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

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control. They are but inversions of self. A convinced Lamarckian, Freud assumed that the nature and experience of prehistoric humans were still relevant to the understanding of modern ‘civilized’ man: the primitive still lives within us, internalized, as a sort of lascivious and violent monster that it is the tragedy of modern civilized man to have to control. As Corbey concludes (1991:55–6), ‘The world within as Freud constructed it is intricately related to that of a nineteenth-century civilizatory discourse on races, sexes, classes and empire, and the wild other who inhabits this world within turns out to be an avatar of the colonial and sexual others constructed in this discourse’. This is also the discourse that anthropology inherited, and with which it still is having to contend.

See also: Gender, Humanism, Post-Modernism, The Rural Idyll,

The Unhomely

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The concept of auto-anthropology was defined (deliberately ambiguously and tautologically) by Marilyn Strathern as: ‘anthropology carried out in the social context which produced it’ (1987:17). More generously, the concept covers the notions of an anthropological study of one’s own, one’s home and one’s self, and explores that murky ground, at once physical, phenomenological, psychological, social and personal, which ‘an anthropology at home’ gives onto.

Auto-anthropology is situated at the confluence of a number of important debates in anthropology, concerning the very nature and status of the anthropological project: ‘Is anthropology politically correct as an undertaking?’; ‘Is anthropology better undertaken in certain geo-physical settings than others?’; ‘Is anthropology necessarily undertaken in certain existential states of mind?’; and ‘Is anthropology best seen as a universal attitude towards social life, an ethnomethodology in the construction of social relations?’. These questions all pertain to the place of reflexivity both in the life of a professional, primarily Western and university, discipline such as anthropology, and also in the lives of those whom anthropology has undertaken to study.

Is anthropology politically correct as an undertaking?

In a political situation very different from that in which modern anthropology was born, a situation in which erstwhile relations between

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the ‘West and the rest’, between Euro-American cultures and societies and others (of the ‘South’, the ‘under-developed’, the ‘Second,Third and Fourth Worlds’), have come to be described and decried as colonialistic, exploitative and imperialistic, the project of anthropology has itself been called into question. Is it possible to see anthropology as anything but a set of Western discourses and practices? Is it not irremediably tainted both by its birthplace and history and by its continuing intent to translate and compare (define and circumscribe) otherness?

One thing which an auto-anthropological awareness has instigated in the discipline, therefore, is an attempt to elucidate the unspoken analytical givens, concepts and techniques, historical and proximate, socio-cultural and personal, which the anthropologist inevitably brings to the work of engaging with others. Here is a reflexive awareness that ‘adequate anthropological accounts cannot be crafted without acknowledging the forces—epistemological and political—that condition their writing’ (Whitaker 1997:470).

Such reflexivity had always been an implicit part of the modern discipline—Malinowski having been plagued by questions concerning why he was doing what he was doing, and how valid his data were—but now it becomes explicit, and linked to issues of ethics and power. Such a ‘reflexive’ turn was perhaps first noted by Bob Scholte (1969), in the context of a consideration of the politics of fieldwork undertaken by Americans in the wake of the Vietnam War, and in the face of local distaste at thus being studied. Anthropologists, Scholte advised, must always be aware of the political asymmetries which their activities presuppose; also how these are implicated in the epistemological privileges of so-called objectivity and neutrality. Fieldwork and analysis are in the end one praxis, and what is reflexively called for is a critical emancipatory exercise which would liberate the discipline from the vestiges of value-free scientism.

Matters came to a head in 1986 with the publication of two volumes, Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (edited by George Marcus and James Clifford) and Anthropology as Cultural Critique. An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (by Marcus and Fischer), and a flurry of intellectual activity which came to be known as ‘The Writing Culture Debate’. This gave onto three central resolutions: (1) the scientific epistemology on which anthropology had been hitherto based—that anthropology would one day evolve the perfect language for describing ‘real human nature’ or ‘real cultural essences’—was in fact a provincial, and politically unsavoury, Western specificity; (2) all writing was rhetorical, so any claims made by anthropologists about the others they studied spoke less of

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incontestable givens and more of the hegemonies of political and professional scriptural practice; (3) all so-called grand or meta narratives of knowledge and progress might be called into question and, by juxtaposing them against the equally specific narratives of diverse other cultures, deconstructed.

