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

WORLD-VIEW

uniformity within a social group, in personalities sharing a homogeneous ‘cultural’ character, but rather in an organization of diversity. Individuals in any one society need not be found ‘threaded like beads on a string of common motives’; they can still interact in a stable and mutually rewarding fashion, and organize themselves culturally into orderly, expanding, changing societies in spite of their having radically different interests, habits, personalities, customs, and despite there being no one cognitive map that members share.

Indeed, the world-view or ‘mazeway’ of each individual—that mental map of values, plans, techniques, people and things; that organized totality of meanings which each maintains at a given time and which is regularly evoked by perceived or remembered stimuli—may be unique. Each individual may possess a complex cognitive system of interrelated objects which amount to a private world, and may rarely if ever achieve ‘cognitive communality’ or mutual identification with another. To this extent, all human societies are plural societies. Indeed,Wallace goes on to suggest that cognitive non-uniformity may be a ‘functional desideratum’ of social structure, a necessary condition of making social coordination possible, and that if all participants were to share a common knowledge of the social system, or indeed the burden of knowing their differences, then the system would not work.

Wallace’s image of the orderly relationships which constitute stable socio-cultural systems is of what he calls ‘equivalence structures’ or sets of equivalent behavioural expectancies: individuals regularly engaging in routine interactions with one another because they have developed a capacity for mutual prediction whereby the specific behaviour of one is highly likely to eventuate in the specific response of another, and so on. That is, individuals organize themselves, integrate their behaviours into reliable and joint systems, not by developing uniform cognitive maps or possessing equivalent motives but by learning that under certain circumstances others’ behaviour is predictable, and can be confidently interrelated with actions of their own. This system of organizing relations, Wallace suggests, fits interactions of different levels and types: between the American Indians and the Whites, for instance, trading and fighting for years without mutual comprehension; between different social classes, who may not share ideologies; and between bus drivers and passengers, whose interests in avoiding traffic jams may be very different and whose cognitive worlds, especially in large and complex societies, may be ‘uniquely private’.

Nonetheless, what the bus driver and passengers do share is something very precise. Their interests in keeping to timetables overlap, their motives in riding the bus are complementary, and they possess

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detailed, mutual behavioural expectancies. Moreover, the relations are standardized between any driver and any passenger within the urban or regional or national system. Wallace calls this a ‘contract’: something where the equivalent roles are specified and available for implementation to any parties whose motives make their adoption promising. At other times,Wallace also calls it a ‘meta-calculus’: something which is the sum of at least two parties’ particular ‘calculi’, or recipes of behaviour.And he goes on to say that a culture may be described as a ‘family of metacalculi’: a set of standardized models of contractual relationships: a system of interlinking equivalence structures.

In fact, culture becomes a consummate equivalence structure over the diverse whole: the sum of all the diverse world-views of a society’s particular sub-groupings and individuals. In this way, Wallace concludes, individuals can together produce a socio-cultural system which is beyond the comprehension of any single one of them. The contracts which they establish for the mutual facilitation of their separate strivings amount to a structured whole, however tacitly and gradually concocted, which is more complex than the cognitive map of any of its members: a world-view of world-views.

A critique of Wallace

Despite his insistence that his portrayal of a socio-cultural system as an organization of a diversity of individual world-views does not amount to the positing of a distinct, superorganic entity in the Durkheimian sense of something sui generis, Wallace still opens himself up to criticism in this vein. In allowing that individual contracts and group policies give onto a system at another and higher level of complexity and organization, a socio-cultural whole which functions beyond the comprehension of individual participants, we begin to slide towards Durkheimian notions of organicism, of the socio-cultural determining the psychical.

Wallace would probably object to this, saying that he sees culture and personality as constructs of different Russellian logical types— personality signifying cognitive diversity, and culture merely amounting to shared expectations—and that it would be using the wrong metaphors to talk of individuals ‘internalizing’ a culture, or a culture ‘moulding’ the personalities of its members; almost as if one were to talk of a circle moulding the individual points that constitute its circumference.And yet, Wallace’s model does take on this character, and must do so, in order to describe the circle of interactions, the holistic system of interlocking parts, to which individual behaviours come to amount.

