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

MYTH

The dilemma of anthropology: the study of phantom realities

As Shweder has argued (1991b:52–6), the anthropological dilemma is that we study phantom realities, other peoples’ creations and constructions of reality. We look at their culture, their ritual, their myths. All are understood by us as belonging to the world of the imaginary. Like narrative, and as narrative, they are fictive.Words, song, ritual and the postulates of myth, all are to be viewed with mistrust, and indeed as illusory in contrast to the real, objective world of physical nature (we know that the rain which fertilizes the crops is water, not the urine of the creator god). As Shweder notes, the paradox of our work is that a large part of our task is to translate for our readers the world as the ‘native’ understands it. The humanist, Collingwood, taught us (1940) that the creation of skilful history requires the historian to make the effort to understand the minds of other times. Like good Collingwood historians, our chore is to get into other people’s heads in order to perceive the universe as they understand it. At the same time, we are also Western academic specialists, who have inherited the Enlightenment materialist world-view. The great divide in Western theory of nature and culture ever raises its head. In the materialist example, nature is real, objectively knowable, while tradition (because of its subjectivity and diversity) is unnatural, and therefore unreal. One route that has been taken by anthropologists to escape the materialist predicament has been to reduce the cultural to the ‘hard’ facts of the natural. With this solution, we have the assumption that demons and gods have no relation to reality, while, for instance, laws of thought (which are of nature) are real, and therefore can be objectively known—the Lévi-Straussian solution.

It is this materialist world-view that creates real problems for the project of anthropology (cf. Shweder 1991b). Our view conflicts with the one we study. Another people’s interpretation is that they are presenting to us their own true postulates of reality (rain really is the supreme deity urinating). For the Piaroa of the Venezuelan rain forest, what we call ‘myths’ belong to a genre of what they call ‘old talk’, or ‘before-time speech’, to be contrasted to the ‘new talk’ of today. ‘Old talk’ is true talk, and the richer the language of the myth-chanter, the more complex the metaphoricity, the truer it is—and the more powerful. The Piaroa express their strong conviction, not only in the existence of spirits and gods, but also in the efficacy of these beings. The chanter’s intention is, through ‘mythopoetics’, to display knowledge of cosmology, of the cosmogonic events of creation-time history, and in so doing to

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cure illness and prevent it—and also to generate the fertility of people and the land and forest around them. The chanter of myths therefore demonstrates a deep knowledge of ontological matters, and also considerable power in dealing with them (Overing 1990, 1995). The methodological issue for anthropologists is how to reconcile these two contradictory concerns, that of translating as they understand, and that of how we understand (cf. Shweder 1991b).

Roy Wagner (1991) challenges anthropology to rid itself of the divisions of subjectivity and objectivity, to refuse the politics of doubt inherited from Enlightenment writers that leads us to distrust other people‘s certainties. As Wagner asks, how do we verify a poem? Or the design on a canoe paddle? How can we understand other people’s point of view and experience in the world if our gaze is filtered through what we believe is ‘the cool, aseptic skepticism of a scientist contemplating a world of stubborn fact’ (Wagner 1991:40)? For the Piaroa, the postulates of their ‘old talk’ are not only illuminating of everyday experience (Overing 1995), but they are also knowledge about the world. It is on this point especially that the materialist stance works against the anthropological task of understanding the judgement of knowledge made by others who patently hold different premises about existence in the world than those acknowledged by materialists.

Some new directions: from logos back to mythos

Myth and the poetics of everyday life

There is an increasing interest within anthropology to rectify the deletions and excesses of high functionalism and structuralism, along with their materialist-cum-rationalist world-view. The trend is to stress the foremost importance of understanding cultural expression, including the mythic, from indigenous points of view. As Malinowski observed (1926:18), for people who engage with mythopoetics, myth is ‘reality lived’. Many anthropologists now wish to understand the context of the use of myths in everyday life, their performative value as entertainment, as pedagogy, cure and explanation—and as evidence of knowledge and a rich poetics (cf. Brady 1991a;Turner and Bruner 1986). Anthropologists have only recently begun to pay attention to the central role of the poetic, performative side of myth in everyday life. In much of the modernist discourse of anthropology, where attention was focused upon grand theories of structure, society, or thought, there was a clear demotion of the status of the everyday. The land of the daily life, that drab place where women cook and babies cry, was of no consequence

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(Overing 1999). In contrast, a prevalent stance today is to recognize the salient connection of myth, poetics and aesthetics to everyday lived experiences (e.g. Witherspoon 1977; Brady 1991b; Guss 1989; Overing 1989, 1996b).

