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

ECRITURE FEMININE

could be imagined as simultaneously one: a unity derived from a marriage of differences. If autonomy and equality were the masculine discoveries of the past century then difference might be a feminine addition in a future one: the equality of differences.

Anthropological resonances

Much of the above resonates, in ethos, with contemporary ‘feminist’ writings within anthropology and their ‘passion for difference’ (Moore 1994a). To focus on one such, Strathern (1991) describes the new aesthetic in which anthropology finds itself; here the old verities of singular fieldworkers becoming singular authors, in the translation of singular societies or cultures into singular objects of study, no longer convinces. Rather, there is an anticipation of the complexity of phenomena being retained in anthropological analysis without giving way to any more systematic representation of division and conjunction. Complexity might be specified without being simplified: complexity might be analysed without treating that analysis as anything but a controlled and convenient fiction.

One way to maintain a sense of the provisional and tentative nature of anthropological accounting, Strathern elaborates (1988), is through polemics: the continual overthrowing of extant analytical categories, so that the social world is continually apprehended anew. For example, inasmuch as conventional anthropological theories of symbolic classification are imbued with a Western folk conception of society as intrinsically plural and collective, as a gathering together (ordering, classifying and unifying) of irreducible individual persons, it is fruitful polemically to juxtapose against these notions Melanesian-infused anthropological theories which conceive of society as singular and its components as plural and ‘dividual’ (1988:13). Here, the singular person is imagined as a social microcosm, as containing a generalized sociality, so that the bringing together of many persons is just like the bringing together of one.

In a sense, the plurality of the person and the singularity of society can be imagined to be ‘the same’ (namely, homologues of one another), just as Melanesianand Western-inspired anthropologies are ‘the same’ (namely, opposites of one another). Melanesianand Western-inspired anthropologies are contradictory accounts (classifications) of individual and society whose contradictoriness is an enabling factor which extends each. The contradictions enable one to see the provisionality of each account, and enable one to envisage social life as consisting in ‘a constant movement from one state to another, from one type of sociality to

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another’ (Strathern 1988:14). It is through such movement, moreover, that anthropological analysis can hope to retain the flexibility and multiplicity of its socio-cultural objects of study; for here is the fixity and singularity of classification swallowed up in a plurality of classifications, each a displacement and extension (a contradiction but not a refutation) of what has gone before. Here is anthropology as a palimpsest of fictional analyses.

The future hallmark of social science, Strathern envisages, might be a regenerative overthrowing of fixed analytical categories and single symbolic classifications such that ever new meanings and viewpoints are born (cf. Moore 1988:186). Not only would this include displacing the category ‘social science’ in its opposition to, say, ‘literature’, but also the ‘domestic’ vis-à-vis the ‘politico-jural’, the ‘public’ vis-à-vis the ‘private’ (cf. Caplan 1987), the ‘observatory’ vis-à-vis the ‘contributory’ (cf. Grimshaw 1992), the ‘vocal’ vis-à-vis the ‘corporeal’ (cf. Callaway 1992), and the ‘dominant’ vis-à-vis the ‘subordinate’ (Ardener 1975).

See also: Contradiction, Cybernetics, Dialogics and Analogics,

Gender, Literariness

ETHNOMETHODOLOGY

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann once opined (1966:140–1) that if human social reality is a precarious construction in the face of chaos, then conversation with consociates is our most important vehicle of reality-maintenance. Hence, an individual’s everyday life can be seen to represent the working-away, in collaboration with significant others, at a conversational apparatus by whose ‘realizing efficacy’ the world continues to make sense, possesses regular coordinates and is filled with meaningful objects. Moreover, since language, according to Saussure (1983), is a ‘social fact’, the reality which conversation gives onto is a collective and intersubjective one; by partaking of conversation, Berger and Luckmann conclude (1969:66), individual consciousness is structured in terms of the common-sense assumptions and norms, of the taken-for-granted values and categorizations of the social group as a whole.

Ethnomethodology, a school of social analysis associated in particular with the work of Harold Garfinkel, Aaron Cicourel, Harvey Sacks and others, elaborates and complexifies the above ideas, demonstrates them in micro-social practice, and draws out their macro-social implications.