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For the principle of socio-cultural organization in Wallace’s model is the institutionalized meta-calculus or macro equivalence structure, whereby almost any individuals, any assemblage of world-views, can work as interchangeable components of the system. And one must explain how this institutionalization comes about and how it is maintained. Wallace’s answer must be that culture is the driving force: cultural forms, standardized contracts, becoming autonomous and maintaining themselves by teaching members the mutually predictable behaviours necessary to their functioning on different occasions. More than this, culture would also appear to provide members with their diverse world-views: it teaches sets of equivalent meanings by which individuals can predictably define stimuli and, just as predictably, act before one another over wide situational parameters. Far from culture’s emerging from individual invention and continuing decisions about practice, then, it is culture which now acts, and in peremptory fashion, taking advantage of individual cognitive tendencies to make possible a maximal organization of motivational diversity.Thus, notwithstanding his initial renunciation of socio-cultural determinism, we come to find Wallace talking about diverse individual cognitions being articulated by a society into functional equivalence structures, and a culture as an organization which is responsible for coordinating its disparate elements and shaping them into relatively consistent patterns; it is very much to a separate societal domain that these elegant meta-calculi belong.

In short, a diversity of individual world-views becomes, for Wallace, a cultural task, a social tool. Sometimes this diversity is culturally forbidden, he explains, and uniformity is socialized into individual members and rewarded. On other occasions it is ‘in the interests of the survival of the culture’ to encourage randomness and not to organize individuals at all. But most ‘solutions’, Wallace concludes, fall between the two: in one or more of four universal mechanisms (‘Inclusive Structures’—where a subordinate interactional partner bows to the calculus, the plan, of a superordinate—‘End-Linkage’—where a precise articulation of the calculi of equals in different domains of expertise, a division of labour, occurs—‘Ad Hoc Communication’—where a warding-off of centrifugal calculi and societal dissolution takes place through constant casual intercourse—and ‘Administration’—where a group of experts undertakes to check the large numbers of the above three types of contract in operation, adjusting individual members’ calculi as necessary), diversity comes to be socio-culturally organized and used.

In sum, with his image of a circle in whose circumference individual points of difference join and submerge,Wallace himself comes full circle:

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to a Durkheimian picture of individual diversity as a form of (organic) socio-cultural integration. Individual world-views have ceased to have any real relevance and are succeeded by a picture of socio-cultural harmony: a system with a structure of interdependent parts, maintained by standardized behaviours, ensuring at least some degree of social stability and cultural unity.

Wallace‘s work deserves its recognition because of his appreciation of psychic diversity within socio-cultural commonality and his efforts to keep the two analytically in relationship. He shows how individuals might meet in interaction while at the same time executing moves, achieving positions, proclaiming successes, and so on, in private and possibly very different game-plans; so that individual views of social worlds may have tangential connections, colliding and co-evolving without amounting to a single or even compatible world of meaning. He recognizes, in short, that social systems can exist without consisting of replications of uniformity and that cultures need not represent standards, norms, practices, rules, views or beliefs which are shared alike by all members.

What is less sympathetic in Wallace’s portrayal is the way in which individual agency comes to be replaced by that of a cultural force which is seen as accountable for order and responsible for behavioural predictability. The diversity of behavioural contracts between people comes to amount to one, neatly integrated, social system, and a multitude of individual requirements and interests comes to translate into those of socio-cultural organization. We seem to trade (psychical) world-views for (socio-cultural) World-view.

And yet, behavioural complementarity need not entail organizational hierarchy; individual behaviours can be complementary without being integrated together or otherwise subsumed within a structure which is more complex than each. Muddle, moreover, can be a more appropriate keynote than organization.

World-views and context

This is certainly the conclusion of an ethnographic study of worldviews in the English village of Wanet (Rapport 1993a). Here, a multitude and diversity of world-views, both within and between individual psyches, could be seen to give onto no overarching or singular socio-cultural system. Rather, the expression and realization of a diversity of worldviews, in an aggregation of behavioural contracts, amounted to a chaotic array. Here is life in a socio-cultural milieu very much portrayed as a momentary muddling-through.

