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

QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE METHODOLOGIES

social—experiential environment, and one by which the anthropologist is able to access the individual in the act of managing his self-defined transactions with reality. While social science has tended to come to grips with experience by robbing it of its unique richness and fluidity, privileging models, quantities and the experimental testing of hypotheses, and translating experience into static and essential abstractions (‘culture’, ‘social structure’, ‘habitus’, etc.), a narrative of personal documents gives onto that subjective consciousness through which the individual articulates his world. In sum, through a personal documentation the anthropologist can do justice to ‘the flow of subjective experience’, others’ and his own, to a phenomenal consciousness as the individual himself experiences it (Watson and Watson-Franke 1985:97; also cf. Lieblich and Josselson 1994).

For others, such as Weiner (1995), the value of personal narratives in anthropology remains low and their use is to be disparaged. For a focus on personal documents prescribes an unnecessarily narrow understanding of culture, and a reduction of social life to text. Whereas society and culture are significantly more than the stories individuals tell of them: to wit, there is the contrast between what is told and what is done, between ‘what language avers and what behaviour reveals’ (Weiner 1995:5). Moreover, social practices and cultural knowledges are unevenly and restrictedly distributed, and an isolating of any one person’s account will thus represent a partial understanding of the total socio-cultural repertoire of what is known. At best, Weiner concludes, ‘narrated memoirs’ serve to distinguish the rather feeble methodology of the oral historian from that of the social scientist; unlike the oral historian (but more like the psychoanalyst), the anthropologist should socially situate the individual narrator so as to reveal influences and constraints upon his personal documentation (whether in speech or in action) of which he himself may be unaware.

One might question whether Weiner’s view of the objectivity of science and culture, and the anthropology that might emanate from their study, is outmoded. Certainly, it is arguable that it is not ‘a culture’ which possesses a total repertoire of things known, in the way that Weiner would portray, but rather individuals who create and possess an ongoing multitude of diverse and discrepant knowledges which they put to use in the animation of socio-cultural forms. And while it is true that there is more to observe than ‘stories about social life’, it is not true that these other things (from theories to sensations) are any less personal or any more objectively accessible. They are also personal documents, no less interpreted and hence narrated by the individual, and no more properly or hegemonically determinable by

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another. In short, what lies beyond an individuals narrations are other narrations—by the same individual and by others. The anthropologist can collect and juxtapose these in his description-analysis—as may the oral historian—but one narrative does not necessarily ‘situate’ another, does not give onto a superior awareness.

Literary anthropology

Because of the novelist’s command of the personal life of the individual, and the formers desire to connect the externally observable with the internally responsible, Forster (1984) concluded that literature was ‘truer’ than social science.While each person knew from experience that there was much beyond the ‘outer’ evidence of observation, and while the social scientist claimed to be equally concerned to record human character, the latter appeared content to restrict himself to what could be known of its existence from scouring ‘the exterior surface’ of social life only, and to what could approximately be deduced from people’s actions, words and gestures. Only the novelist appeared determined to accrue a fuller knowledge, and seek out ‘the hidden life at its [individual] source’ (Forster 1984:55–6).

It is increasingly true that the distinction Forster would make no longer stands. In a ‘biographical anthropology’ of and as personal documentation, the impersonalizing impulses of an earlier social science are eschewed. It is admitted that novelists have often in the past dealt better than social scientists with ‘the subtleties, inflections and varieties of individual consciousness which are concealed by the categorical masks [of membership in social and cultural groups]’ (Cohen 1994:180), and there are attempts in growing numbers to remedy the practice (cf. Rapport 1994a). Here we find the (qualitative) particularities of individual lived experience no longer necessarily eclipsed by (quantitative) generalization, or otherwise reduced, abstracted, typified or overdetermined according to the axioms of a seeming-scientific regularity, stability, order or control. Moreover, this is nothing other than that which Robert Redfield, for one, long ago urged (1960:59):

As soon as our attention turns from a community as a body of houses and tools and institutions to the states of mind of particular people, we are turning to the exploration of something immensely complex and difficult to know. But it is humanity, in its inner and more private form….While we talk in terms of productivity, or of roles and statuses, we are …moving among an apparatus already removed, by our own

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act of mind, from the complicated thinking and feeling of the men and women who achieve the productivity, or define and occupy the roles. But it is the thinking that is the real and ultimate raw material; it is there that events really happen. And the choice of a human biographic form for describing the whole turns us to it.

