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

CODE

In particular he is mindful of Bateson’s notion that coded messages are tailored by their senders to fit their intended receivers and hence might represent a ‘metacommunicative attack’. Paine thus examines the individual selection of types of code as means of gaining and expressing power; different sorts of code will impart different sorts of control, by senders, over different sorts of message in different sorts of relationship. The closed messages of restricted code may therefore be said to be tailored to exerting a uniform control over a social group organized in terms of status and consensuality of interpretation. While the open messages of elaborated code may be said to be tailored by their senders to exert control over a social group organized in terms of individuals’ autonomous motives and intentions. Hence, a leader with ‘traditional authority’ (Weber) will control a retinue by emotionally rousing them to do their ritual duty, while a leader claiming ‘rational authority’ will control a citizenry by convincing them intellectually of their best interests. Alternatively, a group of individuals seeking to formalize their relations as a group might turn to a restricted code, an argot of some sort, as a means of signalling (to themselves as well as to others) the restrictions on properly loyal and purposive communication which they now intend to instigate (cf. Rapport 1994b).

Codes and translation

If restricted code is a closed form of communication in which meaning is implicit (and largely non-verbalized), and in which exchange is largely a matter of expressing and maintaining the positions and boundaries of a social group, then, Paine wonders (1976), what might be the consequences for translation and understanding between such codes? More broadly, might not types of codes be differentiated according to the extent to which they serve as vehicles of self-enclosure or social distantiation, giving onto a privatization of meaning (Arendt)? Or is it the case that since every code is a matter of learning, practice and use, translation is a hazardous procedure whatever the code’s nature; so that disagreements ramify as people talk past one another in elaborated code, while non-communication prevails as people resist outsiders’ efforts to engage in restricted code?

As intimated earlier, such questions of translation, of the inexorable loss of meaning between different individual speakers of code, go to the heart of language usage: of the use by human beings of symbolic systems to represent their experience. Theorists of translation, such as George Steiner, will argue that individuals must translate whenever they receive others’ messages: ‘all communication is translation’ (1975: 238).

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Furthermore, guaranteed translation requires guaranteed access to the unique idiolect of the individual interlocutor—something which is never achievable and never demonstrable. Hence, codificatory exchange is always ambiguous and ‘indeterminate’ (Quine). No two individuals’ experience is the same and any translation between them must involve inventive interpretation.Translation, Felstiner concludes, remains ‘the art of loss’ (1994).

Considering these ideas more anthropologically, Roy Wagner (1991) admits that the perceived world is always the reaction to the world by an individual: a refracted world, deflected through the prism of the self. Moreover, while ‘nothing could possibly be more clear, distinct, concrete, certain, or real than the self’s perception of perception, its own sensing of sense’ (1991:39), such subjective perceptions can only be elicited in others via codification in iconic—symbolic forms: a process from feeling to felt meaning to intended meaning which is inexorably entropic. Moreover, the meaning which an iconic—symbolic trope elicits is hermetically sealed within the personal microcosm: there is a perennial uncertainty as to whether one’s ‘green’, one’s ‘Prince Hamlet’, is another’s. Meaning is a personal, subjective, internal perception, and the extent to which intuitively apprehended subjective experience can be objectively described is a question without solution.

The way in which people do try to ‘[do] justice to internal selfperception with external means’ (Wagner 1991:39) is the subject of a formidable body of work by James Fernandez (1971, 1977, 1982) which centres on metaphor and has become known as ‘trope theory’. It is not just anthropologists who struggle against the fundamental solipsism and loneliness of incomprehensible individual lives, Fernandez begins, for individuals do so themselves. The elemental vectors of human existence are simple: we project what are initially psycho-somatic experiences of the body out into the world. However, these experiences are ‘problematic and not precisely defined’ even for the individuals concerned; in a word, they are ‘inchoate’ (1982:544). Using cultural codes, then, is a means by which individuals attempt to make more concrete, graspable and therefore resolvable what is otherwise barely comprehensible in their experience and relations with the world. More precisely, people employ the analogies of metaphor and other linguistic tropes (metonym, simile, synecdoche) so as to try to figure out what their lives are like; then, they build up these tropes into narratives which are recounted amongst others in attempts to compare their compositions of their experiences with others’.The codification of experience as trope can be understood as a kind of hypothesis which is being brought to bear on an inchoate subject out of a need for more concrete identity and

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understanding. In particular, via natural analogies with the physical human body and its concrete circumstances, individuals are better able to grasp their inchoate experiences and those of significant others; hence, the centrality of the body as a symbolic construct.

