Hadn’t she heard the same figure tossed off by Gloria Steinem in her 1972 book “Wonder Woman”? “Once upon a time,” wrote Steinem, “the many cultures of this world were all part of the gynocratic age. Paternity had not yet been discovered.” How many feminists, Eller set to wondering, actually believe that long ago the world was ruled by a benevolent, peace-loving matriarchy? Quite a few, she eventually concluded. In certain circles, she claims, the notion of an ancient matriarchy is a booming business. This although there’s no evidence to support the theory that women once ruled the world, or any human society.

In outline, the matriarchal story line goes like this: Prior to about 3000 B.C. horticultural, Neolithic societies were dominated by goddess worship. War was unknown, as was social strife. Women ruled and men accepted it. Ecological balance went hand in hand with a primitive sexual equality. Matriarchalists (as they are known) point to societies like Minoan Crete or Neolithic Malta to support their view of sophisticated, sensual ancient cultures centered on goddesses. Both the curvaceous snake-goddesses of Crete and the massive “fertility temples” of Gozo in Malta have fueled romantic speculation about a golden age of goddess worship.

But then, believers claim, this hypothetical female Eden was shattered by some kind of patriarchal revolution. Along came male rule, war and sexism, and things have gone catastrophically downhill ever since. Female hoes were replaced with male swords. Like all activist literature, it makes for a thrillingly depressing read.

The myth of a remote past dominated by matriarchy is not a contemporary invention. Its originator in the modern academy was the great Swiss philologist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887). In his monumental work “Mutterrecht und Urreligion,” first published in 1926, Bachofen declared what he called “mother-right,” or the sanctity of matriarchal privilege, to be the origin of all culture. Indeed, his minute study of Roman funerary art in the 1840s persuaded Bachofen that Roman law itself — that supposed bastion of Western patriarchy — was characterized by matriarchal origins. “She guides,” wrote Bachofen mystically of Woman, “the wild, lawless existence of the earliest periods towards a milder, friendlier culture.” Following earlier scholars like Joseph-Frangois Lafitau and Arnold Lewis, Bachofen believed in the superiorite des femmes.

In the United States, meanwhile, prehistoric matriarchy was popularized first by Erich Neumann in “The Great Mother” (1955) and then in the 1970s by the Lithuanian imigri archaeologist Marija Alseikaite Gimbutas at UCLA. In 1974, Gimbutas (who died in 1994) published “Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, 6500-3500 B.C.,” in which she laid out an ecstatic vision of the prelapsarian Balkans ruled by women, goddesses and goddess worshippers. These supposedly “gynocentric” societies, such as the Vinca culture of the Danube and the Sesko of Northern Greece have indeed yielded mysterious artifacts: heads of sacred pigs, figures in bird masks, vases with painted bees, delicate stone mushrooms and female statues equipped with egg-shaped buttocks and bull horns. But are they proof of matriarchy?

Gimbutas was a curious character. A product of the German academic system of the ’30s and ’40s, she was heavily influenced by the German ethnologist Ernst Kassener and his theory of “culture circles” — that is, waves of cultural influence radiating in great circles from a distantly ancient point of origin. For Kassener (and the Nazi regime), the most interesting originating point was the primeval Aryans. Gimbutas took this model and simply turned it upside down: For Aryans she substituted an Indo-European horse-riding warrior culture known as the “Kurgans,” who supposedly poured out of the Asiatic steppes around 5000 B.C. and overran the peaceful matriarchies of Old Europe by fire and sword. In other words, patriarchy was installed by the Kurgan invasion. Reassuringly, it arrived at a specific time and place — and therefore can be called neither normal nor inevitable.

This apocalyptic vision has offered the wilder fringes of feminism a comforting vision of the past. Gimbutas’ most vociferous devotee has been Riane Eisler, whose popular “The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future” (1987) sets out a lushly hysterical account of the rise of wicked, war-loving patriarchy. Unfortunately, as Eller sets out to show in her book, Eisler’s theory has about much hard fact behind it as the tale of Little Red Riding Hood.

Eller’s arguments would not be disputed by most experts, and indeed she is hardly the first to do the debunking. Lotte Motz, in her 1997 book “The Faces of the Goddess,” covered much the same ground, as has Lauren Tallalay at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Eller observes that feminist matriarchalists “find evidence of goddess worship in virtually every scrap of prehistoric art,” even though the images they seize upon are enigmatic at best. How, for example, can anyone be sure that all female figurines from the Stone Age are indeed goddesses? Motz, like Eller, has concluded that images of men and animals were just as numerous as those of “goddesses.”

Eller also echoes Motz’s argument that “there clearly was no imposition of a patriarchal system.” If the Kurgan invasions might explain patriarchy in the Middle East and Europe, they surely can’t be the source of patriarchy in, say, Borneo or Andean Peru. And while Minoan Crete might look like a matriarchy from the scattered evidence of its few artifacts, nothing is thereby proved. There’s not a shred of evidence that government and war in Crete were not the exclusive province of men.

Nevertheless, Eller claims, belief in ancient matriarchy is popular among middlebrow feminists: gushy pundits like Steinem, women’s studies advocates and sundry activists. Although she names noted academic Gerda Lerner among the tacit — if not outright — matriarchy-supporters, Eller maintains that matriarchy is a part of the general feminist atmosphere rather than a tenet of a specific school. She may be right; it is difficult to say one way or the other. But in unraveling the pretensions of matriarchalists, Eller also seeks to show that wider matters are stake. Thus, her book takes off in several tangential directions.

Matriarchal myth, Eller argues, is actively harmful at worst and at best unnecessary. In the first place, she points out, matriarchalists tend to glorify “female essentialness” — that is, to portray women as innately and naturally good, kind and loving human beings, and to emphasize the undying differences between the sexes. (This latter is of course a no-no among social-constructivist American feminists, who insist that gender differences are mostly a social invention.) Second, Eller claims, the need that romantic matriarchalists have for some kind of precedent for either female dominance or equality between the sexes in the distant past is both wishful thinking and a superfluous craving. “Whether patriarchy is our only history,” she writes, “or merely one history, we are not in either case bound to clone the past.”