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Bringing together Durkheim’s belief that the consciousness of members of a social group will be steeped in collective representations, Saussure’s theory that the everyday parole of language-speakers partakes of the unitary langue of the social whole, Husserl’s methodology that social wholes must be approached via the phenomenology of individual experience, and Schuetz’s notion that our experience is influenced inexorably (if implicitly) by common background expectancies which we learn to share as culture members…Garfinkel et al. focused on the everyday conversational ‘work’ by which people everywhere continue to give their lives and worlds a ‘methodical’ and shared character.

If our lives in society are structured, then this is not because social reality has a sui generis or even objective existence beyond social agents, the ethnomethodologist argues. Rather, social reality is something worked at methodically and collectively, courtesy of certain common systems of reasoning, comprehending and accounting, with which individuals have been socialized. It is constructed via an ongoing, face- to-face exchange of talk. Moreover, common background expectations of the world lead individuals to interpret the structure of both conversation and reality in routine ways; emerging out of this collaborative work is the continual reconstituting of social structures (cf. Coulter 1979). The project of ethnomethodology is to build models of the background knowledge and methods of interpretation which local actors ordinarily bring to bear in everyday situations.

While his writings are not always the most accessible or succinct, Garfinkel’s work (1964, 1967, 1972) epitomizes the ‘school’ and is used below to set out its chief tenets. Ethnomethodology, Garfinkel summarizes (1967:11), is: ‘the investigation of the rational properties of indexical expressions and other practical actions as contingent ongoing accomplishments of organized artful practices of everyday life’.

Garfinkel’s thought

Persons are members to organized social settings and affairs, to everyday moral orders which are taken-for-granted as natural facts of life. Nonetheless, such moral orders are something which members of a society are in the process of continually effecting, in collaboration with one another in face-to-face interaction. They are able to effect this because they share the same ‘background of common understandings’ and the same ‘socially structured conditions’ of the production of expression (1964:233); the moral orders can be understood as the ‘contingent accomplishments of socially organized common practices’ (1972:323).

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That is, people are intent on determining and demonstrating that their lives are arranged in rational, coherent, consistent, chosen, clear, knowable, planful and uniform ways. Moreover, as members of social groups they have common methods for achieving this and providing themselves with rational (etc.) accounts of their lives and activities. The common methods consist of recourse to conventional norms, tasks and troubles, methods which are employed collectively and continually. Hence, ‘every claim by practitioners of effectiveness, clarity, consistency, planfulness, or efficiency, and every consideration for adequate evidence, demonstration, description, or relevance obtains its character as a phenomenon from the corporate pursuit of this undertaking’ (1972:323).

Ongoing moral orders still demand work, however; acts of individual interpretation are necessary if prior, background, social-structural conditions are to be taken forward as members’ common social properties into the future.True, the conditions will tend towards certain interpretations fulfilling themselves and certain classifications, analyses, understandings and identifications in the world being prescribed. However, the underlying disorder and unpredictability of human life still calls for continuous ‘ad hoc-ing’ by members: filling in the gaps and sorting out the ambiguities of knowledge according to certain shared inferences, expectations and anticipations. Moreover, there is an inherent incompleteness or vagueness in the common understandings which members of a society share and employ, a vagueness which is a necessary adaptive feature if the understandings are to remain relevant and viable for long. Hence, much of everyday practice in society can be said to entail the serious task of carefully managing and negotiating the production of rule-bound, organized social activity by selecting among a communal set of alternative possible explanations, causes, senses, objectivities and facticities. In short, it is through a continuing negotiation of accounting practices—an ‘artful (if unconscious) accomplishment’ (1972:323)—that members continue to make the familiar, commonplace activities of their everyday lives recognizable to themselves as familiar and commonplace.

This all means that the paramount reality in which members live is a commonsensical world of everyday expectations, activities and interpretations. However, this everyday world also serves as a point of departure and return for occasional modifications of normal life—in such phenomena as play, ceremonial, theatre, theory, dream and mortification. For instance, individual identity and status are resultants of communal negotiations based on common grounds of expected behaviours; fellow members will reason how and why an individual

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should act. However, there are also instances—‘status degradation ceremonies’ (1968:205)—where the public identity of a member is temporarily or permanently lowered in status and he or she is shamed. This act of shaming may have the purpose and effect of making the social structures of members’ everyday activities more observable to themselves; stepping beyond the everyday, members look reflexively askance at it, becoming momentarily ‘lay sociological researchers’ and strangers to themselves (1967:78).

