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

URBANISM

they assume shapes around individual inhabitants according to the choices which the latter make among an almost infinite and changing repertoire of possible roles. The social structures of cities are thus indeterminate and amorphous, awaiting the imprint of an individual’s choice.

The notion of ‘softness’ comes from travel-writer Jonathan Raban (1973). An urban environment is soft, Raban suggests, in that it becomes what its inhabitants make of it; it awaits its inhabitants’ consolidating it into a certain shape while embodying little in and of itself. Once they have decided, then the city assumes a certain fixity, reflecting back the identity which has been imparted to it. Should they stop imprinting themselves upon the urban environment, however, they can then easily develop the sense of being adrift since the city offers no anchors and no hard groundings of its own. Cities are plastic by nature and urban living amounts to a continual creative play.

What the notion of urban softness brings to the fore is the experiential reality and variability of the city as perceived by its inhabitants: a quality more real than the seeming hardness of the city as a fixed object of design on maps or in statistics.There are thus echoes in Raban of Park: ‘every section and quarter of the city takes on something of the character and qualities of its inhabitants [becoming] inevitably stained with the peculiar sentiments of its population’ (Park 1968:6). Certainly, the city can be found home to a wide array of lives, and embodying a potential for diversity which is at once the stuff of dreams and of nightmares. For those without continued faith in their vision of their identity, or those without the resources to put their visions into effect, an urban softness may be greatly threatening. The softness of São Paulo or Manila or Cairo is such that the inhabitants of the shanty-towns can become all but invisible to the well-to-do. Within the soft city, therefore, anthropology can explore what choices are made, how choice is managed, how resisted and how competed for.

What is important to bear in mind is that, as Cohen (1993) puts it, people invest the city with culture—people enculturate the city—rather than passively responding to it as a deterministic power. As Amit-Talai concluded in her study of Armenians living in London (1989), it is in terms of a ‘voluntary’ involvement rather than an inherent imperative that individuals in the city can be seen acquiring the resources necessary for the development and expression of their social identities. This identity may, in Hannerz’s programmatic terms (1980:255–61), be a matter of becoming encapsulated in one social world, or else of living in a number of such worlds (with varying possible degrees of segregation or integration between them), or, finally, of living in comparative solitude without significant others. Again, at different times of their lives,

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individuals’ choices vis-à-vis the above identity-types may change too. But it is wrong to envisage the city massificating and anonymizing individuals, fracturing them into roles, segmenting them à propos different social worlds. For this would be to reduce them to mere ciphers of the logic by which the analyst would model urban social life (and the elites control it). Focus instead on how ‘people shape the city through their everyday resourcefulness’ (Cohen 1993:8), image the city in their ongoing experience of it and supply it with meaning in the contexts of their personal circumstances. Urban milieux are constituted by, not constitutive of, the selves of their individual inhabitants.

Cities as transitory

The betweenness of cities has been asserted—a space between local groupings and the wider world—and also their softness or plasticity. Another way of conceptualizing this is to consider cities as sites of transition.

People move across and within urban spaces continually, while social practices and cultural symbols are, in Hannerz‘s image, continuously trafficked through them, becoming transformed and creolized in the process. Cities are ‘migrant landscapes’ (Chambers 1994a:14, 94), home to ‘shifting, mixing, contaminating, experimenting, revisiting and recomposing’: recomposing histories and traditions, shifting centres and peripheries, mixing global tendencies and local distinctions. They are sites of transformations of socio-cultural reality, transitory lives and cultural movements. A diffuse sense of mobility thus characterizes urban life as inhabitants, in transit across multiple and diverse social worlds (house and work, family and friends, religion and recreation), find connections, avoid relations, meet people, garner experiences, routinize space and escape routine.

How best can this transitoriness be apprehended anthropologically? After all, ‘the crowds, the helter-skelter, and the constant buzz of joking conversation’ (Geertz 1960:49) possess an inherently elusive quality. For Hannerz, the key lies in an analysis of networks of interaction, with cities envisaged as ‘networks of networks’ in a shifting collage of individuals, roles, domains and situations of exchange (1980:200; also cf. Sanjek 1978). In an ethnography of the Canadian city of St John’s, Newfoundland, Rapport (1987) traced the network of links surrounding conversations about ‘violence’. Tracing ‘talking violence’ (the violence of armed robberies, of the police, in bars, around drugs, against women, and in possible nuclear war) through different urban settings, Rapport felt he could capture the way in which people variously came together in St

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John’s for the instigation and development of different kinds of relations, before again departing on their personal itineraries across the city. ‘Violence’ was a node of communication around which conversation was regularly and conveniently deployed; a catchword which made transient (potentially unsafe) conversational exchanges appear formulaic and routine. Speaking of uncertainty in a habitual fashion engendered certainty.