Eller claims correctly that matriarchal myth is largely driven by ideology. But of course the same is also true of much of the “enlightened” feminism that Eller herself speaks for. The term “gender” itself, repeated ad nauseam, is a nugget of ideological implications, going hand in hand with a whole set of assumptions about the so-called construction of sexuality. While the notion of the innate moral superiority of women is troublesome, the suggestion that any innate differences between the sexes is immaterial is equally unconvincing. Eller claims that human cultures have demonstrated a dizzying variety of such constructions and that little in sex is not socially contrived.

“Sex roles,” Eller writes, “and gender expectations are extremely diverse from one culture to another, to the point of being completely arbitrary.” And she goes on, “Heterosexual sex, present in all cultures for reproduction, is sometimes the norm, the only approved sexual activity, and at other times accepted only as a grudging necessity. Gender, another cross-cultural universal, varies from being tremendously significant to comparatively minor.” She also asserts that some cultures have a “third gender.”

These assertions are also pure ideology, rather than cultural observation. They express the quintessential Western (and especially American) belief in the optimistic possibilities of social engineering. In which culture, pray, is gender relatively “insignificant”? We are not told. In which culture is heterosexuality regarded only as a “grudging necessity”? We are not told. And if “gender expectations” are really so diverse why is there such a thing as … universal patriarchy? Feminism, essentially, has no answer to these questions.

The explanations offered by feminist anthropologists like Sherry Ortner, that men more or less “lucked out” because they don’t bear offspring, are hardly eye-opening, if reasonable enough. As for the “third gender,” it is as mythical as the matriarchs of Eden. It is the irresolvable love-hate agon between men and women that drives all cultures, not a whimsically benign rainbow of artificially manufactured gender hues.

Behind all this is what Eller approvingly calls “gendered archaeology.” By this, I think, she means the rewriting of the past according to feminist principles. She contrasts this worthy aim with “the archaeology of gender,” which I assume would include the work of Gimbutas. Gendered archaeology would view gender in terms of its “variability, permeability, changeability and ambiguity,” while matriarchalists seek the Eternal Feminine under every ancient stone. It’s a tossup, though, which is the more woolly.

For whatever the obvious sillinesses of the matriarchalists, it is not clear either what “gendered archaeology” would have to tell us about ancient times. Feminist archaeology and anthropology are long on hot air, but rather short on empirical detail. So far, neither has fundamentally revised anything in our view of prehistory. I admire the work of Elizabeth Barber on the history of textiles, for example, but the insights we gain into the lives of ancient Mesopotamian women by studying their relation to looms are necessarily limited. Shards of pottery, meanwhile, are not especially eloquent about “gender relations.” What feminist disciplines have done, on the other hand, is to impose large amounts of parochial contemporary obsessions upon our reading of later, historical societies like classical Greece.

Eller is fond of quoting ideologues like classicist Eva Keuls, whose rabid and often foolish pronouncements about Greek “phallocentrism” are more an excursion into the grim hinterland of American sexual politics than a measured assessment of the Greeks themselves. Erecting wholesale moral condemnations of long-distant cultures because of your one-sided reading of their sexuality is a dubious enterprise at best. At worst, it is purely philistine. The Greeks are largely unknown for us. What can we categorically pronounce about them? Extreme sensitivity and meticulously evenhanded erudition are needed, and by and large feminism is not especially adept at either. Politics is not scholarship.

And here arise paradoxes in Eller’s otherwise deft exposi. She correctly accuses feminist matriarchalists like Gimbutas and Eisler of being fast and loose with facts and of being overly given to grand, sweeping assumptions. But could not the same thing be said of people like Keuls or Kate Millett, whom Eller quotes approvingly? Both Keuls and Gimbutas, after all, share a remoralizing about the past in terms of an obsessive preoccupation with victimhood. Neither has much credibility among real scholars. All of these writers are adept only in the use of the intellectual machine gun, not of the patient knitting needle.

Furthermore, if Eller can diagnose matriarchalists as being a pretty homogenous group of mainly white, educated, middle-class women from a tiny number of mainly rich countries (the U.S., Britain, Germany, Australia), then exactly the same can be said of feminism in general. Eller’s use of the cozy pronoun “we,” when addressing her presumably female (and probably white, educated, middle-class) readers seems clubby and a touch smug to me.

At the same time, however, Eller makes another kind of argument about matriarchalists: namely, that their myths might have some value when understood purely as myths. That is, they might have some value as boosters of feminine self-esteem.

This seems both understandable and a tad condescending. Condescending, because women in reality have no need of self-esteem myths — and if they do they can always turn to Oprah, not to classical scholars. But sympathetic, too, because goddess-mongering is also a kind of confused, blind attempt to reclaim some form of earthy femininity in a culture that fundamentally recoils from it — today’s divas and Hollywood stars are a pretty sapless bunch.

As our corporatist society becomes increasingly sexless and blandly androgynous, pathological reactions inevitably set in. Matriarchalism could be seen as one of these. Eller herself seems to admit as much. “Messages of female specialness,” she notes, “are perhaps especially appealing now, in an era of feminist stocktaking.” However, this is not a problem of feminism per se but of the wider culture: Another such reaction can be seen in the romantic masculinism and warriordom of Robert Bly.

Eller is perfectly right that matriarchalists are woozy, sexist romantics. But there’s a rub. Liberal feminism itself has missed the boat on many fronts. Art, sexual love and religion, for example, seem somehow to be completely beyond its ken. Nor has feminism exactly eroticized the culture, as it might once have promised to do — quite the reverse. And despite its endless, droning perorations about gender, feminism has produced little deep imaginative insight into what transpires between men and women. The result has been volcanic frustrations — or just boredom.

It’s possible, then, that in an odd way the sentimental, gawky matriarchalists, with their gung-ho celebrations of seething procreation and female fecundity are addressing something that mainstream feminism ignores or arrogantly trivializes. The resentnik myth is largely twaddle. But its emotional roots may not be so easy to dismiss.

