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

HOME AND HOMELESSNESS

the affective and the physical; the spatial and the temporal; the local and the global; both positive evaluations and negative (cf. Wright 1991:214). As Simmel sums up, ‘home’ may be said to provide a ‘unique synthesis’: ‘an aspect of life and at the same time a special way of forming, reflecting and interrelating the totality of life’ (1984:93–4). A working definition for charting the morass of ambiguities and fluidities of contemporary identity may be of ‘home’ as ‘where one best knows oneself (Rapport and Dawson 1998)—where ‘best’ means ‘most’, even if not always ‘happiest’.

Such an understanding of home is also apposite for coming to terms with the movement inherent in social life, for charting the intrinsic migrancy of identity. Increasingly, individuals are seen as moving between homes, erstwhile to current, or as moving between multiple present homes. More precisely, the thesis of transnationalism implies a radical change in the conceptualization of relations between movement and home: not only can one be at home in movement, but that movement can be one’s very home.

This is certainly the explicit thesis of John Berger. For Berger, the realization of a world of movement gives onto radically different ideas of home—and also of homelessness. A far more mobile notion comes to the fore, ideational and behavioural: home as something to accompany people whenever they decamp. For a world of travellers—labour migrants, exiles and refugees—home comes to be located in a routine set of practices, in a repetition of habitual social interactions, in styles of dress and address, in memories and myths, in stories carried around in one’s head, in the ritual of a regularly used personal name. People are more at home nowadays, in short, in ‘words, jokes, opinions, gestures, actions, even the way one wears a hat’ (Berger 1984:64).

It might seem, as Heidegger pronounced, that ‘homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world’, but it is rather that there is a recognition that we possess another sense of being-in-the-world (cf. Chambers 1994b:246). (It is not that there cannot be a sense of homelessness—far from it—but that a sense of home or of homelessness is not necessarily related in any simple or direct way with fixity or movement.) One dwells in a mobile habitat and not in a singular or fixed physical structure. Moreover, as home becomes seen as more mobile so it also becomes more individuated and privatized; everyone chooses their own, and one’s choice might remain invisible (and irrelevant) to others (cf. Rapport 1995). As Berger concludes, ‘no longer a dwelling’, home can be conceived of as ‘the untold story of a life being lived’ (1984:64). A sense of homelessness perhaps derives, paradoxically, from a reaction against movement, a refusing of fluid boundaries; hence

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the clamouring by the homeless for renascent ‘particularisms’: primordial places for which they are willing to kill and die (Auge 1995:35).

To traverse the globe with their informants, then, is for anthropologists to record the ‘moving’ homes of various kinds, behavioural and ideational, which individuals construct and enact. Here are routine practices and narrations which do not merely tell of home but represent it: serve, perhaps, as cognitive homes in themselves. As Gaston Bachelard puts it, the human imagination always builds ‘walls’ of impalpable shadows, comforting itself with the illusion of protection, and so carries ‘the notion of home’ into any ‘really inhabited space’, whether cognitive or physical. Thus it is that ‘we ever bring our lares with us’ (Bachelard 1994:5; also cf. Rykwert 1991:54).

Homelessness?

And yet, for Berger, there is still that sense in which many people are at home in ‘untold stories’. This is by no means the same as being ‘homeless’—as being without a moving account of one’s passage across boundaries and through life—but it is a recognition that, as individual, mobile and private, the homes of many remain invisible. Many people in movement across the globe today do not have the resources (temporal, financial) to exhibit their homes and make them formally or widely known; and even if they did their homes would remain invisible inasmuch as they would clamour for attention alongside millions of others’; while those in a position to publicize these multiple versions of home attempt deliberately to suppress them, or at least ensure that it is only their own versions which are exhibited, held up as models and recorded for posterity (cf. Berger 1975).

Superficially, this conclusion comes close to that drawn by Peter Berger and his collaborators in the premonitory text The Homeless Mind (1973). They agreed with a portrayal of modern social life as a plurality of social life-worlds between which individuals were in inexorable migration. Every day, they argued, individuals transgressed between a variety of divergent, discrepant, even contradictory, social milieux; so there was no consistency concerning what was experienced as ‘right’ or ‘true’ between different contexts and life-stages. However, rather than appreciating that individuals may be in possession of their own cognitive homes and itineraries which gave their transgressions a sense of consistency and direction, Berger et al. defined this migratory process as a ‘spreading condition of homelessness’ (1973:138).

