Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

CONSCIOUSNESS

Finally, by participating in and observing this present, by taking account of the storifying process by which individuals continue to write their lives into a narrative whole, the anthropologist can hope to gain access to the consciousness of others as it moves from past awareness to future (cf. Tonkin 1992; Hastrup 1995a). It is their memory and their anticipation that individuals express and perform in their use of cultural symbols and social institutions.

An anthropology of consciousness

The anthropologist seeks the subtleties of intimate knowledge: knowledge behind the ideal-types, categories, generalities and abstractions of public exchange. The quest is for the knowledge which animates these collective forms, forms which far from revealing this knowledge may well mask it beneath the vagaries of symbol or conventional idiom. For much of its history, social anthropology has lived with the comforting notion of collective representations. However, to continue to resign itself to the inaccessibility of consciousness is for anthropology to abide by a view which it knows from experience to be false: that behaviour can be taken at face value, and that what people appear to do equates with what they do do and what they think. Anthropology cannot be concerned solely with what is public or revealed, for this is, or may be, mere gloss on what is concealed or not obviously apparent.To gloss consciousness either by notions of society or by culture, so that an individual experience is treated as if it were simply identical to or derivable from that of the collectivity to which he or she supposedly belongs, is to deny or, at best, misrepresent individuality and selfhood by gross simplification. Moreover, with the collapse or redundancy of the old positivistic orthodoxy which stipulated a strict difference between the anthropologist and the anthropologized, consciousness has certainly become more accessible to valid study than previously. It is no longer acceptable (à la Durkheim, or Mauss (1985)) to claim a consciousness for ourselves which we deny to others.

In a sense, of course, this is not so much a new departure in anthropology as a matter of rediscovering what its practitioners have always enjoined; anthropology has been concerned with consciousness (as a method and a subject) since Malinowski first wrote in his field dairy in 1917: ‘Principle: along with external events, record feelings and instinctual manifestations; moreover, have a clear idea of the metaphysical nature of existence’ [1989:130].Anthropologists have long made claims about other people’s consciousness and their grasp of it, and ethnographic reports have been replete with imputations of belief,

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thought, knowledge and emotion to members of the societies and social groups with which they were concerned; anthropologists have sought to make sense of what they have seen and heard, and have taken this latter as evidence of conscious sense-making beings. Of late, however, they have been more prepared to admit that this is necessarily the case, in studies of consciousness as this pertains to: creativity (Fernandez 1993), individuality (Rapport 1993a), childhood (James 1993), psychopathology (Littlewood 1993), healing (Kapferer 1983), spirit possession (Stoller 1989a), or altered states (Lewis 1971).

Ultimately, an anthropology of consciousness translates into a ‘decolonizing’ of the human subject: a liberation both from overdetermining cultural conditions and overweening social institutions (discourse, collective representation, social relationship, habitus, praxis), and from their social-scientific commentator-apologists. This is not because of a desire to change anthropology’s object from society to the individual, but because anthropology can no longer rest content with traditional assumptions that social behaviour originates or resides in forces (social, historical, cultural) beyond and ‘outside’ the individual.

See also: Cognition, Individuality, Narrative, World-View

CONTRADICTION

In an influential collection of essays (1990), the philosopher Isaiah Berlin elaborated upon the Kantian aphorism that ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’. Between the supreme values, the true answers and the final ends as construed within the diverse world-views of different individuals and societies there can be expected no necessary commensurability, no final reconcilability and no true synthesis. ‘Great goods’ can always be expected to collide for there is no determinate means of putting different ‘goods’ together, no single overarching standard or criterion available to decide between or harmonize discrete moralities. Moreover, this is so not merely in the case of the values of a succession of civilizations or nations, persons, times and places, but also of contemporaneous ones. Every social milieu, in short, can be said to be grounded in incompatibility and contradiction. These, indeed, are perhaps the only non-contradicted human realities.

