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

INTERPRETATION

become individual in the context of ‘cultural patterns’: under the guidance of the historically created systems of meaning ‘in terms of which we give form, order, point and direction to our lives’ (1973:52). Thought thus represents an ‘intentional manipulation of cultural forms’, of systems of symbols of collective possession, public authority and social exchange.The symbolic logic and the formal conceptual structuring may not be explicit, but they are socially established, sustained and legitimized.

They are, moreover, ‘out in the world’ (1983:151); tied to concrete social events and occasions, thought processes are publicly enacted and expressive of common social worlds. Giving meaning to behaviour is not something which happens in private, in short, in insular individual heads, but rather something dependent on an exchange of common symbols whose ‘natural habitat is the house yard, the market place, and the town square’ (1973:45). Hence, outdoor activities such as ploughing or peddling are as good examples of ‘individual thought’ as are closet experiences such as wishing or regretting, while cognition, imagination, emotion, motivation, perception, memory and so on, are directly social affairs.

In Geertz’s adumbrating of ‘an outdoor psychology’ (1983:151), then, culture (as systems of historically transmitted symbols) is constitutive of mind, while individual experience and memory of the social world are both powerfully structured by deeply internalized cultural conceptions and supported by cultural institutions. Social life entails a public traffic in significant cultural symbols; individual consciousness comes about via the co-embodying of a world under the auspices of a common system of symbols: ‘I think’ via ‘we name’ (cf. Percy 1958:640). Thus, while flagging Suzanne Langer’s phrase that ‘we live in a web of ideas, a fabric of our own making’ (1964:126), and seeming to adopt a Nietzschean (interpretivist—perspectivist) stance, Geertz concludes that the webs of significance we weave, the meanings we live by, achieve a form and actualization only in a public and communal way. There can be no private (individual, unique) symbolizations for mind is transactional: formed and realized only through participation in cultures’ symbolic systems of interpretation; while different ‘individual’ minds within the culture are in fact neither opaque nor impenetrable to one another, for they think in terms of the same shared beliefs and values, and operate the same interpretive procedures for adjudicating reality. To construe a system of cultural symbols, in sum, is also to accrue its individual members’ subjectivities (cf. Frake 1964).

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INTERPRETATION

Anti-Geertzian interpretation

An ‘outdoor psychology’ which is ‘out in the world’—for all its apparent expansiveness and openness—turns out to be rather a confining metaphorization. It appears to deny any inner, private life and language which is not readily accessible to others who employ (are employed by) the same cultural system of formal symbolic signification.At one and the same time, Geertz appears to champion a humanistic appreciation of the human condition and the anthropological project: ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’, whose analysis is ‘not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning’ (Geertz 1973:5); but then he seems to fall foul of a most restrictive determinism: ‘culture is best seen as …a set of control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call “programs”)—for the governing of behavior’, and it is the ‘agency’ of these mechanisms which is responsible for reducing the breadth and indeterminateness of the individual’s inherent capacity to live thousands of lives to the specificity and narrowness of his actual accomplishment in living one life (Geertz 1973:44–5).

In short, the interpreting—imagining, constructing, writing—which Geertz foresees is intra-paradigmatic: contained within a certain encompassing, collective, public and shared cultural context. Initially, he appears to follow Langer’s lead when she explains that ‘at the center of human experience, then, there is always the activity of imagining reality, conceiving the structure of it through words, images, or other symbols’ (1964:128). But for Langer, this places the imagination at the source of all human insight, reason, dream, religion and general observation: the greatest force acting on our feelings, and bigger than the stimuli surrounding us. Not only, therefore, does imagination make our human worlds, framing, supporting and guiding our thinking, it also ‘gives each of us a separate world, and a separate consciousness’ (1964:103). For Geertz, however, little leeway is left between the cultural patternings ‘of’ and ‘for’ social practice. Ultimately, Geertz would appear to sign up to a Saussurean—Durkheimian thesis wherein the varieties of individual interpretive paroles simply depend and derive from an enabling collective langue. Particular interpretive—linguistic performances are here prefigured by a structure of rules and possible relations, by a set of representations collectives, so that individual expressions within a socio-cultural milieu add up, at any one time, to a total and autonomous synchronic system of related parts, and so that individual consciousness is a manifestation, temporary, episodic and epiphenomenal, of a conscience collective.

