ABOUT THE BOOK

Amid the diversity and range of the volume, its partiality and openendedness, it is intended that its dual authorship will tend towards a consistency of ethos and continuity of voice in the whole—at the least, towards a consistency and continuity of narrative tension.

A number of other voices have nonetheless ably assisted the authors in composing their text. For their support and advice the authors would like very much to thank Anthony Cohen, Andrew Dawson, Alan Passes, Marnio Teixeira-Pinto and Jonathan Skinner; Elizabeth Munro and Napier Russell; also their editors at Routledge, Roger Thorp and Hywel Evans, and copy editor Michael Fitch.

NJR and JO

St Andrews 1999

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LIST OF CONCEPTS

Agent and Agency

Alterity

Auto-Anthropology

Children

Classification

Code

Cognition

Common Sense

Community

Consciousness

Contradiction

Conversation

Culture

Cybernetics

Dialogics and Analogics

Discourse

Ecriture Feminine

Ethnomethodology

Form and Content

Gender

Gossip

Home and Homelessness

Human Rights

Humanism

Individualism

Individuality

Interaction

Interpretation

Irony

Kinship

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LIST OF CONCEPTS

Liminality

Literariness

Methodological Eclecticism

Methodological Individualism and Holism

Moments of Being

Movement

Myth

Narrative

Network

Non-Places

Post-Modernism

Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies

Reading

The Rural Idyll

Science

Situation and Context

Society

Stereotypes

Thick Description

Tourism

Transaction

The Unhomely

Urbanism

Violence

Visualism

World-Making

World-View

Writing

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AGENT AND AGENCY

AGENT AND AGENCY

The concepts of agent and agency, perhaps related most closely to that of power, are usually deployed in debates over the relationship between individuals and social structure.They also pertain, however, to the nature of individual consciousness, its ability to constitute and reconstitute itself, and, ultimately, the extent of its freedom from exterior determination.

Agency and structure

Agents act, and agency is the capability, the power, to be the source and originator of acts; agents are the subjects of action.Weber suggested that acts be distinguished from mere (animal) behaviour on the basis of acts being seen to entail a number of features of human rationality: consciousness, reflection, intention, purpose and meaning. He felt that social science should be an interpretive study of the meanings of human action and the choices behind them. G.H.Mead sought to clarify the Weberian notion of meaning, and its social-scientific understanding (Verstehung), by differentiating acts into: impulses, definitions of situations, and consummations.

On a Durkheimian view, however, what was crucial for an appreciation of human action were the conditions under which, and means by which, it took place; also the norms in terms of which choices between acts were guided. Over and against action, therefore, were certain structures which implied constraint, even coercion, and which existed and endured over and above the actions of particular individuals, lending to individuals’ acts a certain social and cultural regularity. What social science should study, therefore, was how such formal structures were created and how precisely they determined individual behaviour. To the extent that ‘agency’ existed, in short, it was a quality which derived from, and resided in, certain collective representations: in the social fact of a conscience collective; only in their pre-socialized, animal nature (a pathological state within a sociocultural milieu) were individuals able to initiate action which was not predetermined in this way.

Much of the literature on agency since the time of Weber and Durkheim has sought to resolve these differences, and explore the limits on individual capacities to act independently of structural constraints. Despite attempts at compromise, moreover, the division does not prove an easy one to overcome. Either, in more individualistic or liberal vein, one argues that structures are an abstraction which individuals create andwhich cannot be said to determine, willy-nilly, the action of their

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makers. Or else, in more collectivist and communitarian vein, one argues that structures are in fact sui generis and determine the very nature of individual consciousness and character: so that individuals’ ‘acts’ are merely the manifestation of an institutional reality, and a set of structural relations.

Numerous claims to compromise have been put forward, nonetheless, most famously by Parsons (the theory of social action and pattern variables, e.g. 1977), by Berger and Luckmann (the theory of the social construction of reality, 1966), by Giddens (structuration theory, 1984), and by Bourdieu (the theory of practice and the habitus, 1977). In each case, however, the theorist can be seen to end by privileging one or other of the above options; the compromise is hard to sustain. Hence, a division between social structure and individual agency is collapsed in favour of either a liberal or a communitarian world-view—and more usually (certainly regarding the above claimants) the latter (cf. Rapport 1990).

