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

AUTO-ANTHROPOLOGY

others’ individuality with their membership of a social or cultural group. The idea of individual as social cell or cultural clone may be convenient but it is not experientially authentic. Our own self-experience should tell us that others cannot be treated as mere ciphers of a collective sociocultural condition; to employ a collective set of symbols is not to think or feel collectively or alike, while public identity is a transformation of the individual self rather than an equivalent expression of it. In short, we none of us passively conform to or reflect a social milieu and its forces, and ‘[i]f we do not do descriptive justice to individuals, it is hard to see how we could do it for societies’ (Cohen 1992a:229).

This is not to say, of course, that others’ self-knowledge, as opposed to the superficial and formal knowledge which their use of symbols would flag, is at all easy to access. However, the auto-anthropological resolution would be that the discipline cannot continue to be practised as if selfknowledge did not exist, or were irrelevant, or somehow less important or less anthropological than collective knowledge. ‘People’s knowledge of themselves is of critical importance to us for without it we misunderstand them’, Cohen concludes (1992a:230). Again, our best methodology is our experience of ourselves: our self-realization that we must no more deny the self as too difficult to access anthropologically than, as participants in social milieux, we accept the versions of ourselves which others hold of us.

Towards this end, Okely (1996) proposes that nothing of the fieldworker’s self should escape his or her consciousness in the process of analysing data, or be dismissed as private, taboo or improper—any more than parts of local life were traditionally excluded from a holistic analysis. Even the anthropologists unconscious self might be accessed, psychoanalytically, so as to explore that of informants.

As long ago as 1961, David Pocock nicely summed up what has become, in the reflexive or auto-anthropological turn, a revaluation of the entire anthropological enterprise: only in appreciating the totality of one’s ‘personal anthropology’ and its consequences, he recommended, can the anthropologist expect fully to perceive others’.

See also: Ethnomethodology, Literariness, Qualitative and

Quantitative Methodologies

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CHILDREN

CHILDREN

The child is, in many ways, the paradigmatic ‘other’: ‘the child’, its attributes and identity, is something that adults and anthropologists have constructed in dialectical relationship to their own senses of world and self. Perhaps for this reason, anthropological work on children and childhood has been extremely diverse and long-lived without being particularly coherent (cf. James and Prout 1990). In conjunction with a common conceptualization of the child as an asocial or pre-social putty (a throwback to Durkheimian notions of animalistic human individuals who are perforce socialized into a collective moral consciousness), the study of children and childhood has, until recently (cf. James et al. 1997), reflected approaches and problematics from other anthropological spheres rather than generating its own theorization. Over and above this, however, the study of ‘the child’ presents us with a problematic of its own (which is at the same time exemplary): how to apprehend a research subject whose being is a continuous becoming? More generally, the study of children and childhood raises the vital question of how anthropologically to approach and accommodate the continuities of existential identity which lie beyond the reductive stasis of socio-cultural categories and classifications.

Children as indices

The appearance of children as indices of extraneous (adult), anthropological concerns makes for a long list. Among the latter concerns might be included the following:

Cultural relativism: Mead (1928) and Benedict (1938) both employed children and youth in an argument in favour of privileging the influence of culture over biology. Hence, less adolescent stress and more altruistic (nurturant—responsible) behaviour were to be found in ‘other cultures’ than in the competitive and egoistic (self-seeking) West. Derek Freeman (1983) succeeded in casting aspersions upon a Meadian approach, but controversial claims continue to be made, such as that women may withdraw from the mother—child bond in the event of the cultural estimation of scarce resources (Scheper-Hughes 1985).

Neo-Freudianism: Childhood practices in different societies have been compared, sometimes in large numbers (Whiting and Child 1953), in terms of Freudian assumptions concerning the way adult character is a reflection of childhood conflicts (cf. Erikson 1977). In an extended study, Du Bois (1944) argued that maternal neglect of young children on Alor was responsible for affective shallowness, suspicion and instability among

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Alorese adults, for a folklore which stressed adult-child frustrations and hatred, and a cosmology of suspect deities. Spiro similarly introduced Freud into Trobriand and kibbutz childhoods (1958, 1982).