Controversy has continued to surround Brasillach’s fate. Kaplan, the daughter of a Nuremberg prosecutor, reminds us that it is difficult to consider these matters — and individuals like Brasillach — with a cool and measured eye. On the other hand, she agrees with Simone de Beauvoir, who attended Brasillach’s trial, that his sentence was symbolic rather than judicially sound. The case is even more charged for us today because our very definition of “hate speech” is a product of the events of the 1940s, the period that created much of our contemporary moral debate about whether and how to punish the sort of “intellectual crimes” Brasillach committed.

De Gaulle later declared that whereas he had pardoned from execution all those who had not actively colluded with German authorities, he had to make an exception for Brasillach. “Talent,” he loftily declared, “is a responsibility.” Brasillach had fully earned his death warrant, in other words, because of his poisonous pen.

Only in France, it is often said, could the misuse of words carry a death sentence. With Brasillach’s death, France attempted both to close the terrible wounds of the Occupation and to affirm the majesty of the written word. Had he been tried just a year later, many historians believe, Brasillach almost certainly would not have died. And the French intelligentsia, many of whom attended his sensational trial at the Palais de Justice in January 1945, were certainly uneasy with his condemnation. Fascist he may have been; but Brasillach was still one of them — an intellectual, a literary star, a renowned literary critic of exceptional sensitivity and acuity, the youthful author of the world’s first sustained work of film criticism, the superb “L’Histoire du Cinema” of 1937.

An odor of bad conscience hung over the whole affair, for Brasillach’s judge and prosecutor had themselves — as he pointed out in his spirited defense — been employed by Vichy. Was Brasillach, as his contemporary defenders on the far right now claim, a sacrificial lamb butchered by the forces of Gaullism on the altar of some fictive “national unity”? Or were his guilt and his punishment simply two independent vectors which should not have met at the stake, as Kaplan suggests?

Brasillach was born in 1909 to a comfortable upper middle class family from Perpignan. His father served in the colonial military in Morocco and was killed there in 1914. Three years later, his mother remarried a wealthy doctor and the family moved to the small town of Sens near Paris.

The embittered boy had already written what Kaplan calls his first work of vitriol to this prospective stepfather, insulting him with impressive dexterity and thus providing sundry biographers with an interpretive handle for explaining his later fascism. Hating his bourgeois pseudo-father, in other words, and hating the sham, left-of-center Third Republic of the ’30s could be seen as synonymous. Either way, explaining Brasillach’s political proclivities is not a simple task. Yet we cannot understand fascism without understanding why gifted, superlatively educated boys like Brasillach drifted into it. Brasillach, along with peers like Celine and Drieu La Rochelle (both of them now acknowledged as among the greatest of 20th century French writers), represents the most disturbing face of fascism. Not the usual stony Freikorps face, but that of the puny, bespectacled and disillusioned poet.

The usual place to start is the right-wing Action Francaise paper, the brainchild of the violent and rather rancidly radical monarchist Charles Maurras and a hotbed of rightist revolutionary thought — and action. It was the paper’s Camelots du Roi (a kind of monarchist street gang) who created the right’s greatest martyrs of the ’30s when 15 of them were killed by the Paris police during a demonstration in 1934. Brasillach venerated their memory all his life. Was it a turning point in his own spiral into fascist mythology? Perhaps. But many Action Francaise writers went on to be heroes of the Resistance. The roots of Nazism and its appeal to men like Brasillach, in reality, go far deeper than questions of simple nationalism or even of racism — and Brasillach was certainly a racist by anyone’s definition.

By the early ’30s, Brasillach had already made his name as a literary critic with a scathing attack on Andre Gide and an odd book on Virgil called “Presence de Virgile”, which celebrated the Roman poet’s love of young boys. He went on in the intellectually high-quality pages of Action to become a feared young Turk of the Left Bank literary scene. At the same time, as Kaplan tells it, he wrote a series of rather thin, lyrical novels, with plots turning around sublimated incest and a great deal of sentimental and artificially arranged “atmosphere.” Kaplan thinks there is a politically telling disjunction between the critic and novelist: the one fierce, witty, lethally lucid; the other lost in bamboozling lyricism.

What, then, does this disjunction in Brasillach’s work tell us about the mind of a talented writer toying with his first steps toward moral catastrophe? To Kaplan, it’s a question of denial. The same brittle polarity, she argues, was brought to bear on Brasillach’s view of decadent, democratic France (the object of his lucid, devastatingly critical side) and young Nazi Germany (the object of his romanticizing, “soft focus” side). Nazism, in other words, was first and foremost a lyrical mood, a religious effusion that harnessed his harsher side only when dealing with the Jews: His anti-Semitism had nothing soft-focus about it.

“The scandal of Brasillach’s concept of fascism,” Kaplan writes, “is that he relied on the reference points and vocabulary of a literary critic — images, poetry, myths — with barely a reference to politics, economics or ethics.” Curiously, however, he was entirely capable of describing Hitler himself as a “small, sad, vegetarian civil servant.” What Brasillach really liked was the strapping, pure, utopian, devoted and hyper-masculine Nazi work camps. In short, the classic, shrill and immensely charged aesthetic of Revolution itself.

In his psychological dependence on myth and symbol, moreover, and his scorn for politics and economics, he eerily mirrors Hitler himself. As Albert Speer records, Hitler was famously always pining for the day he could retire from “filthy politics” and become an “artist.”

Brasillach himself wrote the following of his visit to the Nuremburg Rally of 1937:

Faced with this serious, delicious decor of an erstwhile romanticism, faced with this immense flowering of flags, faced with these crosses from the Orient [swastikas], I asked mysel f … if anything goes …

The fragmentation of the quote itself seems to hint at the inner dissolution of the individual in a moment of mass hysteria.

And this brings us to the heart of Kaplan’s quest to uncover the psychic dynamics of her subject. What, she asks, were the sexual pathologies underlying Brasillach’s infatuation with orgiastic Nazism? It is, of course, a much-pondered question, most famously in the heretically Freudian work of Wilhelm Reich and in Klaus Theweleit’s 1978 “Male Fantasies,” a somewhat overworked Reichian exploration of the sexual pathology of fascism. This is interesting if murky territory. And fascism does indeed lend itself to such lurid deconstructing. For where communism seems drably asexual, the quasi-erotic swagger of Nazi regalia, symbolism and uniform seem equally undeniable. Hitler’s sexual relation to his audiences, whom he called “my bride,” was legendary. What is at work here?

