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

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supposed ignorance of the domestication of nature, are the category of people who sit on the very lowest step of societal development. The corollary of using a ‘simple’ technology of hunting, fishing and food gathering is a low capability for developing the wider network of social and political ties that are necessary to the development of society (e.g. Sahlins and Service 1960; Service 1962; Woodburn 1982). ‘Tribal societies’ are a rung up the ladder because they have learned the technology of horticulture. Since they can create a surplus of food and also store it, they are therefore able to create more ‘socio-centric’ statuses through which to relate economically, and therefore politically, to wider communities of people.The idea is that it is through economic exchange that the political structures of society are created, and its hierarchical societal integration achieved. In neo-evolutionist thought (e.g. Service 1962), ‘chieftainships’ achieve ‘higher’ levels of societal integration than ‘tribal’ peoples because of the grand redistributive networks of goods over which the chieftain leadership has control, while the ‘state’, because of the complex economic powers of its executive, achieves the highest level of all. Peoples are considered to have different degrees of society, a judgement made according to the evolutionary progress of their hierarchical structures.

The ‘domestic mode of production’, and society as hierarchical ordering

In anthropology the notion of society (to be equated with ‘social structure’, and indeed ‘the social’) is usually defined by (1) structures of separation and opposition, and (2) structures of inequality, or the institutional elaboration of relations of dominance and subordination. Egalitarian peoples are considered less social than those that favour their hierarchical institutions because they have less society (e.g. Bloch 1977). The anthropological gaze upon the egalitarian ways of doing things has predominantly been one of suspicion.

Sahlins (1972) provides one of the clearest arguments for equating society and the social with the achievement of politico-economic hierarchical structures. He maintains that ‘tribal’ peoples follow a ‘domestic mode of production’ that is typically based on egalitarian principles that are linked to values which must be overcome in order for the social to be attained. The problem stems from the fact that the household in the ‘domestic mode of production’ is given economic autonomy. In contrast to the capitalist system, ‘the domestic system’, he says, ‘entertains limited economic goals, qualitatively defined in the terms of a way of living rather than quantitatively as an abstract wealth’

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(ibid.: 86). Although he makes the case that this modality leads to an ‘affluent’ life, in that the individual has freedom and leisure, eats well, and does not overly toil, he also argues that its social defect is that the domestic mode only serves intimate and therefore ultimately selfish familial satisfactions, and not those of the wider whole. As a result, production in the domestic mode, Sahlins complains, ‘has all the organization of the so many potatoes in a certain famous sack of potatoes’ (ibid.: 96)—there is a small-time anarchy lurking beneath the surface of things; there is disarray in the background.

So far perhaps so good, but Sahlins further concludes that because of its stress upon quality of life and the intimate relationship, ‘the domestic mode of production’ is like the state of nature. In itself, it provides no mechanisms for holding a growing community together; that is, as an economic mode of operation it has few means for coercing people to work harder. Economically, ‘primitive’ society is therefore founded on anti-society (ibid.: 86, 97–8, our italics). Tribal life becomes social, and attains society, only insofar as the ‘economic defects’ of the domestic mode of production, with its values of autonomy, equality and leisure, are overcome through the political force and economic exploitation of the chief (ibid.: 134). For tribal societies, Sahlins is not only opposing domestic and public domains, but he also places the first—the intimate relations of family life—within the domain of nature. Only the public domain, within which the chief operates through means of political coercion, merits in this view the label of ‘social’. Collectivity, and the very possibility for its attainment, becomes by definition a matter of hierarchical structure and institutions of exchange and coercion. To be social is to engage in hierarchical relationships.

There are nuances here of ways of thinking that speak to our wellknown antinomy of individual and society, where society’s role is understood as a force that moves over and beyond all those egoistic and asocial individuals who make up its numbers (but see Sahlins 1999). Except here the unit of egoism is comprised of a set of domestic relationships. Those intimate relationships which Sahlins declares asocial are also those that are centred on the caring and raising of children. Even if we ignore the very questionable status of Sahlins‘s isolated household unit, which in fact for the majority of indigenous peoples sits firmly within the context of everyday multi-faceted relationships of community life (e.g. Overing 1993a), Sahlins’s assumptions about the domestic unit fit neatly with Western ideas about society that assume an opposition between the public domains of societal importance and the asocial private domain of family and kinship life which is considered to be on the side of nature. Within the context of such a narrative, if one should

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categorize the economic base of ‘tribal society’ as ‘domestic’ then it is a reasonable next step to conclude that the primary thrust of ‘tribal society’ is asocial—and like the ‘state of nature’. Such an argument would be a strong modernist formulation of primitivism.