Their ideas derive from a sense of loss: that in the modern world there has been lost a traditional home of fixity and physical centredness,

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of absolute values and a unified reality. Now uprooted from this first and ‘original’ socio-cultural milieu, no succeeding one becomes truly home. Individuals are in transit between a plurality of life-worlds but come to be at home in none. Berger et al. describe this condition as at once normative, spiritual and cognitive: the anomy of social movement correlates with a metaphysical sense of homelessness in the cosmos which correlates with personal alienation on the level of consciousness.

Moreover, the ‘homeless mind’ is hard to bear, and hence there is widespread nostalgia for a condition of being ‘at home’ in society, with oneself, and with the universe: for homes of the past which were socially homogeneous, communal, peaceful, safe and secure. ‘De-modernization’ movements of various kinds (socialism, localisms, religious cults and fundamentalisms) therefore promise new homes where individual members are reintegrated within all-embracing, meaningful structures of social, psychical and metaphysical solidarity. There are also growing attempts by those with the wherewithal to reconstruct homes in private, closed havens which shut out the present and serve as subjective refuges of the self. Nevertheless, Berger et al. conclude, before the cold winds of homelessness, nostalgia proves to be fragile defence; de-modernization schemes which are not institutionalized and society-wide are mostly precarious buffers, given the finitude and mortality of the human condition. Thus, in a modern world in which ‘everything is in constant motion’ and where ‘the life of more and more individuals [is] migratory, ever-changing, mobile’, homelessness represents a deepening global effect (1973:184).

The Homeless Mind remains a challenging thesis, but it is steeped in a communitarian ideology which would decry modern ‘ills’ (individualism and pluralization, alienation and anomy) so as to posit an idyllic past of unified tradition, certainty, stasis, and cognitive and behavioural commonality, But this latter is highly questionable; the existence of an ‘original life-world’ of traditional absoluteness and fixity (where the individual may said to be first and ‘truly’ at home) is without empirical foundation (Phillips 1993:149–56; also cf. Geertz 1995:15–16).

Furthermore, not only does the thesis of cognitive homelessness involve a mythic past, it also remains ethnographically ungrounded in the present. Even as individuals lead their lives in and through movement (cognitive and physical) and refrain from finally and essentially affixing their identities to places, the empirical evidence points to the resilience of people’s achieving of ‘homes’ (however these may come to be defined) and the inexorability of their home-making. Contra Berger et al., there is no necessary relation between fixity and physical centredness and the accruing of absolute values and a unified reality. Individuals are

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quite able to maintain the latter in continuous movement. Being ‘at home’ and being ‘homeless’, in short, are not as such matters of movement, of physical space, or of the fluidity of socio-cultural times and places. One is at home when one inhabits a cognitive environment in which one can undertake the routines of daily life and through which one finds one’s identity best mediated—and homeless when such a cognitive environment is eschewed (cf. Silverstone et al. 1994:19).

Paradoxes of home-making

Certain paradoxes surround the concept of home, however, which are not easily ignored.

First, there is the paradox, already alluded to, that an increase in movement around the world, and the freeing-up of restrictive boundaries to travel, is accompanied by an increase in renascent particularisms. In Hobsbawm‘s terms (1991), home as an essentially private and individual routine, fantasy, memory, longing or presence— Heim—is impacted upon by Heimat: an attempt publicly and collectively to impose home as a social fact and a cultural norm to which some must belong and from which others must be excluded. Hence the ‘exiles’ and ‘refugees’; and hence, too, the tramps and ‘bag-people’ expelled from the ranks of those felt deserving of combining house and home.

There is also the paradox that it is by way of transience and displacement that one achieves an ultimate sense of belonging. As Kateb puts it (1991:135), to be at home ‘in one’s own place’ it is necessary to become alienated and estranged to some degree, mentally or spiritually. Exile is a resource inasmuch as it gives onto that vantage-point from which one is best able to come to know oneself, to know oneself best. It is for this reason too that home ‘moves’ us most powerfully as absence or negation (Hobsbawm 1991:63).