The picture of St John‘s which emerged was of a socio-cultural milieu constituted by a fund of common catchwords-in-use, and a host of changing agreements and disagreements over how individuals chose habitually to come together by way of these catchwords and converse. Dipping into this fund as they crossed urban space, individuals would develop relationships of variable verbal-cum-social closeness and complexity, and meet on varying levels of verbal-cum-social inclusivity. Here was a shifting sliding-scale of verbal sameness and difference. As a city, St John’s comprised a phraseological community, catchwords, clichés and formulae of exchange being its relatively common and stable currency by which a transient population might embed itself for the purpose of local exchange.

See also: Community, Home and Homelessness, Network, The

Rural Idyll

VIOLENCE

Raymond Williams (1983a:329–31) described violence as a ‘keyword’: one of a class of concepts which seem to force themselves on our attention, invariably entering general discussion of social life. He identifies numerous denotations of the word: violence as unruly behaviour; as an infringement of property or dignity; as vehement conduct; as use of physical force; as physical assault; and as threat or dramatic portrayal of any or all of the above. In an anthropological treatment of ‘violence’, perhaps two features have run in tandem: difficulties in defining and circumscribing the diverse phenomenal manifestations of violence (and their ‘threat’ or ‘portrayal’), and also the ubiquity of such phenomena.

Violence and the socio-cultural

It has been suggested (cf. Aijmer 2000) that violence and the social be seen in a mutually constitutive relationship; that, paradoxical as it may

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appear, violence is intrinsic to everyday social relations: an instrument or means of their propagation, as well as an idiom or mode of their expression. Violent acts and expressions are fundamental to an understanding of socio-cultural order, even while they may seem, by definition, to exist beyond the habitual, orderly and routine: as a departure-from-order, as un-order, as dis-order and as out-of-order (Stanage 1974:229). For, as a dramatic presence, violence (including its threat and its portrayal) occasions an impulse towards the order of social practice and cultural imagery being re-constituted (cf. Gilsenan 1996).

Much anthropological writing has been concerned to explicate the precise ways in which the relationship between violence and sociocultural order is mutually constitutive. The Durkheimian legacy has it that the social exists as a domain from which the violence of natural, individual and amoral instincts is ideally removed by socialization. Secondary social institutions, from ritual to gift-giving to feud, thereafter serve as periodic mechanisms which relieve any build-up of tensions in acceptable ways, and thus maintain the social-structural in homeostasis or equilibrium (cf. Mauss 1954; Gluckman 1956). The Marxian legacy has it that certain class-based, social-structural tensions within society will always be prone to violence and that ultimately this provides the mechanism by which the socio-cultural evolves and history proceeds down its teleological path (cf. Bloch 1986). An ethological legacy, finally, has it that violence is part and parcel of human-animal nature and cannot but express itself in the socio- cultural—which is but another idiom of expression for the instinctual (cf. Montagu 1968; Chagnon and Irons 1979).

More recent anthropological work has gone into exploring ways in which ‘violence’ is part of what the socio-cultural constructs rather than what it attempts to overcome. Neither a natural, a necessary or a necessarily avoided feature of human being, violence is treated as a contingent phenomenon, instrumental in achieving certain sociocultural goals. For instance, when British football fans take part in fights with one another in order to defend and flaunt their honour and their territory—their pride in their ‘Ends’ of the ground (Marsh et al. 1978)—it is clear that their violence describes a social career and a social space. Marsh, Rosser and Harre identify how violence is ‘grown’ and then dissipated through certain stages of adolescence—as males (primarily) pass through the statuses of ‘Novices’, ‘Rowdies’ or ‘Nutters’, ‘Town Boys’ and then ‘Marginals’—and how it erupts according to certain norms of dress, time, place and demeanour. The violence helps maintain a certain football subculture (in Europe as a whole) and serves to demarcate one micro-society from another (cf. Dunning et al. 1988).

