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

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activity than the ‘domestic’ domain of women, the status of females is always judged as inferior to that of men.

Overing has argued (1986) that when the anthropological gaze is through the lens of such Western paradigms of power females are universally placed in a position of ‘catch-22’. As Joseph Heller in his novel Catch-22 tells of air force regulations, ‘there was only one catch…and that was Catch-22’: you are damned if you do and you are damned if you don’t. A similar absurdity was evident in much of the early literature on gender, where any piece of ethnographic information on women’s activities was taken as evidence of female degradation. The catch to Meillassoux’s judgements of male and female tasks is clear. He asserts (Meillassoux 1981:28–9) that in societies where hunting and therefore war is valued (an unwarranted assumption itself) women are correspondingly devalued and made inferior because of their social vulnerability, and thus ‘put to work under male protection and given the least rewarding, the most tedious and above all, the least gratifying tasks such as agriculture and cooking’ (ibid.: 19, my italics).We find that by the ethnographer’s definition, the work, ritual, obligations and pain of men are all tribute to their high status as controllers of society, while women’s work, ritual, obligations and pain become evidence of their subordinate status and exploitation. If women follow menstrual taboos, have children, tend gardens, prepare and cook meat and vegetables, bake bread, spin cotton—all these activities are taken as signs of woman’s exploitation by men and of their demeaned status. Similarly, if they do not hunt, go to war, make political speeches, play sacred flutes and drums, make canoes, cut down trees—each such omission also provides yet one more example of woman’s lowly position.

Attempts such as that of Meillassoux, to achieve a viable unified Marxian theory of gender relations (and of social inequalities more generally) have proven to be based on too uncertain a ground. As Keesing notes (1987b:59), anthropological theory, including the Marxian attempt, has not developed a concept of ideology that is sufficiently sensitive to allow for adequate generalizations about the force of cultural symbols or constructs cross-culturally. The achievement of such a unified theory would, at any rate, be highly unlikely in that the Marxist notion of culture-as-ideology acquires its saliency within a particular history, and that is a Western one. As such it carries all the baggage of this specific history which makes it risky to use as a lens for understanding even those other systems that manifest blatant inequalities, and for which such concepts as ‘subordination’, ‘exploitation’ and ‘oppression’ are too bluntly crude (cf. Strathern 1988; Keesing 1987b; Overing 1986).

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The question of coercion, and its evaluation

The Western notion of the political tends to be highly restrictive, being attached to ideas about coercion and the control of labour and the products of it. Also, embedded in it are all those ethnocentric assumptions about what work is, what constitutes personhood, agency, power, what subjects and objects are, and what property is (cf. Strathern 1980, 1984, 1988). It is assumed that women’s work, the products of their labour, and their reproductive capacities are controlled by men. But equality and inequality can be very difficult to judge, and there is a serious methodological question with regard to how we as ethnographers recognize exploitation among other peoples. Roger Keesing remarks (1987:59–60) that attempts to find the mystification, false consciousness and oppression lurking within other peoples’ practices, and their constructs of gender, rely too often upon hazardous assumptions about what constitutes inequality, domination and exploitation, or about what equality means and what a just and liberated society would be like.

From a cross-cultural perspective the equation between public leadership and dominance is questionable. What does one mean by ‘dominance’? Does it designate coercion? Or control over ‘the most valued’? ‘Political’ systems may be about both, either, or conceivably neither. The idea of ‘control’ would be a bothersome one for many peoples, as for instance among many indigenous peoples of Amazonia where all members of a community are fond of their personal autonomy and notably allergic to any overt expression of control or coercion (cf. Clastres 1977; Thomas 1982; Riviere 1984; Overing 1993a). The conception of political power as a coercive force, while it may be a Western fixation, is not a universal. It is very unusual for an Amazonian leader to give an order. If many peoples do not view political power as a coercive force, nor as the most valued domain, then the leap from ‘the political’ to ‘domination’ (as coercion), and from there to ‘domination of women’, is a shaky one. As Marilyn Strathern (1981:167–8) has remarked, the notions of ‘the political’ and ‘political personhood’ are cultural obsessions of our own, a bias long reflected in anthropological constructs. We should be wary of projecting our own value of ‘the political’ upon others.