Similarly, by deliberately causing disruption to everyday routines, social analysts (‘professional strangers’) have the best chance to watch the ad hoc work of repairing and reconstituting normal reality.

Ethnomethodology in action

An apt illustration of the above thinking is provided by Sacks (1974) regarding a seemingly innocuous and casual piece of ‘natural language’.

A study of natural language shows how Garfinkel’s ‘everyday practical reasoning’ is employed, Sacks begins, for it is in communicative acts that social norms are maintained. Grammatical norms govern members’ interpretation of meaningful speech, while social norms govern members’ interpretation of meaningful events; members’ implicit social knowledge is thus revealed in their making of sentences and partsentences into coherent and structured social texts. It is knowledge of shared norms which enables members to perceive actions as intelligible, conversation as meaningful and events as orderly. A common social structure enables members to understand conversation, in short, whose shared understanding replicates social structure.

Take, for instance, the minimal verbalization (Sacks 1974:226): ‘The baby cried.The mommy picked it up.’ Among culture members a number of observations can be made. First, it is likely that members assume that the mother in question is that of the baby. Next, they assume that the event described in the second sentence took place after that described in the first sentence; indeed, they will presume a causal relationship such that the mother picked up the baby because it cried, and with a mind to soothing it. Finally, these sentences are recognized as a possible general description of a state of affairs without knowing which particular mother and baby are involved. These two sentences represent a complete story, and the ‘shared cultural device’ of grammar means that members have access to a common world of meaning and value.

Members are able to interpret in the above fashion, Sacks continues, because ‘the fine power of a culture’ is such that it ‘fills the brains’ of culture members ‘so that they are alike in fine detail’ (1974:218).

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Members share the same ‘categorization devices’ of objects in the world and how these might be properly expected to occur in their lives, in what sequence and with what ramifications, and conjoined with what activities: ‘babies’ can be expected to ‘cry’ and ‘mommies’ can be anticipated ‘to pick them up’. Once members have perceived a possible eventuality, the ad hoc meaningfulness they have arrived at may divert them from testing other possibilities. However, the latter are equally prescribed. Members will share the same lexical system such that a range of possible alternatives is also supplied for different points in the meaningful sequence of events: ‘infants’ also cry, and ‘fathers’ also do the ‘picking up’. Rules of relevance per situation will tell members which lexical ranges to expect to hear when.

Fellow travellers

Clearly there are overlaps between the issues which Garfinkel et al. are treating and their ways of proceeding and other schools’ and social analysts’. Berger and Luckmann’s portrayal of ‘the social construction of reality’ has already been referred to, and mention might also be made of attempts by Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, and other so-called ‘action theorists’ to account for the continuing structuration of social milieux without recourse to Durkheimian notions of social facts as sui generis—to notions of social arrangements reproducing themselves without the mediating effects of individual agency (cf. Rapport 1990).

But more particular overlaps and borrowings between ethnomethodology and anthropological work might justifiably be alluded to. In Clifford Geertz’s theory of common sense (1983), for instance, there is a parallel debt to Schuetz. Common sense is a taken- for-granted set of matter-of-fact assumptions, Geertz begins, which claims to be the immediate deliverances of experience and known by anyone in their right minds, but which is better understood as an ordered body of considered thought, a cultural system of learnt symbols. As such it will differ from one society to another. Nevertheless, its style, its way of knowing, the attitude to life which it engenders, the tone in which its wisdom is expressed—these may have a universal quality. To wit, common sense is a totalizing, ambitious and dogmatic frame of thought, claiming to strike at the heart of how things are. It pretends to knowledge which is natural and inevitable, practical and easily accessible, plain, obvious and earthy. Moreover, it is where most people in most places spend most of their social (intellectual and emotional) lives. Only intermittently do human beings see their lives in other than practical down-to-earth ways. And even then, more theoretical, religious,

