The birth of anthropology and Europes intellectual climate
The fact is that anthropology had its birth as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during what we might label the height of modernist thought and at the apex of Western imperialist endeavours. Modernist and imperialist ways of thinking about things go very deep, and since anthropology could but be the child of its times, the intellectual and political climate of those times is deeply implicated in its own development. This is why present-day anthropology...
Are science and religion contrastive in nature
Besides the missing moral component in a scientific world-view, how different an engagement with the world is represented by the evolution from religion to science Are science and religion contrastive in nature On this point, anthropologists seem divided, as is nicely represented by a debate between John Beattie 1966 and Robin Horton 1967 . For Beattie, religion should be understood as essentially expressive and dramatic behaviour more akin to art than science. Religion concerns symbolic...
The modernity of stereotypes
Stereotypes have been described as affording a discursive and conceptual bulwark against the randomness and complexity of the world. These static, limited, inert idioms provide beacons of constancy and recognition through which familiar cognitive order can hope to be replicated and stable collective rhythms maintained Sherif 1967 157 60 . Indeed, as social life sees an increase in scale and pace through such 'massifying' processes as globalization, mass communication, transnationalism and...
Existential anthropology
The anthropology which has sought most deliberately to keep this truth in view has been termed 'existential' or 'phenomenological' cf. Jackson 1989, 1996 also Douglas and Johnson 1977 Kotarba and Fontana 1984 Csordas 1994 Stoller 1997 , after the philosophical traditions associated with such writers as Kierkegaard, Emerson, Nietzsche, Husserl, Jaspers and Heidegger. As adumbrated by Sartre 1997 44 6 Our point of departure is.the subjectivity of the individual . not because we are bourgeois, but...
See also Classification Cognition Methodological Eclecticism CONVERSATION
For Michael Oakeshott 1962 , conversation is what human cultures accomplish and what human societies inherit. Conversation is a meeting of individual voices speaking in different idiom or mode. Science, poetry, practical activity and history are such modes of speech, different universes of discourse. It is the very diversity, the manifold of different voices, speaking in different idioms or modes, which 'makes' conversation. The voices need not compose a hierarchy, and the conversation need not...
See also Movement Science Writing METHODOLOGICAL ECLECTICISM
In 1964, Max Gluckman and economist Ely Devons collaborated on a book entitled Closed Systems and Open Minds The Limits of Naivety in Social Anthropology. Their topic was anthropological method more precisely, given the complexity of that human reality which anthropology set out to investigate, their topic concerned how the investigator could both open himself or herself up to socio-cultural complexity and close off a manageable portion for presentation. The solution, Gluckman and Devons...
Descriptive eclecticism
There is, in Michael Herzfeld's formulation 1993 184 , a strong temptation to reduce social experience to single models. Indeed, the representation of social life may be fatally prone to simplistic reduction, inasmuch as singular texts stand for plural exchanges, and concepts replace complex processes of interpretation. However, to represent the diversity, the openendedness, the chaotic relativism that comprises cultural process is not necessarily to attempt to re-present a social milieu...
AntiGeertzian interpretation
An 'outdoor psychology' which is 'out in the world' for all its apparent expansiveness and openness turns out to be rather a confining metaphorization. It appears to deny any inner, private life and language which is not readily accessible to others who employ are employed by the same cultural system of formal symbolic signification. At one and the same time, Geertz appears to champion a humanistic appreciation of the human condition and the anthropological project 'man is an animal suspended...
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 'background expectancies' which typify their experience and make it comprehensible. However concrete, obvious and natural the facts of an individual's everyday life seem, these facts are, 'in fact', already constructs. All thinking involves constructs, Schuetz claimed, as well as bodies of rules...
The Unhomely
'The unhomely' is a Homi Bhabha turn of phrase 1994 which he employs to highlight the plight of 'unhomeliness' of all those people refugees, migrants, the colonized, ex-slaves, women, gays who have no home within 'the system'. Today, most indigenous peoples of the world also belong to this category. As a construct it refers to the state of 'hybridity' being neither here nor there , and as such is situated within post-colonial debate. In his writings on the unhomely, Homi Bhabha is offering some...
