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

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though man’s purposes may be, at least none of them is wholly foreign to me, since every human purpose presents itself as an attempt either to surpass these limitations, or to widen them, or else to deny or to accommodate oneself to them.

Some of Sartre’s phraseology seems old-fashioned now, sexist and selfsatisfied; it can appear the credo of the secure and resourceful bourgeois, able to reflect on the self, to determine ‘his’ relations to the conditions or circumstances of his life, and to lay claim to a certain lifesome dignity Indeed, this has led some anthropologists to reject such an existentialist orientation tout court. However, such a reading is superficial, and mistaken; avoiding gender-specific linguistic formulations may still not be easy, but by his words Sartre succinctly points up a number of important truths. Let me elaborate upon a number of his phrases in turn.

(i) I think, therefore I am is the absolute truth of consciousness

Descartes‘s attempt to isolate a knowing subject as a foundation for a scientific exploration of the world has been heavily criticized in recent social science. The search for a res cogitans, a discrete substance and process of cognition, has been seen as responsible for setting up a number of misconceived dualisms, such as mind versus body, thinking versus feeling, reason versus emotion, thought versus action, individual versus environment, man (society and culture) versus nature. However, Descartes’s description of consciousness can be easily improved upon without being discarded by adding such words as ‘feel’ and ‘imagine’, ‘sense’ and ‘dream’, ‘evaluate’ and ‘experience’, to ‘think’; and by portraying the knowing being as always situated, as a body in a certain time and space. One thus retains Descartes’s insistence on a discrete consciousness as the ontological essence of being human. Hence: ‘I think and feel—I experience—at a particular moment, and therefore I am at that moment’ (cf. Cohen and Rapport 1995).

(ii) Outside of the Cartesian cogito, all objects are no more than probable

What the individual knows with most immediacy, clarity and certainty is what his senses inform him, what he experiences first-hand. Indeed, this is the only thing of which he has certain knowledge. He knows what he senses but he cannot know the accuracy of those senses and measure them against an absolute standard because he ‘is’ his senses and not something over and against them. He can test, improvise and experiment

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with what his senses tell him, but these procedures also call upon his senses to effect and measure. He can compare what his senses tell him with what others’ senses tell them but, still, these efforts entail his sensual interpretation of the information he gleans from (what he interprets to be) others’. In short, the individual’s senses of self and world are the beginning and, in a way, also the end of knowledge. They are certainly the paradigm of knowledge, and give onto a sense of certainty that is never equalled in other forms of knowledge—however much they might inspire the wish for such comprehension. As Roy Wagner concludes (1991:39):

nothing could possibly be more clear, distinct, concrete, certain, or real than the self’s perception of perception, its own sensing of sense. It is the very archetype, the inspiration, of everything we have ever imagined for the objective

And yet such knowledge remains hermetically sealed within the personal microcosm. Hence: ‘I am certain of my own cognitions at a particular moment (and therefore I am) but I am not so certain about anything else’.

(iii) The necessities of being in the world, of having to live, labour and to die there, is a universal human condition

The notion of ‘independent existence’ Whitehead (1925) famously decried as a philosophical misconception since entities are more properly understood in terms of the way they relate with the universe. In the Heideggerian terms which have become popular in environmentalist anthropology, human beings can be said ever to dwell within worlds of nature and of socio-cultural exchange (cf. Ingold 1986; Weiner 1991). However, this dwelling does not detract from human beings’ individuality. For our being-in-the-world courtesy of individual bodily mechanisms of cognition and perception is such as always to make of the world something other, always something interpreted. One comes to see, to construct, the world and its objects in certain ways which have proven personally ‘valuable’ over time (cf. Edelman 1989:184), and one learns to recognize signs and symbols by which are expressed the experience of dwelling in the (‘same’) world of other sentient beings. But these signs and symbols remain ambiguous, and the world and its objects ever something refracted through the prism of a situated consciousness. Ambiguity, doubt, incoherence and multiplicity are the nature of the universal human (not to say animal) condition, dwelling alongside fellow

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sentient creatures, dependent upon one another and the remainder of the organic and inorganic universe for the environmental conditions of one’s life (even for the transient agglomeration of chemicals that underwrite one’s bodily existence), and yet never certain concerning one’s meaningful construction of that universe, its rectitude or sharedness. Meaning is a personal, subjective, internal perception (cf. Rapport 1993a). Hence: ‘I experience and become myself (I am) at particular moments while dwelling within environments comprised of other, similarly cognizing, beings and inorganic, non-beings; and while there is a relatedness, even a mutuality, to all this matter, I know of it only as an interpreted other’.

