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

KINSHIP

action. Enxet kinship is about not making those with whom you live angry; it is about being generous. As such the personal quality of a relationship as made manifest through everyday practice is paramount to its classification as kin or not kin, or as a particular type of kin link.

More generally, the ongoing quality of an Amazonian personal relationship (as in the ‘growing’ of a child by a parent and child, the mutual care of brothers, or sisters, or of any other personal relation) may have generative value in a material sense that goes far beyond the minimal possibilities that are endowed through the act of sex (e.g. see McCallum 1989; Gow 1991; Lagrou 1998; Overing 1999). Teaching, feeding, working together tranquilly, all are generative processes pertinent to their personal idiom of kinship. For sure, the personal-kind terms that are here being applied to their nearest and dearest, and to those further afield, are about reproductory possibilities, but it is not ‘reproduction’ in the sense that the anthropologist conceptualized it in traditional kinship theory.To understand their language of reproduction, the anthropologist needs to turn to an anthropology of the emotions through which affect, thought and moral value can be highlighted, and to wed the pragmatics with the metaphysics of using the personal idiom of kinship.

Kinship is alive and well

In fact we can say that the area of kinship is as alive and well as ever in anthropology, in that the personal relationships and activities of parenting and nurturing and the whole process of generating and gendering of bodies into social adulthood hold central attention. Such studies are, however, unrecognizable as pertaining to the kinship theory of yesteryear. A similar reorientation of concentration is as clear in Melanesian studies as in those of Amazonia (e.g. see Strathern 1988; Gillison 1993) where personal relationships are discussed through categories very different from the former ones of prescriptive rule, roles and statuses, and social structure. Here instead, as among Amazonianists, talk is upon the indigenous understandings of such matters as gender distinctions, the content of the self and its mastery of them, and the construction of social bodies. It is about indigenous ambiguities over the nature of personhood and the various possibilities of agency in this world and others, and the elaborate relation of these issues to indigenous practice and metaphysics. In other words, a dialogue is being created between us, the anthropologists, and them, the peoples of New Guinea or Amazonia, over what it means to be human in this world (cf. Storrie 1999).What does it mean to be social beings in this world? And how do we go about attaining this state? If for other people the Western grand

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distinctions between society and nature do not hold, what other possibilities of an interesting kind are there? These are very different questions than were being asked in mainstream anthropology a couple of decades ago.

See also: Agent and Agency, Common Sense, Culture, Gender,

Moments of Being, Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies, Society, The Unhomely

LIMINALITY

The concept of liminality, from the Latin word for ‘threshold’ (limen) and implying all manner of interstitiality, of being betwixt and between, is most associated with the work of Victor Turner, and his extending of the original ideas of Arnold van Gennep; it has also been put to profitable use by Max Gluckman, Mary Douglas and Edmund Leach, and given rise to a host of spin-off applications. Through liminality, anthropology has found it possible to focus conceptually upon such phenomena as marginality, alterity, rebellion, ostracism, subalternality, pollution, eccentricity and deviance.

Rites of passage

‘The life of an individual in any society’, van Gennep observed (1960:3), ‘is a series of passages from one age to another’: from baby to infant to child to adolescent; from kindergarten to primary school to secondary school to university; from maiden to wife to widow; from warrior to elder to ancestor. In Rites of Passage (1960 [1909]), van Gennep examined and compared the way that these passages and stages were socio-culturally constructed, marked and effected, by the practising of certain ceremonial, public rites: rites which accompanied every change of place, state, social position and age. Indeed, such ‘rites of passage’ seemed to represent the majority of ritual or ceremonial occasions in any socio-cultural milieu.They at once proclaimed movement from one state or category of recognized existence to another and brought this about.

Furthermore, rites of passage seemed to partake of a common, tripartite structure, to share a grammar of three distinct phases, even though these were possibly differently emphasized on different kinds of occasion (a birth versus a death). There was a ‘rite of separation’ or

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disaggregation by which the old identity, status or frame of mind, was sloughed off, followed by a middle, mediatory or liminal stage of rites of transition, where the protagonist undergoing the change (the initiate or neophyte) was neither one thing nor another but betwixt-and-between, followed by a ‘rite of incorporation’ or aggregation by which a new identity was assumed. While the symbolism accompanying the rites of separation and incorporation often bespoke death and rebirth, and the moving from one socio-cultural condition to another was often represented by physical movement out of and then back into sociocultural space, the mediatory or liminal stage was far more complex and confused. For, having crossed the threshold beyond one status or identity while not yet having crossed into another one, the initiate was neither here nor there; beyond normal, everyday socio-cultural categories, beyond normal conceptions of routine identity, and also the conceptions of behaviour, rule, time and space that accompanied identity.

