"Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science"
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Graves lands the punch with a compliment that turns into a quiet indictment: anthropology is supposed to be bilingual, fluent in both measurement and metaphor, yet too often comes back from the field speaking only in lyric. Calling anthropologists a "connecting link between poets and scientists" flatters the discipline's ambition to translate human strangeness into knowledge. Then he undercuts it by suggesting that proximity to "primitive peoples" - a period-coded phrase that already signals the colonial gaze - can seduce the researcher out of analytic discipline and into story.
The line works because it sketches a whole professional temptation in one sly reversal. Field-work is meant to be anthropology's guarantee of rigor: you were there, you observed, you recorded. Graves hints that being there can produce the opposite effect. Immersion doesn't just yield data; it rearranges the observer. The anthropologist starts to privilege texture, myth, and felt experience - the very materials poets handle best - and the "language of science" becomes thin or even inappropriate. It's praise for attentiveness disguised as a rebuke for imprecision.
Context matters: Graves is writing from a 20th-century literary intelligence skeptical of technocratic authority and allergic to sterile prose. Postwar Britain had seen "science" elevated as the master language of legitimacy; a novelist-poet like Graves would be alert to what gets lost when human life is forced into lab-speak. His jab also anticipates anthropology's later crisis of representation: who gets to describe whom, and in what voice. Graves isn't rejecting science; he's warning that the most honest account of people may refuse to sound scientific at all.
The line works because it sketches a whole professional temptation in one sly reversal. Field-work is meant to be anthropology's guarantee of rigor: you were there, you observed, you recorded. Graves hints that being there can produce the opposite effect. Immersion doesn't just yield data; it rearranges the observer. The anthropologist starts to privilege texture, myth, and felt experience - the very materials poets handle best - and the "language of science" becomes thin or even inappropriate. It's praise for attentiveness disguised as a rebuke for imprecision.
Context matters: Graves is writing from a 20th-century literary intelligence skeptical of technocratic authority and allergic to sterile prose. Postwar Britain had seen "science" elevated as the master language of legitimacy; a novelist-poet like Graves would be alert to what gets lost when human life is forced into lab-speak. His jab also anticipates anthropology's later crisis of representation: who gets to describe whom, and in what voice. Graves isn't rejecting science; he's warning that the most honest account of people may refuse to sound scientific at all.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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