A Starting Point
This volume represents the collective construction of a specifically anthropological approach to a question at the heart of all social science. How should we simultaneously account for both society and for individuals? Unlike most social science books about the individual, this volume is not concerned with individualism nor with the way different societies conceptualize individuals. Because, irrespective of whether people live within a highly individualizing or a highly socialized environment, we still have the task of understanding them as individuals. Furthermore anthropologists, in particular, commonly convey their findings through the presentation of individuals who were encountered during fieldwork. So this volume is not especially concerned with the study of individualism, nor with the growth of individualism.1 The understanding of the individual is something that should be part and parcel of the domain of anthropology even when we are working in a society which seems almost entirely opposed to individualism. We would repudiate an artificial disciplinary history that left social science concerned with that aspect of society that transcended its composition by individuals and ceded to psychology the study of the individual per se. This book creates an approach to people that is no more psychological, and no less anthropological, through a decision to concentrate on the individual as its primary unit of analysis.
The means by which this is accomplished is through a deliberate and systematic appropriation of anthropological models that were originally designed, not for the study of individuals, but as approaches to an encompassing view of society. Traditionally, in social science, these two have been opposed, as a rise of individualism in modern life was seen as the deposition of the larger social order represented by the terms society and culture. Our discovery was that approaches created by anthropologists for the purpose of contending with society turn out to be singularly and unexpectedly appropriate for the study of the individual. So that instead of abandoning those perspectives, we can appropriate them and apply them to this other terrain. In doing so we employ what has become recently one of the vanguard elements in contemporary anthropology, the study of material culture.
This will by no means be a single or uniform appropriation. In this introduction I will take the most extreme view, suggesting that in a place such as London, the application of this perspective to the individual becomes tantamount to the study of culture as an aggregate of these micro units of society, at least with respect to some forms of behaviour. As befits a situation where all the other contributors have studied with me, the rest of the chapters in this volume all take issue, in some way or other, with my argument and contest it or transform it through its application to quite different circumstances, providing alternatives, and contrasting variants. Either because the situation they are confronted with is very different from that found in London (as I also argue in a further chapter within this volume, set in Jamaica) or because they remain unconvinced by particular aspects of my own argument. So the volume is constructed in dialectical tension between the introduction and the subsequent chapters.
The approach that will be used to illustrate this argument is derived from one of the most established and influential anthropological models of cultural order, that of Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of habitus. Students of material culture, which include all the contributors to this volume, are particularly beholden to Bourdieu, because in his book Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), the main process of socialization into becoming a member of any given society was the everyday association with practical taxonomies embodied in the order of material culture. From Bourdieu we learnt how individuals become a typical Kwakiutl, Trobriand Islander or New Yorker through habits and expectations fostered in our everyday object world. Through catching salmon or catching taxis. The best-known example employed by Bourdieu was the organization of space in the houses of the Kabyle, a Berber community. The systematic oppositions found in the internal order of the house were seen as an underlying structure that gave people their unconscious expectations of the order they anticipate in many different aspects of their lives. These underlying structures of order became second nature, that is taken-for-granted habits, that could apply equally to agricultural tasks, meal times, the body or kinship.
This work carried the further implication that although patterns of objects were thereby central to constituting social order, equivalent in many respects to our entire educational system, their contribution was entirely unacknowledged. This corresponded to what I (Miller 1987) elsewhere called 'The Humility of Objects'—the ability of material things to establish the frame for proper behaviour without us noticing that they inhabit this powerful role. I argued that objects performed a task central to what Goffman (1975) and Gombrich (1979) in different ways termed Framing— that which orders life and behaviour without our being aware of it.