Liminality
The concept of liminality, from the Latin word for 'threshold' limen and implying all manner of interstitiality, of being betwixt and between, is most associated with the work ofVictor Turner, and his extending of the original ideas of Arnold van Gennep it has also been put to profitable use by Max Gluckman, Mary Douglas and Edmund Leach, and given rise to a host of spin-off applications. Through liminality, anthropology has found it possible to focus conceptually upon such phenomena as...
Analytical eclecticism
To represent adequately the local conversation of epistemes is, to borrow from Feyerabend 1975 18 to be epistemologically 'opportunistic' in one's analysis. This must be characterized by epistemological 'complementarity' Claxton 1979 415 , and a refusing of epistemological resolution cf. Simmel 1971 xii . For no theory or episteme or narrative which the social commentator might bring to bear could cover all the 'facts' which are alive and being exchanged in a social milieu and convey the...
Democratic versus nihilistic violence
A more fruitful avenue of enquiry than that of attempting to understand violence either as specific behaviours, or as a relationship between behavioural types, is perhaps to explore issues of predictability violence as a matter of behavioural expectability rather than explosiveness. Here, 'violence' is understood as a decision to negate a relationship of reciprocal predictability and orientability, or to refuse to enter into one violence as a deliberate negating of formal routine and a refusal...
The politics of culture
Today, the politics of the use of the concept of culture is such an explosive topic that no anthropologist can afford to remain naive about the issues involved. Anthropology is not an innocent endeavour a point the debate makes abundantly clear. At the same time it raises questions that appear to threaten the very political and academic viability of the discipline at least as practised in modernist guise. Post-modernism has taken its deconstructive toll, while the voices of post-colonialism...
Lyotard
In The Post-Modern Condition A Report on Knowledge 1986 , Jean-Fran ois Lyotard describes the superficiality, the fragmentariness and the multiplicity of contemporary socio-cultural life and practice. We live in a world where there is a proliferation, even an excess, of ways and forms of knowing, speaking and gaining 'truth', Lyotard begins from science to religion to consumerism to popular culture to multi-culturalism. Each makes its own claims, posits its own values, but we are at a loss to...
Victor Turners liminoidal
Like Douglas, Victor Turner was to move from ideas concerning ritual liminality to a theory of socio-cultural life as such. Initially 1964, 1967 , however, he focused upon initiation rituals among the Ndembu of Tanzania, as seen in a van Gennepian light. Here was an oscillation between the individual experiencing of society and culture as highly structured, and the episodic venturing into ritual situations which were transitional and ambiguous in ethos vis- -vis the preceding and following...
Formative development
Building upon Raymond Firth's distinction between 'social organization' and 'social structure' 1951 , the former representing the present social system as derived from the sum of a series of decisions made by a group of individuals, and the latter the perduring factors which influence constrain and direct the choices about which individuals decide, Edmund Leach 1954, 1961b explored the gap between behaviour as ideally prescribed by social-structural norms and that actually decided upon. The...
Individualism
Individualism should not be confused with individuality, difficult though it has been to separate their definition and implication in anthropologists' work. To attempt this as a starting-point here, individualism pertains to a particular historico-cultural conceptualization of the person or self. Included within this conceptualization would be notions of the ultimate value and dignity of the human individual, his moral and intellectual autonomy, his rationality and self-knowledge, spirituality,...
Anthropological science
In part, the opposition between the qualitative and the quantitative is an anachronism a throwback to nineteenth-century conceptions of science, and attempts by social science to ape the reputed certainty of its methods of measurement and so borrow from its legitimacy and status. With the advent of twentieth-century science Einsteinian relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory comes a new ethos, however an appreciation of the contingency, situatedness and intrusiveness alternatively, the...
See also Cognition Individuality Narrative MOVEMENT
Movement conceptualized as a mode of human being ramifies into all manner of arguments concerning socio-cultural life and identity. The contemporary importance of the concept is forcefully stated by Paul Carter 1992 7-8, 101 I t becomes ever more urgent to develop a framework of thinking that makes the migrant central, not ancillary, to historical process. We need to disarm the genealogical rhetoric of blood, property and frontiers and substitute for it a lateral account of social relations .An...
