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

NARRATIVE

and constraints on sense-making: on the forms in which social knowledge is conventionally acquired and stored. It will further provide a framework for understanding the new, laying the grounds of future intelligibility. In short, modes of narration are seen as determining collective modes of perception, of the encoding of information, and of its remembrance and recall; in sharing the knowledge to produce and read narratives in a particular way, members of a cultural group will share ways of thinking about, of framing, schematizing, and memorizing, experience, and will thus come to share a collective memory (cf. Werbner 1991).

As Bruner concludes (1990:96): ‘[t]o be in a viable culture is to be bound in a set of connecting stories’. Indeed, what cannot be narrated in terms of conventional frames and categories is either forgotten or is highlighted (routinized) as an exceptional departure from the norm. Rendering the exceptional (or even new) as deviant in this way, canonical patterns come to be reaffirmed; the exceptional is explained and simultaneously explained away. Finally, this is said to afford the narrative event a moral aspect or component. The deeply internalized narrative conceptions connect with and find support in other cultural institutions so that to focus on norms and deviations from the culturally canonical is inexorably to treat moral consequences and to adopt a moral stance. It is within a narrative understanding that moral reasoning in a particular socio-cultural setting is situated and developed.

To sum up the argument for the socio-cultural determination of narrative and narration, it is said that we perceive, anticipate, remember, tell stories and moralize from them in conventional ways. Through our narrative acts we create meaning out of experience, but only in terms of pre-existing and prescriptive categories. We can but narrate ourselves in and into socio-cultural space. Even in our autobiographies, ‘the ultimate function…is self-location…in the symbolic world of culture’ (Bruner and Weisser 1991:133).

The individual derivation of narrative

What the above line of argument appears to overlook or underplay is the uniqueness of individual experience, the complexities of subjectivity and the rich subtleties of the relationship between form and meaning. On this view, whatever the seeming habituality and longevity of narrative forms, the individuals partaking of them (animating them by their mental and bodily, verbal and behavioural presence) willy-nilly find themselves cognitively apart from those forms as such.

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That is, within the conventional forms of narrative, its cultural patterns of framing, organization, recitation, interpretation and evaluation, an individuality of meaning is an inevitable product. For, what participating in and performing narratives inexorably give onto are personal interpretations and understandings; individuals impart these forms with meaning which derives from unique perspectives on the world. Hence, individuals create space for themselves beyond the formal surfaces of public and collective performance. However much their narratives might be inspired by living in a particular socio-cultural environment, however much their medium might be a public and collective system of signification, and however much their structure might borrow from a conventional intertextuality, still individuals create something particular to themselves.

The ongoing engagement with narrative thus amounts to a way of proceeding actively through life, fixing personal moments of being and giving them meaning. Indeed, narrating a meaningful life and at the same time enacting the stories which they narrate make of individual lives works of art, whose character (complexity, beauty, closure) derives from a specific consciousness. Through narrational performances, conscious selves come to be maintained: selves with pasts, presents and futures; selves with world-views and identities; selves with relations and possessions; selves with knowledge, self-consciousness and understanding.

In short, the construction of personal meaning in individual narratives exhibits an originality and artistry which places them beyond the overdetermination of the language in which they are written, the collective, public forms which they employ; they are affected by these latter, in varying measure, but in no wise effects of it (cf. Rapport 1998). Through the performance of narratives, individuals write and rewrite the story of their selves and their worlds, and while the means of doing this is a bricolage of largely inherited cultural forms—words, images, behaviours—it is not society or culture which they embody so much as individual agency and consciousness. Narrative form becomes personalized in use, and individuals continue to write stories which depict their own world-views. Narrative comes to express nothing so well as the unique and undetermined nature of the lives lived through them.

Narrative hospitality

With the recent literary turn in anthropology, an evaluation of the conventions and responsibilities of disciplinary narratives, as well as an

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experimentation with new narrative possibilities, has increasingly been a feature of anthropologists’ work (cf. Bruner 1986). There has been a concern both to overcome cultural assumptions (of singularity, authority and integration) which accompanied earlier narrative practices, and to benefit from the narrational potentialities of engaging with others in a situation of interpretational pluralism.An anthropological appreciation of narrative can be seen to have a number of practical consequences.

