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

LITERARINESS

Hence, the calls, in recent years, for new, non-canonical ways of writing: first-person narratives; reflexivity; rhetorical self-consciousness; linguistic play; heteroglossia; verbatim recording; performative translation. In Stephen Tyler’s vision (1986), ethnography should become a dialogic and collaborative production which replaces the monologic ‘rape’ of a scientistic ‘alienation’ (with its synthesizing gaze, transcendent argument and final word) with a negotiated and cooperatively evolved text. This might hope to evoke in readers the therapeutic possibility of a new commonsensical reality, transformed, renewed, even sacralized.

Writing Culture

Writing Culture is introduced (by Clifford) with the claim that far from being objective, anthropological writings are literarily constructed accounts, in a word, inventions and fictions.They are fictions because any historically situated truth is only ever partial, and because every one telling of a story must deny the telling of another at the same time from another perspective. As Nietzsche (1911) put it: ‘all constructed truths are made possible by powerful “lies” of exclusion and rhetoric’. Anthropologists, then, are those who traditionally have had the power to tell their story of other cultures, while silencing the voices of the actual members and pretending to tell an authoritative, objective story in an omniscient way (with personal details, purple prose and rhetoric eschewed). But, however much anthropological writing intends to be impartial, even advocatory (written on behalf of the natives, and critical of present power relations), it is still enmeshed in a world of power inequalities; and it enacts further power relations.

More precisely, anthropological writings are overdetermined:

1contextually: by the social milieux in which the anthropologist lives while he or she writes;

2rhetorically: by the expressive conventions of language which are used, which use them;

3institutionally: by the specific academic discipline the texts feed into and the academic audience which reads them;

4generically: by the genre they add to (monograph; thesis; edited collection; textbook) and set themselves against (novel; poem; religious tract);

5politically: by the power they have to assume the authority to describe and analyse and publish ‘a culture’;

6and finally historically: by the fact that all the above factors are changing through time.

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In sum, the anthropologist must be constantly self-conscious when he writes: conscious of the historical situation which places him in the position of writing up accounts of others; conscious of possibly competing accounts; conscious of how he is constructing his text, so that while avoiding self-indulgent confessionals, he admits to the personal nature of his account.

Works and Lives: II

The way out of the moral asymmetries and discursive complexities, according to Geertz, is to admit that anthropology entails representing one sort of life in the categories of another (those of the writer), and to accept that anthropological texts are literary texts: to be looked at and not just through. Of course, this makes authorship more burdensome. For, it is art which is primarily involved in bringing anthropological texts to life and keeping them active, and such artistry cannot be displaced onto ‘method’ or ‘language’ or ‘the people themselves’. Anthropological writing entails telling stories, making pictures, concocting symbolisms and deploying tropes: ‘half-convinced writers trying to half-convince readers of their (the writers’) half-convictions’ (Geertz 1988:139). Only by admitting this can claims that the enterprise is iniquitous or impossible be countered.

And yet one still finds great resistance to seeing anthropology as a kind of imaginative writing. It is regarded as improper for anthropologists to reflect upon such literary questions instead of surveying the external world: an unhealthy self-absorption; narcissistic and decadent; time-wasting and hypochondriacal (cf. Sangren 1988:423; Spencer 1989). It is felt that anthropologists produce texts which do not warrant literary inspection: they are not aiming for distinct styles; they are not mixed up in the ‘sharp practice’ of rhetoric. Moreover, it is feared that disinterring how knowledge claims are rhetorically advanced will reduce their plausibility as serious knowledge.

To this, Geertz responds that reality privileges no particular idiom in which it demands to be described—literally, positivistically, or without fuss.Anthropological representation has always been an ‘impure’ business, of feelings and sentiments, deriving from a dialogue between anthropologist and informant which changes them both. Indeed, the ‘classic’ anthropological texts have always been stylistic tours de force (cf. Hymes 1973b).What is called for, then, is for anthropology to admit that its continuing genealogy is literary, not scientific, and that it is inappropriate to peddle scientific-sounding rhetoric concerning ‘induction’, ‘reification’, ‘generalization’, ‘truth’, or ‘fact’. After all,

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‘ethnographic reality is actively constructed, not to say invented’ (Dumont 1978:66). The anthropologist attempts to convey the multiplicity of voices and viewpoints which passed through his consciousness during his research, while knowing that his consciousness has inextricably transmogrified those viewpoints. Thus, anthropology should recognize its proper realm to be ‘“faction”: imaginative writing about real people in real places at real times’—where the ‘imaginative’ and the ‘imagined’ need not be confused with the ‘imaginary’, the ‘fictional’ with the ‘false’, or the ‘made-out’ with the ‘made-up’ (Geertz 1988:141).