In the case of Brasillach, Kaplan deals head-on with his reputed homosexuality and its relation to Nazi ritual. It’s a theme Genet also explored in his wild account of the male sexuality of the Occupation, “Pompe Funebre,” with its glamorous and virile blond Nazi lover figure. In his Occupation diary, quoted by Kaplan, the Parisian writer Jean Guehenno wrote in 1941: “Sociological problem: Why so many pederasts among the collaborators?” Kaplan distances herself from the dated tone of this rhetorical (and perhaps tongue-in-cheek) question. But the collaborationist gay scene, she points out, was indeed very conspicuous in Paris (just as it had been among Hitler’s SA).

None of this matters, of course, except insofar as Kaplan is able to suggest that Brasillach had a kind of homoerotic relation with fascism — just as Genet had described it. According to writer Jean-Louis Bory, the German army exercised a distinctly sexual allure. It consisted, he claimed, in “a taste for boots, leather, metal, and the famous Nuremberg masses in which … someone like Brasillach could find the exaltation of a humanity to their liking.” And Kaplan herself concludes : “Whatever the reality of his sexual life, Brasillach’s writing suggests a homoerotic attraction to the rituals of fascism.”

But Kaplan also shuns any simplistic explanations along these lines. There were many possible psychological roots for fascism. “How many children of men killed in the First World War,” she asks, “were there among the fascists?” The orphaning and brutalizing effects of the First World War on this generation have been inadequately understood. The roots of Brasillach’s tragic pathology, in other words, were unfathomably complex, and they disturb us precisely because we also do not really possess a convincing explanation for fascism itself. Despite the lakes of ink expended on its analysis, deep down we remain baffled by it. We are obsessed by fascism and its terrors, as any evening spent watching the History Channel will prove. They are our principal collective nightmare, which we cannot intellectually resolve and from which we do not seem able to escape.

More important, however, are the unanswerable questions about Brasillach’s fate. Why, Kaplan asks, was Brasillach shot while Rene Bousquet, the head of the Paris police who oversaw the infamous roundup of Parisian Jews, was given only two years of a suspended jail sentence? She suggests that it’s partly a question of timing. The legal definition of “crimes against humanity” is a fairly recent invention; the trial of men like Klaus Barbie was not possible until its advent. Brasillach, too, was tried while the war still raged. Passions were high, and De Gaulle perhaps needed a symbolic execution to close one era and begin another.

Yet there is also the question of Brasillach’s undeniable guilt in committing technical treason, the crime for which he was actually shot. And there is the more obscure question, too, of his actual involvement in denouncing Jews in hiding in the pages of Je Suis Partout. It was never proved beyond doubt, but clearly the intent to harm existed. It’s an open question whether such ambiguities merit death. In a society at peace, it is difficult to judge the mood of a place like wartime France, where words could literally kill.

“Hate speech” still arouses passion because of the Nazis, essentially, and because of men like Brasillach. We have seen the horrors they are capable of. But Kaplan, like de Beauvoir, is right when she points out that executing people because of their words is a dubious path to tread. If words are actions, after all, why not have a thought police and arm them to the teeth? Brasillach would have approved.

Eighty years on, the grouch has not lessened, and the hysteria is still at boiling point. Witness the bitter controversy over the recent discovery of so-called Kennewick Man. On July 26, 1996, two young men stumbled on a human skull in the Columbia River in Kennewick, Wash. Local coroner Floyd Johnson called in a forensic archaeologist and expert in human remains, James C. Chatters, to make an identification of the excellently preserved remains.

With permission from the Walla Walla district Corps of Engineers, which oversees the site, Chatters recovered a human skeleton which he characterized as having “caucasoid traits.” He assumed, therefore, that it must be a 19th century cadaver. Not so: Radio-carbon dating established an age of at least 9,000 years. The tall, middle-aged man who had come to grief in Kennewick nine millennia ago was not, according to Chatters, typically Native American. Then who was he? Was he possibly not Native American? “Lack of head flattening,” Chatters coolly noted, “from cradle board use.” Was he “white”?

The media jumped on board at once. Had early Europeans, they asked, preceded even the Vikings into the New World by thousands of years? Antagonisms arose between the scientific community and the alliance of five tribes who claim the body as a violated ancestor — the Umatilla, Yakima, Nez Perci, Wanapum and Colville. Examine the remains for DNA, cried the scientists; bury our sacred ancestor, cried the Five Tribes. “All we’re asking for,” said one Five Tribes member, “is a little common decency.” The grouch suddenly sprang to life again.

Nor were things helped much when Chatters made a reconstruction of Kennewick Man’s face. Lo and behold, he was the spitting image of “Star Trek’s” Jean-Luc Picard. “He could also pass for my father-in-law,” mused Chatters diffidently. “Who happens to be Scandinavian.” The Five Tribes were not amused.

Now into this murky and emotional fray steps David Hurst Thomas, a curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a founding trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian. His new book, “Skull Wars,” purports to be a history of the Kennewick lawsuit as well as a broad overview of the “deteriorating relationship” between archaeologists and Native Americans.

The book is prefaced by the noted Indian activist Vine Deloria, author of the gung-ho jeremiad “Custer Died for Your Sins,” who is also neatly enough accorded a chapter in Thomas’ book. The latter, notes Deloria, filled him “with incandescent rage.” In his own book, Deloria sneered at white anthropologists as “anthros” and portrayed them as grim, hypocritical, imperialist exploiters. It is a dull caricature that Thomas himself enthusiastically endorses.

Thomas is nimble and well-read, and the bibliography betrays a mind that is curious and wide-ranging. I was pleased, for example, to see there the excellent David Henige of the University of Wisconsin, who has written brilliantly on modern misinterpretations of Columbus. Would, however, that Thomas had some of Henige’s serious scholarly commitment to carefully worked insight and masterful intellectual narrative.