Neo-Darwinism: Child-rearing practices have been studied from the point of view of their instantiating a customization of environmental pressures and features. Parental investments in large numbers of children, then, may reflect life-threatening instabilities in the environment, whereas having fewer children and investing more time and energy in each (allowing each to be more demanding) furthers their survival chances in more socio-economically complex environments (cf. LeVine 1982).

Developmental psychology: From Piagetian notions of universal stages of human cognitive development, anthropologists have explored how children constitute their understandings of the world first through a manipulation of concrete objects and then through more abstract, logico-moral reasoning (cf. Dasen 1994).While from Vygotskian notions concerning how universals of developmental biology are mediated through particular historico-cultural contexts and everyday social processes, anthropologists have produced ethnographies of: Hausa children learning purdah (Schildkrout 1978), Tahitian children learning gentleness (Levy 1978), and Japanese children learning homesickness (Goodman 1993).

Role play: In studies of the relational nature of social life, of the way identities are elicited in terms of a mutuality of interconnected instrumentalities, ‘children’ and ‘adults’ are explored anthropologically as roles that give rise to one another. Through children, adults learn to be parents (Harkness and Super 1996); by fostering children, adults learn to be kinsmen (Goody 1982); by feeding children, adults learn to be covillagers (Carsten 1991). Relatedly, of course, the differential attributes of parenthood give onto very different ‘children’.

Self-consciousness: Consciousness, according to Ong (1977) is something that grows through time. This is true both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. Hence, with each succeeding generation, humankind relates to the cosmos and to itself with more conscious control, while the child enlarges its storehouse of conscious experience and knowledge as it moves from primitive unconsciousness to adult reflexivity.

Social policy: In a number of works dealing with deprivation and disadvantage in contemporary societies (and often oriented towards their alleviation), anthropologists have focused upon children’s lives as markers of levels of social welfare and manifestations of social care (cf. Ennew 1986). Here are studies of disadvantaged children in school

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situations (Lacey 1971; Heath 1983), of social support systems beyond the school (Weisner 1989), of sibling caretaking (Weisner and Gallimore 1977), and of children with developmental abnormalities (Weisner et al. 1996).

Social critique: After Gramsci or Bourdieu, children figure in a range of works whose intent is a disinterring of the reproduction of hegemonic discourses of socio-cultural inequality. Inasmuch as hierarchical structures of socio-cultural milieux are seen as being reproduced through the agency and the false-consciousness of individual actors—even those with least to gain by the hierarchy—the teaching and learning of children to maintain exploitative relations is an important process. Here, then, are children who learn to live with poverty (Jenkins 1982), who learn to labour (Willis 1978), and who learn to die (Scheper-Hughes 1992). Seemingly, the best such children can hope for is escape into a subculture of abandonment or denial (Jenkins 1983; Hebdige 1979).

Children as agents

Something of a revolution in the anthropological study of children has been recently brought about, however, by the rise of more interpretive, phenomenological and literary approaches. Here is a realization that children might be looked to for their own accounts of experience, of participation, activity and relationship in socio-cultural milieux and beyond, as distinct from an adult‘s construction or interpretation of these (cf. James 1993). Children’s social and emotional dependence do not mean that they may be regarded as mere passive recipients of adult expectations and knowledge—pawns in a process of conditioning socialization—or that adult assumptions and preoccupations provide the best basis for entering into or understanding worlds which may be built upon very different premises (cf. Amit-Talai and Wulff 1996). Unlike other ‘exotics’ whom anthropologists study, children might not have a formally distinct language (although this too is debatable), and they are taught to know and tell of themselves in (conventional) adult terms. Nevertheless, this ought not to detract from an appreciation of the way that children’s utilization of conventional forms and meanings is reformatory and idiosyncratic; whether through innocence (ignorance) or expertise (rejection), it is as much a matter of creation as of learning (cf. Bruner and Haste 1987).