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INTERPRETATION

Post-Geertzian interpretation

Geertz’s part in the refocusing of anthropological interest from the measuring of social structure to the interpretation of meaning, and in the re-reckoning of the anthropological enterprise as ‘fictional writing’, has been found liberating and inspiring (cf. Myerhoff 1974, 1978; Cohen 1987; Rapport 1994a). Ultimately, however, and despite his Nietzschean (and Weberian) borrowings, Geertz can sound conventionally Durkheimian (and structuralist). For, like other well-known exponents of a symbolic anthropology which came to focus centrally on the meanings with which human beings invested their worlds (e.g. Schneider 1968; Sahlins 1976), he saw these meanings as amounting to a collectively held, coherent and singular system; this might be abstracted from individual sayings and doings as if it were sui generis and autonomous.

But this is unsubtle. Such an abstraction belies the actual, everyday work of interpretation which anthropologists witness in their individual informants—its complexity and agency—and the radical diversities that issue forth (cf. Keesing 1987a). If systems of symbols are ‘vehicles for conceptions’, as Geertz puts it, then the systems of meaning which they give onto will necessarily be individual and highly diverse (cf. Cohen 1985). More precisely, a system of symbols in common usage is possessed of an inherent duality: a common surface and a private base, in Steiner’s phrasing (1975:173). Beneath the publicly consensual symbols which label social life, there lies the individual consciousness which is responsible for animating those cultural symbols with meaning. Here are pan-human potentialities, capacities and processes, which begin at birth (if not before) and continue throughout life, by whose works ‘the world’ (cultural categories, images, stories and language; people, interactions, social selves and things) becomes endowed, invested, infused, with personal emotion, fantasy and affect. It is these psychological processes of sense-making, of interpretation, which are finally responsible for shaping and constituting human life and society, for creating and recreating culture as a meaningful phenomenon in the life of each individual; thus are systems of symbols ever made subjectively, personally, individually meaningful. As Chodorow states (1994:4):

People personally animate and tint, emotionally and through fantasy, the cultural, linguistic, interpersonal, cognitive and embodied worlds we experience, creating and interpreting the external world in ways that resonate with their internal world, preoccupations, fantasies and sense of self and other.

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IRONY

Rather than according the interpretation of symbolic realities a primarily collective and cultural ontology à la Geertz (et al.), then, and rather than conceiving of individuals being inscribed into pre-given cultural texts, a notion of ‘the interpretation of cultures’ might be seen to give onto individual world-views. For, in using the various symbol systems which a culture places at their disposal as tools of their writing, individuals personalize them—and hence make of the symbol-systems something ‘of and for’ themselves. Individuals consume cultural symbolic forms in the construction of their own systems of meaning, and in terms of their unique biographies and personal histories of intrapsychic strategies and practices. The contexts in which individuals fashion, speak and live their world-views may be seen to be ontologically internal to themselves (cf. Rapport 1995).

For Nietzsche, for individuals to ‘find their own words’ in the language of the community was an ‘aesthetic’ experience; it was a way of coming to terms with the intrinsic nature of the human condition (as meaningless and absurd beyond acts of interpretation and outwith the aesthetic appreciation of beauty), and also a source of dignity. It represented both an individual’s particular responsibility to heror himself and the foundation of a general human power. For, to interpret was to become who we were; and to change how we interpreted was to change who we were: to reconstitute our worlds and ourselves. Human history was the history of successive metaphors, Nietzsche suggested, and the important dividing line was not between falsehood and truth but between old and new interpretations of ‘falsehood’ and ‘truth’.

There was nothing more powerful or important than ongoing interpretations, in sum, because these acts demonstrated that the notion of a single ‘true’ world was a fable; all human life was a construct of the particular individual employment of symbolic systems.

See also: Classification, Consciousness, Discourse, Thick

Description, World-View

IRONY

Besides its literary meaning, of certain figures of speech (antiphrasis, litotes, meiosis) where there is an inconsistency or contradiction between what is said and what is meant or apparent, irony can be understood to represent a certain cognitive detachment from the world as is or seems, and an imagining of its infinite possible otherness.

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Nietzsche famously referred to this ironic imagining as a ‘revaluation of all values’, and he counselled its ongoing practice as the means of humankind’s continuous ‘coming-to-itself’.

