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

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issues have been brought to a head (cf. Heider 1976; Stoller 1992). Perhaps the best that can be said, following Sol Worth (1981), is that a film or video is anthropological if an anthropologist chooses to treat it as such, a judgement likely to be made on the basis of the extent to which the ‘screen-play’ can be seen to be informed by local ethnographic knowledge, while the subject-matter is local behaviour which is normative (whether spontaneous or scripted) in a particular socio-cultural milieu.

History

The history of a visual appreciation in anthropology, and its filmic representation, goes back to the very beginnings of modern fieldresearch. An argument can be made, in fact, that in W.H.R.Rivers’s conception of field-research (before a Malinowskian format became paradigmatic), a visual record and an appreciation of otherness were seen to be inextricably tied (cf. Grimshaw 1994). Since then, the nature of visual representation and what it should pur port anthropologically to be has undergone a number of transformations: from a romantic capturing of the exotic and anachronistic, to positivistic observation, to realistic dramatization, to surrealistic fictionalization, to reflexive and subjective construction, to collaborative textualization (cf. Marks 1995).

However, a number of key dates and occasions, linking the above developments, stand out:

—1895: Felix Regnault films a Wolof woman in Paris making a clay pot.

—1898: Alfred Haddon takes a cine-camera with him (and Rivers) on the Cambridge University expedition to the Torres Straits.

—1901: Baldwin Spencer films Aboriginal dances.

—1914: Edward Curtis produces the exotic Kwakiutl movie In the Land of the Head-hunters.

—1922: Robert Flaherty releases the Eskimo drama Nanook of the North (followed by Man of Aran (1934)).

—1930: H.Carver directs The Silent Enemy: An Epic of the American Indian with an all-Amerindian cast, one of a number of ‘rescue’ films depicting native and peasant populations, in costume, proudly enacting their everyday lives, rituals and adventures for posterity.

—late-1930s: Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead undertake a photographic project on national character and cultural ethos as they are revealed in social interaction, culminating in analytical films such as Childhood Rivalry in Bali and New Guinea (1951).

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—1940s onwards: Jean Rouch begins a series of influential cinematographic narratives, located in Africa and France, such as Les Maîtres Foux (1953) and Chronique d’un été (1960), which experiment with plot and genre.

—1950s: the Goettingen Institut fuer den Wissenschaftlichen Film launches its ‘Encyclopaedia Cinematographica’ project and archive.

—1960s: advances in camera technology (colour reproduction, soundsynchrony and video) lead to a great expansion in the number of films made by such luminaries as David and Judith MacDougall, Timothy and Patsy Asch, Melissa Llewelyn-Davies, Paul Henley, and (the Oscar-nominated) Dan Marks.

—1970s onwards: the release of a number of ethnographic film series on prime-time television: Granada’s Disappearing World; PBS’s Odyssey;

BBC’s Face Values and Worlds Apart.

—1980s onwards: universities offer specialist courses in visual anthropology (Manchester, New York, Southern California).

Issues

Visual anthropology has succeeded in bringing into focus, throwing significant light upon or putting into interesting perspective, a number of key issues in contemporary anthropology. These include:

Fieldwork method: Making films in the field elucidates the processes by which field data are elicited through the anthropologist’s presence and the particular relations in which he or she is enmeshed. As a medium of record and reportage, film can be particularly reflexive, making explicit field methodology, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. As provocation, the camera can cause people to articulate taken-for-granted aspects of their culture (cf. Ruby 1980; MacDougall 1995).

Teaching methods: Timothy Asch, in collaboration with John Marshall, has made over 20 films on the !Kung San, and, with Napoleon Chagnon, over 35 films on the Yanomami (such as Ax Fight (1975)), primarily as teaching-aids. Might not filmic immediacy elicit a sense of ethnographic immersion? Then again, might not students used to film-as- entertainment receive the filmic text as an affirmation of prior prejudices (cf. Martinez 1992; Asch and Asch 1987)?

Advocacy: As a new means of communication, one which bypasses the state and also the need for literacy, can film offer a medium for resistant local voices? Via projects such as Navaho Film Themselves, sponsored by Worth and Adair (1972; also Michaels among Aborigines (cf. 1987) and Turner among Kayapo (cf. 1992)), locals who are given the chance to film themselves produce cultural documents which reveal aspects of an

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indigenous world as seen through local eyes. This may culminate, as in the British ‘Black Audio Collective’, in a forum for grass-roots political critique.

