia,
social relations are paradigmatically established and sustained by the exchange of
material objects, and to that extent they are egalitarian. But objects are differentially
valued, and social rank is immanent in holding and owning the more highly valued
objects. Moreover, any exchange of objects that converts value down is seen to entail
a painful loss ofrank. This results in the division ofMelanesian economies into relatively
distinct spheres of exchange, in contrast to the perpetual flow of upward and downward
conversions on which Indian systems are based.
This is not just a question of economics. It has been increasingly recognized that
Melanesian exchange transactions are themselves symbolically ordered, and embody a
cultural construction of reality (Schieffelin 1980). In their deeper and more collective
aspect, Melanesians focus attention on the problem of replacement, rather than on
mere norms of reciprocity. That is to say, they are concerned with the enigmas of
reproduction (Weiner 1980). But a 'theory' of reproduction is not articulated, only its
application to material transactions. And, as Strathern (1988: 223 sqq.) puts it, the
anticipated outcome is the aesthetic trap of the gift economies of Melanesia. The
conceptual content of communication becomes embedded in the relationship itself
and is not the object of abstract representation: the Gurus' characteristic exegeses and
pontifications are not performed. Thus, though Melanesian initiators create relation-
ships, they cannot author rules: they only influence another's acts within the parameters
set by their relationships (Strathern 1988: 324). Gurus, by contrast, are eminently placed
to 'author rules' and 'influence the acts of others' by means of the abstracted, verbalized,
capsuled and transportable injunctions that are their characteristic products.
To summarize the Melanesian premisses for our present purposes: recognition and
rank in Melanesia are characteristically derived from supremely valued objects. You
give these out only in delayed reciprocity for other, equally or more valued objects,
which will come back to you and stick to your skin and give you enhanced rank. But
by these directives, you engage yourself in an informational economy where the
transmission and reproduction of knowledge are painfully at cross-purposes with your
basic value premisses. Rank should be something you obtain from holding and hoarding
secrets, not from giving them downwards by teaching. Yet you are trapped in a double
bind, since the alternative of not transacting produces no relations. Recall Oliver's
(1955) Solomon Island aphorism on the asocial miser: they say, 'spinach smokes it'.
He has no durable valuables, only greens; he does not exchange them but leaves them
on the shelf over the fire where they become covered with soot; he is the proverbial
rubbish man. The only option open in Melanesia to the great man who knows secrets
is the act of sacrifice, namely a transaction with the ancestors. Only in relations with
them, through transactions over even greater values, can one actualize valued knowl-
edge without loss.

Let me schematize the argument:


* The Guru is conceived so that all his exchanges with others will entail converting
value 'down' - but this activity is seen as enhancing the rank of the giver.
* His characteristic product is composed of words - a highly decontextualized form
of knowledge.
* But with this product, he enters into stable, intensive reciprocal relations with
numerous disciples, giving knowledge and receiving lower forms of benefits,

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650 FREDRIK BARTH

* and thus he produces a spate of multiplication and elaboration of these forms of


knowledge, and related cultural products.

The Melanesian initiator, on the contrary, lives in an ambience which discourages


downward conversions.
* His valued knowledge can only be transacted with dead ancestors, in return for
the supreme boons of health and fertility.
* Only as initiator can he transmit and reproduce the knowledge with which he
has been entrusted, and this he can only do in an embedded context, as ritual
action.
* As a result, his relationship to novices remains a weak, ephemeral and temporary
bond,
* and the form of knowledge he perpetuates, though it may be strong on 'meaning',
is weak on abstraction and transportability, and relatively limited in mass.

The result of these contrastive binds and pressures is to propel indigenous Southeast
Asian and Melanesian intellectuals to follow very different trajectories and to generate
very different effects in their societies. Through their myriad activities they will tend
to shape cultural expressions into the characteristic Southeast Asian and Melanesian
forms respectively - regardless of where the particular images and ideas came from
that they are employing and developing. And so, the contrast between Asia and
Melanesia is reproduced, even as cultural items may pass across the divide. Culture
areas, then, are not only a product of past history: in a very real sense, they are being
made now, by the efforts of different intellectuals elaborating different kinds of knowl-
edge. As a result, our task in comparing culture areas is no longer just to provide a
synoptic account of the whole diversity of particular forms within each area; instead,
the major step is to identify the contrastive dynamics that generate convergent features
within each area or region.