Not that seeing anthropology as in important respects a literary vocation does not have its dangers. For then the enterprise may be seen as the seduction to intellectual positions through rhetorical artifice, with its central quarrels construed as conceptual ones, and its central value as aestheticism and the pleasures of a good read (cf. Marcus 1980).

Anthropology as Cultural Critique

The argument is taken on in Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Marcus and Fischer ask how precisely anthropological writing can be made more sensitive to its broader political, historical and philosophical implications. And their answer is: by questioning the conventions of representation and by seeing in a permeability of disciplinary borders— between social science and the humanities, between the textual and the contextual—a liberation from traditional (illegitimate-because- absolutist-and-essentialist) symbolizations of the world.We might rework traditional differentiations between disciplines and genres, and see them instead as analogous enterprises: as corresponding ways of treating social reality which can come into fruitful communication and complementary relationship.

As Pratt argues (1992), particular tropes and genres need not be seen as somehow natural or native to a discipline, and just as anthropologists have had recourse to particular ones in the past, so they might invent new ones now. Anthropological texts need not be so far removed from novels, from travel reports, memoirs and journalism, from avant-garde cultural commentary, where these are seen to be corresponding ways of ‘writing social reality’.

Or again, in the same way that the so-called realist novel (which depended on a narrator whose insight into circumstances and subjectivities was omniscient) was superseded by the modernist text (highlighting dialogue between the narrator and the other characters, between the writer, his subjects and the reader, so as to achieve a

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reciprocity of perspectives), so dialogue and reciprocity between a multiplicity of legitimate voices and views, may be watchwords for a new way of writing anthropology. The anthropologist engages in dialogue with his informants, and this can be conveyed in the text—with the reader then engaging in further dialogue. The processes of writing and reading alike could be conceived of as a series of multivocal exchanges in which a juxtaposition occurs of manifold cultural assumptions. In place of one culture representing another in its own terms, then, there are cultures juxtaposed, each framing questions which challenge the others’ preconceptions. After all, it is not only anthropologists who write socio-cultural reality, and by playing off of such realities against one another one may accrue (not ‘the truth’ but) fruitful dialogue without end.

Works and Lives: III

What is central to the anthropological text, Geertz urges, is the experience of its writer. If anthropological writings attempt to provide openings onto others’ socio-cultural realities, then they persuade not through the facts they contain, nor through their stylistic elegance, but to the extent that they convey, in its fullness, the author’s experience of travel between ways of life and worlds of meaning. In the conveyance of this, there might also be travel between ways of writing, between tropes and genres. Because not only does the reality anthropology approaches not demand one way in which it must truthfully be described, but, to the contrary, this reality is human reality—a necessarily experienced reality—and ever multiple. To travel between literary forms in one’s efforts to represent human socio-cultural reality is to seek to do justice to this multiplicity.

‘Factional’ genres?

Genres have been defined as ‘literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a cultural artefact’ (Jameson 1981:106). To coin a term such as ‘faction’, as Geertz does, in order to refer to the ‘literariness’ of contemporary ‘anthropological’ writing, is at once to evince the relationship between academic disciplines and certain genres of representation, and to posit a destabilization of this relationship. Disciplinary boundaries between literature and anthropology should no longer disguise or subvert inter-disciplinary correspondences in their representation of socio-cultural realities.

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Ordinarily, however, it is still the differences (of genre, institutionality, artefact) between the two disciplines which tend to be emphasized by their various apologists and exponents. Thus, the fictional is claimed to address the might-have-been, the should-be, the could-well-be, the would-never-be (and so on); so that when actual people and events gain ascendancy over invention then literature becomes what it is not (cf. Lodge 1977:8). In anthropology, meanwhile, as Geertz reports, there is the broad claim that its writings may be speculative, and are probably inductive, but nevertheless they can, do and should aspire to being in true and direct relationship to the stimuli of an externally met world (to real people and events), and to representing themselves plainly and honestly.