Understandings of irony

Irony may be defined (ironically) as: ‘never having to say you really mean it’ (Austin-Smith: 1990:51–2), or never accepting that words mean only what they appear to say Treated more broadly, irony means being at home ‘in a world without guarantees’—without an Archimedean point of reference or transcendental truth—and prepared to explore ‘the tense truth of ambiguity’ (Chambers 1994a:98). Its definition may be said to include an ontological premise that human beings are never cognitively imprisoned by pre-ordained and pre-determining schemata of cultural classification and social structuration. They can everywhere appreciate the malleability and the mutability of social rules and realities, and the contingency and ambiguity of cultural truths. Hence, people always practise a certain detachment from the world-as-is for the purpose of considering alternatives. In unmasking the world as an ambiguous fiction, irony plays with the possibility of limitless alterity. Here is an ability and a practice, enduring and ubiquitous, by which people loose themselves from the security of what is or appears to be, and creatively explore what might be. Here is a process by which human beings render even the most cherished of their values, beliefs and desires open to question, parody and replacement. However momentary the impulse, irony represents an endemic reaction against ‘final vocabularies’ (Rorty 1992:88), a celebration of the fictive nature of all such human inheritances and the imaging of other worlds.

Such a broad understanding is controversial, and arguments have certainly been made for the ironical stance or attitude’s being historically and culturally specific. Ortega y Gasset (1956), for instance, suggests that the ability to become detached from the immediacy of the world and treat it ironically is a manifestation of the technological revolution in human civilization. Entering an intense, inner world in which ideas are formed which are then returned to the world as a blueprint for its reconstruction represents a concentration which humankind has created for itself painfully and slowly.The growth of irony has followed a growth in science, and the freedom not to be obliged inexorably to concern oneself with reacting to things as they are but temporarily to ignore the latter in favour of a created self and a plan of action. In short, irony as that detachment by which the world becomes anthropomorphized, a reflection and realization of human ideas, is a technological by-product.

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IRONY

Oppenheimer (1989), meanwhile, attaches an ironic consciousness to certain literary forms. Irony was present in Socratic dialogue, then, and also in the poetics of Classical Rome but thereafter, through some seven centuries of the Dark Ages, it disappeared. Only with the rise of the sonnet in a twelfth-century Rome was there an ironic renaissance. The sonnet might be described, therefore, as the lyric of ‘personality’ and the ‘private soul’ for with its invention came a new way for people to think as and about themselves. Irony, in short, is a matter of that introspection and self-consciousness which the possible silent reading of the sonnet literary form made fashionable, conventional, esteemed, and hence possible.

Giddens (1990), however, makes an argument that only modernity— that recent sociological condition characterized by capitalism, industrialism, cosmopolitanism and the massification of complex society—is characterized by an ironic detachment. Indeed, the presumption of this reflexivity (including our sociological reflection upon our reflexivity) is an intrinsic part of modern social practice. We constantly examine and reform our practices in the light of incoming information about those practices, which thus alters the character and constitution of the practices we next examine. In short, irony is part- and-parcel of the process of structuration by which modernity reproduces itself and knows itself.

Finally, Appadurai (1991a) sees irony as part of the ‘cultural economy’ of contemporary globalization. The deterritorialization of ideas, images and opportunities brought about by mass communication enables people to lead complex lives more of projection and imagination than enactment or prediction.The balance between habitus and improvisation (Bourdieu 1977) shifts, such that fantasy becomes a social practice in even the meanest, poorest and harshest of lives, and conventional cultural reproduction succeeds only by conscious design and political will. People no longer view their existence as a mere outcome of the givenness of things, in short, but as an ‘ironic compromise between what they [can] imagine and what social life will permit’ (Appadurai 1991a:199).

Notwithstanding the above, it can convincingly be argued that the cognitive displacement and detachment of irony is a universal human trait, capacity and cognitive resort. As John Berger sums up the case (1994): ‘[T]he human condition actually is more or less a constant: always in face of the same mysteries, the same dilemmas, the same temptation to despair, and always armed unexpectedly with the same energy.’ Or, in more strictly anthropological vein: ‘[T]here were never any innocent, unconscious savages, living in a time of unreflective and

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IRONY

instinctive harmony. We human beings are all and always sophisticated, conscious, capable of laughter at our own institutions’ (Victor Turner, in Ashley 1990:xix). Always and everywhere one finds ‘individuals engaged in the creative exploration of culture’ (Goody 1977:20), intellectually distancing themselves from the existing conceptual universe and looking at it askance. Any notion of a binary divide between those (intellectual individuals, times and places) with irony and those without, Goody concludes, is a nonsense (cf. Shweder 1991a:14).