See also: Humanism, Literariness, Narrative, Post-Modernism

READING

An anthropological interest in reading is relatively recent, another effect, perhaps, of that shift of concern (‘the literary turn’) which brought into focus those practices of inscription by which anthropology as a discipline comes to produce data and reproduce itself. An anthropology of reading explores the diversity of reading traditions in the world, treats these as historically, culturally and socially situated practices, and examines the consequences of their use. Here is ‘reading’ as an intrinsically social exchange, historically informed, culturally specific, often collectively practised.

A diversity of reading traditions

In The Ethnography of Reading, edited by Jonathan Boyarin (1993), two themes predominate: the variety and the universality of reading.To study reading anthropologically is to become aware of how simplistic are such binary distinctions as literacy versus orality or individual versus collective when applied in an evolutionary or an otherwise classificatory fashion to types of societies and the reading practices to be expected within them. There never is or was an oral pastoral, for instance, while there always is a complex, multidirectional and political interplay of different forms of human communication, of which reading is frequently one. In an anthropology of reading what can be expected is a focus less on a particular technology of data-processing than a range of social acts and a specific cultural tool—of domination as well as liberation, of sociality as well as isolation, of longevity as well as recentness. Reading comes to be approached, in Boyarin‘s words, as a ‘living textuality’.

In particular, the Boyarin volume explores the diversity of reading practices surrounding the Hebrew Bible and Talmud, ancient and contemporary; the Christian reading culture adopted by Jesus and his

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early followers; reading as culturally constructed in Anglo-Saxon England; the manipulation of Chinese orthography by pre-modern Japanese scribes and story-tellers; the incorporation of oral and written in the ritual and political practice of highland Colombia; the recitative reading of the Koran in Arabic (albeit incomprehensible) in village Indonesia; reading groups as sites of collective action in urban Texas; and the challenge of reading traditional (mythological) Kashaya stories in an Amerindian reservation classroom.

A reading of what these case-studies together show might conclude as follows: ‘reading’ in the Hebrew Bible translates as a speech act which occupies the public spaces of forum, synagogue, House of Study and court; it almost always means ‘to read aloud to someone’ and has immediate public consequences. Reading is here a proclamation, a declaration, a summons. Similarly, reading has a conversational character in traditional Islamic societies, where mastery of the sciences of life begins with memorization of the Koran. In the Christian West too, reading at one time had an ascetic quality and a behavioural orientation—as is yet evidenced by coenobitic monasticism: communities bound together by the oral delivery and counselling exposition of common texts.

However, by Late Antiquity reading had also become a silent and private practice of the Western study and bedroom: a meditative transaction between reader and book, and a vehicle of innerworldliness. Now we come to have a combination of textual practices, oral and literate, collective and solitary, such as we still see replicated around us today, from Indonesia to Colombia, from the anthropologist in the academy to the ‘other’ in the field. What is of note is less an evolution between reading practices than a dynamic tension. Indeed, to privilege one practice over another is to truncate our understanding of this tension. For, behind the private reading is always the public infrastructure which sustains literacy and legitimates solitariness, while behind the collective group of readers is the individual’s reflective voice.

In short, just as there is no essential separation between the oral and the literate, so, individual and collective readings, a tradition and its performance, must also be seen in ongoing relationship. Furthermore, talking, writing and reading are significantly implicated in one another; reading is a ‘kinetic art’, in Stanley Fish’s phrasing (1972:401), and it is only in understanding the ways in which people move between communication in terms of talking, writing and reading that an appreciation of the significance of each in any particular historical, social and cultural situation is to be gained.

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The agency of reading

But it is not only in its pertaining to conventions of talking and writing that the practice of reading concerns kinesis; and it is not only in terms of historico-socio-cultural milieux that reading attains to particularity. For reading is also individual and agential, and there is a vital balance to be struck between objectified reading traditions-cum-artefacts and active subjects. Reading is a kinetic art inasmuch as it concerns an individual author’s textualizing and an individual reader’s actualizing, and for an imaginative meeting between the two (cf. Rapport 1994a).