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scientific, or aesthetic perspectives only come into play to make up for certain insufficiencies in the explanatory force of common sense. In most situations of human life, the cultural system of common sense, employed together with one’s peers, is sufficient for making life meaningful. At certain non-everyday moments—a ritual, for example— a different cultural system of meaning, mood and activity can be brought to bear whereby everyday happenstances become recontextualized— perhaps in ‘ultimate’, sacred terms. Nevertheless, this non-everyday light thrown on the commonsensical serves to elucidate and thereby bolster the latter, so that members return to its system of significations and significance more solidly rooted. Indeed, it is out of the commonsensical that all more theoretical systems of meaning have grown, and they retain a dialectical relationship to it; in transcending common sense, they complete and maintain it (cf. Geertz 1971:90–112).

In the work of Esther Goody et al. (1978), there is a recognition that it is from seemingly trivial, micro-social, linguistic forms and processes that the building blocks of social structure are made. At the same time, social interaction is shaped by general ‘goals and constraints anchored in the wider social structure’ (1978:2). Indeed, each culture will possess a predominant interactional style and ethos, and prescribe a certain ‘interactional systematics’ (1978:288); here will be ‘patterns that are daily replicated by countless individuals’ (1978:245). Hence, the dialectic: interactants behave according to a common set of rules concerning how properly to proceed, and successful interaction serves to reinforce this repertoire of culturally standardized strategies of expression and representation. Under the aegis of such rules, moreover, meanings come to be successfully negotiated and managed, and selves presented.

Part of the interactional systematics of a culture will be what John Gumperz and Deborah Tannen call ‘frames’ and ‘contextualization cues’ (1979:307–8).These amount to a constellation of surface features of interactional style which direct participants into interpreting the content of conversation in particular ways and as particular types of activity. Contextualization cues channel interpretation so that some common background knowledge is unconsciously brought to the fore and some reserved for other occasions. Hence, there exists a conventionalized co-occurrence between such features of conversation as: prosody, phonology, lexical choice, turn-taking, interjection, rhythm, timing, breathiness, volume, tone, somatics, formulaicism and thematic progression.

A further part of a culture’s interactional systematics will be what Kenneth Pike calls ‘emic units’ (1964:55). Cultures, he explains, cut up

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and classify the world into ‘emes’—units of information and behaviour—and thus cause their members to perceive and expect certain possible experiences; culture members will share a knowledge of ‘emic spots’ at which certain unit behaviours and their class of alternatives are likely to occur. Conversation becomes a matter of negotiating which objects of experience are being represented, and their possible alternatives, and which behaviours are appropriate. Since the verbal and the non-verbal are inextricably bound, since emic units of language seamlessly give onto ‘behaviouremes’ (1964:58), the emes of a culture are part-and-parcel of a unified phenomenon of behaviour, of thought, speech and action, through which all purposeful human activity is socially structured alike.

Ethnomethodology and ethnography

One difficulty in applying ethnomethodological analysis more widely to ethnography is the knowledge demanded by the analyst of his or her informants’ language. Few anthropologists working outside their mother tongue will have the competency to subject their data to the requisite micro-social focus.

One attempt explicitly to treat non-Western ethnography according to ethnomethodological tenets, however, is provided by Moerman (1988) who compares Thai conversation with American. Moerman’s intent is a ‘culturally contexted conversation analysis’ from which may issue a scientific account of how experienced moments of social life are constructed, and the ongoing operation of the social order is organized. ‘[I]n every moment of talk’, he explains, ‘people are experiencing and producing their cultures, their roles, their personalities’ (1988:xi).

Moerman sets out his case using 58 pages (out of a total of 214) of transcripted and annotated conversational segments between both Thai and American speakers. These he describes as ‘interactive processes’ which speakers enact largely unconsciously. They are acquired schemes of expression for: ‘the intentionless invention of regulated improvisation’ (Bourdieu 1977). So encompassing and coercive are members’ common interactional systems—whether Thai or American—that in both cases they routinely make ‘single sayable somethings’ with exact timing and without error. In both cases, their conversations derive from and by-and-large replicate common worlds of sense, orientation and experience.

See also: Code, Common Sense, Discourse, Interaction

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FORM AND CONTENT

FORM AND CONTENT

This conceptual distinction is most usefully introduced by reference to the seminal work of Georg Simmel (e.g. 1971, 1980).

