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

AGENT AND AGENCY

forms of social life and its creative processes provides the dynamic of cultural history.

For Burridge, the very same dynamic pertains to the world and writing of social science. Individual creativity provided the apperceptions which made an anthropological world-view possible, but then routine anthropological analysis tends to fix, objectify, generalize and institutionalize its socio-cultural object. Individuals become transformed into persons, events into categories, and the continuous vicissitudes of life into a constraining and stultifying, logical and orderly structure.

It has seemed, therefore, that individual creativity has remained a submerged strand in anthropological elucidation, drowned out by socialstructural rigours and demands. The latter, especially in their ‘deep’ French manifestations (Lévi-Strauss, Godelier, Dumont), but also their ‘conventional’ Anglo-Saxon ones (Radcliffe-Brown, Fortes, Gellner), have been seen as more or less sui generis mechanisms which determine relations between elements of a society—indeed, to an extent determine those elements (their being and behaviours) tout court (cf. Park 1974). Individual agency has come to be buried under the vast weight of the collectivity. But then, contemporary ethnography, and a disinterring of a line of thought (from Bateson to Leach and Barth,Turner and Burridge, and on) which recognizes (à la Existentialism) an intrinsic agency to human being whereby individuals possess the power to be self-caused and free, does serve as a corrective.

For example, defining creativity as ‘human activities that transform existing cultural practices’, activities that, courtesy of a ‘creative persona’, emerge from traditional forms and yet move beyond them and reshape them (Rosaldo et al. 1993:5–6), the volume Creativity/Anthropology (dedicated to Victor Turner) brings together cases of creative ‘eruption’ from different societies and cultures: the !Kung (Shostak), for instance, the Cochiti (Babcock), and Asturias (Fernandez). Here is social structure understood as ‘discursive idiom’ (Jackson 1989:20): a shared language which may provide the basis (the form) of individual interpretation, which may articulate, mediate and typify individual experience, but which cannot be taken at face value as encompassing, capturing or determining that experience (cf. Parkin 1987:66). Social structure, here, is not sui generis, and does not exist through inertia; it depends on the continuing, conscious, concerted activity of different individuals to intend, produce and sustain it (cf. Holy and Stuchlik 1981:15–16). Furthermore, social structure does not inexorably give rise to homogeneity, stability, consistency or communication. As a discursive idiom, a fiction, it is always subject to creative interpretation, to

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individualmanipulation and re-rendering, to ‘alter-cultural action’ (Handler and Segal 1990:87).

In this way, anthropology has begun more concertedly to fill in the gaps in the ethnographic record of relations between convention and creativity, social structure and individual agency.

See also:Consciousness, Individuality, Transaction, World-Making

ALTERITY

The concept of alterity has only recently, in the 1990s, acquired an important place within the vocabulary of anthropology. This more general acceptance of the notion of ‘otherness’ as a major concern for anthropological consideration comes in the wake of innumerable writings over the past two decades that have been seriously engaged in a critique of all those grand ‘isms’ of modernist thought (evolutionism, functionalism, structuralism, and so forth) that are implicated in Western civilization’s imperialist and capitalist past. A striking characteristic of this literature is that it consistently blurs the boundaries normally held between such disciplines as philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history. For instance, the writings of Zygmunt Bauman, a ‘sociologist’, are relevant to all the neighbouring fields of study within the human sciences, and also those of literary and cultural studies. Two very interesting and significant results of such crossing of disciplinary boundaries are that (1) unless one is ‘in the know’ it is often very difficult to pinpoint the author’s disciplinary attachment, and (2) the traditional boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities are being systematically dissolved. The reason for the latter is that the primary resolve of this recent talk about ‘alterity’—about, in other words, the concept and treatment of the alien objectified other—is to shake the foundation of the objectifying thrust of the human sciences, along with all its claims of scientific authority and objectivity.