The liminal stage was a zone of socio-cultural non-identity, nonexistence. In different socio-cultural milieux, van Gennep found the liminal stage of rites of passage to be treated with very different kinds of attention (or inattention) and gravitas: from the honeymoon period of an English married couple to the vision quest of a Comanche brave (cf. Hoebel and Wallace 1958); but there were interesting symbolic overlaps. Individuals in this stage were often removed from everyday sight, or else treated as if invisible. They were often spoken about as dead or as dissolved into amorphous, unrecognizable matter, or as unformed or embryonic. They were often involved in tasks and occupations which were never normally undertaken in the course of everyday life. They were often treated as unclean and polluting to those still going about their everyday lives; also as potentially dangerous, as possessing the power to harm those engaged in quotidian routines should there be unmonitored contact between them. Hence, initiates in the liminal stage were often the responsibility of certain ritual officers or experts who managed their lives until the rite of reincorporating them into sociocultural space, time and identity was to be effected.

Anthropological applications

Since van Gennep’s comparative work, there have been detailed ethnographies of initiation and socio-cultural renewal which have instantiated and commented upon the above schema (cf. Richards 1982; La Fontaine 1985a). Gluckman developed the idea of rites of passage as entailing behavioural irregularities or reversals to explore the seeming ‘rites of resistance’ or ‘reversal’ which accompanied such things as regal

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investitures in African kingdoms, and which had clear echoes in Classical European festivities such as Saturnalia and Bacchanalia. Here, amidst uncommon revelry and behavioural unrestraint, there was a reversal of normal formalities and hierarchies such that commoners, slaves and women would temporarily lord it over their socio-cultural ‘betters’. For Gluckman, such rites of reversal represented preludes to the reestablishment of everyday relations of stratification (1963a). They were transitions between states of order which served in fact to bolster the systematization of inequality by periodically releasing tension and disquiet.

For Leach, as part of an exploration of the structures of communication by which socio-cultural milieux were maintained between individuals (1976a), liminal zones, stages and statuses made possible transitions between entities whose identity called on them to be at once discrete and bounded but not incommunicado. Lands must be divided between owners, worlds between gods and men, lives between bodies and souls, times between pasts and futures. In each of these cases (and others), ambiguous, liminal phenomena, partaking of the character of both sides of the divide, kept the identity of things both related and distinct.

Douglas, meanwhile, developed the van Gennepian notion that what was liminal and neither here nor there was at once polluting, dangerous and powerful.There is a human ‘yearning for rigidity’, Douglas began, a longing for ‘hard lines and clear concepts’ (1966:162). Hence, each socio-cultural milieu came to be based on and to embody symbolic classifications of the world which were indubitable, coherent and systemic, and from which the contradictory, the incoherent and the arbitrary were banned. Nonetheless, any systematic ordering and classification of matter inexorably rejected certain elements as inappropriate: it had to do this in order to arrive at clean lines of division between matter (which is otherwise, in reality, continuous). Hence, an inevitable by-product of a system of symbolic classification was ‘dirt’: that which contravened the ordering. Hedged about with taboo, the dirt which threatened the clear-cut ordering of the world, which would ‘pollute’ its cleanliness, was eschewed; while the notion that something was polluted served to protect cherished principles and categories from contradiction.The only exceptions to this eschewing were extraordinary, ritual situations. For while the disorder which dirt represented was a threat, it was also recognized to be powerful. Unrestricted by existing categories and order, it ushered in the imagined possibility of new patterns. In certain rituals, therefore, one could observe efforts to harness this power; the rituals represented ventures outwith social order and

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control in an attempt to tap supernatural, ‘cosmic’ power inhering outside the everyday nomos of human life. In ritual one found an acceptance of the wholeness of the real in contradistinction to the partiality of everyday nomic categories, and a surmounting of conventional differentiations. Human beings possessed a ‘common urge to make a unity of all their experience’, Douglas concluded, ‘and to overcome distinctions and separations in acts of at-onement’ (1966:169).

