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

COMMON SENSE

‘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 concerning how thinking with such constructs is to proceed. Abstractions, idealizations, generalizations and formalizations thus always intercede between human beings and the world, preselecting and pre-interpreting it for us.

Background expectancies are taught and learnt from birth, thereby becoming intersubjective norms which are shared by members of a socio-cultural milieu; not only socially derived, they are also socially approved, controlled, maintained and institutionalized. Indeed, Schuetz suggested that group membership be analytically conceived of in terms of its members’ sharing of a set of common background expectancies by which the world was properly to be typified and known.

Background expectancies also come in different types, Schuetz theorized, perhaps the most important being that which typified behaviour, motivations and goals which were deemed sensible, reasonable and rational on an everyday basis; he called such expectancies ‘commonsensical’. Schuetz claimed that these pointed up a type of cognition, a set of constructs, which most people employed most of the time: ‘the paramount reality of human experience is an everyday world of commonsensical objects and practical acts’ (1953). Of the many different kinds of socially imposed rules and recipes for typical sensemaking, it was common sense that provided human beings with their fundamental grounding in the world, that which made the everyday world an obvious ‘natural’ and ‘concrete’ reality. ‘[C]ommonsense knowledge of the world’, Schuetz concluded, ‘is a system of constructs of its typification’ (ibid.).

Schuetz’s work, in turn, has provided the foundation for much anthropological thinking on the everyday realities which people construct for themselves and the sense of naturalness with which these realities come to be invested. Geertz, for instance (1983), has elaborated upon the workings of common sense ‘as a cultural system’. Common sense, Geertz begins, claims to apprehend reality matter-of-factly; it is but the immediate deliverances of experience, what ‘anyone in their right mind could see’. However, cross-cultural comparison of what is ‘matter-of-fact’ and to be taken-for-granted quickly reveals that here is a specific cultural system: an ordered body of considered thought, a set of symbols and messages taught and learnt, whose practice is as much an accomplishment as reciting a theological covenant or following a logical proof. Common sense is as dogmatic as religious knowledge and as

58

COMMON SENSE

ambitious as scientific knowledge, Geertz argues, affording a totalizing frame of thought with which to access the ways of the world.

While the content of common sense varies greatly between sociocultural milieux, however, there are certain stylistic, attitudinal and tonal features which make people’s commonsensical constructions of everyday reality everywhere comparable. There is what Geertz calls a ‘commonsensical voice’, with five distinctive features. First, common sense claims to identify things which are ‘natural’: inevitable, intrinsic to the world. Second, common sense claims to be a superlatively practical wisdom for getting things done. The forms it takes are anecdotes, jokes, maxims and proverbs; together these may amount to a disparate, heterogeneous, even contradictory, pot-pourri, but they also provide practical advice for engaging with life in all its multifariousness. Third, common sense claims that the truths of the world which it enunciates are obvious, patent and plain; it is what anybody who is sober can see. Fourth, common sense provides immediate wisdom that fits the moment. Finally, common sense promises wisdom which is accessible to all, needing no expertise or special powers, only maturity and some worldliness. These features, to repeat, demarcate a mode of everyday knowing and being-in-the-world which is universal, however it may locally be dubbed; (the term ‘common sense’, and its distinction from ‘religion’, ‘science’ or ‘sociology’, is merely a Western framing).

In another place (1971:91ff.), Geertz adds a further distinctive feature to commonsensical knowledge: its limitedness. Common sense, he explains, may be handy and economical but it is also insufficient to deal with all of human experience and to make sense; always and everywhere it needs supplementing and superseding by other, more theoretical, more specialized, forms of knowledge, often within the provenance of experts. Religion, science, sociology, art, law, medicine might all be described as provinces of specialized knowledge which grow out of common sense and go beyond it: transcending, completing, transforming it. Most of the time and for most purposes common sense might be sufficient but periodically there are occasions when answers are needed which common sense fails to supply; mundane routines are effaced by the advent of random, marginal, chaotic and otherwise disorderly happenstance. At this time, the paramount reality of everyday life is left behind and an explanation for the commonsensically inexplicable (disaster, miracle, dream, dispute, disease, death) is sought elsewhere (cf. Berger 1969:23–4).Again, Geertz is keen to emphasize that substantively, the content of what is inexplicable is wholly socio-culturally contingent; only the cognitive move from common sense to specialist knowledge is universal. And even here Geertz injects a note of caution. It may be that

59

COMMUNITY

some milieux are more dominated by a non-specialist ‘colloquial’ culture than others; it may be that only some cultures square off areas of particularly systematized, ‘studied’ expertise (1983:74). Nonetheless, whatever the extent of the specialization of knowledges, it will always be true to say that the deficiencies of common sense are episodically made up for by cognitively resorting to the religious expertise of shamans and priests, the medical expertise of doctors, the legal expertise of adjudicators, the scientific expertise of chemists, and so on.