For example, for Bourdieu, to escape from vulgarly mechanistic models of socio-cultural determinism is not to deny the objectivity of prior conditions and means of action and so reduce acts’ meaning and or igin to the conscious intentions and deliberations of individuals. What is called for is a more subtle approach to consciousness where, in place of a simple binary distinction between the conscious and the unconscious, one recognizes a continuum. One also recognizes that the greater part of human experience lies between the two poles, and may be called ‘the domain of habit’: most consciousness is ‘habitual’. It is here that socialization and early learning put down their deepest roots; it is here that culture becomes encoded on the individual body, and the body becomes a mnemonic device for the communication and expression of cultural codes (of dress and gender; of propriety and normalcy; of control and domination). Competency in social interaction is also to be found in the habitual domain between the two poles: individuals act properly by not thinking about it. In short, the wide provenance of habit in human behaviour is a conduit for the potency of processes of exterior determination and institutionalization. Objective social structures produce the ‘habitus’: a system of durable, transposable dispositions which function as the generative basis of structured, objectively unified, social practices. Such dispositions and practices may together be glossed as ‘culture’, an acquired system of habitual behaviour which generates (determines) individuals’ schemes of action. In short, social structures produce culture which, in turn, generates practices which, finally, reproduce social structures.

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In this way, the ‘compromise’ which Bourdieu provides ends up being a structurally causal model based on reified abstractions and materialist determinations. While claiming to transcend the dualism between structure and agency Bourdieu remains firmly rooted in a communitarian objectivism.While claiming to reject deterministic logic which eschews individual action, what there is of the latter (the intentionless convention of regulated improvisation) is merely a medium and expression of social-structural replication; what (habitual) subjectivity is allowed for in Bourdieu‘s portrayal is heavily overdetermined by social process. Agency is reduced to a seemingly passive power of reacting (habitually) to social-structural prerequisites (cf. Jenkins 1992).

Creativity and imagination

What social science often effects when faced with irresolvable opposition is a change in the terms of the debate.Thus, fresh purchase is gained on the relationship between social structure and individual agency when ‘creativity’ is introduced: the creativity of an individual agent in relation to the structures of a socio-cultural milieu.

Extrapolating from processes of fission and fusion (of ‘schismogenesis’) among the New Guinean Iatmul, Bateson concluded that each human individual should be conceived of as an ‘energy source’ (1972:126). For here was something fuelled by its own processes (metabolic, cognitive and other) rather than by external stimuli, and which was capable of, and prone to, engagement in its own acts. Furthermore, this energy then imposed itself on the world, energizing certain events, causing certain relations and giving rise to an interaction between things organic and inorganic, which were then perceived to be ‘orderly’ or ‘disorderly’.

Human individuals were active participants in the world, in short. Indeed, inasmuch as their energy determined the nature of certain relations and objects in the world, individuals could be said to be creators of worlds. For what could be understood by ‘order’ or ‘disorder’ were certain relationships between certain objects which individuals came to see as normal and normative or as abnormal and pathological; here were some from an infinite number of possible permutations of objects and relations in the world, whose classification and evaluation were dependent on the eye of the perceiver. But there was nothing necessary, objective or absolute about either designation; ‘disorder’ and ‘order’ were statements as construed by individual, purposive, perceiving entities and determined by individuals’ states of mind. Between these

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latter there was great diversity, however, both at any one time and placeand between times and places.What was random or chaotic for one perceiver may be orderly and informational for another, which in turn gave rise to the disputational, conflictual and ever-changing nature of social relations and cultural arrangements.

Bateson’s commentary was widely appreciated, taken on, for instance, by psychiatrist R.D.Laing, and his definition of a person as ‘an origin of actions’, and ‘a centre of orientation of the objective universe’ (1968:20). Strong echoes of Bateson also occur in Edmund Leach‘s alluding to the imaginative operations of the individual human mind and its ‘poeticism’: its untrammelled and unpredictable and non-rule-bound nature (1976a:5). ‘You are your creativity’, Leach could conclude (1976b).