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Similar conclusions have come from anthropological work on violence in Northern Ireland (Feldman 1991; Jarman 1997), in the work of the British police (Young 1991, 1993), and in New Guinea (Harrison 1993).

Violence and perception

If there is a processual, mutually constitutive relationship between violence and socio-cultural order, however, then the relationship is also characterized by ambiguity It is in the nature of all human behaviour that, in the words of the Berkeleyian motto, ‘To be is to be perceived’ (Esse est percipi); ‘[a]ll “phenomena” are literally “appearances”’, as Bateson puts it (1972:429). Hence, ‘violence’ is in the eye of the beholder, and however influential a role ethnographers may wish to attribute to it—whether in the constitution and reconstitution of the socio-cultural routines of statecraft, boundary-maintenance, ritual, punishment or sport (cf. Riches 1986)—violence can only be understood and approached as a meaningful, ‘experienced reality’ (Aijmer2000).

Another way of saying this is that violence must be seen in a socio-cultural context. Violence cannot be regarded as a thing-in- itself, as an ideal-typical act, an inherently meaningful sociological condition or category of behaviour, which is directly investigatable; it cannot be defined as abnormal or pathological, or as any one thing at all. (This, as Bernard Crick puts it (1974:2), would merely be to perpetrate a vulgar hypostatization, and to engender a ‘bastard military sociology’.) Rather, violence must be seen in the context of socio-cultural interaction, and defined in ter ms of all the complexities of particular situations.

An insightful study in this regard is Laurie Taylor s of ‘the underworld’ of the professional London criminal (1984; also cf. Klockars 1975). Violence, here, was seen to accompany that which was ‘out of order’: behaviour which ‘took liberties’ with a shared code of honour, whose perpetrators needed to be reminded of ‘proper respect’ (Taylor 1984:148–57). Being ‘out of order’ was a phrase regularly enunciated, both in connection with the dishonourable and the treatment meted out against them. It covered a diversity of non-social or anti-social acts (as defined by the criminal micro-society), and Taylor found it to be an odd understatement, seemingly employed without moral qualm. Whether expressed as an inherent part of violent acts, or as part of tales of violence recounted in later gossip, being ‘out of order’ and hence subject to violence was something phenomenally bleached of all moral colouring. The violent acts themselves, matter-of-fact and routine, were

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simply the instrumental means by which departures-from-order were socio-culturally inscribed and overcome.

Also significant in the above ethnography is the impossibilty of differentiating between violence as a physical act and its symbolization: between ‘doing violence’ and ‘talking violence’. Talking is a form of doing in the London underworld, and doing a mode of expression.This insight warrants being put on a wider footing.The socio-cultural context of violence may be expected always to encompass both the done and the said, such that no ontological disjunction is positable between ‘real’ violence and ‘symbolic’ violence, between the physical and the merely figurative.

Clear-cut and universal distinctions have been anthropologically sought, notwithstanding, between the violence of words and of action, between violent expression by tongue and by fist, these distinctions then implying others: ‘verbal-cum-symbolic violence implies no neurological change in the perpetrator, self-control not yet giving way to rage (real, physical violence)’; or ‘verbal-cum-symbolic violence implies upperclass socialization rather than plebeian, where tongue-lashing is likely to give way to physical beating’ (cf. May 1972).These kinds of reductionist and deterministic theorizations show little respect for the ethnographic record, however, and do not stand close empirical inspection. The symbolical and the physical are inextricable in human behaviour. Certainly, resort to physical violence cannot be correlated with alienation from, or negation of, language; there is no possible or necessary differentiation (and hence relation) between them such that ‘symbolic’ violence negates ‘real’ violence, or ‘figurative’ violence makes ‘physical’ violence more likely (cf. Wertham 1971; Frank 1976). To appreciate the complexities of particular situations is to see any combination of behaviours (of the so-called symbolic/figurative/lingual as opposed to the real/physical/fistical) as being possibly negotiable in the constitution of routine social relations, and any number of means and modalities by which they can be ‘violated’—and violence done to them (cf. Rapport 1987).