Anthropology and the imperialized other

By definition anthropology’s primary object for study has been the Western imperialized other (while sociology has had the task of objectifying the West’s own internal subaltern classes).Thus, as anthropology is the academic discipline most overtly involved in an objectified imagery of otherness, it has become the obvious target of much post-colonial critique (e.g.Asad 1975;

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Said 1978;Thomas 1994;de Certeau 1997;Bauman 1995;Fabian 1983).The incorporation of the concept of alterity into anthropology itself reflects a strong contemporary awareness within the discipline of the iniquities of its past, its own particular programme of scientific objectification. It must face its own centrality in the provision of constructions of otherness central to the vision of modernity (cf. di Leonardo 1998). Having lost its innocence, anthropology is now in an ‘age of self-reflection’,a process through which it often joins other post-colonial voices in a critique of the grand narratives of modernism. This exercise of addressing the past engagement of the discipline (whether naive or otherwise) in the creation of colonial agendas can be painful, especially when addressing what the political implications of some of our narratives of otherness have been for the great majority of peoples who have been marginalized in the name of the dogma derived from them. One thing is certain.The programme of decolonizing our ways of thinking about otherness means that the anthropology practised today is not the same as yesterday’s.

The irony is that because of its historical expertise in the study of otherness, its specific voice can be a strong one raised against the dark side of colonialist excess. It has strengths unparalleled by other traditional fields of study, except perhaps history, in that it understands the importance of the particular, and thus the local, over against the universalist and the global. Anthropologists contextualize specific lifeways by keeping intact the systems of values and practice to which each is tied. Careful anthropologists do not usually go around making global, universalist sweeping statements. The cultural relativism of anthropology has been subjected to major attack by all those defensive defenders of universalist modernist models of human nature (cf. Hollis and Lukes 1982), and conversely praised by defenders of more humanist, perspectival concerns (MacIntyre 1985; Taylor 1985). Ever since Malinowski‘s famous work with the Trobriand Islanders in the South Pacific in the second decade of the twentieth century, the claim has also been that a major aim is to understand ‘the native’s’ point of view, which provides, it would seem, a multi-perspectival framework for all analysis and conclusions. In other words, anthropologists should know well how to understand the perspective of the other, and to refrain from creating a fantasized other easily digestible for Western colonialist and scientific consumption. So where did things go wrong?

The birth of anthropology and Europe’s intellectual climate

The fact is that anthropology had its birth as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during what we might

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label the height of modernist thought—and at the apex of Western imperialist endeavours. Modernist and imperialist ways of thinking about things go very deep, and since anthropology could but be the child of its times, the intellectual and political climate of those times is deeply implicated in its own development. This is why present-day anthropology is mainly involved in a scrutiny of its own discourse on the primitive other, an ongoing deconstruction of its major concepts toward the end of uncovering the intellectual effects of the imperialist, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, and the practical, political implications of them.

The brand new science of anthropology was faced at the turn of the century with the necessity of claiming its own intellectual space, over which it could be the guardian of truth and objectivity. It needed to produce its own object (cf. Fabian 1983). It was Malinowski, cited above as the promoter of ‘the native point of view’, who set the standards, the rules and norms, for modern ethnographic writing. Ethnography is the recording of an ethnos, and, as Peter Mason phrases it (1990:13), ‘a form of translation and reduction’. ‘All ethnography’, he goes on to say (ibid.), ‘is an experience of the confrontation with Other set down in writing, an act by which that Other is deprived of its specificity’. He notes that such writing conforms to particular stylistic and literary conventions. It must meet certain expectations. In producing a discourse on the Trobrianders, ‘Malinowski was creating a work which is of the same substance intellectually as, say, James Joyce’s Bloomsday’ (Mason 1990:13; cf. Ardener 1985:57). Thus there is a sense in which ‘the Trobrianders’ as presented through this discourse do not have empirical reality, for, being the product of the ethnographic scientific discourse, they are but fiction.

The rhetorical genre which Malinowski created led to what Mason calls (1990:13) ‘the naturalist or realist’ monograph. It was a form of anthropological writing that was followed throughout the period of modernism, which Ardener (1985) situates between 1920 and 1975 for anthropology. In short, this realist genre through which the ethnographer presented his or her object (as an example of the West’s colonized other of the South Pacific, Africa, or Australia) followed the naturalist pattern set by other studies of nature, those of the flora and fauna of far-flung parts of the world. Mason quite rightly classifies (1990:6, 15–17) ‘the objects’ of such studies of humans as the stuff of imaginary worlds, or the world of myth. Through the realist rhetoric of the anthropologist, the Trobrianders were naturalized, and thereby belong to one of those worlds transcended by modern civilization to be marked as an uncivilized part of nature, something which, to the