Given this difficulty of defining ‘the political’ within a crosscultural framework, it would be facile to assume that women are not political beings, nor powerful actors within their own societies. It should be noted that for many peoples it would be difficult to draw the line between what we might separate as ‘religious’ and ‘political’

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domains. In early feminist literature the general idea was that while boys at puberty receive esoteric privileged knowledge, girls only suffer prohibitions and restrictions at their initiation. This is an area where later ethnographic attention has greatly enriched and enlightened our view, particularly on the topic of the privileged knowledge of women (e.g. Keesing 1987; Descola 1994, 1996; Ardener 1975; Hugh-Jones 1979). As Overing has noted (1986), the meaning of gender, its cultural construction, is often associated with highly complex theories of energy, fertility, and power in the universe.Thus to reduce the meaning of such idea systems to the political one of male dominance over women would be foolish. David Guss writing on the Yecuana of the Orinoco Basin notes that privileged knowledge, or ritual activity, permeates every cultural function, whether centred on males or females. Women, who are masters of the domain of gardens, own powerful magical herbs which ‘are the paramount expression of women’s sacred knowledge and ritual independence’ (Guss 1989:35). Some of these plants heal children or initiate women, others ‘ease menstruation, aid or prevent birth, cure or produce fever, frighten snakes, stop rains, secure lovers, induce sleep, dispel ill humor, deter evil spirits, protect travellers, and cause death’ (ibid.). For the Yecuana, power vacillates between men and women through the endless interplay of dualistic structures: female and male, inside/outside, house and garden; female outside/male inside; female inside/male outside. There is therefore a strong relativity to Yecuana gender politicking, which is also ritually played out, where women, and not just men, take their respective centre positions.

The relationship between the genders among Amazonian peoples is often highly egalitarian by anyone’s standards, and an emphasis, for instance, on ‘hidden’ control mechanisms that might allow for male dominance can too easily lead one to miss the more socially prevalent institutions that create equality. There is by now a large amount of ethnography telling of indigenous peoples among whom the women, both ideologically and in practice, control their own labour, and the products of it (see much of the contemporary literature on Amazonia). On the other hand, values—and the structures of equality and inequality linked to them—may well not be so straightforward, but ambiguous, as among the Hagen of New Guinea (Strathern 1981, 1988) where there is constant play between egalitarian and hierarchical principles. There are also by now many ethnographic examples showing that the quality of the relations between the genders may well be subject to perspective, where females have a very different view from males of the strengths of their respective roles and participation within the social life of the

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community (cf. Ardener 1975; Keesing 1987b). The problem for the ethnographer is that because of our gender politics a particular kind of inequality is presumed to be the predominant mode of existence.

A plurality of voices, and the artful skills of everyday life

Anthropology, in its self-reflection upon its treatment of the ‘problem of women’, and subsequent attempts to rectify its sins, has, because of its cross-cultural perspective, much to offer its sister disciplines. The most difficult set of assumptions of all to shift within anthropology has been those having to do with the Western distinction between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’, and the immensity of the implications of its ensnarement of our judgements are only beginning to be appreciated. The dichotomy of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘private’ has been noted time and again in gender studies more generally to have special saliency within Western political and moral thought and evaluations, and it is therefore with its intricacies and iniquities that much of the more recent feminist literature has been concerned.

The distinction assumes that women are imprisoned within the domain of the private and the domestic, and therefore devalued by the male public and political arena. One of the chief contributions of feminist thought to political theory, psychology and moral philosophy is to question this line that divides the public and the private (cf. Gilligan 1982; Benhabib 1992; Baier 1994). Women, being bound to the domain of the private, have been confined beyond the pale of justice where they take an invisible place within contemporary theories of justice and community. As Benhabib says (1992:12–13), ‘the norms of freedom, equality and reciprocity have stopped at the household door’.The moral reasoning of women has been denigrated as they are shown to be lacking in their acceptance of universals of justice, and more attentive in their moral judgements to context, details of relationships and narratives (Gilligan 1982). Some feminists are attempting to wed the traditional male theories of justice and contract theory with what they understand to be the female concerns of care and nurturance (cf. Benhabib 1992; Baier 1994). In other words they are trying to find ways in which ‘the public’ can responsibly include the female domestic matters of childrearing and all the other normal concerns and responsibilities with which we are daily and intimately most concerned.These writers assume ‘the domestic’, and the concern for care and trust, to be largely a matter of gender, of interest to females but not males. For them, the genders have different moral outlooks: while men tend to phrase morality in terms of obligation, contract and justice, women are most concerned

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with a morality relevant to the bringing up of children, engendering of love, care, trust and cooperation.

