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

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through. Socio-cultural milieux are neither systemic nor singular, for they are constituted by the aggregation of a multiplicity of private symbolic—classificatory orders which collide, abut, overlap, and need not consistently coordinate or coincide. Furthermore, the muddle is ongoing, brought on by interacting individuals continuing to influence one another and themselves in all manner of possibly unintentional ways.

From the traditional Durkheimian image of singularity, coherency and consistency, of symbolic—cognitive classifications expressing the structural—functional solidarities of their societal origins, we have arrived at a rather different conclusion. Here is an image of a diversity of contradictory symbolic realities or perspectives in use at any one moment and between moments, even in the ‘same’ sociolinguistic milieu, and in no necessarily singular, clear, uncontested or coherent relationship one with another. Individuals may live in a diversity of constructed world-views and identities, their contradictory cognitions giving existence to a plurality of social worlds in any one time or place. This, it can be argued, represents a more authentic picture of ethnographic reality, of individual and society, than a denial of the contradictory or its sidelining as something extraordinary if not pathological.

Muddling through the myriad of versions of symbolic reality in use in a socio-cultural milieu may not make experience easy or comfortable. Notwithstanding, there is an inexorable relationship between symbolic order and the contradictory, and perhaps it is in the latter that there is to be found evidence of our human being and becoming, its creativity and artistry. In the symbolism of society and culture, things can be both/and because human worlds run along poetic lines, and in terms of momentary cognitions. Both/and amounts to a cognitive norm, and it points up the constructed, provisional nature of the social worlds which we inhabit and for which we are individually responsible.

See also: Classification, Cognition, Methodological Eclecticism

CONVERSATION

For Michael Oakeshott (1962), conversation is what human cultures accomplish and what human societies inherit. Conversation is a meeting of individual voices speaking in different idiom or mode. Science, poetry, practical activity and history are such modes of speech, different universes of discourse. It is the very diversity, the manifold of different

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voices, speaking in different idioms or modes, which ‘makes’ conversation. The voices need not compose a hierarchy, and the conversation need not amount to an argument; the diverse voices may differ without disagreeing, and they may appear to be saying the same without agreeing. Hence, conversation is not an inquiry or contest, exegesis or debate; it does not set out to persuade, refute, or inform. Conversation has no truth to discover, no proposition to prove, no conclusion to seek; reason is neither sovereign nor primary, and there is no accumulating inquiry or body of information to safeguard. Instead, as ‘thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another’— responding to and provoking one another’s movement, obliquely interrelating without assimilating—so their individual thinkers engage in the ‘unrehearsed intellectual adventure’ of socio-cultural life (1962:198). Going on in public and inside themselves, a conversation between individuals ultimately contextualizes every human activity and utterance.

For anthropology, perhaps the key characteristic of conversation is that it gives onto socio-cultural reality; ‘[i]n every moment of talk, people are experiencing and producing their cultures, their roles, their personalities’ (Moerman 1988:xi). Conversation is a kind of interaction in which human reality—a constructed reality which does not objectively exist beyond the consciousness of its individual agents—is continually created and recreated. A sensitivity to the micro-processes of conversational interaction is a growing anthropological concern (cf. Bauman and Sherzer 1974; Bruner 1983).

Conversation and anthropological accounts

Conversation as focus, theme and image is no stranger to anthropological representation. It is expected that the anthropological text will convey conversation between informants; oratory, disputation, curing and cursing might all elicit precise reportage of the verbal and other expression and exchange in the field (cf. Favret-Saada 1980; Rapport 1987; Cohen 1989). Similarly, it has come to be acceptable, even expectable, for there to be conversation recounted between informant and anthropologist; as the anthropologist enters into relations in the field, verbal and other, so that field takes shape for him, is indeed shaped by his interactions (cf. Briggs 1970; Dumont 1978; James 1993). Likewise, the anthropological text may be expected to engage in conversational exchange between the writer and his academic reference group; as the anthropologist makes sense of the field so his sense-making is informed by accounts he has read before, and mediated by the effect he would wish his writing to have on others (cf. Rabinow 1977; Clifford 1986;

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Campbell 1989). Finally, it is anticipated that the anthropological account achieves its effect only through engaging in conversation with its reader; as objective and positivistic representation no longer persuades—is denigrated as epistemologically mistaken and morally questionable—so the reader is expected to make sense through an evocation and performance of the text (cf. Bruner 1986; Tyler 1986; Brady 1991b).

