179
or blanket answers to questions posed in such a general way, but although the post-moderns have denied their validity ('Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces the 'real' symptoms?' asked Baudrillard, 1994), yet it is important I think to consider them. For these questions go to the heart of the relationships between culture and the polity, between modernism and modernity, between culture and society, between even the ethos's of the romantic and the puritan, the romantic and the rationalist - that is, to the analysis of modern culture and its relation with the social polity, addressed in such different ways by Daniel Bell (1976), Colin Campbell (1987) and Daniel Miller (1987).
But what I should like to do in Conclusion is to trace a little further some of these questions about the nature of communities, and nations, which the foregoing reflections and materials must inevitably provoke.
For in a sense it is with notions of the community that anthropology starts.
And here our models of what the Imagination is and how it works prove crucial.
The primal community, you will remember, was seen by Morgan, Maine and others as a body of people related to each other by bonds of blood who lived in one place and met daily, on a face-to-face basis. There was no occupational specialisation or division of labour (of the kind later emphasised by Durkheim) in this kind of community because everyone produced, no rationalisation of common goals. This kind of, familiar, community was contrasted by Tonnies (1887) to a society, or association (Gesellschaft); in the latter you might not know personally other members of your group; occupational specialisation had occurred and people came together on the basis of common interests;
you related to a man as a baker or candlestick-maker rather than as your MB, and one baker or candlestick-maker could be substituted for by another. On that simple binary transition from 'status' to 'contract', to use Maine's (1861) terms, which also contrasted ties based on blood to those of territory, a whole edifice of social science was constructed. The isolation of anthropology from both history and psychology during the middle years of the last century perhaps accounted for why rethinkings of this paradigm did not occur much earlier. Indeed, while