Any social phenomenon has two inseparable elements, Simmel suggests (echoing a Kantian distinction between appearance and actuality): form and content. The form of something is its structure, its skeleton, its grammar. Forms amount to categories and collections of categories, taxonomies, schemata, languages, rotas, systems of classification. Moreover, the world and its aspects only become possible matters of experience and knowledge when constituted by forms. Forms negate the continuity of matter by introducing the distinctions that make things separate. Thus, forms specify the conditions under which it is possible to have a certain kind of experience and acquire a certain kind of knowledge. Forms, in short, are objects and the relations between them: objects like morality, sexuality, flirtation, prostitution, eroticism, love, household, society, history, bourgeoisie, drama, religion, death, science, art, literature and anthropology; and relations like hierarchy, complementarity, symmetry, correspondence, obviation, metaphor and metonymy. Forms mediate the human experience of the world: the human world can be said to be formally constituted.

Furthermore, forms are synthesizing processes. Forms are the means by which individuals come together, negotiate continuing relations and affiliate into groups. Through a sharing of language and other formal, classificatory systems, individuals are able to meet in regular and routine interaction: are able to make ‘society’. Society represents individuals interacting under the aegis of common forms, individuals using forms in conjunction and compatibility with other individuals; and one can think of an amalgam of different types of society as forms are used among members: in precisely the same way or with marked differences, in cooperation or in opposition, with complementarity or with mutual exclusivity, with simultaneity or with sequentiality, in face-to-face settings or at a distance, with mutual knowledge or without.

Perhaps a definitive human characteristic is the multiplicity, the diversity and heterogeneity of forms which are used to mediate human relations with the world, however. For forms are humanly invented, and a plurality of languages, perspectives, conceptual and mechanical schemes serve to constitute a plurality of worlds of human invention. No one form or set of forms possesses a privileged logical, ontological or epistemological status over any other, and use of particular forms is a matter more of contingency, of tradition, of rhetoric, of strategy, of power and of practical implication. A particular set or fund of forms,

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linked over time, might be described as a ‘culture’, and to belong to a culture is to share a knowledge of the normal use and proper practice of a fund of forms. Moreover, as with the amalgam of types of society, one can imagine a continuum of types of culture members, in time and space, running between those who share all, some and none of the same cultural fund of worldly forms.

The discipline of anthropology, for example, would represent a particular culture (as would any number of other ‘ologies’ and ‘isms’ (Boon 1982:231)), its members possessing alike knowledge of such formal objects as: fieldwork, functionalism, ethnography, Azande witchcraft, the Kachin, Clifford Geertz; and knowledge of such relations as: procuring a set of informants, writing up fieldnotes into a thesis, publishing a literature review, getting the Current Anthropology treatment, representing the Manchester School (and everything else down to pageformatting (Brady 1991b:13)). Those who use these cultural forms adequately, compatibly and in conjunction with other members at a particular time and place, can be said to belong to an ‘anthropology society’.

In the Simmelian portrayal, then, a fund of cultural forms provides a medium of interaction through which individuals come together; the fund is their means of sociation, of setting up a society between themselves and claiming to share a symbolic reality. To belong to a society means to use the same cultural forms for the construction of reality. Cultural funds, however, are never static. For forms are in perpetual historical processes of variation and transformation, so that cultures amount to sets of objects and relations in constant flux. To understand why is to appreciate meaning or content. Forms are invented, we have said. In fact, they are the products of individually intentioned mental and physical activity, of individual agency. Individuals create the forms by which worlds come to be made and experienced, and by which ‘others’ come to be met. This they do in order to satisfy any number of different drives and secure any number of ends. Individuals make and use forms so as to fill them with a diversity of personal meanings; they give them sense and significance particular to their own lives: their purposes, interests, desires, needs, beliefs, values, and so on. It is this which makes up the content of their forms. Moreover, it is this individual usage which causes their collective exchange; individuals continue to bring cultural forms to social life, continue to make society and share culture, for the purpose of expressing their individual meanings.And yet, since content is fundamentally distinct from form, the same content is able to find expression in many different forms, and the same form is able to house any number of different contents. Hence, no

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