Anthropologists have had cause to consider the contradictoriness of social life, the ‘disharmony of ends’ (Douglas 1966:140) of which individuals and societies are in pursuit, in a number of contexts. First,

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there is what Malinowski perhaps first enunciated, the contradictions which come to be contained in an anthropologist’s field notes.The fieldjournal, ‘in which everything is written down as it is observed or told’, amounts to ‘a chaotic account’ (Malinowski, cited in Wedgwood 1932– 4: notebook 18 May 1932). In part, this can seen to be due to an elision of the spoken with the written. Oral exchange involves ‘the flow of speech, the spate of words, the flood of argument’, and here ‘inconsistency, even contradiction’ can prosper in ways which appear chaotic when seen through the ‘critical scrutiny’, ‘explicitness’ and ‘fixity’ of the written (Goody 1977:49, 37; also cf. Clifford 1990:64).The field-journal contains a chaotic aggregation because of recontextualization: because the grammar of oral exchange, and the rubrics of intelligibility and consistency, are not those of written exchange (cf. Rapport 1997a:93–105).

Secondly, anthropologists have sought to avoid a recontextualization of local notions of rationality; what appears ‘chaotic’ in their data, illogical and contradictory, may well evidence an alien logic and way of ordering matter which does not accord with Western notions. In debates over rationality, therefore (Wilson 1970; Hollis and Lukes 1982; Overing 1985a), anthropologists have sought ways of avoiding construing their data via the empirically based truth conditions and formal rules of logic of the West. Alien truths may contradict our own and in our terms may seem selfcontradictory, but this is something that we can neither ignore nor explain away as ‘poetry’: as examples of figurative or analogic or metaphoric thinking which exist still within the bounds of a (necessarily universal) Western account of human reason and reasoning (Overing 1985b:152).

Perhaps the central issue, however, concerns the question of consistency which the anthropologist can expect to encounter both within and between the people they are investigating. Are individuals and the societies they come to constitute likely to be characterized by contradictory thoughts, words and actions? Should the anthropologist expect, and expect to recognize, a certain non-contradictory consistency in the social milieux they are investigating?

Sybil Wolfram (1985:72–3) has warned anthropologists that logicians often distinguish between ‘contradiction’ and ‘inconsistency’.Two things are contradictory if they are of opposite truth-value, so that one is true if the other is false, and vice versa; two things are inconsistent, however, if they cannot both be true, but both could just as well be false. Anthropologists, notwithstanding, are usually satisfied to use the terms interchangeably, and to understand by ‘contradiction’ something whose existence appears to deny the possible simultaneous existence of something else: both/and rather than either/or (cf. Rapport 1997c).

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A Durkheimian treatment of contradiction

Early on, Malinowski appreciated that:

arguing by the law of logical contradiction is absolutely futile in the realm of belief, whether savage or civilised.Two beliefs, quite contradictory to each other on logical grounds, may co-exist, while a perfectly obvious inference from a firm tenet may be simply ignored.

(1948:194)

However, to the extent that, conventionally, social-anthropological theorizing has followed the lead of Durkheim rather than those of, say, Simmel, Weber or Marx, the above wisdom has been undervalued. Hence, it has been an anthropological orthodoxy that human beings symbolically classify the world in such a way as to eschew contradiction, and follow social practices which call for, and ultimately maintain, consistency in thought and behaviour.

Primitive Classification (Durkheim and Mauss 1970 [1903]) was an important volume for drawing attention to the fact that order in human life is procured through the construing and imposing of systemically related symbolic categories. As Durkheim and Mauss expounded, complex systems of classification characterize every socio-cultural milieu: discrete things arranged in distinct groups and categories, separated by clearly determined lines of demarcation and hierarchy, standing in fixed relationships to one another and uniting to form single, congruous wholes. These classificatory systems are necessary to human understanding.They make intelligible the relations which exist between things, they connect ideas and they unify knowledge.

Moreover, Durkheim and Mauss insisted that classificatory systems were cultural products, derivative of, modelled on and expressive of, society. Such a view came to be widely shared, laying the foundation for much social-anthropological appreciation of the social-structural ordering of human things, from Radcliffe-Brown through EvansPritchard and Fortes to Gluckman. It found perhaps its most elaborated expression in Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966).