Anthropologists remain divided, however, on the matter of where this leaves the anthropological enterprise. Some (Prattis 1985) feel empowered reflexively to stand back and consider those discursive constraints on perception and knowledge production—others’ as well as our own—and, by use of ‘pragmatic methodologies’, still make translations across cultural and personal boundaries (1996:1073). Even if every language is partial and relative, unable to describe the diversity of human realities, then notwithstanding, a reflexive anthropology can hope to escape such tautology and unite observer and observed together in a new intersubjective space: a space of universal human being lying beyond language and culture. For some, in short, reflexivity shows the way towards a poetics by which we may access each other’s individual experience beneath a multiplicity of cultural surfaces.

For others, a reflexive awareness points up the impossibility of ever studying ‘others’ except as a means further to define oneself—reducing otherness to a limiting space within one’s own construction.There is no possibility of attempting to repair anthropological representation merely by being more self-conscious about it. ‘Proper’ representation can only ever be that effected from within a home environment, and all anthropology can properly attempt is an enabling or advocating of local voices; at most, anthropology can cause an accession of local voices to global platforms.

For still others, an eschewing of generalization and comparison, even of a description of otherness, tends towards a radical relativism which simply plays into the hands of conservatism and reaction. The so-called ‘new’ insights into the production of anthropological knowledge which reflexivity provides are simply partial reiterations of old Marxian ones, now redrafted into an elitist language which disables action and possible critique.

Is anthropology better undertaken in certain geo-physical settings than others?

Leaving aside questions of epistemology for a moment, the politics of post-colonialism has also meant that the geo-physical setting of much anthropological fieldwork has changed of late, and that many anthropologists are focusing on their own or home societies. This is not

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a wholly new situation (cf. Little 1948; Frankenberg 1957;Warner 1959), but more now than before anthropologists routinely find themselves (in Cheater’s formulation (1987)) at once ‘investigator and citizen’.

This situation has a number of causes and a number of consequences. As Jackson puts it (1987:12), after a ‘century-long flirtation with exotic fieldwork’, anthropology has returned home (and seems home to stay) because research there is easier to access, cheaper and faster. More distant climes have become harder to reach due to decreasing Western funding, and due to suspicion elsewhere over Western research into local ‘primitivism’ or ‘tribalism’; to hark back to a (pristine) tribal past is to practise a present intellectual neo-colonialism. At the same time, anthropologists have discovered a long-standing ignorance concerning their own Western societies—their histories and cultures—and the extent to which they are home to a diversity of socio-cultural practices and world-views. Surely there is a place for the micro-social methodology and specialism of anthropology in disinterring the underlying nature of life in the West?

As a consequence of work in Western societies, moreover, genuine theoretical advances, of relevance to all locations of anthropological study, have been made. For instance, anthropology at home brings to cognizance the true extent of individual mobility and social change in a milieu, and the way in which boundaries between cultural groupings are in constant flux. It has been an anthropological orthodoxy since the time of Malinowski that societies and cultures may be associated with bounded locations, and that thereby isolated and somehow timeless communities could be imaged and imagined in which anthropologists were to do their work.And yet it is now clear that anthropological places and regions can be constructed in this fashion only by way of arbitrary and political exclusions; Malinowski’s Trobriand Islands were selfcontained tribal isolates only at the expense of rendering others (White administrators, missionaries, traders, et al.) invisible. In fact, boundaries between separate cultures cannot be demarcated and areas are always interconnected; place is never coterminous with identity, geo-physical regions are never homogeneous, and any cultural groupings are only ever provisional.

For this reason, Okely (1996) would describe the erstwhile anthropological privileging of the study of ‘other’, exotically constructed regions, to the neglect of its ‘home’, as the discipline’s worst example of exclusivity and elitism. Excluding study of its own centres of power, defining Europe, for instance, as outside its professional brief—because ‘easy’ or ‘known’ or the provenance of other disciplines—anthropology has missed both commonplaces elsewhere and exotica close by; it has

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mistakenly constituted itself as a regional as opposed to a theoretical specialism.

