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

CLASSIFICATION

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

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

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Nietzschean classification

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

(Nietzsche 1968: no. 482)

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

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

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

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

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

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

See also: Cognition, Contradiction, World-View

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CODE

CODE

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

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

Codes and knowledge

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

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

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CODE

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

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

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

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

Codes and community

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

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