Intellectual property rights: The distribution and reproduction of film calls into question rights of ownership of footage. A film made by Timothy Asch and Asen Balikci on nomads in Afghanistan—produced by the Canadian Film Board as Sons of Haji Omar, then sold to the BBC, who add a political commentary concerning the role of the protagonists in the (1980s) Afghan war, before releasing it as a finished product—ends up endangering the lives of those originally filmed.

Contested discourses: A growing realization that the camera is more than simply a window on the world—a neutral, transparent, objective unimpeachable medium—brings to the fore questions of its ideological nature: of filming as the pronouncements of the ideology of the filmmakers upon that of the filmed. To film is to have the power, the technology, the operational knowledge and the marketing control to film, and to abide by certain hegemonic conventions of producing the ‘filmic gaze’. But all this is also contestable by its consumers (cf. Minh-ha 1989; Crawford and Turton 1992).

Kinaesthetics: Film is ideally equipped for the study of body movement, whether as dance or as everyday gesture, and the sociocultural spaces in which this takes place. It records the proxemics of interaction, and can call into question their overdetermination as socalled cultural habitus (cf. Birdwhistell 1970).

Globalization: Film is part of a globalization of technology, of translocal and transnational production and consumption. As such it provides a test case of how a Western cultural artefact and practice is advertised and sold, and also how it is locally transformed (cf. Armes 1987; Appadurai 1991b).

Mass media: Many questions surround the relationship between contemporary mass media and their importance in social life, and the formation of cultural identities. Via film one is able to explore the construction of local identity as part-and-parcel of its being represented (cf. Musello 1980; Kottak 1990).

Reflexivity: From film of people watching themselves on film, to filmmakers’ making their presence behind the camera felt in front of it, film can show up the constructed nature of all texts, the individual artistry and the collaboration that goes into their final forms (cf. Loizos 1993).

Individuation: Inasmuch as film captures the transience of particular moments of interaction—between film-maker and local, between local and local, between film-maker and film-maker—it is individual actors and their practices which are focused upon. Thus film can help rectify

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tendencies to generalization, collectivization and abstraction which have plagued traditional ethnography and given rise to brands of fictional holism (cf. Asch and Asch 1988).

See also: Literariness, Post-Modernism, Qualitative and

Quantitative Methodologies

WORLD-MAKING

No socio-cultural version of reality is entirely original, according to David Parkin (1987:66), and no socio-cultural practices or expertise wholly pristine (cf. Strathern 1991:14). And yet innovative reworking continually creates realities and practices which are new and distinct, as an inherent individual creativity engages in innovative dialogue with conventional socio-cultural forms. Moreover, while each new reality might borrow from, adapt and parody a myriad of previous ones, it can yet do so without being predictable, encompassed or otherwise predetermined. As new formal worlds (new objects and relations) are created from old, so culture becomes a constantly reworked product, a workaday bricolage, not only without beginning but also without end.

Nelson Goodman, in a celebrated essay (1978), dubbed this process ‘world-making’. The facts of a world, its objects and relations, are fabricated, not found, Goodman begins. Any order we experience in the world does not simply ‘lie there ready-made to be discovered’; nor is not determined by passive observation. Rather, order is reached by painstaking fabrication: ‘imposed by world-versions we contrive—in the sciences, the arts, perception, and everyday practice’ (1984:21). Goodman then identifies some five ways in which a contriving of world-versions, via a reworking (and recreating) of the extant, frequently occurs (1978:7–16).The first he calls ‘Composition and Decomposition’. Here, old worlds are taken apart (wholes divided into sections, parts into subsections, complexes into components) and then new entities are composed through different connections being made. (In anthropology, we find the world of Lévi-Straussian structuralism, for instance, composed from decomposed aspects of Boasian culturalism, Saussurean and Prague School linguistics, and binary-code computer logic.)