For Bourdieu this process is effective because in each area of life this underlying structure of order remains homologous to the others. People are socialized into habitus through the habits of everyday life, and reproduce it in their own creations because culture is best understood as practice. So unlike its psychological equivalents, this does not need to be viewed as a cognitive model. It exists tangibly in the order of the material world people inhabit. While anthropologists were most influenced by Bourdieu's application of these ideas to the Kabyle, those in other disciplines were enthralled by his exemplification of these same processes in the book Distinction (1979) which examined the order of French society in the 1960s. Bourdieu argued that there was a foundational structural opposition in French society that corresponded to class. At one end of the spectrum were those who preferred the taste of foods that were substantial, the opinions of particular newspapers and saw Holy Communion as the obvious subject for a painting. At the other end were those who had a more minimalist aestheticized approach to food and saw more artistic potential in a car crash. So, amongst both the Kabyle and the French, there were structural oppositions that were productive, in the sense of basic, to the ordering of society.
Distinction neatly demonstrated Bourdieu's insistence upon the virtue of a larger structural understanding of French culture and society in opposition to starting from the perspective of the individual. As he noted, the very term 'taste', was taken colloquially to represent the specifics of an individual's preferences in the world. Yet, in his analysis, he shows how taste actually derives from the highly structured conditions of French class and hierarchy, and is anything but the mere quirky predilection of individuals. Aesthetic preferences thereby exemplify, not individualism, but its opposite, the original holistic tradition of anthropology. People are situated within a general cosmology, as much evident in their kinship and social structure, in the form of exchange and economic orders, as in their beliefs and religion.2
Bourdieu was by no means the only exemplar of this holistic tradition. It is implicit in the very notion and structure of the traditional anthropological monograph, and its long commitment to various forms of structural-functionalism. Similarly Clifford Geertz (1973, 1980) could discern a distinctive Balinese aesthetic disposition that could apply as much to statehood as to dance. A typical monograph on an African pastoral society or on Chinese lineage would often link relationships with food to ritual or demonstrate the homology between kinship and village, or indeed urban, planning. Sometimes the academic discerns a pattern that is one of a single and overall consistency within and across domains. At other times, as in the work of Levi-Strauss or Bourdieu's Distinction, it is a holism based on systematic opposition, inversion or contrast. Indeed so common is this trope within anthropology that when, in other disciplines, such as where the Annales school of French historical analysis treated past societies as quasi ethnographies to examine consistency between cosmology, economy and social order, then the analysis comes to feel anthropological to the degree that it is structurally holistic (e.g. Le Roy Ladurie 1978).
In this context, the study of the individual seems reduced to that of the microcosm that exemplifies the macrocosm, or alternatively the dualism that is society. We see the individual as exemplifying the precise position he or she holds in society and reproducing at this scale the same sense of order and expectation we recognize as that of the society as a whole. A person is his or her place in the overall picture, as is appropriate to his or her categorization, for example by gender or class. Almost as though they each generate and reproduce some larger societal DNA or cultural code. This academic tradition became so established and hegemonic that inevitably it led eventually to an almost violent repudiation. A new post-modernist perspective arose that denounced any implied structural analysis or holism. Post-modernism tried to blow apart this sense of order and refused to see people as any more than the aggregation of fragments. The post-modern assault was generally coincidental with an ever more confident liberalism which saw itself as triumphant over older more holistic political traditions such as socialism. Post-modernism has therefore had a longer lasting impact in the United States which remains far more deeply imbued with a spirit of liberalism and emphasis upon individuals as compared to the more collectively orientated European tradition (Lindholm 1997).
The problem with this history of academic studies is that in many respects it neglects what should have been a core question from the very inception of scholarly interest in society. A question that is sidelined when we start from an opposition between the individual and society, or a subsumption of the individual as mere microcosm to society, or a refusal to accept the existence of either society or individuals as in post-modernism. Instead, we might take as our starting point the coincidence and compatibility of the individual and society, where society is understood as an entity that transcends its aggregate composition by individuals and remains irreducible to them. Individuals still live in society, society always included individuals. The more important question therefore was how these two exist in tandem. If the individual is more than the microcosm of the macrocosm then what is the precise relationship between these two entities? Where do we find evidence for this relationship and how may we reveal it? These are the questions the current volume seeks to investigate.
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