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

MOMENTS OF BEING

we are necessarily always conscious of this, however. Rather, the conscious momentariness of our lives derives from our momentarily stepping back and forming mental images of what is to come and what has passed; we image momentary snapshots of past and future occasions. As Woolf described it in the case of emotion: ‘one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past’ (1980:18 March 1925).

Furthermore, it is rarely the ‘official’, collective moments of crisis or celebration which are the crucial ones in personal experience. Instead, the moments which we look back on and forward to, the moments by which we experientially age, achieve their significance through judgements and criteria particular to the construer. Hence: ‘it’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses’ (Woolf 1978:82). The individual experience of individual lives seldom runs to institutional design.

Finally, if we construct individual moments of being, if we ever live in discrete experiential units, of time, of self, of individuality per se, then equally, such moments are a constant, for we are never not being in a moment of some kind and degree or other. Our lives may turn on moments of greater and lesser significance, but our reflection on our lives is never non-momentary (or non-momentous) and hence the moments of our lives are eternal.

Socio-cultural time

In the social-scientific literature, the particularity to the West (the cultural and historical specificity) of cutting up the passage of time into moments of progression is well attested (cf. Gell 1992). At least since the Enlightenment, it is explained, Western culture has, unusually, imaged time as inexorably linear: stable, unrepeating and oriented towards a becoming: an ‘evolutive’ time. Such notions, indeed, are said to inform the very (deep-structural) bases of Western society; from neatly and constantly sectioned intervals of varying duration, timeliness comes to impose a certain ‘discipline’ on everything from the individual body to the institutions of state (Foucault 1977:151).

Hence, the experience of discrete temporal moments echoes equally discrete moments in ontological experience: we are babies, then infants, children, adolescents, adults and, finally, old-aged. We see time cut up into regular, precisely measured and constantly applied units of greater and lesser duration, and we see society segmented into a hierarchy of social levels and social beings of greater and lesser inclusivity. As seconds

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are parts of minutes, of hours, days and so on ad aeternitatum, so individuals are parts of families, of neighbourhoods, clubs, churches, communities, ethnic groups, nations and confederations which become larger and larger. As minutes can seem to amount to hours, so heroic individuals can seem to represent entire communities; as hours can appear to pass in minutes, so lifetimes of whole societies and epochs can appear as ephemeral as morbid individuals; and so on. Temporal sectionalization and progression, in short, can be seen to mirror the conceptualization of stages of a life-cycle and components of a social hierarchy (cf. Gellner 1998:3).

The same effect is said to pertain in societies and cultures where time is circular or cyclical rather than linear, or possessed of some other rhythm. What is significant is that time always has a rhythmical (and hence momentary) quality and that, in Durkheim and Mauss‘s influential formulation (1970), it is seen as a representation and a manifestation of a conscience collective. As with other socio-cultural distinctions, that is, time can be seen as emanating from ‘the collective mind’ of society, and thus as coming to ‘express’ the socio-cultural milieu in which it is practised (Durkheim and Mauss 1970:85, 66).The rhythm of temporal distinction penetrates the individual members of a society or culture and instils a pervasive ‘anatomo-chronological schema of behaviour’; so that a correct use of time (thinking in momentary terms) precipitates a correct use of individual body and mind and the way they are conceived of (cf. Mauss 1985).

Moreover, the more temporal division is refined, it has further been argued, the more detailed the partitioning of experience into moments of individual being, so the more the activities of that individual, their stages, development and elaboration, may be subjected to detailed government. Foucault (1977) thus charts the rise in militaristic eighteenth-century Prussia of a modern, highly detailed structuring of time, an increasing refinement in the conventional recognition of minute temporal intervals, as that which also comes to determine an entire disciplinary regimen or discourse within which individuals live. Indeed, Foucault would tie in the genesis of this conception of time (the fetish for chronometry and timetabling) with the invention of the modern Western individual (and its ‘cult status’) as such. In the moments of being of an individual’s life, then, time may be seen as a social-structural, functional and ideological imposition which places that individual— body and being—within a collective social framework at once totalizing, integrative and disciplinary (1977:150–60).

In short, the social-scientific account of temporally sectionalized lives—lives classified into moments and statuses—has generally been

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impersonal and collective. A homology is posited between the structure of a society and the cognitive structures of its (individual) component parts, brought about by time’s obligatory rhythm.