Anthropology ‘at home’, in short, has unique lessons to teach, concerning cultural ambiguity, hybridity and heterogeneity. The anthropologist of the West recognizes it as customary not exceptional, for instance, for a diversity of ways of thinking and being, a multiplicity of cultural realities and worlds, to co-exist in the same place. As anthropologists learn another language in the words of their mother tongue they see how surface similarities of form may hold contrary and subversive meanings (cf. Messerschmidt 1981).

On the other hand, anthropology at home has its own difficulties and dangers. It may not always be possible to gain that distantiation which has been the hallmark of anthropological method—so-called ‘cultureshock’, by which the conventions of local life are seen as strange and thereby calling for translation, if not ‘explanation’, by the anthropological observer. The anthropologist at home must sometimes work harder not to take things for granted and to make himself view things as a stranger might. Then again, as a citizen, the anthropologist expects to engage more mediately, not to say politically, with the socio-cultural milieu he is studying. Even if he does not see his writings as referring explicitly to the political situation of governance and the deployment of material and non-material resources, still those in power may make such direct links between the constructions of local intellectuals such as anthropologists and the workings of government policy. It may not be so easy for anthropologists at home to separate their academic from their more public pronouncements, and difficult, as Cheater puts it, to be a ‘parttime citizen’ (1987:176). Nevertheless, as more ‘indigenous anthropologists’ (albeit usually Western-trained) set about undertaking research in their home communities—in New Guinea, Brazil, India, Africa and the erstwhile Communist world, as well as the West—this is a situation in which more find themselves.

There is an awareness now abroad, in sum, that anthropology dare not overlook its own, usually ‘Western’ space—Western exoticism and multiplicity—in some banal occidentalism (cf. Carrier 1995). Studying ‘at home’, in fact, can lead to an awareness and a promotion of anthropological disciplinary expertise as an enterprise theoretically and experientially (rather than geo-physically or regionally) validated and based.

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Is anthropology best seen as a universal attitude towards social life, an ethnomethodology in the construction of social relations?

Powerful anthropological voices continue to be raised against an anthropology ‘at home’ in the West, nevertheless, even one practised alongside that of more ‘exotic’ locales. This opposition is both epistemological and political. It is said that many Western-based academic disciplines shine their light upon Western society and culture, from the humanities through the social sciences to the natural sciences, but only anthropology has taken as its central plank the decentring of the West, and the appreciating of other ‘literatures’, ‘cultures’ and ‘sciences’ (cf. Bloch 1988). At a time of Western retrenchment, in terms of the financing of research and of charitable aid overseas, and of a certain smugness concerning ‘the end of history’ and the domination of a Western model of national-democratic polity, it is all the more important that anthropology remain as flag-bearer of non-Western interests, in all possible senses.

Coincident with this is an argument that only via the radical disjunction of culture-shock is it at all possible to gain perspective either on oneself or on others. Anthropology at home in one’s own culture is impossible because anthropological insight only derives from that ‘contact zone’ (Hastrup 1995b) which is set up when members of different cultures interact. As Ardener elaborates (1987), people’s heads are full of concepts and categories ‘generated by the social’, and they spend their lives projecting these latter ‘back upon the social’. But in ordinary circumstances, as ‘native’ actors, people do not perceive this, do not recognize this as representing their everyday experience and practice, because for them social space and the cultural worlds it contains are not objects of contemplation. Only the shock of the strange—the arrival of an anthropologist in an exotic community—breaks the quality of routine and automatism, both for the anthropologist and the locals, and makes what is normal unfamiliar; only then does one know whether one is ‘at home’ or not.

This makes ‘anthropology at home’ of only limited provenance and relevance, Strathern elaborates (1987). For all such reflexive or autoanthropology can mean is rendering people’s conception of themselves back to themselves. Anthropology is a folk discourse of the West (or, at least, an academically distilled and derived one), dealing with notions of ‘society’, ‘culture’, ‘class’, ‘socialization’, ‘roles’, ‘relationships’, ‘community’ and so on, because this is how a certain Western discourse has historically developed. Anthropology at home can only mean a

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recycling of these notions in a tautological fashion, and in no wise reaching an epistemological position from which they could be deconstructed (explained and critiqued). The only way beyond cultural discourses, concepts, categories, notions and genres, is via other such discourses: by setting up a contact zone as a tertium quid between radical differences.

