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

FORM AND CONTENT

two individuals may impart meanings to cultural forms alike; so that at the same time as they are exchanged in interaction between individuals, indeed serve to make that meeting possible, they may be being used and interpreted in a diversity of ways.

Notwithstanding the free play between form and content, individuals make new forms because they continue to find that their desired meanings are not expressible within existing ones. To understand, in turn, why this is so, is to appreciate that once invented by individuals to house and express certain contents, forms become to some extent autonomous. Once an individual has made his or her word, fact, icon or car, they cannot as easily be unmade; they have lives (in dictionaries, in encyclopaedias, in films, in churches, in garages) which are independent of their makers. Moreover, they function according to their own mechanisms and capacities (cars cannot be used to write poetry, words cannot be used to drive to Cardiff). And, finally, once invented, their individual inventor has slight chance of controlling their effect on or use by others, or the hypostatization and institutionalization that they might undergo. In short, forms may achieve a certain independence from their creators and their moments of creation, acquiring a certain self-sufficiency, stability, even objectivity, whereby they fix the world.

It is not that they acquire their own power or force; this point must be made clear. Forms do not become things-in-themselves; they do not live their own lives. Rather it is individuals who continue to lead their lives through them. Forms are inert: they embody inertia, not momentum. Words in dictionar ies, cars in garages, facts in encyclopaedias, icons in churches, call for continuing human agency for them to work and move, to have continued relevance in human lives. Forms continue to depend on individuals’ bringing them to interaction, habitually relating them together, routinely exchanging them, regularly using them in mental, physical, spiritual contexts.

The point is that, while lumpen and inert, cultural forms are still difficult to ignore. Dictionaries and encyclopaedias, garages and churches, make for cluttered (not to mention institutionalized) worlds, and individual users of these forms must carefully manoeuvre with and around them if they are to express themselves normatively and with propriety (and so join synthetically with their fellows in socio-cultural milieux). Indeed, manoeuvring around cultural forms, leading routine lives of habitual exchanges, can take up the whole of life of a society’s members. Moreover, as cultural forms pass between many hands, are used in many different interactions, so their shapes and qualities are reduced: smoothed, flattened, drained, distilled by common denomination. Words

138

FORM AND CONTENT

become clichés, facts become common sense, machines become furniture, icons become dogma. The clutter of forms can rigidify interaction, petrify further imaginative agency, estrange individuals from their creativity.

More historically usual, however, is the situation of formal inertia and individual invention proceeding side by side. Hence, as cultural forms ‘congeal’ and become independent, detached from the energies which produced them, and fill the world with habit, individuals are also creating new forms, and causing a world of further heterogeneity and flux. New energies, not incorporatable within old forms, create new forms. This happens as, first, amid the clutter of forms, individuals have the possibility of choosing between a number of often competing options (religion and science; Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis; Jaeger, Armani and St Michael tailoring; Manchester City, Man. Utd, Wolves and Hibernian football); and also of putting these forms together in a sequence and frequency which amounts to a new bricolage (Lacanian psychoanalysis; Punk tailoring). Secondly, as individuals may find that no existing forms suit their purpose, feel right, fit what they have in mind, so they invent new ones both for their own use and for possible later inclusion into the collective fund: new words (‘spliff’; ‘byte’), new facts (time is relative; one in ten children is sexually abused), new machines (aeroplanes; faxes), new icons (white witchcraft; electric guitars).

In sum, Simmel’s picture is one of inert forms and ‘energetic’ contents. The former are produced by the latter, but then the former stand still, become autonomous, objectified and institutionalized, while the latter progress and change—thus producing a potential tension and conflict between them. Creative energies, moreover, are in individual possession, while the inert forms come to be collectively owned. And so new individual subtleties are continuously coming into conflict with old collective formalities. Simmel described this as the sociological ‘tragedy’: the common forms of cultural exchange facilitating widespread communication and also making it practically ineffective; the routine exchange of objectified cultural forms acting as an impediment, a constriction, to the individual subjectivity which seeks continuing expression through them; individual creativity being threatened by the very forms it has produced. But then again, it is these tensions which are responsible for the dynamism of social life and for cultural development and change. Here, in sum, is a picture of society neither simply as something of systemic imposition or objective determination, nor as the mere momentary impulsions of subjective states of mind, but as the coming together of collective, autonomous

139

FORM AND CONTENT

objects and relations with continuing individual creativity.To a fund of common forms individuals impart experiences of social life which are multiple, fragmentary, idiosyncratic, inexorably conflictual and endlessly processual.