What might be added to the above varied appreciation of conversation is an emphasis on conversation as perhaps the fundamental ground on which social life rests.We use conversation as anthropological focus, theme and image because of the ‘naturally occurring’ importance of conversation; conversation is a feature of every socio-cultural milieu, and its practice radically affects the nature of both social exchange and cultural process.

Conversation as naturally occurring

An awareness of the significance of naturally occurring conversation (albeit more sociological than anthropological) is nothing new in social science. Symbolic-interactionism (Blumer), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel) and sociology-of-knowledge (Berger and Luckmann) approaches all make it central to their projects. As Blumer would put it, if individuals act towards things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them, and these meanings are the sine qua non of the socio-cultural existence of things per se, then it is in conversation with their fellows, in the processes of interaction, that this construction of meaning takes place (1969:3). For Garfinkel, meanwhile, it is in conversation that the shared but implicit competency, knowledge and common-sense assumptions of culture members comes into play; it is here that members do the work of artfully (if contingently and unwittingly) apprehending order and reasonableness in social life (1972:323). And again, for Berger and Luckmann, just as social reality is a precarious human construction, an ongoing everyday work in the face of encroaching entropy and threatening anomy, so conversation is the most important vehicle of reality-maintenance; working away at his conversational apparatus, the individual protects and confirms the consistency of his world (1966:140).

For each of the above theses, furthermore, conversation gives onto, and can be treated in terms of, an epistemic singularity. In each case, conversation connects with (is preceded and followed by) a single social structure and a consensual culture. Through (Blumerian) symbolic interaction and mutual indication, then, a group of common objects

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emerge for a group of people, objects which bear the same meaning; conversation eventuates in shared perspectives, in a high degree of consensus over what people call ‘reality’. This consensus then enables group members to define and structure in common most situations in which they meet, and to act alike (Blumer 1972:187). Meanwhile, by complying with (Garfinkelian) common background expectancies of interpretation in conversation, the stuff of everyday life gains not just an accountable and ‘methodical’ but also common character; thanks to the stable social structures underlying the processes of unconscious interpretation, cultural systems thereby replicate themselves: a world its members know in common and take for granted (Garfinkel 1964: passim). Finally, the conversation which (après Berger and Luckmann) ongoingly maintains a construction of reality against chaos also serves to structure subjective perceptions into a typical, intersubjective, cohesive and universal social order.This constrains what individuals experience in terms of what they can communicate, since conversation cannot but accommodate itself to the edifice of coercive categories and objective norms that is a society’s language (Berger and Luckmann 1969:66).

Epistemic diversity

Epistemic singularity arising out of conversation might now be regarded as questionable. Indeed, it has become a commonplace of contemporary anthropological reportage that today’s world (‘globalized’, ‘postmodern’) is characterized by a diversity of discourses, narratives or epistemes per socio-cultural milieu with no necessary consensus or synthesis between them (cf.Tyler 1986:132). No single locale is possessed of just one local (symbolic or structural) order of things through which the world is understood and normalized, and rather than any overarching ideological totalism, the locale is home to the intersecting of a multiplicity of systems of meaning. It is recognized, in short, that conversation gives onto epistemic diversity and interaction, with individuals negotiating their ways between competing centres of philosophical gravity and the shifting balances of their power, playing off one episteme against another as different existential strategies at different moments (cf. Jackson 1989:176–86).

Furthermore, it can be argued that there is nothing particularly new (or ‘post-modern’) in this condition, and that cognitive and practical manoeuvring between a plurality of socio-historically situated epistemes has ever been characteristic of human life. Epistemic conversation is something which individuals practise everywhere, and have always practised, part-and-parcel of our ‘human realities’ (Fernandez 1985: 750).

