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

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Nevertheless, such definition should not be allowed to gloss the diversity of opposing hypotheses and conclusions concerning the nature of consciousness. For the sake of convenience, contemporary explanations of consciousness (whether empirical or philosophical) might conveniently be plotted as a continuum. At one pole is found a ‘closed’ view of consciousness which sees nothing that is not ultimately reducible to materialist explanation: to a physical theory of mind in an objective world. At the opposite pole is found an ‘open’ view which emphasizes the unconfined scope of the imagination and the potential infinity of linguistic expression, and concludes that there is a unique subjective quality to conscious experience which transcends a purely objective accounting (cf. Cornwell 1994:10/4–10/ 6). Traversing the continuum, a sample of such studies might include the following:

1Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis. The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994): conscious awareness, sentience, feeling and intellectualization derive from the assembly of nerve cells in the brain, their networks and oscillation (at 40 hertz). Neurons fire and consciousness results; humans are no more than the sum of their molecules.

2Hans Moravec, Mind Children (1988), or Colin Blakemore, The Mind Machine (1988): the brain amounts to an evolved, biologically programmed computer which gives merely the impression of free will. There is no substance to the ‘mind’ and it should simply be

identified with some of the faculties, states and activities of the body.

3Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind (1989): mechanical computation could not possibly propagate consciousness. But the latter could be an outcome of microcosmic physics: the effect of quantum gravity in the brain.

4Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991): the brain is an ‘anticipation machine’, working on a principle of ‘parallel distributed processing’. Consciousness is an illusion, a series of shifting ‘multiple drafts’ with no ‘centre of narrative gravity’ and no continuity.There is no Cartesian theatre where ‘I am’ comes together; moreover, the qualia of experience, the way things seem, are far from ineffable or merely subjective.

5Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (1992): consciousness is an intractable problem which Dennett (et al.) explain away rather

than explain. Accounting for the presence of consciousness in a world of physical objects and processes, understanding the self, free will, meaning and knowledge, simply transcends our natural powers; it is

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too great a problem for human intellect ever to surmount. Or Patricia Churchland, ‘Can Neurobiology Teach us Anything about Consciousness?’ (1994): despite the spectacular advances in neuroscience made this century, and even if we eschew the mind—body dualism, how human consciousness emerges from networks of neurons yet escapes scientific understanding.

6John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992): to insist on treating ‘objectively observable phenomena’ alone is to ignore the mind’s essential features. Hence, while we might accept that both consciousness and intentionality are biological processes of the brain, we need not accept a materialist orthodoxy which would either eliminate consciousness—because it is observer-relative, or because it is really something else (language, environment)—or else reduce it to something more basic (such as computation). Rather, we must insist that consciousness and intentionality are both intrinsic and ineliminable. We all have inner subjective qualitative states of consciousness; we all have beliefs, desires, intentions, perceptions et al. which are intrinsically mental.

7Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992): to reduce a theory of an individual’s behaviour to a theory of molecular interactions is simply silly. The way the brain develops and works (before as well as after birth) is more like an object undergoing natural selection in an ecological habitat than a computational system, hence the ceaseless novelty, creativity and change of our mental processes. Consciousness is a habitat ultimately beyond the physical, and science will never ultimately explain the human individual.

8David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996): consciousness arises from the mind but is intrinsically beyond the material facts of the world. The ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, what it feels like for an individual to be looking out at the world from the inside, is beyond the ken of science.

9John Eccles, How the Self Controls Its Brain (1994): a purely materialist explanation for consciousness is by no means inevitable; some form of dualism is inevitable. For, through language, consciousness transcends its own biological bases, becoming conscious of the latter and even exerting some control over them. As ‘mind’, dead matter is transcended.

Given the importance of consciousness, and the diversity of competing claims concerning its nature, one might expect anthropology to have been insistent long ago on making its own contribution. And for this to have been welcomed. For, as historian of science, Roy Porter, recently

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concludes: the hard sciences still tell us far less about the aspects of the ‘soul’ (the self, personality, individual identity) that really matter—about the details of the subjective nature of consciousness, and about ‘the stupendously complex dialectical interplay of subjectivity, self and society’—than those first-hand observations of the ‘moral narratives’ by which meaningful lives are lived (1994:7).

