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

INTERACTION

appreciation of the dialectical interdependence between the institutionalism of interactional routine and the diversity of individual purpose.

For instance, in an influential treatise, The Social Construction of Reality, Berger and Luckmann described conversation as a most important vehicle by which the contours of a homogeneous social reality are maintained and developed; by way of conversation individuals are integrated within a set of social practices, and a common cultural worldview is objectified and crystallized (1966:140). This is brought about by sharing in what Brown and Levinson (1978:256) dub a cultures ‘interactional systematics’. As elaborated upon by Gumperz and Tannen (1979:307–22), partaking in a successful interaction is a matter of a subtle and complex coordination of conversational elements, such as: turn-taking, direction of gaze, establishment of verbal rhythm, cooperation to produce identifiable lines of thematic progression, orderly sequencing, and recognition of and assistance in formulaic routines. Participants in an interaction are called upon to identify familiar and conventional types of activity and styles of speech which ‘frame’ the words they hear and the behaviours they observe so that they are able to define habitual and shared ‘speech-situations’. Finally, a combination of an understanding of semantic content and an appreciation of cues of contextualization within such formulaic routines enable the signalling and interpretation of shared meaning.

In short, the shared rules of conversational conduct are seen to entail common techniques of interpretation, and a constellation of features of conversational form are seen as directing fellow interactants into interpreting one another’s words in the same way. Successful interaction is a manifestation (a resultant and a constituent) of an ongoing community born out of common expectations concerning conventionalized co-occurrence between potentialities of words’ semantic content and aspects of discourses’ surface style.The interaction becomes a joint activity, whose performance replicates part of the coherent and ‘corporate’ structures of the societies and cultures to which the individual participants belong. As Hymes sums up, shared rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech represent the primary determination by a community of the competence and belonging of its members (1972:54–8; also cf. Garfinkel 1967:11; Schegloff 1972:350).

Symbolic interactionism

However, to appreciate the consciousness of individual participants as something distinct from the various structures of socio-cultural exchange

198

INTERACTION

in which they partake is to understand interaction as entailing both more and less than the above portrayal. More individual creativity may go into its negotiation, and less commonality or sharing be occasioned by its successful maintenance.

As Hymes would also recognize, then, what counts as a ‘communicative event’ is not something that can be predicted or even easily identified, for its status ‘is entirely a question of [its] construal by a receiver’ (1973a:22–6).To identify a successful interaction and its sociocultural ramifications—even to identify what passes for an ‘interaction’ as such—is a subjective judgement, a matter of what Winch has called ‘internal relations’ within a system of ideas or world-view (1970:107). It is rash to extrapolate, therefore, from the seemingly orderly nature of an interaction between individuals, and the superficial systematics in which they partake, to the character and extent of a culture or society of sharing in which they are members.

This is the starting-point of Herbert Blumer’s work (1969, 1972), and the furthering of an appreciation of ‘symbolic interactionism’ which had its roots in the thinking of the social theorist G.H.Mead. It is wrong, Blumer begins, to consider interaction as a medium through which socio-cultural determinants move so as to constitute the forms and contents of human behaviour; interaction is between individual actors, not factors imputed to them, and individuals’ actions are a consequence of their interpretations of situations and the meanings that things hold for them, rather than an expression of socio-cultural forces. Lines of action are built up step by step, Blumer suggests, by a process of ‘selfindication’ or self-communication whereby people, relations, events, objects and situations are defined according to their possible significance to the individual concerned. Individuals communicate with themselves in this way continuously, indicating things to themselves, making sense, dealing with what they note, and moulding their behaviours. ‘Instead of the individual being surrounded by an environment of pre-existing objects which play on him and call forth his behavior, the proper picture is that he constructs his objects on the basis of his on-going activity’ (Blumer 1972:182). Importantly, the process of self-indication stands over and against so-called external forces of the make-up of society and culture. Through self-designation and self-interaction, individuals manifest how they are pro-active, not passive or merely reactive: the nature of the interactions with others in which they partake consists of the meanings that they have for the individuals for whom they are objects of consciousness.