Life experiences may remain ‘inalienable’, Ricoeur has argued (1996), so that we cannot directly share in those of others, but using imagination and sympathy we can hope to reach out to others via our stories. We already do this for fictional and mythical characters with whom we identify in the course of a narrative telling, and we do this for ourselves as we retell our own stories and hence (re-)configure our pasts, presents and futures. In the same way, Ricoeur suggests, we may take responsibility for the stories of others and exchange with them our own.

The work of realizing the experiences of one another through our narratives is no easy task, but it is nonetheless vital. Indeed, generously extending ‘narrative hospitality’, in Ricoeur’s terms, might be seen to be a primary ethical requirement for a world of movement and a shrinking globe. This hospitality entails at once making space for one another’s narrational identities, and allowing for such identities to be fluid and plural, and matters of perspective.We must reach out for the narrated identities of others; we must expect such identities to be ongoing and changing; we must allow our own narratives and identities to be likewise retold by others; we must allow one another to reconfigure valued narrational forms in the fashion of alien logics. In this way, while not eschewing the temporal sequences of which narratives are made up, or the stories in which identities importantly reside, we can work towards achieving a space of generously plural reading. In such a hospitable ambience individuals, as world-travellers (even world-citizens), might feel free to exchange their most cherished stories, trying on one another’s for fit.

See also: Consciousness, Discourse, Literariness, Moments of

Being, Myth, Writing

NETWORK

It is said that the idea of a network for conceptualizing the connections and interconnections between individuals moving within and among different socio-cultural milieux came to John Barnes whilst

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undertaking fieldwork in a village of Norwegian fishermen (1954). The location is significant for understanding the history of anthropological theorizing. Kinship relations, ‘genealogical method’, and structural-functional assumptions of socio-cultural holism had predominated in the periods of anthropological study of distant, ‘exotic’ peoples. Once anthropology began to pay attention to its home environments (the Euro-American ‘West’), the types of modelling it had seen fit to employ and impose elsewhere (collectivism depersonalizing, distantiating) no longer passed muster. Too much was known, and known experientially, to talk convincingly of ‘Norwegian [à la Tallensi] descent systems’ or ‘Norwegian [à la Sherente] structures of marital exchange’. The focus in network analysis is on individuals and their relationships, and there is an emphasis on personal behaviour and experience, on choice, action and strategy. As explained by one of its early exponents, Elizabeth Bott (1964:159), a network of friends, neighbours, relations and particular offices and institutions conveys an appreciation of the ‘primary social world’ and the ‘effective social environment’ of individuals who may occupy the same physical space but live in different experiential worlds.

A concise definition is provided by Whitten and Wolfe (1974): ‘a relevant series of linkages existing between individuals which may form a basis for the mobilization of people for specific purposes under specific conditions’. An appreciation of the social-structural as a ‘contingent mobilization’, and of the patterns of interpersonal relationships within a socio-cultural milieu—their formation and mobilization—as revealing the moments, range and character of that social structure, represents a radical departure from anthropological analyses which begin with notions of socio-cultural systems as overarching and a priori.

Attempts have been made still to treat the network model in evolutionary terms: as a methodology pertaining to the Western, the complex, large-scale and urbanized in the same way that more structural analyses (of descent, alliance, hierarchy and equilibrium) fit the traditional, rural and communitarian (cf. Sanjek 1978). However, this is to set up an unwarranted (dualistic) opposition between the way people act and interact in different socio-cultural milieux; individuals do not go about negotiating and developing relations in an ontologically different fashion because they live in rural as opposed to urban, or small-scale as opposed to large-scale environments, and so on (cf. Goody 1977:8). Whatever the differences in formal discourse (kinship, say, as opposed to neighbourhood or occupation), the way individuals form relations with one another, and their logics for doing so, are comparable among the Tallensi, the Sherente and the Norwegians.