Conventionally, however, as has been explained, après Durkheim, the anthropological appreciation of the problem of consciousness has been somewhat narrow. Even in the work of Clifford Geertz, responsible for an interpretive anthropology which recognized that the conscious imposition of meaning on life was the major end and primary condition of human existence, and that ‘becoming human was becoming individual’ (1973:52), still consciousness is seen solely as a collective phenomenon which pertains to the culture or the social group. For Geertz postulates that we become individual only in the context of ‘cultural patterns’: under the guidance of historically created systems of meaning ‘in terms of which we give form, order, point and direction to our lives’ (ibid.). Even though individuals are ever making interpretations, these are determined by the systems of significant symbols and particular cultural contexts in terms of which they are expressed. In this way, Geertz claims human thought to be ‘out in the world’; it represents merely an ‘intentional manipulation of cultural forms’, of systems of symbols of collective possession, public authority and social exchange (1983:151). Moreover, such thought is publicly enacted: tied to concrete social events and occasions, and expressive of a common social world. In short, giving meaning to behaviour is not something which happens in private, in insular individual heads, but rather something dependent on an exchange of common symbols whose ‘natural habitat is the house yard, the market place, and the town square’ (1973:45). The symbolic logic and the formal conceptual structuring of this thought may not always be explicit, but they are socially established, sustained and legitimized. Cognition, imagination, emotion, motivation, perception, memory and so on, are thus directly social affairs, while outdoor activities such as ploughing or peddling are as good examples of ‘thought’ as are closet experiences such as wishing or regretting.

In Geertz’s adumbrating of ‘an outdoor psychology’ (1983:151), then, culture (as systems of historically transmitted symbols) is constitutive of mind, while individual experience and memory of the social world are both powerfully structured by deeply internalized cultural conceptions, and supported by cultural institutions; life in society entails a public traffic in significant cultural symbols. Geertz concludes that the webs of significance we weave, the meanings we live by, achieve a form and

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actualization only in a public and communal way. There can be no private (individual, unique) symbolizations for mind is ‘transactional’: formed and realized only through participation in cultures’ symbolic systems of interpretation. Furthermore, different ‘individual’ minds within the culture are neither opaque nor impenetrable to one another, for they think in terms of the same shared beliefs and values, and operate the same interpretive procedures for adjudicating reality. To construe a system of cultural symbols, in sum, is to accrue its individual members’ subjectivities.

In this way, Geertz‘s interpretive anthropology may be aligned with preceding anthropological approaches to consciousness. In Durkheimian (or Saussurean) terms, individual interpretation is prefigured by a set of collective representations, while individual consciousness as such is a manifestation—temporary, episodic and epiphenomenal—of a collective conscience; the particularities of conscious individual expression (or parole) simply depend and derive from an enabling collective language (or langue).

Consciousness as movement

It is the ‘terrifying feature’ of studying consciousness, as Searle has put it (1992:16), that the ontology of mental states is a first-person phenomenon while the epistemology and methodology is third-person. It seems that we know what consciousness is for ourselves—our consciousness is ineluctably ours, however all-encompassing, diaphanous, momentary, multiple and impossible to circumscribe it also seems—but we can judge its existence in others only by inference. As we have seen, Geertz’s ‘outdoor psychology’ obviates this problem of knowing other minds by regarding ‘minds’ as consisting of nothing more than publicly exchanged symbols. Notwithstanding, other methodologies do suggest themselves by which consciousness can be treated more humanistically and individually and still be approached ethnographically. These centre on notions of movement: on the movement of consciousness, and on consciousness as movement.

