HENRY MAYHEW (1812-1887) AND

Chapter 6
The Tsllgled Net: Critid Anthropology, Cultural Hegemony,
and the 'TPrlmitive/Civbed Debate" in Mayhew's London
(1) lntrodurtion
Critical anthropology - as the cultural practice of a comparative, histclcical, and
revolutionary perspective on contemporary Western civilization - also reflects on the
practice of writing as the dominant way that knowledge is productxi in the west. ' And it
cannot fail but argue that Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1 86 1-62)
was, in certain regards, not only a r md of an expanding civilization, but also the
handmaiden of imperialist litaature and Victman ernpire-building. Fa within the
broader domain of literature, writing practices were Wed to bourgeois domination
within modernity because writing, acccxding to Rousseau, was part of a vast and tangled
net of social ad
cultural factas, which predominated during the niaaeenth century.'
From the very lirst pages of Volume I - "Of Wandering Tribes in ~enaal,'" - London
Labour began with the "primitive/civilized debate" and the practice of cultural
hegemony, which was very central to the ideology of Victorian civilization. The term
"cultural hegemony" refers genaally to a complex set of ideas, meanings. and
associations coupled with ways of expressing those mpanings and associations that depict
unequal circumstances and other fonns of domination, In regards to London Labour more
Roseberry, William, "Mam and Culture." In The Polilics of Culture, ed. by Brett Williams,
Washington and -don: Smithsarian Institution Ress, 1991, 19-43,33.
' Rousseau ("On Script," 1%6,24) understood that as written languages especially scripu became
more analytical and mathematical, the variety of spoken languages became inaeasingly mae
homogenous: The mae a people learn to read, the more are its dialects obliterated."