In order to approach the experiential ‘sensorium’ in which other minds are enmeshed (1992:135), Fernandez advises, the anthropologist must hope empathetically to approach the phenomenological subjectivity of others via the tropes they employ. To discover what others’ lives are like is to accede to the appropriateness of their metaphors. Indeed, this is the only access anyone ever has to the experience of others. Even an individual’s closest socio-cultural consociates know him in terms of the metaphorical associations he brings into play and their feeling of rightness: ‘perhaps the best index of cultural integration, or disintegration…is the degree to which men can feel the aptness of each others metaphors’ (Fernandez 1971:58).

But then is metaphorical usage so statically descriptive? Beginning from an attempt to codify and share experience, does not the employment of tropes itself give onto new experiences, new inchoateness (and an infinite deferring of intended meanings being communicated)? This was certainly the conclusion of linguistic theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) for whom two embattled tendencies characterized the life of language-in-use. On the one hand there was the fixed unity of language which continually convinced its fellow-users that there existed an abstract grammatical system of denotative forms through which their common world-views might find expression. But on the other, there was the continuous becoming of language into something new, something deriving from ongoing perceptions of its users and the contingency of those moments in which the schemata lead its socially charged, intentioned and accented existence.

In their study of codes and codification, and of metaphor in particular, anthropologists tend to have emphasized one or other of these Bakhtinian tendencies. For Fernandez, then, metaphorical communication amounts to a movement between different semantic domains within a culture’s shared ‘quality space’ (1977:459–61); this ‘cross-referencing’ provides a sensation of experiential fixity and of cultural integration. And Michael Jackson agrees: metaphor reveals unities between the intelligible, the sensible and the social; to use metaphors is to make the domains of the personal, the social and the natural co-extensive, and thus achieve a sense of a cosmic ‘wholeness of being’ (1989:152–5). If all metaphoric correspondences were ‘discovered’, Berger concludes, one would secure proof of the indivisible ‘totality of existence’ (1984:97).

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On the other hand, for Paine (1981:188), metaphor is the trope which most develops and extends thought. As Ricoeur elaborates (1981:180–1), the essence of metaphor is the crossing and the breaking of boundaries, the transcending of ordinary usage within any one semantic domain by bringing it into unusual relationship with others. Hence, the most important feature of metaphor is its nascent or emergent character; here, in the provision of previously unapprehended combinations of thought, is an enlarging of the circumference of the imagination. In nascent metaphorical usage, Steiner concludes (1975:23), is a new mapping of the world and a reorganization of the experiential habitation of reality.

Taking these battling emphases together we can perhaps conclude that metaphorization, as a process in the codification of experience, both serves as a means by which individuals seek to formulate and convey their prior perceptions and is itself a significant source of future perceptions to be conveyed.

See also: Classification, Cybernetics, Discourse, Interaction

COGNITION

‘Cognition’ concerns the knowledge which people employ so as to make sense of the world, and the ways in which that knowledge is acquired, learnt, organized, stored and retrieved. More loosely, it covers the major modalities of human experience: the ways in which people think, feel and sense, and so make their lives meaningful and more or less ordered.

