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

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social institutions and functions, and have nothing to do with cognitive a prioris or universals. How might we suppose that individuals may apprehend spatial, temporal, socio-cultural distinctions, or whatever, if there were no innate individual capacity for or tendency towards classification, and these latter were pure and simple reflections of social organization? Inasmuch as the same categories and relations recur among different people, and inasmuch as one would wish to avoid the LéviStraussian fallacy of granting classificatory schemata their own transfermatory and sui generis facticity, one would have to conclude that classification reflects certain general underlying principles of human cognition. Much recent anthropological work, then, has gone towards elucidating what form such human universals might take (e.g. Berlin and Kay 1969; Berlin 1992). As Ellen concludes (1993), we classify as we do because we possess certain innate cognitive skills, and because we organize our perceptions by cultural means such as language. Occasionally the logic of our classifications can be derived simply and directly from the logic of the cultural medium (from linguistic grammar, for example). More usually classificatory schemata can be seen to derive from an interplay between individual experience, linguistic form, cultural tradition, social context, material circumstance and metaphoric transformation. Far from being rooted in the socio-cultural, classificatory function and form are grounded in the individual human body (its rhythms, somatic states and formal constitution) and in a bodily experience of the environing world.

Fernandez has argued, in this vein, that classificatory schemata are a kind of hypothesis which people bring to bear on what they otherwise experience as somatically inchoate, ‘as problematic [because] not precisely defined’ (1982:544). Classification serves the need for more concrete identification by people of their bodily circumstances, their selves and those of significant others; natural analogies, perhaps, are used to make more concrete, graspable, and therefore resolvable, what is inchoate in psycho-social experience and relationships. Systems of classification are thus embodiments of certain elemental vectors of human existence: ways in which we project what are initially psychosomatic experiences of the body onto the world. Here are individual bodily concerns ramifying, via cultural media, into social strategies of boundary and identity. For this reason, classificatory schemata could be said to be inherently perspectival (à la Nietzsche), matters of projection from individual points of view, and matters of the moment, as new bodies continually come along with projects to complete by which the inchoate becomes identifiable.

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Nietzschean classification

We set up a word at the point at which ignorance begins, at which we can see no further, e.g., the word ‘I’, the word ‘do‘, the word ‘suffer’:—these are perhaps the horizon of our knowledge, but not ‘truths’.

(Nietzsche 1968: no. 482)

Anthropological work on classification began with the Durkheim— Mauss thesis which posited the sources of classification as being the social group, the purposes of classification as being the socialization and integration of group members, and the consequence of classification as being the objectification of a collective life-world which all share. Here was an imaging of a one-to-one relationship between a social group, its language-world, and that language’s meanings: language as determinant of a single and consistent classificatory schema (cf. Berger and Luckmann 1969:66). What has been argued for since is a freer appreciation of the relations and the potential among system of classification, language, group membership, world-view and behaviour. There is no necessary one-to-one or once-for-all relationship between classificatory schema and language, between language and world-view, between classificatory schema and behaviour.

Relationships, here, are understood far more as complex, fluid and purposive: matters of interpretation not mechanics. Classifications as used in a socio-cultural milieu may not be singular, or neat, or consensual, or collective, or coercive, or holistic, or final, or even systemic. Classifications can be consciously multiple, even contradictory, and individuals can practise denying or deeming true different schemata over time or at the same time. Moreover, a classificatory schema need not be synonymous with social organization, and neither need account for the pragmatic and rhetorical manoeuvrings by which individuals organize and enunciate their passages through life.

This kind of anthropological appreciation owes its origins to an Existential or Nietzschean imaging: to a perspective on classification which includes the conscious and self-conscious individual agent, and which ties the classificatory firmly to the cognitive constructions of creative minds in interaction. Deriving from developing individual cognitions, the function of classifications of the world would appear to be a series of ongoing individual constructions of order (of self, other, beauty, and hierarchy) for the fulfilment of a series of individual purposes. In place of Durkheim and Mauss’s understanding that a formally similar and singular societal language translates, via a shared

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system of classification, into social solidarity, anthropology has moved to a more reflexive understanding whereby linguistic practice need say nothing about the possible (inconsistent) classifications expressed within it or outside it. Language is rather envisaged as a medium for an attempted exchange of a surfeit of ongoing, individual orderings, the assumption being that there will exist a diversity of such orderings within the individual person and within the social milieu at any one time as well as over time (cf. Rapport 1993a, 1997c).