A second way of world-making, Goodman calls ‘Weighting’. Here, a current world is made anew by a different accentuating: by giving different relative prominence to certain of its features. (Anthropological functionalism, then, becomes neo-functionalism by a different weighting of social disorder,

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conflict and competition, dynamic equilibrium and disequilibrium.) Thirdly, there is ‘Reordering’. By ordering differently the elements of a world-view, the meaning of each element becomes different, and their aggregation amounts to a different systemic. (It is by a reordering of this kind, then, that anthropology moves between being conceived of as an empirical pursuit and a rationalist one: ‘a problematic in the data eventuates in an explanatory model’ versus ‘an explanatory model eventuates in a problematic in the data’.) Fourthly, there is ‘Deletion and Supplementation’. Here, worlds are made out of each other by the excision of certain elements and the introduction of others from elsewhere. (Neo-Marxian anthropology deletes the notion that economic relations of production always and alone represent the foundational infra-structure of a society, then, and allows the supplementation that in primitive social formations such relations may be expressed through kinship.) And finally, new worlds can be made by way of ‘Deformation’. A world is renewed by distorting, reducing or elaborating upon, some of its elements, and by making variations on its themes. (A Foucauldian deconstruction of society deforms the Marxian critique, for instance, by elaborating upon the themes of power and ideology to the extent that every interaction and every body is implicated; the result is that any overarching system of control fragments into a palimpsest of parodic, ultimately uncontrollable moments.)

The above represents a sample of ways of world-making, not an exhaustive set, Goodman admits (1978:17–20). New ways are always being created, and since these can also occur in combination and in layers, change can also issue from more than one process at the same time. Moreover, worlds can be made up from different kinds of symbolic forms: words, numerals, pictures, sounds, smells, or any combination of these; and the translation of one kind of symbolic notation into another is also tantamount to the creation of a new world. Finally, since there is no direct way of translating between different versions of the same symbolic notation, say from Chagall’s version of the pictorial to Stanley Spencer’s (never mind from the written in anthropology to the written in anthroposophy), any attempt to say the same thing in a different way can be seen as in fact amounting to saying a different thing.

Goodman concludes that: ‘comprehension and creation go on together’ in the human mind (1978:22). Our ‘facts’ would be better conceived of as small ‘theories’—and our theories big facts; (après Goethe: ‘the highest wisdom would be to understand that every fact is already theory’). What we know is what we make and use in socio-cultural milieux. For the truth of the world, as Goodman puts it, is a docile and obedient servant, mediated by the questions we ask of the world and by the way we participate in it. ‘Truth’ does not derive from correspondence between

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perception and a finished, ready-made universe; rather, ‘truth’ derives from a correspondence between perception and a humanly made system of conception. Hence: perceiving is producing, recognizing is imposing, discovering is drafting, is finding a fit. ‘Truth’, indeed, becomes the name for the perfect fit, the perfect tailoring and fabricating of the universe, the perfect designing of its laws and patterns.

But if there is nothing absolutely solid underneath us then there is nothing stolid either: worlds are continuously made from other worlds and in such a way that any one is radically different from any other and irreducible to it. What is striking is how worlds abound, how a vast variety of versions and visions, of symbolic realities, of cultural worlds, are in existence at one time, each advocated by a different science or scientist, or painter or school of art, or politician, or political interest, or ethnic group, or religious denomination, or poet or farmer or man-in- the-street. These different world-versions (concerning both the stuff which the world is made of and the things it contains) are inherently irreducible; at best, they can be transformed into one another only with great difficulty and corruption. What this speaks of, to repeat, is the prevalence of individual creativity reworking collective forms: refiguring the funds of forms to which cultures amount, and refashioning the social interaction to which the routine exchange of such forms gives rise.

Imagination of worlds

The quality necessary for an individual to conceive of such refiguring and refashioning is imagination.This is a quality different from ‘knowing how’ or ‘knowing what’, what Edward Ions refers to as ‘a third way of knowing’ (1977:152–3), pertaining not to hypothetico-deduction but to intuition. What is essential is the forming of mental concepts, schemata, projects, for what is not present. Imagination deals not with extant observable systems but with the unseen; it is the quality of thinking, feeling, knowing oneself and one’s world as other, the intentional stepping away from the extant.

Individuals may dwell within certain epistemological frameworks, habitually embodying themselves and becoming embodied in terms of paradigms, pre-understandings, which are conventional and collective. Nevertheless, through their imagination individuals also have the capability of questioning the present and opening out their horizons (cf. Gadamer 1975:238). The relationship between the imagined and the present is thus metaphoric rather than metonymic, entailing the potentiality of an epistemological leap rather than simple reflection or extension.