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To regard the network model as pertaining only to certain (evolved) socio-cultural milieux is also to miss out on its full power and versatility (cf. Mitchell 1974; Boissevain 1979; Johnson 1994).The model is able to map an enormous variety of types of relationship, and network theory has concerned itself with demarcating, for instance: single-stranded relations and many-stranded, dense relations and rarefied, tightly knit and loosely knit, more clustered or overlapping or zoned relations and less so. Rather than evolutionary anchors, these have been explored in terms of individuals’ different situations and purposes (cf. Barnes 1978). From types of relationship arise different types of social groups: from egocentric to amorphous, from specific-purpose organizations to longerlived associations, from behaviourally consensual to diverse, from those employing face-to-face dynamics to those more impersonally instituted (cf. McFeat 1974).

Network analysis is further able to tackle the old canards of the dichotomies between what informants say as distinct from what they do, and what is actually done as distinct from what is done ideally. Hence, in a celebrated study, Boissevain (1974) charted the Maltese networks claimed by a number of individuals on the island in comparison to the people whom they actually saw and engaged with on a regular basis; the 638 people claimed as part of a network of consociates by one individual translated into 128 regular interlocutors. In Bott’s (1964) study of family networks in London, meanwhile, the ideal-typical relations and roles between spouses and kin were seen to be influenced if not offset by actual relations which individuals enjoyed in the personal networks which they maintained. Echoing the famous distinctions suggested by Firth (1951) between ‘social structure’ and ‘social organization’, and by Leach (1961b) between statistical and formal analyses, then, network analysis is able to provide (statistically significant) portrayals of individuals’ actual behaviour—group membership as determined by the intensity of connectivity between individuals, or role-adoption as determined by the parts frequently played by individuals within a matrix of social relations. The development of computers has significantly enhanced the potential of this kind of mathematical modelling (cf. Hage and Harary 1983; Schweizer 1988).

Finally, inasmuch as, topographically speaking, the network model consists of points or nodes and the cross-cutting lines which connect them, the points and lines have also been treated metaphorically: to represent organizations, places and times as well as people, and flows of information and commodities as well as social relationships (cf. Sanjek 1974). So long as this does not eventuate in another style of reification (so long as the decision-making and agency of individuals remains the

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model’s driving force), network analysis can in this way provide subtle and humanistic interpretations of the workings and interconnections between socio-cultural institutions.

See also Gossip, Interaction, Transaction

NON-PLACES

Marc Augé (1995) has suggested the notion of ‘non-places’ as a corrective to certain conventional conceptualizations of social milieux which are no longer persuasive. For Auge, the Durkheim—Mauss orthodoxy of ‘societies’ identified with geographical locations, in which are to be found representative role-players or ‘persons’, who belong to behavioural ‘cultures’ conceived of as complete wholes, can now be seen to represent an ideological conceit which had led anthropology up a blind alley. To construe a consistency and transparency between culture, society and the individual fails to provide a convincing account of the processes of identity and otherness.

No anthropologist could ever have been unaware of the contingency of socio-cultural ‘places’; the image of a closed and self-sufficient world (of relations, identity and history) was never more than an instrumental semi-fantasy, a provisional myth, even for those who worked (whether inside the academy or without) towards its collective materialization. However, the organization of space etc. upon which the ideology rests is one which the world today comprehensively and irrevocably refutes. For, the measure of modern life is of movement, networks, and situations of interaction, taking place on a global stage and much in terms of ‘nonplaces’; here are a proliferation of transit points and temporary abodes where individuals engage, without essential ‘cultural’ mediation, with global processes. In waiting-rooms, wastelands, building sites, refugee camps, stations, hostels and hotels, malls, thousands of individual itineraries momentarily converge as travellers break step. In these spaces individuals are at once alone and one of many; non-places are ‘palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten’ (Auge 1995:79).

Of course, ‘non-places’, too, can be construed as an ideology, no less partisan than traditional ‘places’; while fixity, social relations and cultural routine (groups, gods and economies) can be seen to continue to reconstitute themselves in the world. But non-places serves the purpose of exploding the normative singularity of place; so that place and non-

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place represent contrastive modalities, the first never wholly constituted, the second never completely arrived at. The possibility and experience of non-place is never absent from any place, with the result that no place is completely itself and separate, and no place is completely other.