The picture of society, culture or community which emerges is neither of systems nor integrations but of aggregations of variable

199

INTERACTION

numbers of jointly occurring actions, of variable linkage, all pursued for their individual participants’ interests, not a system’s requirements. Society entails ongoing negotiation between individuals engaged in their own multitudinous activities and lines of action. Its study is the story of many individual lives recurrently intersecting in symbolic routines which exhibit shared forms and endlessly variable individual meanings. ‘Interaction’ conveys the sense in which actions carried on by, and belonging to, an aggregation of individuals come to be fitted together into a developing matrix or routine (cf. Watson and Watson-Franke 1985:205–6; also Rapport 1997a:12–29).

Socio-cultural life, Blumer says, is individuals interacting with one another. To the extent that there is joint action, group action or ‘interaction’, then, this can be seen as an interlinkage of individuals’ separate acts, an articulation, a coming together, that is new in each instance. Initially, individuals coming-together in interaction do not know what to expect from others, so they test inferences and gradually identify one another as beings who behave according to certain rules. Interaction thereby becomes a form of mutual typification. From a routinization of this process of mutuality, of equivalent structures of individual interpretation, socio-cultural structures emerge.The process is ongoing, however, and constantly revised. It is often also precarious, for the negotiated norms of interaction depend on the reciprocal but distinct interpretations of the participants; the routines are adhered to only as long as they are separately felt to be meaningful or useful, or at least better keeping to than not.

In short, the process of mutual individual self-indication or interpretation, giving onto the construction of a socio-cultural reality of common structures of behaviour is never to be taken for granted (cf. Dreitzel 1970). Even while many instances of interaction will occasion a repetition of forms of coming together which have been negotiated in, and recalled from, the past, they still call for the work of individual management and interpretation; they are maintained because they continue to be worked by—and work for—the individuals involved. Socio-cultural structures and institutions do not work themselves.

It is important to emphasize this point. Routine interactions do not possess or assume an independent power, logic or life-force; nothing emerges from them which is greater than or distinct from the sum of the individual energies of which they are made up. Routine interactions are like inert moulds or masks in which, and behind which, individual meanings are made and interests pursued, and it is wrong to talk as if these interactions worked themselves, or had requirements; they are rather worked, serving as vehicles for individual users. Moreover, they

200

INTERACTION

may be seen to be worked, not as a machine which is switched on and off for the performing of a set task, but more as a piece of music which is jointly interpreted by an ensemble of instrumentalists. Different noises come together, different parts are played in the whole, different senses are made of the whole. The interaction, in short, does different jobs for different participants. It may be incumbent upon each to know and employ certain routine, even standardized, forms (musical, behavioural) in order to enter into the exchange, but these serve a diversity of ends; they are not a constraint. In the poet Shelley’s formulation (1954:281): ‘a single word, even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought’.

Focusing more precisely on the nature of linguistic interaction for a moment, one can say that a shared language provides a fund of forms and cases which individuals adapt to their communicational requirements. However, past linguistic practice does not determine present communicational possibilities, and so interaction eventuates in varied and inconsistent usage, with the repetition of words and syntax regardable as only partial replication; the language becomes home to polythetic readings without end. In contrast to portrayals of structural determinacy, then, a linguistic grammar should be seen as neither overwhelming nor sacrosanct. Rules of grammar represent only very approximate and unstable summaries of past regularities, and aggregations of individual interactants need not assume any regimented sameness in their linguistic practices or competencies (cf. Steiner 1975:204–5). Individuals continuously improvise, innovate and make meaning as best they can, and notions of linguistic predetermination make little sense in relation to their construings of acts of communication. Interaction represents a structure of exchange which individuals by and large make up, without convener or referee, as they go along (cf. Harris 1981).

Individuals do not engage in routine interactions willy-nilly. Rather, these linguistic and behavioural forms are available for implementation by those who choose to adopt them as instruments towards their own diverse ends. And while it is the case that not all interactions are equally freely entered into or followed through, still they do not run by themselves or for themselves, or in a realm separate from individual consciousness and will; interactional routines cannot force participants’ compliance and, even when adopted, cannot determine individual users’ states of mind.