(iv) Being in the world and relating to its conditions is a subjective phenomenon because the world and its conditions are nothing if individuals do not live them

Whatever may be the ultimate nature of earthly physical reality, human beings gain access to it only through their senses. Moreover, this is not a passive or reactive exercise entailing the reception of external stimuli but rather the pro-active testing of original models and the adjudicating of consequences. To ‘interpret’ the world in this way is not only to give it meaning, then, but also form: to construct it, its objects and events in a certain way. In the world of human being, as Bateson has it (1958:96), the Berkeleyan motto cannot be faulted: ‘To be is to be perceived’. Moreover, it is important to emphasize that it is the individual who is the ‘energy source’ behind this act of worldly perception or interpretation (Bateson 1972:126). Knowledge is individual and subjective, deriving from individuals’ sensitive bodies, and the dr ive, the work and the habitude behind this are exemplifications of individual agency. This is especially important to recognize with regard to habit.Worldly order which they find valuable or satisfying, individuals tend to maintain. They also tend to maintain certain orders in common with those others with whom they dwell in ‘an’ environment—human and animal, organic and inorganic. (In a habitual way of farming, for instance, individuals will find themselves in symbiosis with human neighbours, with animals, domestic and wild, with crops and with soils.) However, these orders do not acquire their own energy or momentum; they are always inert unless continually worked and made meaningful by their individual users. Should they cease to be considered valuable, they cease to exist. These common orders (languages, social structures, ecosystems) are always ambiguous, always means by which a diversity of understandings and motivations

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are synthesized by common forms and practices which allow a diversity of gratifications. Moreover, they tend to be temporary and transitory, so that after a time individuals construct orders anew and old environmental arrangements and alignments die. Hence: ‘I experience and become myself by dwelling at particular moments in particular environments; but those environments (and that self) exist only so long as I continue to construe them in a particular way and practise them as such’.

(v) Individuals are responsible for determining whether to attempt to surpass the conditions they construe around them or to accommodate themselves to them

Individuals construe the world as they take it to be; nothing is certain but their own consciousness of self, but they construct the world in a way which proves valuable (successful, meaningful) for them. Once they have done so, individuals must also determine how to react in relation to this world. This is a decision which nothing and no-one else can make for them, because the decisions and behaviours of others must still be cognized and perceived, interpreted and made meaningful, within the world-views of the individuals concerned. Hence, individuals can be affected by the decisions of others, if they are something of which they take notice, but not determined. There is no alternative to individuality, in short, no certain or direct access to another consciousness or to the world ‘as is’, and there is no other source of an individual’s meanings but that individual himself. Hence his responsibility for deciding how to react to the world he has made: to do as before (maintain a habit) or to create anew; to try to fit in with what seem to be the expectations and aspirations of others (be a ‘good family member’, a ‘loyal client’, a ‘pious co-religionist’) or to cut a different path for oneself (as ‘poet’ or ‘rebel’ or simply ‘Jean-Paul Sartre’). Objects and events which he construes within his environment may affect his decision—say the wishes, deeds and words of other individuals—but these cannot determine his decision; there can be no external determination because the world beyond the individual is always something other to him which he is ultimately responsible for construing. Even trying to fit in to a social group or accede to others’ wishes is a creative act of individuality. The individual, as Sartre concludes, is inevitably ‘free’, of guidance as of determination (cf. Burridge 1979). Hence: ‘I experience and become myself by dwelling in particular environments, and I am responsible at every moment for deciding how to act (and be) in relation to my cognitions, and where to take the world around me’.