Phenomenological time

What is significant in Woolf’s account of moments of being is its centralizing of the experiencing individual. She might live in moments as formal units of time just as those around her, and she might deal with these units as conventional forms in her interaction with others, but the experiential time of her life, notwithstanding, she construes and maintains independently of, and most likely differently to, others. Ultimately, the significant moments of her life are hers alone.

What makes these moments of being are encapsulation and juxtaposition. Moments make moments, in short, a viewing of the times of one’s life from across an experiential boundary, from another time: one interaction, one holiday, one generation, status or identity, from another. The act of juxtaposition replaces a flowing continuity of lived-in time (an unconscious immersion within it) with a detached observation of it. Furthermore, since moments are constructed from outside, from across a boundary, their significance, their existence as ‘moments of being’, as moments at all, also varies according to the particular vantage-ground. Moments of being are contingent, therefore, upon their particular differentiation, connection and comparison with others.

What makes moments of being more or less significant is their felt intensity; also their unexpectedness as experiences. In comparison with the moments which juxtapose or encapsulate them, far more has happened within them. Here are, in Fernandez’s words (1986:xi), ‘moments of a sudden constellation of significances’ which become ‘“revelatory incidents’”. There are crests to experience and there are troughs, in other words; and here too there is contingency. For, only afterwards, looking back on significant moments of being, can their heightened intensity (emotional, intellectual) be seen at some point to have begun and to have stopped. As moments and as intense experiences, moments of being are contingent upon individual acts of post facto construal.

In short, if it is a collective shadow which tends to fall across much contemporary social-scientific accounting of time, then ‘moments of being’ also calls attention to an individual phenomenology of experience over and against its formal sectionalization. As Woolf’s contemporary, E.M.Forster, phrased it: ‘man does not live by time alone’ (1961:199); the significance and resonance of the experience of time is individually variable and not appreciable simply in terms of its external, measurable

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proportion.True enough, homologies can be drawn between the way we image social time in the West, say, and our image of individuals as components of society: between the logics of Time and Society as discourses in common usage. Notwithstanding, such formal overlaps between discursive logics do not necessitate cognitive overlaps, nor demand that these overlaps be used or experienced in a particular way. Human behaviour, after all, is less a matter of the formal properties of socio-cultural institutions such as discourse than of occasions of their individual interpretation.

What is evidenced ethnographically, then, is less the conventionality of temporal experience and its division than its personalization (cf. Crapanzano 1980; Campbell 1995). Individuals make their own significant moments, which are not necessarily others’, nor even ones others are aware of as significant or as moments at all (cf. Rapport 1994a: 156–88). The morphological logic is no guide to the sense that is derived from it: the formal conventionalities of Time and the Individual in no measure point to the embedding and control of the former discourse in the latter’s consciousness. Indeed, an emphasis on moments of being identifies those nature and the processes which make for an individual control over time; by conceptualizing their lives in terms of significant moments, moments of greater and lesser intensity, individuals gain a certain purchase upon their temporal experience. For, the idiosyncrasy and privacy of their moments of being, the fact that they do not involve collective participation or entail collective acknowledgement, mean that the moments become theirs to run and rerun, classify and reclassify, juxtapose and rejuxtapose, model and remodel, as they will; they become resources for facing the future (cf. Wallman 1992).

To cut up a life into moments of being, in sum, is for the individual to possess a means by which that life can be filled, shaped and reshaped in significant ways.

See also: Cognition, Individuality, Narrative

MOVEMENT

Movement conceptualized as a mode of human being ramifies into all manner of arguments concerning socio-cultural life and identity. The contemporary importance of the concept is forcefully stated by Paul Carter (1992:7–8, 101):

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[I]t becomes ever more urgent to develop a framework of thinking that makes the migrant central, not ancillary, to historical process. We need to disarm the genealogical rhetoric of blood, property and frontiers and substitute for it a lateral account of social relations…An authentically migrant perspective would, perhaps, be based on an intuition that the opposition tween here and there is itself a cultural construction, a consequence of thinking in terms of fixed entities and defining them oppositionally. It might begin by regarding movement, not as an awkward interval between fixed points of departure and arrival, but as a mode of being in the world.

