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

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labour. It was a courageous step even as late as the 1980s for an Amazonianist to admit to working among such inauthentic people—and to state not only the worth of such a study but also the irrelevance of our notion of ‘authenticity’ (see Gow 1991).

Still, times have changed, and we find that today the notion of hybridity is alive and well. Indeed hybridity is thought to be part-and- parcel of the post-colonial, globalized, fragmented identity—and for some (e.g. see Bauman 1995; Haraway 1990), everyone in the world, including both ‘natives’ and civil servants, have become hybrids. Thus writers within the post-colonialist tradition tend to write as if hybridity is a product of Western civilization.The present-day self is a fragmented one; we have become half humans, half machines. On the other hand, there is an anthropological view that sees all cultural activity as belonging to hybridity, as being a product of cultural assimilation. In other words, there has never been such a thing as an ‘authentic type’, or a ‘pure system’, for people are always exchanging, changing, processing, incorporating, elements of culture. From this perspective the position is that we have all always been hybrids. To live culturally is an ongoing, ever-shifting activity (we are the ones who place ‘culture’ within museums, centring, reifying, turning it into the matter of evolutionists’ dreams).

All people, however, do not belong to Homi Bhabha‘s category of the ‘unhomely’. Only ‘marginalized’ hybrids can be ‘unhomely’. They are not only betwixt and between, but also have no home.They are the ones classified as inauthentic hybrids, and thus it is they who still suffer from the remains of early-twentieth-century Eurocentric notions of authenticity with its associated time-warp ways of thinking. There exists the strong sentiment among politicians, development agencies and even anthropologists that deprived, powerless, dominated peoples must, if they wish to be recognized, remain ‘authentic’ by living frozen to their past. The imagery of the ‘pure’ primitive goes deep, and thus has political weight today (see Overing 1998).We have the bureaucrats of Brussels promoting with perhaps the best of intentions the idea of ‘the indigenous community’, a dutiful salvage job for the world of nation-states. The United Nations document, ‘Article 21’, calls for all nation-states to conserve the shared cultures, the united cultures, of their respective indigenous peoples. The understanding espoused is that natives live in homogeneous communities, the members of which share identical views of the world; the nation should respect these individual cultures, these homogeneous world-views. What should we do? Should we suspect such documents? Or aid and abet them? Should we ask, as Nicholas Thomas (1994) might do, whether such a

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document is yet another example of white society’s primitivism? And, as such, an aggressive act of essentializing? Is ‘Article 21’just another colonialist appropriation, with its emphasis upon the community of the native (we have individualism; they have community)? Yet, do we not wish to preserve the notion of community? There is the longing of Homi Bhabha (1994) for the creation of a ‘community of the unhomely’ to take care of the unhomely‘s desire for social linkage, and to join, to join …We find that this question of community is not very straightforward.

The importance of perspective

Similarly, Nicholas Thomas notes (1994) that despite the insidious role that ‘essential discourse’ has played in the colonial constructions of native identity, the notion of ‘authenticity’ also has its ambiguity, certainly as a political tool.To know the perspective of the user of such discourse is absolutely essential to understanding the power game at hand. We may well be offended by the ‘modernized’ Maori, or Aboriginal, or Native American promoting the ‘authenticity’ of their traditional ways.We see ‘hybrids’ disrupting the space of the ‘authentic native’. On the other hand, what these hybrids have learned is that the very act of essentializing, as the colonial West and global capitalism has long known, is empowering. Thus the table can be turned. Indigenous peoples may put themselves in the studio or the museum in order to subvert colonialist discourse. The Maori art exhibitions capitalized on white society’s primitivism, creating thereby some prestige and power for the Maori that did not exist before the 1980s. There is also the example from the Cultural Palace of the Rio Negro in Manaus, which recently engaged in a great cultural display of Amazonian ethnicity and a eulogy of its cultural authenticity in a festival entitled ‘Expressions of Identity and Ethnic Affirmation’. There was an example of Yanomami shamanism, and an ayawaska (hallucinatory drug) ritual of the Marubo. There was myth-telling, and chanting, ritual dances performed and videos of indigenous festivals shown. A sonata was even performed by the University of Amazonas orchestra, entitled ‘The Dance of the Masks’.The extent to which this display was indigenously planned and organized is unclear.

