Secrecy In American Culture

Secrecy has long been a topic of anthropological investigation, beginning, indeed, with the “father” of US anthropology, Lewis Henry Morgan, and continuing on with work on secret societies around the world, especially in Africa and New Guinea. Characteristic of this literature is that unlike much of the writing of sociologists, it does not presume the individual as the bearer of secrets, privilege the realm of the “private” as a space of secrecy, or assume transparency as the norm. The most extensive elaboration of these ideas comes from New Guinea specialist Gilbert Herdt, the most interesting theorist of secrecy, who finds in New Guinea men’s secret cults positive sources of meaning and identity rather than the instruments of female oppression and peculiarly

One is the relation of secrecy to power structures and politics. “Secrecy is an intentional process of differentiating included persons and entities from those excluded, while simultaneously building solidarity among secret-sharers. . . . Secret collectives assemble hierarchies, between outsiders and insiders, and between members of the collective itself. . . . Secrecy is, necessarily, always coupled with hierarchy,” writes Herdt (1990: 360-361). The secret society can become “an elite caste,” using terror (their performances as masked devils) as a means of social control (Bellman 143). According to William Murphy, an outstanding student of secrecy among the Kpelle of Liberia where secrecy is an unusually prominent organizing feature of social life, “The secret is essentially a boundary mechanism separating members of different social categories or groups. . . . ‘The secret here is a separating or distancing mechanism between a leading and a subordinate group.’ In Kpelle society secrecy separates elders from youth. It supports the elders' political and economic control” (Murphy 1980: 193). Describing Kpelle secret societies, he