It might, however, be wise to take a closer look at this Western dichotomy that is so denigrating of the domestic relationship. We might then understand better its tenacity within anthropological literature, as used, for instance, by Sahlins in his shaping of a ‘domestic mode of production’, and also the significance of the part it has played in obscuring indigenous thought and experience.

A feminist critique

It is from a feminist point of view that Marilyn Strathern provides (1988), through her studies of the peoples of Melanesia, a major critique of the construct of society as it has been prevalently used in anthropology.The feminist critique in general has played a crucial role in de-centring the construct of society as it sits within modernist social theory. In large part its success has been due to its focus upon the male bias that is embedded within the Western opposition of the domestic and the public, which, as it is argued, implicitly links women and men evaluatively to their respective places within another powerful dichotomy salient to Western thought, i.e. nature and culture. Strathern argues that the indigenous peoples of New Guinea, and in particular the Hagen with whom she worked, do not have the non-ambiguous misogynist perceptions of sociality that are characteristic of Western classifications of social order. The Hagen have no counterpart to our notion of society, with all those metaphysical problems attached to this concept, such as the idea that men complete culturally and socially what women begin naturally through childbirth. As Strathern notes, ‘however useful the concept of society may be to analysis, we are not going to justify its use by appealing to indigenous counterparts’ (Strathern 1988:3).

She explains that in Western ideas of social order, the power of society is often judged by its control of extra-social individuals, who are conceived of as so much biological raw material for society to domesticate. Society’s socialization of individuals becomes synonymous with the notion of its subordination of nature. There is moreover a symbolism of gender relations, and an evaluation of the respective genders, that lie at the heart of this particular model of society, for the relationship between part and whole (the biological individual with society) is envisaged as that between female and male (ibid.: 94). The

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larger whole, or the controlling collective force of society, coincides with the public domain of men, while the subordinated, individuating, familial domain of the domestic pertains to women—and their biologically based activities. Indeed, in this Western formulation of society, it is the very separation that holds between the dominant public domain and its subordinated private spheres of life that is thought to allow for the creation of society (ibid.: 94–5). And this is the crunch. Without the regulation and control of the wayward, non—collective and biologically based domestic domain of woman by the collectivity of men, society could not be created nor culture made (ibid.: 94, 318).

In this specific myth about the creation of society, ‘primitives’ and women hold the same symbolic position. Women, who typically relate through the individuating bonds of domestic kinship, and ‘primitives’, who also hold dear the domestic relations of kinship, are both metaphorically assimilated to the domain of nature. In other words, their capabilities for creating culture and society are minimal. Both are on the low end of sociality. As is true for any vision of the social, this narrative of society has its history and its own political justifications and agenda.

It is hardly surprising that Strathern, as feminist, critiques anthropological perceptions of sociality when they coincide with the above story of society. In it society is seen as a domain that is metaphorically categorized as male. Society is understood as a wider regulating sociality; it is equated with the public domain of men, who form together a collectivity of men responsible for society. This is to be contrasted to women’s individuating, domestic activities which are viewed as ‘the problem’ for men, and thus for society at large, in that they threaten and impinge upon the solidarity of the collectivity of males (cf. Pateman (1989:641) who observes that the Rousseau-esque social contract is for men only, with women being seen not just as excluded from it but a continual danger to society’s orderly running). Strathern, as anthropologist, is most concerned to set the record straight with regard to indigenous views of sociality.

She notes that many portrayals of Melanesian sociality have followed the Western tale of society which assumes that it is the collective action of men that forms society, with male bonds of solidarity providing for its necessary cohesion. In the anthropological literature, since Malinowski’s publications on the Trobrianders (1922), Melanesian peoples have been famous for their great networks of ceremonial exchange, which linked otherwise autonomous communities into greater societal structures through which big leaders could gain power and prestige. Such structures of male ceremonial exchange were analysed by anthropologists as responsible for social control, the integration of groups, and the

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promotion of sociability. It was the political force of ceremonial exchange that provided the unity necessary for the creation of society, which otherwise would have been impossible because of the individuating, centrifugal inclinations of individual desire. Anthropologists assumed that social structure was concerned with groups of males, and that society was a matter of male solidarity (Strathern op. cit.: 52). It is this popular anthropological myth about the hegemonic relation of men’s collective ritual and exchange to the building of the social relations of society that Strathern wished to shatter

(ibid.: 67–9).