Finally, inasmuch as we create systems of classification which are arbitrary, multiple, momentary, contested and inconsistent, what are the phenomenological implications of living with such diversity and provisionality? In a system of classification we construct a bulwark against ignorance, Nietzsche suggested, and yet at the same time we admit that our concepts and categories are inherently and unavoidably ambiguous: they are singularities which stand for actual multiplicities. That is, human beings recognize that the world is actually multiple— subject to a diversity of actual and potential cognitive constructions— and that any one system of classification is only a pretence at overall orderly encompassment.We recognize that there is a contradiction at the very heart of the classificatory process: the practice of giving a name (however provisionally) to a diversity. We classify, we categorize, conscious of the logical impossibility of so doing once-for-all, and thus we continue to make ‘the world as a work of art’ (Nietzsche 1968: no. 796).

But if this is the case, if the categories and concepts of classificatory schemata are recognized to be attempts logically to define, make singular, limited and congruous what at the same time we know to be multiple, unlimited and incoherent, then why do we continue with the practice? Because we recognize our human products as aesthetic or poetic ones, and that this production is what makes us human.We recognize that it is through the conscious ongoing creation of a plurality of inconsistent systems of classification that we become individual human beings living within social milieux and also experience ourselves as such. To gain analytical vantage upon these cognitive processes, in turn, calls for what Nietzsche described as a poetic or aesthetic, rather than mechanical or structural, understanding.

See also: Cognition, Contradiction, World-View

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CODE

CODE

Code and codification are important concepts which lie at the interface of anthropological theories of communication, knowledge, translation and community. The concepts deal with questions of media of information, of the forms in which information is packaged, conveyed and expressed, and the way in which the form and the content of information are mutually influential, even constitutive: codes ‘control both the creation and organization of specific meanings and the conditions for their transmission and reception’ (Bernstein 1973).

At the same time, the concepts deal with translation, with the transcription and transition of information between domains or levels, contexts or situations—translating different perceptions, different generalities, different societies and cultures—and questions of the extent to which information remains ‘the same’ through the translation process. Finally, code and codification have themselves been treated by anthropologists as concepts of different levels of generality, referring to: sets of rules for the transcription of one experiential domain into another; communicational devices; and types of discourse which are swopped in accordance with social circumstances such as degree of formality.

Codes and knowledge

Codification, Gregory Bateson explains (1951), refers to the transition between events in the external world and their life as perceptions, propositions and ideas in socio-cultural milieux; codification is the process whereby the latter come to stand for and substitute for the former. However, a system of codification is not only a network of perception, it is also a system of communication. Codification gives onto messages about the external world and their passage between those who share knowledge of the code. In short, codification enables communication about the world, and it entails two translations: between the world and a code, and between one user of the code and others. A ‘codification system’ (Bateson 1951:175) can be understood as the way in which a universe of objects, relations and events is transformed into communicable signs.

For codification to work in these dual ways calls for a certain systematization, so that there is a consistent relationship between certain events and certain elements of code. Hence, codification usually represents an analogic mirroring of relations among one set of phenomena (‘events’) in another set (‘symbols’). The latter can then

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consistently be read as signs, as symbolizing certain events and the actions that might follow. This is necessary both for the initial perceiver of events to know what he is seeing—his code orders and generalizes his perceptions—and necessary for his possible communication of information about his perceptions to others; decodification of messages is not possible if the code contains too many random elements.