VI
It would seem fitting to cap my presentation of this model by tracing the transformation
of some single cultural element as it passes between these two distinct worlds and is
transformed. But I have not aimed at an analysis whose crowning achievement would
be a historical reconstruction, nor have I aimed to identify the origins of particular
cultural traits. I find it far more interesting to try to formulate more general and
pervasive characteristics of cultural variants: to identify features such as relative mass,
regional segmentation or unity of major streams in larger regions, and the kinds of
knowledge and ways of knowing that are particularly developed from the different
prevailing premisses. Moreover, I wish to explain these features in terms of the model:
by considering the pressures and inducements imposed on intellectuals who are placed
in these contrasting transactional positions with respect to the knowledge they possess.
In this, my interests and the insights I seek need not be isomorphic with the purposes
or knowledge of those who live the patterns I describe, but must nonetheless be able
to account for and embrace their perspectives. Thus it is important to pursue a critical
ethnography of actors' perceived purposes, concepts and meanings, but without im-
puting omnipotence or hegemonic validity to native representations, in the fashion of
some currents of contemporary anthropological writing. On the contrary, I seek to
distinguish actors' purposes from the unsought entailments of their acts; and in this

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FREDRIK BARTH 651

particular analysis I am primarily concerned with the inadvertent, cumulative effects


of activity to which actors are propelled by perceived necessities or advantages attaching
to other aspects of the activity.
Thus, I would argue that Gurus seek knowledge from far places out of an acquired
religious and intellectual interest, and so as to achieve fame, but not so as to homogenize
a regional tradition - although that will be a conspicuous result of their activity.
Likewise, they fashion their increments of creativity and systematization so as better
to prepare for, and be compelling in, the execution of their teaching role. They need
have no conception or awareness of their contribution to an emerging tradition of
knowledge; and even where they may have such an awareness, they need not be
impressed with its importance and value. Other considerations, such as the need to
enhance their store of knowledge in order to be able to consummate an identity as
Guru, are sufficient to propel them to those acts which marginally, in their con-
sequences, contribute to building and transforming the traditions of knowledge in
which they are enrolled. But for us as social anthropologists, it seems both important
and interesting to note these cumulative effects on the content and form of a regional
tradition, and thereby to take a small step towards a generalized understanding of the
dynamics of culture.
Above all, the theories of culture and society which arise from the perspective itself,
and the features of culture and society which its models are capable of depicting and
explaining, should hold our attention. Methodologically, I believe the key element to
be the focus on efficient causes: the cultural and interactional enablements and con-
straints that affect actors, with consequences that can be seen in the patterning of
resulting acts and their aggregate entailments. In this way, the micro-level where most
of our anthropological observations are located, and the macro-level of institutional
forms and historical processes, can be integrated. Keesing (1987 and elsewhere) provides
perhaps the finest examples of such integrated analyses, at once theoretically informed
and ethnographically contextualised; but I would suggest that we can achieve more
determined and dynamic models by reversing the direction in which we trace these
connexions. Where Keesing uses the perspective of a sociology of knowledge to read
from knowledge and its distribution in order to decode basic modes of conception and
reveal structures of power, I wish to move the opposite way, generating features of
knowledge and ideas from the practice that arises from particular forms of empower-
ment, namely, as Gurus and as initiators.
Recent anthropological theory has rightly moved away from the representation of
cultures as 'wholes', and has recognized the multiplicity and multivocality that char-
acterize the realities we live in. Rosaldo (1989) is particularly eloquent on this theme:
how every view is necessarily positioned, and no final 'truth' can be located. These
are insights that should compel us to redesign the representations we make of culture
and its variations (cf. Barth 1989). On the other hand, I am not happy to seek rest, as
some would, in a loose reference to 'multiple voices'. Rather, I draw the conclusion
that we must recast our concepts so as to be able to look elsewhere, in new places, for
determined forms and connexions. This liberates us from the holistic paradigm that
required us always to embed our modelling of particular cultural features in a broad
context ofpolitics, economy or kinship. Instead, we may focus our effort on identifying
processes which will have determined effect - at best, regardless of such context. The
perspective I have outlined above has the potential to produce relatively tightly argued