As living textuality, that is, the process of the origination of meaning is not restricted to the writer: it also extends to the reader. Reading is creative; it entails personalizing words, imbuing them with significance, with relevance, with life, in a particular way and at a particular time so as to make them possibly uniquely meaningful. Far from static entities, read texts represent lived works: activities which individuals perform, actively using them as instruments in their imaginative moulding of the world. This is why the written can continue to be enacted while being wholly separated from its author—‘emancipated’, ‘distantiated’, ‘decontextualized’ from the psycho-sociological conditions of its production (cf. Ricoeur 1981:91): because the reader engages in a process (comparable to the author) of imparting order and meaning to language‘s common symbolic forms.To read a text, in short, is to impart personality to language: to personalize verbal forms and express a personal construction of the world.

An elucidation of this point has perhaps been most clearly made by Fish (1972, 1979, 1988; also cf. Iser 1978, 1988).To begin, Fish criticizes any approach which treats the text as a self-sufficient system of signification and attempts to locate meaning in its formal features; as if meaning were something which all readers simply extracted from this repository by the same general procedures. Treating the text as a complete and stationary object in this way, as a thing-in-itself, is dangerously misleading, Fish argues, however suggestive might be the physical autonomy of printed verbal forms. For meaning must always be located in the intention of the author and thereafter in the response of the reader.The text itself is indeterminate, and meaning is re-constituted by a reader’s interpretation and ‘narration’: making and revising assumptions, specifying causes, asking questions, solving puzzles, giving and withdrawing approval, rendering and regretting judgements, coming to and abandoning conclusions. The connectedness of the text is not so much of the text itself as the product of the reader’s consciousness, outlook, past experience and expectations being brought to bear upon

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its raw materials. The reader transforms the text into a personal experience, the text becoming a kind of mirror of his or her dispositions. Indeed, it is the reader’s interpretive assumptions, procedures and expectations which come to impart such formal features to the text as the notion of an originating ‘author’ with ‘intentions’.

Reading is an event, in short, brought about by the reader bringing an interpretive framework (a cognitive schema, a world-view) to bear upon the text, and ‘experiencing’ it by constructing its meaning. The text becomes alive, and becomes concrete, when realized through the individual reader’s disposition; the reading process sets the work in motion. Finally, since the meaning of a text is its experiencing by a reader, and since a reader’s active and activating consciousness can be different per occasion, the meaning is fluid; there is no fixed relationship between the forms recognized in a text and the response they elicit.

Readers who share interpretive principles and strategies, who similarly constitute texts’ properties and intentions, Fish describes as members of the same ‘interpretive communities’; here are those who share certain structures of interpretation which make particular readings conventional, normal and obvious. But what is far more likely to happen, Fish admits, especially in modern, complex societies, is that a reader’s interpretation of a text will be multiple, and often inconsistent, even at one and the same reading. Readers will oscillate between different possible organizations and interpretations of the text even as they seek consistent patterns and coherency. This is perhaps because the reader’s interpretive community possesses more than one strategy for how texts are to be read—modern societies being seen as increasingly less fundamentalist, and entertaining a variety of authentic exegeses. Alternatively, a number of interpretations signals the individual reader as either belonging simultaneously to a number of different interpretive communities or else moving between them, perhaps as they grow and wane, perhaps as they compete with and complement one another.

Finally, a number of interpretations signals individual readers becoming what Nietzsche dubbed the ‘wandering encyclopaedias’ of the modern-day. Faced with a complex and varied repertoire of interpretive strategies and a heteroglossia of communities, individuals pick and choose, borrow and compound, negate and invent—creolize, in a word—so that the sum of strategies within their lists, and their habitual application and bricolage, is ultimately particular to them alone. One finds an irreducible individuality to the language-worlds interpreted by each reader whereby texts are read according to ‘unique associationnets’ and ‘personal lexicons’ (Steiner 1975:173). To read, in short, is to translate, and to precipitate pluralism, dynamism and individuality.