Victor Turner’s limin(oid)al

Like Douglas, Victor Turner was to move from ideas concerning ritual liminality to a theory of socio-cultural life as such. Initially (1964, 1967), however, he focused upon initiation rituals among the Ndembu of Tanzania, as seen in a van Gennepian light. Here was an oscillation between the individual experiencing of society and culture as highly structured, and the episodic venturing into ritual situations which were transitional and ambiguous in ethos vis-à-vis the preceding and following structures, if not purposely anti-structural. If Ndembu society was conceived of as a structure and classification of positions, standards, behaviours, customs, rights and duties, then the ritual periods and processes amounted to interor extra-structural situations.The Ndembu moved from one social status (with its attendant proprieties, moralities and identities) to another and to another throughout their lives, the moves sometimes involving great changes in behaviour, world-view and expectation, by way of ritual periods which were themselves asocial, amoral, out of time, out of sight and out of mind.

Certainly, liminality was the main focus of ritual activity among the Ndembu. There were liminal initiates, liminal officiants and liminal activities, taking place in liminal spaces. These spaces were powerful, even dangerous, phenomena, through which the Ndembu could be expected to be visited by otherworldly creatures and forces. It was with the assistance of the latter, for instance, as spirit helpers, that ritual officiants managed the transitions between social statuses of Ndembu initiates. Initiates were regarded as being ground down or rubbed clean of their earlier identities, so that they entered a uniform, formless state of pure potential, from which they were fashioned anew. Initiates were shown fearful and mysterious sacred objects which shocked them out of their complacency within existing identities and prepared them to learn and adopt new perspectives on life and themselves. Often monstrous in form, Turner hypothesized that the sacred objects and experiences to which the initiates were subjected provoked them into reconsidering the world, its nature and relations; so that it and they

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became objects of their own reflection and fantasy. Here was, in Eliade’s words (1959), a ‘still centre’ to the universe from which all the current classificatory trappings of the socio-cultural milieu could be looked at askance. However, being strictly managed by their officiantkeepers when in a transitionally amorphous and identity-less state, initiates’ rebirth took the apposite and required directions; as far as possible, their reflections and fantasies were manipulated and directed (their bodies coerced, even humiliated), so that their new world-views were as appropriate to their statuses as their old ones.

Like Gluckman and Douglas, then, Turner, in this early work, enunciated a conservative vision concerning the structural nature of socio-cultural life, and the play of ritual liminality within this. It was not that the cake of custom was broken per se, so much as that individuals temporarily or permanently came to have their positions within the social structure changed. While rites of passage might radically affect initiates, the social system to which they returned remained, as a whole, unchanged; individuals may change, episodically, thanks to the creative processes of ritual, but the structures of social systems on the whole did not.

It was as if rituals carried health warnings. Human beings could not bear the (polluting) effects of supernatural power, of formlessness beyond human apprehension, on a routine basis or for too long. After their ‘time-out’, therefore, ritual participants were returned to social systems whose structures came to be validated afresh. Nevertheless, as a religious believer himself, Turner did wish to emphasize the favourable aspects of the ritual state. If everyday life was a matter of social-structural positions and identities, then the creativity of ritual process opened up an antistructural recognition of life beyond such arbitrary distinctions. Washed clean of particular and parochial statuses, initiates had the opportunity temporarily to enter a state of pure being, to engage with one another as representatives of a generic humanity Turner coined the term communitas to describe a sense of heightened togetherness which people might feel with one another once the superficial clothing of age, status, occupation, gender and other differences had been removed.