More precisely, it is said that anthropology attempts something more than, or at least different from, literature, which lacks the realism of content of the anthropological endeavour, the expected rigour of research, method, theory and presentation.While literature takes cultural material and transforms it, exploits it, instead of presenting it for its own sake, the discipline of anthropology is based on the descriptive integrity of ethnography: a dedication to fact, not to the satisfaction of artistry; a holistic depiction of actual happenings in genuine settings, not an impressionistic fusion of idea and reality. Even if literature sets itself the goal of realism, then, this is not the same as descriptive accuracy because the idea will always come first and reality then be made to fit it (Erickson 1988).

Furthermore, the literary text is not beholden to a painstaking revelation of the steps in its argument, of the logic in its associations and extrapolations, so that conclusions can be reached which simply suit its opening ideas. The literary text is indirect and selective, introverted and self-oriented; it seeks to rivet attention on itself rather than seeking, as does the referential text in anthropology, to describe literally the external reality of an objective world (cf. Watt 1979:306– 8). Hence, anthropology remains a project well worth pursuing even by writers who will never achieve the artistry of literaryism and, indeed, might not aspire to it.

In sum, many anthropologists resist a ‘literary turn’ to their discipline when this is seen as a mooted change to their institutional practices and a threat to the tradition, ideology, training, purpose, prestige, in a word, the ‘culture’ of their discipline. For, here are ways of writing (of giving names to things; of orienting collective activity; of deriving meaning; of systematizing date; of configuring the truth) which are exclusive and exclusionary They are incommensurable and irreducible, relevant in different ways, for different times, and different purposes. To take a

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LITERARINESS

‘literary turn’, in short, is to surrender anthropology to its antithesis, to precipitate its demise.

But this can equally well be turned around. If anthropology would conventionally constitute itself through a contrast with literary ‘otherness’, then it cannot isolate or even separate itself either; it cannot exist without literature since it needs this other to describe the ‘factual’ nature of the problem it sets itself. If the latter has been called into question, then might not this ontology of self and other? Might not both come together as different versions of the one ‘factional’ project?

In their intent to produce realistic representations of social life, then, there is perhaps much in the anthropological and literary enterprises which might be seen to overlap. Certainly, between the anthropological fieldworker-cum-analyst and the ‘social novelist’—Fielding, Dickens, Eliot, Forster, Woolf, Lawrence, Greene, and others ‘concerned with detailed and prolonged observation and comment on the manners and mores of a social milieu in which he is at the same time a participant’ (Rapport 1994a:67)—there are compelling correspondences of a historical, methodological and experiential kind. If there is something fundamentally anthropological in cultural comparison and critique, then, equally, literature is grounded in a transcending of the apparent and a critiquing of the conditions of its own existence. The station of the novelist, as Graham Greene described it, is ever to be on the ambiguous borderline, promulgating an alternative world and providing novel insight into people’s perceptions, evaluations and sensations (cf. Hoggart 1966:247)

That is, looking beyond distinctive disciplinary and generic institutionality (at ‘anthropology’ versus ‘literature’) is to see the figure of the individual writer who puts these institutions to use in the writing of social reality. This writing, whether in anthropology or literature, is a poetic enterprise. It entails stepping back from experience, reflecting upon it, and then transforming this into orderly text. It also entails personalizing institutional verbal forms so that they may convey a novel individual sense of reality. To author a ‘literary-cum-anthropological’ text, in short, is to impart personality to language and to express a personal construction of the world. Both anthropology and literature come together under the rubric of what Leach dubbed ‘divine inventiveness’ (1969:90). Indeed, the anthropological destination, for Leach (1982:53), should be the insight which great novelists display: that quality of deep understanding into the behaviour of others.

Nor does such questioning and realigning necessarily threaten anthropology, or detract from its practical purpose or efficacy. These practices, in fact, could be seen to be intrinsically ‘anthropological’.