The writings of Dell Hymes (1981) on the poetics of the mythic narration of Native Americans are a ground-breaking endeavour for the enterprise of understanding everyday poetics. He unfolds the wellelaborated poetics of Native North American narrations, a poetical form neither recognized nor expected by anthropology in the past (‘primitives’ cannot have poetics!). His methodology is one that he frankly labels as ‘structuralist’, but it is a formalism that only hints at a precedent of French hue. In Hymes’s hands meaning is carefully contextualized to capture its culturally specific values, ones that are also attached to the individual narrator‘s style and intent. Style, individual performance and the dialogics of performance, entertainment value and a moral point of view—all of these elements are necessary to understand the grammar, the co-variation of form and meaning within the poetics of Chinook mythic narration. Here, context and performance, as in Greek mythos, are essential to meaning.

Nowadays more anthropologists are asking about the role of myths in the framing of much of daily practice, and about the relation of the poetics of myth to indigenous understanding of the everyday. In other words, the emphasis is more upon the conscious use of myths through which basic (conscious) postulates of reality are also expressed, and as such made constitutive of everyday practice. At the same time we are questioning (as did Lévi-Strauss) a representational view of myth, the idea that there is any one-to-one relation between the myth and social structure. Myths and mythic narration are more complicated than that, in that they are often more a reflection upon reality than a reflection of it. As the ancient Greeks understood, myths have the capability of delivering a shock, they inspire laughter and tears, all toward the end of providing greater insight. Roy Wagner suggests that mythic narration is a creative way of standing outside of convention. In other words, myths play an innovative role in dislocating conventional orientations through a process he refers to as ‘obviation’ (Wagner 1978:255).

Indigenous knowledges, and the reality of the really made up

Many anthropologists, such as Taussig (1993), are today looking at the reality of the really made up. It has become, for instance, steadily more obvious to Amazonian specialists that they can understand everyday behaviour of Amazonian peoples only by also learning how they

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understand and use the mythic. In other words, indigenous judgements are at last being taken seriously. The argument of Lévi-Strauss that the reality postulates of myth have no relevance to the real world refers to that actuality which is known and charted by the natural sciences.There is little reason why we should expect the two to coincide—the indigenous and the scientist’s realities, since we could not but agree that in indigenous metaphysics many of the basic propositions about modes of being in the world are at variance with many of those assumed by biologists and physicists. However, do we need then to conclude that indigenous peoples in their mythology have got it ‘wrong’? Our current dilemma is just this uncertainty about what it is that we wish to include in any real world. This is in contrast to the perspective of Lévi-Strauss who was more certain about such matters.

Nevertheless, current received wisdom more or less accepts two basic ‘rules’ for mythic interpretation: the acceptance that (1) myths express, evoke, explore and deal with, if not directly at least consciously, a people’s reality postulates about the world, and (2) mythic truths pertain more to a moral, evaluative, or significant universe of meanings than to a ‘natural’ one (in the sense of the physical unitary world of our scientists) (Overing 1995). Increasingly, anthropologists are also accepting a third dictum, namely, that knowledge is not tied solely to reason and the material world of natural law. Rather, there are many types of knowledges: among others there are empirical, rhetorical and metaphoric, social, moral and aesthetic knowledges (cf. Goodman 1978). It is time that the power of actors thinking as social and moral beings is accepted as knowledge about the world of human sociality (Overing 1985b). For those educated within a Western tradition, myth is a strange place indeed to discover ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’. Nevertheless, even the most absurd of happenings, at least within Amazonian myths, has its moral and ontological implications for what it means to be a human alive today on this earth (see e.g. Overing 1985d, 1997 on the Piaroa myth telling of the day they lost their blue crystal anuses and genitals— and thereby acquired social knowledge).