Then Turner came to broaden his focus, beyond the Ndembu and beyond rites of passage narrowly defined. He argued (1974, 1982a, b, 1986) that the phenomenon of liminality—or ‘the liminoidal’, as he came to call it by way of distinction—could be seen to apply to a great variety of institutions, practices, movements, situations, roles and persons: from churches to shrines and priests, pilgrims, monks and nuns, ascetics and hermits, even hippies, kibbutzniks, new-age travellers and revolutionaries. In different ways, extents and durations, all of these

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shared in a condition of ‘sacred marginality’, their nature characterized by something of the anti-structural, the transitional and processual, the creative and re-formative, the reversing, resistant and rebellious, the communal and communing. They stripped themselves of normative everyday identities and refrained from normal practices in order to achieve vantage-points from which the social structure could be critiqued and re-formed. They deliberately held the everyday social structures of others in abeyance, opting out of status-bound, positionoriented lives, even if this meant taking on the stigmata of the lowly, poor and unkempt, the vagrant and ostracized, the mad and simple.They voluntarily abstained from participation in and membership of those social structures within which most mainstream life was conducted so that they may replace social-structural obligation and differentiation with a sense of true human bonds, based on personal relations of love, equality, spontaneity and freedom.

From being a transitional passage between social states, then, the liminal developed in Turner’s work and appreciation to being an ongoing (asocial) state in itself. Not only was this always and everywhere present, in some shape or form, in human socio-cultural milieux, but, for Turner, it represented the best of those milieux. It was where people related to one another as full human beings over and above their sociocultural exclusivities, and it was where they distilled the creativity and energy with which they created and re-created society and culture, and returned to them reinvigorated, preparing to keep giving them another try. Refusing social-structural distinction, classification and hierarchy, fragmentation and compartmentalization, the limin(oid)al was always a threat, always polluting and undercutting, always presenting a view upon the global and cosmopolitan, the universal and eternal. Hence, the guardians of social structure always attempted to police the liminoidal, if not out of existence then out of sight (time, mind) and seriousness in terms of everyday life.The power of the liminoidal might be recognized as of periodic use by these policemen, but it was also something whose application and provenance had to be carefully controlled, whose representatives were to be co-opted, wherever possible, into (marginal) positions within the social structure.

However much co-optation occurred, though, Turner concluded, however much church or hippy or punk ‘leaders’ and the groups they ‘represented’ became institutionalized parts of the socio-cultural milieu (and spoke on behalf of the status quo rather than its re-formation), there remained the sense in which every socio-cultural milieu continued to be characterized by an ongoing dichotomy between structure and antistructure. Every individual life, indeed, partook of this dichotomy in an

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oscillatory fashion. For while the creative and rebellious and personalizing and communitarian spark may light up some individuals’ lives more than others’, it was a potentiality inherent to them all; every individual life had the potential to see beyond the conventionally normative and divisive, and every individual life shared in the necessity to experience this otherness at some time and to some extent. All were rebels, poets, humanists at some moments; all felt the power of social authority, property, wealth, tradition, status and fashion, but all also recognized the potentially far greater power of human overcoming and at-oneness.

In imaging the co-optation and routinization of liminality, but also its dialectical rebirth, Turner comes to appear quite Weberian, where uncategorizable ‘charismatic’ authority episodically affords the insights whereby socio-cultural milieux advance but where this authority inevitably comes to be routinized, institutionalized, in a ‘traditional’ or a ‘rational—legal’ form. Perhaps this is also why Turner (1982a:132–53) comes to soften the stark distinction between structure and antistructure and talk of their similarities. Hence, there may be different kinds of communitas which liminality can give onto: ‘existential’, ‘ideological’ and ‘normative’. These latter might initially sound self- contradictory—how could the generic human bond of communitas be conceived of in the same terms as ideologies or norms?—but what Turner has in mind is the way that the spontaneous communitas felt by those who together ‘drop out’ of the social system must evolve into something more routine (even if still voluntaristic and ‘free’) if it is to maintain itself over time. Hence, the Franciscan monastery, the hippy commune and the kibbutz.

Turner may be criticized for the religious underpinning and romantic overtones which he gives to the concept of limin(oid)ality. He may be taken to task for an overemphasis on everyday life as structured, static and inhumane, and on ‘sacred marginality’ as humanistic, spontaneous and creative. The institutions and officers of the sacred have, after all, the habit of being at least as hierarchical, divisive, formal, fixed, narrow and inflexible as those of the socialstructural, and not necessarily so otherworldly in their orientations either (cf. Mandelbaum 1966; Stirrat 1984).