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Competing readings

Given the likely diversity of readings within socio-cultural milieux, both in terms of interpretive communities and of individual readers, what are the likely consequences? How might an abuttal of readings ramify into other situations. A study of such relations is offered by Eric Livingston (1995).

In An Anthropology of Reading, Livingston sets out to compare what he calls the ‘different cultures of reading’ to which professional literary critics and lay readers of English Literature belong, each laying claim to proper practice. Here are two versions of reading the same texts, and the relationship between them, Livingston argues, is fundamentally one of mistranslation. Setting out to explicate the proprieties of ordinary reading, to explain how a certain lay reading is achieved and what a proper reading should be, what literary critics in fact achieve is an alchemy of laic practices—a misconstruction and a mystification. Aiming for an understanding of ‘reading simpliciter’, the interpretive community of professional critics ends up constituting its own ‘reading cultura’. The analytical apparatus which professional literary critics employ to uncover ‘the natural rules of reading-really’ actually reveal nothing but ‘texts’ and ‘poetic objects’ constructed (read) according to their own conventional practices of interpretation and criteria of propriety: to read in a cultivated, reasoned and reasonable way.

In becoming members of their interpretive community, literary critics have become instructed in the application of a ‘powerful technology’ of reading; the poetic object of a ‘text/reading pair’ emerges from a background of participatory communal work (Livingston 1995:15). Moreover, the community of critics is an orderly and hierarchical one, and as fellow professionals, members are expected to act as implementers, purveyors and sentinels of their community’s shared ways: the practice of ‘reading-really’ is something that all are expected to do alike. Indeed, the work of reading, the skills of ‘reading pace, eye fixation, and recognition’ (1995:12) from which form and content emerge, become so learnt and ordinary that literary critics—as much as lay readers, socialized as children—do not notice their own routines. However, it is this routinization which is responsible for the mistranslation which occurs. The literary critic applies an analytical apparatus of grammar and rhetoric, and of ‘reading competency’ so as to disinter a ‘natural’ orderliness in the text. But this technological practice ‘discovers’ (that is, constructs) texts as always possessing certain institutional features, and misses the possibility of the text having other natures and institutionalities to discover, and emerging into other

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facticities. In short, the professional practice of the literary critic and the ‘instructed reading’ which results passes the laypractice and the ordinary reading by Moreover, so engrossed is each in their own community constructions that their treating of ‘different texts’ does not become apparent. What the community of literary critics ends up studying is itself alone, while its claim to be ‘reading-really’ amounts to nothing more than a projection and legitimation of its own institutions.

Ultimately, Livingston’s work is a critique of all professional practice. Inasmuch as literary critics work a text into affording a certain interpretation which is actually no better than another, so any reading— anthropological included—must be appreciated pragmatically: not for its absolute truth-value but for what work that reading does, for the empowerment that that particular construction of a ‘true reading’ achieves.

See also: Interpretation, Literariness, Writing

THE RURAL IDYLL

The concept of the rural idyll concerns the way that ‘the rural’ possesses a certain meaning and value in socio-cultural milieux which are overwhelmingly urban. It pertains to the extent to which people measure their identities and make sense of their lifestyles in terms of their purported ‘rurality’ or ‘urbanity’, and, in particular, how ‘the rural’ comes to be a repository for ways of life which are regarded as more natural, holistic and harmonious (cf. Strathern 1982). Among those affected in this way by notions of the rural can be included anthropologists and their depictions of village communities and of communitarianism.

The ‘rural idyll’ as an idiom of British social exchange provides a fitting case in point.

The British rural idyll

Since the Second World War, trips to the country from the town have become Britain’s most popular recreational activity. In 1979, 37 million people took at least one trip to the countryside; by 1994 this had risen to one billion day-trips to the countryside per year overall. Next in popularity as a leisure activity comes a trip to the seaside (followed by gardening, then by walks around urban parks, trips to historic sites, museums and zoos, and sport).

