TRASTORNOS DE LA PSICOMOTRICIDAD QUE SE MANIFIESTAN EN LA

This chapter is about— to borrow the words of Gregory Bateson— passing through the threat of that chaos where thought became impossible. The threat of chaos in the particular instance which provides both background and subject for this book was that chaos in the years of 1976 through 1980 where American-Australian-Western thought was useless to the point of irrelevance and Torres Strait Island thought was truly impossible. There were times, even months and months into the fieldwork, long after my wife and I had begun hanging around with Torres Strait Islanders, when the threat of that chaos was untenable. Winston Churchill's famous 'nothing to fear but fear itself' came to mind, but wryly, as do all those things which, ostensibly personal, are shown in the glare of the light shed by another culture to be merely the trappings of our culture, ineluctably social. Churchill's dictum was useless without the history, without the time in which it happened and the mentality which provides for its appreciation. And without its social use it was truly useless, as useless as it must have seemed to the RAF pilots and gunners of the time.

Unwilling to give up the fieldwork, to return to the world of Winnie's famous saying without bringing back something of the citydwelling Torres Strait Islanders who I had gone to study, I hung

on, and emerged from that thought-threatening chaos. These pieces of writing are about that going, and fearfulness, and emerging. They are also about the people known as Torres Strait Islanders. It would be (if I read some of my colleagues aright) both easy and expectable to say that this writing is as much or more about me as about Torres Strait Islanders. If easy, this would be said with the ease of accuracy; what it misses is that it is, since it is writing, as much about my readers as it is about me or Torres Strait Islanders. In part, this is a low-key caution about taking the whole of this thesis, or any of its parts, as other than they are. This caution is prompted by a concern that a genre of writing has come about which we might characterize as soulless sociology. It has been suggested by writers before me that the jargon of such a genre be called ' sociologese' . I would like to make two brief comments on the genre which has apparently come into being and about the criticisms of it which have been leveled at its excessive jargon.

In the past century or century and a half a number of students of society have written and published, have written to and against one another, have talked and talked about the problem of man, of humankind, of society, of societies. Sometime along the way a style of (mostly written) presentation got established, a dry and all-humanity-honed-right-out style which likely lay behind Edmund Leach's well-known (to fellow anthropologists) statement on how impossible he found other people's ethnographies to read. Doubtless his statement has become so well remembered because it says what so many of the rememberers have been thinking. There have been a number of critics who have proposed analyses of the problem of which Leach's boring ethnographies are a sympton. Among them my own view is closest to that of Ernest Becker, whose The Lost Science of Man is composed of two critical essays, one on "The Tragic Paradox of Albion Small and American Social Science" and the other a "Sketch for A Critical History of Anthropology". Becker traces, briefly, what he calls "the science of man as a Grand Vision" from Rousseau and the philosophes to the lament in critical historical essay of Georges

Gusdorf (i960): "Anthropology is becoming more and more of an exact science, but we know less and less exactly about what."^

Conscious of the invigorating influence of our point of view and of the grandeur of a single all-encompassing science of man, enthusiastic anthropologists may proclaim the mastery of anthropology over older sciences that have achieved where we are still struggling with methods, that have build up noble structures where choas reigns with us, the trand of development points in another direction, in the continuance of each science by itself, assisted where may be by anthropological methods.

Apropos this excerpt from Franz Boas' 1904 History of Anthropology, Becker writes, "What Herder, Spencer, and Tylor really achieved that was of lasting value, in Boas's words, was not a science of man but rather an attitude of historical, genetic inquiry, which 'sowed the seed of the anthropological spirit in the minds of

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historians and philosophers'. ... That is to say, anthropology had hardly taken shape as a science when it abandoned its vision and became a method that anyone could use and that would be parceled out to the other disciplines." Becker says, harking to the cognate problems of Albion Small and early American sociology, "It is almost as though Albion Small were speaking in an adjoining room, and we could hear his echo through the wall. Anthropology (sociology) has no business lording it over the older disciplines in an imperialistic, superordinate pose; the older disciplines have built up sound method, real scientific stature, which we anthropologists (sociologists) must now strive to equal, if we are to be respected and accepted. The one thing that anthropology (sociology) has to offer the older disciplines is a unique method or attitude, which will help them invigorate their data".

What I am suggesting here is that the problem of boring and dull