Nonetheless,Turner’s exposition of a liminal cognition, identity and practice beyond the social-structural status quo has proved very fruitful. In the anthropological study of play (Schwartzman 1978), of performance (Hughes-Freeland 1997), of literature (Ashley 1990), of creativity (Rosaldo et al. 1993), of existential individuality (Burridge 1979), of celebration (Manning 1983), of pilgrimage (Eade and

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Sallnow 1991) and of deviant subcultures (Marsh et al. 1978), Turner’s version of the liminal-cum-liminoidal can be seen to have offered significant leads.

See also: Alterity, Children, Humanism, Irony

LITERARINESS

Since the 1960s, an appreciation of the contingencies of anthropological representation has steadily grown. Since the 1980s, with the so-called ‘literary turn’, this has become a major preoccupation. Representation, it is said, inevitably serves certain interests and purposes. Furthermore, the means of construing representations is tantamount to a particular construction of data; socio-cultural reality per se is a matter of representation. Anthropologists, in short, have come to treat writings— their own as well as others’—as ‘situated texts’.

Traditionally, anthropological texts purported, or at least aimed, to simply present a true and detached view of the world. But texts do not simply come from nowhere, and they do not give onto an unbiased reality; inevitably they represent historico-socio-cultural documents. Indeed, the very claim to truth represents a particular rhetoric, a narrative and stylistic technique, which has served to obscure the links between those representations, the ‘knowledge’ they construct, the relations of power they embody, and the interests they further. Far from a true view of the world, here is simply one institutionalized way of being which is not intrinsically better than any number of other ways; truth being a ‘docile servant’ (Goodman 1978:18), there was no monopoly on ways in which a construction of reality might be seen to ‘fit the facts’.

By way of the ‘literary turn’, then, there has been a move away from an innocent focus upon the analysis of ‘others’ to an analysis of the processes by which anthropology comes to order, express, disseminate— in a word, inscribe—its analyses of others to the point where, for some, the questioning and self-doubting has endangered the practice of the writing per se. Looked at more positively, however, an anthropological consciousness of its acts of writing has caused a freeing-up of those practices and a willingness to experiment: a seeking out of genres which does not pretend to disinterestedness but best serves certain interests. Through a mixing of genres, a ‘blurring’ of distinctions and connections between genres and disciplines, there has been more of an open

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embracing of the power, creativity and beauty potentially to be found in all genres of representation (cf. Geertz 1983:19).

To continue this exposition, a narrative may be woven which begins from three important literary-anthropological texts: Works and Lives.The Anthropologist as Author by Clifford Geertz (1988), Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography edited by George Marcus and James Clifford (1986), and Anthropology as Cultural Critique. An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences by George Marcus and Michael Fischer (1986).

Works and Lives: I

‘“What does the ethnographer do?”’, Geertz asks himself rhetorically: ‘—he writes’ (1973:19). However, in Works and Lives, Geertz discovers a certain nervousness in the state of current anthropological writing, a lack of confidence and persuasiveness in its traditional claim to explain others. Engaging others in the field and then representing them in the academy has become far more visible, and is felt to be incongruous and uncomfortable.As Strathern puts it (1991:8–11), anthropology finds itself in a new ‘aesthetic’ wherein the traditional fieldworker and author who claims authentically to translate his or her particular observations of a culture or society no longer convinces.

The nature of the difficulty is both moral and epistemological, Geertz continues.The moral difficulty concerns logistics of ‘going there’ which were laid largely in the context of colonialism, but whose power asymmetries can be seen to be replicated today; still anthropologists act as unrequested, lifelong spokespersons-cum-experts for groups of people with fewer Western ‘resources’, whom they briefly meet in some ‘peripheral’ environment. And yet, such colonialist trappings are a far remove from the reorganization of ethnic political relations in which many anthropologists would nowadays hope to see themselves involved. The epistemological difficulty concerns a questioning of what description of ‘there’ means. Words offer no transparent medium of representation, and anthropological analyses represent constructions which are not automatically more truthful or accurate or impartial or scientific or objective than native ones.

In short, where once the discipline of anthropology shared complex institutional connections with Western colonial expansion on the one hand, and a salvational belief in the power of pure science on the other, now anthropologists find they can no longer act convincingly either as transcontinental mediators or as transcultural theoreticians. Is anthropological representation of the other decent? Is it even possible?

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