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Complementary to Goodman‘s account of the various processes of creative world-making is Preston’s attempt (however seemingly oxymoronic), then, to describe the inventive qualities of the imagination (1991). The imagination commonly transforms the world along four dimensions, Preston suggests: the spatial, the temporal, the morphological and the comprehensive.Within each of these dimensions, there then exists a variety of possible processes of transformation, which can occur singly or together. For example, ‘spatially’ an existing world might be imaginatively transformed through ‘magnification’ and ‘miniaturization’, through ‘condensation’ (as in a shorthand), or through ‘translocation’ (of the viewing eye). ‘Temporally’, a world might be imaginatively transformed through ‘montage’ (as discrete events are made kaleidoscopic), through ‘simultaneity’ (as different events are juxtaposed), and through ‘progression’ and ‘retrogression’ (with the inclusion of wholly new events in future and past).Again, a world might be ‘morphologically’ transformed through ‘transmutation’ of its shapes and structures, through ‘animation’ and ‘materialization’ of its being, or through ‘complementarization’ of its relationships (the changing of its symmetries and asymmetries).And finally, a world might be ‘comprehensively’ transformed in terms of its overall ‘chromatics’ (its colouration and light), in terms of one’s ‘focal depth’ (one’s particular concentration), one’s ‘distortions’ (and various enhancements), or one’s decisions on overall ‘composition’ (the balancing of all of the above means of construction).

Preston’s attempt is inevitably inconclusive; what surpasses the present cannot adequately be described. Nevertheless, his account emphasizes the perspectival nature of socio-cultural reality, and the transformatory quality of individual imagination. His conclusion neatly sums up the discussion: imagination is the capacity to give reality to culture, and to keep inventing social worlds anew.

See also: Agent and Agency, Interpretation, World-View

WORLD-VIEW

‘World-view’ is the common English translation of the German word Weltanschauung, meaning overarching philosophy or outlook, or conception of the world.The original loan status of ‘world-view’ has led to a conceptual usage which is particularly broad.

In an early anthropological usage, Robert Redfield (1952, 1960) argued for the importance of accessing ‘the peasant world-view’ if the

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anthropologist was to be able to appreciate responses to change in traditional little communities’ on the road to modernization and urbanization. Without an understanding of peasant notions of ‘limited good’ (Foster 1965) and the ‘amoral familism’ which comes to characterize peasant social interaction (Banfield 1958), the anthropologist would be able neither to make sense of, nor predict, behaviour in a community under study and its relations to the outside world.

In this usage, ‘world-view’ is employed to point up diacritical features of cognition and perception which then give onto certain behaviours. ‘World-view’ represents fundamental conceptions of the world, conceptions which ramify into all other thoughts and feelings about the world, and conceptions which directly influence how people behave in the world. Furthermore, ‘world-view’ is used to point up critical differences between groups of people: here, between peasants and moderns (urbanites and cosmopolitans), based on how they view the world.

Clearly, there are overlaps between ‘world-view’, as used here, and at least two other common anthropological concepts: cosmology and ideology. Treated in ‘vertical’ orientation, as it were, ‘world-view’ (like ‘cosmology’) covers those relations between group, world and cosmos. Treated in more ‘horizontal’ orientation, ‘world-view’ (like ‘ideology’) covers that outlook on the world which guides behaviour within a particular social group, perhaps obscuring or imperfectly mediating a ‘true’ or more beneficial version of relations between that group and others. Indeed, if understood broadly as ‘a particular system of values, beliefs and attitudes held by a specific group (based on locality, age, class, status, ethnicity, nationality or religion)’, there is little to choose between ‘world-view’ as a concept and traditional anthropological conceptions of ‘culture’ or ‘sub-culture’.

To begin to narrow the matter down, one can say that ‘world-view’ focuses on thought and feeling in distinction from behaviour, also in a sense as prior to behaviour. There is a theorization of causation and sequence implied by the concept such that behaviour is not seen as automatic or as meaningless, as sui generis or as a priori; behaviour is what world-view gives onto if the latter is translated into action. Kearney (1984) adds a qualification to this understanding, and would define ‘world-view’ as tacit knowledge about their worlds as distinct from those thoughts and feelings which people are willing or able to make explicit (cf. Sperber 1975:x–xi).