A good place to begin is with William James’s (1961 [1892]) conclusion that consciousness is not so much a substance as a process, continuous and yet always changing. In existentialist writing of later periods, too, there has been an appreciation that individual consciousness is a matter of an ongoing (and never completed) project. The process of consciousness, in short, entails the continuous ‘writing’, rewriting, erasing and developing of a narrative of being and identity. The individual continually defines and composes the story of his or her life,

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and it is in the composing and in the telling (to themselves and to others) that consciousness arises and dwells. Consciousness comes to know itself in and through the movement between different points of view in time and space. Moreover, this involves directedness or intention: relating consciousness to itself and to otherness for the purpose of coming to know it, and be it, in relation to others. Consciousness is thus both innerand outer-directed; it possesses ‘open closure’, in Ong’s words (1977:338). Moreover, being a process of becoming, something which attains to knowledge via cognitive movement between ‘itself and what is ‘other’, consciousness offers at least potential access from outside; as a narration of otherness, consciousness is more observable than if it were an unchanging substance or thing.

An early anthropological appreciation of this relationship between consciousness and movement is to be found in the work of Gregory Bateson (1951, 1972). The human brain, Bateson begins, thinks and knows in terms of relationships: all knowledge of external events is derived from the relationship between them (1951:173). Indeed, things and events are epiphenomena of the relationships which the brain conceives between them. Moreover, to conceive relationships (and so create things) is to move or cause to move things relative to the point of perception (the brain) or relative to other things within the field of perception; subject and object, perceiver and perceived are thus intrinsically connected. Movement is fundamental to the setting up and the changing of relations by which things gain and maintain and continue to accrue thingness. And since one of the ‘things’ that thus comes to exist as an identifiable thing is ‘oneself (the perceiving brain as objectified ‘out there’), movement is also fundamental to the thingness, the identity, of the self.

There are a number of implications of these conclusions. The first is that the things which derive from cognitive movement in this way— differences, relations and things—are material and immaterial alike. Ponds, pots and poems, are all the outcome of engineering movement relative to a point of perception; to cause to move relative to a point of perception is to construct an ambient environment that is both ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’. All experiential phenomena in human life are, thus, ‘appearances’, that which is perceived to be.

A second implication is precisely that the mind is ‘individual’ in its constructing. Bateson describes the individual as an ‘energy source’ (1972:126), responsible for the movements which underlie the perception of difference, as well as the point of perception per se, and thus responsible too for energizing the events in the world; it is not that the mind is merely being impacted upon by environmental triggers.

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More generally, each human individual is an ‘energy source’ inasmuch as the energy of his or her acts and responses derives from his or her own metabolic processes, not from external stimuli. It is with this energy, through this movement, and by this construction of relations and objects, that individuals create order and impose it on the universe.

A third implication, then, is that what can be understood by ‘order’ is a certain relationship, a certain difference, between objects which an individual mind comes to see as normal and normative; it is one of an infinite number of possible permutations, and it is dependent on the eye of the individual perceiver. Furthermore, this may not be what others perceive as orderly. ‘Order’ and ‘disorder’ are statements of relations between an intentioning perceiver and some set of objects and events; they are determined by individuals’ states of mind.

In exploring the relationship between movement and consciousness, then, what Bateson established (at least: translated into an anthropological environment from an existential one) was the fundamental relationship between such movement and perceived order in the world, and between such order and individuality.

The evolution of consciousness

An appreciation of movement of another kind characterizes anthropological work which approaches consciousness from the vantage point of human evolution, both phylogenic and ontogenic. In the latter vein, Gerald Edelman (1989, 1992) has argued for an ontogeny of individual consciousness in terms of activity in the world; the individual brain evolves during its lifetime by selecting between different ideas and behaviours.

Much conventional thinking about the brain, Edelman explains, has been either instructionist or programmatic in intent; the characteristics of the brain are seen as being either produced in response to the environment or else written into a computer-like programme which is in-born or learned. Edelman, however, suggests a selectionist model wherein characteristics are seen as originally appearing in the brain randomly, and independent of their possible usefulness or use, and are then selected for by an experimenting human organism which moves through life solving problems. The model has come to be known as ‘neural Darwinism’.