Amazonian myths typically often stress modes of power. Since myth concerns the adventures and battles of heroes or gods constructing the universe in which we live, it inevitably pertains to the mighty forces of creation and destruction which have allowed for our particular humanity, and those of our enemies of whom we must beware. Often tales of great moral complexity, these mythic episodes deal with the multiple faces of power that relate to a people’s images of selfhood. They state sets of identity criteria for a people and a community.Thus we find that myths of identity are equally myths of alterity, or significant otherness; for to

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state identity is also to speak of difference, for example between sensual and intellectual might, or the potency of the gun versus the power of thought. The images of identity and alterity that play such an important role in myth have obvious political as well as social implication. Myths are usually expressive of particular political visions that distinguish the relative worth of an array of modes of power. In these schemes the appropriateness or monstrosity of specific modes can usually be clearly spelled out (Overing 1996a). The Piaroa myths of alterity become a means through which the narrator explores the ambiguity of the human condition. While the root metaphor for alterity in Piaroa discourse is that of ‘the cannibal other’, such an image can hardly preclude in any absolute manner the Piaroa themselves.As eaters of animal flesh, they too are predators of the jungle. In the Piaroa highly egalitarian ontology of existence, predators are the prey of their own prey.Their mythic stress is upon the human predicament itself, and thus upon the absurdities and evil as well as the positive strengths of human power.

The Piaroa, who are very attached to their myths, live within a ‘meaningful’ universe, which contrasts with the unitary, objective, universe of the Western scientist. All postulates about reality in a meaningful universe, including those about physical reality, are tied explicitly to an evaluative universe. For example, personal malevolence, for the Piaroa, is ultimately the cause of all deaths. It is normal among the tropical forest peoples of the Amazon for postulates about ‘physical reality’ to be constitutive of other postulates which are social, moral and political in scope. This is why a main concern in anthropology today is the power of actors thinking as social and moral beings, and not as physicists.

The fact that indigenous postulates about reality are consciously not decontextualized from social, political and moral concerns, and thus from everyday practice, is not a trivial matter (Overing 1995). One methodological issue, especially pertinent for our understanding of other peoples’ mythology and mythic narration, is that local meta-physical postulates about reality (e.g. sorcerers exist, as do gods; time does not flow only in a linear fashion) should not be interpreted in the same light and in accordance with the same standards as those of physics. Since they are incommensurable, have distinct concerns, and belong to separate histories, they require different standards of judgement. Or another way of putting it, is that myth and physics can equally well be treated as particular types of local knowledge. We could at the same time happily argue that one set of postulates is just as true of reality as the other. However, the expertise associated with each set deals in the main with differing aspects of reality.

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See also: Alterity, Consciousness, Culture, Qualitative and

Quantitative Methodologies, Science, The Unhomely, WorldMaking, World-View

NARRATIVE

Conveyed variously by way of language, image and gesture, human narratives are ubiquitous.They are to be found in myths, legends, fables, tales, novels, epics, histories, tragedies, dramas, comedies, mimes, paintings, films, photographs, stained-glass windows, comics, newspapers and conversations. Humans may be said to: dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, believe, doubt, plan, gossip, revise, remember, anticipate, learn, hope, despair, construct, criticize, hate and love by narrative (cf. Hardy 1968). Human beings, Roland Barthes concluded (1982:251–2), are ‘narrating animals’, since: ‘narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society…. [N]arrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.’

Notwithstanding this, narrative is one of a number of concepts which have gained prominence in anthropology primarily since the literary turn of the 1980s. Its study has accompanied an increasing appreciation within anthropology of the practice of ‘writing’ social reality, both by the subjects of anthropological study and by anthropologists themselves.

A definition of narrative

For a definition of narrative, one might turn to Kerby (1991:39): ‘Narrative can be conceived as the telling (in whatever medium, though especially language) of a series of temporal events so that a meaningful sequence is portrayed—the story or plot of the narrative’. A narrative account involves a sequence of two or more units of information (concerning happenings, mental states, people, or whatever) such that if the order of the sequence were changed, the meaning of the account would alter. It is this sequentiality which is used to differentiate narrative from various other forms of conveying and apprehending information about the world: from the general abstraction of ‘theory’, the momentariness of ‘feeling’, the simultaneity of ‘sensation’, the semantic vault of ‘metaphor’, and the elemental fixity of the ‘model’.

Narrative is also understood as giving onto a particular way in which the world is ordered and understood: temporally. Narrative is the form of human representation concerned with expressing coherence through time; it provides human lives with a sense of order and meaning within

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and across time. By describing an orderly developmental sequence of events (etc.) temporal expanses are made meaningful.