Geertz (1973), meanwhile, adapts an earlier usage of Bateson’s (1936) and differentiates ‘world-view’ from ‘ethos’, this being tantamount to a distinction between thought and feeling. For Geertz, ‘world-view’ refers to an intellectual understanding of the world, a way of thinking about

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the world and its workings, which is common amongst a particular group, while ‘ethos’ refers to an emotional appreciation, a way of feeling about and evaluating the world. It is the work of religious rituals, Geertz concludes, to assure that world-view and ethos have a mutually supportive relationship (and hence that the culture remains integrated): what is thought remains emotionally acceptable and what is felt remains intellectually reasonable.

Psychic unities

Perhaps the most common matter that ‘world-view’ has been called upon anthropologically to signal has been the relationship between psyche and society or culture, and questions of psychic unity. To what extent, in short, are cognition and perception socially or culturally determined, and to what extent are social or cultural groups psychically homogeneous, consensual or harmonious?

Four positions obviously suggest themselves (cf. Hunt 1967). In the first, the realms of society and culture on the one hand and individual psyche on the other are separate and distinct, and must be analytically treated as such. One can recall in this connection Durkheim (1966), and his insistence upon a distantiation of sociology from psychology since the ‘social fact’ of the conscience collective made psychic variables irrelevant. The second position is perhaps a derivative of this, as expounded by Boas and his descendants. This sees the socio-cultural as determinant of the psychical: the psyche is culture writ small (Benedict 1934), as effected, for example, by a culture’s linguistic grammar and lexicon (Whorf 1956), or other ‘primary institutions’ such as type of subsistence, household pattern and methods of child-training (Kardiner and Linton 1939). As summed up by Sacks (1974:218): ‘the fine power of a culture [is such that it] does not, so to speak, merely fill brains in roughly the same way, it fills them so that they are alike in fine detail’.

The third position concerning the relationship between the sociocultural and the psychical reverses the relation of determinacy and sees the latter as causative of the former: culture is psyche writ large. In some of Malinowski’s notions regarding the route from individually felt anxiety to collective rites of religious assuagement one finds this conclusion (1939; also cf. Homans 1941). As with the second position, there is a positing of psychic unity, not now eventuating from some standardized conditioning but responsible for joint socio-cultural procedures. Finally, the fourth position, as advocated by the likes of Bateson, Wallace (1961) and Schwartz (1978a), argues that the sociocultural and the psychical are distinct but interdependent and mutually

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influencing realms. To the extent that one can analytically identify a particular ethos (emotional tone) or eidos (cognitive style) in a particular society or culture, one must also recognize the individual as a distinct ‘energy source’ whose metabolic processes give rise to the constant possibility of perceiving and cognizing random, new objects and relations in the external world (Bateson 1972:126).

This fourth position adds a creative tension or dialectic to the picture which the others lack. It presumes neither psychic unity nor difference, and generalizes on the basis neither of determinism nor irrelevancy; rather, it allows for an analytical appreciation of the relationship between the individual and the socio-cultural which is subtle and variable. As Schwartz puts it (1975:128), the relationship is dynamic and unresolved; or again (1978a:430–2), culture is no more a shared totality than psychical contents are confined or unique to different individuals. Rather, think of individual psyches or ‘ideoverses’ (1978a:429) as different versions or portions of a culture. Individuals will have different cognitive, affective and evaluative mappings of the world, in terms both of the structure of events and their classification; here are cultural constructs as experientially discovered and individually transformed. What becomes significant for anthropological analysis is the way different individuals’ ‘personal constructs’ (Kelly 1969) variously intersect and play around structures of commonality by which degrees of inter-personal communicability and coordination are maintained.

In this ‘distributive’ picture, then, world-view does not amount to something either essentially uniform or necessarily shared but to a sum of diversities. The focus has also shifted, from an assumption that ‘cultures’ or ‘societies’ eventuate in common world-views to an exploration of how a diversity of world-views can co-exist within ‘single’ socio-cultural settings.

‘The organization of diversity’

These ideas have found their fullest elaboration in the theorizing of Anthony Wallace (1961, 1962, 1964). Certainly, it is his work which is most frequently referred to in connection with attempts to come to terms with a dynamic relationship between the psychical and the sociocultural (cf. Goodenough 1963; Szwed 1966; Paine 1974; Schwartz 1978b).

Wallace’s opening premise is that the cultural does not form a closed system; it is always engaged with non-cultural factors such as the psychological. Moreover, the dialectical relations between the cultural and the psychological eventuate not in a replication of psychological

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