Anthropologists, however, may well question the cross-cultural relevance of the Western case, where males and females appear to be opposed in moral outlook in accordance to their respective separation of domains of activity. There are peoples who do make a strong separation between the public and the domestic, and others who do not (cf. Overing 1986). Or, conceptually, the distinction may not make a fit with our own. For instance the notion of ‘the private’ may well pertain to the person, and not a domestic group. Among many indigenous peoples, female performance as primary actors, listeners, or provocative commentators is as public as that of the men (cf. Passes 1998). Moreover, there are peoples, certainly in Amazonia, who prize ‘the domestic’ over the political, as that informal, intimate domain where the art of everyday maintenance and artful skills for social life reign. In such cases that is what social life is about, the care of children and the trust in relations of interdependency related to such care. Here neither a gender distinction in moral outlook, nor a distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ domains, is relevant (cf. Overing 1989, 1999). Until recently, because of the dominant strand in Western political theory, from which anthropology has not been totally exempt, that excludes domesticity and the everyday relations of the ordinary moral agent, this type of Amazonian sociality was not seen, much less understood. By listening to the women, the messages of the men could be understood in a different light, for these are peoples whose social organizations make no sense without the full inclusion of the social acts of their women.

In short, it has made all the difference to the ethnographic endeavour to include the subject of women and especially women’s voices. In the process we have time and again discovered a rich symbolic world that demands an understanding of the interplay of men and women, and their respective knowledges, that makes a travesty of the simplistic ‘male only’ models of yesteryear. It is only by understanding both male and female (often complementary) perspectives that gender relations among another people can begin to be comprehended. As gender studies progressed, it became absolutely clear that the peremptory voice of the ethnographer was insufficient, as too that of the male informant. Nor can we speak from the perspective of a generic female, for there is no such thing. There is ever a plurality of voices, a seemingly helter-skelter chiming, that provides, significantly, rich layers of evaluative contextualization, the recognition of which has in the end transformed our anthropological visions of culture and society.

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All those kinship structures through which men established important relationships with each other through the exchange of their muted women, which became the model of ‘society’; all those ‘political’ roles and statuses through which men who controlled the political domain became the knowledge-holders of their culture—these were the topics that once were recognized as primary anthropological concerns.The recognition by gender studies of the critical importance of allowing the authorship of a multitude of voices has led to energetic debate over the epistemological foundations of anthropology, which in turn has transformed the question, the topics and the methodology of the discipline—and in the end its own self-image as having the right of authorial privilege.

See also: Ecriture Feminine, Kinship, Moments of Being,

Post-Modernism, Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies, Society, The Unhomely

GOSSIP

In any socio-cultural milieu, people may be occupied in gossip for a substantial part of their every day. Recognizing, since Malinowski, that studying the world of the everyday is the key to an understanding of how people behave, anthropologists have long appreciated the significance of gossip.

Nevertheless, sustained analysis of gossip per se remained intermittent (cf. Radin 1927; Herskovits 1937; Colson 1953) until the 1960s, when three broadly distinct approaches emerged: the functionalist, the transactionalist and the symbolic-interactionist.

The functionalist approach is exemplified by Max Gluckman (1963b). Gossip, Gluckman begins, is a culturally determined and sanctioned process, a social fact, with customary rules and with important functions. Notably, gossip helps maintain group unity, morality and history. For, the essence of gossip is a constant (if informal and indirect) communal evaluation and reaffirmation of behaviour by assessment against common, traditional expectations. Furthermore, gossip enables groups to control the competing cliques and aspiring individuals of which they are composed; through gossip, differences of opinion are fought out behind the scenes (through customary innuendo, ambiguity and conceit) so that outwardly a show of harmony and friendship can be maintained. Finally, gossip is a hallmark and a privilege, even a duty, of group membership. A group gossips, gossip is group property, and to be a member is to gossip—about other members.