Thus, narrative can be said to transform the potential discord of humanly experienced time: the experience at once of fragmentation, contingency, randomness and endlessness. But more than this, narrative makes time an aspect of socio-cultural reality; time becomes human in being articulated within a narrative sequence. Time comes to have a certain texture, a way of its being humanly experienced, due to its being home to and punctuated by a certain flow and development of events.

Again, an eventful sequentiality is key. Narrative provides a way of temporally experiencing the world by the way it records and recounts, defines, frames, orders, structures, shapes, schematizes and connects events. A beginning, a middle and an end is a common structure for events to come to possess, then, and this unitary closure assists the transformation of an inchoate sense of formlessness in experience. Furthermore, ensuring sequentiality between events also assures human lives of direction and growth. At the least, as Barthes put it (1982), what is narrated is ‘hemmed in’.

The ubiquity of narrative

This makes of narrative a powerful tool, a means of eschewing the experience of fragmentation and of structuring the world over time; narrative is an instrument of doing as well as saying. Moreover, since narration presents an account of how the world is, it also represents a site of possible contest. For one narration of the world can be seen to repress or replace or otherwise obscure preceding or alternative ones. Perhaps it is the power of narrative to create temporal order coupled with the potential of narrative continually to offer new versions of that order which makes narrative so universally pervasive in human life.

Rendering experience in terms of narrative is seen as a meaningmaking activity which dominates much of human practice, and (as Barthes and Hardy have noted) as taking many forms. Besides those listed above, then, writers have made distinction between real and imaginary narratives: ‘histories’ as distinct from ‘novels’ (Nash 1994); also between more and less consciously written and finished narratives: histories, novels, biographies and autobiographies which we work-up to a polish as distinct from the less conscious narratives of everyday circumstance in which we live on an ongoing basis (Kerby 1991); and again between sacred and profane narratives: ritual re-enactments of mythic, stylized, conventional and communal events, in an allusive, dramatic, corporeal language, as distinct from mundane articulations of

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commonsensical reality which people tell one another and themselves by way of gossip (Crites 1971). In short, within the same narrative form (and with similar power and potential) can be found a plurality of types of ‘referential commitment’—epistemological, logical, make-believe, etc. ‘Writing’ narratives helps us to make sense of the world, but we can be aware of different kinds of possible relations between that narrated world and the actual one we live in, and maintain any number of relationships, intellectual and emotional, to the particular narratives we have made.

The argument is also made that the ubiquity of human narration, the human ‘readiness or predisposition to organize experience into a narrative form’ (Bruner 1990:45), tells us something significant about human consciousness. Consciousness can itself be seen as an incipient story, and narrative as the form of its own experiencing; past, present and future are the inexorable modalities of human experience. Our present consciousness absorbs the chronicle of memory and the scenario of anticipation into a layered narrative which guides and also absorbs our present actions; in the narrative of our consciousness, action and experience meet too.

We humans are temporal beings, in short, with our perceptions, understandings and identities embedded in an ongoing story. Our conscious lives constitute dramas in which our selves, our societies and our reference groups are central characters, characters whose significance we interpret even as we live out their stories: ‘[N]arratives are a primary embodiment of our understanding of the world, of experience, and ultimately of ourselves…. It is in and through various forms of narrative emplotment that our lives—…our very selves—attain meaning’ [Kerby 1991:3ff.]. This is a never-finished project, and our conscious lives are taken up with self-narrating, with continuously rewriting, erasing and developing the definitions of our own stories.

The socio-cultural derivation of narrative

If narrative mediates our conscious human experience as individual sentient beings, then further argument surrounds the question of whence such narrative derives. Is it primarily socio-cultural in origin or individual? Many commentators have plumped for the first option, emphasizing the way that extant narratives precede the birth of particular individuals and influence, if not cause, their coming to selfhood. The self arises out of signifying practices, the argument runs; contra Cartesian or Judaeo-Christian notions of autonomous mind or soul, the self does not exist prior to its being represented. Hence, the self is given content, is delineated and embodied, primarily in narrative

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constructions or stories. What we understand as individual persons are simply the result of ascribing ‘subject status’ or selfhood to those ‘sites of narration and expression’ which we call human bodies (cf. Kerby 1991).