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To elaborate, briefly, at one point in his discussion of the individuation of language, the way in which each speaker possesses an ‘idiolect’ of finally irreducible personal meanings, George Steiner speaks of the unique ‘association-net’ of individual consciousness (1975:173). It is in the way that different individuals associate words with one another that the key to the uniqueness of individual meanings and memory is to be found. Focusing on the everyday expression of a few close informants, it was the phenomenon of idiolect or association-net (a verbal form of Wallace’s ‘mazeway’ or Schwartz’s ‘ideoverse’) that Rapport’s work in Wanet arrived at as outward expression of an individual’s world-view.

The daily utterances or ‘speech-acts’ (Searle 1973) of different individuals Rapport found to consist of certain sets of phrases, routinely repeated. Each individual speaker possessed a number of verbal loops, of words and phrases which they habitually associated together, and which they regularly expressed. In different moments of interaction, greater or lesser lengths of different strings or loops of an individual’s habitually associated words and phrases would be enunciated.

But it was not simply a matter of words. For Rapport noted that each verbal loop also entailed a particular mood, humour or outlook, a particular identity or persona, which the individual speaker appeared to assume for the length of the particular verbal expression. It was as if the verbal phrasing and the tenor of its expression were part-and-parcel of one phenomenon: a particular outlook on the world which the individual adopted, and a particular identity which accompanied that outlook.

Finding himself able to piece together the habitually linked phrases of his informants, the verbal building blocks of their utterances, into longer and longer strings, so that aggregated words became great chains, Rapport determined to call these association-nets of words, feelings and outlook, ‘world-views’. For, in its entirety (a form actually unlikely to be expressed in any one speech-act), each association-net traversed an amassment of opinion, detailed and rich: a seemingly whole world around which its owner might cognitively travel. The strings of verbal associations, that is, translated into assemblages of ideas, identities and behaviours which found their owners experientially located in distinct, self-contained worlds of people, events, values, norms and constraints.

Moreover, different sets of linked words and phrases (whether of the same or different individual speakers) resulted in an outlook on the world, a world-view, possibly very different from that constructed from another set. Even though the same individual words cropped up in different world-views, when related and contrasted to other words, to

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form a cognitive set, their meanings became different. Hence, opinions expressed would differ, as would expectations and evaluations of behaviour—definitions of behaviour per se and the people and events it was deemed relevant to consider. Inasmuch as each individual possessed a number of verbal loops, then, the ‘same’ individual would also possess a number of different world-views; from one close informant Rapport discovered nine world-views, and from another, seven. It was as if his informants were habitually living and talking in a number of different, bounded, socio-cultural environments at one and the same time, and were different people in each. Moreover, the set of worlds in which one individual lived was not necessarily the same or even consistent with that of others.

Furthermore, linking together in this way the sets of preferred phrasal associations of different individual speakers, the snippets of world-views that speakers would reveal in different utterances, Rapport felt was more a process of recontextualizing than decontextualizing people’s words. It was as though he were returning the words from the momentary interactions in which he had heard the words expressed to the larger worlds of opinion, the cognitive homes, from which individual speakers had initially extracted their words for the mundane and rushed business of everyday conversation. To the extent that speakers partook of a common behavioural contract to meet, talk and work together, this was more a matter of partial overlaps, of individuals’ construing the ‘same’ events rather differently (fulfilling ‘different’ contracts) than their being organized into one common, socio-cultural context. It was beneath the surface of ambiguous conversational exchanges, in their series of diverse world-views, in which speakers lived more fully (intellectually and emotionally).

Inasmuch as world-views gave onto context, then, the latter should be understood as something internal: something originating in individual cognition rather than immanent in, or emanating from, an interactional setting. Context was something prior to interaction, something which individuals brought to it and employed within it. Context was the way individual speakers internalized words and related them to others in their heads so as to accrue meaning. Hence, the same cognitive context could reappear in any number of externally different situations, and vice versa, the same interactional setting being cognitively contextualized in any number of different ways.This was not to say that there could be no regularity or consistency between cognitive definition and external setting, that an individual did not possess a number of routine ways of behaving when talking in a particular setting, but that the decision was an individual and possibly private one.