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(vi) This appreciation of individuality succeeds in not having humanity appear objectified

Human knowledge is something to which individuals subject the worlds they construe around them. There is no escape from individuality in human life, the latter being ever a subjective condition; human individuals are always subjects: always agents and always exercising their agency. Indeed, there is no other source of human agency but individuals. In search for relief from, or denial of, the burdens of responsibility in their lives, individuals sometimes imagine other sources—gods, ancestors, natural forces, linguistic grammars, cultural traditions, unconscious histories, social conditions—but these are fantasies, and serve as puppets in the hands of their individual users.This denial of responsibility and turning oneself into an object created, construed and controlled from without, Sartre calls ‘bad faith’: living one’s life ‘inauthentically’. What it is also important to say is that it too is an instantiation of individual agency and subjectivity; here are individuals making themselves into certain kinds of object. An existentialist appreciation of human life becomes ‘humanist’ at that point when it is felt that individuals can do better for themselves than spend their lives falsely objectifying the fantastical, and perhaps they can be influenced towards more truthful construals of their condition (cf. Rapport 1994a). Hence: ‘I experience and become myself in particular environments at particular moments, and in recognizing my responsibility for the above I abide by my individual integrity: I accede to the dignity of my individuality’.

Anthropology and individuality

To become human is to become individual, Clifford Geertz once expounded (1973:52), and we become individual in an environment of socio-cultural forms and patterns in terms of which we give form, order, direction and point to our lives. The crucial question which this begs is the precise relationship between socio-cultural forms and the individual lives lived by them. Becoming human and individual in an environment of socio-cultural forms is neither becoming ‘the same’ as others, or even necessarily comparable, nor is it becoming after a deterministic or directly influenced fashion. In becoming individual in certain sociocultural milieux, energy, agency, intention and interpretation remain the property of the individual, self-conscious subject.

This seems often to be overlooked or negated in anthropological writings, where a system of forms is foregrounded to the almost total

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exclusion of their individual usage (creation, animation, interpretation, re-formation). Indeed, the intrinsic dichotomy between the individual and the world is often eschewed as a peculiarity of ‘Western’ sociocultural milieux, and hence as methodologically and analytically inapplicable. This is indefensible. At best it confuses individuality with individualism; and while the latter might be said to describe a particular socio-cultural form of behaviour (the pursuit of self-distinguishment), the former concerns a condition which is a human universal: by virtue of a unique consciousness, each of us perforce engages with the world as other and is possessed of distinct perspectives upon it. Such individuality remains consequential whether or not individual consciousness is an item of collective discourse, whether or not individual reflection is publicly eschewed, and whether or not individual distinctiveness is something which the institutionalization of a fund of common behaviours does its utmost to obviate. No process of socialization or enculturation overcomes the separateness of the individual body and brain, the phenomenology of the ideating, acting, breathing, eating, mating, dying, birthing subject. Individuals experience and interpret (and interpret themselves interpreting) and therefore they are.

Treating individual distinction as a matter of socio-cultural discourse, however, has allowed much anthropology to pass over individual agency and responsibility even where diversity is admitted into the analysis. For the diversity now becomes that of opposed social-structural interests, of competing status groups, of contradictory mores, of situational roles, of circumstantial norms, of a disequilibriated social organization, of a complex system of values and beliefs, of a social system in change. It is collective socio-cultural systems which become the sources and guarantors of meaning, and socio-cultural forces to which individual ‘members’ perforce respond and of which their behaviour is an expression. That is, individual distinction and diversity disappear as individuals are decentred from analysis, dissolved into various systems of convention which are said to be operating through them, constituting their beings.