Meanings and motivations
'Tourism' has been anthropologically classified according to a range of types cf. Cohen 1979 domestic, international, resort-focused, religious, adventure, ethnic, off-the-beaten-track, educational 'tourists' likewise from bourgeois FITs free independent travellers , to working-class package-junkies, to latter-day hippies. What links this range, however, is the sense that tourists and tourism are concerned with a time and place beyond the ordinary and everyday with travel, even 'pilgrimage',...
The evolutionary agenda of the anthropological use of the royal quartet
It is important to note the hidden political agenda to retaining our Western categories of societal ordering as universals in the task of understanding the sociality of other peoples. When treated not as local social facts, but as universals, the royal quartet can only serve to reflect distinctions of worth that separate the West from all the rest, and the incisive question can no longer be 'what is the character of their sociality ', but only 'to what degree does their social life approach or...
Inclusivity and exclusivity as political solutions
Overing argues 1996a that the contrast of an emphasis on either inclusive or exclusive solutions for dealing with otherness can relate respectively to egalitarian and hierarchical political strategies, and to a difference between social philosophies that stress social symmetry and those that are attached to social asymmetry. As mentioned, native peoples of Amazonia were identified with Europe's subaltern classes. The signifying quality of otherness in Eurocentrism, certainly as it was...
Competing readings
Given the likely diversity of readings within socio-cultural milieux, both in terms of interpretive communities and of individual readers, what are the likely consequences How might an abuttal of readings ramify into other situations. A study of such relations is offered by Eric Livingston 1995 . In An Anthropology of Reading, Livingston sets out to compare what he calls the 'different cultures of reading' to which professional literary critics and lay readers of English Literature belong, each...
Cultural pluralism versus culture in the singular
Given the fact that anthropology has usually been defined as the study of other cultures, it is not surprising to find 'culture' to be one of the most crucial concepts of the discipline. The focus of anthropology is upon the diversity of ways in which human beings establish and live their social lives in groups, and it is from this diversity that the anthropological notion of culture, at least in the twentieth century, is derived. This idea of the plurality of culture contrasts with the idea of...
Is anthropology politically correct as an undertaking
In a political situation very different from that in which modern anthropology was born, a situation in which erstwhile relations between the 'West and the rest', between Euro-American cultures and societies and others of the 'South', the 'under-developed', the 'Second, Third and Fourth Worlds' , have come to be described and decried as colonialistic, exploitative and imperialistic, the project of anthropology has itself been called into question. Is it possible to see anthropology as anything...
A Foucauldian anthropology of discourse
'Discourse' is perhaps Foucault's key conceptual term, but it also figures as part of a broader post-structuralist imaging of social life as the playing out of impersonal and largely unconscious systems of signification anonymous, depersonalized networking of images cf. Kearney 1988 13 14 . Here, collective discourses or forms of life are seen to cause to be true or 'real' certain constructions of the world and its components, as well as instituting a set of knowledge-practices with inevitable...
Symbolic interactionism
However, to appreciate the consciousness of individual participants as something distinct from the various structures of socio-cultural exchange in which they partake is to understand interaction as entailing both more and less than the above portrayal. More individual creativity may go into its negotiation, and less commonality or sharing be occasioned by its successful maintenance. As Hymes would also recognize, then, what counts as a 'communicative event' is not something that can be...
Some new directions from logos back to mythos
Myth and the poetics of everyday life There is an increasing interest within anthropology to rectify the deletions and excesses of high functionalism and structuralism, along with their materialist-cum-rationalist world-view. The trend is to stress the foremost importance of understanding cultural expression, including the mythic, from indigenous points of view. As Malinowski observed 1926 18 , for people who engage with mythopoetics, myth is 'reality lived'. Many anthropologists now wish to...
The domestic mode of production and society as hierarchical ordering
In anthropology the notion of society to be equated with 'social structure', and indeed 'the social' is usually defined by 1 structures of separation and opposition, and 2 structures of inequality, or the institutional elaboration of relations of dominance and subordination. Egalitarian peoples are considered less social than those that favour their hierarchical institutions because they have less society e.g. Bloch 1977 . The anthropological gaze upon the egalitarian ways of doing things has...