For Darwin’s theory of selection, diversity was the key—the diversity of species, the diversity of individuals—and how such diversity was selected from. Even tiny differences, independently occurring, could affect the environmental viability of the organism. Edelman’s model has

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it that selection, on a different time-scale also operates within the individual body. Comparable to the immune system, adapting the body on a time-scale of hours and minutes so that new antibodies come to be selected for, the brain adapts the body in seconds: by selecting for new ideas and behaviours.

The grounds of Edelman’s model are three: (1) There is initial diversity in the brain, spontaneous and intrinsic, which exists independently of the environment and how it is changing (the brain has 100 billion nerve cells, with a possible million billion connections, and each is responsible for causing a potentially different idea or behaviour).

(2) From this initial diversity, variant forms of idea and behaviour are experimented with as means to encounter and interact with the environment; sensory signals (visual, auditory, etc.) then relay information back to the brain concerning the ‘success’ of the idea/ behaviour in gaining a favourable, ‘hedonic’ result. (3) Those patterns of brain connections which produce a favourable result are ‘strengthened’. The successful movements come to be ‘valued’ more highly than the failures by cellular ‘value systems’ located in the brain stem which chemically amplify certain cellular connections over others which have been tried. The behaviour is then ‘learnt’, the idea ‘remembered’.

In this way, human beings can acquire complex skills without being pre-programmed—and without the need to conceive of the brain as a logical machine or the plaything of socialization. (Programmaticist thinking has the brain merely rearranging what has been put in, while instructionist thinking must posit a cause-and-effect relationship between environment and human activity.) It is through experimental activity in the world that individuals build up more and more abstract cycles of thought and action, every action suffused with value, with some goal that has been achieved; by interacting with the world from the moment they are born (if not before), individuals select the perceptions that work and discard those that do not.

What this is doing, moreover, is ordering the world and locating the owner of the brain as an individual actor vis-à-vis that order.The human brain is thus not so much a passive receptor of information from the world as an active constructor of it.There may be a real world out there (with cultural and social as well as natural lineaments) but individual experience of it does not involve neat parcels of information waiting to be unwrapped. Rather, the world is diverse, ambiguous and entropic, and it is out of unstructured and incoherent impressions which it receives that the brain makes distinction and actively generates information. The brain does not copy boundaries of the world so much as impose them on the world, and the way the latter is perceived and organized depends

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on the individual organism doing the work. In short, individual organisms construct their own versions of the world and generate their own action within it.

The facts speak to Edelman, in short, (as they did to Bateson) of an individuality of consciousness. First, ‘[t]he forms of embodiment that lead to consciousness are unique in each individual, unique to his or her body and individual history’ (1992:136). Second, not only is there an enormous diversity and individuality of brain structure, but each brain interacts with the world in a unique way, motivated by its own system of ‘values’, of what has worked ‘successfully’ for it over time in the past. Finally, each consciousness also gives on to a unique future. It is impossible to prescribe how an individual will in future behave, even with the knowledge of his or her ‘strong values’ in the present. For the inherent spontaneity of the brain’s activity always throws up new variations for possible experimentation. Here is the creativity, the ‘extraordinary imaginative freedom’ (Edelman 1992:170), whereby each individual, each day, says and does and thinks things never done or said or thought before, by them or anyone else, and may judge their success and value with equal novelty.

In terms of the phylogenetic evolution of humanity, the ‘higher-order consciousness’ described above, Edelman would regard as a relatively recent organic development. ‘Primary consciousness’, meanwhile, has a far longer inheritance. It arose, possibly, as a means by which animals (and plants?) might differentiate, coordinate and retain information on two vital kinds of perceptions and the relations between them: that of the outside world and that of the body’s internal homeostasis and wellbeing. Self/not-self and inside/outside were two of the most fundamental things for an animal to recognize; it was necessary to know where one’s self ended so that one could preserve oneself and not eat oneself when hungry, and so that energy was not wasted saving enemies or ‘the world’.

In human beings, primary consciousness became enhanced by the evolution of a memory with which to retain hypotheses about what things had hedonic value for the self and then to project these hypotheses onto the future. The human brain thus became able to experiment with a multitude of different generations of simulations of events—without overt trial and error, and using innocuous remembered environments—in milliseconds. The human brain became an ‘anticipation-machine’ (Dennett 1991) which would track, memorize and plot its environment, surmising self and world and anticipating action: zillions of idea germs competing for space in a final draft of future likelihood.