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The transactionalist approach, spearheaded by Robert Paine (1967), eschews the presumptions of seeing groups as united and equilibrated, and social-structural convention as being always geared towards this end. Paine argues that it is more apposite to see gossip as a means by which individuals manipulate cultural rules and to see individual gossipers as having rival interests (in power, friendships, networks, matériel) which they seek to forward and protect. Individuals, not groups, gossip, and they gossip primarily not about group values but individual aspirations, others’ and their own. Indeed, any appeal to group unity should rather be seen as a managing of self-interest: an attempt to have a particular definition of a social situation prevail. In short, gossip allows the moral order to be bent to individual purpose. It is instrumental behaviour which uses a genre of informal communication for the partial effecting of competition between individuals through the selective imparting and withholding, the manipulating, of information.

To an extent, the above dichotomy between groupand individualoriented analyses is collapsed in the symbolic-interactionist approach. Here (Haviland 1977; Heilman 1978) the emphasis is on how, through everyday talk, cultural reality and social relations are continually being represented and debated; in gossip, individuals can be seen actively speculating together on the nature of their lives and world. Hence, gossip provides individuals with a map of their social environment and with current information about happenings, inhabitants and their dispositions. This then provides the resource by which they can devise a programme of action.Also, gossip is the means by which individuals align their actions: negotiate between themselves the scope and import of cultural rules and the social behaviours to which they apply. Gossip is essentially a metacommunicative process: an activity through which individuals examine and discuss together the rules and conventions by which they commonly live. Moreover, since rules are relative and ambiguous in their application, such interpretation is never final or consensual. Hence, gossip at once disassembles, evaluates and reconstitutes the everyday world.

See also: Community, Ethnomethodology, Interaction, Narrative

HOME AND HOMELESSNESS

Anthropologists have long been interested in migratory processes, often of people in search of work (possibly later followed by their families) and often from rural areas to urban ones, and from relatively or seemingly

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deprived areas to less deprived ones. Indeed, the complexities of the relationship between labour migration and (momentous) social, cultural, economic and political change, and the numbers of people involved or affected by such movement in search of a better ‘quality of life’, have been a major conceptual concern (cf. Kearney 1986).

Hence, there have been studies of communities of poor rural labourers in overcrowded cities (cf. Parkin 1969; Scheper-Hughes 1992), and the networks of contacts by which people move and move again in search of work, and information moves with them (cf. Mitchell 1969; Gardner 1995). There have also been studies of the traditions of labour migrancy that can flourish as generations of men and women move from their homes (cf. Lloyd 1979; Marx 1987), and the problems that can accrue as returners hope to find their original homes again (cf. Gmelch 1980; Ballard 1987). Migratory processes have been seen to cast significant light on questions of socio-cultural reproduction and development, both concerning those who move and those who stay put (Redfield 1960; Meillassoux 1981), and on the relationship between individual (migrant) actors and global (modernizing) processes (Frank 1965), and to call for an elucidation of the meanings imparted to migratory processes by those who move and those who ‘host’ them (Lewis 1961; Grillo 1985).

At the same time, inequalities in the distribution of wealth, resources and power have led to migrations which may be described as less than voluntary; hence the anthropological interest in the ‘exile’ and the ‘refugee’ alongside the labour migrant. Exile has been explored (après van Gennep 1960) as a rite of violent disaggregation from a home community which pitches refugees into a liminal zone (for example, the refugee camp) and which can only be overcome by a corresponding rite of reaggregation into new identities (Conquergood 1988). Exile has also been explored as a categorial anomaly, a ‘pollution’ (après Douglas 1966), which derives from the collision of cultures and their incompatible systems of symbolic classification (Malkki 1995). In particular, anthropological study has focused upon a mediation between the definition of ‘refugees’ under international law—being those who have fled their country of former habitual residence out of fear of persecution on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a specific social group—and the experiences on the ground of the exiles themselves and those agencies set up to deal with them (cf. Gilad 1990; Harrell-Bond 1986). Finally, as exile experiences extend over the years, anthropologists have explored the cultural adaptations exhibited by long-term refugee communities, and the tensions involved in their self-identification: not ‘acculturation’ to new

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identities so much as a practising of a permanent in-betweenness or transnationalism (Hirschon 1989; Gonzalez 1992).