Simmel and anthropology

The Marxian critic Georg Lukacs once dubbed Simmel the theoretician of Impressionism and advocate of Transitionalism (cf. Gassen and Landmann 1958:171–3); here is a vision of culture and society stressing not the systemic requirements and normative constraints of Marxism (or functionalism, or structuralism), so much as the equivocation and polyphony of interaction and the phenomenological contingency of those individual minds where interactions are experienced and hence ‘occur’. But then it is precisely to Impressionism (as represented by Cezanne’s six variant portraits, Still Life with Apples and Oranges) that David Parkin turned (1987:64–6) to furnish anthropology with an image of contemporary cultural life as composed of potentially limitless perspectives: a vast variety of visions and versions, complementary to one another but without any underlying structure of common denomination, any circumscribed set of generative principles, any single controlling logic. More generally, it is to the line of thought from Impressionism through Cubism to Dadaism that Parkin would now have anthropology look to for its social models; here is a mocking of the possibility of thinking in terms of fixed structures and certainties, to inspire in us new key metaphors of incompleteness, perspective and creativity (cf. Moore 1987:729–30).

Nor is this anthropological meeting with a Simmelian ethos exclusively of recent vintage. Edmund Leach, after all, argued that the essence of our humanity was to be found in our continuous rebellion, as individuals, against received collective structures, laws, rules, customs and controls, and our creating of something new. Leach saw structure and creativity, tidiness and vitality as being in inevitable contradiction, and implicated in an inexorable dialectical process (1977:19). While Victor Turner’s adaptation of the Weberian dialectic of routine versus charisma into a universalizing theory of structure versus anti-structure, turned, essentially, on the same tension. Symbolic behaviour constituted society, Turner elaborated, and society as a process involved the uniting of structure and anti-structure in variable proportions. Moreover, it was the anti-structural which was prior to and creative of the structural, while remaining antithetical in character and embroiled in a continual struggle for individuals’ true loyalty (1974:231–69, 1982a:96–129).

140

GENDER

What is demonstrated is how (Simmelian) form-and-content offers anthropology an apposite way of conceiving of creativity, diversity and ambiguity in social life (cf. Rapport 1993a:161ff.). This conception entails an appreciation of the diverse individual use of collective cultural forms (objects and relations, institutions and grammars): the diverse constitution of forms, combination of forms, and imparting of meaning to those forms.

See also: Culture, Discourse, Interaction, Society

GENDER

The ‘problem of women’

In 1972 Edwin Ardener published an article entitled ‘Belief and the problem of women’. In it he illuminated a methodological predicament of ethnography of the greatest magnitude, namely, the absence of speaking, thinking, believing, knowing women within ethnographic texts. In the anthropological writings of the 1960s, unlike those of earlier decades, there appeared almost always only the voices of men, whereas, whether the ethnographer be male or female, women were ‘muted’, erased as conscient beings. While the behaviour of women might be observed (they married, tended children, cooked, farmed), they were ‘effectively missing in the total analysis or, more precisely, they were there in the same way as were the Nuer’s cows, who were observed but also did not speak’ (Ardener 1975:4).

Ardener concludes his article by warning female ethnographers to resist ‘expressing the “maleness” of their subject when they approach the women of other societies’ (ibid.: 15). In short our own dominant (male) models about the workings of society, within which women are viewed as outsiders, invalidated even for the female anthropologist the very possibility of the worth and importance of the perspectives of women on the procedures and lifeways of their communities. Ardener challenges women ethnographers by remarking that ‘it may well be, too, that their positive reluctance to deal with the “problem of women” [the silencing of them] is the greater because they sense that its consideration would split apart the very framework in which they conduct their studies’ (ibid.).