Nevertheless it is wise to remember that cultural activism on the part of the marginalized and ‘discontents’ of colonialist history has not been unusual. As the art critic, Guy Brett, observes (1991:118ff.), the sheer volume of artistic critique and resistance to the colonial process on the part of the colonized has been in fact concealed in the West—or not

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recognized by it (cf. Gossen 1996).The mocking critiques and images of colonial masters would make, it seems, a bad fit with the widely accepted view that the colonized are uncomprehending victims. Nowadays, this art of the unhomely, which often weds a ‘sophisticated’ Western training in Paris or London with imagery from ‘back home’, tends to make explicit the dialectics of cultural discourses between centre and periphery, and their related relations of power. There have been, however, many powerful artists from countries peripheral to the great art markets who on the whole are unknown to the West, ignored by it and thereby forcibly localized (Brett 1991).Though, if known (such artists as the Russian, Malevich, or the Mexicans, Rivera and Kahlo), they are seen by Europe as mere ‘primitivists’. It is, however, a particular political use of ‘primitivism’ that is for the most part radically different from the way it has been used in Western art (Brett 1991). We must remember that the one who does the labelling of the unhomely, the authentic or inauthentic, and the hybrids of the world—and for whom— makes all the difference to the game of empowerment: it follows that the flipside is disempowerment, as in the strategy of fixing ethnic identities long used by the nation-state.

The right to hybridity and the patronizing gaze

The Caribbean Nobel prize author, Derek Walcott, warns us (1996) about the dangers of the ‘patronizing gaze’ that insists upon the purity of culture. Walcott reminds us that a lot of defensive, aggressive academics and politicians have seized upon the definition of folk. He notes (1996:271) that there is something dangerous about ‘the property of reaching people and preserving what belongs to the people, all that stuff’—there is a curious kind of patronage in it. He says that he himself does not write ‘folk’:

[w]hen you talk about folk as a writer, then the danger there is you tend to say: ‘Well, we’ve got to preserve what we have, you’ve got to be rootsy, X or Y, you’ve got to talk that way’. You know, that kind of thing; it’s all very dangerous and ephemeral, that kind of aggressiveness. It turns into anthropology; and you can’t patronize genuine people by making them anthropological specimens, like saying: ‘Oh, you are a great representative of the folk. Now you keep doing that. Right?’ While in the meantime you’ve been watching a good soap opera, or singing country songs.

(Walcott 1996:271)

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Walcott goes on to insist (ibid.) that each person has the right to go to the cinema, ‘instead of being a damned representative of folk for the rest of his or her life. So anyway, there’s that, that we have to look out for.’ Stephen Hugh-Jones (1992) makes a similar powerful plea for the right of indigenous peoples to make their own decisions about the acquisition of consumer goods. He argues that there is hypocrisy to the assumption that the integrity of Amazonian ‘culture’ is in jeopardy as it comes into contact with the allure of greedy market forces, which are now entering contemporary Amazonia from a myriad of directions.The idea is that Amazonian folk must not partake of, they must in fact be protected from, the capitalist vision of humankind’s limitless needs, which are now propelling humanity to its benefit into an unbounded spiral of progress. Unlike people of the Western world, who are not beguiled by the necessary ruthlessness of market forces, indigenous peoples are portrayed as passive victims of the market economy.Yet, in the name of progress, they have been drawn into it willy-nilly at the hands of missionaries, merchants and government agents.As Hugh-Jones observes, the possibility is rarely considered that these are a people who are also fully capable of reflecting upon their relationships with the market economy, and that indeed they often well understand its risks, its dangers

and its allure.

Amazonian peoples are deeply aware of the dangers of rapid economic and social development. They have suffered conditions of extreme change over the past thirty years: they have seen strangers entering their territories to take their land and destroy it. They have experienced the building on their lands of hydro-electric dams and roads, the mining of gold and the extracting of oil, the burning of forests and the creation of large cattle ranches and mono-culture plantations. They have been displaced from their up-river small villages to down-river highly populated communities. Their young people have had to enter an educational system which uses a foreign language and teaches an alien knowledge of the world. The indigenous peoples have good insight into their problems with the market economy; they know the enemy and its effect upon them. They know about the social costs of rapid change, and also the economic and personal costs of the market economy. They increasingly do not have the land to sustain indigenous practices and the type of community life which they value. To survive and feed their families they must engage in wage labour—where they can neither look nor act in accordance to their ‘ordinary’ (authentic?) ways of doing things.They have many skills, but not the political ones for dealing with big government or big multi-nationals which would

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be necessary to get their lands back, and thus their freedom for leading in one way or other their ordinary, everyday life.