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When the trippers reach the countryside, they find their visit anticipated by such institutions as the National Trust, and numerous National Parks. Begun in 1895, the Trust is a charity which acts as something of a protective caretaker over British ‘rural heritage’: in England, some 590,000 acres of cherished countryside, 545 miles of coastline, 234 historic houses and 160 gardens, and countless archaeological sites and vernacular buildings. National Parks were set up in Britain after the Second World War, by Acts of Parliament, to ensure that areas of ‘outstanding natural beauty’ were conserved and their recreational enjoyment by visitors was promoted. Just over a fifth of England and Wales has now been accorded some form of official ‘protection’ for the ‘settled harmony’ of its countryside or the rarity of its wildlife.

The trippers can also anticipate the ‘country life’ they will find thanks to the frequent diet of rural narratives which they find on television and radio. Often seen from an urban or ex-urban point of view, these promote the image of a ‘good life’ to be had as a country land-owner or vet, retiree or small-holder, or simply ‘A Daughter of the Dales’ (Hauxwell 1991; also cf. Moggach 1996). Even if the life is one of relative hardship, it is seen to give onto an earthy, and yet a fresh and untainted, wisdom.

This is the case in an overwhelmingly urban country, where mass urbanization began more than two centuries ago, where the rural population has been outnumbered for some 150 years, and where some 90% of the population now resides in city, town or suburb.What may be described as a British love-affair with the rural continues unabated: the ‘countryside’ as a place of sentiment, to preserve and to visit (Palmer et al. 1977:739). ‘The rural idyll’ remains one of the most widespread and abiding myths in common circulation: a romantic idea and ideal of the rural as the proper, the healthy, the original, maybe too the eventual, place of people’s habitation, and which the current rural population holds in trust.

Some commentators find the roots of this anti-urban bias in the nineteenth century, and the fears of the then well-to-do that the expanding towns could become unhealthy sources of social discontent and political disorder, while the country remained a secure repository of ideal traditional values—of deferential country-folk, manors, lords and manor-houses (cf. Phillips and Williams 1984:2–3). In Dickens‘s archetypal depiction of Preston (or ‘Coketown’) in Hard Times (1971:102), the urban—industrial agglomeration also becomes home to confinement, disease, greed and the essentially unnatural:

that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in; at the heart of the

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labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, which had come into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man’s purpose, and the whole an unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to death.

And yet the historical source of the idyll is not so easy to isolate. Thus, Eden can be found celebrating, in 1797, the virtue, intelligence and independence of the healthy peasant of England’s North Country as compared with those who seek help and charity in the more familiar regions of the populous South (cited in Dewhirst 1972:1), while as late as 1890 Gomme is to be found describing the village as a ‘primitive element’, of necessity broken under the advance of civilization (1890:232). Clearly, the uses to which notions of the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’ are put are several and complex, and more issues are involved (the question of geographical distance, or of south Britain versus north) than simply a blanket validation of country life at the growth of urbanization. In other words, ‘rural versus urban’ is an idiom of great longevity and common usage; Williams (1985:1), indeed, argues for a contrast between country and city (as fundamentally distinct ways of life) to be seen reaching back to Classical times. Moreover, different meanings and intents can be found adhering to the contrast in different contexts and occasions. No doubt this is an important aspect of its continuing popularity and power in Britain as a rhetorical strategy.

Leaving aside the question of its origin for an examination of its contemporary provenance, perhaps the first thing to say is that in recent decades, the British rural population has begun to rise again. In common with other industrialized countries, there is a process of ‘counter-urbanization’ under way (in France it is called rurbanisation) whereby the population of large cities in particular (London, Glasgow, Birmingham), and their inner cores, has fallen dramatically. Much of this has fed into a burgeoning suburbia on the urban peripheries (cf. Riesman 1958), but some at least has translated into residential growth in more remote rural districts, especially those which remain ‘high amenity environments’ (Cote 1987). Accompanying the rise of new technologies of production, then, and the growth of service industries at the expense of manufacturing and primary production, more people are preferring to live and work, or to retire, or at least own second (holiday) homes, in rural areas. The English Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales, Devon and Cornwall, as well as Wales and Scotland, each has its share of what are sometimes dubbed ‘white settlers’ (Jedrej and Nuttall 1996).

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