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modern spirit, was to be dominated and tamed. To objectify is to naturalize, and therefore to create distance between self and the object, whether it be animate or inanimate, human or stone.This ability of the scientist to move away from and transcend the object of enquiry is a measure of its arbitrariness, and thus lack of reason (cf. Bauman 1995:163).We see then that anthropological realism is not an innocent, value-free task, for it is a highly coloured presentation of a very specific kind. As such it is a creation of ‘the reality of the other’, and not a representation; as a creation it has its own ‘reality effect’ (cf. Mason 1990). Such presentations acquire their special signifying power by taking their place within a network of other imaginary worlds also created in the modernist spirit by the rest of the human sciences as they made their fit with the natural sciences. Within all these fields of human studies our own historically contingent and local values, truths and practices were usually raised to absolute principles from which all deviance was judged, dismissed, or, even worse, ignored. For example, the eighteenth-century value upon a particular type of logic and reasoning became the defining attribute of human nature.

Eurocentrism and the inferiorization of excluded others

It is probably a truism that all peoples are ethnocentric. It is also more than likely that ethnocentric constructions of the stranger always follow a process through which alterity is reduced to a familiar form that is easily accessible to self. All systems of otherness are structures of identity and difference that have more to do with the establishment of self- identity than with the empirical reality of the other—whether their neighbours, trading partners, enemies, conquered peoples, or spirits that populate other worlds. This does not mean that we should consider all ethnocentrism or concepts of difference as the same, or as following an identical structure. Strangers might often be considered monsters; but peoples’ concepts of the monstrous are not only splendidly diverse, they also have considerably different implications for the ways in which the self can interact with them. In all systems of alterity there is at least some interplay of the principles of inclusivity and exclusion which together provide the rules and norms for such interaction. In this play, the nature of the boundaries designating otherness varies tremendously from one people to the next: for some, who give weight to inclusivity, they are highly permeable, while for others they are rather rigid, which speaks of a more exclusivist set of values.

The literature on Western systems of alterity is now enormous, for Western civilization’s treatment of the other throughout its modernist

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phase of development and expansion is the mainstay of all postcolonialist writings today. The stress time and again is that Western creations of difference and images of otherness are products of a process of exclusion (e.g. see Todorov 1987; Pagden 1982; Hulme 1986; Mason 1990; Lindqvist 1996 [1992]; Bauman 1995; Corbey 1991; Karstens 1991; de Certeau 1997; Duerr 1985; Fardon 1995a; Hiller 1991a; Thomas 1994; Said 1978; Bhabha 1994). The exclusivist ideology, which assumes the superiority of self vis-à-vis all others, is a very good strategy through which to disempower others. In the writings of Todorov, Pagden and Hulme, we have been presented with highly interesting discussions of the development during the conquest of the Americas of the European imagery of, and discourse on, the ‘radical otherness’ of the New Worlds indigenous peoples, especially those of the Caribbean and Amazonia. In colonial discourse the populations of the Americas appeared for the most part as the exotic and pathological antithesis of what the conquerors thought themselves to be.Through a principle of inversion, the difference between self and other was understood to be absolute. The most virulent argument for the inferiority of the American Indian was given by the lawyer, Sepúlveda, in his debate conducted in Valladolid in 1550–51 with the priest, Bartolomé de Las Casas, on the question of whether the indigenous peoples were human (see Hanke 1959; Pagden 1982:117–18; Mason 1990:52–3). Sepúlveda’s characterization of the Indian was of a creature who was child-like, irrational, savage and incontinent as an animal, to be contrasted with the adult, rational, cultured, tame (gentle) European. Through the principle of inversion, the cultures of America became defined as an ensemble of negations to be contrasted with the civilized and cultured society of the developing ruling classes of Europe.

An insightful observation of Mason (1990: Ch. 2) in his discussions of Eurocentrism is that the imagery of the exotic that was used for the American Indian was but a projection of the imagery signifying both lack and excess already in use by the European upper classes for their own internal other. In other words, the Europeans, in conquering the Americas, in particular Amazonia, fixed the status of Native Americans at the level of the lower echelons of their own society, placing them alongside the Jew, the mad, the wild, the child, the peasant, the Gypsy and the witch. Incorporated into this language of alterity used to characterize both domestic and foreign European others was the rich imagery of the non-European monstrous and fabulous races depicted in Greek and Roman travel lore and described in Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, a text that had great appeal throughout the Middle Ages and that also

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enjoyed considerable popularity during the sixteenth century (Mason 1990: Ch. 3). The imagery of the brutish giant—the naked, bestial, and cannibalistic wild man—along with his cohort, the sexually profligate, cannibalistic wild woman especially caught the imagination of medieval Europe.These images, applied to Europe’s internal subaltern classes, were transported to the New World and utilized for its inhabitants, as evidenced, for instance, by Sir Walter Raleigh’s giant and headless Ewaipanoma, a people of the Guianas, who Raleigh says had ‘eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts’ (in Mason 1990:108). The image of the sexually deviant and monstrous cannibal heathen (with his or her culinary, religious and sexual perversions) covered both Europe’s internal and external others (Mason 1990:44).