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LITERARINESS

Certainly, if anthropology, as cultural comparison and critique, is intent on juxtaposing one viewpoint and symbolic construction of the world against another and identifying their ongoing relations, then this applies to its own viewpoints and preconceptions, its own practice too; maybe especially so. There is perhaps a routine need for anthropology to be non-routine: through comparison and critique, to step outside its own symbolic constructions so as to contextualize and evaluate its relations with other disciplines. For, if anthropology is a discipline, then, to borrow Keith Hart’s phrase, it is also a ‘virtual anti-discipline’ (1990:10). It ought not to bound itself; it should recognize categorical differences (such as in ways of writing, in genres), but not be restricted by them in its search for as complex an appreciation of experience as possible. Anthropology was ‘born omniform’, as Geertz puts it (1983:21), and should continue to be thus.

Individual writing

In Works and Lives, Geertz analysed the writings of four anthropologists—Malinowski, Benedict, Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss— and compared how they imparted their own identity and very personal signatures to their texts. Here we find individual writers bringing their ‘creativity’ (Parkin 1987) and ‘imagination’ (Finnegan 1977) similarly to bear upon the socio-cultural realities they find around them.The results are ‘factions’ which belong to the ‘romancer’ who created them.

‘Imagination’, ‘creativity’, ‘faction’, still do not sit easily as terms of anthropological self-description. We might grant that, in its way, literature can ‘take stock of a culture’, its efforts evincing a ‘reflecting mind and feeling heart’ (Turner 1976:78); we might even admit that literary writing can be ‘free-floating’—its meaning too flexible to be directly or closely tied to the social exchanges in which it appears, its life-in-use not rigidly bound by a socio-cultural environment (Finnegan 1977:260). However, we are immeasurably more leaden when it comes to appreciating how our own writing works (is worked).

And yet we write in the same way. At least, when Malinowski, Benedict, Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss (Bateson, Leach,Wallace, Geertz) use ‘fieldnotes’, ‘papers’ and ‘monographs’ to write up their field experiences, their work is great in its individuality. In use, the cultural forms and social relations of anthropology are personalized and transformed: given meaning, brought to life, within the particular contexts of individual lives. In other words, anthropological writing is free-floating stock-taking too, for it can be bound (predicted, determined, encompassed) neither by the field experience nor by the

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disciplinary genres which preceded it. Its greatness, perhaps, can be measured by the extent to which it rewrites both: ‘explains’ the other and ‘extends’ the discipline.

The American novelist Don DeLillo has described each writer as his or her own language, ‘building himself word by word and sentence by sentence’ (1991); it is here that the novelist and the anthropologist ultimately meet.

See also: Movement, Science, Writing

METHODOLOGICAL ECLECTICISM

In 1964, Max Gluckman and (economist) Ely Devons collaborated on a book entitled Closed Systems and Open Minds: The Limits of Naivety in Social Anthropology. Their topic was anthropological method; more precisely, given the complexity of that human reality which anthropology set out to investigate, their topic concerned how the investigator could both open himself or herself up to socio-cultural complexity and close off a manageable portion for presentation. The solution, Gluckman and Devons maintained (1964:162–8), turned upon the notion of naivety; naivety was an anthropological duty, inasmuch as it was in naivety that openness and closure met. Open to all manner of socio-cultural complexity, the anthropologist circumscribed, delimited, incorporated, abridged, isolated and compressed his or her experience into a distinct narrative of interrelations which contained its own order: a closure which specialists of different particular fields may inevitably find to be naive.

Anthropology, the most humanistic of social sciences, the most comparative of humanities, thus could be said to make a specialism out of non-specialism. Anthropology was an interdisciplinary discipline which, through the exercise of an ‘intellectual poaching licence’ (Kluckhohn) and a seeming amateurish use of all manner of information, could expect to tackle the ‘vast intricacies’ (Bateson 1959:296) of the worlds of human cognition, sociation, construction and interaction.

