as many as two thousand people might be decapitated in the “grand customs” that followed a royal death. Smaller numbers were dispatched in the yearly echoes of the larger ritual. Sometimes these were carried out in order for the living to communicate with the dead. “The king, wishing to send a message to his father, summons a captive, carefully primes him with the subject of his errand … and strikes off his head. If an important word be casually omitted he repeats the operation.” The deaths were therefore vehicles of social connection, not a breaking of interpersonal bonds. “A Dahoman king neglecting these rites would be looked upon as the most impious of men.” For an outsider to argue that the practice should stop was bootless: “It may be compared without disrespect to memorialising the Vatican against masses for the dead.”60
Burton’s account of these practices—as well as of some others, involving female warriors and their complex sexuality—foreshadows that of more modern anthropologists, making clear that his positing of a biological basis for cultural difference did not impede—if anything it encouraged and enhanced—his ability to understand it in strictly cultural terms. His attention to the ways that apparently senseless forms of behavior give expression to coherent and pervasive systems of belief calls up a well-known comment of the highly (and rightly) esteemed anthropologist Clifford Geertz: “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs.”61 Burton did not rise to the level of Geertz’s metaphor, but he would easily have grasped its sense.
We need to recognize, however, that he offered such analyses in a somewhat different spirit from the cultural anthropology that has descended from Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas. Anthropologists in this tradition have been not just inquirers into cultures that are more compact and integrated (and to us more exotic) than the ones modern Westerners inhabit, but defenders of those other ways of life, against outside efforts to “improve” the lives of their members.62 Burton was also a defender of the cultures he sought to understand, the African ones toward which he felt some kind of instinctive unease no less than the Arab ones he spontaneously admired, but his attitude differed in one significant respect from that of modern anthropologists. The best way to describe this difference might be to say that he was more mindful than his successors that what Geertz describes as webs of meaning are also tissues of nonsense, or—perhaps it would be better to say—that it mattered more to him to make clear how fully permeable the boundary between cultural meaning and nonsense really is.
That he regarded “primitive” cultures as shot through with nonsense no less than with the meaning he identified in the Dahomey “customs” is already clear in his earlier writings on Africa. Burton was surely aware that such practices as killing or enslaving infants who cut their incisor teeth in the wrong order had some basis in shared beliefs and assumptions too, but the practice was no less to be condemned for that, and on some level this was his attitude toward sending messages to the land of the dead by chopping off the heads of living messengers. In the same place where he defended the Dahomey customs he told of a tribe that had nearly been annihilated because its members believed that putting a sacred snake on the path to their village would defend them from their enemies (the reptile was dangerous, Burton maintained, only to rats). This does not mean that he regarded all such “civilized” judgments as superior to those of less advanced people: contesting the common European view that Africans in general led “a wretched existence,” he maintained that “the so-called reflecting part of Creation will measure every other individual’s happiness or misery by his own; consequently it is hoodwinked in its judgment. Considering the wisdom displayed in the distribution and adaptation of mankind, I venture to opine that all are equally blessed and cursed.” Generalizing this judgment in another place, he wrote that “nations are poor judges of one another; each looks upon itself as an exemplar to the world and vents its philanthropy by forcing its infallible system upon its neighbor. How long is it since popular literature has begun to confess that the British Constitution is not quite fit for the whole human race, and that the Anglo-Saxon has much to do at home, before he sets out a-colonelling to regenerate mankind?” (To which Americans in the first decades of the twenty-first century may sadly respond that for some of their elected leaders such a time has, alas, not yet arrived, even now.)
* * *
This skepticism, dashing cold water on both the claims cultures make to regulate the lives of their members and on their belief in the high worth of their values, became a central element in Burton’s meditation on cultural difference sometime in the 1860s. That this attitude should be understood as a fruit of his longstanding sense of never belonging wholly to any single culture, and of his attempts to carve out for himself some kind of space between different ones, can best be seen by looking at the two works in which he gave it most explicit expression, Stone Talk (1865) and The Kasidah of Haji Abdu el-Yezdi (1880).
The two writings strike different tones, the first excited and aggressive, the second calmer and more reflective, and only the former speaks specifically about life in the nineteenth century, but the two works are very close in spirit. Both are written in verse, there is much overlap in their content, and both put ideas and sentiments that are clearly Burton’s own in the mouths of imagined “Orientals,” a Hindu in the first and a Muslim in the second. Burton never publicly admitted being the author of either, a tactic that served to shield him from the opprobrium that giving voice to radical critiques of morality, religion, and contemporary British and European life would have been bound to call down on his head; but not putting his name to the works also allowed him to speak at once as a person with a particular cultural identity—not his own—and as an anonymous voice coming from no definite place. The first book, a dialogue between an English scholar, “Dr. Polyglott,” returning very tipsy from a dinner at which the talk was “’Bout India, Indians and all that,” and a London paving stone that his inebriation helps him to see as the metamorphosis of a long-ago Brahman, was published under the name “Frank Baker” (“Frank,” as Fawn Brodie notes, was a version of Burton’s own second name, Francis, and Baker the family name of his mother); the second claimed to be a translation by “F.B.” of a poem by the Persian friend (and Mecca pilgrim, since he bore the honorific “Haji”) whose name appeared on the title page. Burton printed 200 copies of the first but few survive because his wife, Isabel, quickly recognizing him behind the pseudonym and fearing that enemies would use the book to damage his chances for getting desirable appointments from the Foreign Office, bought up as many copies as she could find and burned them. With its more polished and sweet-sounding style, the Kasidah seems to have been partly inspired by the success of Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (published in 1859), which Burton hoped to emulate, but in contrast to its model it found little success with the public (although it has recently been reprinted a number of times). Like Fitzgerald’s book, Burton’s affirms the pleasures of life in the present over the promises of any future or beyond, but the Kasidah is peppered with anti-religious ideas that most readers at the time would have found shocking.63
One thing that made Isabel so anxious about the possible impact of Stone Talk on Burton’s career was the book’s wide-ranging and acid-voiced criticisms of contemporary European life. A major focus was on moral and religious hypocrisy, especially in regard to English sexual and moral prudery and its effects on women; putting this critique in the mouth of a Hindu allowed its anti-Christian dimensions to receive especially free rein. No less harsh, however, was the blast against imperialism, an evil in Europe since the time of the Romans: “But SHE forgot / to plunder subjects; You do not.” The “death and doom” brought by “the ravening Saxon,” and that left “India once so happy, now / In scale of nations sunk so low,” was so palpable that the very mention of her name in the House of Commons “clears every bench to England’s shame.” (This did indeed happen on some occasions in Parliament.) Similar effects of imperial domination were evident among “the Red Man in the [American] West,” as well as in Turkey, Tasmania, and Japan. Nor were things better inside Britain itself, where many poor people had been turned into virtual slaves, condemned to inhabit such places as “the dread dens of Manchester.” All the same, no horror of the time was worse than the actual slave trade, “blacks