The reappearance of women

Ardener’s prophecy about the implications of a female rebellion was brought home with a vengeance. In the 1960s, ethnographic publications

141

GENDER

with ‘women’ in the title did not sell, while today the section on gender in any reputable academic bookshop is healthily large. This change of attitude, however, has to do with far more than the popularity of the topic of women, or the female perspective on things; for gender studies within anthropology, as in its sister disciplines, have played, along with the forces of post-modernism and post-colonialism, a salient role over the last two to three decades in a major critique of the grand narratives of the human sciences. This dawning recognition of ‘the problem of women’, not only in anthropology but in many of its sister studies as well, served as one of the major impetuses for the redrawing of sacred academic boundaries, visions and concerns.

Thus, the reason for this particular consciousness-raising exercise, or ‘the problem of women’, having such momentous effect, has been that gender blindness was but the tip of an enormous iceberg formed by the cold procedures of Western juridical, political, economic and academic thought and practice which have created all those other inequalities— beyond those between men and women—of class, race, ethnicity, nationality and sexual preference. Once women were firmly inserted within the parameters of ‘establishment’ discourse, either as objects of social research or as subjects conducting such inquiry (having shed their previous status of honorary males), the consequences were, as Edwin Ardener predicted, a true ‘Kuhnian’ paradigm shift. The epistemological and methodological foundations of ‘the disciplines’ are indeed shaken when females, fifty per cent of the world’s population, finally enter the picture. In the words of Seyla Benhabib (1992:178, her italics), ‘the definition of the object domain of a research paradigm, its units of measurement, its method of verification, the alleged neutrality of its theoretical terminology, and the claims to universality of its models and metaphors are all thrown into question’.

Once recognized, the ‘question of women’ did then play a large part in upsetting established ways of thinking and practice in the human sciences. Those systems and institutions once viewed as just, egalitarian and progressive came to be understood as unjust, unequal and regressive. Previously all those suffering from the inequities of dominant structures had been both unheard and unseen, for the most potent strategy of Western establishment ways of seeing, whether for political or academic intent, was not to see all those who had been categorized as not just like self, that is, the white, middle-class, propertied male (Benhabib 1992). Thus to recognize women as agents in the world has meant to actually see an other. The undermining by feminists, post-modernists and postcolonialists alike of hallowed paradigms has led to the recognition of this difference.

142

GENDER

This discovery of the fact of difference—and with it the acceptance of the full humanity of all those different others—has been a subversive activity, defiant of many of the universalist traditions that the human sciences have held as sacred (Benhabib 1992:191). For feminist theory, as for other major critiques of grand narrative logics, the unravelling of the implicit ideological construction of otherness in Western academic thought, and the explication of its social and historical constitution, have become the central chores.The local nature of our constructions of truth, reason and humanity needed to be Reconstructed. As these are tasks for a social theory that is centred in the art of social contextualization, the anthropological studies of gender relations which have been carried out over the past two decades can be understood to be especially crucial to the development of this rebellious interdisciplinary task.

The early writings on the female voice in anthropology, and their contributions

The impact of feminist studies upon anthropology seems to have made its mark a good decade before similar intrusions were felt in the other human sciences. For instance in psychology, Carole Gilligan’s groundbreaking study, In a Different Voice, which questioned the premises of a Piaget and Kohlberg developmental model of moral capability, was published in 1982. Within anthropology a series of volumes, which became mainstream, centring on ‘the question of women’ and expressing dissatisfaction with the androcentric bias in anthropology were published in the 1970s (cf. Strathern 1981:167).Among these were: Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere’s edited collection, Women, Culture and Society, in 1974, and Shirley Ardener’s Perceiving Women in 1975. The latter volume had both female and male contributors, yet another indication of mainstream acceptance of the issues. In addition, during the 1970s well-received ethnographic monographs by women anthropologists that focused upon the women of particular societies began to enter the literature; among these were Marilyn Strathern‘s 1972 publication of Women in Between and Annette Weiner’s Women of Value, Men of Renown in 1976, both based upon research in New Guinea.