Cognition as culture

Clearly there are overlaps between cognition as broadly conceived and the concept of ‘culture’. In this sense, there never has been a time when cognition was not a major anthropological focus. One may recall here, the early debate between Levy-Bruhl and Malinowski concerning ‘how natives think’. For Levy-Bruhl (1985), ‘primitive’ people were characterizable in terms of a pre-logical or mytho-poetic apperception of the world: a mentality governed by emotion, magical contagion and incoherency, and a belief in mystical connectedness. For Malinowski (1948), on the other hand, all people were equally rational and could recognize the same logical principles, and all people applied these principles in their everyday worldly dealings; it was not as if primitives

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inhabited something akin to enchanted dream-worlds from which modern man’s technological practices divorced him. In a later version of this debate, Lévi-Strauss (1966) posited that ‘savage thought’ was characterized by ‘a science of the concrete’ while modern thought was more abstract. Primitives (including their modern-day craftsmen descendants) made meaning and solved problems by way of employing extant and concrete objects and analogizing from them: so that differences between people may come to be conceived of as those between different animal species (totemism), while dreams were explained in terms of spirit-doubles at large in equivalent other worlds. Moderns, meanwhile, were less imaginative in their thought-processes, less wild, and content to solve problems on the basis of reasonable, intellectual models.

The question of the so-called ‘psychic unity’ of humankind lived on in ‘the rationality debate’ (cf.Wilson 1970).The issue was now reformed as one concerning whether the logic of reasoning perforce took one universal form or whether, following notions of Wittgenstein (and Winch 1970), people in different cultures could be said to reason within the criteria and terms of diverse ‘forms of life’. As Evans-Pritchard famously concluded concerning the witchcraft beliefs of the Azande of Sudan, and the rationality of maintaining those beliefs in daily practice: within the conditions and confines of their belief system, the Zande reason perfectly well, but they could not and did not reason beyond or against them (1950). In similar vein, the project of ‘ethnoscience’ (cf. Frake 1980; Atran 1993) set out to collate native categories of thought as constituted in particular places. From elementary ‘units of meaning’ (equivalent to phonemes, the elementary units of meaningful sound), a cultural grammar for normatively constituting the world could be disinterred: from elementary terms for kinsfolk, plants and diseases, say, to the lineaments of social life.

In this way, issues of cognition and rationality also came to merge with those of cultural relativism, and questions concerning the nature of cultural difference as it pertains to individual members’ experiences and mentalities. It is worth noting here, therefore, the challenge to culturalrelativist notions (Boasian and Whorfian) of the direct effects of culture on individual psyches posed by more recent work on innate cognitive tendencies. The Chomskian revolution in language-acquisition, for instance, has substituted a focus on common human genetic programming for earlier (say, Saussurean) ideas of predetermining cultural matrices, so as to delineate how individuals learn and continually transform what they know. More particularly, in opposition to Whorfian notions of colour-words determining colour-cognitions Berlin and Kay

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(1969) have convincingly argued for an understanding of people‘s perception of colour not in terms of a physical spectrum of light being arbitrarily and differently divided up per culture, but a matter of the same cognitive principles being applied with only limited variation.

Similarly, from assertions of ethnoscientific diversity, anthropology has moved to an appreciation of underlying, universal principles in human cognitive structurings of the individual or person, of self and other, of relationships and causality, of recognition and classification, of narration, and of space and time (cf. Sperber 1985). This is not to say that people will not differ vastly in their cognitions; (indeed, transformative differences may represent the only permanency and sameness in human cognition). But the logic of difference is a common and human rather than cultural and particular issue. As Jack Goody concluded (1977), neither binaristic not relativist theorizing will suffice in accounting for the patent universalities in human intellection and intuition.

Cognition and practice

Since the rise of symbolic or interpretive anthropology, from the 1970s onwards, debates over cognition have shifted somewhat. Cognition now becomes part of the continuous process by which the world is symbolically constructed: the focus is on the precise knowledge held by individual actors within a socio-cultural milieu, their ‘systems of meaning’ (Geertz 1973), and the contexts in which that knowledge is practised. The key issue is less whether cognition is a matter of cultural variation than the extent to which individual members of a social group could be said to partake in a social consensus concerning the structure and content of the way they knew the world.

As Holy and Stuchlik (1981) elucidate, social life is a matter of intention and performance: the impacting of meaningful, goal-oriented actions upon the world so as to maintain or change a status quo. Cognitive models are responsible for constituting the worlds of human being (through the application of given criteria of evaluation), while actions taken in the light of those models are responsible for continuously reconstituting the worlds of human being. Anthropological analysis must encompass both: intention and performance, model and action. Even though only the enacted or performed is visible, anthropology must study the relationship between it and the intentioning cognitive models if the social structures which emerge from performance are to be understood.