Codes must also carry information, however implicitly, concerning what kind of information they contain, who it is for, and what is to be done with it. Besides information about external events, therefore, the messages in a codification system also convey information about the system itself and those who are using it. Hence, not only do the messages communicate information, they are also communications about communication, or ‘metacommunications’ (Bateson 1951:209). In fact, ‘every statement in a given codification is an implicit affirmation of this codification and is therefore in some degree metacommunicative’ (1951:214). In some circumstances, the metacommunication ‘We are communicating’ may be the most important thing that is being exchanged, more important than the overt contents of the message.

Metacommunications may be divided into two main kinds: those concerning the system of codification, and those concerning the interpersonal relations of those who share the system of codification and seek to communicate through it. Hence, terms of courtesy or respect, intonations of condescension or dependence, are metacommunicative cues: statements about the relations between users of a code contained in the way the code is used. Other cues will indicate what is jocular, what is ironic, what is secret, what is informal, and so on. Levels of regress, meanwhile, may be endless; ‘This is me communicating to you that we are communicating about communicating…’.

In short, codes are to be understood as specific symbolic systems in given socio-cultural milieux, containing information about the world and also information on how to interpret and treat the information contained. Simply to participate in an exchange affirms the fact that rules of codification are shared, and hence codes are at once communicative and metacommunicative.

Codes and community

From this Batesonian basis, we might see much of the anthropological work on codes as concerning an elucidation of the types in use in different social situations and cultural contexts, and the ways in which these are shared, imposed, developed, exchanged, switched between and translated.

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This has found perhaps most formal expression in the work of Gumperz and Hymes (e.g. 1972). Social groups, they begin, amount to ‘speech communities’ which share a repertoire of regular ways or ‘fashions of speaking’ (Whorf); any focus on the regularity and diversity of ways in which human beings codify the world and communicate their codifications, therefore, should centre on ‘a community sharing rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech, and rules for the interpretation of at least one linguistic variety’ (Hymes 1972:54). As Gumperz continues (1972), a social group may be wider than a speech-community (one social group may consist of more than one speech-community), but within each such community, members will have shared knowledge of communicative options and constraints, and will share the rules governing conventional communicative strategies in a significant number of social situations. This will include the proper encoding and decoding of social meanings in symbolic forms—knowledge which derives from members’ social networks and their frequency, longevity and intensity of contact. To the extent that group members of different status or age or gender or wealth or occupation or recreation come into more or less contact with one another, a variety of different speech-communities may develop.

However large or open a speech-community, certain choices will be made concerning appropriate codification and limits set on the conventional repertoire. More precisely, as a discrete social grouping, a speech-community will be responsible for coordinating the appropriateness of different members’ ‘speech styles’ with different ‘speech situations’. There will be many conventional speech situations recognized by the group (such as ceremonials, fights, hunts, meals, lovemakings) and in each rules of speaking will be part-and-parcel of the setting. Indeed, competency in knowing appropriate styles of speaking may represent one of the primary determinants by a community of its full members. Making up different speech situations will be ‘speech events’—the different parts of the different role-players—and constitutive of speech-events will be individual ‘speech-acts’.These latter too will be formalized within the group context so that form and content will gel with setting and scene, speaker and addresser, addressee and audience, purpose and goal, ‘key’ (tone, manner or spirit) ‘channel’ (oral or written) and genre (prayer, say, poem or lecture). In this way, even individual speech-acts may be given general, causal explanations (related to the social structure as such) and treated not only in terms of the conditions of their origin but also their maintenance, development and change. ‘[W]e are never not in a situation’, in the words of literary critic Stanley Fish (1972:250), never outwith a situational frame or

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structure of expression and interpretation by which meaning, symbol and setting are socially conjoined; hence, ‘a set of interpretive assumptions is always in force’ (1972:257).

Leavening the collectivist tenor of the above analysis, Gumperz and Hymes have also attempted to introduce the strategic individual speaker—hearer of code. While an individuals choice is subject to grammatical restraints (whereby only some codifications are intelligible to fellow users) and social restraints (whereby only some codifications are considered pukka), still there will likely be a range of possible, acceptable formulations within a speech-community, each with a subtly different effect.Thus the individual’s selection from the repertoire is akin to a choice of weapon from an arsenal (Gumperz 1970). It is important, moreover, not to underestimate the extent to which individual speaker—hearers can strategically deploy their competencies, switching between repertoires, grammars and speech-communities, creating anew, and having their innate differences of voice socially celebrated, exaggerated or ignored (Hymes 1979). In short, it is important not to over-emphasize the homogeneity of a speech-community or the uniformity of its ideal speaker—hearers.

