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

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created realities come to be the predetermined worlds which the latter inhabit. Discourses ‘imprint’ themselves on users’ minds and bodies so that their very beings become prison-houses. This means that human beings are not at the centre of history or in control of their lives, or even of their meanings, but are the ‘effects’ of discourses and particular positions within them. ‘Truths’ are meanings constructed in and by particular discourses, while the very notion of ‘human beings’ is ‘a simple fold in our knowledge’ (1972:115).This also means that there can be no such things as objective knowledge or independent reasoned judgement, or autonomous individual selves, or any world that is not constructed by historically specific cultural discourses. Being, as we are, positioned effects of the anonymous play of these systems of signs, we can have no real subjective inwardness, no imagination, no original perception, no creativity. At best, we are bricoleurs, skilfully operating amongst networks of signs which we did not invent and do not control. What we can mean is a contingent matter dependent upon relations and differences between signs in a linguistic matrix. There is no originality here, only an endless discursive play: of signs relating to other signs in a parodic circle. There can be no escape to reality or an absolute referentiality or a real presence—God or Man—only discursive ‘mimesis without origin or end’.

Finally, inasmuch as we live within (a plurality of) discourses which create socio-cultural worlds and give onto what and how we know about them, discourses are the source of knowledge, and also of great power. Or, as Foucault dubbed it, discourses are the seat of powerknowledge. Moreover, it is within power-knowledge that human beings come to consciousness. To be is to know oneself and the world in a particular way, which is to create oneself and the world in a particular way, which is to deny creating oneself and the world in other ways. Power-knowledge enables and at the same time eschews. There is no way around or outside the power-knowledge of discourse; no way of escaping its effects, but also no way of being except as one of its effects.

The reception of post-modern thinking

Differences of emphasis aside, there are clear overlaps between the above three visions: a going-beyond Marxian notions of power, relations of production and alienation; a sense of the anonymity and unreality of contemporary mass society; a feeling of ‘being spoken’ by languages of commodities and cultural artefacts; a sense of the impossibility of escaping back to a time of clear-cut orders and legitimacies; an awareness of a plurality of lives and worlds which can be known and related

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together only through the power of particular, contingent ‘knowledgepractices’. As summed up pithily by Terry Eagleton (1981:137), such post-modern exponents concur in their:

modest disownment of theory, method and system; the revulsion from the dominative, totalizing and unequivocally denotative; the privileging of plurality and heterogeneity; the recurrent gestures of hesitation and indeterminacy; the devotion to gliding and process, slippage and movement; the distaste for the definitive.

Eagleton‘s description, nonetheless, is of something of which he, writing as a Marxist still, is highly critical. If the individual self of Enlightenment modernism—autonomous, active, free-willed, unified, self-identical—is emptied of psychical inferiority and ethical substance, and dissolved into a network of libidinal attachments—the ephemeral function of this or that act of consumption, media experience, sexual relationship, trend or fashion—then what of the political quietism and compromise that must issue forth from it? Fragmented by institutionalized public discourses such as language, technology and consumerism, into so many pieces of ‘reified technique, appetite, mechanical operation and matrix of desire’, post-modernism can only supply actors whose deepest ‘natures’ are cultural and de-politicized (Eagleton 1988:396; also cf. Jameson 1988:383). More broadly, Eagleton complains of what he sees as the untenable inconsistency, the false consciousness, of remorselessly centralizing the contingent and the marginalized, of dogmatically privileging what escapes over what does not (the duplicitous and the undecidable), and of constantly dissolving and fracturing dialectical oppositions (1981:138).

Giddens concurs (1990:46–7). Here is the infuriating illogicality of claiming a post-modern project and epoch in a history which, it is also claimed, has no single linearity, in a world which has no one shape and therefore can be addressed by no one totalizing notion or theory. Here is a cynical scepticism, an ironic detachment, fetishizing the fragmentariness and eclecticism of present humankind while still claiming to recognize something called ‘contemporary general culture’, and to be able to describe a universality of change in a unifying description.