Contrary to popular ideas about the matter, indigenous peoples are often quite open to change. They tend to be epistemologically open (cf. Salmond 1985), and thus, because knowledge and practice are not separate for them, they are not opposed to accepting new practices. It is not unreasonable also to say that they themselves prefer having a say in the matter in order to decide what is good or damaging to their communities, and their desired ways of living. However, the idea of self-directed change is too much of a challenge to the axiomatic premise of the Western assimilation paradigm, where all change that can be appropriate must be decided upon by the ‘superior’ and ‘developed’ form of life, which by definition ‘knows best’. There are many academics, bureaucrats and politicians who believe strongly in the ‘purity’ of indigenous lifeways, and therefore view any sign of ‘openness’ to change with disdain, especially if self-directed and selfmotivated. The idea of ‘authenticity’ is a political stance which can be used against the ‘unhomely’ of the world as a means to keep them within control.

Thus it is for many reasons that to question the ‘authenticity’ of the motivations of indigenous peoples—who wish to wear trousers, or want to make their own decisions about (or use outside expertise with regard to) their relations to the market economy and the agents of the nationstate demanding their ‘development’—would border on the vacuous. However, among bureaucrats and agents of development, the pomposity, not to speak of the political weight, of their accusations of inauthenticity goes unquestioned (cf. Hobart 1993; Salmond 1995; Oldham 1996). In other words, indigenous people must not become skilled in their dealings with the world of the whites. Categorized by the state as irritating ethnic hybrids, they have no right to real hybridity which would allow them to act skilfully in both worlds. Their modern condition is precisely that which Homo Bhabha coined as ‘the unhomely’.

Is an anthropology of ‘the unhomely’ possible?

An interesting question to be raised is whether anthropology can become one of the voices for the unhomely? Can we take the perspective of the unhomely?—all those blurred categories, wanderings to and fro, an unease with Western capitalism, and nausea over the structures of domination created through modernist ways of thinking and acting. However, as Zygmunt Bauman has noted (1990:158), the

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premise of the assimilationist and the colonial relationship is one that has made inequality—political, social, epistemological—the axiomatic starting-point of all argument. Such assumed inequality becomes thereby secure against challenge and scrutiny, whether by the pen of governor or anthropologists. There are nevertheless possibilities for a very different type of overt engagement. One suggestion would be that the successful anthropologist of turn-of-millennium times must with full selfknowledge assume the status of the reflexive hybrid. In so doing he or she sheds, to the extent possible, their status as a representative (and certainly spokesperson) of a powerful nation-state and academy. Only if necessary strategically is it a status to be resumed in the process of dealing with governmental, multi-national and funding institutions. ‘Hybridity’ can take many forms. The message here is that of the novelist Walcott, that everyone has their right to hybridity—but included here is the anthropologist as well as the indigenous people.

The greatest strength of anthropologists is that we appreciate multiperspectivism. Within the universe of pluralities that we study, there are also plenty of ‘hybrids’, and ‘states of hybridity’. This multi-perspectival outlook is surely anthropology’s real potential. To translate all those blurred categories of human existence, now that is a worthwhile project. One way we can do this (acceptably) is systematically to undermine the exotica of Western obsessions, its use of, display of, things and peoples considered as exotic. To displace Western exotica is a worthy anthropological ambition.This is not to underplay the extent that people can differ, for perspicacious difference is the object of this message. Exotica and difference do not need to be conjoined.

We can diminish the exoticism rampant in anthropology (all that magic, all that ritual and scarification taken out of context) by focusing upon (accepting) the everyday of indigenous life, translating it in such a way that it becomes familiar to us. In other words we can become ‘at home with the unhomely’ (see Overing 1999). What about situated practices, their everyday ways of knowing and doing things, acting and responding? What about the sentiments and bodily styles that attract them, and those that offend? What about the homeliness of ‘the unhomely’? It is wise to remember that indigenous peoples see what they do as ‘everyday’, ‘ordinary’; for them what we do is ‘exotic’. An anthropology for ‘the unhomely’ would be where we, on our side, transmit the message that we too are local, and often bizarre in our solutions. Indigenous peoples usually do not need this particular lesson about themselves, and certainly not about us.They are usually very comfortable with the idea of shared knowledges, but for obvious reasons not so keen on the idea of assimilation. They from the start, not having our

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hegemonic ideas about knowledge and being more tolerant about difference, are usually much more open than we.