In an important pair of studies, for instance, Briggs (1970, 1998) elucidates how, far from being givens, ‘Inuit children’ make ‘Inuit culture’, its institutions, rules, practices, values, habits of interaction and meanings, through processes whereby individuals experience themselves

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as agents engaged in emotionally charged conflicts with others. Individual Inuit children and Inuit culture are thus mutually created. Moreover, the process is ongoing; Inuit individuals never stop being ‘children’ creating their culture and their identities (Briggs 1992). Adult cognitions, in other words, can be expected to be as fluid, and contextually embodied, as those of children (Toren 1993).

Rather than treating fixed socio-cultural categories, then—‘child’ and ‘adult’, ‘society’ and ‘culture’—what needs to be anthropologically examined are those interactions in which concepts, behavioural forms and meanings are created, recreated and acquired, and individuals become committed to their acquisitions (cf. Bluebond-Langner 1978). Pertinent studies of children as dynamic agents who learn (create) culture and society in interaction with other children and with adults would then include how Nepalese children’s understandings of caste, gender and the future at once reflect, resist and reinterpret adult conceptions (Skinner and Holland 1996), and how English children learn how to ‘belong’ to an English village milieu by creating public but individual identities for themselves (James 1986).

As Hockey and James conclude (1993), to appreciate children as actors in their own right is to convey a sense of individuals partaking in a number of ongoing tensions.To be a ‘child’ is to be both an agent and part of a world of socio-cultural structures run by adults: to be both an actor with an identity of its own and something which comes into its own only by a recognition of its difference from certain consociated others; to be both a symbol of change in a socio-cultural milieu and an aspect of continuity in socio-cultural reproduction; and to be both a phenomenon of local diversity in the world and one of global generality.

See also: Agent and Agency, Alterity, Liminality

CLASSIFICATION

The human practice of classifying the world into distinct objects and relations is a cognitive accomplishment: the means by which human beings create order and identity in an environment, making it sociocultural. It also embodies a paradox and tension. Classification is the activity of assigning people, things, concepts, relationships, forces and so on, to different categories; human beings are perhaps unique among animals for the extent to which they manipulate the physical realities of

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their environs in terms of the categories they impose upon them—and for the extent to which they depend upon such creative cognitive manipulations for the procuring of a stable environment in which to live. Classification is essential to our human ability to think about and know the world, and to think about and know our own place and that of our activities within it. At the same time as our classifying the world empowers us to act and to know, however, it also limits us, because what we can know, what we anticipate, and recognize, and intend, and regard as orderly and work towards, are all in a way pre-given by classificatory schemata which we are employing.

In philosophical deliberation, the tautological or circular nature of human interpretation has become known as ‘the hermeneutic circle’. For human beings, there is nothing that is necessarily or simply ‘there’ in the world besides the entropy of matter, or flux.What is there is a matter of what we anticipate to be there, and only by courtesy of a system of anticipations do we make meaningful interpretations and hence ‘fix’ our world. Hence Gadamer’s conclusion: ‘it is our prejudices that constitute our being’ (1976:9). In other words, classification gives onto definition and order which are also an impoverishment and a constraint. For one way of seeing the world, of making it orderly and humanly livable, tends to preclude our simultaneous appreciation of other ways; we are limited by our definitions. As succinctly put by Karl Mannheim (1952:20): ‘The fact that we give names to things which are in flux implies inevitably a certain stabilisation…. It excludes other configurational organisations of the data which tend in different directions.’

But then the complexity of our human relationship with the accomplishment of categorial order in the world must also be taken into account. If classification is the means by which human beings become (human), then it is also what they endeavour to overcome.The labour of the categorial division of the world comes to be recognized not only as an achievement but also as a burden; division thus entails the wish for, and the promise of, conjunction. Moreover, human systems of classification are ever uncertain and contingent because in the diverse assemblage of classificatory possibilities, each system contests the others, and each shows up the others as arbitrary and partial.

‘Primitive Classification’

Anthropological interest in classification can fairly be dated from the publication by Durkheim and Mauss of the book Primitive Classification in 1903. If human beings classify the world by matching up perceptual images, words and concepts, then, for Durkheim and Mauss, it is the

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collective cultural representations of a society which supply all three; to the extent that people are members of a society, they will share in the conscience collective (the collective consciousness) of the whole, and thus partake of the same classificatory system. In short, as emanations of ‘the collective mind’ of society, classifications ‘express the very societies in which they were elaborated’ (1970 [1903]:85, 66).