Finally, there is the paradox concerning whether the movement to which home is party is linear or circular. Chambers (1994a) (à la Heraclitus) is definite that the migratory processes of the world are linear, since no returns are possible or implied. The journey of our lives is not between fixed positions and there is no itinerary affording routes back again. And yet, while it may be true that ‘the destiny of our journeys’ is not circular, still home represents both ‘the place from which we set out and to which we return, at least in spirit’ (Hobsbawm 1991:65). We engage in ongoing transgression partly out of a desire to overcome it, and find our end in our beginning.

Perhaps it is part-and-parcel of an appreciation of the way that individuals live in movement, transition and transgression, that its

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conceptualization, as ‘home’, should be similarly paradoxical and transgressive.

See also: Irony, Movement

HUMAN RIGHTS

In the past fifty years, human rights has become ‘one of the most globalised political values of our times’ (Wilson 1997:1). And yet, most anthropological literature has isolated itself from mainstream discussion of these values; it has tended to regard the legalistic language and the nation-state frameworks of much discussion as falling outside its professional scope (cf. Messer 1993), and questions of better or worse socio-cultural practice as value-judgements which go against its professional ethos (cf.Wolfram 1988).While ‘human rights’, as discourse and as international law, has enjoyed enormous growth, anthropology has therefore remained aloof, if not sceptical.

Even when they find themselves, perforce, within the human rights arena, anthropologists have been loath to pass judgement on what might be meant by such notions as the right to ‘life’, to ‘adequate-food, shelter, health care and education’, to ‘privacy and the ownership of property’, to ‘freedom from slavery and genocide’, to ‘freedom of movement’, to ‘freedom of speech, religion and assembly’. Even a practice such as ‘female circumcision’ (clitoridectomy and infibulation), anthropologists have insisted, must needs be regarded by those affected as a ‘problem’ before cultural outsiders may intervene and provide information for change. Little wonder that, as Richard Wilson puts it, anthropology is often viewed by human-rights theorists and activists as ‘the last bastion of cultural absolutism’ (1997:3); as if somehow believing that cultures contain an inherent moral rectitude, whereby one might always expect ‘underlying cultural values’ ultimately to assuage immoral political systems (American Anthropological Association 1947:543).

This stance can be seen as anachronistic if not irresponsible and reactionary. In a ‘post-cultural’ world (Wilson again), a world where ‘[t]he ‘fantasy’ that humanity is divided into [discrete groups] with clear frontiers of language and culture seems finally to be giving way to notions of disorder and openness’, anthropologists remain committed to a romantic communitarianism and relativism (Wilson 1997:10). They continue to believe that, as canonized by the 1947 statement of the American Anthropological Association executive board (penned chiefly

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by Melville Herskovits), it is upon ‘a respect for cultural differences’ that respect for all other social and individual differences should be based (1947:541).

The logics of human rights

A number of ideal-types of ‘competing normative logics’ (Falk 1980) concerning human rights may be identified. For much of the past two centuries in the West, the prevailing logic has been what might be termed ‘statist’. That is, nation-states have demanded the right to their own sovereignty and their own juridical and political equality; as such, the rights of their citizens are internal or domestic matters, and it is outwith the prerogative of members of other states to intervene. Statist logic was a development out of ‘hegemonic’ logic.This is the reasoning that ‘virtue’ is a manifestation of power, ‘might is right’, and it is the right of the more powerful to interfere in the affairs of the less powerful so as to maintain their interests and their (more virtuous) version of right. In its turn, however, statist logic has had to vie for its privileged position, in political debate of recent decades, with a number of other logics.There is a ‘supra-national’ logic, which lodges judgement of rights with institutions such as the United Nations, NATO, or the European Union; it is they now which claim the power to determine the rightness of states.There is also a ‘transnational’ logic pertaining to non-state, nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or the Worldwide Fund for Nature, which yet claim the right to monitor behaviour on a global scale whoever the protagonist. Then again, there is a ‘populist’ logic which rejects the necessary authority of states—if not all such self-perpetuating institutions—and seeks to derive rights instead directly from ‘the people’; this might span a range of manifestations, from Bertrand Russell’s pacifist War Crimes Tribunal to fundamentalist and terroristic organizations such as The Red Brigades or Hizbollah. Finally, there is what Falk refers to as a ‘naturalistic’ logic of rights, claiming that they inhere in human nature and therefore should be recognized universally and take precedence over all other (institutional) claims.