Such ‘inferiorization’ of excluded others became a constant throughout the development of European thought. It developed by the nineteenth century into a unifying discourse upon alterity that was structured further by the increasingly popular language of evolutionism. With its stress upon the progressive move of humankind from the primitive to the civilized, such imagery had clear and powerful implications for the colonial enterprise (Corbey and Leerssen 1991; Lindqvist 1996 [1992]:104). If it can be argued, as Edward Said has done, that the Orient is a product of a Western hegemonic exoticism, the same can certainly be said for Native America as it too became the primitive other to Europe’s civilized self (see Said 1978; Overing 1996a). Anthropology, as evidenced by its technical vocabulary on the primitive, has hardly been exempt from the encroachment of the prevalent European language of exoticism, and certainly not from the rhetoric which signifies and stresses lack. Peter Riviere (1984), commenting on the state of Amazonian ethnography, notes that through it Amazonian peoples are best known, not for what they are, but for what they are not—stateless, with no government, no lineages, no descent groups, no structure, no….

Two solutions to alterity: anthropophagia and anthropoemia

Lévi-Strauss, in the chapter entitled ‘A Little Glass of Rum’ in Tristes Tropiques (1961), discusses the contrast between two solutions for neutralizing the dangers of the other, the anthropophagic versus the anthropoemic strategy (cf. Bauman 1995:179–80). He notes that the first, the strategy of cannibalism, is repellent to Western sensibilities as the most barbaric of all customs. It is, however, a widely spread notion of

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native Amazonia that the powers of the self acquire their human potency only by assimilating the powers of dangerous others (Overing Kaplan 1981). For some Amazonian peoples the process must be literal, through the ingestion of the ground-up bones of a relative (otherness itself is a highly ambiguous state in Amazonia), as among the Yanomami, or the eating of a fragment of an enemy corpse as occurred among the Tupinamba. For others, it is the idea of ‘cannibalism’ (at least from our point of view) that frames their understanding of human life (see Overing 1996a). Thus to marry fits within this structure (one marries a stranger who becomes absorbed physically and socially as kin), as too does the eating of meat and vegetables (they both were human at the beginning of time). The ideal is to assimilate the other, and in order to achieve a life that is human this process of incorporation must be constant.There is the widespread Amazonian message that alterity is the hallmark of this-worldly social living: the achievement of the social state itself, and hence of the world of the interior, requires the force and creative powers of those different from self. Without consuming the powers of others, there can be no fertility and no productive capacity. Such an anthropophagic strategy of dealing with alterity follows the inclusivist route: we incorporate the powers of the other into our own body—and body social.

Lévi-Strauss comments (1961:386) on our own ethnocentrism in being appalled on moral grounds by either actual or ritual cannibalism. To condemn cannibalist practices implies for instance a belief in bodily resurrection, which would be compromised with the material destruction of the corpse. This would be a religious belief of the same order as those in which ritualized cannibalism is practised. He suggests that there is no good reason why one belief should be preferred over the next. Lévi-Strauss also proposes that our own strategies would in turn appear highly uncivilized, repugnant and barbaric to the native Amazonian. He gives as example our own judicial and penitentiary customs which neutralize the powers of dangerous others through a process of anthropoemia (from the Greek emein, to vomit). As Lévi-Strauss says (ibid.), our judicial procedures ‘expel these formidable beings from the body public by isolating them for a time, or forever, denying them all contact with humanity, in establishments devised for that express purpose’. This is the exclusivist strategy, which severs all social links with the other. For the Amazonian this solution is an outrageous denial of humanity.

