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Four Years of Corruption 373
ogies. We have not made clear the ‘outreach’ of our ‘microanalysis’
into the more conventional world of ‘Theodoric and
Dante’. In terms of political history, we have not adequately
rendered ‘unto Caesar’. Oddly, no reviewer seems to have made
this point about our Four Definite Places in chapter III. But
many critics have expected to find familiar landmarks in later
chapters: they want ‘the city’, ‘the state’, and, if not ‘the
Church’, then some large consideration of religious change.
That request arises from our viewing cultural history in the
widest sense from the remote vantage point of microecologies.
In chapters XI and XII, we to some extent cut loose from
microecologies and venture into cultural anthropology. We are
then vulnerable to the charge that we do not fully analyse the
links between culture and ecology from the cultural end. Shaw
(2001: 452) asserts that we make no connection between honour
and risk. We do in fact try (CS 518–19), but the attempt is
admittedly brief and—to shift the blame a little—reflects the
fact that the ethnographers on whom we draw have been of
surprisingly little help in this respect.
A second aspect of the critique is that we lack a theory—or if
not a theory, then some basic conception—of agency. We again
have our cake and eat it. On the religious front, we steer a course
between Marx and Durkheim: to our critics, an uncertain
course; to us, a pragmatic one. More generally, we rely on
vague assertions of two-way interaction between humanity
and the environment. We have no consistent means of encapsulating
the relation between the two in such a way as to show
how the environment is controlled and the cultural variables
mediated by the decisions of individual producers or individual
representatives of ‘the powerful’. 43 It has been suggested to us
that Bourdieu’s quasi-Aristotelian concept of habitus might
offer a working metaphor here, 44 not least because it is, for
him, exemplified in, and perhaps derived from, his own ethnography
in Algeria. 45
43 Parker 227: ‘on their model, human initiative is heightened rather than
dwarfed by ecology.’ CS is, we think, full of people; it is just that many of
them are now anonymous.
44 By Megan Williams, in conversation.
45 P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977). For
context see J. Parker, Structuration (Buckingham, 2000).