While the longevity of the above logics may be placed in a historical framework, it is important to recognize that all continue to contest for space and allegiance on a world-political stage today. And while the criteria for distinguishing between their appeals are many, perhaps the crucial one for present purposes concerns the units in which they see rights as inhering and to which harm can be done: from groups and collectivities on the one hand to persons and individuals on the other.As

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an ideal-type, statist logic sets out to protect collectivities from infringements against their rights while naturalistic logic is focused on individuals.This distinction then correlates with a further important one, that between relativism (statist) and universalism (naturalistic).

Human rights and anthropological relativism

Inasmuch as anthropology has seen its pedagogic mission as the furtherance of respect for ‘other cultures’—has argued for the rights to cultural difference, and posited cultural differences as the grounds for all others—it can be seen to have adopted a collectivist and relativistic logic. The thinking behind anthropological relativism is well rehearsed (cf. Crawford 1988; Downing and Kushner 1988). It is said that ethnography evinces no universal notion of humanity, and no commonality among those notions that do exist concerning the distribution of rights, duties and dignity. It is further said that there is no universal ‘individual’—that unified human subject with a knowable essence whom a naturalistic logic posits as the bearer of rights—only socially constructed persons. Those notions of ‘human nature’ and of ‘rights’ which derive from the fact of being human are historically and culturally bounded, it is argued; there can be no essential characteristics of human nature or rights which exist outside a specific discursive context. In particular, the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 was a charter of European, post-Enlightenment, liberal—humanist and idealist, political philosophy which came to be formulated in the wake of the Second World War and the Holocaust. It can be seen as a continuation of Kantian attempts to establish an Archimedean point that provides rational foundations for universal norms of justice; and it must be understood as part-and-parcel of the rise of capitalism—a means for individual profiteering enterprises to proceed unencumbered by communitarian obligations, traditional custom or a localized morality. In its application—in Western interference in moral issues internal to other cultures—the Universal Declaration has been responsible for a particular normative blindness towards indigenous peoples and their collectivist narratives of land ownership, political determination, selfhood and so on. Meanwhile, Western governments, such as that of the USA, feel free to pull out of UN bodies, such as UNESCO, when they feel too much emphasis is being placed on collective rights of peoples; a strengthening of group interests at the expense of the human rights of individuals is decried as the so-called ‘socialist bias’ of non-democratic societies.

But then what are the so-called human rights and freedoms of individuals as distinct from rights which people practise in the context of

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cultural, national and spiritual communities? To enjoy individual human rights requires community rights; individual rights cannot be exercised in isolation from the community—individual rights to join a trade union or to enjoy their culture, for instance, necessitate rights of groups to preserve their trade unions or their culture. Even in a laissez-faire Western democracy, individual rights are not absolute or immutable: they are balanced by the rights of others and by the interests of society, so that freedom of expression, of association and assembly, for example, are subject to the maintenance of national security, public order, and health and morals. In short, removed from his communities, ‘man loses his essential humanity’ (Moskovitz 1968:169–70).

Hence, the truly anthropological proposition that cultural rights have been implicit in any other rights from the start. Furthermore, if there is today a demand or a desire for anthropology to exercise ethical judgements, then this need not be paralysed by an appreciation of cultural relativism. The latter simply demands that such judgements always be made in cultural contexts and take account of the local habitus. Rights cannot be seen as anything but particular cultural forms, and notions of human rights as somehow existing outside or beyond distinct cultural realms is logically and empirically impossible.

Nonetheless, most if not all societies have propositions concerning some rights or others, however differently they might be perceived and formalized, and the claims operationalized. Hence, one can say with anthropological accuracy that human rights propositions invoke claims to specific goods and privileges by specific groups in specific places and times. Moral judgements, similarly, pertain to particular socio-cultural contexts; European genocide is not equivalent to tribal head-hunting or infanticide, cannibalism or feuding, because questions of violence must relate to cultural logic, technology and scale.

More generally, anthropologists can support a devolution of power to less powerful yet culturally distinct groups, and advocate their being given fair treatment before the law, towards the aim of maintaining if not increasing cultural diversity. Anthropologists can support the rights of groups to reproduce their own culture, and argue that this be seen to be as fundamental as the right to genetic transmission. One might describe a right of Third World peoples currently to express themselves in nationalistic terms, for instance; in their so-called ‘third generation rights’ (cf. Prott 1988) are expressed collective assertions of the right to self-determination, to protection from genocide, to permanent sovereignty over natural resources, to socio-economic development and to peace and security which grow out of the senses of group solidarity of various Third World populations.

