Carl Schuster
by Edmund Carpenter
(please click on images for detail and copyright)My favorite letter in the correspondence file of Carl Schuster (1904-1969) was written from New York during the Second World War. Carl addressed it to a friend in London to whom he regularly sent a package containing soap, socks, tea, and jam on the last day of each month. His letter explained a one-day delay: the previous evening Miguel Covarrubias had arrived unexpectedly, bringing with him "the young Rockefeller" (Nelson) and "a tall Czech or Hungarian count" (Rene D'Harnoncourt). Carl uncorked a bottle of wine he had been saving for a victory celebration and they talked until 3 a.m. about creating a museum for tribal arts. I cannot think of four people better qualified to address that question. From that evening's discussion came New York's Museum of Primitive Art and its successor, the Rockefeller wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
That the artist Covarrubias, philanthropist Rockefeller, and curator DÕHarnoncourt sought out Carl Schuster late on that rainy night in a tiny room in an unfashionable neighborhood is a testament to the erudition of this quiet scholar. Recently Abrams published Patterns That Connect, a one-volume edition based on Social Symbolism in Ancient and Tribal Art, itself an earlier but posthumously published twelve-volume edition of Schuster's work designed for libraries. Now that Carl Schuster's writings are accessible, my guess is that more people will seek out this scholar whose advice proved so important.
Incredibly, the twelve volumes of Social Symbolism, composed of 3500 pages and 7000 illustrations, represent only a fraction of the Schuster Archive, which is now housed in Basel's MŸseum der KŸlturen. This enormous body of material contains approximately 275,000 photographs, more than 70,000 negatives, some 18,000 pages of detailed correspondence, 5,670 bibliographic references, and a vast amount of other resources, all cross-referenced five ways with a master catalogue in thirty languages. If forty scholars with forty grants labored for forty years, they could never equal that archive, yet Schuster worked alone. His ceaseless travels, all miracles of frugality, took him wherever he thought evidence of his theories existed, whether it meant getting there by camel or dugout canoe. He was obsessed with his work, and only an open, easy manner saved him from becoming a complete recluse. "I live like a hermit and know only two people, besides shopkeepers, in my small community," he once wrote. Yet he remained connected to the world through correspondence. He probably spent more on stamps than on food.
Schuster studied at Harvard and in Vienna, spent ten years in rural Asia, and served as a cryptanalyst during the war. From then on, he circled the world, again and again, gathering data. He published little, preferring "to wait, wait." He died unexpectedly in 1969, leaving his files in perfect order, but providing no overall explanation. That task fell to me, his literary executor.
The unparalleled scholarship I found in these files exists nowhere else in the world. Forget most existing literature. Forget the American preoccupation with political agendas. Forget Jungian nonsense, psychological explanations, art critics' metaphors, and anthropologists' fears of "far-flung comparisons." An examination of Schuster's work takes one into a mind that bypasses academic conventions but whose thought is rooted in empirical evidence.
The closest counterpart to Schuster's work lies with the Structuralists, particularly Claude Levi-Strauss and Rodney Needham, both life-long friends of his. The Structuralists focused on the universality of symbolic opposition. Schuster extended their examples into prehistory. He then distinguished between generalized universals and highly specific, non-universal symbols transmitted through tradition.
For example, in the art traditions of many traditional cultures, the dead are represented as inverted, with the inversion symbolizing the reversal of life. This relatively obvious imagery could easily have been reinvented or rediscovered endlessly throughout history, especially if, as Structuralism tells us, the human brain operates on the basis of symbolic opposites. More difficult to explain, however, is the persistence of a specific form of inverted figurine, the well-known Paleolithic "Venus," which survived into relatively recent Neolithic cultures in the Arctic and in Oceania. The frequently encountered perforation near the ankles of these figures indicates that most examples were intended to hang upside down. Survival of that specific form can be explained only in terms of the dispersal of peoples combined with the tenacity of tradition, transmitted by word and act, mother-to-daughter, father-to-son, generation-to-generation, millennium-to-millennium, continent-to-continent. Not libraries, not museums, but living people are the great preservers.
The real value of Schuster's work, however, does not lie in explanation, a process which he generally shunned. It lies in his identification and documentation of an immensely complex symbolic system, which he traces back at least 30,000 years. He referred to examples of this system as "genealogical patterns."
Archaeologists have long inferred that the artists at Lascaux and Altimira possessed fully developed languages. What these scholars have consistently overlooked is another symbolic system, this one visual and central to many forms of traditional art. Just as beautiful calligraphy can distract from meaning, the elegance of this iconography often conceals, at least from our eyes, its underlying meanings. Yet these designs "say" something. Placed on bodies and garments, tools and weapons, these are statements which can be read.
For thousands of years, this iconography served as a single system, everywhere obedient to the same rules, everywhere addressing itself to the same ideas. Its glyphs were simple and its precepts clear, and it illustrated a symmetry of silent assumptions that underlay traditional thought. By definition, the extreme antiquity of genealogical patterns implies that the same social intelligence lies behind them. As such, no matter how varied the specific art style, the rules governing the composition of these patterns are everywhere alike. Once these rules are understood, the patterns can be decoded.
The key element in genealogical iconography is the human figure sharing limbs with similar figures, an image that appears around the world. This makes no sense anatomically, but perfect sense genealogically. Here, human reproduction is equated with plant budding, an analogy based on simple observation. The world is functionally stable, but the structure that defines it is a matter of belief that finds outlet in symbol. The world would appear no different to us if the earth was flat and circled by the sun, as many traditional cultures assert. Nor would our observation of conception change if, as many of the same peoples also maintain, mothers were really gardens planted by men.
Symbolic depictions of the human form are a part of almost every culture. One common variation is the figure divided vertically, half male, half female. Underlying this symbolism are the notions of "opposites united in One" and "many united in One." These basic concepts were once widespread but fell into disfavor with the coming of literacy and the rise of individualism in our culture. Within the structure of traditional culture, however, it makes sense to begin with the whole, then delimit the particular. This may explain why certain peoples conjugate and decline from plural to singular, rather than, as we do, from singular to plural.
Quadrated figures, two-headed figures, and a seemingly endless panoply of other forms from the ends of the earth all reside neatly catalogued in Schuster's archive, where the patterns that diverged so long ago once again come together for common understanding. What the attuned observer soon finds, scattered through time and space, are not puzzling parallels, as is often thought, but parallels obedient to codes we have never learned. Tattoos once dismissed as decorative or geometric suddenly become representations of social categories, the imagery of which derives in changing but identifiable forms from the dawn of culture. In his quiet work, Schuster broke this code, and in doing so opened fresh vistas on the traditional arts of the world that have yet to be fully explored.