Here, Abrams concludes (1988:273–5), is the hypocrisy of writers’ preaching indeterminacy of meaning, and multiplicity of interpretation in the conventional verbal form, whilst all the time dependent upon an obvious and univocal reading of their words, and assuming the normative

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grammar of language to describe their points. Substantively, too, what is so new and what is so insightful in what the post-moderns have to say? There is nothing new to the West in exhibiting scepticism about extant truths; in fact, it is rather conventional. Meanwhile, is it true that metanarratives have lost their popularity or persuasiveness? What is popular culture after all but a grand narrative, and what are religious fundamentalism, market capitalism and laboratory science? Finally, what is the picture of the modernism of the Western Enlightenment being followed by post-modernism but a meta-narrative of historical epochs in evolution?

Anthropological reactions

Anthropology’s reception of post-modern thinking has been highly ambivalent, as has been mentioned. In many ways it is with an anthropologically informed awareness of socio-cultural contingency and diversity that post-modern thinking has been underpinned. Anthropological writing has been instrumental in illuminating paths beyond Western conceptions of essence, rationality, system, self, writing, language, and so on, while anthropological method (fieldwork and the dialogics of otherness) has provided the inspiration for imaging methodological progress beyond a narrowly defined scientific method. This has led to a welcoming of post-modernism in some anthropological quarters, some chagrin that the popularity of post-modern ideas has given rise to a host of new disciplines (Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Communication Studies) rather than simply an expansion of anthropology (cf. Nugent and Shore 1997), but also an acceptance that Lyotard, Baudrillard, Foucault and the like (Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Rorty, Bhabha) have extended anthropological insights in provocative ways. In particular, the notion of a ‘literary turn’ in anthropology in the 1980s, and its ramifications is a signal of the positive reception to the above ideas, at least their usefulness for thinking against (cf. Rapport 1994a).

While the names of James Clifford, Stephen Tyler, Paul Rabinow, George Marcus, Marilyn Strathern, Vincent Crapanzano and Michael Taussig stand out as writers within anthropology whose work shows some sympathetic engagement with post-modern concerns, that of Ernest Gellner stands out as a vehement critic. For Gellner (e.g. 1993), there are three basic intellectual positions (three claims to ways of knowing) which compete for our attention and loyalty in the contemporary world. These are: fundamentalist religiosity, which believes itself to be in possession of a uniquely revealed truth; post-

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modern relativism, which forswears the notion of unique truths and would treat each cultural and discursive vision as if true; and Enlightenment rationalism, which believes in a unique, scientific truth but never believes that we possess it definitively, only that through certain procedural rules we can continue to approach it. Gellner is a firm adherent of the last position and attacks the post-modern one (and the religious one) in some of the same terms that he maintains a long-standing opposition to a Wittgensteinian philosophy of language (1959). For, it is in part from Wittgensteinian notions that all concepts are social in nature, that speech-communities have terminal authority, and that all cultures make their own worlds, that post-modernism would conclude that everything is a text and there is no access to objective reality. Also that so-called facts and generalizations are the tools of colonial domination, that ranking kinds and ways of knowledge is wicked, and that the seemingly rational self is a product of contradictory, packaged, discursive meanings and is imprisoned in a hermeneutic circle. The popularity of these notions, Gellner surmises, derives from various failures in the social application of science this century (from the Holocaust and Hiroshima to ‘mad cow’ disease) and the science-like modelling of society (from Nazi Germany to Stalinist Russia), and from the difficulties of practising anthropology in a postcolonial world. These have precipitated an affirming (expiatory, sentimental and escapist) of cultural discourses as the only reality.

And yet, Gellner insists, knowledge beyond culture is possible; indeed, this is the central, most blatant, and by far the most important fact of our shared, and global, human condition today. Science, that is, represents a form of knowledge which is valid for all (its propositions and claims translatable without loss of efficacy into any socio-cultural milieu), a cognition which reaches beyond any one culture (so that new social orders spring up, sharing this new learning, in remarkably consensual ways), and an understanding of nature which leads to a universal technology for the transforming of human being. Like it or not, this is the world we live in, and the necessary starting-point of any adequate anthropology. Science represents a form of knowledge to which all cultures must and do come to terms.The world is neither one of balance nor of isolation—of culture ‘A’ having one version of reality, and culture ‘B’ having a distinct but equal one. Cognitive claims are inherently unequal—however equal people may inherently be. If post-modernism denies this, then it is a travesty:

cognitive relativism is nonsense, moral relativism is tragic. You cannot understand the human condition if you ignore

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or deny its total transformation by the success of the scientific revolution…. Valid knowledge ignores and does not engender frontiers. One simply cannot understand our shared social condition unless one starts from the indisputable fact that genuine knowledge of nature is possible and has occurred, and has totally transformed the terms of reference in which human societies operate.