These early writings made two major contributions to the development of gender studies. The first was to make the discipline of anthropology itself clearly aware of its exclusion of women as a topic for study, and how such oversight was moreover linked to the male bias of dominant theoretical and methodological assumptions of the discipline. In Women, Culture and Society, its authors show how women, like men, trans-culturally ‘are social actors whose goals and strategies are intrinsic

143

GENDER

to the processes of social life’ (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974:11), and that ‘even in situations of overt sex role asymmetry women have a good deal more power than conventional theorists have assumed’ (ibid.: 9). It became quickly obvious that disciplinary presuppositions and procedures needed to be radically reconsidered in order to include the agency of women.The second contribution was that the anthropological treatment of the female question was from a cross-cultural perspective, rather than being situated within the Western context alone. It was especially this sensitivity to cultural and social difference that provided one of anthropology’s important gifts to the development of gender studies across disciplines in the 1980s and 1990s, for from its early writings on ‘the woman question’ it emerged that the ways in which women and men related to each other, and the manner in which each of the sexes was conceptualized, varied considerably from one people to the next. In other words, gender and its attributes are not givens. As Rosaldo and Lamphere conclude, ‘different forms of social and cultural organization have provided women in different places with very different powers and possibilities, so our [own] contemporary situation renders any “natural” ranking or differentiation of the sexes altogether obsolete’ (ibid.: 14).

By the early 1980s, the concept of ‘gender’ came to be used to designate the social construction of differences between men and women, to contrast with the notion of ‘sex’ which refers to their biological difference (cf. Pine 1996). It was ‘gender’ as a symbolic construct that became a major focus of interest in the 1980s (cf. Strathern 1980), along with the exploration of the ways in which such constructs might variously relate to practice. There are those today (e.g. see Benhabib 1992; Moore 1994b) who would argue that the notion of ‘sex’, or the nature of the ‘biological’ make-up of men and women, is likewise a social construction. In other words, what is recognized as a physically distinct sexed body is not so straightforward a matter as once thought. Certainly in Amazonia, some peoples have no concept of ‘body’, and most consider a person’s capabilities for reproduction to have an otherworldly source, that is, not to be a ‘biological’ matter. What we understand as a biological ‘given’ may well conflict with other peoples’ ideas about physical reality (cf. Strathern 1992b; Overing 1996a).

The early debate on the ‘subjugation of women’: the vestiges of Western values

Despite their crucial role in rectifying the anthropological erasure of female agency in ethnographic writings, the early writers upon ‘the problem of women’ tended to raise as many questions as they answered.

144

GENDER

In large part this was due to the fact that extrication from the received paradigms of power and authority could not be a quick process, nor was it easy to shed the penchant for subscribing to the universalisms underpinning them. For instance, many of the feminists of the 1970s and 1980s used Marxist models of power relations to interpret their findings, a Western paradigm of power par excellence. The result was that there was a tendency to universalize the woman question in terms which, while highly relevant and useful to the project of unfolding misogynist bias within their own society, were perhaps not so perspicacious when it came to understanding the complexity of the situatedness of the gender relations among other peoples.

For more than a decade the most chosen generalization was that women were universally dominated, and everywhere men tended to have more prestige (e.g. Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974:9). Indeed, Ortner and Whitehead (1981:x; also see Collier and Yanagisako 1987) defined gender as a form of social inequality, and they therefore viewed the study of gender as ‘inherently a study of relations of asymmetrical power and opportunity’ (Ortner and Whitehead 1981:4). As a second generalization it was argued further, most forcefully by Sherry Ortner (1974; also see Rosaldo 1974:41), that women are universally devalued because of their reproductive capacities, which place them culturally on the side of nature, the emotions, the particular, the domestic, the private, and thus the irrelevant.

As was also pointed out by certain writers (e.g. MacCormack 1980; Strathern 1980, 1984; Jordanova 1980), the second of these assumptions, the linkage of the female gender to the domain of ‘nature’ is a salient myth of the West. However, the extent that either assumption (including the notion of gender as a major framework for the playing out of inequalities) might hold elsewhere is always another question (cf. Overing 1986; Strathern 1992b). If we can accept the local quality of these ‘universals’, ‘the problem of women’ as some of these early writers phrased it, can be seen as integrally linked to Western ideology and a Western paradigm of power relations.The idea that women are devalued and dominated because they are seen to be on the side of nature, the ignorant, the uncontrolled and the domestic was the powerful myth about gender relations associated with both the rise of science (Jordanova 1980:61, 64) and of capitalism (cf. Benhabib 1992) in the West. Nature, a category including other peoples and societies, was to be a realm upon which European man acted and which he controlled; women, perceived as part of nature, are a man’s property—or an object of man. As Marilyn Strathern notes (1980:217): ‘It is our culture which sets up males as creators and inventors and females therefore as perilously

145

GENDER

near objects, for we define “culture” itself as manifested in things which are made and are alienable’.Women within such a scheme, being viewed as objects, are then treated as a natural resource.