There is a human ‘yearning for rigidity’, Douglas begins (1966:162), a longing for ‘hard lines and clear concepts’, and all such epistemologies are to be found anchored to ongoing social realities. Each culture comes to represent a universe to itself, and members come to view their social environments in common as consisting of people and things joined and separated by boundaries that are socially sanctioned and must be

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respected. Here are indubitable, coherent systems from which the contradictory, the incoherent and the arbitrary are banned. However, having constructed symbolic classifications of the world, Douglas admits, we human beings have to ‘face the fact that some realities elude them, or else blind ourselves to the inadequacy of the concepts’ (1966:162).That is, any systemic ordering and classification of matter inexorably rejects certain elements as inappropriate: it must do this in order to arrive at clean lines of division between matter. An inevitable by-product of a system of symbolic classification, therefore, is ‘dirt’: that which contravenes the ordering. Hedged about with taboo, the dirt which threatens the clear-cut ordering of the world, which would ‘pollute’ its cleanliness, is eschewed; while the notion that something is polluted serves to protect cherished principles and categories from contradiction. The only exceptions are certain extraordinary, ritual situations. For while the disorder which such dirt represents is a threat, it is also recognized as powerful. Unrestricted by existing categories and order, it ushers in new possibilities. Ritual, therefore, represents a venture out of social order and control in an attempt to tap an extraordinary power which is seen to inhere outside the everyday nomos of human life and to belong to the supernatural cosmos. Here is a surmounting of conventional differentiations, Douglas concludes, and a confronting of ambiguity and contradiction: an expression of a common human desire ‘to make a unity of all their experience and to overcome distinctions and separations in acts of at-onement’ (1966:169).

However, if the universe of human experience is a purely sociocultural universe, and that universe is necessarily coherent and unitary, on the Durkheimian view, it is not quite clear where and how those ‘dirty realities’ intrude: how categories come to fray at the edges and so how individuals come to ‘see’ the contradictory. Seeking to marry Durkheim and Mauss to a Marxian critique which placed contradiction, via competition and contrast, at the centre of the societal model, therefore, was the work of Max Gluckman. Gluckman described ‘social systems’ as replete with ambivalence: as fields of tension, cooperation and struggle (e.g. 1963a:135–6). There were inherent tensions between principles of social-structural organization, between institutions, and between individuals. Nevertheless, some control of these tensions was achieved through their cathartic expression in ritual. Rituals effected an institutionalized expression of conflict and protest which worked paradoxically to renew, strengthen, and even sacralize, the established system; here were public statements of rebellion against, and hostilities within, the established social order, dramatizations of conflict, and annulments or reversals of hierarchy, whose regular, routine and

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normative staging served as a prelude to their nomic reinstatement. ‘Rites of reversal’ and ‘rituals of rebellion’ (1959), in short, were extraordinary, topsy-turvy stages which removed the significance and, to an extent, the cognizance of the contradictory in ordinary social life so that the tensions (social and psychological) which derived from these contradictions came to be dissipated. Hence, while a social system may no longer be conceived of in terms of a stable equilibrium, at least dynamic equilibria persisted. In a more radical appreciation of this dynamism, Leach (1954) theorized that this might entail societies in continuous change, swinging, pendulum-like, between contradictory ideal-typical versions of how, symbolically, social life was to be conceived of and lived.

It remained unclear, in the Durkheimian picture, however, just why recognition and embrace of the contradictory should be cordoned off in, and only cognized as, the extraordinariness of ritual. Upon this, Victor Turner sought to elaborate (1964). If symbolic behaviour ‘created’ society, then ritual performances could be described as dynamic moments in social groups’ creative practices wherein symbolic creations adjusted to internal or external pressures for change. The symbols in terms of which rituals were structured provided points of junction, and enabled compromises to form, between social needs of classification and control on the one side, and innate (anarchic) human drives on the other. For what symbolic formulations afforded, Turner theorized, were unifications of disparate, contradictory significata; ritual symbols brought together, in condensed form, what was otherwise divided and kept apart. They juxtaposed ideological against sensory meanings, the normative against the emotional, and the cognitive against the affective. Symbols thus effected an interchange of qualities such that what appeared tense, contradictory and potentially anomic in the everyday came to seem a unity. As a result of ritual catharsis, normative social classifications were revitalized.

In sum, the anthropological orthodoxy which began with Durkheim problematized contradiction to the extent that it saw social order as wedded to an everyday eradication of symbolic contrarieties. Societies, as social facts, as things-in-themselves, were unitary and orderly; the institutional structuring of societies took place in non-contradictory fashion; and individuals, as members of societies, cognitively mirrored the institutional structures in which they were habitual role-players. At best, contradiction was recognized in this formulation as pertaining between the states of order and disorder or un-order—between different social-structural episodes, between structure and ritual—but not as a state in itself.