(Gellner 1995b:8)

Instead of pretending that knowledge of natural reality is inaccessible, anthropology should endeavour to answer why scientific modelling has proved so successful with regard to some domains and less so in others.

Post-modernism and anti-humanism

Gellner’s criticisms, like those of Eagleton, Giddens, Abrams and others, are well-taken. And yet there is something in the postmodernist project which would seem to accord with contemporary experience—hence, perhaps, its persuasiveness. The oxymoronics of post-modernism, its appreciation of chaos and excess, of multiplicity, contradiction and inconsistency, its difficulties with a systematization of knowledge, all ring true.

At the same time, however, a number of key exponents of postmodernism can surely be taken to task for their illiberalism, not to say anti-humanism. (The controversy surrounding the disinterring of sympathetic writings on the Nazis by Paul de Man—a major conduit of post-modern ideas in North America—and the refusal of other postmodernist figureheads to condemn them has brought this into sharp focus.) An opposition can well be mounted against the post-modern tendency to displace (‘dissolve’, ‘decentre’) individual agency and deconstruct subjective inwardness and imagination so that social life becomes the mere playing-out of unconscious systems of signification (cf. Foucault 1972:22).

Post-modernist thinking is right to draw attention to the difficulty, even the impossibility, of carrying through the nineteenth-century, scientistic project of making man-in-society a wholly understandable, hence controllable and directable, phenomenon. But then a critique of applying positivistic versions of systematizing science (pre-relativity theory and quantum mechanics) to the domains of human consciousness and the sociocultural is Nietzschean, and nothing so new. Indeed, if one wishes to argue that the essence of life must always elude definition, since its circumstances are haphazard, chaotic, contradictory, irrational, unpredictable,

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unmanageable,and ambiguous, however simple they may superficially seem; that the nature of social reality is thus fragmentary, with perfect knowledge an illusion and immaculate perception a myth; that, furthermore, the human mind is inconsistent and eclectic, biased and situated, and its understanding of the other is only rough-and-ready, piecemeal and makeshift; and that, finally, as one cannot see things both steadily and whole, one cannot achieve a total and unequivocal interpretation of experience, it is appropriate to see them steadily and incompletely, recognizing in individuals’ socio-cultural engagements not any grandiose plan but a casual disorder, a muddlingthrough, and representing this not in terms of closure or completion, ‘[n]ot rounding off but opening out’—then one need look no further than such modernist social-cum-literary commentators as E.M.Forster (1984 [1927]:149). Post-modernism is obviously a question of emphasis, but the old Nietzschean wisdom holds the key, that ‘irony is in fact of the essence’ (Bradbury 1966:130).

See also: Discourse, Home and Homelessness, Irony, Science

QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE

METHODOLOGIES

Opposition between the concepts of the qualitative and the quantitative in research methodology points up disagreements over the nature of anthropology as such: art or science? When considering the range of methods of gathering data which anthropologists employ—participant- observation, interviews, life-histories, genealogies, censuses, questionnaires, network analysis, archival transcription—and the difficulty of deciding whether each is ‘qualitative’ or ‘quantitative’, and to what extent, it becomes clear that the latter distinction is really one of overall orientation and intention.

At the heart of the division is a disagreement over the relationship between anthropological knowledge and the replication of information. For something to be true, does it have to be observably replicated or replicatable (quantitative); and does a sample of events of the same kind have to be taken into account so that the representativeness of the new information can be ascertained? Alternatively, can one accept something is true if observed only by one person on one occasion (qualitative), both the manner of observation and the nature of the thing observed precluding replication; indeed, can something be imagined to be true if it is unique, its own kind, and while implicated in other things is not them and not like them?