An extended endorsement of this position is provided by Handler and Segal’s (1990) anthropological examination of the writings of Jane Austen. Writing in and of a time and society (early-nineteenth-century England) where irony might seem a far cry from a stable, unambiguous, axiomatic and largely conventional way of life, Austen shows no ironic ‘reticence’. Readily ironizing any claims of a homogeneous, integrated or bounded socio-cultural system to give onto a singular or unitary truth, she offers her readers an appreciation of the normative, the institutional and the principled in culture (here, the implicit cultural principles of genteel English society of marriage, courtship, rank and gender) as symbolic forms always subject to, and needful of, creative interpretation, and always affording independent manipulation and individual re-rendering. Handler and Segal call this ‘alter-cultural action’. Clearly, for Austen, the schemata of cultural classification and social structuration, being arbitrary, and being recognized to be arbitrary, should be seen less to regulate conduct or ensure the unconscious reproduction of an established order than to give communicative resource, significance and value to what Handler and Segal dub her characters’ ‘serious social play’. Rather than norms which are taken literally, conventional etiquette and propriety become matters for meta-communicative comment and analysis; and hence come to be displaced in the process of individual constructions of situational sociocultural order.

The writings of Jane Austen, Handler and Segal conclude, are a celebration of the ‘fiction of culture’, and of individuals’ creative potential for alter-cultural world-making: of an enduring human disposition to render all socio-cultural norms ultimately contingent. Moreover, what is true for Austen’s language can be argued as true for language as such: it is ‘of its very nature, an ironic mode’ (Martin 1983:415), imbued with the multiple ironies of there being no certain or necessary accordance between the meanings of different individuals, or between those and the way the world is. Hence, what is true for Austen’s age is true for all times.

Hutcheon notes (1994:9) that the historical claim to be an ‘age of irony’ is a repeated one, but perhaps equally or more true is its denial; for

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IRONY

the socio-cultural milieux in which the cognitive freedom (scepticism, creativity, idiosyncrasy) which irony flags is welcomed (the will and the practice to complexify, multiply and call into question socio-cultural realities) are at least balanced by a blinkered absolutism or fundamentalism in which the substance of inherited verities alone is validated. But whether it is celebrated or negated on the level of public convention, irony exists as a cognitive proclivity and practice, embodying a certain imaginative movement from the world(s) as is, a certain reflection upon the latter and differentiation from it.

Non-ironic displacements

Not all such cognitive movement, reflection and differentiation need be identified as ironic as such, however. Irony amounts to cognitive movement as an endemic mode of being; it is a continuous process to treat the world ironically because every truth reached is recognized to be contingent and perspectival, and bound to be left behind in a progression of meaning which is without limit. Irony thus represents something of a royal road to recognizing infinite regress and contingency: a necessarily limitless revaluation of values. Certain other cognitions partake of part of this movement, then, but not its habituation. It might, however, be worth briefly referring to these so as further to isolate the ironic mode.

Conversion can be said to entail a cognitive shift or move such that one looks back at a position from which one has now become displaced— from which one has displaced oneself—due to an original sense of ‘meaning-deficit’ in one’s life and a need for revitalization (Fernandez 1995:22). This accords with the philosopher Kierkegaard’s understanding of religiosity per se. As he explains, religious identity derives from believing something which is deeply offensive to reasoning, for it is the very difficulty of belief which provides its reward: the believer feels alive and singularly inspirited in ways which believing something currently plausible could not achieve. The essence of religious belief, for Kierkegaard, is not being persuaded by the truth of a doctrine, but becoming committed to a position which is inherently absurd, which ‘gives offence’ to those criteria of truth which existed prior to the conversion.

This also applies to Gellner’s understanding of cultural or ethnic belonging. As he succinctly puts it, a culture is a collectivity united in a belief: ‘[m]ore particularly, a collectivity united in a false belief is a culture’ (1995b:6). Truths, after all, are universal and available to all; but errors are culture-specific and define a continuity of faith and its believers. Hence, non-facts, the currently unproven or unprovable, tend

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to become badges of community and of loyalty. ‘Assent to an absurdity identifies an intellectual rite de passage, a gateway to the community defined by that commitment to that conviction’ (Gellner 1995b:6).