Finally, the multitude of routine interactions under way in a sociocultural milieu (constituting a milieu of greater or lesser density of networks of relations between people) should not be seen to eventuate in one, integrated, working system. Society and culture can be thought

201

INTERACTION

of as funds of interactional forms (linguistic and behavioural) from which individuals concoct their personal relations. But the way some individuals develop routine relations with one another need in no way constrain those same individuals in their negotiations with others. Far from operating together in equilibrium or integration, one routine may oppose another—in time, in style, in consequence—or have tangential relations or none at all. Far from enactants of deterministic socio-cultural structures and members of singularly integrative communities, individual interactants can be depicted as negotiators of routine exchanges whose most vibrant and significant communities may ultimately remain private to themselves: it is within the boundaries of their selves that their most significant truths are construed and reside. In sum, socio-cultural milieux amount at one and the same time to arenas in which there is an ongoing exchange of shared forms and a continuous construction of individual worlds of meaning.

Ego-syntonism

The question remains of how common interactional forms are able to serve the interests of a diversity of individual users, and here, the phenomenon of ego-syntonism, as sketched by Devereux (1978:126), provides significant pointers:

[B]oth organized and spontaneous social movements and processes are possible not because all individuals participating in them are identically (and sociologistically) motivated, but because a variety of authentically subjective motives may seek and find an Ego-syntonic outlet in the same type of collective activity.

Ego-syntonism is a process whereby a number of discrete consciousnesses come harmonically to interact one with another.

A great advance in the appreciation of the processes of sociation, of interaction and socio-cultural participation, Devereux felt, would be to recognize that the collective or joint act (the family meal, the clan ritual, the regional market, the national war) should not be construed in terms of either a homogeneous set of individual experiences or a single massive, social one. Instead, the collective act represented the embodiment of an institutional medium, a channel, an occasion, afforded by ‘society’ or ‘culture’ through which was achieved the public actualization, ratification and gratification (in different ways and to different extents) of any number of individual meanings and motivations

202

INTERACTION

(1978:127–8). The institutional medium or movement may be regularly repeated (weekly church-going) or rarely so (the 1956 Hungarian uprising), and may be revolutionary or conservative in consequence, but what is important is that differently motivated persons can come to perceive in that certain socio-cultural moment or event a suitable outlet for their various gratifications.

The crucial distinction here, for Devereux, is between collective action and the ‘conglomerate’ of individual motives underlying it: between public behaviour and its personal meaning. Certainly, the notion of ego-syntonism would appear a useful instrument for construing relations between the individual and the collective, between the personal and the public (cf. Rapport 1994b). For here is a recognition that joint social events need not be singular in order to be maintained, and need not eventuate in singularity either. Individuals need not be in agreement when they begin to interact, and constant interaction need bring them no closer to a joint or standardized consciousness, or an overcoming of their idiosyncrasies: a great deal of their interaction can go on in a situation of misperception or misinterpretation of one another’s meanings and motivations. As Devereux sums up, quoting the Latin aphorism with approbation: ‘“Si bis faciunt idem, non est idem” (if two people do the same thing, it is not the same thing)’ (1978:125). A variable number of individual actors can come together in a group, form a public collectivity, and at precisely the same time remain apart, maintaining their discrete and diverse individualities. Indeed, in echoes of Simmel, Devereux recognizes how the two are dialectically conjoined; the development of collectivity and individuality takes place through a constitutive tension of opposition.

The key to ego-syntonism is the ambiguity of socio-cultural forms. For the latter to serve as significant synthesizing instruments by which the threads of different individuals’ lives come to be interwoven, they must possess a basic indeterminacy. A language of common forms is the means by which individuals both come together and remain apart. Always mediating between the actions of one individual and the interpretations of another, the ‘friendly ambiguities’ of interaction, as Sapir put it (1956:153), conspire to reinterpret for each the behaviour they observe in terms of ‘those meanings which are relevant to his own life’. The ambiguity of common forms also adds to their inertia. Vague and superficial, they can be inherited intact by different generations and adapted to a variety of settings; they are ready-made formulae always capable of being substantiated and revived by new motivations and moods (cf. Propp 1968:116): their inertia or conservativeness, their usefulness and prevalence, issue from their malleability in use.