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In short, it was within individual world-views that the significance of socio-cultural exchanges lay; it was their diverse world-views which individuals used in constructing, populating and anticipating the social worlds around them, and these furnished them with their expectations before meeting with other people in interaction, their opinions during such meetings, and their conclusions afterwards.

Representation and analysis

A conclusion to be drawn from focusing upon world-views as contexts of individual significance in socio-cultural milieux is that the anthropologist is not able to give just one neat and consistent account of socio-cultural interaction or exchange. Not only do individual worldviews fail to gave onto a set of common-denominational, communitywide perspectives, but this individual diversity refuses to be tied to objectively defined situations. The logic behind these cognitive contexts is subjective and particular.

The analytical value of focusing on world-views would seem to depend on refusing to corrupt this logic: refusing to impose a spurious unity upon informants, singly or collectively, in the name of clarity or generalization. The aspiration must be to an understanding of internal judgements and definitions, so that the integrity of world-views is maintained over and above dubious leap of abstraction to socio-cultural (or psychical) wholes. In spite of the chaotic aggregations which may result, it is a diversity of individual orderings of particular landmarks in idiosyncratic landscapes that the analyst determines to convey. The commonalities of exchange—the sharing of abstract codes, of a grammar of interaction, and of regular occasions on which it is exchanged—can then be recast as moments in which a diversity of individual meanings and motivations find expression, realization and fulfilment. It is through the working-out of these individual world-views that the fate and development of the contractual commonalities lie.

See also: Cognition, Individuality, Interaction, Situation and

Context

WRITING

Raymond Williams once commented on the way in which the process of writing has become social-scientifically ‘naturalized’ in the Western academy (1983c:1). We ask ‘what is the writing about?’, ‘what

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knowledge, facts and experience does it contain?’, but we treat the process itself as non-problematic: as transparent and commonsensical, once the skills of writing have been acquired in childhood.

Writing and literacy

Anthropologists, perhaps, have been less prone than others to this lapse, since they more often treat those who do not and may not seek to acquire the writing technique to which Williams refers. Hence, treating writing as a marker of literacy, anthropology has emphasized the historico-cultural specificity of such writing, and the effects which its arrival precipitates. Anthropology has postulated, inter alia, that the technique of writing represents an objectification of speech and a proliferation of words and meanings which causes more layering and less indexicality in socio-cultural milieux, so that individual members become palimpsests who participate less fully and more sceptically, less securely and more selectively, in their traditions (Goody and Watt 1968:57–8); writing affords that socio-cultural alienation and distance out of which a sense of greater unities comes, and an evolution in consciousness, science and technology in terms of encyclopaedic composition and sequentiality (Ong 1977:47). Here is a technique for the fixing of discourse, preserving it as a possible archive of later analysis and translation, and the creating of a quasi-separate world of texts which comes to eclipse the circumstantial world of orality (Ricoeur 1981:145– 9); writing is a means of keeping present moments at bay and at the same time preserving them, recontextualizing them, as ongoing, univocal, unifocal and reconsultable (Clifford 1990:57–64). Or again, here is a technology which lends itself to the social institutions of its time and place so as to serve a number of possible functions (hierarchical, educational), and thus to structure a particular ideological reality for those who employ (rather, are employed by) it (Street 1984:8; and cf. Herzfeld 1993:116). In short, in anthropology, writing comes to be conceived of not so much as a neutral medium of knowledge, facts and experience, a window onto an independent reality, than as a way of knowing in itself.