Nietzsche and anthropology
Nietzschean interpretation has been a major inspiration behind twentieth-century Existentialism, not to mention post-modernism Nietzsche 'there is no immaculate perception' 'there are no facts, only interpretations' 'truth is a mobile army of metaphors' , and also the philosophy of consciousness Henri Fofillon 'The chief characteristic of the mind is to be constantly describing itself cited in Edelman 1992 124 and anthropology did not miss out either. Indeed, Shweder goes so far as to say that...
Tactical humanism
There are a number of possible responses to this critique. One is simply to reassert an existentialist and rationalist position and say that cultural relativism and deconstruction are just plain wrong. Science, medicine, history, literature and travel prove the existence of a universal humanity, and the inherent individuality of consciousness and experience through which it is embodied cf. Rapport 1994a, 1997a . Of course, this proof cannot force itself on those who would see otherwise hence,...
Cybernetics
Cybernetics might be described as the 'elucidating of patterns in recursive, nonlinear systems' Harries-Jones 1995 3 . More generally it deals with the patterned nature of the world with the connectedness of phenomena and the connections between things with the way patterns of connectedness both relate spheres of life and experience that might circumstantially seem unrelated, and are ultimately responsible for the existence of those seemingly unrelated phenomena in the first place. Cybernetics...
A Durkheimian treatment of contradiction
Early on, Malinowski appreciated that arguing by the law of logical contradiction is absolutely futile in the realm of belief, whether savage or civilised. Two beliefs, quite contradictory to each other on logical grounds, may co-exist, while a perfectly obvious inference from a firm tenet may be simply ignored. However, to the extent that, conventionally, social-anthropological theorizing has followed the lead of Durkheim rather than those of, say, Simmel, Weber or Marx, the above wisdom has...
The dilemma of anthropology the study of phantom realities
As Shweder has argued 1991b 52-6 , the anthropological dilemma is that we study phantom realities, other peoples' creations and constructions of reality. We look at their culture, their ritual, their myths. All are understood by us as belonging to the world of the imaginary. Like narrative, and as narrative, they are fictive. Words, song, ritual and the postulates of myth, all are to be viewed with mistrust, and indeed as illusory in contrast to the real, objective world of physical nature we...
Anthropological movement
In this context, anthropology has had increasing recourse to 'write movement'. Through such concepts as 'deterritorialization' Appadurai 1991a , 'creolization' Hannerz 1987 , 'massification' Riesman 1958 , 'compression' Paine 1992 , 'hybridization' Bhabha 1990 , 'inter-referencing' Clifford 1986 , and 'synchronicity' Tambiah 1989 , it has sought to comprehend the processes that movement effects in socio-cultural milieux and so to apprehend the relations between movement and identity. This may...
Gregory Bateson
In his intellectual biography of Bateson 1904 80 , Harries-Jones describes him as 'the most brilliant holistic scientist of this century' 1995 3 . Holism was a key word for Bateson an understanding of our human part in the whole 'living system' that was the world he saw as crucial for our earthly survival. Furthermore, anthropology had to be a non-specialist, 'interdisciplinary discipline' because only in a holistic however seemingly seeming amateurish use of all manner of information could it...
The royal quartet and the transformation of the normative into the universal
There are many reasons for anthropologists to question fiercely the imagery of society portrayed within the history of the field's grand narratives of social order. As the above section suggests, our own notion of society, and the elements of which it is comprised, is a product of local historical forces in the West, namely the rise of the nation-state, capitalism, imperialism and the colonialist endeavour. The image of society that came to be favoured in modernist social theory was one that...
An urban way of life
For Simmel 1971 , cities are particular because they give rise to certain common psychological traits in cities there is an intensification of nervous stimulation, so that a lasting and predictable sequence of psychic impressions as in rural communities is replaced by a crowding-in of rapidly changing, unexpectable and discontinuous images. City-dwellers thus become more mentally sophisticated but also more blas . Similarly, for Durkheim 1964 1893 , cities represent distinct environments due to...