It is useful also to broaden the focus and remark upon the convergences between Bateson‘s ethnographic conclusions and Existentialism’s philosophic ones. As Sartre famously put it, ‘being precedes essence’: each human being makes himself what he is, creating, and recreating continually, himself and his world. Of course, individuals are born into certain socio-cultural situations, into certain historical conditions, but they are responsible for the sense they (continue to) make out of them: the meaning they grant them, the way they evaluate and act towards them. Indeed, individuals are for ever in the process of remaking their meanings, senses, evaluations and actions; they negate the essence of their own creations and create again. They might seem to be surrounded by the ‘actual facts’ of an objective historico-socio-cultural present, but they can nonetheless transcend the latters’ brutishness, and hence surpass a mere being-in-the-midst-of- things by attaining the continuous possibility of imagined meanings. Between the (structurally) given and what this becomes in an individual life there is a perennial (and unique) interplay; individual experience cannot be reduced to objective determinants (cf. Kearney 1988:225–41).

Imagination is the key in this depiction: the key resource in consciousness, the key to human being. Imagination is an activity in which human individuals are always engaged; and it is through their imagination that individuals create and recreate the essence of their being, making themselves what they were, are and will become.As Sartre put it, imagination has a ‘surpassing and nullifying power’ which enables individuals to escape being ‘swallowed up in the existent’; it frees them from given reality, and allows them to be other than how they might seem to be made (1972:273). Because of imagination, human life has an emergent quality, characterized by a going-beyond: going-beyond a given situation, a set of circumstances, a status quo, going-beyond the

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conditions that produced it. Because of imagination,the human world is possessed of an intrinsically dynamic order which individuals, possessed of self-consciousness, are continually in the process of forming and designing. Because they can imagine, human beings are transcendentally free; imagination grants individuals that margin of freedom outside conformity which ‘gives life its savor and its endless possibilities for advance’ (Riesman 1954:38).

Imagination issues forth into the world in the form of an ideally ‘gratuitous’ act, gratuitous inasmuch as it is seemingly uncalled for in terms of existent reality: unjustifiable, ‘without reason, ground or proof (Chambers Dictionary). For here is an act which surpasses rather than merely conserves the givenness in which it arises, which transcends the apparent realities of convention, which seems to resist the traditional constraints by which life is being lived. The gratuitous act appears to come from nowhere and pertain to nothing, something more or less meaningless in terms of the sense-making procedures which are currently instituted and legitimated; what is gratuitous is beyond debt and guilt, beyond good and evil.

Finally, then, it is the gratuitousness of the creative act of human imagination which makes it inherently conflictual; for, between the imagination and what is currently and conventionally lived there will be a constant tension. The indeterminacy of the relationship between individual experience and objective forms of life—the dialectical irreducibility of conventional socio-cultural conceptualizations on the one side and conscious individual imaginings on the other—means that the becoming of new meanings will always outstrip the present being of socio-cultural conditions. For, while what is currently lived is itself the issue of past imaginative acts of world-creation, and dependent on continuing individual practice for its continuing institutionality, inevitably, present imaginative acts will be moving to new possible futures; in the process of creating a new world, existing worlds are inexorably appropriated, reshaped and reformed. Or, to turn this around, the continuity of the conventional is an achievement and a conscious decision (not a mindless conformity) which must be continually worked for—consensually agreed upon or else forcibly imposed.

Anthropology and creativity

The essence of being human, Leach argued, is to resent the domination of others and the dominion of present structures (1977:19–20). Hence, all human beings are ‘criminals by instinct’, predisposed to set their creativity against current system, intent on defying and

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reinterpretingcustom. Indeed, it is the rule-breaking of ‘inspired individuals’ which leads to new social formations and on which cultural vitality depends. Nevertheless, the hostility of creativity to systems as are, means that its exponents are likely to be initially categorized and labelled as criminal or insane—even if their ultimate victorious overturning of those systems’ conservative morality precipitates their redefining as heroic, prophetic or divine.