In fact, this is what anthropology has done all along, and continues to do even when it claims to be working ‘at home’ in the West. Western anthropology is only possible because the anthropologist sets himself apart from his fellow ‘citizens’ and creates a discontinuity between his accounts of them and their accounts of themselves. And he is able to do this only by courtesy of the comparative ethnographic record: by his reading in other cultures and his drawing upon concepts and discourses which do not belong to the milieu under study.To this extent, inasmuch as such anthropological accounts set aside indigenous framings, accounts of the West are not so different from those of, say, Melanesia.

To recap, auto-anthropology is limited in its provenance on this view, not to say oxymoronic, because culture members cannot get a conceptual grasp of the conditions within which their lives are routinely lived except via radical cultural disjunctions. But such disjunctions rarely occur naturally To the extent that anthropology sets itself up as the comparative study of cultural membership, then, its project is a strange one (is one concerning strangers) which will always distance it from the discourse of natives. There must always be this differentiation and a distance between the anthropological investigator and investigated because the latter are at home with certain kinds of discursive premises about social life while the former is at home in always attempting to displace such premises in a continuous round of tricksterish playing the vis-à-vis: anthropology offers ‘an orgy of defamiliarization’ to those at home in any one cultural world (Boon 1982). Moreover, anthropology achieves its aims only via specific disciplinary practices, namely the culture-shock of fieldwork—a new bodily becoming via immersion in new habitual practices—followed by writing up the experience in a theoretical language which is neither here nor there but both at once. While these practices may differentiate them from natives, they serve to link anthropologists together in a ‘conversational community’ of shared meanings, ideas and morals to which all belong. Finally, such an ‘anthropological culture’ can constitute a ‘force field’ which offers a site of resistance against Western givens and draws attention to the silent, embodied and inarticulate, collective memories of other cultures (Hastrup 1995b).

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What is at issue here is the nature of culture and the place of reflexivity in everyday social life. For the above critics of reflexive or auto-anthropology, culture represents a discourse within which human life can but be lived, so that the anthropological employment of a concept of reflexivity neither brings the investigator closer to the investigated nor situates either in a cognitive space beyond or outwith cultural determinism. As Strathern comments (1987:31), it is merely ‘mystification’ to claim that auto-anthropology, understood as ‘techniques of self-knowledge’, constitutes a universal class of phenomena; reflexively elucidating culture or society is not part of the way in which most people experience their everyday lives. Hastrup concurs (1995b): cultures ground people in socially constraining holistic worlds; all human beings are thus natives in a particular cultural world of which they have experience but only tacit knowledge.

Strathern has little time, therefore, for bland claims, such as those of Giddens (1984:335), that all social actors are social theorists (‘scientists’, in Kelly’s appellation (1969:144)), able to reflect upon their sociocultural milieu in order to direct their purposive action within it. Techniques of knowledge-production and theorization are themselves culturally specific and mediated, and one only transcends such cultural situatedness by way of a diversity of other cultures’ situations.

From a somewhat different ontological perspective, however, cultural techniques, practices and discourses are merely the superficial clothing in which universal human capabilities and proclivities express themselves in different places. However different the cultural grounding, then, cognitive reflection on self and other is ubiquitous and its outcome possibly transcendent. How else would universal human communication, never mind global anthropological analyses, be possible? On this view, the person who leads an unexamined life (who cannot explain his own socio-cultural practices better than an anthropologist) does not exist and never has done (Shweder 1991a:14). Human beings have never been prisoners of linguistic, social or cultural worlds from which they are unable to detach themselves so as to turn their attention elsewhere and concern themselves with their own inwardness and selfhood (Ortega y Gasset 1956:166–7).

As Paul Rabinow sums up (1977:151–2):

This is the ground of anthropology: there is no…valid way to eliminate consciousness from our activity or those of others. …We can pretend that we are neutral scientists collecting unambiguous data and that the people we are studying are living amid various unconscious systems of

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determining forces of which they have no clue and to which only we have the key. But it is only pretence.