Leavening the functionalism of the work of Gumperz and Hymes still further have been studies which examined the development and exchange of codes between socio-cultural groups. Werbner (1989), for example, argues against the one-to-one matching of code and community and uses African ethnography to show people happily using several at once. Of these, the analyst might describe one as a ‘source code’ and others as ‘pidgins’ or ‘creoles’ which have developed from it. Locals might class one as their ‘traditional’ indigenous code, one as that of strangers which they have nonetheless imported, and one as ‘universal’ which pertains to all social groups in the region. To switch between such codes is, then, an opportunity for speaker—hearers to meta-communicate that their identity transcends any one group; to import strange codes is to meta-communicate that the speaker-hearers have privileged access to exogenous sources of power.

Finally, leavening the formalism in Gumperz and Hymes are approaches which emphasize the inevitable loss of meaning in processes of codification (cf. Rapport 1993a). As Bateson argued, between the external world and its symbolization, and between the senders and receivers of symbolic communication, there is an inevitable process of ‘entropy’ or disordering. In other words, any attempt to say the same thing in a different way (to symbolize the world, or have two people share the same symbol) can be seen ultimately to amount to saying a different thing (cf. Hough 1969:4). And it is for this reason, as Leach

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observed (1977:11), that when one appreciates what people actually do as opposed to what they are supposed to do (how they actually speak, say, rather than how the social group would have them speak), most neat categorial distinctions (such as ‘speech-communities’) leading to an orderly framework for our social thinking, whether as group members or as analysts, disappear.

Put more sociolinguistically, the concept of a normal or standard idiom of encoding or decoding must be treated as an analytical and social fiction, because each speaker—hearer possesses a ‘personal lexicon’ (Steiner 1975:46). No ‘language system’ is a ‘singular entity’ since ‘it exists only as individual language systems in individual brains; and these systems and these brains are all in some ways different’ (Martin 1983:428). More precisely (Steiner again (1975:46)): ‘the language of a community, however uniform its social contour, is an inexhaustibly multiple aggregate of speech-atoms, of finally irreducible personal meanings’. In using a code, therefore, we find speaker—hearers drawing upon a more or less common vulgate and also upon a more or less private thesaurus, an idiolect, making contingent connections in unpredictable ways. Individual experiences and intentions and social contexts and conventions mix in irreducibly specific ways.

As Fillmore elaborates (1979), individual differences in codification point to both different competencies—different internalizations of grammar—and different performative practices—different strategies of use which individuals prefer to employ. Even if they were to try to be ideally representative speaker—hearers, sharing both competencies of use and performances with fellow members of social groups, individuals’ different personalities, memories, skills and experiences— in a word, their different consciousnesses—would make them codify differently. If different patterns and styles of codification exist in different situations, therefore, then this is as likely to be a matter of individual interpretation of context than it is of social definition, perhaps more so. Individuals, as Leach reminds us (1977:9), will cross social boundaries (and socio-linguistic systems of codification), and thereby make cultural distinctions fuzzy, no matter the conventions and laws instituted to stop them.

Codes and communication

Much anthropological work has gone into identifying particular types of code and charting their use. Most famously, perhaps, Bernstein, as part of a wider exploration of how speech may be regarded as ‘the major means through which the social structure becomes part of individual

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experience’ (1964:258), identified two different ideal-types of codification in everyday use. One is a highly coded form of language, impersonal and ritualistic, and suited to an explicitly authoritarian and reactionary social structure; the other is a more open and fluid ‘nowcoding’ language suited to the ongoing realization of personal identities. The former Bernstein called ‘public language’ or ‘restricted code’, and the latter ‘formal language’ or ‘elaborated code’ (1964, 1972).