According to Strathern, the indigenous view of their own sociality followed a very different sort of narrative. Among indigenous peoples of Melanesia, she says, there was no image of men ideologically promoting their own male values as those of society at large. Men did not regard female values as a mere counterpoint to their own activities. There was no simple dualistic split between the stereotypes of men and women. Male collective life did not entail a heightened sociality that served a set of male hegemonic social values, over and against those of females. Rather, both men and women were directed toward the same goal. Most of men’s endeavours were ‘directed towards the same production of domestic kinship, growth, and fertility as concern women’ (ibid.: 318; cf. Overing 1999, on Amazonia). The goals of ‘the collective’ and ‘the domestic’ merged, and it is for this reason that Strathern argues that ‘the forms of Melanesian collective life are not adequately described through the Western model of a society, and that however men are depicted it cannot be as authors of such an entity’ (Strathern op. cit.: 319). Rather, collective actions in Melanesia are one type of sociality—they co-exist with the sociality of domestic relations; they alternate but cannot be dominant to them. Nor are men considered ‘more social’ than the women. In contrast to our Western image of society, the Melanesian view does not visualize sociality as a superstructural elaboration of forces, and thus the collective life of men is not understood to have a privileged vantage-point of sanctioning commentary on the ‘rest’ of society (Strathern op. cit.). In short, we must resist the anthropological tendency to conflate ‘their collectivity’ and ‘our society’, for Melanesian people do not have society as we know it. What they do have is sociality.

Basically, anthropologists, in objectifying the notion of society, have transformed modern Western distinctions of worth and judgement into the analytic constructs through which to gaze upon other types of socialities, and in so doing they have often been asking questions that serve to obscure rather than shed light upon indigenous experience.The

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big question is what does it mean to be social? If we define society as institutions of hierarchy and coercion, then it is clearly the case that many indigenous peoples do not have much of it, nor do they want it (e.g. Clastres 1977; Overing 1993b). They nevertheless are clearly social beings, and they also happen to have their own strong views about proper human sociality.

See also: Agent and Agency, Common Sense, Culture, Gender,

Humanism, Individuality, Kinship, The Unhomely

STEREOTYPES

Stereotypes and the practice of stereotyping—attributing to all members of a category or class identical features—have not traditionally been well-received within the social sciences. Of the three broad analytic approaches, the sociological, the psychodynamic and the cognitive, all concur in linking stereotypes with pejoration and perverse inter-group relations (Ashmore and Del Boca 1981). Defined as ‘relatively rigid and oversimplified conceptions of a group of people in which all individuals in the group are labelled with the group characteristics’ (Wrightsman 1977:672), and functioning as ‘chunks of attributed traits [which cause] an individual’s evaluations of others to come in packaged Gestalten’ (Pettigrew 1981:313–14), stereotypes are seen as deriving from hearsay and rumour rather than induction from proven fact, and from a simple projection of one’s own values and expectations onto the environing world (Allport 1954). It is said that stereotypes are the resort of those lacking cognitive complexity, the penchant of those frightened by ambiguity and unsubtle in how they categorize stimuli; or else those emotionally aroused or distracted and unable to attend fully to cognitive classification; or those fixated on deindividuating themselves, and thereafter visiting the same on others (Wilder 1981:235–40). Hence, stereotypes allow simplistic and fantastic claims to be made about a group’s manifold membership, claims which are all the more ambiguous and gross the higher the societal level to which the collective label is applied.

In short, stereotypes are seen to form a discursive and conceptual fortress in which groups can barricade themselves, universally convinced of the safety, rectitude and respectability of their own traditions while at the same time aroused into making prejudiced (but self-fulfilling) responses not towards real others but towards masquerades and

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phantasms (Basow 1980:3–12; also Glassman 1975:14–20).Thus it is that stereotypes come to be decried as sources of social pathology; they are a root cause of misconception, and thus of intractable and oppressive sexism, racism and classism (Elfenbein 1989:viii, 158), of misdirected and xenophobic aggression, warring and pogrom (O’Donnell 1977:23–4; also Lea 1978).