To unpack this conclusion somewhat, for Durkheim and Mauss, a society or culture amounts to an orderly, integrated and harmonious human space which extends over time. Such order is secured and denoted by classificatory schemata, often conceived symbolically, in terms of language; and this order is modelled on society. Each society propounds a certain model of order in the world and the order envisaged is a reflection of those structuring principles by which life in society is itself ordered and arranged. If the world is conceived of as having certain classes of being, then this is because society has such classes (houses, lineages, status groups, say). If the world is conceived of in terms of divisions of space and time, then this is because society has such divisions (between habitations, between annual festivities, between agegrades). And if the world is conceived of as party or prey to certain relations and certain forces, then this is because society is home to relations and forces too (hierarchy, cause-and-effect, power and authority). For Durkheim and Mauss, in sum, society was the elemental model for logical classification, and only gradually did such schemata come to dissociate themselves (for example, science) from social realities, social functions and social needs.

Even in the latter cases, however, there would be a relationship to trace (however implicit and indirect) between the society and how the wider world was humanly conceived. This was inevitable because, in itself, the human mind lacks any innate capacity to construct systems of classification: hence the diversity of the latter. Furthermore, giving rise to the systems of classification by which the world was known was one of the chief mechanisms by which societies maintained their own existence. The world as reflection of the social made the latter seem more natural and inevitable, hence legitimate.While having societal members all share in one and the same schema of classification provided for social solidarity even if those members were seen as occupying different categories within the schema. Hence, members of a society come to classify alike, and to represent and act upon their classifications alike.Via socialization into a system of classification, the shape of the individual mind comes to be collectively derived. One society means one collective manifestation of a precise and, where possible, once-and-for-all division and conjunction of people and things in the world.

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For many years after Durkheim and Mauss wrote, anthropologists who regarded it as their ‘first task’ to ‘discern order in a sociocultural milieu and make it intelligible’ (Needham 1970:40) took what Durkheim and Mauss had propounded as the paradigm of their efforts. There might have been some fine-tuning of the model (cf. Gluckman 1959, 1963a; Douglas 1966; Leach 1968), but it was generally assumed that systems of classification were social in origin, were intrinsically logical and non-contradictory, were singular and shared in any one time and place, were part-and-parcel of social solidarity, and were what mediated between individual cognitions and collective actions.

Even seemingly revolutionary advances were grounded in the Durkheim—Mauss orthodoxy. Thus, Lévi-Strauss (1969a) explored the logical—universal life to which he claimed collective systems of classification could be seen to lead. If Chomsky could argue for underlying grammatical structures of which every language and every speech-act might be said to be transformations, then Lévi-Strauss determined that comparably unconscious, deep structures of symbolic classification, albeit now culturally derived, inhabited the minds of socialized human individuals. A structural anthropology might chart the vast network of transformations and variations by which the classificatory systems of different cultures and times were linked and the transformatory principles (such as binary opposition) by which this was effected.

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956), meanwhile, proposed that language was the key to cognition inasmuch as the different classificatory structures of different languages would determine different ways in which speakers of those languages would perceive and think as well as speak. If it was through the (arbitrary and historico-culturally specific) indices of verbal labels and syntactical constructions that human beings recognized and ordered the objects of their worlds, then the ways in which different languages cut up the flux and continua of reality into discrete categories, things and relations (objects, persons, events) would cause different language-users to live in different worlds of perception and experience. People thought through linguistic categories, and did not think outside them, and so their understandings (of themselves and their environments) would be structured by their grammar; taxonomies thus gave onto knowledge.