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Inasmuch as the world is constructed on an ongoing (ad hoc, contingent, conjectural, contesting, ‘poetic’) basis by individuals exchanging cultural forms in social interaction, a conversation between a diversity of epistemes can be seen to be the natural condition of human life.

See also: Discourse, Interaction, Literariness, Methodological

Eclecticism

CULTURE

Cultural pluralism versus culture in the singular

Given the fact that anthropology has usually been defined as the study of other cultures, it is not surprising to find ‘culture’ to be one of the most crucial concepts of the discipline.The focus of anthropology is upon the diversity of ways in which human beings establish and live their social lives in groups, and it is from this diversity that the anthropological notion of culture, at least in the twentieth century, is derived. This idea of the plurality of culture contrasts with the idea of culture in the singular, an interpretation that began its development in eighteenthcentury European thought (see Williams 1983a), and became predominant in the nineteeth century. Framed through the social evolutionary thought linked to Western imperialism, culture in the singular assumed a universal scale of progress and the idea that as civilizations developed through time, so too did humankind become more creative and more rational, that is, people’s capacity for culture increased. The growth of culture and of rationality were thought to belong to the same process. In other words, human beings became more ‘cultivated’ as they progressed over time intellectually, spiritually and aesthetically. De Certeau (1994:103) notes that such a model, which proclaims culture as a defining feature of ‘cultivated’ human beings (other people have something called ‘tradition’), can have a strong political agenda, and in the hands of empires it has served a rather useful tool for introducing elitist norms wherever they imposed power.

In contrast, the modern anthropological stance, on the side of cultural relativism and in confrontation with racism (cf. Boas 1911), has been startlingly liberal in its insistence that culture must always be understood in the plural and judged only within its particular context.Very early on, Franz Boas firmly placed all cultures on equal par, and scoffed at notions that wed technological might with social and cultural superiority (Boas 1886). In this view Chinese culture is different from, and equal to, that of

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the African Nuer, or the Amazonian Yanomami. Each culture pertains to a specific, historically contingent, way of life, which is expressed through its specific ensemble of artefacts, institutions and patterns of behaviour. Another and related use of the term within anthropology states that culture pertains to that huge proportion of human knowledge and ways of doing things that is acquired, learned and constructed, that is, not innate to a newborn child.Thus while the capacity for language may be inborn, the specific language that the child learns to speak is not, and as learned knowledge its particular grammar and idiosyncratic classifications of the world become a crucial part of his or her own cultural heritage.

There is nothing straightforward about any of these meanings, including the anthropological notion of culture in the plural. Probably most of us apply the term across a range of overlapping meanings, depending upon the approach being used, the questions being asked, and increasingly the political point we wish to make. From its inception, anthropology has been engaged in active controversy over the meaning of the term, and in recent years there has been an ongoing, virulent debate over the propriety of its very use. Thus today, even in the most ‘liberal’ of hands, the term is so fraught with complications that what we might individually decide to include as ‘belonging’ to the category of culture becomes a flag-waving gesture, a throwing down of the gauntlet. Edwin Ardener noted (1985) that important concepts tend to go through periodic stages of hot debate, and they do so whenever a field of study is on the verge of a strong epistemological break. The concept about which he was speaking was ‘rationality’, and the epistemological rupture that he foresaw was an abrupt shift away for anthropology from the high modernist era of the anthropological grand narratives of Marxism, structural-functionalism and structuralism. Ardener’s discussion was over a decade ago, but the present-day controversy over the concept of culture is to a large extent a continuation of the same remarkably perplexing chore of extricating ourselves methodologically, epistemologically and politically from the powerful categories of modernist thought.

Below will be discussed some of the more interesting aspects of the controversy over culture, such as questions about the status of culture‘s reality (does culture in fact exist?). If there is a reality to culture, where does this culture reside? does it dwell in the mind or is it a matter of practice? to what extent is culture shared? through which approach (cognitivist? phenomenological? materialist?) can ‘it’ best be understood and translated? These are large issues, and none of course has been resolved.To do so would entail agreement over just what culture is, and

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also over just what it is that anthropology does. It is probably because an agreement with respect to either endeavour would be most unlikely that controversy over culture will remain electric, and thus continue to play an essential role toward creating an anthropology that is relevant (and we hope acceptable) to the academic and political concerns of the twentyfirst century. As will be made obvious, the big question revolves around the ways in which anthropology can best persevere toward the end of extricating itself from its nineteenth-century colonialist and grand narrative beginnings.