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What is absent from this line of thought is an appreciation of the possible ubiquity of contradiction: people saying and doing and thinking inconsistent things as a matter of course; people employing multiple, contradictory symbolic classifications at the same time; people able to construe classificatory systems which are in themselves contradictory. In a well-known example provided by Foucault (1973), a Chinese encyclopedia suggests the following division of animals:

a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush, 1) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies.

It is with cognitive-symbolic contradiction of this kind (not either/ or but both/and) that anthropology has come slowly to recognize it must deal.

A Nietzschean treatment of contradiction

Inasmuch as Durkheimian notions of social order were in sympathy with nineteenth-century natural-scientific notions of homeostasis and an emphasis on the conservation of energy, an appreciation of the ubiquity of contradictoriness in human social life coincides with a postEinsteinian emphasis on the contingency of order, its pertaining to perception and perspective, and on entropy (cf. Bateson 1951:246ff.). There is now a far more reflexive anthropological appreciation of the implicatedness of human beings in the order they construe and the uncertainty this gives onto; constructions are situated and diverse, and constructions change. Even as human beings seek meaning and order in themselves and their world, their lives remain unpredictable—to themselves as to others—even chaotically so (cf. Abrahams 1990; Prigogine 1989).

Part of the reflexive revolution which anthropology has embraced of late concerns the implications of its own expectations for the sociocultural realities it ‘discovers’. ‘[E]thnographic reality’, in Dumont’s words (1978:66), is something ‘actively constructed, not to say invented’; while ‘other cultures’ might be understood as anthropological imaginings of plausible explanations of what other people seem to have been doing (Wagner 1977:500–1). If anthropology has traditionally eschewed contradiction, then, this is so because of the dogmatic,

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axiomatic and doctrinal nature of its own analytical discourse and not the nature of socio-cultural reality. Perhaps now, other discourses should be chosen for anthropological analysis, ones more ‘commonsensical’, in Geertz’s terms (1983), than specialized, technical or theoretical, and so closer to those employed in the everyday by informants. Is it not now possible to imagine an anthropological way of looking, knowing and inscribing which is heterogeneous and self-contradictory, even wildly so, a way which transcends what Kundera refers (1990:7) to as that ‘“eitheror” [which] encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge’? Perhaps only a pot-pourri of disparate analytical notions is capable of grasping the vast multifariousness of human social life (Geertz 1983:90–1).

As Marilyn Strathern puts it (1990a:6), the ‘diversity and multiple character’ of phenomena (including their contradictoriness) need not necessarily give way, in analysis, to any more systemic representation; one can imagine an anthropological account which specifies complexity without simplifying it. Moreover, any one anthropological account can flag its own provisionality, insist on its own perspectivity and timeliness (Cohen 1992b); while the contradictions between such accounts serve merely to point up the fluidity and multiplicity of human social life and classification, and the aggregation of ‘limitless discursive perspectives’ (Parkin 1987:66) to which the latter amount.

Kundera’s reference, above, to ‘the absence of the Supreme Judge’ alerts us to the essentially Nietzschean nature of the new anthropological dispensation concerning the contradictory (cf. Shweder 1991b:39). For Nietzsche, human society and culture are above all poetic projects, artworks, and it is to artistic models and aesthetic evaluations (and not scientific assessments and rational judgements) that one may best turn for an understanding of them. Like an art-work, human worlds are something constructed and something requiring interpretation in order to be understood—made livable, mastered—by their inhabitants; being the joint product of ineffable matter and human interpretation, there is no absolute truth about the world, and it possesses no independent character. Moreover, the world can be interpreted equally well in innumerable, vastly different and deeply incompatible ways. The ‘death’ of God (as hero and author) means that the world is not subject to a single interpretation—God’s will or intention; it is something, instead, with ‘no meaning behind it, but countless meanings’ (Nietzsche 1968:267).This being the case, there could never be a ‘complete’ theory or final interpretation of the world or anything else, merely an array of succeeding perspectives.