Finally, inasmuch as common sense and more specialized forms of knowledge are complementary to one another, the particular substantive qualities of common sense in any one time and place also give rise to the particular substantive qualities of expertise. If religion and science, alike, provide wider causal understanding than can common sense—breaking common sense down into componential aspects, relating these to a wider universe of forces, and so extending its limited causal vision (Horton 1967)—then common sense provides the grounds from which they grow. Another way of saying this is that, whatever their ideology and mystique, specialist knowledges are not worlds apart. Religion, science, sociology, art, whatever, have a history which sees them not only growing out of the mundane worlds of common sense but also designed in specific ways to supersede them (cf. Schuetz 1953:3; Latour and Woolgar 1979:21). Perhaps, Geertz concludes, a comparison of the ways and extents by which common sense is periodically replaced by other modes of thought provides a better way of considering the differences between socio-cultural milieux than to talk of one being more ‘traditional’, ‘modern’ or ‘post-modern’ than another.

See also: Ethnomethodology, Science, World-View

COMMUNITY

The concept of community has been one of the widest and most frequently used in social science. At the same time a precise definition of the term has proved elusive. Among the more renowned attempts remains that of Robert Redfield (1960:4), who identified four key qualities in community: a smallness of social scale; a homogeneity of activities and states of mind of members; a self-sufficiency across a broad range of needs and through time; and a consciousness of distinctiveness. Nevertheless, in 1955, Hillery could compile 94 social-scientific attempts at definition whose only substantive overlap was that all dealt

60

COMMUNITY

with people (1955:117)! To overcome this problem, community is often further specified by a qualifying or amplifying phrase: the ‘local community’, the ‘West Indian community’, the ‘community of nations’ or ‘souls’. But this would seem only to beg further questions.

Traditional anthropological approaches

In anthropology, one might usefully isolate three broad variants of traditional approach. ‘Community’ is to be characterized in terms of: (i) common interests between people; or (ii) a common ecology and locality; or (iii) a common social system or structure.

Taking these (briefly) in turn, Frankenberg (1966) suggests that it is common interests in achievable things (economic, religious, or whatever) that give members of a community a common interest in one another. Living face-to-face, in a small group of people, with common interests in mind, eventuates in community members’ sharing many-stranded or multiplex relations with one another; also sharing a sentiment towards the locality and the group itself. Hence, communities come to be marked by a fair degree of social coherence.

For Minar and Greer (1969), physical concentration (living and working) in one geographical territory is the key. The locale will throw up common problems and give rise to common perspectives, which lead to the development of organizations for joint action and activities, which in turn produces common attachments, feelings of inter-dependence, common commitment, loyalty and identity within a social group. Hence, communities come to exhibit homogeneity: members behaving similarly and working together, towards common aims, in one environment, whatever their familial or generational differences.

For Warner (1941), meanwhile, a community is essentially a socially functioning whole: a body of people bound to a common social structure which functions as a specific organism, and which is distinguishable from other such organisms. Consciousness of this distinction (the fact that they live with the same norms and within the same social organization) then gives community members a sense of belonging. So long as the parts of the functioning whole (families, agesets, status-groups, or whatever) work properly together, the structure of the community can be expected to continue over time.

Whether it be in terms of interests, ecology or social structure, then, anthropologists have traditionally emphasized an essential commonality as the logic underlying a community’s origination and continuation. Communities have been regarded as empirical things-in-themselves (social organisms), as functioning wholes, and as things apart from other

61

COMMUNITY

like things. This was in turn the logical basis of ‘the community study’: the tradition in anthropology of basing research on what could in some sense be treated as a bounded group of people, culturally homogeneous and resident in one locality, because this ‘community’ would provide a laboratory for the close observation of the interrelations, the continuing interfunctioning, between interests, sub-groups and institutions; and also serve as a microcosm of a bigger social picture which might prevail as societies grew in size and complexity. Anthropologists conventionally studied communities (villages, tribes, islands) because these were regarded as the key structural units of social life: what the elementary structures of kinship gave onto; what the complex structures of society were composed of.

Symbolic approaches

As varieties of functionalism and structuralism have come to share space in the anthropological armoury with approaches which emphasize the extent to which cultural reality is negotiated and contested, its definition a matter of context and interpretation, and as anthropologists have come to regard social life as turning on the use of symbolic not structural logics, so notions of ‘community’ have changed. Conceptions of something reifiable, essential and singular have been replaced by a focus on how ‘community’ is elicited as a feature of social life, on how membership of community is marked and attributed, on how notions of community are given meaning, and how such meaning relates to others. In place of the reified notion of community as a thing-in-itself, then, comes the realization that, as Gregory Bateson put it succinctly: things are epiphenomena of the relations between them (1951:173); or as Barth elaborated, social groups achieve an identity by defining themselves as different from other such groups and by erecting boundaries between them (1969). In terms of their field research, anthropologists have come to admit a distinction between the locus of their study and their object of study: they may study in villages (on islands, in cities, in factories) but not villages per se.

Applying these ideas fruitfully to the concept of community has been Anthony Cohen (1985). Community, he argues, should be seen as a symbolic construct and a contrastive one; it derives from the situational perception of a boundary which marks off one social group from another: awareness of community depends on consciousness of boundary. Hence, communities and their boundaries exist essentially not as socialstructural systems and institutions but as worlds of meaning in the minds of their members. Relations between members represent not a set of

62