Although “Skull Wars” offers entertaining thumbnail sketches aplenty of American anthropologists like Franz Boas and Lewis Henry Morgan, the book is little more than a journalistic political tract designed to arouse the aforementioned “incandescent rage.” In a series of rather rambling mini-essays we range with groaning predictability over every white-Amerindian grievance of the past 500 years, from Columbus and accusations of cannibalism to Red Power at Alcatraz. Foggy p.c. buzzwords such as “mainstream society,” usually undefined, litter almost every page. And the loosely jumbled chapters somehow never accumulate any real continuity or vertical depth. In short, “Skull Wars” creates a curious texture in which sometimes interesting details (especially gossipy accounts of archaeological infighting ) are swamped by the vulgar and piously sermonizing mind of the activist. It is an all-too-familiar spectacle with American academics.

Thomas no doubt thinks that by devoting his first 100 pages to a kind of miscellaneous, potted History 101 account of post-conquest injustices that we will be better informed as to the cultural background to the Kennewick controversy. This is both patronizing and ludicrous. At one point he tells us that it was because the Greeks had a well-defined sense of “barbarians” that later Europeans decided to be unpleasant to Native Americans — as if every culture in world history didn’t also have similar notions of inferior outsiders. (The Ancient Mexica — the correct term for the Aztecs — for example, flatly called those living north of the Rio Grande “barbarians.”)

But of course Thomas wishes to grandiosely string together Aristotle, the Conquistadors, poor old Columbus, Buffalo Bill, American anthropologists of the 19th century (fearful racists, needless to say), Manifest Destiny, the “termination” reservation reforms of the Eisenhower years and Kennewick Man into one seamlessly awesome tale of woe and infamy. They are all avatars, you see, of wicked “mainstream society.”

The idea, bluntly put, is to imply that a branch of knowledge, in this case anthropology, is the slavish handmaid of conquest and unconsciously or consciously reflects its inner dynamic: standard neo-Marxist stuff. “The lingering issues between Indians and archaeologists,” writes Thomas, “are political, a struggle for control of American Indian history.” So there we have it.

We are therefore treated to numerous examples of American anthropologists pillaging tomb sites, hauling Native American artifacts into museums and generally displaying their brutish prejudices at every turn. True, Thomas also shows us the surpassingly liberal inclinations of a man like Boas while grudgingly admitting that it hasn’t been all bad. But in general the men who created American anthropology are viewed as “anthros” — white supremacists in mortar boards. We are then breezily told that “the American academic community — led by grave-digging archaeologists — has robbed the Native American people of their history and their dignity.”

This is, of course, a fairly silly calumny. One wonders if the Egyptians or the Greeks, too, feel that their “history and dignity” have been abnegated by “grave-digging archaeologists”? Now, it is true that the former often wish the return of antiquities plundered by Indiana Jones-style 19th century archaeologists like Luigi Belzoni or the repulsive Lord Elgin. But they also acknowledge that these same early “grave diggers” were creatures of their time and often the very people who lifted ancient cultures out of oblivion.

Whether we like it or not, Egyptology began with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt: Before that, Ancient Egypt had been more or less forgotten. Is Egyptology, therefore, a creation of imperialism? Of course it is. Is it therefore “imperialist” in nature? Hardly. One thing does not necessarily entail the other, and Egyptians themselves have embraced Western scientific Egyptology with passion — for what else is there? Knowledge is never a pure commodity.

On the other hand, it might be countered that the conquest of the Americas was unique in many ways, and that it has unleashed uniquely painful pathologies and racial distrusts. The Egyptians, one could say, are not a conquered people. (Actually, they are, since the Arabs were imperialists not indigenous to Egypt.) One could also argue that, because Indians have failed to achieve much in the way of tangible concessions from any Western society, their academic champions resort to hit-and-miss intellectual guerrilla war instead.

Nor, for that matter, can one really blame Indians for hating the powerful civilization that overwhelmed them. As Lawrence pointed out, dispossession and extermination do not exactly improve one’s mood. What, in any case, is the Indian supposed to feel but distrust? Gratitude for affordable electricity?

But condemning whole intellectual disciplines as a way of “healing” these bitter divides is a cheap gambit as best. In much the same way, Martin Bernal tried this spin on the 19th century classicists in his polemic “Black Athena,” crudely trying to represent the massive, groundbreaking scholarship of that era as a conspiracy allied to colonialism. Bernal’s amateurish exaggerations, dubious linguistic conjectures and hyperbole eventually cost him dearly when he was painstakingly unravelled by the Wellesley classicist Mary Lefkowitz in her devastating “Not Out of Africa.” Modishly insulting a few 19th century scholars, Lefkowitz showed, not only misrepresented many of them but also embarrassingly highlighted Bernal’s own grindingly parochial political agenda. Their scholarship, in other words, was largely more professional than his — but then again, most of Bernal’s readers had never read the originals.

There are two critical questions relative to Kennewick Man, however, that Thomas does try to tackle with a minimum of politically correct rhetoric. The first is the possible relation between the ancient Neolithic American Clovis culture that flourished around 7,000-8,000 B.C., and a European equivalent, the Solutrean culture of the Slavic region and the Ukraine. As Thomas acknowledges, there are extraordinary similarities in tool-making technologies between these two cultures, while, surprisingly, none exist between Clovis and the equivalent Neolithics of northeast Asia, where Native Americans are supposed to have originated.

This is an intriguing avenue of speculation and an exciting frontier in North American archaeology, though not one that Native Americans themselves seem to feel very keen about. Surely, one would think, there is room for a reasonable examination of the Kennewick remains in the light of this evolving line of inquiry? Europeans could well have migrated across the subpolar tundra into the Americas or even taken boats.

Thomas seems to agree. But, disappointingly, he devotes little space to this fascinating issue and wafflingly concludes only that ancient America was “the original melting-pot.” (Which part of the world was not a “melting pot”?) Why, the reader asks in frustration, are there only three pages about this possible provenance of Kennewick Man (not a certainty by any means, but a viable possibility) — the same amount as are devoted to squabbles about the name of the Washington Redskins, the American Indian Movement of the ’70s, the Boston Tea Party and Indian Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe?