In short, individuals become collective constructs. Psyches become defined and realized by society: universes of discourse reflecting social positions (cf. Berger 1970:375). Selfhood becomes allocated from sociocultural repertoires for use in certain collectively structured worlds of experience: pegs on which items of collaborative manufacture can be hung for a time (cf. Goffman 1978:245). Roles played become allotted and determined by society, representing bundles of obligatory activity (cf. Goffman 1972:76–7). Even imaginative explorations become emanations of certain pre-given and pre-structured life-worlds of

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socialization (cf. Psathas 1973:8–9): it is not individuals who think through their fantasies, then, but fantasies which think through them, unbeknownst and outwith their control (cf. Lévi-Strauss 1969b:20). In short, diversity is socialized and enculturated, and thereby sanitized; it is not the individuals who are diverse so much as the working parts of the complex social systems of which they are components and conduits. Their diversity is itself governed and part of a replicated pattern. In fact their diversity becomes an absence of diversity, of individual difference, and a triumph of cultural order. For culture, on this view, is essentially a set of ‘control mechanisms’, as Geertz would have it (1983:44–5): symbolic devices—plans, recipes, rules and instructions—which act like computer programs, reducing the breadth and indeterminateness of individuals’ potential lives to the specificity and narrowness of their actual ones (cf. Gellner 1995a:50).

Such modelling is existentially fallacious; it offers only a pale pretence at depicting the ambiguities inherent in human life and the complexities of individual interactions in socio-cultural milieux. Nor is it sufficient to say, as some apologists are wont, that social-scientific theorization is committed to holistic explanation and so is bound to seem out of place and ‘vulgar’ in the context of the individual and particular case (cf. Culler 1981:16). Because it is surely from individuals that any comprehension of socio-cultural milieux must proceed, since it is they who provide what A.J.Ayer dubbed ‘final testimony’ to the existence of a common socio-cultural world (1968:256–7): it is they who remain the ‘anthropological concrete’ (Auge 1995:20).

Far from entities with mechanisms and dynamics operating in their own right, what is socio-culturally institutional and systemic is made up of a complex and continuous interlinkage of individual actions, deriving in turn from how individuals define and decide to meet the situations in which they find themselves. The large-scale system of cooperation or conflict (the community, kinship group, class-uprising, political confederation, or religious sect) may be broken down into smaller-scale interactions between interpreting individuals in any number of settings and situations. Even if, in extremis, the socio-cultural milieu has come to be seen locally as a machine, a super-organism with a separate existence, then this state of affairs should be described as the ongoing construction of the individuals who serve it. It is they who remain responsible for this ‘phantasy’ of groupness, as Laing depicts it (1968:81), and for the ‘bad faith’ (Sartre) which is ever necessary for its maintenance.

To ‘decolonize’ the individual human subject from its common anthropological representations, in short, is to liberate it both from overdetermining cultural conditions and overweening social

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institutions (discourse, language-game, collective representation, social relationship, habitus, praxis), and from their holistic and hegemonically minded social-scientific commentators. Anthropological analysis should retain respect for individual cognitive processes and, to this end, apprehend that ambiguous interface between aggregation and individuality. It should take into account both the individual agency which brings socio-cultural milieux to life and also the common socio-cultural forms and practices by which individuals coordinate their activities and world-views within these milieux. In this way, an anthropological appreciation might be reached of socio-cultural milieux as encompassing and composed of individual difference, indeed, in a significant way constituted by it: by self-conscious individuals making an ongoing diversity of meaningful worlds.

See also: Agent and Agency, Consciousness, Individualism,

Methodological Individualism and Holism, World-View

INTERACTION

Collective behaviour, as Anthony Cohen puts it (1994:7), is a triumph; far from something mechanical it should be understood as the comingtogether for particular purposes of a greater or lesser number of individuals, for shorter or longer periods of time, in more or less formalized and institutionalized fashions. Above all, it should be understood as an aggregative rather than an integrative phenomenon. Collective behaviour entails the meeting of individuals but not their elision, their being subsumed within some super-organism: a group mind, a collective conscience, a reified society, community or culture.

Interaction as synthetic

How precisely is collectivity possible? This was a question Simmel posed himself (1971), and the answer he suggested entailed an appreciation of interaction, its moments, situations and processes. Interaction represented a ‘synthesizing phenomenon’ whereby individual and often private purposes intersected with public institutions in a routine, negotiated fashion. This meeting then gave onto, and itself embodied, structures of social exchange and cultural practice held in common; through interaction, individuals created and maintained societies and cultures.