Victor Turner (1982a), finally, argued for an oscillation, cognitive and social, between the classificatory and the non-classificatory as constituting a universal dynamics of human life. Human beings oscillated between inhabiting structure and anti-structure, between division and

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homogeneity, but human culture must be seen as comprising both. Everyday life, then, was characterized by a status-bound social order: persons and things differentiated according to their positions and roles in a segmentary symbolic system. However, at periodic intervals human beings resorted and reverted to an antithetical, indeed primordial, modality of relationship characterized by ‘communitas’ or total communion. Here was a recognition, however fleeting, of a generalized social bond between all human beings, and between them and the world, not yet fragmented into a multiplicity of structural divisions and ties; via this generic bond (beneath all differentiation, hierarchy and conflict) human beings related to one another freely and as totalities. From the point of view of the structural, such communitas appeared anarchic because it was marginal and unclassifiable in terms of everyday criteria. And yet, both modalities of human relationship were necessary for societal continuity; equally, individuals needed to alternate between the two experiential states. For, the creative power of communitas fashioned the being of individuals and communities in liberating, potentiating ways, while the routinization of this creative togetherness into normgoverned distinctions and relations afforded a stability conducive to taking stock and taking action.

Post-Durkheimian classification

‘We have not truly got rid of God if we still believe in grammar’, Nietzsche tersely concluded (1979), and anthropologists are now, finally, getting to grips with dismantling a Durkheim—Mauss framework to classification. Contra the latter emphasis on the almost superhuman determinations of a classificatory system upon, and ramifications through, human life, comes the allowance that ‘there is absolutely no captivity within a language’ (Gadamer 1976:16), nor, by implication, within any particular hermeneutic schema per se. Here is a loosening of the hold which classificatory schemata can be said to have upon human life—an appreciation of the diversity of relations possible between human beings and this most human of creations—and an exploration of the diverse nature of the schemata as such. Not only may classifications vary according to what content is assigned where, then, but also what kind of content: from physical things, to attributes of things (colour, weight, shape, size, sound), to synthetic things, to abstractions. Not only may classifications vary according to the scope of categorial content but also the complexity of the latter’s definition: from monothetic or common denominations, to polythetic denominations or ‘family resemblances’ (Wittgenstein 1978). Finally, different categories may relate to one

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another in a variety of ways: as parts of taxonomic or hierarchical wholes certainly, but also as opposites, by analogy or other metaphoric transformation (cf. Ellen 1997).

Rodney Needham, for example, who was responsible for translating the Durkheim—Mauss text into English, has also furbished trenchant critique concerning the symbolic nature of human classification, and the relations between classification and action (e.g. 1979, 1985). Durkheim and Mauss would have us see symbolic classifications amounting to collective philosophies concerning things and relations, to commonly held values, upon which social groups and the constraints of membership depend. But much that is classified is not symbolized; much that is important in the way of socio-cultural knowing is not represented or made explicit but held implicitly, subconsciously, by group members (cf. Sperber 1975:x–xi). In this way, classification can be seen as preceding language (the symbolization of words and labels) and as proceeding outwith what is overtly known or expressed; categories, things and relations can exist without there being words for them.

Furthermore, classificatory systems and their antitheses (structures and their so-called polluting anti-structures) can be viewed as going together, as aspects of the same world-view. Schemata of classification are not threatened or broken down by indefinable anomalies or transitions, and one need not view ritual or other intervals in classificatory order as somehow transcendental moments. Human ingenuity allows for anything to be made to fit a classificatory schema if this is desired, and thus anomalies and ambiguities should better be seen as special parts of such a schema: parts to which people wish to give a special value—of respect, or distrust, or comedy, or indifference, as well as of danger or fear (cf. Geertz 1983:80–5). Structure and anti-structure, order and pollution, belief and scepticism, belief and practice, should better be seen as parts of the same form of life, not as a classification and its threatened overcoming (cf. Heald 1991).

Furthermore, it is not necessary to posit a classificatory schema so as to explain behaviour. Sometimes people have reasons for their actions and sometimes not; in either case it might be better if anthropologists were to view behaviours (some at least) as meaningless, with no significance beyond themselves.Their ‘meaning’, purpose and effect is in the performance, which itself makes them ‘the right thing to do’. In other words, where a classificatory schema is enunciated it need not evince a degree or level of explanation more inclusive than the behaviours which it accompanies.

Finally, Needham (1970) has questioned the tenability of the Durkheim—Mauss notion that classificatory systems find their roots in

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