More precisely, in elaborated code language is specifically and newly formed to fit a particular referent (situation and speaker), to serve as an individuating factor in experience and to describe individual experience; language is used explicitly to clarify meanings, and acts as a mediation of complex personal sensation and cognition. It exemplifies analytical thought processes, and fine gradations of measured cogitation and subjective sensitivity. Elaborate code accords, in sum, with ‘organic solidarity’ (Durkheim): with differentiation and ambiguity surrounding the changing relations between a diversity of creative individuals and their perceptions.

In restricted code, a referent is designated using ready-made terms and phrases from a common repertoire, put together quickly and automatically in a well-organized sequence. Syntax is rigid, grammar simple and sentences predictable; likewise the type of content, if not the specifics of what the sentences contain. Meaning is implicit, largely impersonal, and ritualistic, even tautological. The effect is the symbolizing, establishing and reinforcing of the normative arrangements and relations of a social group; it is social not individual symbols that are expressed and exchanged. In short, restricted code expresses concrete thought processes and a high degree of affect concerning a restricted range of significant subjects and assumptions held in common by the group. It accords with ‘mechanical solidarity’ (Durkheim): with loyalty, passivity and dependency in a social group characterized by inclusive homogeneous relations.

While emphasizing that these were ideal types, and that individuals moved between codes according to social context, nevertheless, Bernstein further argued that particular social contexts could be seen to be dominated by one or other of these codes.Their usage was a function of subculture and of particular forms of social relationship (rather than individual psychology). Hence, restricted code pertained to ‘positionoriented’ social milieux and relations—armies, prisons, age-grades, longestablished friendships and marriages—while elaborated code pertained to ‘person-oriented’ ones. In particular, the two codificatory usages differentiated the working class from the middle class; the ‘genes’ of working-class sociality and solidarity were transmitted by restricted code,

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while the genes of middle-class sociality and individuality were transmitted by elaborated code.

Bernstein’s differentiation between restricted and elaborated code has been highly influential, and anthropologists have gone on to identify versions of it, even if they have sought too to loosen ‘the straitjacket of ideal dichotomous propositions’ and speak of restricted or elaborated ‘situations’ rather than social groups (Paine 1976:74). Fillmore, for instance, describes how ‘an enormously large part of natural language is formulaic, automatic and rehearsed, rather than prepositional, creative, or freely generated’ (1976:9).A large part of an individual’s ability to get on with any social system of codification will depend on his or her mastery of and facility with such formulaic expressions as clichés, bromides, proverbs, politeness-formulae and leave-takings (cf. Goody 1978). Individuals will learn and memorize these in close association with the often very specific situations in which their use is called for. Cultures and social groups will vary, however, according to the situations for which the formulaic is especially required. In the USA, for example, funerals represent a routine social context (a speech-situation) in which exchange is most fluent when it is most formulaic; beyond formulae people find themselves tongue-tied even when they desire to give comfort (Fillmore 1979).

For Bloch (1975), meanwhile, political oratory among the Merina of Madagascar takes place in a restricted code in which the vocabulary, syntax and style, intonation, loudness, sequencing and illustrations of the speaker are institutionalized. Such oratory may be said to lie at the end of a spectrum of Merina codifications, between the formal or polite and the informal or everyday. Nevertheless, power resides in the use of this formal language, and it conveys the traditional authority of those with the status to use it. For the hearers’ response is equally institutionalized and polite; to employ such oratory is to coerce an audience whose only alternative is to revolt against the code altogether. Hence, Merina oratory may be described as a form of social control, and an expression of a hierarchical relationship. At the same time it is a highly ambiguous and impersonal codification of expression. Since they are known in advance, utterances in this code cannot be tailored to particular cases or relationships or policies or personalities; conventional order and role are emphasized above all.Thus the skilful politician combines more and less formal codes in the exertion of his personal power.

Paine (1976) begins with Bernstein’s assumption that codes control ‘both the creation and organization of specific meanings and the conditions for their transmission and reception’, but seeks to combine this with a more individually strategic approach to linguistic transaction.

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