See also: Home and Homelessness, Movement, Network,

Situation and Context

POST-MODERNISM

‘[T]he will to a system is a lack of integrity’, Nietzsche once aphorized (1979:25), and there is a sense in which anthropology has always agreed. Anthropology has often felt ‘uncomfortable’ as a ‘discipline’ of study, desirous of being ‘non-specialist’ (Bateson 1959) in order to tackle the complexities of experience in socio-cultural milieux. In its representing of socio-cultural realities, furthermore, anthropology has pursued the polemical end of ever abnormalizing its discourse so that new possibilities can be constituted for thinking about human experience: ‘constantly [building] up the conditions from which the world can be apprehended anew’ (Strathern 1990a:19). To this extent, anthropology has long practised as a ‘virtual anti-discipline’ (Hart 1990:10).

In another sense, however, anthropology has seldom agreed with Nietzsche’s counsel. For in any number of its paradigmatic manifestations—functionalism, structural-functionalism, structuralism, Marxism, ecologism, cognitivism, interpretivism—achieving a holistic analysis of a phenomenon conceived of as a whole—a society of institutions, a culture of representations, an environment of symbioses, a mind of schemata—has been anthropology’s founding, abiding and guiding ideal.

Much ‘post-modern’ thinking represents a fantasia on Nietzschean themes—‘the bread and wine of modern philosophy’. (The origin of the term ‘post-modern’—or one of the origins, at least—is said to be Charles Jencks’s (1977) characterization of a style of contemporary architecture which offered a juxtaposition of different styles without attempting an overarching integration.) And in the same way that the relationship between anthropological practice and the above Nietzschean aphorism is an ambivalent one, anthropology’s relationship to post-modernism is ambivalent too. Beginning with the writings of three of post-modernism’s noted figures, this will become clear.

What should also become apparent is the difficulty of assigning ‘a particular shape’ to the relationship between anthropology and post-

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modernism at all—and again, the very post-modern nature of that ambivalence and that uncertainty. For thinking that takes as its cue the notion that ‘a will to a system is a lack of integrity’ is immediately caught up in a possible reductio ad absurdum. One seeks to avoid systematizing, because to will a system is to delimit and lack—to lack integrity (moral and ontological)—and yet to go about eschewing systems is itself systematic. So for post-modernism to have ‘a nature’ is for it to stop being post-modern.All that is left is its reactive character: post-modernism is not a thing but a reaction to things and thingness. In particular, postmodernism is a reaction to the propositions of thingness set out by ‘modernism’: of Western, Enlightenment conceptions of reason and rationality, objectivity and truth, scientific method and the progress of history and knowledge, individuality and liberal-democratic advance.

Lyotard

In The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1986), JeanFrançois Lyotard describes the superficiality, the fragmentariness and the multiplicity of contemporary socio-cultural life and practice.We live in a world where there is a proliferation, even an excess, of ways and forms of knowing, speaking and gaining ‘truth’, Lyotard begins: from science to religion to consumerism to popular culture to multi-culturalism. Each makes its own claims, posits its own values, but we are at a loss to know how to judge between them so as to grant one a superior legitimacy. Hence we arrive at no single, overarching truth, no definitive answers to our questions: is there a God? is there scientific certainty? is there artistic transcendence? is there an escape from unequal relations of power? is there an end to colonialism? In a world of excessive claims and information, we have lost faith in singularities. Not any longer knowing how to hierarchize different claims to knowledge and privilege one above others, we instead possess a ‘flat’ collection of types of knowledge all of which compete for our attention and among which we network, sample and drift. Each type of knowledge represents an island of determinism, its own irreducible world of order (or disorder), its own brand of (knowledge-)product, and we are travellers, shoppers, consumers amongst them. We use types of knowledges in a piecemeal and parallel fashion, trying them on for size in different situations, appreciating their usefulness for particular purposes, but not adhering exclusively to any one or believing in its overarching validity.This gives our lives a certain fragmented character.We live in episodes of particular ways of knowing but these do not last. Moreover, between our different episodes of knowing particular things in particular ways there is no

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necessary sequentiality, no real consequentiality. ‘Things’, as the (Yeatsian) title of Chinua Achebe’s famous novel has it, ‘fall apart’, and we lead lives of contingency, chance and overriding uncertainty.