The critique of cultural homogeneity, and culture’s objective reality

While anthropologists have insisted upon the plurality of cultures, they have also tended to view a given culture in the singular. Although Boas was the most important force in introducing the idea of the plurality of historically conditioned cultures into anthropology, the discipline has not always followed his insistence that culture itself is an ongoing creative process through which people continually incorporate and transform new and foreign elements. Boas argues further, still within his romanticist and anti-evolutionist perspective, that it is through such adaptations that a culture arrives at an integrated spiritual totality. Although his observations on the creativity and openness of the cultural process tended to be ignored, Boas’s notion that cultures become manifest as distinctive coherent systems has had considerable influence. A more up-to-date version would be the notion of the aesthetic autonomies of cultures. The idea that culture refers to a systematically harmonized whole with each therefore comprising a shared and stable system of beliefs, knowledge, values, or sets of practices held sway for a very long time in anthropology. It is a notion strongly embedded in all functionalist, structural-functionalist and structuralist thought.Thus this notion of the homogeneity of culture flourished and developed through many versions, but in the direction that assumed (unlike Boas) the fixity, coherence and boundedness of cultures. In what Fabian (1998:x–xi) refers to as this ‘classical modern concept’, a position of ‘ontological realism’ is assumed with respect to culture which understands tradition as something real, to be found outside the minds of individuals, and objectified in the form of a collection of objects, symbols, techniques, values, beliefs, practices and institutions that the individuals of a culture share.

It is a position that has much at stake, for in portraying cultures as having objective reality over and beyond individual agency, the

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foundation is set for what is thought to be the development of a true science of anthropology.The major bequest of Durkheim (1966 [1895]) to the discipline was the idea that the discovery of the social sciences’ own distinctive object (‘the social fact’) would provide the upstart human sciences with a competitive edge—i.e. the methodological procedures through which human behaviour could be explained. With this achievement the social sciences would acquire scientific respectability vis-à-vis the natural sciences. There have been important voices taking exception to such a goal. We have Evans-Pritchard in his Marett Lecture of 1950 (see Evans-Pritchard 1962) hotly debating that, because anthropology’s distinctive subject matter pertains to conscious, thinking human beings, the methodology of the discipline should be situated within the humanities, and not the natural sciences. On the whole, however, we see that Boas‘s most important argument, that creative process, historical contingency, and learned, socially transmitted behaviour are not in conflict, has not been widely explored until fairly recently. We find instead that the notion of culture as a coherent, bounded, and stable system of shared beliefs and actions has been a powerful twentieth-century idea that has been very difficult to shift. As intimated above there were reasons for such neglect.

The crisis in representational theories of meaning

In the 1960s there was a move away from the earlier emphasis upon culture as customary or patterned behaviour, to a stress upon culture as idea systems, or structures of symbolic meaning. Each culture was understood in this later view to consist of a shared system of mental representations. As David Schneider saw it, culture consists ‘of elements which are defined and differentiated in a particular society as representing reality—the total reality of life within which human beings live and die’ (1976:206). In this view culture is not just shared, it is intersubjectively shared (cf. D’Andrade 1984). Such a Parsonian/ Weberian systemic, ‘symboland meaning-centred’ concept of culture became the centrepiece of a ‘unified theory of action’ designed to provide a mighty and authoritative theoretical linkage between all the social sciences (see Fabian 1998:3–4, 6). Culture, as a conceptual structure made up of representations of reality, was understood to orient, direct, organize action in systems by providing each with its own logic. Culture gave purpose to the social system, and ensured its equilibrium. Behaviour out of sync with the system’s cultural valuations was said to be abnormal, deviant, dysfunctional, with the implication being that it was aculturally, or anticulturally, driven. It took some time for this

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powerful law-and-order (as Fabian dubs it) concept of culture to be seriously questioned.