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652 FREDRIK BARTH

models ofconnexion and causality, without imposing a false 'wholeness' on the totality.
Clearly, there are other agencies than Gurus at work shaping society and knowledge
in Southeast Asia; and there is nothing in my argument that requires me to deny that
fact, or to claim that those other factors are unimportant. Yet that does not reduce the
force of the connexions to which I have pointed, or the impact which a strongly and
widely embraced ideal of the Guru will have on a tradition of knowledge. Indeed, we
should acknowledge that there are also distinctive currents of secrecy and bodies of
esoteric knowledge transmitted within Southeast Asia. But in contrast to Melanesia,
these must in Southeast Asia be pursued and realized within an ambience of ideas about
knowledge and how its value can be enhanced in transactions which clearly favour
the Guru mode and give it formative force.
I would venture to argue that wherever that role is embraced, if only by a few,
Gurus will start to have their effects: like termites, they will work and multiply -
building and systematizing and verbalizing- thus producing strongly determined results
in the culture and society they inhabit. Any fuller analysis of a region, however, would
of course have to identify the various other processes, partly at odds or crossing in
their impetus and their consequences, to capture the major dynamics of a historical
situation. But the principal contrast between the forms and regional patterns of dis-
tribution of knowledge in Southeast Asia and Melanesia that I have pointed to is, I
would argue, generated by the contrasting distribution of these two roles, and is a
historical reflection of their effects over time. Where pervasive aspects of culture in
Southeast Asia are shaped by the activities of thinkers in the Guru mould, Melanesian
cultures have been profoundly shaped by their absence, and the consequent hegemony
of initiators. Beyond specifying the parameters of transactions in knowledge that define
the conditions of their absence, the question of why Gurus should be absent may also
be a fruitful one, but has not been addressed here; I have been content to ask only
what follows from their absence.
In the most abstract and general terms, my plea is that we should stop relying so
narrowly on structural images - or to put it in a more fashionable idiom: we must
change our tropes. Structuralism leads to a search for an embedded pattern, and
misrepresents it as a logical necessity, where we know perfectly well that the phenomena
we are describing could well have been different, and are perpetually changing. Instead,
we should employ metaphors ofprocess, focused activity, marginal change, cumulative
transformation, and above all think more imaginatively in terms of determined models
of formative, generative processes. In designing such templates, we still have a great
deal to learn from Huxley, and from the giants on whose shoulders he stood.

NOTES

I wish to acknowledge helpful comments and suggestions on a draft of this article from Arjun Ap-
padurai, Roger Keesing, Renato Rosaldo, Buck Schieffelin, Marilyn Strathern, and as always my wife
Unni Wikan.
1 'Guru' is of course both etymologically and culturally an Indian concept, but one widely distribut
in Southeast Asia. The small Muslim minority in Ball has developed a distinctive, highly institutionalized
vanant which is in no sense representative of the whole region, or even of the Bali-Hindu majority
population. But the form developed in the Muslim community on which I focused a part of my field-
work in northern Bali serves graphically to epitomize basic and general features of the essential teacher in
most of the great Asian traditions.
2 Bali-Hindus seek spiritual guidance and advice from a far greater range of persons and statuses than
do Balinese Muslims. But the concept of Guru is also used widely in the vernacular among them to

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FREDRIK BARTH 653

designate the salient syndrome of teacher/mentor with supenor knowledge, to whom one enters into a
relationship as follower, pupil or intellectual dependant.
3 As noted by Raheja (1988), there may be certain dangers inherent in receiving such gifts from below;
but these need not distract us in this context.

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Le gourou et l'illusionniste: transactions dans la connaissance et la


formation de la culture dans l'Asie du Sud Est et la Melanesie

Resume
Des differences entre des traditions de connaissance sont mises en lumiere en comparant les transactions
dans la connaissance par lesquelles elles sont reproduites. Alors que l'expert en Melanesie initie des novices,
le gourou des grandes traditions asiatiques enseigne a des disciples. L'investigateur est contraint par des
idees melanesiennes de perte engagees en des conversions de valeur vers le bas alors que le gourou obtlent
du m&nte en donnant une edification supremement estimee pour des recompenses materielles modestes.
Finalement, l'investigateur manipule la connaissance iconique en secret, alors que le gourou doit traduire
en paroles sa connaissance et mettre en valeur sa masse afin de ne pas perdre de statut en venant a manquer
de materiaux. Ces constructions et ces pressions contrastantes engendrent de grandes differences dans la
forme, l'&chelle et la distribution de la connaissance dans l'Asie du Sud Est et la Melanesie, avec des effets
historiques profonds sur leurs cultures, meme oa des idees significatives similaires sont embrassees.

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