Network
It is said that the idea of a network for conceptualizing the connections and interconnections between individuals moving within and among different socio-cultural milieux came to John Barnes whilst undertaking fieldwork in a village of Norwegian fishermen 1954 . The location is significant for understanding the history of anthropological theorizing. Kinship relations, 'genealogical method', and structural-functional assumptions of socio-cultural holism had predominated in the periods of...
Is anthropology best seen as a universal attitude towards social life an
Powerful anthropological voices continue to be raised against an anthropology 'at home' in the West, nevertheless, even one practised alongside that of more 'exotic' locales. This opposition is both epistemological and political. It is said that many Western-based academic disciplines shine their light upon Western society and culture, from the humanities through the social sciences to the natural sciences, but only anthropology has taken as its central plank the decentring of the West, and the...
The anthropological rural idyll
While the argument above has concerned the rural idyll as a British discourse, the phenomenon is by no means restricted in its application. In a quest for the rural idyll there are clear overlaps with those pilgrimages made by tourists and the religious to name but two , in search of particular 'authentic' values. Certain localities are set aside and seen as privileged sites for the attaining of experiences which are not only clearly distinct from current, everyday life but also of superior...
Narrative hospitality
With the recent literary turn in anthropology, an evaluation of the conventions and responsibilities of disciplinary narratives, as well as an experimentation with new narrative possibilities, has increasingly been a feature of anthropologists' work cf. Bruner 1986 . There has been a concern both to overcome cultural assumptions of singularity, authority and integration which accompanied earlier narrative practices, and to benefit from the narrational potentialities of engaging with others in a...
An ethos of eclecticism
This gives to anthropological accounting a particular character. As Deborah Tannen puts it 1989 197 , the anthropological project is at once scientific and humanistic and aesthetic it is fraught with tensions between knowledge, value and ethics which are ultimately irresolvable. Philosopher Richard Rorty 1980 357 72 has drawn a useful distinction between two kinds of disciplinary pursuit, one being essentially constructive and systematic, the other reactive and edifying. A systematic discipline...
Paradoxes of homemaking
Certain paradoxes surround the concept of home, however, which are not easily ignored. First, there is the paradox, already alluded to, that an increase in movement around the world, and the freeing-up of restrictive boundaries to travel, is accompanied by an increase in renascent particularisms. In Hobsbawm's terms 1991 , home as an essentially private and individual routine, fantasy, memory, longing or presence Heim is impacted upon by Heimat an attempt publicly and collectively to impose...
Anthropology alterity and the myth of primitivism
The place of anthropology within this discussion about types of cultural discourse is hardly simple. First of all the constructs of 'the unhomely' and 'hybridity' are part of a much larger set which include other related notions that mark a Western imagery of otherness that has proven to be exceedingly powerful in Western dealings with those marginal to our own way of life. Included would be such major concepts as 'exoticism', 'primitivism', 'tribalism', all highly relevant historically to the...
List Of Concepts
Methodological Individualism and Holism Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies
Authenticity and the unhomely
By definition, 'unhomely' peoples are 'hybrids', that is, people who are no longer authentic. The very idea of authenticity even when thought to be used for very positive ends had the consequence of freezing other peoples into a mythic past, where to remain authentic and thus appreciated they could not leave. Until very recently there has been a strong code in anthropology that a real anthropologist did not study people who were so tainted as to wear Western clothes men in trousers, women in...
Critique
Developments of transactional theory such as Bailey's and Barth's met with the reactive critique of systems analysts from the original functionalist and structuralist camps to arriviste Marxian and post-structuralist ones. There was a reiteration of the belief that only some form of methodological holism could apprehend the system and structure that was culture and society thereby reinstating the axiomatic nature of these variable and processual phenomena . Only a top-down analysis, treating...
Cities as diverse
The particularity of the city in the Chicago model was to come under increasing attack, however. Were there not many urbanisms to consider the industrial city as distinct from the pre-industrial city, the Western city as distinct from the non-Western, the colonial as distinct from the postcolonial, and so on And did not this diversity mitigate against reductive generalization such as, for instance, the notion that in the city kinship as a load-bearing social institution was superseded by...