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Secondary oppositions then follow in the wake of this question of replication, and extend the division (cf. Filstead 1970; Johnson 1978). For instance: Is it proper to explain subjects from an independent, extraneous or etic standpoint (quantitative), or must explanation be emic, and in subjects’ own terms (qualitative)? Should the researcher begin with a directing hypothesis (quantitative), or with an open mind, cleared as far as possible of preconceptions concerning the nature of his research subjects (qualitative)? Should research identify variables and causal relations which, it is hoped, possess universal provenance (quantitative), or is it sufficient to disinter substantive concepts and theories which are known to be locally grounded (qualitative)? Should the researcher restrict himself to sensory observation and the control of reason (quantitative), or allow himself to empathize, introspect and intuit meanings and relations (qualitative)?

Anthropological science?

In part, the opposition between the qualitative and the quantitative is an anachronism: a throwback to nineteenth-century conceptions of science, and attempts by social science to ape the reputed certainty of its methods of measurement and so borrow from its legitimacy and status. With the advent of twentieth-century science—Einsteinian relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory—comes a new ethos, however: an appreciation of the contingency, situatedness and intrusiveness—alternatively, the creativeness—of the research process as such. Conveniently summed up by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, here is a realization that the observer is inevitably and inexorably a part of what he observes, so that what the researcher confronts is ‘reality’ as apprehended through his own particular prism of perception, and what he gathers as results are artefacts of the process of his observation (cf.Wiener 1949:191).The research process is an interactive one, and the researcher, the observer, is at one and the same time an interactant, a part of the field of events under observation. Any interpretation of the information accrued, therefore, must somehow come to terms with the fact that far from being ‘things-in-themselves’, true for all places and all times, data are epiphenomena of their means of acquisition and their framework of representation (cf. Bellah 1977:xi). If there is no ‘immaculate perception’, and there are ‘no facts, only interpretations’, as phrased by Nietzsche (1911), then research observations, interpretations and generalizations are not so readily distinguishable from beliefs, hypotheses and evaluations (cf. Popper 1965:36).

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If there is a growing recognition in the natural sciences that proofs are learnt and respected practices common to a paradigm, and truth ‘primarily a matter of fit: fit to what is referred to in one way or another, or to other renderings, or to modes and manners of organization’ (Goodman 1978:138), then anthropology has also come to accept that ‘ethnographic reality is actively constructed, not to say invented’ (Dumont 1978:66). To write an authentic anthropological text is less to represent an absolute reality than to fabricate a fit of a particular generic kind between two types of conventional activity (exchanging spoken words and arranging written words), and hence to write social reality. The truth of anthropological accounts, in Wagner’s celebrated formulation, is that anthropologists invent a culture for their informants: here is what they imagine to be a plausible explanation of what they understand them generally to have been doing (1977:500–1).

This conclusion remains controversial, and much anthropological debate continues to occur concerning the nature of research processes, of research results, and of the presenting and appreciating of information. What should anthropology represent itself as if not a ‘generalizing science’ (cf. Ingold 1997)? Is it more than ‘a collection of travellers’ tales’ (Louch 1966:160)?

For some, however, this ambiguity and uncertainty is all grist to the anthropological mill. Anthropology—‘the most humanistic of the social sciences, the most scientific of the humanities’—has never been comfortably placed within certain categories of disciplinary knowledge, and, indeed, has seen its project as the exploration, and the calling-into- question, of conventional and disciplinary divisions as such. Anthropology was ‘born omniform’, Geertz puts it (1983:21), and should refuse to be bound or restricted by the preconceptions of categorial knowledge. In seeking as complex an appreciation of experience as possible, an appreciation of the ambiguities concerning the nature of knowledge and truth should make anthropology ‘more like itself (cf. Rapport 1997e).

This was certainly Edmund Leach’s message in his last writings. Drawing inspiration from the eighteenth-century philosopher—scientist Giambattista Vico, Leach set great store by the facility of an anthropologist’s ‘artistic imagination’ (1982:53). For Vico, the human imagination was to be regarded as a primary tool in a ‘new science’ which sought to understand the real as opposed to the outwardly observable nature of a human engagement with its environment. Such real knowledge called for an entering into the minds of other people; so that one came to know not only that (Caesar was dead) or how (to ride a bike) but what it was like (to be poor, to be in love, to belong to a

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community) (cf. Berlin 1990:62). Moreover, it was in the nature of this imaginative knowing, or fantasia, that it was not analysable except in terms of itself, and it could not be identified except by examples.