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For something to be seen to exist, Simmel elaborated, contrast must be construed between it and other things distinct from, or opposed to, it; oppositional entities, processes and tendencies are, thus, ultimately complementary because a constitutive force inheres in the tension between them. In the social realm, we find this fundamental constitutive dualism in the opposition between individuals as members of societies and cultures and the routine socio-cultural behaviours, structures and institutions by which such membership is formalized. One can envisage the shared worlds of society and culture as a collection of common symbolic forms: languages; scientific, educational, historical and economic concepts; artistic, moral, religious and legal precepts. In interaction with one another, individuals come together and exchange these common forms, maintaining them in their usage. However, their usage is a personal and subjective one. As they employ or ‘consume’ the symbolic forms, so they personalize them; they incorporate them into their individual lives, deploy them in the development of a subjective world-view. Here are commonalities of interaction engaged in for the pursuit and fulfilment of personal, diverse and possibly contradictory individual ends. And the one feature or aspect is married inexorably to the other. Individuals express and realize their idiosyncrasies because they engage in routine social interactions, and routine interactions continue to take place between members of societies and cultures because of continuing individual idiosyncrasies. The social exchange is constituted by this inherent duality.

In any socio-cultural phenomenon, in short, purposes and institutions, meanings and forms, are distinct, opposed but intimately related. Indeed, they can be seen to constitute one reality. Interaction entails the comingtogether of common forms and diverse meanings or contents. Divorced from their socio-cultural form, individual meanings would not achieve public expression, while emptied of content, separated from individual goals, motives, purposes and interests, thoughts and feelings, the languages of common forms would fall into desuetude. Hence, the relationship between form and meaning is one of interdependence and multifactoriality; individuals depend upon these common socio-cultural artefacts in order publicly to express themselves, while the vitality of the forms depends on individuals with meanings they endemically want to express through them. Forms are the shared vehicles by which individuals and their meanings come together; they represent a mode of exchange and of continuing association.

At one and the same time, then, interaction is routine and something shared—something owned together by those individuals who partook of its regular exchange—and yet something multiple and diverse. It

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represents at once something institutional and, in its symbolic regimen, possibly constricting of free expression, and also a vehicle of idiosyncrasy, of creative expression and escape.This was the source of beauty in social interaction, and also its potential drama, Simmel felt: the tension between the surface agreements of the exchange, the orderly interactional form precisely structured, painstakingly developed, and carefully maintained between members, and the unique visions, the limitless avenues of thought that were motivating and animating the exchange, causing its regular re-occurrence, but dancing invisibly around its expression. The ambiguity of everyday interaction is translated into both an uncertainty and a release.

Anthropology and interactionism

Such thoughts are not strange to socio-cultural anthropology. A number of years ago (1961), David Pocock was advising that society is a dialectical process between principles making for aggregation and principles making for individuation, and urging that their interaction be the object of anthropological study (1961:103, 114). Indeed, a century of ethnographic exploration since Simmel wrote makes the latter’s portrayal seem in some respects truistic and anthropologically unremarkable.

However, there is the question of emphasis, and the extent to which the implications of a viewing of society as symbolic interaction—that the collective structures of social reality can only be fully grasped through an appreciation of the way they are personalized in individual lives; that the objectification of cultural objects is only to be understood in terms of the subjective psychic processes of the individuals who use them in interaction, the intentions which they bring to that usage and the experiences they construe—are carried into practice. All too often, it seems, following Durkheim, Simmelian insights are deemed inapposite: eschewed as social psychology, or decried as psychologisms. That is, tending to privilege the abstraction of a system of forms to the exclusion of their individual negotiation and usage, anthropology has approached the regularities of social interaction as if they pertained to a reality external to the individuals responsible for constituting and reconstituting it, which could satisfactorily be described in their absence. Thus, various kinds of interactional determinism have been arrived at— structures of exchange responsible for formulating the thinking of individual members—while little or no account has been taken of the consciousness of those involved: of their ability to reflect on their own behaviour, make choices and construct meaning. It is rare to find a full

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