Two central questions now arise: how to gain access to those cognitive models by which individual members construct social reality,

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and how to explain the forms the models take over time. As Toren warned (1983), while the interface between individual cognition and observable practice is the key to anthropological knowledge, a yawning gap could open up between anthropological interpretations and those to whom the practice, as symbolic vehicle, belonged. Symbolic meanings could be imaginatively construed in potentially limitless ways; anthropologists needed a conceptual guide by which they could model and typify the way local imaginations and cognitions tended to operate.

The notion of cognitive ‘schemata’ or ‘scripts’ had been developed by the psychologist F.C.Bartlett, working in Cambridge in collaboration with the anthropologists Rivers and Bateson earlier in the century (1932). Memory and mind, Bartlett suggested, work by way of mental representations of prototypical events, behaviours and things. These define for the person the nature of any situation in which they are likely to become involved, including the emotions they might feel there and the goals they might attain.The representations are simple and simplified models but they significantly frame and inform perception and knowledge. If nothing else, it is the taken-for-granted background anticipations which enable the person to take more notice of less predictable aspects of life.

These ideas have been significantly developed in social psychology since then by the likes of Neisser (1976), and have remained influential with anthropologists. Perceiving, imaging, thinking, remembering and speaking are skilful exploratory activities, Neisser suggests, which are directed by certain pre-existing cognitive structures or schemata. The latter prepare the person to anticipate, perceive and accept a certain kind of reality (and the meaningful events of which it is composed), while remaining open to certain modifications on the basis of exact information which is received. Cognition therefore represents a dialectical relationship with an environment, wherein schemata assure a certain continuity over time but are themselves in a continuous process of change; perceiving changes the perceiver while at the same time what is perceived is a matter of what has already been perceived. Schemata may be more or less general (‘anticipate someone laughing at a joke’, ‘anticipate Uncle George laughing cynically’), more or less overarching (‘win in life’, ‘win this football match’), and more or less proactive (involving patterns for action as well as patterns of action), but people will possess many and these will be related together in complex ways.

Ordinarily, anthropologists have read work on ‘schemata’ as means of both generalizing cognitive norms to collectivities and explaining social reproduction. Gellner, for instance, has claimed (1970) that schemata (and the concepts and beliefs which are their individual elements) can be

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treated like other social institutions.They exist in the context of people- in-society not in isolated individual minds, and they provide a fairly permanent coercive frame, independent of any one individual, within which conduct takes place (cf. Zijderveld 1979). Hence, the anthropologists can chart their correlations with other institutions, and, indeed, must do so for their use to make sense; through such activities as religious rituals they can examine the ways in which society endows its members with conceptual schemata and imposes their acceptance.

But then, examining another activity in which it might seem as though societies were simply ‘endowing and imposing’ schemata— child-rearing—Toren (1993) shows how schemata are actually transformed and reconstituted in the process of their being made available and learned. It is never a simple matter of individuals’ being taught by others how to experience, think, feel and know within certain social configurations and historical conditions, then, for children end up constituting their own ideas of themselves and their worlds, and changing these equally idiosyncratically over time (cf. James 1993).

Cognition as personal construct

This introduces a more individually oriented approach to cognitive schemata, such as has been psychologically championed by the likes of George Kelly (1969). Kelly has urged an understanding of schemata as ‘personal constructs’: as ad hoc anticipatory frameworks, reference axes, contexts, plots, criteria of judgement and identity which each person devises for and by heror himself. Personal constructs are properly seen to be neither dictated by environmental events, nor a property extracted from them, but as beholden to the person; they are psychological, not logical, abstractions and they have no existence independent of the person whose cognition they characterize. They are the outcome of individuals’ defining their own stimuli, and also determining their own responses, in contexts of their own devising. Individuals thus confront themselves with people and events of their own creation, and their behaviour amounts to an experiment made in terms of their created cognitions.

