On Ambidextrousness, Or, What is an Innovative Action? (Essay‪)‬

In 1909, Robert Hertz, a student of Emile Durkheim and associate of Marcel Mauss, published an influential essay entitled "The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand." Hertz argued that the basic spatial distinction between the left and right hand acquires the polarity of a social hierarchy due not to the physiology or psychology of motor asymmetry but due to a cultural choice rooted in experiences of the sacred and profane: "What resemblance more perfect than that between our two hands!"--he exclaimed--"And yet what a striking inequality there is!" (89). Widely seen as a precedent for the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, Hertz's essay makes an important argument for the social determination of spatial distinctions. Rejecting the physiological explanation that we are righthanded because we are left-brained, he suggests we are left-brained because we are right-handed. This would be one of the more extreme examples of the doctrine of the tyranny of culture over biology in the Annee Sociologique tradition. But Hertz retreats just enough to recognize a slight organic asymmetry between the hands (one that can be overcome with physical training) and to contend that it is society that gives this difference value: "There is no need to deny the existence of organic tendencies toward asymmetry; but apart from some exceptional cases the vague disposition to righthandedness, which seems to be spread throughout the human species, would not be enough to bring about the absolute preponderance of the right hand if this were not reinforced and fixed by influences external to the organism" (91). Implicit in his argument is the proposition that the social causes that lead to the differentiation of the two hands may be permanent, even if, as he ends his essay by declaring, modern society should "strive to develop better the energies dormant in our left side" (113). Hertz accumulates a wealth of evidence to support his case, gathered mostly from the published works of practicing ethnographers (he never conducted fieldwork himself). The tendency of some Indonesian tribes to bind the left arm of children, the notion among the Maori that the left is the "side of death," the belief that certain Christian saints refused the left breast of their mother: all are cited to substantiate the idea that the preponderance of the right hand is a cross-cultural phenomenon, which is "anterior to all individual experience" and "linked to the very structure of social thought" (112-13). For Hertz, the division between the left and right hands is signal of a system of dual symbolic classification that functions across society as such. And this remains the case even if the contribution of the left hand to human labor comes to rival or take the place of the right: "Can it be said that any effort to develop the aptitude of the left hand is doomed to failure in advance? Experience shows the contrary. In the rare cases in which the left hand is properly exercised and trained, because of technical necessity, it is just about as useful as the right; for example, in playing the piano or violin, or in surgery. If an accident deprives a man of his right hand, the left acquires after some time the strength and skill that it lacked" (92). It is not my purpose to celebrate the influence of Hertz, whose analytical insistence upon religious polarity has now been widely questioned. Beginning in 1933, Mauss began to distance himself from Hertz, noting not only the need to account for other spatial distinctions such as up/down and front/back but also the existence of classification systems based on number or gradation rather than dichotomy. Nonetheless, Mauss referred favorably to Hertz's essay in his text of the following year, "Techniques of the Body," and the influence of "The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand" can be traced to thinkers as diverse as Louis Dumont and Rodney Needham. What interests me is the unexpected reading given to Hertz's essay by the anthropologist Ernesto