In this way, study of migratory processes also includes an appreciation of diasporas. Originally a term referring to the exile and dispersions of Jews from the land of Israel following persecution in Classical and preClassical times (and thence the migration of Jewish communities around the Gentile world for ensuing millennia), the term has since been applied more widely to include those populations separated from an erstwhile home and scattered around the world who nevertheless retain a sense of themselves as present strangers. Armenians (Amit-Talai 1989), Italians (Gans 1965) and Greeks (Moskos 1989), for example—like Jews (Avruch 1981)—seek to maintain an ethnic unity, a cultural continuity, and a sense of peoplehood across the globe. They retain distinctive practices, a myth of their uniqueness, memories of their past home, and a hope of eventual repatriation: ’…Next year in Jerusalem’.

Migration and ‘home’

It may be argued, however, that the labels ‘migrant’, ‘refugee’, ‘exile’, ‘expatriate’, betray differences in evaluation and orientation, differences in strategic dealings with the phenomenon of migration, more than differences in the migratory process as such. By ‘expatriate’, then, is conveyed a sense of wealth and voluntary detachment, by ‘migrant’ a hope for upward mobility, by ‘exile’ a sense of loss, and so on (Tedlock 1996:341). Beyond these labels, however, lies the migratory process whereby people operate as ‘transnationals’—ever transgressing so-called socio-cultural borders rather than operating strictly within circumscribed fields.

It was a thesis of Edmund Leach’s (1977) that individuals spent their lives crossing socio-cultural boundaries—whatever the norms might have prescribed and law-keepers sought to realize in terms of their closure. Hence, Leach posited, most categorial distinctions (the orderly frameworks behind socio-cultural routinization) evaporated when anthropologists observed what people did as opposed to what they were supposed to do. Recently, this has found more general anthropological favour. The thesis of ‘transnationalism’ (Schiller et al. 1992) signals a move away from the notion of bounded socio-cultural units of analysis in favour of an appreciation of individuals who move cognitively and physically through their lives: who throughout their lives move shorter and greater distances across the globe, and who imagine communities of belonging (and invent their traditions) on their way (cf. Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). It is as a result of this shift in

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anthropological sensibility that an analytical focus on home and homelessness becomes timely.

‘Home’ did not much figure in traditional anthropological conceptualizations, except perhaps as a synonym for ‘house’ or ‘household’ (cf. Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995). Here was ‘home’ as stable physical space, and a place which amounted to an ‘embryonic community’ (Douglas 1991:289), in which territory and time were structured functionally, economically, aesthetically and morally; so that even if the potential mobility of home was attested to—the tent of the nomad, say—still the focus was on the necessary routinizing of time and space. As Douglas elaborated, home could be defined as a pattern of regular doings, furnishings and appurtenances, and a physical space in which certain communitarian practices were realized. Homes began by bringing space under control and thus giving domestic life physical orientations: ‘directions of existence’ (Douglas 1991:290). Homes also gave structure to time and embodied a capacity for memory and anticipation. In short, homes could be understood as the organization of space over time, and the allocation of resources in space and over time.

Then again, the routinization of space—time was also aesthetic and moral; it provided a model for redistributive justice, sacrifice, and the common, collective good. Homes were communities in microcosm which coordinated their members by way of open and constant communication, a division of labour, rights and duties, a commensal meal, and a rotation of access to resources. They encompassed totalprestatory systems which exerted possibly tyrannous control over their members’ minds, bodies and tongues in their search for solidarity.

However, to understand homes in this way—as being synonymous, in microcosm, with Durkheimian notions of solidary communities and coercive institutions—is anachronistic and provides little conceptual purchase on a world of contemporary movement. A broader understanding is possible and necessary, and one concerned less with the routinization of space and time than with their fluidity and with individuals’ continuous movement through them (cf. Minh-ha 1994:14). A conception of home is required which transcends traditional ways by which identity is analytically classified and defined (according to locality, ethnicity, religiosity or nationality) and is sensitive to allocatings of identity which may be multiple, situational, individual and paradoxical. As a concept, ‘home’ must encompass cultural norms and individual fantasies, representations of and by individuals and groups; it must be sensitive to numerous modalities: memory and longing; the conventional and the creative; the ideational,

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