For nature is open to an infinity of constructions, and human environments derive from the particular constructions placed upon it: ‘Man develops his ways of anticipating events by construing—by scratching out his channels of thought. Thus he builds his own maze’ (Kelly 1969:86). ‘Only human imagination sets limits to the constructions which can be employed to this effect. Moreover, since human beings are intrinsically active—since human lives, as such, are

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forms of movement or process—personal constructs are always changing. Not only do these systems of anticipation link past to future, then, they are also being transformed and created anew: in relation to what is construed, and often in terms of what is already known, but also possibly ab initio. Finally, this implies that no two persons are likely to share the same construction system, the same cognitive schema. Communication between the ‘private universes’ of personal constructs is, therefore, a matter of time, effort and chance: a matter of developing an empathetic understanding of another person’s constructs by endeavouring to ‘share’ experiences with them.

An ethnographic exploration of cognitive schemata as personal constructs is provided by Rapport (1993a; also cf. Ewing 1990; Briggs 1992). In a micro-social analysis of the interaction largely between two individuals in an English village, Rapport attempts to identify personal constructs in the process of being used—as they are put into practice or enacted—and also to describe the individual worlds (the ‘world-views’) from which they derive.

Exploring cognition as a matter of personal construct in an empirical setting, a number of general points are arrived at (cf. Rapport 1993a: 150–8). First, individuals can be found defining themselves in relation to a wide array of ‘others’—things, people and events—in the universe around them.The individual self becomes the hub, the anchoring point, of a constellation of other objects; this practice both provides individuals with contexts (social and physical) in which to act and also a measure of significance for their actions. Individuals claim significance for themselves by construing the possible relevance of their actions for these others and vice versa.The denser the relations, the more the evidence of the individuals’ own existence, the greater its importance and the more precise its nature. In sum, individuals place themselves within full social- cum-natural environments and so construct for themselves meaningful identities and satisfyingly full, rich and varied social lives.

Not only do individuals construe personal relations between themselves and a host of others but they also ‘realize’ these relations; the things, people and events they construe become part of their real experience. Thus do individuals’ abstract personal constructs have concrete consequences. Indeed, it is by claiming a relevance which a host of others has for them, and which they have for others, that individuals’ own selves become real to them. Cognizing and naming objects in the universe is to give them shape and stability, to impose form upon an otherwise ‘entropic’ universe and so to create ‘information’ (in Bateson’s terms (1951:217)), and acting with their selves upon their assumptions is for individuals to vitalize both.

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Individuals’ selves are fleshed out and animated in terms of a populous environment of relevant others with which relationships have been effected or could be, if desired, in future.

To realize one pattern of things, however, to configure one order of people, things and events in the universe, is to exclude and eschew other ones; every concept and organization of information represents a type of taboo against other potential orderings and meanings. For individuals to realize one set of identities, therefore, is to negate others those same individuals might have assumed. Not only that, existing schemata tend to act as canalizing devices for what is cognized in future. The schemata serve as self-fulfilling prophecies, their meanings self-sustaining. Hence, individuals can usually be found seeing what they expect to see, reaffirming objects in the universe which their cognitive schemata have led them to expect all along; perceiving familiar things from preconceived perspectives, hypotheses about environments are reconfirmed and cognitive schemata come to be reinforced. In short, produced in compliance with prior expectations, the features of the universe which individuals ‘recognize’ around them usually come to seem not only obvious but inevitable.

However, if individuals come to see largely what their personal cognitive schemata lead them to expect, then there is a sense in which this makes for satisfaction. For, to find in new situations echoes and reflections of old ones is both to have one’s prior assumptions and evaluations vindicated, and to reaffirm that the world around one is governed by principles which are consistent and amenable to one’s reason and comprehension. Of course, fulfilled expectations do not necessarily mean pleasant ones and often, indeed, occasion anxiety. Nevertheless, the ‘discovery’ of worrying scenarios still brings with it a kind of security; for, the disharmony is of a certain, expectable kind, of which the individual has past experience. By way of an individual’s personal constructs, ‘familiarity breeds content’ (Young and Wilmott 1974:116).

See also: Consciousness, Stereotypes, World-View

COMMON SENSE

In a famous formulation, Alfred Schuetz (1953), building on the phenomenological insights of Husserl, argued that individuals regularly and habitually apprehend the world around them courtesy of a set of

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