The other critical issue is the antagonism between oral history and Western science. “The Kennewick controversy,” writes Thomas, “highlights yet another serious conflict in interpreting … criteria of ‘a preponderance of the evidence.’” And he goes on: “Here, then, is the nub of the conflict: What are the relative merits of evidence about the past?” In other words, are oral tribal traditions and science reconcilable? It’s a good question.

It’s also one that should have been the intricate heart of this book, and to some extent Thomas does give it its due. But by simply urging reconciliation and sensitivity between Indians and scientists, he underestimates the profundity of the rift. In some ways it is unbridgeable. He quotes lawyer Alan Schneider, who worries that in certain instances the rest of America will be obliged to follow tribal historical lore when contemplating this continent’s remote past. Even though Thomas argues that Indians are not necessarily against scientific examination of human remains, which I’m sure is true, I would say that this is a legitimate fear. If, for example, the Kennewick remains are reburied without being submitted to serious and accountable analysis, then the tale they might tell us is effectively silenced. Potential knowledge is reburied with them.

For his part, Thomas tries to paper over the cracks in his plan by overestimating the precision of the oral tradition itself. He claims that archaeology has been “humanized” in recent years on account of its learning to use “an entirely different history” — the oral lore of Indian people themselves. “Most Indian tribes,” he asserts, “maintain rich oral traditions, which describe in detail their remote past.”

But there are deep problems with this. In the first place, what actually does “oral history” tell us about the Neolithic period? The answer is practically nothing. Indeed, oral history tells us almost nothing even about the Middle Ages, let alone about societies living 10,000 years ago. When African historians tried to reconstruct the notable 14th century East African kingdom of Great Zimbabwe through oral histories, for example, they ended up with the names of 12 kings and two battles. Everything else was lost, including the culture’s actual name — let alone things like its language, currency, diplomacy, etc. What “rich details” about American life 10,000 years ago, then, is Thomas talking about? We would love to know. Oral history is not, in fact, an “alternative way of knowing” the Neolithic age. At best, it might be a form of poetic collective memory, profound and often beautiful, but providing no “rich details” on the historical plane.

Secondly, however much traditional historians and anthropologists might be willing to work with oral historians, the accommodation is not returned; the Umatilla do not recognize the validity of scientific interpretations of Kennewick. To the contrary, they flatly reject them and insist that they know best. “From our oral histories,” says tribal member Armand Minthorn bluntly, “we know that our people have been part of the land since the beginning of time.” So that’s that.

In the end, trying to make tribal lore and science equivalent ends up being a very tricky act. Witness Deloria, cavalierly dismissing radiocarbon dating and scorning scientists vastly more knowledgeable than himself as “incredibly timid people” crippled by a worship of orthodoxy. He also insists that mammoths were around at the time of the Pilgrims — more oral history? — and wonders if the Vikings, whom he calls “the premier explorers of the Christian era,” really came to America at all. (The Vikings were, of course, militant pagans infamous for their violence toward Christians and were certainly not greater explorers than the Portuguese.)

Thomas himself tries desperately to navigate a sensible course through this pseudo-intellectual twaddle. Noting that Deloria has rejected evolutionary theory as well, he muses: “These are strange bedfellows: Native American communities, right-wing Christian groups and left-wingers. It is just this curious coalition that was instrumental in the passage of reburial legislation by the U.S. Congress.”

Exactly. And scientists are justifiably outraged. For what was really at stake in that decision was not the freedom of Native Americans to adhere to their beliefs about the prehistoric past, which are not being denied, but the ability of this society in general to reflect rationally upon that same past without having to genuflect unduly to the above-mentioned groups, none of whom has any monopoly on the truth. In this instance, I would argue, it is not the anthropologists or archaeologists who are being the intellectual obscurantists. And why, it should be explained, is anyone’s “identity” threatened by that same truth, whatever it may be?

In the end, “Skull Wars” cannot possibly resolve these impasses. It is simply an overheated work of protest. We can always bemoan, too, the fact that scientists are not more like the enlightened, cosmically multi-culti Jean-Luc Picard. But at the end of the day they have more to tell us about the past than anyone else. The rest is largely grouch.

For Reagan, religion was not an elusive private affair or a mystical revelation that the ancient desert eremites might have recognized, it was part of the quantifiable material world. Religion was true because it “worked.” Americans want religion to pay off and give us a competitive edge. We are a nation of materialists, engineers and money-makers, not artist-monks, and our religion has a peculiar whiff of sanctimonious brimstone and hysteria: “Night of the Hunter” mixed with car salesmanship, gestalt therapy and a dash of the Harvard Business School. How much better if we could bring religion into line with what we really believe in: machines.

Since Galileo, religion and science have stubbornly refused to talk to each other. Like two disgruntled and bad-tempered old relatives forced to sit together at the same Christmas dinner table, they utter barely a word to each other except for an occasional “Bah!” According to many scientists, spirituality is largely an example of the Higher Twaddle, a gaseous domain of high-minded but improvable verbiage. Science is an arrogant, ill-mannered lout, say most religionists. The mood at table, alas, is grim.

But now into this awkward breach a larger-than-life gentleman has stepped. His name is Sir John Templeton, a brilliant mutual funds manager and committed Christian, a billionaire modestly domiciled in Barbados who established a charity known as the Templeton Foundation with the exuberant aim of reconciling the rival claims of religion and science. Recently, he has sponsored a number of science-religion conferences and discussions such as the open debate between Nobel Prize laureate Steven Weinberg and physicist-turned-priest John Polkinghorne, held in April 1998 at Washington’s National Museum of Natural History.