Traditional social-scientific appreciations of stereotypes

The origin of contemporary social-scientific interest in stereotypes is probably the work of Walter Lippmann, especially Public Opinion (1947 [1922]). Reality is too complex for human beings to apprehend directly, Lippmann theorized (1947:89ff.), therefore they form mental pseudoenvironments, a key part of which are stereotypes. Modern social life is hurried and multifarious, with little time or opportunity for intimate acquaintance; there is a need for economy, for seeing things as types and generalities. At the same time, there is a human love of absolutes and a dislike of constant qualification: an orderly world-view is one of clear demarcations. Hence, stereotypes represent schemata which simplify perception and cognition, and help to process information about the environment in a uniform and regular fashion. These schemata are not reached or maintained by individual testing, however. Rather they are learned as cultural practices; stereotypes come to form integral parts of individuals’ world-views and yet they represent the imposition of prerational characterizations and classifications on data deriving from a cultural habitus. Stereotypes therefore rationalize ‘prejudicial’, prejudgemental, cognitions and conclusions about the world.

The three main analytic approaches to stereotypes which have developed since Lippmann‘s day (the sociological, the psychodynamic and the cognitive) have all focused upon the factually incorrect, overgeneralized and prejudicially rigid nature of stereotypes.The sociological approach (cf. Chapman 1968; McDonald 1993) focuses on the sociocultural factors behind groups’ use of and belief in stereotypes. Stereotypes are treated as temporally and regionally consistent ideological matrices which are learnt by individual members through processes of socialization. Due to the cultural mismatch of classificatory systems by which different social groups construct the world, moreover, stereotyping can be understood as an autonomous discourse which predominates within the worlds of the representers quite independently of any ‘truth-value’, and irrespective of any connection to those ‘others’ it purports to depict. Part-and-parcel of a group’s ‘identity rhetoric’, stereotyping is a function of the social construction of group

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characteristics; by way of a normative treatment of others, a consensus surrounding stereotypes bolsters social solidarity and integration. Through partaking in processes of prejudicial othering, individuals can express common group membership and hope to gain the recognition of their fellows.

Psychodynamic approaches to stereotypes have centred on those instinctual and unconscious factors in the human make-up which might make for poor inter-group relations. Both the instinct for aggression per se, and the arising of certain personality types (authoritarian, for instance) from a dialectical interplay between particular instincts and particular agonistic social formations, are seen as motivating human beings towards prejudicial treatment of others (cf. Wrightsman 1977). Cognitive approaches, meanwhile, have tended to reject a focus upon both motive and ideology, and accepted a limited human capacity to process information and think rationally. Stereotypes here represent breakdowns in environmental perception such that experience is not cognized directly or wholly, and cognitions are not changed in the face of new data. These systematic perceptual biases are due to inevitable human fallibility. In endeavouring to reduce environmental complexity to a manageable size, when bombarded with environmental stimuli, untested cognitive short-cuts come to be employed which have a tendency to become self-fulfilling. As with ‘autistic thinking’ in general, stereotypes are insufficiently perspicacious to afford valid generalizations and any true relation to reality which they bear is merely by chance (cf. Klineberg 1951; Peabody 1985).

In sum, stereotypes are conventionally treated as over-generalized, overdetermined, second-hand and partial perceptions which confuse description and evaluation, which merely reflect ideological biases, instinctual motivations or cognitive limitations.

An alternative appreciation of stereotypes

This bad press can sometimes miss the mark, however. A better appreciation of the practice of stereotyping might begin by identifying just what stereotypes, as a discourse and a cognitive resort, can be said to offer.

First, then, stereotypes afford both opposition and exaggeration. From the former (from comparison and contrast), notions of being are to be gained: by continuously ‘playing the vis-à-vis’, as Boon phrases it (1982:231), distinctions between self and other are realized. From the latter (from hyperbole), as Douglas suggests (1966:4), clarity and definiteness are to be derived.Thus it is that in stereotypes distinct senses

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of identity may be seen to inhere; through the positing of stereotypical images of difference, individuals and groups can maintain their senses of belonging, while in stereotypical hyperbole differences between self and other can become ever more clear-cut. Rather than scourges of the alien, then, stereotypes may be seen as facing primarily inward: into the group and, even more, into the individual, furnishing him or her with comforting shibboleths of self.