Then again, this applies to various theorists who see consciousness—the coming to a consciousness of oneself—as something akin to a conversion experience.These theories have a Freudian tinge (‘self-consciousness begins in frustration’) inasmuch as they posit selfhood as deriving from a certain point in the maturation process when the individual achieves satisfaction only by repressing what he or she knows to be true. For Brodsky, then, the origin of consciousness is to be found in childhood lying (cited in Bruner and Weisser 1991:132). Giving a deliberately false self-report, distancing himself from what he knows presently to be the truth, the child first appreciates his power to change the world and become himself as the source of its perceptions. Being oneself is, to an extent, then living one’s lies. From Ortega y Gasset (1956) we hear something similar: ‘Man is a sort of novelist of himself who conceives the fanciful figure of a personage with its unreal occupations’. The life of the self is then taken up with converting these fictions or lies into a believed-in reality.

As mentioned, the above conversions of identity—religious, cultural and individual—are seen to entail certain cognitive movements and displacements, certain distantiations from what is, but they do not amount to displacement as an ongoing cognitive resort, as a conscious way of being.They do not compass being as an endemic becoming. And yet this seems to be essential to irony; it is a living with displacement, a living in cognitive movement, and a refusing to take any value as final or absolute, as free from revaluation, except the value of revaluation per se.

Holding an ironic attitude towards one’s current final vocabulary, Nietzsche argued, was tantamount to appreciating how the world was as full of final vocabularies as it was of other people. Choices could and should be made between these, as well as there being a recognition of the choice to compose a new vocabulary for oneself ab initio. This ‘ironic’ recognition was a resource which took an individual beyond any one final vocabulary, and indeed, beyond language as such.

From Nietzsche’s prescriptions can be disinterred an anthropological appreciation of the human capacity to transcend present ontologies and epistemologies, present appearances, and insist on the reality of an individual’s own being and becoming. Irony is part-and-parcel of this individual force which ‘insists on itself’ and proceeds continually to create and to live its own truth.

See also: Consciousness, Interpretation, Movement, World-View

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KINSHIP

KINSHIP

Studies in kinship, and the related institutions of marriage and the family, have until recently been central to anthropological investigation and debate. As Ladislav Holy remarks (1996:1), ‘if there was a subject which anthropologists could have rightly claimed to be their own, it was kinship’, and thus the problem of handling the topic of kinship crossculturally is the key to understanding the historical development of a large majority of anthropology’s central analytic concepts, theories and methods. Deliberations over the puzzles of kinship and marriage gave rise to the discipline‘s most sophisticated technical and theoretical elaborations, and also its most virulent, ever-present controversies. It was also assumed to be the area of technical expertise, the most demanding of rigour of thought, through which anthropology could best defend its scientific respectability. The issue of kinship became therefore the topic through which the most able minds in the history of anthropology could display their erudition. As a result, kinship was that aspect of social life that became the linchpin for the unfolding of all the grand paradigms of thought within anthropology, whether it be Morgan’s narrative of evolutionism (1871) or Malinowski’s of functionalism (1930), RadcliffeBrown’s of structural-functionalism (1962 [1952]), Lévi-Strauss’s of structuralism (1969a [1949]), or Meillassoux’s of structural-Marxism (1981). As Robin Fox could comment in 1967 (1967:10), ‘kinship is to anthropology what logic is to philosophy or the nude is to art; it is the basic discipline of the subject’. The situation, however, has changed.

Today, anthropologists demonstrate such a decided lack of interest in the topic of kinship that it is tempting to declare it no longer to be a key concept. In 1984, David Schneider advised anthropologists to stop looking for ‘kinship’ which he claimed was but a vacuous and confused domain when applied cross-culturally. As he argues, there has been a drastic problem in the ways in which anthropology has treated the topic that takes us well beyond anthropology to the emergence and growth of the human sciences themselves, and to the modernist project through which they developed. Because kinship studies were the heartbeat of the discipline of anthropology, it is no wonder that ‘kinship’ can be dismantled as the emperor with no clothes, or rather the emperor fully clothed in grand-narrative imaginary dress. All the perils of the modernist stories through which anthropology developed as a field of study are highlighted in those passionate debates about the substance of ‘kinship’. To now ask why kinship was once so predominantly prioritized will take us then to problems in the major presuppositions underlying anthropology’s highly valued analytic constructs of kinship

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