In large part, this narrative history is self-mediated; the self is a reflexive being which comes into being through its own self-narrating. In other words, individuals become human persons by means of participating in a narrative history of themselves (and to the extent that they are seen to do so).We tell the story of our lives, from the point of view of a first-person narrator, and through this description and emplotment actually create our individuality. Through our telling, in a public language, our lives emerge into meaning and reality. Furthermore, our lives maintain their coherence only to the extent that we continue to narrate them. We understand ourselves and know ourselves insofar as we construct narratives of and for ourselves which develop over time, which possess internal coherence and accessibility: we must present our stories well to ourselves.

Of course, the sense that we have of our self-identities as continuous also depends on the story we tell ourselves, and can be seen to be ethnographically variable. Over and above the fluidity and mobility which narrative identity affords—the temporal dialectic which speaks to process and change in ways that more fixed ascriptions of identity, derived from structure or substance, do not (cf. Ricoeur 1996)—use of that fluid potential will vary. It might be that one lives in a series of fragmentary, discontinuous narratives and takes oneself to be a different character at different times (to have a multiple personality). And it might be that self-scrutiny and self-narration is more of a marginal concern; there are other stories with which one is more involved (collective ones, sacred ones) and only at rites of passage or at times of personal crisis does one turn one’s attention to the narrative of one’s particular life.

However concerned the individual is with the narrative of self, and however coherent the result, the above line of argument is assured that social and collective practices of narration are the source. The stories individuals tell of themselves are seen as being influenced by the vocabulary and grammar of the language in which they are expressed, by the broader cultural conventions of context, style and genre of expression, and by the other stories in circulation. In this way, individuals come to consciousness within a conventional narrational context, and within a narrational space which they are expected to occupy Indeed, even their self-narrating represents them becoming conscious of stories in which they have been narrated before their birth. Individual selves have been narrated from a third-person perspective long before they gain competence to narrate their own first-person ones. Hence

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individuals produce second-order stories of themselves which intersect with numerous preceding first-order ones. Indeed, even individuals’ most personal stories are but segments of other stories: parents’, kinsfolk’s, enemies’, strangers’.These other narratives set up expectations and constraints on an individual’s own; at least they contribute significantly to the material from which the latter narratives derive, and at most they cause an individual’s own narrative identity as such. As Barthes concludes (1982:293), drawn from ‘the centres of culture’, individual narratives amount to nothing but ‘a tissue of quotations’.

Within this line of argument, much anthropological work has gone into an examination of the narrative stock which a society or culture can be expected to possess (its classificatory forms and genres, its conventional structures and typical contents), the norms regarding its use, and the functional consequences of that use.Analogous to Propp’s (1968) analysis of the conventional morphology of the Russian folk-tale and Lévi-Strauss’s (1969b) analysis of South American myth, then, Labov (1972) identifies six elements of universal narrative structure: an abstract, an orientation, complicating action, an evaluation, a resolution and a coda. Barthes (1982) theorizes that all narrative contains different structural levels, specifically a horizontal plot-line in contradistinction to vertical points of punctuation into which alternative possibilities of character and action are slotted. In any particular socio-cultural setting, Greimas continues (1983), listeners will know not only the story presented to them but also reflect on the alternatives which were passed over. Any narration thereby alludes to much beyond itself—both sociocultural situations and other narratives. In fact there are four components which will be present in any narrating situation, Bruner suggests (1990): time or sequentiality, narrative voice or ‘agentivity’, narrative structure or canonicality, and point of view or perspectivity. It is in an operation of contextualization, Genette explicates (1980), by which relations between these components of the ‘narrating situation’ come to be fully elaborated, that a sufficient analysis derives. Indeed, as Georges concludes (1969), the content of the narrative, the performance, the listeners and the knowledge, the interpretive procedures and aesthetic mechanisms which they bring, the setting, the use of the narrative to persuade or to negotiate social relations, rights or whatever, all add up to one ‘storytelling event’.

The consequences of such events are seen to be that members of a society or culture come to share the same ways of organizing, presenting and remembering information, and so knowing the world.The narrative stock of a culture is thus seen as embodying what are socially recognized to be typical behaviour patterns. This will also involve assumptions for

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