Anthropological fixity

Paradoxically, perhaps, what has been conventionally assumed in anthropology is a relationship between identity and fixity. In the promulgation of essential cultures, societies, nations and ethnic groups (embodying ways of life which were coherent, homogeneous, and more or less long-lived), the traditional anthropological understanding has been that the cognitive environment in which human beings undertake their daily routines is a fixed one—if not stationary then at least centred.

Hence, anthropologists have come to depict environments as normatively fanning out around the perceiver in concentric circles of greater and lesser degrees of consociality, with the perceiver at the perspectival centre: from house to lineage to village to tribe to other tribes, perhaps (Sahlins 1968:65). A language of classification has been seen to place the speaker reassuringly at the centre of a social space and fan out from there: from ‘self’ to ‘sibling’ to ‘cousin’ to ‘neighbour’ to ‘stranger’, perhaps; or else from ‘self’ to ‘pet’ to ‘livestock’ to ‘game’ to ‘wild animal’ (Leach 1968:36–7). To be at home in an environment, in short, has been to situate the world around oneself at the unmoving centre, with ‘contour lines of relevance’ in the form of symbolic categories emanating from this magisterial point of perception (Schuetz 1944:500–4).To know (oneself, one’s society), it was necessary to gain a perspective on an environment from a single, fixed and homogeneous point of view.

Even if the subjects were nomads, their myths were regarded anthropologically as making of the environment through which they passed a known place, an old place, a proper place, not only fixed in memory but to which their belonging was stationary because permanent, cyclical, normative and traditional; cognitively, they never

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moved. And even if the subjects engaged in ritual journeys outside everyday space and time—rites of passage; pilgrimage; vision quests—in search of sacred centres to their lives (Eliade 1954:12–20), these antistructural events served in fact to fix them even more; as special, extraordinary, aberrant experiences, the rituals merely emphasized and legitimated an everyday identity which derived from fixity in a social environment. Ritual pilgrims used their moments of (imagined) movement to establish routinely fixed orientations to a world around them (cf. Yamba 1992). Similarly anti-structural and marginal, finally, were the passages undertaken between status-groups by individuals in hierarchically organized societies (between classes, between professions, between age-grades), for here was movement whose experiential purpose, whose successful conclusion, was eventual stasis. As Lévi-Strauss concluded, myths should be understood as machines for the suppression of the sense of passing time and space, giving onto a fixed point from which the world took and takes shape (1969b:14–30); a conclusion Leach then extended to ritual acts in general (1976a:44).

In short, under this traditional anthropological dispensation, movement was mythologized as enabling fixity. As cultures were rooted in time and space, so cultures were seen to root societies and their members: organisms which developed, lived and died in particular places. Finding a stationary point in the environment from which to engineer one’s moving, perceiving, ordering and constructing was regarded as a universal necessity. Movement and travel, as Auge quipped (with Lévi-Strauss in mind), was something seemingly mistrusted by this anthropology to the point of hatred (1995:86).

Movement and identity

Of late, however, there has been a conceptual shift in the norms of anthropological commentary.As Keith Hart begins (1990), socio-cultural fixity and stasis no longer persuade; the world is not divisible into framed units, territorial segments and the like, each of which shares a distinctive, exclusive culture, a definite approach to life. There are no longer traditional, bounded cultural worlds in which to live—pure, integrated, cohesive, place-rooted—from which to depart and to which to return (if there ever were), for all is situated and all is moving. Human society is fluid and inclusive, such that ways of life ‘increasingly influence, dominate, parody, translate and subvert one another’ (Clifford 1986:22). There is a complex movement of people, goods, money and information—variously depicted as: ‘modernization’; the growing global economy; the migration of information, myths, religions, icons,

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languages, texts, entertainments, imagery, cuisine, décor, costume, furnishing, fashions, above all, persons (Geertz 1986:120–1); the new technologies of communication and ‘knowledge engineering’ exploding distinctions between localities, and between the local and the global (Schwartz 1987); the induced, often brutally enforced migrations of individuals and whole populations from ‘peripheries’ towards EuroAmerican metropolises and Third World cities (Chambers 1994a:16)—all of which causes even the most isolated areas to belong within a cosmopolitan global framework of socio-cultural interaction. As Hart concludes: ‘everyone is caught between local origins and a cosmopolitan society in which all humanity participates’ (1990:6).