Descriptive eclecticism

There is, in Michael Herzfeld’s formulation (1993:184), a strong temptation to reduce social experience to single models. Indeed, the representation of social life may be fatally prone to simplistic reduction,

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inasmuch as singular texts stand for plural exchanges, and concepts replace complex processes of interpretation. However, to represent the diversity, the openendedness, the chaotic relativism that comprises cultural process is not necessarily to attempt to re-present a social milieu singly, steadily and as a whole, if one maintains the ‘naivety’ of a certain epistemological pluralism and narrational eclecticism. That is, the seeming closure of the anthropological account is ameliorated by its embodying a certain methodological eclecticism, such that the account itself implies conversation: between different systems of sense-making, different universes of discourse, in a word, different epistemes. If the bringing together in one text of the distinct, diverse and incompatible voices and epistemes of a socio-cultural milieu in such a way as to point up their irreconcilability and their interaction may be described as ‘writing conversationally’, then it may be possible to aver that ‘the epistemological conversation of this anthropological text is a homologue of the everyday conversation of social life’.

Analytical eclecticism

To represent adequately the local conversation of epistemes is, to borrow from Feyerabend (1975:18) to be epistemologically ‘opportunistic’ in one’s analysis. This must be characterized by epistemological ‘complementarity’ (Claxton 1979:415), and a refusing of epistemological resolution (cf. Simmel 1971:xii). For no theory or episteme or narrative which the social commentator might bring to bear could cover all the ‘facts’ which are alive and being exchanged in a social milieu and convey the latter’s intrinsic complexity and diversity; while any attempt to force social life into one or other perspective ends in tautology and serves only to destroy the ‘reality’ under study. To eschew the endemic diversity of cultural construction in one’s account—‘the maze of interaction’ (Feyerabend 1975:17–18), rich in content, varied, many-sided, lively and subtle—may indeed make for neatness, system, clarity, the contentment of order, but only at the expense of a totalizing dogma and a totalitarian depiction (cf. Louch 1966:239).

To adopt an eclecticism of analytical narration and style is to free one’s account from an obsessional Aristotelian combat between battling singularities. In such eclecticism—locating human behaviour in more than one frame of reference at once; locating such (often mutually exclusive) frames of reference in conversation with one another in the text—one finally escapes the notion that epistemic diversity can and should ultimately be ‘resolved’ in terms of a finite limit of possibility (Society; structure) or an ultimately determining and integrating code (God; grammar).

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Eclecticism instanced

In modern physics, methodological pluralism or eclecticism has reached renown as a means of dealing with the mutual exclusivity of theories positing the nature of electrons as particles or as waves—as isolated material entities or as perturbations in a continuous field.The ‘reality’ of electrons is attested to by the plurality of explanations of which it admits (cf. Devereux 1978:1–3).A direct corollary of this in anthropology might concern the dispute between theories of meaning. Is meaning a function of (isolated) individual intention at a particular moment, and an act which can wilfully alter or subvert any collective system that grounds it? Or is meaning a (continuous) collective fact, deriving from culturally determined codes and textual mechanisms which transcend particular volition?

An anthropological eclecticism of analytical style would allow for such mutual exclusions, as well as others one could name—instance versus category, performance versus competence, event versus structure, subject versus object—and more plural oppositions as well— functionalism versus symbolic interactionism versus Marxism versus structuralism versus post-modernism—all to appear within the same text. Indeed, analytical eclecticism would insist that this were the case: that a text be constructed out of a conversation between different epistemic realities.

For instance, in her account of contemporary Chagga social life— 500,000 people living on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro—Sally Falk Moore (1987) is cognizant, above all, of the ‘fact’ that the events of local life are not coherent instantiations of shared, pre-existing structures (normative, conventional, grammatical), rather they are revelations of multiplicity and indeterminacy, contestation and change. Hence, Moore determines that the ‘event’ of her text should not be characterized or informed by any single mode of knowing or interpreting. She decides to construct her anthropological narrative around the analysis of three ‘chopped-off anecdotes’ (1987:734) which were told her (concerning the transfer of land), and to process (to converse) between and among their overlapping themes: the meaning of good and evil; the competition over a scarce resource; the contested powers and weaknesses of church and state. What the conversation of her text elucidates is that ‘like a sunburst’, the anecdotes can be seen to lead in all directions. They are shot through with ambiguity, with ‘a contiguity of contraries’. Every anecdote carries concomitantly antithetical messages, every theme open to contradictory interpretations; every statement made by their protagonists, or by her, their reporter, could be shown to have kinds of

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