As a postscript to Lévi-Strauss’s observations, we might add that the West has a history of its own anthropophagic practices, the reasoning for which being very similar to those of indigenous peoples of the Americas,

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i.e. that they revitalize and give health! Medicinal cannibalism in Western medicine has a long history, and was especially popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Paracelsian medical philosophy was followed. According to Beth Conklin (1998; cf Gordon-Grube 1988), Europeans consumed human blood, fingers, hands, fat and liver, bones and bone marrow as treatments for arthritis, sciatica, reproductive difficulties, skin problems. The public executions of criminals were a main source of blood and other body parts—blood drunk from people who died violently was considered especially potent. According to Peacock (1896:270–1, and see in Conklin 1998), epileptics were reported to ‘stand around the scaffold in crowds, cup in hand, ready to quaff the red blood as it flows from the still quavering body’. It is probable that the indigenous peoples of America would have found some of such practices exotically fascinating.Whether they would regard the anthropophagic practice in the West today of transplanting hearts, kidneys, lungs and livers as exotically monstrous is another question.

Inclusivity and exclusivity as political solutions

Overing argues (1996a) that the contrast of an emphasis on either inclusive or exclusive solutions for dealing with otherness can relate respectively to egalitarian and hierarchical political strategies, and to a difference between social philosophies that stress social symmetry and those that are attached to social asymmetry.As mentioned, native peoples of Amazonia were identified with Europe’s subaltern classes. The signifying quality of otherness in Eurocentrism, certainly as it was elaborated as political and colonial discourse, was first and foremost that of inferiority.The gaze was that of the conqueror who took for granted a natural order premised upon conquest and the relations of superordination and subordination that might emerge from it. So extreme was the strength of this notion of the inferiority of the other that the divide between the self and other easily slipped into the opposition of the human and the non-human. The Eurocentric discourse, born within a hegemonic and totalizing rhetoric of hierarchy, is deeply exclusive in its view of humanity. It allows might to the conquerors alone. In contrast, the ethnocentrism of indigenous Amazonian discourse can best be understood as being based upon a rhetoric of equality, and its expressions of alterity are much more inclusive in its categorization of humanity. Here power does not accrue to self alone.

The indigenous peoples of Amazonia have no ‘lower echelon’ classes, and for most of its indigenous social groupings, certainly those of the Guianas, where the persistent destabilization of hierarchy in personal

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relations is the norm, it would be a misconstrual to identify specific social divisions or whole categories of people within them as inferior or subordinate to others (cf. Overing 1993a; Thomas 1982). Since the right to domination is alien to the understanding most native people have of proper social relationships (cf. Clastres 1977), they would not judge external others, even if monstrous, as inferior beings who were therefore rightfully subject to their domination. Instead we find a certain tolerance of difference (as well as a fascination, fear and strong desire for it). Moreover, the boundary between self and other tends to slip and slide; it is difficult to draw, as too is the distinction between human and nonhuman. Among the Piaroa of the Venezuelan Guiana, the root metaphor for alterity in their rhetoric was the lascivious and monstrous cannibal other—a character ironically very similar to the Spanish conquerors’ imaginary other (Overing 1996a; cf. Mason 1990). However, for the Piaroa such an image did not preclude in any complete sense themselves. The ‘cannibal other’ devours people; the Piaroa cook and eat animals and plants which are transformed humans. There is always an ambiguity to the Piaroa language of alterity, for their stress is upon the plight of human existence as might generally be the case (for both self and other), and therefore upon the potential for the irrational and the villainous, as well as the positive strengths in human power; whereas in the European vision evil and danger are usually assumed to come from without, not from within.

It is true that in the nineteenth century, many European authors, influenced by the Romantics’ rebellion against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, also stressed in a positive way the non-rational, emotional and wild aspects of a creative interior self. However, by contrast, psychoanalytic theory was to be put to the service of taming the neurotic, the uncontrolled, aggressive and lascivious beast within. As Raymond Corbey has so convincingly argued in his essay on the role of alterity in the architecture of psychoanalytical theory, Freud’s understanding of the monstrous primal man within civilized man was in accordance with a nineteenth-century discourse on savagery and civilization and its pervasive association of prehistoric or contemporary ‘primitives’ with the wild, the impulsive, the childish and the excessive (Corbey 1991:49). It was a discourse that operated with the same polar opposites used by Sepúlveda in the sixteenth century: the opposition between contemporary and primitive society, culture and nature, man and beast, men and women, white and black, adult and child.These were distinctions used in a privative way (cf. Karstens 1991:78–81). All of the second pole of opposites lack essentially what is of quality in self: women, beasts, primitives and children lack reason, civilization and

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