As Overing (1986) and others (especially Strathern) have argued, the ‘problem’ of gender when placed within a comparative framework, becomes in large part one of not taking the rhetoric and claims of Western science and society at face value. In the meantime, we have learned in the process of our mistake a good deal about Western images and evaluations of gender, its moral judgements about it, while the ethnographic evidence supports the view that this particular package of values is hardly a universal. It is also clear that our own understanding of gender in the West is tied to notions not just about the relations between the sexes, but to more general ideas about how culture is different from and superior to nature. At the core of this construction of the relation of culture to nature is also a theory about power and the political, which includes very specific notions about relations of domination and subordination, exploitation, coercion, control and, of course, inequality. Western academic notions of order and rationality favour the play of dominance and subordination. However, the perils of ethnocentrism go further. On one powerful level these relationships are envisaged in scientific thought as having amoral content, that is, humankind’s relation to the environment is understood as an exploitative one without the limits of a higher morality to order it; the scientist’s truths, free from value, are amoral ones (cf. Overing 1985b). It can be said without stretching the truth too much that our theories of power and the political, and also of gender relations, tend to reflect this bias toward the amoral forthcoming from the world of science.

Still, the understanding of Western science both of truth and of the proper relationship of humans to the environment contrasts sharply with the ideas held by many other peoples who see both truths and relationships of human beings to the environment to have moral, social and political value. Their understanding of gender relations are as enmeshed as our own within wider networks of meaning, and thus their images of gender can be framed against the backdrop of ontological concerns radically different from our own. As Gillison comments (1980:172), other peoples have their own obsessions, and to underrate the complexity of indigenous cosmologies would be to deny this to be true. Following this line of thought we should expect theories of personal agency and power relationships for many peoples to differ substantially from our own. However, the theoretical implications for the cross-cultural study of gender relations of such

146

GENDER

rich ethnography as that by Gillison on indigenous theories of power, and the place of gender relations within it, of the Gimi of Highland New Guinea, has only slowly left its mark (see especially Gillison 1993; also see McCallum 1989, Belaunde 1994, Guss 1989 on Amazonian peoples). Why then did universalist theories of gender relations hold sway for so long?

The Marxian argument and the ‘catch-22’ of gender relations

The Marxian argument of Meillassoux (1981) provided one of the strongest assertions of the universal domination of women by men. It also was a point of view highly favoured by both women and men throughout the 1970s and 1980s in their anthropological writings on gender relations: women because they were disgruntled and infuriated with Western gender asymmetries, men because the view supported what they already assumed. Meillassoux argues that it was the formation of the sexual division of labour, itself, that led to the socio-political subjugation of women, and thus made ‘the woman (or slave) a servant of men’ (Meillassoux 1981:21). Kinship institutions are the culprit, for it was through their development that the subjugation of women was achieved. Marriage, conjugality and paternal filiation, all were imposed upon women by men to be the means through which men could constrain women. Through the regulations of kinship, men gained control over both the means of reproduction and female labour in society (ibid.: xii–xiii, 20).

Since much ethnographic work until recently has been within what anthropologists once referred to as ‘kinship-based societies’, the reader can understand the implications of such a Marxian argument: women as social beings are first and foremost trapped and exploited as victims of ideological hegemony, and most obviously so among those peoples about whom anthropologists write the most. This is a view, however, predicated upon certain precarious Western assumptions about civil society through which gender becomes defined from the start as a structure of inequality. It is assumed that notions about gender are universally about male superiority and female inferiority, and that gender relations are therefore always enacted through modes of exploitation and domination. It is taken for granted that it is universally the case for women’s activities to pertain to a denigrated, restrictive world of the ‘domestic’, while men tend to their own prestigious political (and economic) affairs within a wider realm of relationships. Because this male domain of politics is assumed to be always a more valued sphere of

147