‘Democratic’ versus ‘nihilistic’ violence

A more fruitful avenue of enquiry than that of attempting to understand violence either as specific behaviours, or as a relationship between behavioural types, is perhaps to explore issues of predictability: violence as a matter of behavioural expectability rather than explosiveness. Here, ‘violence’ is understood as a decision to negate a relationship of reciprocal predictability and orientability, or to refuse to enter into one:

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violence as a deliberate negating of formal routine and a refusal to enter into relations of mutual expectability through the perpetration of ‘disorderly’ and unoriented behaviours which go beyond them. The keyword here is ‘routine’, while ‘violence’ is that which makes civil relations in socio-cultural milieux impossible.

Drawing upon an Existential legacy (Nietzsche, Camus), Edmund Leach theorized upon the fundamental role that doing violence to extant social-structural relations and norms plays in the constitution of human being. ‘[A]ll of us are criminals by instinct’, Leach suggested (1977:19), and it is ‘part of our very nature’, ‘the very essence of being a human being’, to resent the domination of customary social practices and imagine their creative rewriting: ‘[A] 11 creativity, whether it is the work of the artist or the scholar or even of the politician, contains within it a deep-rooted hostility to the system as it is’ (1977:20). Nevertheless, by distinguishing between the outward form of socio-cultural relations and their inward content, it is possible to prescribe an accommodation between the intrinsic, human—natural violence which Leach describes—ubiquitous, creative, individual, ‘democratic’—and another, ‘nihilistic’ kind, that which destroys the possibility of a creative engagement with social structure in an individual constitution of self, or indeed of any kind of ongoing (civil) socio-cultural relations.

Social structure may be described as a set of discursive idioms in terms of which individuals meet, for the purpose of expressing, constructing, fulfilling and extending their personal world-views (cf. Rapport 1993a). Meeting in terms of common, shared, often formulaic behavioural forms (verbal and non-verbal), individuals are able to make meaningful interpretations of their worlds and selves of great personality and diversity.

A.F.C. Wallace spoke of ‘the organization of diversity’ which social structure entails (1964: passim). Each individual may inhabit what amounts to a private world, and may rarely if ever achieve ‘cognitive communality’ or mutual identification with another. What is necessary for individuals regularly to engage in routine interactions with one another is mutual predictability. Individual A knows that when she perpetrates action a1 then individual B, in all probability, will perpetrate action b1, which will lead to her doing a2, et cetera. Meanwhile, individual B knows that when he perpetrates action b1, individual A responds with a1, which he follows with b2. In other words, individuals A and B need not concur on when precisely the interaction begins and whose action is perpetrated first—on who acts and who reacts—never mind concurring on the content of their interaction. Rather, Wallace’s image of the orderly relationships which constitute stable socio-cultural

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systems is of what he calls ‘equivalence structures’ or sets of equivalent behavioural expectancies. Social structures are jointly held notions of relations, and something which individuals establish for the mutual facilitation of their separate strivings.

What is crucial in the above, to repeat, is expectability. However different and diverse the interpretations of individuals who partake of the ‘contractual’ relations of exchanging common social forms— however creative and new—so long as each can predict, each can expect, certain behaviours from the other, then the relationship is able to continue—as can the underlying diversity. Expectability means that each individual is able to continue to find the behaviour of the other (s) understandable, meaningful. Even to the extent that had each understood the actual meanings of the other, then they might have felt violated.

A ‘democratic violence’ may be described, then, as one which does not deny or negate the possibility and ability of fellow-interactants to go on interpreting and meaning as they choose, even as the meanings which each construes in the interaction might be found to violate the others’. ‘Democratic violence’ enables individual creativity to live beneath an ambiguous surface of social-structural calm and within a form of behavioural norms which individuals continue to share. If the sine qua non of the social contract is individuals’ possession of mutual expectations which allow them to orient their behaviour to one another in a particular relationship or kind of relationship, then the stability of such expectations is not threatened by a violent diversity of individual interpretations which do not breach the civil surface of the exchange.

A ‘nihilistic violence’, on the other hand, may be described as behaviour which deliberately or unintentionally disorients others in the relationship such that the latter‘s acts of prediction and interpretation are made impossible. Nihilistic violence despoils the shared forms of behaviour, such that orientation towards it by others, and their development of stable expectations with regard to it, are prevented (cf. Johnson 1982:8).