Writing as a mode of cognition

Nevertheless, there is a sense in which writing has still become ‘naturalized’ in this anthropological appreciation. For, writing has been treated wholly as a particular technique or technology: writing as the inscription of words or forms on a page or material surface. However,

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writing could profitably be regarded as something far broader: the orderly inscription of words or forms per se, whatever the precise technique and technology of that inscription. Hence: words in phrases and sentences, but also musical notes in chords and phrases, daubs of paint in shapes and relations, religious icons in mouldings and arrays, physical behaviours in habits and routines, prescribed roles in institutions and hierarchies. Inscription, moreover, might take place on any number of surfaces: fields, houses, footballs, spaces, bodies and memories, as well as pages. Here is writing understood as ‘the orderly use of symbolic forms (that is, forms which carry meaning for their user) for the making of orderly worlds’; writing conceived of not as a technique of communication but as ‘a mode of cognition which makes experience meaningful’.

To elaborate, briefly, writing entails the separating of experience from its ratiocination (Stock 1983:531). Writing is an experiencing of experience, a meta-experience; it is the considered ordering of experience in symbolic form, and the conscious production of meaning from it. Understood in its fullest form, writing is the practice of symbolically reflecting on, and making sense of, experience.

Furthermore, since symbols are simply ‘vehicles for a conception’ (Geertz 1973), the outward manifestations of such writing may be highly diverse. Diaries and novels, of course, monographs and theses, poems, songs and plays; but also the shapes of field-systems and the patterns of their ploughing; also ways of shaping, carrying, tattooing and clothing bodies; also forms of dancing and politicking, orating and marketing and warring. All these may serve as mnemonics by which messages about life’s order and meaning may be inscribed, retained and recalled. A definition of writing in this conceptualization would be, then: the composition, in symbolic form, of a sequence of thoughts and ideas and senses such that a set of meanings is created and retained from passing experience for further possible retrieval, amendment and elaboration. The practice of written reflection remains a constant even as the forms of its expression vary.

Writing as universal

Writing, in this way, can be appreciated as a universal: a ubiquitous and constant part of human being. It is the special preserve neither of certain cultures and times (literate versus non-literate), nor of certain social classes and occupations (professionals versus workers); it is practicable and practised by all (cf. Berger 1979:6).

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Certainly, both in socio-cultural milieux which practise largely oral techniques of communication and those which prefer scriptural ones, there will flourish the practice of scrutinizing and abstracting from experience so as to produce orderly accounts. Orality and literacy do not necessarily entail different habits of thought. As Shweder comments (1991a:14), if we use the word ‘civilized’ to describe those people who can explain their practices far better and with more imagination than the anthropologist, then the ‘primitive’ who leads an unexamined life does not exist. ‘There is no “primitive”’, Rabinow concurs (1977:151–2), ‘[t]here are other men living other lives.’

Writing, text and self

Another way of saying this is that every socio-cultural milieu is a textual milieu, where ‘text’ (from the Latin root) implies a ‘weaving’ of language into patterned compositions, whether spoken or scripted or both (Stock 1990). Every milieu has its meaningful, inscribed narratives.

It is in this sense, too, that one can understand Bruner and Weisser’s claim (1991:133) that: ‘“lives” are texts: texts that are subject to revision, exegesis, reinterpretation, and so on’. For, one comes to know one’s life through ‘never-ending textualization’, through the formulation and reformulation of a conceptual and narrative account of what that life is about.The individual constitutes himself for himself (and as a self) in an ongoing story; carried in memory, such textualization represents the primary process of ‘self-accounting’.

The textual account of self might be verbalized (voiced or unvoiced) or it might be otherwise imagined, it might be enunciated as shorter or longer versions of itself, it might be to some extent unified, but it is always evolving and always referred to, whether implicitly or explicitly. Cognitive writing, in short, is a constant process. As Bruner and Weisser sum up (1991:136): ‘The process of life-textualization is…a neverending interpretation and reinterpretation. Its textual status is not in the strict sense determined exclusively by acts of speaking and writing, but depends instead upon acts of conceptualization.’

Writing and coherency

By writing a text, Augustine argued (1907), one is able to hold together the fragments of consciousness and hence make meaning and some kind of order in one’s life. In a sense, he felt, such autobiography is fictional since one is attempting the impossible: to know oneself from amid one’s life and story as if from without; to see as whole and complete—as

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