Despite his 18th century and seemingly very English name, the 86-year-old Templeton is actually a Tennessee native who relinquished his American citizenship in favor of the British variety in 1968, and could thus be knighted. Having created the lucrative Templeton Growth Fund in 1954 (average annual growth 14 percent), he has come to be associated with a variety of odd-sounding bodies devoted to such missions as planetary wisdom, world peace and global harmony. Now Templeton has earmarked $40 million for the Foundation’s pursuit of the ultimate intellectual Grail: scientific proof that faith really does pay — in both the literal and figurative senses — and that religion has a statistical basis underpinning it much like winged aircraft and off-shore investment. A vulgar conception of the Spirit, perhaps, but if it worked, to paraphrase Charles Fillmore, “The Lord would be my banker, for my credit is good.”

Two years ago, the Foundation announced that it would fund experiments by professor Russell Stannard of the Open University and Herbert Benson of the Harvard Medical School into the medical effects of prayer. Stannard and Benson duplicated a similar experiment that Randolph Byrd conducted of coronary-care patients in San Francisco in 1988. Although Byrd’s study initially seemed to show some positive results for prayers, his methods were later criticized, arousing widespread skepticism among scientists.

In the Stannard and Benson trial, two groups of hospitalized patients awaiting heart surgery were told that they were being prayed for by special “praying groups.” Both sets were told that they were being assisted by concentrated prayer while in reality, only one group was the object of appeal. Stannard, a practising Christian, told a British newspaper that the Templeton Foundation had no vested interest in a positive outcome. “We are genuinely interested,” he said with saintly neutrality, “in any experimentation that has a bearing on religion.”

The carefully guarded results will likely be published in the year 2000. But in case there is a negative result, Stannard has a sly escape clause. It would not prove, he claimed, that prayer did not help. God, after all, might not be cooperative on that particular day. And why, for that matter, should he be especially interested in Open University experiments into his mysterious workings anyway? Then again, there might be a problem with what Stannard called “unwanted background noise,” unaccountable prayers whizzing through the airwaves from more distant sources. Who could say? But if the outcome meant little if it was negative, why conduct the experiment at all?

“Enthusiasm for progress” is what Sir Templeton calls this attempt to put God on a par with earthquakes and the laws of gravity. He is clearly a charming, clever and ebullient man, a kind of modern Dr. Pangloss straight out of Voltaire’s “Candide.” Indeed, Pangloss’ optimistic motto, “The best of all possible worlds,” could well be his. “We always,” Templeton says, “put things in an optimistic, progressive perspective.”

Templeton also believes the world’s religions offer attitudes worthy of emulation such as optimism, even-temperament and productivity, ideal qualities for a corporate employee. And like the effects of prayer, Templeton believes scientific laws can explain these attributes.

In a recent interview with Wired, Oxford planetary scientist and Templeton grant-award committee chairman Charles Harper described the qualities needed by a successful shoe salesman: “You are still reading Stendhal novels,” he said, “and you are not selling so many shoes. So you stick in a cassette tape while you are commuting and you stick these maxims in your mind, and, lo and behold, it helps!” Otherwise put, drop your useless Stendhal and pick up your copy of the Templeton Foundation’s spiritual manual “Worldwide Laws of Life: 200 Eternal Spiritual Principles.” Instead of boring old character analysis and psychological acumen, you’ll find the merry, uplifting saws of Johnny Mercer and Henry Ford.

Although our culture is obsessed with pretentiously scientific explanations for all human emotions, most people would concede that spirituality is a rather different matter. It’s a tricky and ambiguous affair, honed by rather unscientific things such as suffering, instinct or a lifetime’s cultural knowledge. It is neither a matter of information nor of neurology, and it is unquantifiable.

Why, then, do foundations, committees, willing scientists and philanthropists — an entire class of well-paid international Dr. Panglosses — devote millions of dollars to futile research into the nature of something that is by its very nature elusive? But Templeton’s project mirrors our corporate culture’s view of human personality and fulfillment where everything is rational and nothing is elusive. Sex, pain, passion: Read the conflict resolution manual. Simon the Stylite, climb down off that pillar and accentuate the positive!

One is struck by the similarity of this tinny view of the inner life and its Soviet equivalent. The Soviets, too, were “scientific” materialists who understood the persuasive power of spiritual kitsch. And they believed in that great red herring of the Enlightenment, scientifically determined happiness: a perfect recipe for unhappiness (not to mention vast amounts of bad prose).

A chilling example of this vision of scientifically engineered human contentment is provided by another Templeton endeavor. Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neurobiologist, has been studying a troop of baboons in Kenya. The dominant male baboons had all been poisoned by contaminated refuse at a garbage dump, which the other members had not consumed. All at once, the troop became less violent, less hierarchical and calmer. The remaining baboons’ blood pressure went down.

Templeton agreed to fund Sapolsky because he was intrigued by this metamorphosis and thought it could give clues to similar transformations among humans. After all, didn’t these baboons seem to be accentuating the positive? Blood tests confirmed that they were indeed “happier,” and that although the decease of the dominant males had been an accident, it created a permanent mutation. Perhaps one could suggest euthanasia for jocks?

Attempting to draw social moralisms from biology is banal at best. Do we really need baboon experiments to tell us that violence is not very nice and harmony lowers our blood pressure? At worst, the endeavor to give a scientific basis to our utopian wish-fulfillments and religious passions is highly suspect. When science becomes the willing handmaid of social utopias and personal therapy, it becomes a dislikable and bossy accessory of the Higher Twaddle. “I do believe,” says the physicist Polkinghorne, “that religious belief can explain more than unbelief can.”

Science has proven very little about our inner life, because the latter is the result of incalculable experiences. Can a Positive Feelings Index or a Productive Emotion Graph really tell us what goes on in the psyche of someone praying for a dying relative? It does not seem very likely that the current Templeton prayer study will tell us very much about some future health care directed by priests, vicars and rabbis — or even optimistic venture capitalists. In other words, give science and religious feeling their very dissimilar dues, have a good laugh at Pangloss, then quietly pick up your Stendhal.

All in all, this is what surrealism’s founders, Andri Breton and Louis Aragon,
wanted. Theirs was to be a revolution not of works and acts but of the interior
life: Their heroes were dandies, recluses, iconoclasts. To them, surrealism was not
so much a means of mass-producing art as it was a war zone, played out in the
aestheticized and hysterical domain of male friendship. It was a game of liaisons
dangereuses among intricate egos — or among “a bunch of pederasts,” as some
sneered.