Furthermore, for Leach, since ‘the only ego I know at first hand is my own’ (1989:138), anthropological research was to be conceived of as a subjective process whose ‘data’ represented ‘a kind of harmonic projection of the observer’s own personality’ (1984:22). Inevitably, each anthropologist saw something which no other would recognize. But this still made the results of anthropological research admissible as knowledge because the aim was not ‘objective truth’ but ‘insight’ into behaviour, one’s own as well as others’: a ‘quality of deep understanding’ equivalent to ‘fully understanding the nuances of a language [as opposed to] simply knowing the dictionary glosses of individual words’ (1982:52). This made anthropological writings ‘interesting in themselves’—full of meaning, intended and unintended—and not revelatory of ‘the external world’ so much as of the authors reactions and interactions with it (1984:22).

In this Leach comes close to the tenor of suggestions by physics nobel-laureate Igor Prigogine (1989). For Prigogine, an appreciation of the instability and creativity inherent in our world, the impossibility of absolute control or precise forecasting, and a clearer view of the place of human activity-within-the-world, now bring the projects of natural science and social science close to one another. In both, old notions of determinism, materialism and reductionism, of knowledge as omniscient and timeless, must give way to ‘a narrative element’ in the way we conceive of our knowledge, represent it, and act upon its implications. For, ‘[i]n effect, all human and social interaction and all literature is the expression of uncertainty about the future, and of a construction of the future’ (Prigogine 1989:389).

Anthropology as personal documentation

From qualitative versus quantitative methods of knowledge-acquisition, we have thus moved to issues of foregrounding the narrative nature of our human being-in-the-world, and coming to terms with knowledgeprocesses which are constructive and interpretational. For many, this self consciousness has changed radically the nature of the anthropological endeavour: given it a ‘literary turn’. As urged by Needham (1978:75–6), a ‘counsel of perfection’ might now see anthropologists reassessing their tasks, their standards and their ambitions, and contemplating what the discipline might become if it were to break free from its present academicism. Might not anthropology one day achieve something

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possessing the humane significance of metaphysics and art, Needham ponders, if ethnographic interpretations were written with the imaginative acuity, the empathetic penetration, and the literary artistry of a George Eliot, a Dostoevsky or a Woolf? Regarding method, great impetus has been given to treating culture and society and their representation as ‘personal documents’. As a generic category of writing which includes diaries, autobiographies, life histories and letters (cf. Allport 1942), personal documents have long had a respected place in certain, more humanistic, versions of anthropological practice. What is different now, perhaps, is a matter of emphasis and evaluation.There is an appreciation of the ‘personal document’ of society and culture not as a partial component, as a biased version, as an overdetermined manifestation, as false consciousness, or whatever, but as all there is. If truth is constructive and interpretational, and a matter of narrative, then the whys and wherefores of the writing of the personal document that is an anthropological account, concerning the personal documents of those who are the subjects of the research, is all-important.

Opinion is divided, to say the least, concerning what might be described as the collapse of objectivity as a tenet in natural science (à la Heisenberg and Prigogine) and its implications for anthropology. Some see the collapse as a challenge, others as a temporary aberration to be lamented and overcome. Sharing Needham’s vision, for instance, are Watson and Watson-Franke (1985:96–7, 133) for whom

[m]uch ethnographic research lacks a true feeling for human life as it is subjectively experienced by individuals.We know the richness and complexity of our own inner life, and when we compare this to the many tedious, dehumanizing accounts of life in other cultures…we may feel an acute sense of disinterest and even outright alienation…. All too often the real things seem to get lost in the obfuscation of the investigator playing God with his constructs…. To understand the individual in his human fullness we must therefore suspend total commitment to our scientific preconceptions and enter into a dialogue with the life history.

Hence, they would urge a greater appreciation in anthropology of the personal document as a means to restore to the individual actor (anthropological researcher and subject) a measure of his lost integrity, dignity and significance. For such personal documentation may be understood both as an act by which the individual constitutes his

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