In this context, John Berger makes the argument that movement around the globe be regarded as ‘the quintessential experience of our time’, while emigration, banishment, exile, labour migrancy, tourism, urbanization and counter-urbanization, are our central cultural motifs (1984:55; cf. Minh-ha 1994:13–14). Being rootless, displaced between worlds, living between a lost past and a fluid present, are perhaps the most fitting metaphors for the journeying, modern consciousness: ‘typical symptoms of a modern condition at once local and universal’ (Nkosi 1994:5).

To bring different contemporary forms of movement together in this fashion, as Berger does, furthermore, is not inevitably to essentialize movement: to claim ‘it’ is phenomenally somehow always the same, or sui generis. Movement remains a polythetic category of experience: diverse, and without common denomination in its particular manifestations. Nor is it to underrate either the forces eventuating in large-scale population movement in the past (famine, plague, crusade, imperial conquest, urbanization, industrialization), or the forces arrayed against movement in the present (restrictive or repressive state or community institutions, state or community borders). To talk about the ubiquitous experience of movement is not to deny institutionalized power and authority, nor the differential motivations and gratifications in that experience which hierarchy might give onto. Rather, what Berger draws our attention to is the part movement plays in the modern imagination, and in our imaging of the modern; ‘[m]ore persons in more parts of the world consider a wider set of “possible” lives than they ever did before’ (Appadurai 1991a:198). Movement is the quintessence of how we—migrants and autochthones, tourists and locals, refugees and citizens, urbanites and ruralites—construct contemporary socio-cultural experience and have it constructed for us. Wandering the globe, as Iain Chambers puts it (1994a:16), is not now the expression of a unique tradition or history; for the erstwhile particular chronicles of diasporas—

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those of the black Atlantic, of metropolitan Jewry, of mass rural displacement—have come to constitute the broad ground-swell of modernity; modern culture is practised through, and the work of, wandering.

Anthropological movement

In this context, anthropology has had increasing recourse to ‘write movement’. Through such concepts as ‘deterritorialization’ (Appadurai 1991a), ‘creolization’ (Hannerz 1987), ‘massification’ (Riesman 1958), ‘compression’ (Paine 1992), ‘hybridization’ (Bhabha 1990), ‘interreferencing’ (Clifford 1986), and ‘synchronicity’ (Tambiah 1989), it has sought to comprehend the processes that movement effects in sociocultural milieux—and so to apprehend the relations between movement and identity.

This may be exemplified in the work of Drummond (1980), Hannerz (1987) and Paine (1992). For Lee Drummond, the culmination of some 400 years of massive global migration, voluntary and involuntary, of a continuous traffic in capitalist commodities, can be seen to have transformed most societies. However, the result of these transformations is neither new integrations of what were once separate societies and features of societies, now fitting neatly together as one, nor pluralities whereby old separate societies simply retain their cultural distinctivenesses side by side. Rather, what results are socio-cultural continua or combinations: ‘creolizations’. Rather than discrete social spaces with their own discrete sets of people and cultural norms, societies are basically Creole in nature: combinations of ways of life, with no invariant properties or uniform rules. A series of bridges or transformations lead across social fences and cultural divisions between people from one end of the continuum to the other, bridges which are in constant use as people swop artefacts and norms, following multiple and incompatible ways of life. Here is a world in which there are now no distinct cultures, only intersystemically connected, creolizing Culture: a ‘concatenation of images and ideas’ (Drummond 1980:363).

For Hannerz, the traditional picture of human cultures as forming a global mosaic must now be complemented by a picture of ‘cultural flows in space’, within a single field of persistent interaction and exchange (1993:68). Through mass media, objects of mass consumption, and the mass movements of people, culture now flows over vast distances; here is a continuous spectrum of interacting forms, which combines and synthesizes various local cultures and so breaks down cultural plurality; indeed, it may be better to conceive of culture tout court as a flow.