This lack of a single guiding telos to our lives, a grand or ‘metanarrative’ of knowledge, identity and aspiration, Lyotard sees as an archetypically twentieth-century problem. It did not, for example, trouble Marx (Lyotard is a lapsed Marxian), for whom a distinction between truth and ideology or false consciousness was clear. After Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, however, we now recognize how all truth is discursive: a matter of conventionally normative fit between elements in a language-game. Furthermore, it is not something that particularly worries us; ‘problem’ is perhaps the wrong word. For we have no great nostalgia for meta-narratives or overriding truths, and probably would not recognize one as such a creature at all. We do not feel alienated by our loss (even if this was the abiding sentiment during late modernism), and are not shocked by a rule-less and directionless world which lacks a foundational moral sense. As post-moderns we simply live with our senses, and we do not attempt to make sense once and for all. The keyword is ‘eclecticism’: ‘eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and “retro” clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter of TV games’ (Lyotard 1986:76).

Baudrillard

According to Jean Baudrillard (1989), modern culture has entered a Western-spawned age of consumerism and consumption (as opposed to the Marxian, modernist one of production). Furthermore, instead of the useor production-value which commodities might possess in being able potentially to satisfy our basic needs, the value of commodities now derives from what they symbolize, from the images they conjure up. Commodities become encoded objects in a system of potential symbolic exchange, whose ownership we imagine as affording the possibility of being party to any number of communications and being identified with all manner of effects.

As in an age of production, however, this continues to be a wholly alienating situation. Delivered and developed by mass media with which it is impossible to engage or negotiate, the images of commodities contaminate and corrupt our lives in a number of ways. First, the images alienate us from reality and from any hope of accessing reality; so predominant and dominating is the world of images that we lose the

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ability to gain a perspective on our representations of reality as mere representations and to see beyond them. Instead, the images become our reality, and we lead lives of simulation surrounded by simulacra which never touch real referents. Images produce our world—absorbing any ulterior reality to themselves, appropriating reality to their ends—so that, for instance, television soap-operas become our social arenas. Our selves become merely terminals in multiple networks of moving images. Secondly, the world of images is alienating because mass media now so dominate their functions that the ‘message’ disappears; images become examples of pure form without any content at all. The form of the image becomes its meaning, and the world of images is a ‘hyper-real’ one which lacks all depth.

If we have lost control of our consumption of meaningless images, lost the distance and perspective necessary to make real meaning, or see real causes, or partake in a real history, then perhaps the only escape is into (image-less) meaninglessness. If all consumption of images is ideological, then the only route beyond the alienation of a false consciousness lies in the dissolving of Western culture and its systems of signs per se. And Baudrillard borrows from ‘ethnography’ to suggest how such escapes might seem. For instance, there is a ‘beyond’ Western culture, to be found in ecstatic seduction and sex, in unpredictable challenges and adventures, in meaningless catastrophes and disasters, in transcendent poetry, and in death, and there is a ‘before’ Western culture to be found in heterogeneous primitive systems of exchange. What is liberating about these latter is that as ‘total prestations’ (Mauss 1954), the items of consumption and exchange are non-monetary and non-liquid; so that a relational value between the participants (in the kula, in the potlatch) is uppermost. If such otherness can be preserved, then there might yet be an escape from Western imagism.

Foucault

Because we live our lives in terms of an exchange of images, symbols and signs which are themselves commodities of anonymous signifying systems (linguistic tokens), the real is ever epistemologically bracketed off from humanity, Michel Foucault claims (1991). We can never access reality directly, only through codes, ways of speaking and thinking, ‘discourses’, specific to cultural epochs. These codes or discourses, moreover, are less transparent media which provide windows onto underlying reality than creators and guarantors of specific realities. And such is the power of the unconscious workings of discourses upon the minds and bodies of those who are taught to employ them that such

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