Narrowing the discussion of the existential imagination to more strictly anthropological work once more, Leach’s is a good place to start. That of Victor Turner provides another (1974,1982a). Abstracting from the ritual practices undertaken in the liminal period of Ndembu rites of passage,Turner could understand the entire symbolic creation of human worlds as turning on the relation between the formal fixities of social structure and the fluid creativity of liminoidal ‘communitas’. Drawing on Sartre’s dialectic between ‘freedom and inertia’ (as Leach drew on Camus’s ‘essential rebellion’), Turner theorized that society could be regarded as a process in which the two ‘antagonistic principles’, the ‘primordial modalities’, of structure and creativity could be seen interacting, alternating, in different fashions and proportions in different places and times. Creativity appeared dangerous—anarchic, anomic, polluting—to those in positions of authority, administration or arbitration within existing structures, and so prescriptions and prohibitions attempted precisely to demarcate proper and possible behavioural expressions. But, notwithstanding, ideologies of otherness (as well as spontaneous manifestations of otherness) would erupt from the interstices between structures and usher in opposed and original behavioural proprieties for living outside society (ritually if not normatively) or else refashioning in its image society as such.

Or again, in his Someone, No One. An Essay on Individuality (1979), Kenelm Burridge formulated a theoretical model similarly based on a processual relationship between social structure and individual creativity. If ‘persons’ were understood to be products of material (socio-historico- cultural) conditions, and lived within the potential of given concepts— feeding on and fattened by them, killing for and being killed by them— so individuals existed in spite of such concepts and conditions, seeking the disorderly and the new and refusing to surrender to things as they were or as traditional intellectualizations and bureaucratizations wished them to be. For to ‘become’ an individual was to abandon selfrealization through the fulfilment of normative social relations, and to concentrate one’s individual intuitions, perceptions and behaviour instead on the dialectical relationship ‘between what is and what might be’ (1979:76).

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Moreover, ‘individuality’ might be how one identified the practice of moving to the status of being individual, Burridge expounded, something of which each ‘organism’ was capable. What individuality did, in effect, was to transform the person, a social someone, into a social no-one—an ‘eccentric’ at least. However, if others were willing to accept for themselves—as new intellectualizations, a new morality— the conceptual creations of the ‘eccentric’ individual, then the move from someone to no-one culminated in their becoming a new social someone, a new ‘person’.That is, persons were the endpoint of ‘heroic’ individuals, individuals who had persuaded (or been mimicked by) others into also realizing new social conditions, rules, statuses, roles; for here, individuality dissolved into a new social identity. Indeed, Burridge concluded, the cycle of: ‘someone’ to ‘no-one’ to ‘someone’, was inevitable, and individuality a ‘thematic fact of culture’ (1979:116). Here was the universal instrument of the moral variation, the disruption, the renewal and the innovation which were essential to human survival, whether for hunters-and-gatherers, pastoralists, subsistence agriculturalists, peasants, village people, townsfolk or citydwellers. Different material conditions may eventuate in situations which variously allowed, encouraged or inhibited moves to the individual and moments of creative apperception, but over and above this, individuals’ creativity meant that they continually created the conditions and situations which afforded them their opportunity.

In sum, there were ever individuals who were determined to be ‘singletons’: to interact with others and with established rationalizations in non-predefined ways, to escape from the burden of given cultural prescriptions and discriminations, and so usher in the unstructured and as yet unknown.Whether courtesy of (Aborigine) Men of High Degree, (Cuna) shamans, (Nuer) Leopard-Skin Chiefs, (Hindu) Sanyasi, or (American) hippies, new intellectualizations were always being proffered by way of the agency of new individuals.

Anthropology and agency

The new social structures to which individual creativity gives rise soon petrify. In gaining independence from their individual creators, structurings of the world congeal into fixed, objectified, generalized, institutionalized cultural forms. However, all the while, the creative impulse, the active drive to individuality, goes on. It is the fate of individual agency ever to find itself threatened (and possibly stultified) by structure which is inappropriate to its creative needs—even a structure of its own one-time creation—and yet, the tension betweenthe

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