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A variety of cultural logics might give onto a variety of notions of ‘human rights’, in short, but anthropologists can still support and defend the universal rights of cultures to those logics as such. Cultural relativism is after all based on the universalism that cultures are the foundational human right.

An alternative anthropology of rights

Equally well rehearsed are the arguments against relativistic thinking in anthropology. It has morally nihilistic, politically conservative and quietist consequences. It is also imbued with a relativistic meta-narrative concerning cultural difference which is logically inconsistent; for, cultural relativism must also include the relativity of the concept of ‘cultures perse (cf. Gellner 1993).

It further implies a modelling of society and of culture which many would now see as outmoded.That is, society and culture are depicted as sui generis: as reified and as ontologically secure. They are modelled as entities not processes: hermetically discrete and internally integrated; the basis of all similarities and differences between people, the ground of their being, the bank of their knowledge. This illusion of holism might have been legitimate currency in nineteenth-century nationalism and in Durkheimian sociology (cf. Barth 1992), but it is of little account in contemporary existential contexts. Mechanistic, social-structural notions of society and culture as organically functioning wholes must now give way to notions of human groupings as purposive and contingent political entities (ethnicities, religiosities, localisms, occupational lobbies) which live on as sets of symbols and interpreted meanings in the minds of their members. As Wilson sums up, ‘bounded conceptions of linguistic and cultural systems’ are out of place in a context where ‘culture’ may be characterized as ‘contested, fragmented, contextualised and emergent’ (1997:9).

In this situation, ‘culture’ cannot be raised as a right-bearing entity over and against human individuals. Individuals may have rights to cultural attachment and belonging, rights to membership of one or more cultures (of their choosing), but cultures do not have rights over individuals or members. Hence, on this view, ‘female circumcision’ is a violation of: (a) the right to freedom from physical and psychological abuse, (b) the right to corporal and sexual integrity, and (c) the right to health and education (Boulware-Miller 1985:155–77). More generally, the noble anthropological goal of seeking to understand others in their own terms cannot be employed as an excuse to avoid making moral and ethical judgements. Individuals have the right to resist and opt out of the

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norms and expectations of particular social and cultural groupings and chart their own course.

For instance, an individual’s rights freely to choose a marriage partner take precedence over a group‘s rights to maintain cultural patterns of marital preferences—even if it is argued that these norms are basic to a definition of the groups identity. As the testaments of refugees and asylum-seekers attest, many women have recourse only to suicide in order to avoid being forced into an unwanted marriage, and it is the responsibility of the anthropologist to support those disenfranchised individuals who find themselves under the power of others (cf. Gilad 1996). However that power is locally framed and legitimated (as that of elder kinsmen, religious experts, or whatever), here are relations of domination which anthropology should oppose. Moreover, even though such conceptions of individuals taking precedence over groups, of individual freedom contra cultural hegemony, derive from Western liberalism, the United Nations International Bill of Rights which these conceptions have given onto (comprising the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966)) is the only framework we have by which to make decisions on globally appropriate action.

Finally, if the discourse and law of human rights are manifestations of liberalism as a modern political philosophy, then its opposition is no less political or ideological. To decry the seeming atomism of individually conceived human rights—as opposed, say, to notions of collective attachment, common good, public interest, patriotism, group loyalty, respect for tradition, and so on—is to extol the virtues of communitarianism: to wish to replace a politics of individual rights with a politics of common good, and an emphasis on collective life and the supreme value of the community.This has long had its (equally Western) social-philosophical exponents, from Toennies and Durkheim (‘[T]o experience the pleasure of saying “we”, it is important not to enjoy saying “I” too much’ (1973:240)), to MacIntyre,Taylor and Sandel today. However, as an ideology it can also be critiqued (cf. Phillips 1993). As with the aforementioned illusory notions of society and culture as sui generis, communitarianism can be said to represent a backward-looking myth of a situation of cognitive and behavioural commonality that never existed. In practice, communitarianism is often hierarchical, and always exclusionary with regard to those who do not belong—women and slaves, savages, pagans, Jews, Communists, homosexuals. In sociological usage, moreover, the ideology represents an attempt to ‘colonize’ the consciousness of individual members so that the latter are pressed into

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