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Human beings may themselves be part of the world, may be viewing it from situated, interested and partisan perspectives, but nonetheless, it is they who create the world, create themselves and their perspectives in their interpretations. They construct the world as they interpret it; and their constructions add further to the complexity and multifariousness and indeterminacy of the art-work that continues to be interpreted—by others, by themselves—in the present and future.Amidst the profusion of versions and forms of construction of the world, there is only one singularity: the continuation of their profusion. Interpretations continue to be made because to interpret is to be human, and to be individual, and because the human world has no objective character, no underlying or overarching structure, system or regularity to it. Moreover, with the death of God, one might expect the relationship between the profusion of interpretations to be anything but a clear-cut one; instead, it is indirect, tangential and contradictory.

In brief, a Nietzschean emphasis on the artistry of symbolic classification provides an approach to the latter which allows for contradiction, its poetic import and creative promise, in a way which Durkheim‘s insistence on singularity and system does not. With the ‘literary turn’ in anthropology, moreover, the value of Nietzschean aestheticism in the depiction of society has begun to be celebrated.

The contradictoriness inherent within socio-cultural milieux, and its phenomenological appreciation, has also begun to be emphasized in contemporary ethnography (Moore 1987; Ewing 1990; Rapport 1993a, 1997c). Here is a recounting of contradictory thoughts, beliefs and behaviours both between people and within people. Individuals are seen apt to construct and maintain a diversity of perspectives for themselves, each contradictory in terms of the elements, relationships, values, norms, desires, expectations and so on of all the others. Contextualizing their lives in terms of these perspectives, individuals can think, speak and act in any number of contradictory ways. The aggregation of these individual perspectives can also alter with time, as new ones are constructed, current ones developed and old ones sloughed off; and as the aggregation changes so does the array and range of assembled contradictions.

This diversity of perspectives, of world-views and identities possessed by an individual can be more and less conscious, the deployment of contradictions in thought, speech and action more and less strategic. Contradiction may be disguised by the momentariness of life, by the way that conscious existence turns on momentary thoughts, feelings, apprehensions, emotions, on what Virginia Woolf refers to as ‘moments of being’ (1976). Hence, while contradictory in their interpretations of

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the world, in the meanings they imparted to people and events, nevertheless, the contradictoriness of individual lives may be swallowed up by the experiential intensity of each moment—by the absoluteness of order which one particular perspective leads them to attribute to that moment—and by the constant movement of their conscious lives from moment to moment.

Then again, contradictoriness (as duplicity or hypocrisy) can be employed as a vehicle for all manner of purposive social gain: pleasing an electorate, confusing an enemy, being polite to a guest, keeping in with a friend, insulting, provoking, misleading, mystifying another or oneself. While between the more and less deliberate uses of contradictions are beliefs and assertions which might be described as vague or fuzzy, such that contradictoriness is not always so self-evident. One can envisage a graded scale, Wolfram suggests (1985:72–3), between blatant and nonblatant, self-evident and fuzzy contradictions, such that the complexity of an individual’s relationship with his or her contradictory representations of self and world is given full analytical measure. One thing that is clear, however, is that, as Hollis puts it (1982:72): ‘Mankind could hardly survive without beliefs which are incoherent, unlikely, disconnected or daft’. Or again: ‘private paradoxes can be allowed to stand indefinitely’ (Kelly 1970:12).

When the private becomes public, when contradictory individuals interact, the situation does not become any simpler, more coherent or consistent.The opposite, in fact, as the self-contradictory meanings of the thoughts, beliefs, words and actions of one individual meet those of others. That is, interaction between individuals and their variegated cognitions does not somehow give rise to ‘social systems’ which are consensual, coherent, coercive, or without contingency—or which are particularly singular or systemic at all. The picture is rather one of ‘chaotic relativism’ (Rapport 1993a) in which a diversity of individual perspectives influences a diversity of others in all manner of indirect, incidental, contingent, changeable—and contradictory—ways. Moreover, the ambiguities and abbreviations of public systems of symbolic exchange, of language and behaviour, are such that the contradictions and inconsistencies need not become apparent. Symbolic forms mediate between the words and actions of one individual and the thoughts, beliefs and cognitions of others, so that, as Sapir concluded (1956:153): ‘the friendly ambiguities of language conspire to reinterpret for each individual all behavior which he has under observation in terms of those meanings which are relevant to his own life’.

In short, an appreciation of contradiction gives onto a modelling of human social life not as something coherent, rather as a muddling

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