See also: Alterity, Culture, Gender, Home and Homelessness,

Human Rights, Movement, Situation and Context, Stereotypes

URBANISM

Do cities represent distinctive socio-cultural spaces? If so, is this because they are home to particular types of relationship, or attitude and mindset, or practices, norms, roles and ways of life? Or is it that cities are componential parts of wider social systems, regional and global, and as such are better seen as conduits in networks of relations that connect up the most localized interaction with the most far-flung? In either case, do cities play a central role in an evolutionary change of human being: from small-scale communities to ever-increasing large-scale associations?

It is questions such as these that an urban anthropology, an anthropology of urbanization and the city, has been interested to answer. For, even if ‘city’ is understood to be a vague concept—to demarcate simply a sizeable, dense settlement in whose more or less common physical space a relatively high level of accessibility between a relatively large number of people obtains (Hannerz 1980:243)—it is now claimed that more than half of the worlds population has become ‘urban’; and with some half-a-dozen cities boasting populations of greater than 15 million, there is no sign of this trend reversing. However fuzzy the category, in short, ‘city life’ is difficult, anthropologically, to discount.

An urban way of life

For Simmel (1971), cities are particular because they give rise to certain common psychological traits; in cities there is an intensification of nervous stimulation, so that a lasting and predictable sequence of psychic impressions (as in rural communities) is replaced by a crowding-in of rapidly changing, unexpectable and discontinuous images. City-dwellers thus become more mentally sophisticated but also more blasé. Similarly, for Durkheim (1964 [1893]), cities represent distinct environments due to the degree of role specialization likely to be found there, and the concentration of powerful social institutions.

Extending these lines of thought in the 1920s and 1930s, the Chicago School of (ethnographic) sociologists and anthropologists famously developed the notion of an ‘urban way of life’ which could be expected

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to replace a traditional rural one, in the same way that the burgeoning city of Chicago was transmogrifying both a rural hinterland and the stream of ex-rural migrants entering its portals. Central figures in the School were Robert Park and Louis Wirth. For Park, an examination of the impact of industrial-capitalist expansion on Chicago, its suddenly large population of immigrants, entrepreneurs and hoboes, partaking of their own communities, neighbourhoods and leisure pursuits, suggested that city life amounted to a meeting and mingling of ‘all sorts of people …who never fully comprehend one another’ (1968:26). At the same time, and recalling the medieval German proverb that ‘city air makes for freedom’, Park concluded that: ‘[t]he city is…the natural habitat of civilized man’ (1968:3).

In a celebrated paper, ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’ (1938),Wirth sought to detail just what made cities different: how a different domiciliary ecology gave rise to different types of people, identities and relationships. Defining a city as ‘a relatively large, dense and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals’, Wirth described the replacement of rural relations which were long-lived, knowledgeable and often derived from kinship, with urban relations which were impersonal, superficial, segmented, non-cumulative, unpredictable, and given to a faster turnover. Clearly also influenced by the nineteenth-century, premonitory writings of the likes of Henry Maine (1861—‘from status to contractual relations’) and Ferdinand Toennies (1957 [1887]—‘from natural communities to artificial associations’),Wirth imaged cities as distinct social systems, and an evolutionary stage set to change rural ways of life—folkways, folklore, all that was folksy—for ever.

Renowned, Chicago-sponsored, ethnographic studies were undertaken in such evolving urban milieux by the likes of Warner and Lunt (1941, 1942) and Whyte (1943), while Robert Redfield set out to examine the transformations as they occurred at the rural end of a ‘folk—urban continuum’. Communities, it was mooted, could be placed at various points along a continuum as, across time, they evolved from occupying the former pole to the latter. In studies of the Mexican village of Tepotzlan and then on the Yucatan peninsula (1930, 1941), Redfield sought to plot the urbanization of the rural in terms of the following diacritica: small-scale to large-scale; social homogeneity to social differentiation (regarding occupations, recreations, and so on); physical isolation to a predominance of networks of communication; group solidarity to individualism; personal, face-to-face relations to relations at a distance (in both physical terms and emotional); sacred experience and action to secular; illiteracy to literacy; practising Little Traditions of cultural learning to partaking of sophisticated Great Traditions.