Seen from ‘inside’ group boundaries, the stereotype can serve a further useful purpose; individuals can use stereotypes for cognitively mapping and then anchoring themselves within a conventional and secure social landscape. Here are cognitive ‘schemata’ (Neisser 1976:53–4), which direct an exploration of the unknown and potentially chaotic in terms of the personally orderly and known. That is, stereotypes are a stable and widespread discursive currency, and they provide significant points of initial reference.They afford bearings from which to anticipate interaction, plot social relations and initiate knowing—and from a safe distance, too—however far removed their biases become from the manifold elaborations of social relationship and being which eventuate. However diversely conceived and unpredictably shifting the social universe, still an individual need never be at a loss as to what to perceive and how to commence to act; indeed, the simpler and more ambiguous the stereotype the more situations in which it can be used. Perhaps the stereotype does derive from typifying the world ‘outside’ in exaggerated opposition, with others’ cultural traits being seen as alien and as butting against one’s own, but ‘inside’ the stereotype still provides the cognitive furniture of a secure belonging. If two geometric axes must intersect for the identifying of a point in a plane, then in the stereotype the individual finds one ready-made cognitive axis in relation to which to gauge his or her position (cf. Price 1992:58–9).

Moreover, stereotypes are never alone. At least one contrast is entailed and very often an entire set: ‘commonsensical English’ versus ‘stupid Irish’ versus ‘mean Scots’ versus ‘thieving Welsh’ versus ‘haughty French’ versus ‘mystical Indians’ versus ‘regimented Chinese’ versus ‘rough-and- ready Australians’, and so on. And if the stereotype is a cognitive anchor, then a set of them anchors the individual to a socio-cultural world replete with, and ready for, all manner of occurrence. Each stereotype alone may represent a corruption of an immense variety of practice, but as a set they provide a varied, rich and all-inclusive array; however fictitious and remote these labels may be from others’ actual attributes and penchants, together stereotypes constitute a coherent and expectable, wider milieu, common in form to all its members.

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In sum, the stereotype represents a shorthand. It is a source of consistent, expectable, broad and immediate ways of knowing of sociocultural worlds, a ready means by which to embody and express a multitude of complex emotions, and a short-cut to generalities, to future possible regularities and uniformities. Such a foundation is very necessary not only as a bulwark against indeterminacy and unpredictability, but also as an encouragement towards action—that vital movement which, if it were not for the bias of the stereotype and the blind spots of perception it incurs, might be replaced by the self-doubt and paralysis of trying to see an environment from every point of view (cf. Lippmann 1947:114; Rapport 1998).

The individuality of stereotypes

To stereotype is to partake of a socio-cultural discourse: to know of ‘French’ and ‘Indians’, of ‘haughty’ and ‘mystical’, and of how the words go together; also of how properly to enunciate the words, and combine them with actions, in conventional interaction.To stereotype, in short, is to evince enculturation into a set of regularly used and possibly widely shared practices.

However, an argument may be made, notwithstanding, that a discourse of stereotypes remains essentially exterior to the individual: something with which he juggles and enters into relationship. For, at the same time as the individual has recourse to stereotypes, the interpretation of experience which stereotyping affords is far from constricted. The individual can be seen adopting and yet adapting stereotypes, developing his own routine relations with them, posing one against another, personalizing what they purport in his own image. Stereotypes punctuate acts of interpretation, serving as a structure, a syntax, a cement for what is constructed, but they do not determine those constructions.

The externality of stereotypes as a discourse (and the ‘internality’ of their contextualization) speaks to a further feature of stereotypes: their inertia.There is wide acknowledgement of longevity of stereotypes, their persistency and consistency in the face of ‘objective’ contradictory claims. In this discursive stability, it might be argued, is to be found security and an assurance of one’s possessing interactional currency. But besides security, it is perhaps beneath such conventional discursive forms that life can be lived most eccentrically and creatively. The very formulaicism permits the freest flights of fancy to be privately construed with the least of public consequences. As Virginia Woolf poetically phrased it (1969:223):

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