203

INTERACTION

Interaction in Wanet

The paradigmatic form of human interaction, Blumer asserted, is that between two individuals; larger instances of human association are based on this ‘interactional atom’. Not only is the traditional micro-focus of anthropological study the strategic point of entry into a field, then, but the proper grounding of conclusive analysis. A number of well-known works have focused on the dyadic relations between anthropologist and key informant (Dumont 1978; Crapanzano 1980; Shostak 1983), and a number of others have sought to build up an analysis on the basis of small-scale, face-to-face relations between informants which gradually become more inclusive (Briggs 1970; Boissevain 1974; Cohen 1987).

In Diverse World-Views in an English Village (1993a), Rapport attempts to chart the relations between two long-standing neighbours in the English village of Wanet; by basing his analysis largely on interactions between the farmer Doris Harvey and the builder Sid Askrig, he seeks to construct an analysis of the diversity of interpretation and the ambiguity of interaction in a socio-cultural milieu in general. Doris and Sid are found partaking in interaction which is regular and routine and which both regard as appropriate and legitimate. They share, that is, notions of conversational propriety: of turn-taking, of politeness, of the use of space, and so on. Hence, their interaction can be described as a flowing sequence of mutual interpretings and part of a habitual talking-relationship which they maintain between themselves.At the same time, however, the ‘contours of reality’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966) which their interaction maintains and develops are seen to be far from shared or even compatible; Doris and Sid write themselves into often very different worlds. For, they use the conventional devices of expression in different ways. The behaviours they share and exchange prove ambiguous enough for each to impart to them their own meanings, and for each to house them in very different cognitive contexts or world-views.

More generally, the forms of behaviour in common use in Wanet village and beyond could be said to amount to polythetic categories rather than anything singular or common-denominational. While there are many forms of behaviour which people routinely employ in the locale—even regard as special to them in the locale—there are no standard definitions of what these forms mean. Rather, usage is individual, and connected to and expressed within particular relationships. A juxtaposition of these usages reveals a wide range of interpretations with possibly nothing in common other than their formal designation. In short, the forms which many would agree upon as common and proper to Wanet come to be mediated in use by a diversity

204

INTERACTION

of individual ends, and are the means for achieving satisfaction of a variety of kinds and amounts. Interaction in Wanet appears as both a uniformitizing phenomenon and a primary process in the development of individuality.

Aggregations of perspectives

Routine interaction should not be confused with common understandings or a coming-together of individuals on anything but a superficial level. Interaction represents an aggregation of individuals who meet, initially at least, on the surface of their selves. In this dialectic between commonality and diversity, Simmel’s notion of form versus meaning, or content, as a mutually constituent, co-present dualism of socio-cultural life is a significant conceptualization. Society and culture come to be seen as phenomena wherein, to paraphrase Simmel (1971:24), the vitality of individual meanings attains the reality of common forms. The forms alone do not constitute society, do not determine social order, and severed from content they do not gain meaningful existence. But they do facilitate the imposition of individual world-views. Hence a society or culture can be conceived of as an aggregation of perspectives, possibly highly diverse, expressed and maintained in certain limited and common forms. In complex sociocultural milieux, these forms can be expected to have a particular distribution, some common to certain individuals, relationships, families, neighbourhoods, occupations, statuses, more than others (cf. Bakhtin 1981:293). But over and above what Bakhtin has called the ‘heteroglossia’ of formal usage, the way in which these forms are individually employed is the same; through their employ, people can be seen to be members of communities and living in individual worlds at one and the same time. Indeed, the two states may be inextricably related; people are able to manifest and develop their idiosyncrasies because they engage in habitual social interactions, and interactions exist in commonality because of continuing individual idiosyncrasies.

In any understanding of the systemics of socio-cultural interaction it is this highly complex relationship which must be grasped.To talk about the behavioural forms alone, abstracted from individual usage and context, is to produce something reified and sterile, to assign the forms a misleading metaphysic and reality. The necessary focus is instead on specific interactions where individuals regularly meet and interpret these forms—however manifold and intricate the analysis becomes, and however attractive a hypostatization of forms seems. Equally, to integrate these forms into a tight and objectified socio-cultural pattern is to

205

INTERPRETATION

decontextualize the realities of separate situations so as possibly to misrepresent them all. The more vital image is of the complicated and fragmentary: of a socio-cultural fund of forms amounting to a shifting collage of behaviours whose pattern no two members may configure quite alike (cf. Sapir 1956:200–3).