Is anthropology necessarily undertaken in certain existential states of mind?

Once reflexivity is allowed as a universal part of human consciousness, a means and a practice by which people everywhere come to look askance at the particular socio-cultural milieux and languages in which their self-expressions find overt form, then, as Rabinow puts it above (1977:151–2), auto-anthropology comes into its own. Here is not merely an instrument of political correctness, or a technique or location for better anthropological representation of otherness, but something fundamental to the potentiality of the anthropological enterprise as such.

Near the end of his professional life, Edmund Leach made a number of statements which were treated as almost scandalous in the preWriting Culture era of British anthropology; Leach himself provocatively described his revelations as ‘Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology’.What Leach suggested (1984:22) was that every anthropological observer can be expected to recognize in the field something which no other observer will see: a projection of his or her personality. Since this personality ‘distorts’ the interpretation and analysis of that fieldwork experience, what is to be discovered in published anthropological accounts is a record of their authors’ reactions to the situations in which they were acting; here are texts full of possible implications and layers of particular meaning, intended and otherwise, rather than items that give onto a pristine or objective, external world. As in a novel, Leach elaborated (1989:137–8): features of anthropological accounts ‘are derived from aspects of the personality of the author. How could it be otherwise? The only ego I know at first hand is my own. When Malinowski writes about Trobriand Islanders he is writing about himself; when Evans-Pritchard writes about the Nuer he is writing about himself In short, ‘cultural differences, though sometimes convenient, are temporary fictions’ (ibid.).

Since Leach’s death, and The Writing Culture Debate, such thinking has become more widespread, and its implications more followed through. If cultural integrity is a fiction behind which sits the individual personality, then this is as true for those investigated by the anthropologist as for the investigator himself.To understand otherness is therefore to attempt to gain access to other minds, for socio-cultural institutions cannot be understood except via the individuals who populate and create them (cf. Cohen and Rapport 1995); furthermore,

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‘the only way we have of understanding another man’s condition is through ourselves, our experience and emotions’ (Naipaul 1987:220). As Okely pithily phrases it, ‘the personal is theoretical’ (1992:9), and far from being relegated to the periphery of the anthropological enterprise, or pejoratively contrasted with impersonal, generalizable truth, the biography and autobiography of fieldwork selves must be written into an inclusive narrative of analysis and experience.

Cohen elaborates (1992a, 1994). Whether anthropologist or layperson, it is the self which is used to understand the other. Making sense of the world is an interpretive project which begins not with a tabula rasa but with all the specificity of sense-making apparatuses contained within discrete individual bodies; hence, every version of an ‘other’ is a construction of a self (cf. Rapport 1997a). As well as being a universal feature of human social life, this is also our most potent anthropological resource. ‘[E]thnography is an ethnographer-focused art’ (Cohen 1992a:225), and anthropology should now seriously begin to exploit the intrusive self as an ethnographic resource.

This means, first, that in contradistinction to a traditional anthropological view of the individual self as a socio-cultural construction and as inexorably other-directed, we recognize that the sense of personal identity has a certain absolute, self-driven quality to it which is not contingent or relative. Individuality is ubiquitous, and it is upon their consciousness of self that a person’s consciousness of things socio-cultural is built. Secondly, individuals are members of sociocultural milieux through their deployment of certain sets of collectively shared symbols. Nevertheless, these symbols are ever perceived and interpreted in discretely (and often discreetly) individual ways. Not only do individuals remain members of socio-cultural groupings as individuals, then, but there may remain great incongruencies between different individuals’ perceptions, and between how these symbols are publicly, conventionally, or hegemonically treated and how they are privately known: between self-knowledge and social knowledge (cf. Rapport 1993a).We know very well from personal experience the great discrepancies that can occur between the two, the fallacies with which others can construct the self, and we must use our knowledge of the complexity of our own selves to resist the temptation to generalize or simplify those of others.We should use our experience of our own selves to elicit and describe the thoughts and sentiments of others whom we otherwise risk glossing over in terms of the inadequate and crude generalizations we retrieve from conventional, collective social categories: ‘tribes’, ‘castes’, ‘cultures’, ‘ethnic groups’, and so on. In this way we can avoid privileging the social over the personal, and eliding

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