However, over the past couple of decades anthropology has increasingly been involved in a crisis over its representational theories of meaning, and at the same time expressing deep regret over its former misdirected scientific hopes—those as envisioned by our more sociologically oriented masters, who used the natural sciences as the yardstick for judging our own success.What is particularly being called into account is the understanding of cultural (collective) representations as a template for social action, with its related unfortunate effect—all those anthropological portrayals of cultural dopes who act unconsciously in accordance to underlying structures of shared symbolic meaning.The world of meaning, as Roy Wagner insists (1986, 1991), cannot articulate with a natural science format, which must by the very nature of its task (of objectification) ignore, mystify, disdain, doubt personal invention and concrete imagination. Wagner, one of the most persuasive in his critique of the idea of shared, stable systems of collective representations, suggests that cultural meanings are not constituted of the signs of conventional reference, but instead ‘live a constant flux of continual re-creation’. He goes on to say that ‘the core of culture is…a coherent flow of images and analogies, that cannot be communicated directly from mind to mind, but only elicited, adumbrated, depicted’ (Wagner 1986:129).

Any fieldworker who has worked carefully with the telling and learning of myths, or the performance of rituals, should recognize the wisdom of Wagner’s insight into the poetics, creativity, individuality, inconsistencies, contradictions of such cultural processes (also see Dell Hymes (1981) on the poetics of the American North West Coast telling of myths, and Overing (1990) on the tropes and performance of Amazonian myths). As Ingold says (1994b:330, his italics), ‘what we do not find are neatly bounded and mutually exclusive bodies of thought and custom, perfectly shared by all who subscribe to them, and in which their lives and works are fully encapsulated’. What we do find can be much more challenging, and, as one antidote to the treatment of culture through the lens of representational theories of meaning and other grand theory, many anthropologists today are focusing upon the dialogics and poetics of everyday behaviour. In so doing the primary concern is with living, experiencing, thinking, affectively engaged human beings who follow (in varying degrees and a myriad of manners) particular lifeways. It is antagonistic toward all those attempts to create ‘objective’ abstract structures that have the effect of dismissing much of what the rest of the world has to say.

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The question of practice

There is much, it would seem, that representational theorists omit in the experiencing of culture (also see Ingold 1994b). First, while it is meaning systems that is their primary concern, it is cogent to stress that these systems are creations of the anthropologist, and not of the people who supposedly ‘follow’ them. The usual claim is that, for the people, the ‘system’ and the mental representations that comprise it are unconsciously followed. Thus the meaning-creating, speaking, socially occupied person (whether from Chicago, Italy or Timbuktu) is omitted. As too is all practice in which he or she engages, and this by definition since the symbolist view of culture excludes behaviour.

What, we may ask, is the relation between meaning and practice? between mind and body? concept and performance? The present trend is to oppose the representational view of the body as a passive instrument, and thus time and again we find in today’s literature across a range of disciplines—in anthropology (e.g. Wagner 1986, 1991; Fabian 1983, 1998; Ingold 1994b), cognitive psychology (e.g. Shanon 1993), philosophy (e.g. Meløe 1988a, 1988b) and culture theory (e.g. de Certeau 1997)—the plea to recognize embodied meaning, that is, to wed concept and practice, the perceiving with the acting agent.We might say that there is no such thing as ‘a culture’, or rather that ‘culture should not be a noun, but a verb: “to culture”, or “culturing”’ (Overing 1998; also see Friedman 1994:206). As Ingold notes (1994b:330, his italics), ‘it might be more realistic…to say that people live culturally rather than they live in cultures’. For most people around the world, culturing is an endless and ever ongoing, overt activity, which ill fits the social scientist’s categories. From the Amazonian perspective culture time and again refers to the skills for action, which conjoin (independent) thinking and a sensual life, that individuals have, mould and use to live a particular human life. However, to reunite the body, the sensual, acting, feeling, emotive aspects of self, with the thinking, language-knowing self creates havoc with most modernist versions of culture. As should only be expected, debates today on the implications of a more phenomenological approach to culture for the future development of anthropology have a certain edge, a passion and often a political as well as academic challenge to them.

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