It’s appropriate, then, that “Surreal Lives,” a group biography by social
historian Ruth Brandon, is deliciously gossipy, an informal encyclopedia of
surrealism’s endless personal intrigues and factional falling-outs. For this coterie
of lustrous young men, friendships, infatuations and loves were artistic material –
the volcanic, remorseless stuff of the unconscious. Personal seduction, Brandon
makes us aware, was a supreme value for these groomed, snobbish sons of the
French bourgeoisie. They may have thought beauty to be a detestable quality in,
say, a painting, but it loomed large in the enigmatic charisma of individuals. Of
Aragon, who owned 200 ties, Breton sighed, “He is so handsome, you cannot
believe.” Waiting for the arrival of the 22-year-old Tristan Tzara in Paris, Breton
and the salacious Nancy Cunard were in a quasi-sexual ecstasy of apprehension.
Tzara himself, the prodigy of Dada, stage-managed his entrance so that his
glimmering eyes and delicate hands would be noticed. (Breton, however, was
disappointed.)

To say that the surrealists were dandies is to remember the deeper resonances of
that word — the dandy as stylistic and sexual rebel. They loved the occult, the
mysterious elegance of coincidences. Indeed, Breton was almost more obsessed by
the color green than he was by entering any pantheon: The tint had to be
added to all his drinks (except, of course, the occasional Burgundy). Their
contempt was directed at all careerists, especially novelists and journalists — a
voluntary austerity much criticized by Dalm’s avaricious wife, Gala. Yet Breton
exulted in all kinds of people — his generous admiration ranged over the taurine
Picasso, the lordly Francis Picabia, the hilariously gnomic Marcel Duchamp, the
elfin Dalm and the poet Robert Desnos, who would fall asleep in restaurants and
begin spontaneously uttering from the oracular unconscious.

In Brandon’s telling, Breton was especially haunted by one adolescent provocateur, his
red-haired wartime comrade Jacques Vachi, who affected an English accent and
appeared at the opening night of Apollinaire’s avant-garde play “Les Mamelles de
Tiresias” armed with a revolver, as if about to empty its chamber into the
audience. Breton talked him out of that desperate act, but the strange Vachi
continued to supply for Breton “the continually desired dissonance and isolation,”
as Brandon puts it, that he craved in people. In 1919 Vachi was found dead with
another youth in a hotel room after an opium overdose. “Jacques Vachi,” Breton
later wrote, “is the Surrealist in me.” He would also say that the ultimate
surrealist act was to walk into the street with a loaded revolver and fire at random:
a touch of pure Vachi.

Surrealism’s development was marked by a continual clash between the ordered,
sensitively rational minds of its French controllers, like Breton and Aragon, and the
earthy, anti-rational fanaticism of acolytes who came from “backward” corners
of Europe — first the Romanian Jew Tzara, then what Brandon calls the
“Andalucian dogs”: Dalm and Luis Buquel. By concentrating on personal
chemistries, Brandon brings this out beautifully, showing how a volatile dialectic
bound these two psychic halves of Europe together.

Inside the movement, this powerful clash was played out in personal obsessions.
At first, Breton found Dalm enchanting. He couldn’t cross the street without being
led; when he took a train he would huddle terrified by the engine so that he would
“get there quicker.” He spoke a bizarre French that nonetheless conveyed ideas of
fluid delicacy. For Breton, Dalm’s appearance in Paris in 1929 saved surrealism
from an encroaching sterility. But Dalm came from a medieval country saturated
with violent pathologies, and his surrealism was dangerously total. It is difficult
to imagine the fastidious Breton eating his lover’s stools, as Dalm did with Gala’s,
and it is equally difficult to imagine Dalm humbling himself before dreary Marxist
orthodoxy, as most of the surrealists were beginning to do. Breaking with Breton,
Dalm declared instead that “Marxism is shit, the last of Christian shit.” (This
quality might have endeared him to it, except that it did not issue from his beloved
Gala.)

In a sense, communism was the grave that surrealism buried itself in — not only
because it imposed a philistine realist aesthetic at odds with surrealism’s
deepest instincts, but because it also destroyed the primacy of the erotic
interplays that made surrealism’s booming, narcissistic individuals tick. When Dalm unveiled
an armchair studded with glass vials containing milk, Aragon dourly declared that
there were too many children in the world who needed milk and that the armchair
was politically unacceptable. Aragon then took off with Philippe Soupault to the
Soviet Kharkov writers’ conference in 1931 and signed a declaration previously
drawn up by the Communist Party in which he effectively renounced his
surrealist past. “Did the Surrealists’ support for the Party,” Brandon asks, “mean
that their own intellectual activity must be abandoned in pursuit of the good of
the masses?” The answer, alas, was yes.

Brandon makes the claim that in the end it was Buquel alone — because of his
isolation, his mid-life career failures, his great skepticism — who carried surrealism
into the post-war years and who made something resembling great work from it.
The antics of “Les Mamelles de Tiresias” flowered half a century later into the
grandly demented rhythms of Buquel’s “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.”

But Breton, too, for all his faults, is still a magical figure. His “Union Libre,” with
its cascades of terrible and gorgeous animal and mineral images, is perhaps the
greatest love poem in the French language. Who but a surrealist could have written
it? Of this tragic and overlooked figure Brandon concludes, “Along with his hero
Freud, he is one of that select group who defined for our century a new way of
looking at the world.”

If surrealism died because it politicized itself crudely, its force was nonetheless
dispersed over new ground. The surrealist expatriation to New York in the ’40s
helped create the modern American art scene. Brandon gives us the intriguing
image of Breton imperiously leading Robert Motherwell around New York junk
stores, teaching him which objects were surreal and which were not. An
indefinable transference of spirit took place between the surrealists and the New
York art world. But the group’s best, early works show that the surrealists had qualities
rare among their contemporary progeny: erudition, refinement, vast culture, dark
wit, an incorrigible style. The surrealists would have strolled into the Whitney Museum
with a flame-thrower and torched everything in sight.