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Cities as diverse

The particularity of the city in the Chicago model was to come under increasing attack, however. Were there not many urbanisms to consider: the industrial city as distinct from the pre-industrial city, the Western city as distinct from the non-Western, the colonial as distinct from the postcolonial, and so on? And did not this diversity mitigate against reductive generalization (such as, for instance, the notion that in the city kinship as a load-bearing social institution was superseded by non-ascriptive measures)? Instead of treating the urban and the rural as two discrete (types of) social system was it not more accurate to plot their relations in one overarching set of socio-economic structures?

In a historical analysis, then, Sjoberg (1960) described the logic of the pre-industrial city as pertaining more to a concentration of governmental, religious and literate elites than a dense population focused upon manufacture or commerce; in its running, moreover, it continued to favour social organization along familial and ethnic lines. In a series of ethnographic critiques (1951, 1961), Oscar Lewis retraced Redfield’s steps to Tepotzlan and then followed villagers from Tepotzlan to Mexico City. Not only was village life not personable and harmonic, he claimed, but urbanism did not bring about necessarily large-scale or irrevocable changes to social organization or lifestyle. Rather, people always and everywhere tend to live as members of small groups— families, neighbourhoods, associations—and not as nameless parts of amorphous masses; hence it is ‘peasants in cities’ that one can expect to find following processes of urbanization and migration.

In studies based in London (Wilmott and Young 1960; Young and Wilmott 1974), Washington (Hannerz 1969) and Boston (Gans 1965), comparable arguments were put forward for the existence of ‘urban villagers’: people partaking in face-to-face exchanges, living in relatively cohesive communities, based on kinship, familiarity and religiosity. Being encapsulated within an urban space and occupied in urban pursuits need not give rise to urbane identities.To the extent that cities-as-wholes have characters at all, they can be expected to be manifestations of the particular admixtures of the smaller and more traditional groupings that live on within them. This also calls for the study of the city within a broader context: as part of a flow of people and resources within a region and between regions.

This kind of regional emphasis was maintained in a series of studies undertaken by anthropologists working with Max Gluckman at Manchester in the 1950s and 1960s, and focused upon the urbanizing Copperbelt area of Central Africa (Mitchell 1969; Kapferer 1972). The

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specificity of situations rather than the particularity of cities was the logic employed here to apprehend ways of life; cities were spaces in which to undertake studies of (for instance) migration, poverty, ethnicity, networks and cultural change, rather than things to study in themselves.

Indeed, the 1960s and after have witnessed a flowering of studies of particular urban situations and topics: from urbanism and state-formation (Leeds 1994), to urbanism and musical subculture (Finnegan 1989), to urbanism and drug-gangs (Bourgois 1995). One area of special growth has been in studies of shanty-towns, and those post-colonial ‘squatter cities’ which have grown up in many Third World locations and today form the worlds largest conurbations (Lloyd 1982; Scheper-Hughes 1992). In what are often seen as reproductions of colonial-style relations of hierarchy, exploitation and even genocide, new urban elites peripheralize the plight of those masses who move to and fro within and between urban spaces but subsist well below the poverty line. In a critique (in turn) of Lewis’s notions of a ‘culture of poverty’ (1959), whose members are trapped in slum lives and whose fatalistic attitudes condemn them to reproduce their situation across the generations, recent study stresses the complexity of social organization and the flexibility of strategizing that goes on among shanty-town inhabitants (Wikan 1980). Not only do these latter play a vital role in the continuing wealth-creation of the elite, as cheap labour, but in an ‘informal economy’ (Hart 1982) beyond institutional control and official record, they engage in practices which lead to the maintenance of community ways of life against great odds.

Cities as soft

If an appreciation of the diversity of city life has mitigated against reductive generalization concerning urbanism, there are still occasional efforts to construct overviews. In Exploring the City (1980), Ulf Hannerz admitted that urbanism always represents the expression of a particular centripetal tendency in a particular encompassing society, but still felt it amounted to a discrete set of relations between a number of sociocultural domains. The domains of urban life included: household and kinship, provisioning, recreation, neighbouring, and traffic with strangers; and while only the range of provisioning and the patterns of trafficking with strangers may have a specifically urban quality to them, what gave the city its character was variation on the theme of relations between these domains.

At the same time as Hannerz seeks to identify this specifically urban quality, however, he grants that cities are ‘soft’ environments (1980: 249):

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