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To early hominids, such anticipation may have been a crucial adaptive advantage, assisting their survival despite their size and relative defencelessness. Engendered by conscious control, a plasticity of environmental response would have greatly increased hominid fitness. A significant part of this environment, moreover, for the hominid, would long have concerned others of its own kind: family and friends, strangers and enemies beyond the self. Anticipating their movements, predicting their behaviour, would also confer adaptive advantage. Hence, anthropological work has recently concerned the relationship between a phylogenetic evolution of consciousness and human sociation (Ingold 1990).

As Humphrey elaborates (1983), in the same way that our selfknowledge or self-awareness contextualizes our behaviour within an orderly flow of events which meaningfully connects our past life with our future, so we imaginatively write the narrative of the lives of others. Our imagination connects us together and enables us to conceive of others’ different experiences. While the biological integrity of the human body and the way our sensory apparatus connects with our brains means that we each have our own, and only our own, mental experiences, still we can hope to understand one another: not by taking on one another’s experiences but by imaginatively taking on one another’s points of view. In short, others might be seen as acting as they do because of where their lives have come from and where they are directed towards; this movement also affords insight into how they might be expected to act in future. Furthermore, in the same way that we are aware of the subtle discrepancies between appearance and reality where our own behaviours are concerned, how an outward display does not necessarily coincide with an inward sensibility, so we can imagine the possibly labyrinthine layers of intrigue between behavioural form and meaning in the lives of others.

In sum, the phylogenetic evolution of consciousness may have represented a human adaptation of enormous consequence. One’s experience of one’s own bodily routines and changes could be projected onto the environment as a means of anticipation and control; furthermore, using self-knowledge one could hope to get beneath the skin of others. Here were imaginative projections giving onto constructions of the world of great explanatory power.

The modalities of consciousness

A further understanding of the movement of consciousness, of consciousness as movement, concerns the study of individual memory.

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Memory is seen as an important key to consciousness and as that which gives coherence to experience. This is because memory orders the images drawn from experience in a temporal or narrative form (cf. Crites 1971). Memory represents a lasting chronicle (not without its gaps or lacunae) of the temporal course of experience: experience as a succession.

Another way of saying this is that consciousness grasps its objects of attention (of intention) in an inherently temporal way. Past, present and future are the universal modalities of our experience. Or, as Augustine famously phrased it (1907:XI/xxviii): consciousness ‘anticipates, attends and remembers’; what it anticipates passes through what it attends to become what it remembers.

Remembering, nonetheless, is not the same as knowing. To know something is more than the simple recital of the chronicle of memory, of its succession of images. Rather, our experience is illuminated by ‘recollecting’ from the memory: knowledge is recollection. When we narrate the ongoing story of our lives, we recollect particular images, stopping the flow of memory’s stream at certain points, slicing off segments or abstracting certain general features and elements from it.To know (ourselves and our lives) is to re-collect the images lodged in memory, the ‘memory stream’, into particular configurations, continually ordering and reordering past experiences into different presents.

Then again, memory is only one of three modalities of our experience. The second, oriented to the future not the past, is anticipation. Like memory, anticipation has an elemental narrative form. We actively plan and resolve and project and make guesses and predictions of what may happen, and in doing so we write a series of narrative scenarios. Albeit more vague and ‘thin’ than memory, we dream and worry and wish a future; then we act by improvising on this. If memory is the present of things past, then anticipation is the present of things future.

But then, memory and anticipation are more properly seen as tensed modalities of the present. That is, the above two stories are not separate but exist as a tensed unity in the present; an ongoing story absorbs the chronicle of memory and the scenario of anticipation into the thick description of an embodied present, so that our identity remains continuous (even if not coherent). The present becomes the decisive moment in our story of self and other, the moment of decision, and of crisis, between the remembered past and the anticipated but undetermined future. If memory represents the depth of our experience, and anticipation the trajectory of its action, then in the present, action and experience meet.

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