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Nevertheless, any new ‘world system’ results not in socio-cultural homogeneity but a new diversity of interrelations: many different kaleidoscopes of cultural combinations, amounting to no discrete wholes, only heterogeneous and interpenetrating conglomerations. For people now draw on a wide range of cultural resources in the securing of their social identities, continually turning the erstwhile alien into their own; they make sense to themselves and others by selecting from amongst a global inventory of behaviours and beliefs, ideas and modes of expression. Hence, each locality partakes in a global collage, a ‘Kuwaiti bazaar’ (Geertz 1986:121), and speaks in a stuttering, creole voice (Chambers 1994b:247). ‘[W]e are’, in short, ‘all being creolized’ (Hannerz 1987:557).

For Paine, however, such global movement among and between cultures is neither smooth nor is it singular. With individuals making different cultural selections and combinations—different from other individuals and different from themselves in other times and places; different in terms of particular items and their relative weighting, and different in terms of the willingness, loyalty and intensity of the selection—and with individuals combining cultural elements which were not just previously separate but are still incommensurable, so global movement can be expected to be volatile. Advocates of different selections, furthermore, can be expected to be exclusionary if not hostile. At the same time as there is globalization, therefore, and movement across the globe, between societies and amongst cultures, as never before—people treating the whole globe as the cognitive space within which they can or must imagine moving and actually do move, the space which they expect to ‘know’—there is also ‘cultural compression’ (Paine 1992): an insistence of socio-cultural difference within the ‘same’ time and space; a piling up of socio-cultural boundaries, political, ritual, residential, economic, which feel experientially vital, and which people seek to defend and maintain. A dialectic is born (not to say a Batesonian schismogenesis) between global movement and local compression. So that even if travel is ubiquitous, and one is ‘at home’ on the entire globe, to travel within one’s home is to encounter a world of socio-cultural difference; even to stay home is to experience global movement (cf. Featherstone 1990).

Moving from Drummond to Hannerz to Paine in this way is not to meet perfectly commensurable expositions of the contemporary world, then.There is disagreement over the extent to which a globalization of culture results in an ongoing formation of boundedness around social groups, as well as disagreement concerning the extent to which this globalization is experienced as colonial or post-colonial—as the

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imposition of a particular cultural way of being-in-the-world as opposed to the opportunity to constitute and reconstitute the set of cultural forms which go to make up ones lifeway (cf. Appadurai 1990). More significantly, there appears to be divergence concerning whether the thesis linking contemporary movement and identity is a historical one or a representational one. In particular, Drummond is happy to talk in terms of four centuries of change, while Paine’s central motif is a comparison of could-be anthropological representations between E.M.Forster and Salman Rushdie.The historical argument would seem to be the harder one to make, and would also seem prone to the kinds of grand-historical reductionism which characterized conventional anthropology in its traditional dispensation (from ‘fixity to movement’ as from ‘mechanical solidarity to organic’, from ‘community to association’, from ‘concrete thought to abstract’, from ‘hierarchy to individualism’). Certainly, the history and archaeology of frequent and global movement make generalizations about the uniqueness of the present foolhardy.

Movement and methodology

Where Drummond, Paine and Hannerz do meet is in a recognition of the contemporary significance of movement around the globe—its universal apperception, its ubiquitous relationship to socio-cultural identities. Now we have ‘creolizing’ and ‘compressing’ cultures and ‘hybridizing’ identities in a ‘synchronizing’ global society; there is a sense in which metaphors and motifs of movement are of the quintessence in the conceptualization of identity. Identity is seen as forming ‘on the move’: a ‘migrant’s tale’ of transitions and heterogeneities (Chambers 1994a:24).

‘Settled arrangements’ in socio-cultural milieux were always a story, Geertz admits (1995:15–16), and things were always actually fluid and multiform. What is different now is that we recognize our traditional categories of comparison—‘parts’, ‘norms’, ‘practices’ and ‘wholes’—and the master-plots and grand pictures of culture they gave onto—causal forces shaping belief and behaviour to a generalizable, abstractable pattern—as impossibly illmade and unworkable. What is called for, therefore, is representation more attuned to hints, uncertainties, incompletions and contingencies: ‘swirls, confluxions and inconstant connections’. Whether in folk commentary or in social-scientific, the personal myths and rituals that one carries on one’s journey through life (that carry one through a life-course) need not fix one’s perspective on any still centre outside one’s (moving) self

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