Instead of describing society or culture as mechanisms of encompassment and control, they may be more properly seen as means by which a host of individual world-views come to be expressed and realized. For through the exchange of common cultural forms we can say that members of a society are able to build one another into characters in a multiplicity of different worlds, and influence one another in all manner of indirect, incidental, contingent, contradictory and changeable ways. And a culture comes to be represented not as an entity with a positable, objective significance but as the forms in which subjective worlds develop, interact and are fulfilled and maintained: forms which derive their quickness from individual creativity. It is with individuals’ purposes and their reasons for coming together in interaction that the key to any understanding of the socio-cultural lies.

See also: Code, Discourse, Form and Content, Network

INTERPRETATION

In Nietzsche’s phrasing, human socio-cultural worlds are like art-works, something which can be interpreted—read, written—equally well in innumerable, vastly different and deeply incompatible ways: something with ‘no meaning behind [them], but countless meanings’ (1968: no. 481). Indeed, like an art-work, a world requires interpretation in order to be understood, made livable, mastered, by its inhabitants. These inhabitants may themselves be part of the world, may be making interpretations from situated, interested and partisan perspectives, but nonetheless, it is they who create their world, create themselves and their perspectives, through their interpretations. In this way, human social worlds are worlds of human making, dependent upon human activity and symbolic practice for their existence. Human beings compose the world as they interpret it; and their compositions add to the complexity, multifariousness and indeterminacy of the art-work that then continues to be interpreted—by others, by themselves—in the future.

The form human interpretations take, Nietzsche continues, are various. The books of the philosopher, certainly, but also the various

206

INTERPRETATION

habitual practices and modes of life of others. Amidst the profusion of versions and forms there is only one singularity: the continuation of profusion. Interpretations continue to be made because to interpret is to be human; while to make individual interpretations, self-caused and free, and to have these develop and change as one moves through life changing one’s perspectives, is to be an individual human being— likewise self-caused and free.

Nietzsche and anthropology

Nietzschean interpretation has been a major inspiration behind twentieth-century Existentialism, not to mention post-modernism (Nietzsche: ‘there is no immaculate perception’; ‘there are no facts, only interpretations’; ‘truth is a mobile army of metaphors’), and also the philosophy of consciousness (Henri Foçillon: ‘The chief characteristic of the mind is to be constantly describing itself (cited in Edelman 1992:124)); and anthropology did not miss out either. Indeed, Shweder goes so far as to say that the credo of modern anthropology—that society and morality derive from the projection of mental representations onto the universe and their imposition as symbolic forms; that socio-cultural reality is not other than the stories told about it, the narratives in which it is represented—derives from Nietzsche (Shweder 1991b:39; also cf. Thornton 1991, 1992).

The most celebrated Nietzscheanesque title in anthropology is, perhaps, Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Geertz is also content to borrow a Nietzschean tag—froehliche Wissenschaft (joyous wisdom’)—to describe anthropology as a discipline (1986:105). As he elaborates, if human beings make their worlds by making meaningful interpretations of them, then ‘our [anthropological] constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to’ amount to a form of knowledge more akin to that of the literary critic than the cipher clerk (Geertz 1973:9). Anthropological wisdom claims attention not on the basis of capturing exotic facts but of reducing puzzlement: bringing readers in touch with the lives of strangers in other cultures as these people involve themselves in seeking to reduce the puzzlement of their own lives (1973:16).

However, belying its seemingly Nietzschean and Existentialist form, ‘cultural interpretation’ comes to have rather a different understanding for Geertz. For, ‘culture’ Geertz wishes to be seen as ‘an acted symbolic document’ wherein individuals interpret only courtesy of systems of significant symbols in a particular cultural context. Hence, while Geertz admits that ‘becoming human is becoming individual’, he posits that we

207