In this conceptualization, violence might be morally neutral, a fact of the individual (creative) interpretation of social exchange. It is ‘a sort of constant’ (Aijmer 2000) around which the social is organized. Furthermore, violence need not be tied only to particular behaviours and excepted from others: violence does not correspond to brutality or physicality or the absence of empathy; violence is not precluded by the presence of empathy or the expression of love, for instance. Rather, it is violence of a particular, ‘nihilistic’ kind to which others cannot adapt: behaviour which others cannot expect or predict and find meaningful in some way. Only nihilistic violence makes mutual expectation and

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diversity impossible by violating any practicable norms of exchange and hence denying the possibility of a civil relationship of mutual predictability and orientability.

Such denial may take a variety of forms and degrees. Random sounds, silences and actions will preclude viable interactions of a routine and ongoing kind, and hence deny others the opportunity of making sense, of making meaningful interpretations of the particular exchange. But then maiming or killing will preclude viable interaction and meaningful interpretation henceforward and in general. Thus, a sliding-scale of nihilistic violence may be introduced, the severity adjudged in terms of the intended or received injury to others’ ability to make sense, to create meaning, at that time and henceforth.

‘Violence’ and schizophrenia

While ‘democratic’ violence gives onto diverse individual meanings, ‘nihilistic’ violence negates common forms of exchange; it entails the violating of existing or practicable norms of behaviour. If society is seen to encompass individuals’ coming together to constitute manifold types of relationship, using common cultural institutions both to communicate their relationships and to create and express their personal meanings, then there are some individuals who refuse such communication: they do violence to others’ possible perception of routine. Such individuals excommunicate themselves, placing their behaviour beyond the bounds of expectability, orientability and interpretation, and in the process render impossible or ineffectual the communication of others.

This portrayal recalls Bateson et al.’s conception of the schizophrenic (1974:32–4). He is the individual who fails to communicate because he does not ‘correctly’ (conventionally) label or channel his meanings, and does not correctly interpret the labels and channels of others’ messages. The difference is that the nihilistically violent individual may be described as arriving at such a situation by intention. Deliberately he negates and eschews those regularities through which relationships, as contractual equivalence structures, are possible.

See also: Form and Content, Interaction, The Unhomely

VISUALISM

It is perhaps ironical that at the same time as there has been an anthropological desire to deconstruct the central place given in the West

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to vision as a form of knowing (where ‘I see’ is synonymous with ‘I understand’) (cf. Ong 1969; Dias 1994), and to recognize an array of other senses and forms (Stoller 1989b), visual anthropology has also grown into a methodological specialism—albeit one seeking to redress a traditional (Western) emphasis on the written word as a form of representing anthropological knowledge. Nor has the irony gone unnoticed. Indeed, visual anthropology has been critiqued from two vantage-points: the ‘traditional’, in whose view anthropology must perforce remain a logocentric discipline because of the need to convey abstraction and theory, and there being no clear route from the particularities of the image to the generalities of a holistic social structure (cf. Bloch 1988); and the ‘post-colonial’, in whose view the technologies of filmic representation are unavoidably corrupted by their being Western practices with a history and continuing provenance of ideological control.

Notwithstanding this, visual anthropology, the employment of pictorial media as means to communicate anthropological knowledge, has continued to grow; it has challenged notions that anthropological knowledge must needs be seen either as holistic or as hegemonic. It has argued that there are important contributions to be made via pictorial media to the study of the audio-visual dimensions of human behaviour, of culture as manifested in visible symbols and audible sounds—as gesture, script, oration, dance, ceremony, ritual, art-work, craft and material artefact.

‘Pictorial media’ has come generally to mean film and video, although there have been significant anthropological forays into study of and by other visual forms such as photography (Bateson and Mead 1942; Pinney 1990) and television (Intintoli 1984; Liebes and Katz 1990). (The anthropology of artistic-cum-visual forms has tended to represent another specialism again, linked with issues of aesthetics (cf. Layton 1981; Coote and Shelton 1991).) Even here, however, and with film and video being such accepted representational genres outwith anthropology, definitional problems have arisen concerning what is truly or distinctively ‘anthropological’ or ‘ethnographic’ in the pictorial. How seriously are aesthetic, emotional and sentimental registers to be taken as filmic components? How should documentation be validated, and how balanced with narrational needs? What poetic, even surrealistic, strategies are to be permissible in the conveying of subjects’ inner experiences? In short, how, and to what extent, should ‘ethnography’ take precedence over cinematography? Through a number of celebrated films—Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds (1963) and Forest of Bliss (1985); Jean Rouch’s Jaguar (1965)—these

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